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.

technorati tags: emergent, theology, christianity, feminism

Joss Whedon, a film and television writer/director/producer who is known for creating TV shows that become cult hits and also feature strong women characters, was recently honoured by Equality Now! for doing just that.

You can watch his brief but articulate acceptance speech on YouTube.

I’m a feminist who acknowledges the importance of and encourages the participation of men in the struggle, because it still is a struggle, as Joss demonstrates. There are times I wish all television shows were made by Joss Whedon! Then we wouldn’t have to put up with any more dead-strippers-in-the-blood-soaked-motel-room episodes of C.S.I.

Before my engagement with the “real” blogosphere (that is, the blogosphere that is not LiveJournal and its clones), I assumed “real” bloggers did not engage in this kind of self indulgent memery. I was wrong! They do. And so, in an effort to fit in with the cool kids, so do I.

Friday Random Ten
1. Bloc Party, “Banquet (Phones Disco Edit)”
2. Ruthie Foster, “Real Love”
3. Memphis Minnie, “Ma Rainey”
4. DJ Vadim feat. Sarah Jones, “Your Revolution”
5. Joan Jett, “I Love Rock & Roll”
6. Kinnie Starr, “Cee God”
7. Son Volt, “Tear Stained Eye”
8. Magnetophone, “Rae and Suzette”
9. The VaGiants, “Alright”
10. The Hummers, “Au Feu”

It seems iTunes was feeling a bit feminist this morning and that is more than all right with me.

Can’t talk more now, have to leave for tai chi.

Is this the same Calgary-based Beyond magazine that I read in junior high? It’s still around? Amazing! Has anyone read it recently? What’s it like? I remember enjoying it a great deal as a teenager, but back then I believed a lot of things I don’t now, so who knows. I really loved it, though — it was thought-provoking and loaded with truthiness. I’m normally a pack-rat when it comes to saving old magazines, I wonder if I still have some of those old copies… probably not.

I remember it being far more blatantly Christian back in the day. I’d order a subscription to find out, but just spent $25 on Geez and I don’t know if I can justify the expense right away. I’m super curious, though.

One more thing: with all my talk of feminism in the previous post, I wanted but forgot to link to an article that beautifully exposes the silliness of (most) people who claim to be not-feminists.

It is about knowing that a woman is the equal of a man in art, at work, and under the law, whether you say it out loud or not — but for God’s sake start saying it out loud already. You are a feminist.

Sarah Bunting’s Yes, You Are. Take heed, my friends.

I’m reading this anthology my brother read in the course of his youth ministry studies, a volume called Stories of Emergence: Moving from Absolute to Authentic, edited by SCP favourite Mike Yaconelli. The back cover summary reads, “Follow the stories of people who were steeped in their beliefs… and walk with them on their journeys out of those beliefs.” I haven’t read them all — so far only Tony Jones (another SCP, um, favourite), and I liked his a lot. No beef with the Jonester for me. Today.

No, my beef is (however unsurprisingly) with the “former feminist.”

Frederica Mathewes-Green writes about her “Personal Journey through Feminism,” where she begins as a second-waver in the ’70s, becomes a feminist pro-lifer in the late ’80s and eventually abandons the feminist mantle altogether. She writes:

I even began to think that the whole theory was erroneous — that men and women rise and fall together, their situation affected by race or class, but not gender. A housemaid has more in common with her short-order cook husband and her bricklayer brother than with the wealthy female lawyer whose toilet she cleans. (143)

I totally agree. BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT FEMINIST THEORISTS ARE SAYING THESE DAYS. I think what gets me most about this essay is that it’s in a book that will be read in bible schools all across the continent and 19-year-old boys headed for ministry will be reading this and accepting Mathewes-Green’s portrait of feminism as the ultimate, correct one. That’s pretty damn terrifying.

There’s a reason women of my generation separate ourselves from from our mothers’ feminism. Because our ideology has changed and grown! Because we stand upon the foundations laid by women in the first and second waves of feminism and honour the efforts and progress and achievements of the women who established that females were persons under the law, able to own property, hold jobs, and run for political office. But we will also expand our ideas and conceptions.

The only third-wave feminist voice she cites is Naomi Wolf. Maybe Mathewes-Green should try reading feminist tomes that don’t appear on the New York Times bestseller list, and then she’d get a better picture of the shape of things feminist.

The feminisms of today are no longer so myopic that they ignore the plight of women who are not white, middle-class North Americans. Indeed, feminisms of today are hesitant to bind women together in a commonality of experience. “Of all the ways that genuine injustice can appear,” Mathewes-Green writes, “gender seemed increasingly the most spurious grid to use.” My feminist friends and I know that there is no common women’s experience any more than there is a common male experience. Not all women give birth, not all women are mothers, not all women menstruate, not all women work. I am a white Canadian woman, born to middle-class, educated parents, I have far more agency and opportunity and freedom than a large percentage of men in the world. Feminists of my generation and background are not blind to this fact, though Mathewes-Green seems to think that we are.

Has Mathewes-Green even heard of bell hooks, who, in the ’80s, pushed second-wave feminism beyond the paradigm of equating success with equality with the ruling white male class? Is she at all familiar with the feminisms that focus on eliminating sexism which operates as one of many oppressive structures in society?

Mathewes-Green creates a very interesting metaphor in this essay — the Superman cape. She writes:

Feminism is only one of its many expressions; the causes, as I said, are interchangeable. It’s an intoxicating costume. For one thing, the Superman cape works like an invisibility cloak in reverse: put it on and you cant’ see your own faults. Instead, you see everyone else’s…

Superman-Cape attitude has now natural enemies. If opposition arises — and self-made heroes secretly hope it will — it just proves that the hero threatens the powers-that-be…

…it blinds us to our own faults, so exhilarated are we by the faults of others. We develop contempt for others and describe them and their beliefs in the language of insult…

The Superman costume is like the shirt of Nessus, a wedding gift to Hercules that was supposedly charged with supernatural power. In reality, it was saturated with poison… I began to see that feminism was bad for me. It inculcated feelings of self-righteousness and judgmentalism. It filled me with self-perpetuating anger. It blinded me to the good that men do and the bad that women do. It made me think that men and women were enemies, when we actually have a mutual Enemy — who delights in any human discord. (142-143)

I actually like the Superman cape metaphor. As I read Mathewes-Green’s description of the phenomenon, I experience a certain level of conviction. In the throes of ideology I do often become blind to my own faults. I have, too often, stooped to a “language of insult,” as indeed I may have in this very post.

But these have nothing to do with my feminism and everything to do with the fact that I suck.

The Superman cape can be worn in the name of many causes, as Mathewes-Green writes. I have seen it worn in the name of feminism, anarchism, conservatism and, of course, Christianity. Does that fact by itself condemn any one of those causes?

Feminism can, should be, is subject to criticism. Without critical thought it could never expand and grow (like some other movements I can think of). But what Mathewes-Green seems to have missed is that feminism has responded to critics like she, and is changing. It’s too bad she jumped ship before she realized that, though. And too bad all the bible school students reading this anthology won’t be reading bell hooks, too.

Sunday night I went to an ordination service. It’s not the first one I’ve attended, but it’s the first one I’ve attended as a critically-thinking adult. The other times were when I was a kid, including my own father’s, which I don’t remember at all save for the photographs which allow me to manufacture memories based on the images of my three-year-old self in white tights.

This ordination was for my old youth pastor, who’s still youth pastor, but after seven years has completed his Calvinist seminary education.

There’s a strict and boring order of service to these things, the lowlight of which being a talk by some pastor guy that went on and on. In truth it was only fifteen minutes (I was checking the clock, believe me), but seemed waaaaaay longer. That’s what happens, my dad says, when you try to preach without notes! You have to be a really good speaker to speak without notes and not make an ass of yourself. This particular pastor guy was not one of those speakers.

That’s the explanation my dad offered for why this pastor guy, when talking about young pastors going out into the world, referred to all the “young men” God has blessed us with to serve as pastors. Our denomination is loathe to ordain women, we all know this, but can we at least keep up some sort of rhetorical pretense of equality?! Again, my dad blamed this slip of the tongue on the pastor guy’s lack of notes, but I blame it on systemic sexism and idiocy.

Back when I went to bible college (a denominational one), there was a little bit of a kerfuffle when the dean of students was planning to leave her job with the college and go teach at a seminary in Brazil. Despite the fact that any man with her qualifications would have been ordained already, the denomination only saw fit to ordain her before her big missions thing to Brazil in the name of expediency, since ordained clergy have an easier time with immigration bureaucracy.

The dean of academics spoke out on her behalf, calling the situation for what it was: sexist, and racist. Sexist for the obvious reasons, and racist because why was a woman good enough to teach non-white people in Brazil but not good enough to teach white people men in North America?

Just once in my life I want to have a woman pastor. The church I currently attend has three full-time pastors and they’re all men. I could leave this church, I guess, but if all the feminists leave then how are things going to change? I don’t know.

I’ve been wondering for awhile when and if the point will come when I’ll have to leave this particular church, when what I believe and what they believe will be too far apart for me to have a place in the community. What draws me there now is the familiarity, the people I’ve known since I was five.

I was raised some of these concerns with my small group the other week, and they immediately launched into a litany of praise of me, outlining how much they appreciated my contrary and slightly disruptive presence in their group. But I wasn’t fishing for compliments; I’m serious. I don’t know how long it will last, you know? A year, two, three… but eventually something’s going to have to give.

Then again, that night after the ordination service, I had a really good talk with my dad and brother and realized that the gap between their theology and mine may not be as wide as I thought it was. And at least they’re both feminists, though they’d never admit it or label themselves as such. But trust me, they are. (We can smell our own.)

In most of my previous posts (few as they may be) I’ve referred a book called Under the Tree of Life: The Religion of a Feminist Christian by liturgical scholar Gail Ramshaw. I found out about this book from the Feminarian, who wrote a post that completely sold it, literally. That post sums up the enthusiasm and effusiveness I feel in reading the book. It really is that good. I second everything the Feminarian says and so will move on to some other discussion of the book.

It’s a very personal book — Ramshaw doesn’t ever write as though she’s creating the definitive feminist Christianity, but I can’t tell you how encouraging it was to read that there is at least one woman who has been successful in that endeavour. My feminism is one thing that, if it cannot be incorporated into faith, will force me to abandon Christianity for good. So it’s good to know that the two are not incompatible.

It’s so hard to grow up in a religion that negates you. This is something I felt from a young age, reading articles about how to prepare oneself for one’s future husband in Brio magazine. In the evangelical circles in which I grew up, it’s not talked about, the fact that the bible is not woman-friendly (to put it mildly) on a fundamental level. In an organization where the leadership is primarily male, this isn’t exactly surprising, I suppose. Pastors just don’t get this, I think, to a large extent. Since they’re male, they don’t readily know what it’s like to read the bible and have these masculine metaphors, vocatives, and pronouns thrown up, constantly, wearing you down and leaving a woman with a portrait of humanity and divinity both that reflect so little of her. It’s not their fault on an individual level. Most of the pastors I have personally interacted with have all been quite progressive in their view of women and their role in the church, my own father included.

Here’s how Ramshaw summarizes the woman-oppression of the Christian faith as it is practiced pretty much everywhere:

So here is the rug that women have been swept under: God is referred to as he. God is named Father and called King. We are saved by the man Jesus. Jesus chose men as apostles. Males are the thinkers and the leaders in the church. Men are essentially more human than are women, yet men can image the divine as women cannot. Eve was our evil mother, Mary an impossible goal. Women are created for sexual activity, which is unavoidably sinful. Women are to emulate Jesus by serving others. The church licenses social strictures on women, who are to obey male authority. (40)

I don’t know if other ladies will feel me on this, but all of this sums up the source of the pain that I have felt trying to latch on to Christianity. It’s like this secret pain that they don’t talk about at church. They have those Bad Girls of the Bible bible study books, but they don’t have a study book called Your Holy Text Negates Your Validity as a Human Being: Discuss. I wish they did. I wonder how many other women feel this? Maybe not that many others. I don’t know. But I’d like to try and talk about it. Not just with women, of course. I’m a firm believer that men are partners in the feminist struggle, and I think that there are plenty of men who would have the same kind of “a-ha” moment when they realize what it’s like to be a Christian woman.

Back to Ramshaw. The first half of the book is more gender-focussed, and the second half branches out into broader theological territory. One thing I loved about the book was when she outlines beliefs that would have scandalized a, say, 16-year-old me. Like, that she doesn’t believe in the bodily resurrection of Christ or in heaven. It thrilled me, for some reason, to be reading things like that, reading Christian ideas that don’t jive with the mainline interpretation. The church failed me as a child in the sense that there are only certain questions you can ask. Mainline evangelicalism claims to welcome seekers and questioners, but they really don’t; there are only a few questions you’re allowed to ask, and “What if Jesus’ physical body didn’t actually rise from the dead?” isn’t one of them. I don’t know what I believe about the bodily resurrection or heaven, but I relish the opportunity to hear a completely different, yet still Christian, viewpoint on those subjects.

Ramshaw’s theology is firmly rooted in the community ethic that’s resonated so strongly with me over the past couple of years, and that informs her ideas about the body — the body as self and the body of Christ and the body as sexual. She writes about metaphor, and how it’s OK to toss out some of the old ones, and make some new ones, too.

Some biblical metaphors I will pick up, hold in my hands, and see that the silverplate has worn off, the base metal is showing through. These I shut away in the drawer, or throw away altogether. But others, I discover, are sterling. (38)

I came to the realization earlier this year that I personally cannot worship a male God. I think most people in my faith community would agree that God is neither male nor female, but if that’s the case, why are all our prayers to Father God in invocation of his wisdom? Why is this masculine pronoun so freaking omnipresent? Why is “Lord” so freaking omnipresent? In my own personal religious life (as I practice it outside the faith community), there are no gendered pronouns or vocatives. It’s a matter of what metaphors are right for me. Father God may work for you, and I wouldn’t dream of denying your right to use it (OK, actually, I might dream of a day when no one used gendered vocatives, but it would just be a daydream). All I know is that if I’m going to be Christian, there has to be some give in that area. I have to find some new metaphors,

As the title suggests, a favourite of Ramshaw’s is the tree of life. There are so many trees in the bible, and each of them illuminates, however dimly, a facet of God. Some criticize Ramshaw for too easily giving up the cross (which she doesn’t — she just loosens her grip a little). She says that she needs both the cross, and the tree. I imagine the image of a great tree which, when you squint a little, reveals the axes of the cross within its trunk and branches.

The shared symbol system doesn’t beam down from God, offering immediate fruits and granting peaceful shade. No, we have to tend it, prune it, prop it up here and there, protect it from tree-eating beetles. (143)

I find myself clinging to this idea a bit. The idea that we can change, the idea that the religion can change and still be alive and strong and true to its roots. Maybe its a bit of a pipe dream, but what isn’t?