All right. I’ve read this article twice and the condescending overtones are still driving me batty.

I’ve picked this up before in arguments by Dawkins, et al over the sexism in most religions. The educated white man takes off his glasses and stares at me, saying, “Why on earth would you want to subscribe to a system that treats you like dirt?”

To some extent, he’s got a point. Why do I stick around in a religion that has historically seen my embodiment as some kind of hindrance, proof of my own unworthiness, or source of evil in mankind? Why do I stick around a religion that seeks to control my body, treat my sexual desire as something dangerous, denigrate my mind because of my embodiment, and that in some denominations would deny my call to the ministry altogether? Why stick around when I hear that churches refuse to address sexual abuse and rape of their female and male members, even by members of the clergy? Why stick around when my questions regarding the feminine side of God are met by statements like “Nobody cares about stuff like that” or “That’s just idolatrous”? Why stick around when my religion has chosen to exclude my fellow queer friends and exploit the marginalized?

According to the article, it has something to do with my crazy woman brains. And my desperate need to have babies and be accepted by society. And the fact that I’m just not as enlightened as the rational men.

I…wait, what?

Did I just hit a time warp?

I get angry in church when some white guy stands up and tells me that I should believe something because he knows what is good for me and his genitalia somehow gives him direct access to God’s mind. I get just as angry when other condescending people pat me on the head, tell me that there might be scientific explanations behind my belief in God, but that I should evolve beyond it because that’s what enlightened men are doing, and they know better than I do what is good for me.

Neither one accepts my own agency as a spiritual being or respects the fact that I might have some darn good reasons for believing in God and being a Christian. And being a Christian woman, I MUST be oppressed, because liberal religion that might affirm women as something other than the tools and servants of men doesn’t actually exist! Never mind that I might be able to carve out a space for myself in my church, or that I might use my own understanding and rationality wedded to my studies and experiences to find a place before God that is my own and cannot be interfered with by any institutions, or that the teachings of Christ might affirm me. Such things are inconceivable in this enlightened age, when religious people are often equated with being ignorant fools.

Furthermore, the arguments are terribly reductionist and reminiscent of so many of the nature trumps nurture arguments that have been used against women seeking their own personhood since…forever? They remind me of almost anti-feminist screed I’ve ever read: that due to our own biological weaknesses, we don’t know what’s good for us and must have someone tell it to us. It’s for our own good.

Look, I’m not going into the history of women in the church or women and the church; there are a lot of books out there that will do so in a more coherent fashion than I can here. I know there are problems. I’ve listed some of them above. But I ain’t going nowhere. In fact, I’m going further into the institution. God(dess) help me. Christ’s message speaks to me. It gives me meaning. It gives me understanding. It gives me a challenge. It gives me love. It doesn’t discriminate, no matter what people have done with it since it was uttered. I love it enough to ask that his church mirror his love for me and others by asking for our inclusion.

In implying that women should accept discursive erasure of their spiritual experiences in order to be liberated, those outside of church are performing the exact same violence that those inside the church have been doing for centuries. Guess what? Y’all both need to knock it off.

Jessica Glaser is a fierce mainline/emergent feminist affiliated with University Park United Methodist Church and House For All Sinners and Saints in Denver. Her writings can be found at http://aredhel72.blogspot.com/.

Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl
By Susan Campbell
Beacon Press, 2009

I first spotted the book ‘Dating Jesus’ on a friend’s list of books she was currently reading on her blog. I had a chuckle, as about a half a year ago I had started countering growing questions of “So when will you be getting married?” with answers of “When Jesus comes back. I’ll be a bride of Christ.” With that in my head, I asked if I could borrow it when she was finished, and she generously provided.

The book doesn’t give tips on dating your favorite resurrected deity, but instead covers most of what Campbell can remember from her childhood up until, roughly, her graduation from high school. Her life was defined by her participation in the fundamentalist church of Christ in Missouri, into which her family as inducted by her new stepfather. She begins by discussing her immersion baptism at the age of 13 (which had to be done over, in her mind, because there was an air bubble that ruined the whole process the first time), then goes back earlier to her vague memories of being in a Christmas pageant as a little girl in a different church, in stark contrast to the church of Christ, which had no pageants or even a piano in the sanctuary due to some scriptural sticking point.

Between discussions of baseball, the Bible, sexism in the church, and odd expressions of fundamentalist suppression, one gets the impression that this would have been a fairly grim childhood had it not been for Campbell’s own joie de vivre, spunk, and intelligence. She rewrites the stories of women in the Bible when she is dissatisfied with their scriptural treatment (an early fanfiction writer! A woman after my own heart!), but this early gift of writing and hermeneutics is quashed by her stepfather when he finds out, as she should not change one “jot or tittle” of the original scripture. She knows her Bible backward and forward, knows Jesus inside and out, and chafes at the way her church will not let her use her knowledge to teach Sunday school because a girl cannot teach boys past a certain age, or at the way she is punished for asking too many questions. She runs into the same problems that St Paul and Martin Luther did before her: she cannot follow all the rules all the time, even though she really wants to and is really trying. Yet she is not saved by grace in a church where every law must be followed to the letter, and where her physical embodiment (and all the disadvantages conferred thereof) trumps the power of her mind every time.

Sprinkled throughout the narrative are her stories of trying to become equal in the realm of sports in the days prior to and just after Title IX, rounding out the development of her mindset in which fair play is important and embodiment is not something to be ashamed of. Also included is her growing awareness of the world of boys and dating, but her by and large rejection of both due to her fears regarding her salvation and the restrictions of her church and parents (hence the “dating Jesus”). A big chunk of the book isn’t personal at all, but an exploration of the history of feminist theology and the women’s movement in the United States. She also shows the intertangled roots of the evangelical movement, the temperance movement, and the first wave feminist movement before they split off. The way she connects the desire for social justice and a better society with the desire for equality between men and women outside and inside the church is an important and key missing piece, I feel, that has been lost in discussions of women’s role in modern Christianity. My mother is fond of saying if it wasn’t for women, there wouldn’t BE a Christian church. Campbell is arguing something similar in her efforts to remind us reclaim our own history.

My primary qualms with this book don’t have to do with the subject matter at all, but the way we see her go from high school student filled with self-protective notions about purity and love to a fully grown, unchurched adult with liberal leanings. There is no discussion of the conversion process, or the first time she is able to break down her barriers about what she thinks love should be, or the first time she owns herself as a woman shedding an oppressive past. It’s a little disjointed. Perhaps she isn’t comfortable talking about it, and that’s understandable. A little more of a hint might have been useful, though.

At the end, she talks about how she is “haunted” by her fundamentalist past, and how she and her brother feel that fundamentalism “broke off” inside of them; they were pierced by this brutal arrow, and have never been able to fully heal from that experience. It reminds me of why I am troubled by fundamentalism, with its dedication to a set of beliefs with no discernment regarding them at the cost of Christ’s message and actual living people.

In spite of some gaps in the narrative, I heartily recommend this book to people looking for humor, knowledge of Christian hits and misses, American history, and a love note to the fearless little kid that used to live inside all of us.

Jessica Glaser is a fierce mainline/emergent feminist affiliated with University Park United Methodist Church and House For All Sinners and Saints in Denver. Her writings can be found at http://aredhel72.blogspot.com/.

by Jessica Glaser

I’ve slowly begun to work my way through books written about the Emergent movement or reflecting theology, orthodoxy, and practices that many Emergent groups have come to embrace. Nearly all of them are written by men, which says something much larger than I’d like to discuss here. Nearly all of them gingerly step around the issues of abortion and “promiscuity” (whatever that means), seeing them as modern societal problems. I find this problematic, in that abortion and “promiscuity” are usually two words that are thrown about when seeking to impose restrictions on the lives and bodies of women (the other being “family values” in the unholy antifeminist trinity). I leave bigger discussions of these implications for future essays and debates, but when I hear these, I am forced to notice a deafening silence around much more pervasive issues affecting an enormous number of women in the United States and on the planet at large: sexual violence and violence against women.

Around 1 in 5 women in the United States has been raped or sexually assaulted. Only 37% of rapes are ever reported, according to the FBI, let alone prosecuted. Approximately three women are murdered each day. Nearly 5 million acts of domestic violence occur every year. These assaults and murders are usually performed by an intimate partner or someone the victims knows. Furthermore, somewhere around 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the United States every year.

On a global scale, approximately one in three women will be beaten or sexually assaulted during her lifetime.

I hope these statistics are enough to convince you that there is a major problem here. Numerous advocacy groups working since the beginning of the Second Wave Feminist movement have been able to help millions of survivors in their fight to be taken seriously and their struggle to find safety. Over 40 years, a societal shift has occurred (although not strongly enough) wherein it is no longer acceptable to hit or rape your wife, or any other woman, and that it is not the woman’s fault if such violence is perpetrated upon her. And yet, violence and rape of women are still happening on a massive scale.

Every election cycle, I hear numerous condemnations coming from Christian communities on the subjects of abortion, homosexuality, promiscuity, and even occasionally pornography (without the requisite acknowledgment of the work of feminists such as Andrea Dworkin or Catherine MacKinnon). But I never, ever hear condemnations of domestic violence or rape, which hurts families on a grander scale than most (if any) of the issues listed above.

I don’t understand this silence. Is it because American Christians think that people know that they’re automatically against this kind of violence, and thus don’t need to address it? Is it because there is still a society wide (not just Christian) implied pervasive need to blame the victims and survivors of such violence, and residual from the time when women were chattel, less than human according to legal status and protections? Is it because the Christian community at large still values women less than it does men because of the strong patriarchal history and context of the church and its orthodoxy? I’d argue that it’s probably the intersection of all three of these reasons, and others I haven’t mentioned or am not aware of. And based on the way Jesus treated women and his teachings, I’m sure that the fact that this violence goes unmentioned or ignored, or is tacitly sanctioned by the Christian community, is utterly unacceptable.

So let’s have it, churches, theologians, evangelicals, mainliners. Let’s hear what you’re going to do about the abuse of 50% of your members, who you may not see as equals, but who have been equals in God since the beginning, with society just now learning to catch up. This violence inscribed on our bodies, minds, and souls needs to stop, and you need to be part of the solution.

Statistics taken from http://www.feminist.com/antiviolence/facts.html and http://www.now.org/issues/violence/stats.html, which in turn have been taken from the United Nations, the CIA, the FBI, and the US Department of Justice, among others.

Jessica Glaser is a recent graduate of the University of Denver, a former activist with the V-Day Campaign, a mainline United Methodist, an Emergent Lutheran, and an unapologetic feminist.