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.
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