So when a woman takes a seat at the Emergent table, is it like going on a date with Tony Jones?
Ah, Friday. The day of unabashed meme-blogging and, what else? CJD (Crazy Jim Dobson) Wingnuttery!
Pandagon has the story, but it can be best summed up with this line from the Focus on the Family site:
We know dogs aren’t born mooing. But what about people? Are they “born gay?”
You know it’s bad when they don’t even bother to create the pretense of making sense anymore. Dogs… mooing… gay… science…
I’m really trying, here.
Friday Random Ten
“I Everwith,” Blunderspublik
“Warm,” Kinnie Starr
“Fox Confessor Brings the Flood,” Neko Case
“Strugglin’,” K’naan
“The Grass is Blue,” Dolly Parton
“Enjoy,” Bjork
“Back it Up,” Peaches
“AFK,” Pinback
“Yesterday Is Here,” Cat Power
“Life Effect,” Stars
Last week I wrote a post about women and the Emerging church (incidentally, part of the 18th Carnival of the Feminists).
When I wrote that post, I didn’t know about Emerging Women, a two-month-old blog that boasts 33 contributors. I was pleased to see it; after all, until now I hadn’t really come across any blogs that strongly identified as Emergent that were written by women. It’s not that I’ve read every Emergent blog on the web (obviously I haven’t), and my judgement is far from scientific, but I’m just saying.
Anyway, this week there was a little bit of what we on the internets like to call drama and/or mild wank. I have to admit I have a long-time affinity for internet drama — generally watching from the sidelines, not participating, though there have been exceptions to that rule, this perhaps being one of them — and this case struck my interest. Here’s some drama amongst a group of people who pride themselves on being rational and thoughtful and good listeners. Oh, and Christian, which presumably involves something about love and guarding one’s tongue.
Last Friday, a member of the community named Sherri (whose posts are signed From the Margins) made a post entitled, “I Just Learned I’m a Minority Group?” In it, she posted a statement by Kevin Hendricks about women and the EmergentVillage.com website. Hendricks outlined a philosophy that minority groups should not be ghettoized. From the Margins took issue with the characterization of women as a “minority group” within the Emergent organization, and also, it should be noted, framed Hendricks’ remarks as the official stance of Emergent, one which had been deliberately circulated.
Not so deliberate, it turns out. Tony Jones himself replies to the post to chastize From the Margins for posting “an internal document within Emergent,” one that is “not meant to be read outside of the context of a months-long conversation on these issues, and it’s surely not meant to have one paragraph posted and subsequently mocked.” He then calls the post a “significant breach of etiquette and friendship” and disappears from the thread.
I’m not sure exactly when blog administrator Julie removed From the Margins’ post, but she did, at Emergent’s request. Emergent justifies this request saying that the email quoted by From the Margins was part of confidential correspondence with the web design firm who’s working on the new Emergent Village website.
On Wednesday, From the Margins leaves the Emerging Women blog and yesterday mizliz leaves Emergent, or “Emerg***” as she now styles it (an affectation which I might pinch, come to think).
Based on mizliz’s post it’s clear I don’t know the half of what really happened here, but I still have some comments.
First, while these public exchanges are unusual as far as internet drama goes for their overall civility and lack of direct personal attacks,
Sadly, however, this seems to validate to some extent Steve and Josh naming Tony Jones one of the Stupid Church People of the year. Steve and Josh’s rational for choosing Emergent for that honour last December was based on their soliticing funds, something which seemed to go against the grain of the non-organizational “conversation” that Emergent had purported to be. And what are we dealing with now, seven months later? Confidential memos? If this isn’t a sign that Emergent has turned into the same old hierarchical institution it originally criticized, I don’t know what is. And if all this kerfuffle isn’t a fine example of Stupid Church Behaviour… well, you know.
I’m glad to see that the Emergent leadership is taking the marginalization of women in their organization seriously. From what I’ve seen, they do realize that women are a minority — numerically in leadership as well as in sociological terms. But leaked memos? Are you kidding me? And strongarming bloggers? If Tony Jones & Co. are going to be running an institution, they need to know that once the memo is leaked there is no taking it back. (Like that object lesson we all had in Sunday School, the one where you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, you know the one.) Especially where the internet and Google caches are involved. Instead of censoring the offending post, claiming it was out of context (which surely it was) and a breach of contract (which it much less surely was), they might have posted the discussion for everyone to read. Kind of like, you know, a conversation, or something.
Please, please go visit the old bill to read about his day at Folk Fest on Saturday, when he managed to get free tickets for some of his Somali friends. The mainstage bill that day featured the Refugee All Stars of Sierra Leone (musicians who were discovered in the refugee camps, playing music on makeshift instruments) and K’naan, a Somali rapper who now lives in Ontario. His friends got to spend a lot of time with the performers, even partying with them until they had to leave the next morning!
I officially am no longer annoyed with K’naan, who showed up late to the festival and missed his first workshop and then had “no time for interviews.” Media folk like me don’t take kindly to that kind of talk, until you hear that he had no time because he was hanging out with his fellow refugees.
I’ve never in a situation like the one African immigrants face, living in a completely foreign culture. The closest I ever came was being in non-urban Germany, where very few people speak English. I found the language barrier to be unexpectedly debilitating. When I travel in English-speaking countries, I feel pretty confident about being able to find my way, but when you can’t rely on your language skills, it makes leaving the house a lot more intimidating, knowing you can’t ask for directions or read a bus schedule. So I kind of try to multiply that by a thousand to imagine what immigrants feel like when they come here from far away.
I’ve talked before about how throughout my young life, I found the spiritual, worshipful “feelings” elusive. I’ve also said that I’ve had far more religious experiences in a smoky club listening to a band or rapper as I have had in a service or a Bible study.
So when the beginning of July rolls around and with it the Winnipeg Folk Festival, I get pretty excited. I get excited knowing that I’ll get a taste of that intangible, ethereal zeitgeist that results when thousands of like-minded people gather in one place in a spirit of celebration. Ostensibly that is what one could/should get in church, but we all know it rarely works out that way.
Today I had probably the best festival day I’ve ever had. I actually hoisted myself out of bed (I was up late shaking booty to the Refugee All Stars of Sierra Leone) and arrived in time for the annual gospel workshop. “Workshops” are concerts at the festival where two, three or more artists/bands gather on the same stage, under the umbrella of some theme (some titles are “Old Songs, New Songs,” “Percussion Junction,” “One Fiddle to Rule Them All”). Ideally, the participants of the workshop will join in on harmonies and guitar parts of each others’ songs, sometimes jamming and creating entirely new tunes, or adding a bassline or a beat where otherwise there would be none.
“Working on a Building (Gospel Workshop)” featured American bluesmen the Holmes Brothers, local Mennonite bluegrass quartet House of Doc, and my personal favourite, Austin singer-songwriter/guitarist Ruthie Foster. Ruthie was raised singing and playing in the church in central Texas, and there really aren’t words to describe the magic she is on stage. Her voice is so massive and effortless, she really does merit comparisons to the great ladies of song (those comparisons are tossed around so often. This time I mean it). You listen to her voice and you just believe that everything is going to be OK. She’ll raise the roof even if there isn’t one, like at an outdoor festival when the only roof is the sky and so she’ll just raise that. In the workshop following the gospel one, she shared the stage with Bruce Cockburn and Richard Thompson and completely held her own. That’s how good she is.
She sang a song she wrote inspired by her mother, who, when Ruthie was in college, told her that education was fine but “you’ve got a soul to save.” She sang the song she sang at her grandmother’s funeral, two weeks ago. “It’s alright,” she said, “She’s fine. She’s here today… she’s everywhere.” And then she went on to sing a variation of Amazing Grace, about how God saw past her faults and saw her needs.
It’s stuff like that that can almost make a girl believe.
I mentioned Bruce Cockburn, who is well-known for being a “secular” Christian artist. I ranted and whined last week about Christian music, and Bruce indeed is one of those rare artists who manages to be Christian and also good. He sang “All the Diamonds” today, and… well, it was just really beautiful. Go read the lyrics if you’re not familiar. He also did “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” which was also beautiful.
I’m not sure what my point is here. Maybe to say that I can understand why so many people are so attached to the church, because there are so many qualities of church in a festival like this: the fellowship, the transcendence of music (which I have come to believe is inherent to music itself, in some sort of magical, unknowable way, and not at all unique to Christian musicians, as a former choir director of mine actually claimed), the knowledge that you can go to this one place and be rewarded for your efforts with this amazing feeling.
Or maybe that inspiration can be found in many places. That one woman’s voice can be a salve, just as a few lines of poetry in the Old Testament can be. That dancing in the sun is what we should have been doing all along.
Democracy Now! had a segment this morning featuring Michelle Goldberg who has just written a book called Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism. It looks like her book is about all the typical dominionism stuff, but I thought she had some very interesting observations in the interview. She talked about the way the megachurch phenomenon interacts with the suburban/exurban phenomenon, and how brand new, non-urban areas have no built-in social infrastructure (central coffee shops, community organizations) like older urban environments do, and how megachurches nicely fill that void (with gyms, after-school programs, and often coffee shops as well!). When the megachurch becomes the foundation of the community, it provides the ideal environment to foster the kinds of nationalism and dominionism we’ve seen take hold of the United States.
What brings this all to the headlines is, of course, the Memphis church who has erected a copy of the Statue of Liberty who hoists a wooden cross instead of a torch.
You can listen to or watch today’s Democracy Now! at their website; there are various download/streaming options.
I listened to two new albums today, each in its entirety. As a result, I made two discoveries: first, that Thom Yorke’s forthcoming solo release The Eraser will indeed live up to the hype and will probably make my year-end top ten list even though I’m not much of a Radiohead-head, unlike 90% of the people everywhere.
The other discovery is that Sufjan Stevens seems to be such a prolific font of creativity that he can, one year after the release of Illinois, put out an album-length collection of outtakes from it and have it be as coherent and engaging as its predecessor, with depth of lyric and instrumentation.
Sufjan Stevens is a true anomaly. Not only because he’s in the top 10 per cent (you know, that old adage about 90% of everything being crap?) but because he’s a Christian musician whose music does not suck. There are other Christian musicians who do not suck, but they are few and far between and in some cases, such as in the case of Sufjan’s gloriously cacophonous friends Danielson, not nearly as accessible as he.
I’ve come a long way from my days surreptitiously making tapes of the local hit radio station, cowering in fear that my doing so would meet with my parents’ disapproval. The edict was more of an implied one rather than one explicit — I wasn’t supposed to listen to non-Christian music. Secular music. As I said, my parents were never so vulgar as to utter the phrase “devil’s music,” but Focus on the Family publications came awfully close, and with those I certainly was inundated — Brio magazine and then Plugged In. In the case of the former, the magazine was devoted to drilling its moral messages into our heads, issue after issue. The primary message was, of course, do not have sex or even think about sex until you’re married. The second was a concentrated dose of heteronormativity training, distilling already strict gender roles into even more confining, debilitating ones (I’ll note that the boys’ counterpart to Brio did the same thing).
Before I completely go off the rails here into a rant about Crazy Jim Dobson, I’ll digress. Now I edit an indie music magazine and that means I am a full-fledged music snob. Music snobbery is a point of much contention; I contend that there are different versions of music snobbery. One form is genre snobbery, the belief that one type of music is inherently superior to all others. I do not suffer from this affliction, and indeed I can say that I truly appreciate all genres that exist. I cannot say I enjoy all genres, though (I can really only handle one track worth of metal, and even then it has to be Sepultura). I’m just the kind of music snob who believes that most of what you hear on the local commercial radio station is crap. These days my tastes run towards experimental electronica, new weird folk, and some indie pop. Also hip hop, funk, and soul.
I fear I have failed to make anything resembling an argument towards my thesis statement. If I ever had one in the first place. Oh, right — it was Christian music sucks. Looking back at my listening habits in the ’90s there are only a few discs on which I look back with any critical approval — Jars of Clay’s self-titled debut was good (too bad very little they’ve done since has been), and dcTalk hammered out some inventive stuff as far as the Christian rap/rock genre went.
I think what it comes down to is the fact that Christian music, while only a segment of the mainstream music market, is a part of the mainstream music market. Meaning it exists to make money. And as we know, very little music in the mainstream is good; we can apply the 90/10 rule again, here. When you apply the 90/10 rule to the Christian market, which is but a smaller proportion of the mainstream market, the number of aesthetically acceptable acts dwindles to a pitiful number.
Which brings us back to Sufjan Stevens — a Christian musician who invokes the name of God and other Christian tropes in his work, and one who is also critically acclaimed (and not just by me).
In my experience, Christian music tends to spend too much time in the nebulous God-talk and not enough time in the narrative, experiential aspect that draws me to the music I love. This is where Sufjan Stevens succeeds, of course. Take, for instance, this lyric from my favourite song of last year, “Casimir Pulaski Day:”
Tuesday night at the Bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens
When I first heard that lyric, my heart nearly jumped up my throat and out of my body. Who, of we who have experienced the Tuesday night Bible study, hasn’t been there? Right there, in the moment of that lyric?
Maybe if Christian music talked more about the times when we call out to God and nothing happens, I’d take it more seriously.
Well, that and if there were more handclaps.
Let me begin with a lexical clarification. In this essay, I’ll use the term “Emergent/ing” as a blanket term for those who may or may not associate themselves directly with Emergent, a group of pastor-writers who gathered under that name at the beginning of the decade to pool their efforts in encouraging/facilitating postmodern faith “conversation,” through their local faith communities and also through their published works, the most famous of those being Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian. There’s been lots of talk on the interwebs about whether you can be “Emerging” without being “Emergent,” and I think by this point it’s clear that you can. The definition at Wikipedia is a good one:
The emerging church or emergent church is a diverse movement within Christianity that arose in the late 20th century as a reaction to the influence of modernism in Western Christianity. The movement is usually called a “conversation” by its proponents to emphasize its diffuse nature with contributions from many people and no explicitly defined leadership or direction. The Emergent/ing church seeks to deconstruct and reconstruct Christianity as its mainly Western members live in a postmodern culture.
When I first encountered the Emergent/ing “conversation” last year, I was incredibly optimistic. Having read some of the texts valued by the Emergent/ing crowd already (Brian McLaren, Donald Miller), I was pleased to see that there was serious discussion going on about the true nature of Christianity and its placement within a postmodern context.
But then, I found that Emergent has an alarming tendency to be androcentric, and even anti-feminist.
First, the majority of Emergent/ing leaders are men, and white men at that. This list of pioneers in the Emerging Church movement contains 16 names; of those, one is a woman. I’m not suggesting that list is comprehensive (it isn’t), nor am I suggesting that women are not involved in the Emergent/ing Church movement. There’s never been a short supply of women attending church, after all, but there has been a dearth of women in leadership. In the past, it was due to direct decrees and misapplication of Pauline biblical texts. Now, it’s more a holdover from that era. Often, women are not expressly forbidden from leadership but the culture is such that it’s still not done, much. After all, what young girl sitting in a pew will dream of growing up to be a pastor when the person standing behind the pulpit is a man, and she is taught to identify with the woman sitting next to her? Until there are women leaders in the movement — vocal ones on the level of the men on the aforementioned list, Emergent/ing will lack credibility in the eyes of me and other feminists.
Second, the Emergent/ing theological makeover has not gone far enough to excise the pervasive gendering of the divine. Tony Jones, an founding member of Emergent has said that Christianity is suffering from a case of bad theology. Hey, I’m all for remaking Christian theology. The Emergent crowd will likely bristle at the word “remaking” because that’s exactly the kind of word their conservative critics would fling back in their faces, accusing them of making the religion into whatever they want to be. Personally, I’m all for remaking this patriarchal, sexist religion. By all means, do it. But make sure you address the fact that the religion is patriarchal and sexist. I haven’t read Brian McLaren’s new book, but I know that his previous works have given only a token acknowledgment to the fact that Christianity as a religion is incredibly oppressive and dismissive of women. (See Michelle Murrain’s review of A Generous Orthodoxy.)
Patriarchy is so ingrained into evangelical Christianity that I don’t expect it to be removed in a generation. Women have made some gains in agency in American Christianity over the past 25 years, but not nearly to the point where even one third of pastors are women, let alone one half as it should be. Women are doing feminist theology — Gail Ramshaw, Rosemary Radford Reuther, Anne Lamott. But none of them is in the Emergent/ing movement, and few are even known to Emergent/ing adherents. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I read the anthology edited by the late godfather of postmodern Christianity, Mike Yaconelli, Stories of Emergence: Moving from Absolute to Authentic. In it, Frederica Mathewes-Green wrote about her “Personal Journey through Feminism,” meaning, her journey from being a self-identified feminist to being a self-identified non-feminist. You can read the entirety of my reactions in this blog post.
What I want to know is, where are the feminist Emergent/ing Church writers? In my experience, the men of the Emergent/ing movement are not anti-feminist, but rather feminist-ignorant. Sexism simply isn’t on their radar. Part of me wants to cut them some slack — it’s not their fault they grew up reading a holy text where God was the same gender as they and thus they don’t know how disheartening it is to have to constantly mentally switch the pronouns when reading in order to apply its teachings to their lives.
The mostly male leaders of the Emergent/ing movement cannot expect women like me to take their so-called “progressive” theology seriously if they do not check their privelege. If you truly want to create a progressive, egalitarian Christianity, you cannot ignore the gender inequities that are embedded in religious practice and, of course, in the Bible itself.
Would it be too much to suggest that Emergent/ing types start to eliminate the male pronoun when referring to God? There are very few American Christians who, when pressed, would say that God is male. God is without gender and sex, they would say, as would, I’d wager, all Emergent/ing types. So why the hell are you still referring to God with a male pronoun? It’s a bad habit, albeit a millennia-old one. Get over it. No Emergent/ing adherent would ever suggest that God was gendered or sexed. Even most conservative evangelicals will say that God is without gender and sex. But still we see so few members of these communities making any attempt to change the language they use in liturgy, worship, and day-to-day conversation,
The gendered language is right there in the originals (or, the copies of the copies of the copies of the originals as they are). And presumably there’s going to be no changing of the text itself, beyond attempts to be as accurate in translation possibly (as the TNIV has done, never defaulting to the male pronoun when it is not indicated in the original Greek). So that means that Christian faith communities need to make sure their liturgies are as inclusive as possible. That is something the Emergent community is, for the most part, not doing.
I want Emergent/ing adherents, specifically men, to back up their belief that God is not a he with the excision of that pronoun from their discussions. I want those leaders to step outside their experience as men in the Christian faith and try to imagine what it’s been like for those of us in the other half of the human species, the half that’s rarely mentioned in the holy text and usually only as object lessons.