IS CHRISTIAN FEMINISM POSSIBLE?

Introduction
There are many responses to feminism. On the one hand there is a stridency and an extremism associated with the word feminism that puts some people off. Feminism is associated in many people’s minds only with lesbianism and with single women who don’t want children or families. In other words they feel that feminists are deeply opposed to some of the things they hold most dearly.

On the other hand feminism is seen by some as unnecessary. Some women feel that everything is now fine, and we are all equal and feminism is an unfortunate or rather puzzling episode from the past that no longer matters.

Obviously I think feminism does matter. I think we aren’t equal, and perhaps never will be. And there are more young women today who think the world has evened out, but even those of us in a previous generation often took a long time to see the patriarchy that was all around us.
Some of the discrimination against women is really subtle, and some of it is still pretty much out in the open. None of this is to suggest that men are the evil perpetrators of abuse against women; rather we are all tied up in a system that works against women in a systematic way.

These are just some of the examples of what we call patriarchy all around us:

 • Women are the victims of violence and abuse.
 • Women are the victims of the media definition of image.
 • Old women are much more despised than old men.
 • Single women are still much more despised than single men.
 • Women are still socialized to dependency and men to autonomy.
 • Around the world women are victims of rape, prostitution, and infanticide.
 • In many African countries women do all the work.
 • In Islamic countries women are still the property of men.
 • Even in our own culture if you look at who does the household work it is largely women even if both the man and the woman are working.

Women in the workforce still experience pressure for sexual favours in exchange for promotion.
Most of the parents looking after children alone are women and single parenthood drives women into poverty in large numbers.

In the churches that ordain women, women are mostly working in part time or unpaid positions.
I wanted to start by giving some of the reasons that I find myself a Christian feminist, in some sense identifying with both labels, even though of course in many ways labels are destructive as well as descriptive.


My Own Journey
I didn’t grow up evangelical. And for a long while I didn’t believe either. I came back to faith as a young adult from a RC background.. I was marked by the L’Abri movement, and by the social action emphasis of evangelicalism’s left wing. L’Abri was another place on the edges, where shared meals, worship and the asking of questions went hand in hand. Where others have experienced evangelicalism as closed doors and minds, I experienced it as a lively interaction with culture, art, philosophy and urgent questioning about how we should live. In a community that took beauty seriously, I found compassion rather than judgment for those who did not believe. L’Abri interacted with the cultured despisers of religion. They thought things were interesting. They made it possible to think Christianity was interesting and compelling; and redeemed the words “Christian” and “evangelical.” The depth of this communal and spiritual experience was never reflected in descriptions of orthodoxy I encountered in feminist or liberal literature or classrooms.

But again, gender roles were ambiguous and role models at L’Abri were mixed. Women were neither encouraged nor discouraged from theological study, and the only models were somewhat gender stereotypical.. This was for us the place where Scripture and life came together in a most vibrant way, that then made these connections hard ever to leave behind. For many evangelicals their churches were places where conversion was emphasized but questions were not to be asked. When a crisis of faith emerged subjectivity and objective faith appeared to be in conflict. Questioning and doubt were not defined out of the Christian’s experience, but rather included as an integral part of real faith.

But coming to a full feminist identity was a slow process. I had encountered an advisor at graduate school who said you must do the women’s issue to be authentic. At that time I found feminism to be fascinating, but also too lacking in transcendence, too selfish. I disagreed with her and did freedom, but after about 5 years of living in the American South, trying to have children and live the academic life as well, I was converted to feminism. I had simply experienced too much patriarchy, in birthing children, in churches, in small city life, in a liberal arts college. And the more I dwelt within the text, and within Churchly institutions the deeper the sense of patriarchy became.

One summer I was in Europe. I wondered what my identity really was at that point. I wasn’t then connected with any particular evangelical institution, and was very much on the edges of the Episcopal church. That summer I read the feminist Schussler Fiorenza with new appreciation and at the same time worshipped at St Aldates in Oxford on Pentecost. I realized this was where my soul resonated – it was intelligent, liturgical, evangelical and charismatic around the edges.
But I had also a new sense of identity with feminist theology. They were often defined against each other. How to reconcile these, or find a space to be, between maps. I found myself now on two maps, not on one looking out at the other, but truly on the boundary. I was profoundly committed to the Christian gospel, the grammar of the scandal of faith, of the last being first and the worker who turns up late being paid – things against reason.

But with all of this I had the deepening sense that the tradition was marred by a blinding patriarchy, and few of my fellow travellers were Christian. In the women we have interviewed for the book I have just been writing we found that this was true of most of the women we studied. Coming to see the patriarchy that was facing us was a long and difficult task, and one that we faced as attempted to live out God’s call on our lives and encountered opposition.

But as I studied feminism further I discovered its Christian roots. So in answer to the questions is Christian feminism possible I would answer definitely yes. I think we really must be feminist, but it isn’t easy, and it isn’t easy to be the right kind of feminist, or to know how hard to push the boundaries.

Some feminism is obviously undermining of faith and opposed to faith, and even defined in opposition to faith. So why do I think they are compatible?

The first reason is that feminism can be seen have deep roots in the revival movements that make up the modern church.

The second reason is that feminism is directed toward rooting out and eradicating evil in the form of patriarchy. And opposing evil is certainly not only compatible with Christian faith, but fairly central to its practices.

The third reason is that in Christian feminism Christ is see for the first time through the eyes of women’s experience, and it is in some sense only when Christ is understood though all the cultural groups of the world that Christ will be seen fully through human eyes.

So I will begin here by looking at the history of feminism and its theological and secular roots. Then I will talk a little about gender and patriarchy, and the development of feminist approaches to theology. After this I hope to come back to the question of whether we can be both feminists and Christians, or even Christian feminists. And I will end by facing up to some of the difficulties that exist in real life when women try to live out Christian feminism.


Christian Feminism – An oxymoron?
Christian Feminism has its religious roots in women’s leadership in nineteenth century revival movements, and secular roots in the women’s suffrage movement.

In the United States the movement for the abolition of slavery was often led by women, many of whom used similar exegetical techniques to argue for the right of women to preach and lead churches, or to be ordained where ordination applied. Abolitionists argued that although slaves are mentioned in the New Testament the overall trajectory of Scripture is that of liberation. And they argue that being human and made in the image of God precludes ownership by another human person.

Similarly, early evangelical feminists – although they weren’t called this – argued that in spite of the difficult Pauline passages in Scripture, and in spite of Scriptural precedence in most areas Galatians 3:28 should be used as the hermeneutical key by which Scripture is unlocked. Many nineteenth century women studied the Greek NT texts in detail. They came out of Charles Finney’s Oberlin College in Ohio, the first college in the States to give entry to women and blacks. Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown were early graduates of Oberlin. Antoinette was the first woman in the US to be ordained.

But before this time even, the Wesleyan revival in Britain had included female leadership, and earlier still the Quaker Margaret Fell had done a detailed study of the Scriptures and had argued for the rights of women to preach the gospel. And it was in these non-conformist and Wesleyan influenced denominations that women gained power in the nineteenth century. At the end of that century there were 100 women officers in the Salvation Army, 88 church of God women evangelists, 49 women Congregationalist ministers, and 8% of the Nazarene church ministers were women. PRIVATE

But there have subsequently been waves of backlash against women’s leadership in churches. We may be entering a period of backlash now. I frequently hear otherwise women-affirming men blaming the state of the Church on the number of middle aged women who have been ordained in the last few decades. And some evangelical institutions in the States are becoming more conservative about women. But the backlash in the twentieth century has been so profound that even in denominations that did ordain women the memory of this has been forgotten. Why has there been a backlash? Men get uncomfortable when women are too much in charge. And there is a world-wide evidence than when women enter a field in numbers the status of that field diminishes.

Twentieth century secular feminism and the woman’s movement arose in the post war period with the publication of key feminist texts: The Second Sex (1953), by Simone de Beauvoir in France, The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan in the US, and The Female Eunuch (1971), by Germaine Greer in Australia. Women had worked in men’s jobs in two world wars, and had been emancipated from many of the burdens of child rearing by birth control and attempts to curb world population.

Twentieth century Marxism also influenced feminism. It is the work done by women that Marx described as alienating and oppressive. And Marxist feminists did not ignore the role of religion in encouraging and legitimating women’s exploitation. In other words the Church not only repeated the cliché that a woman’s place was in the home, but insisted that God demanded this.

The post-war period also saw an unprecedented isolation of women in their child rearing and domestic tasks. The large households of the nineteenth century and before, and the smaller communities were replaced by suburbia. In the US the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and opposition to war also encouraged a climate open to re-thinking traditional mores. So many women found in feminist thought that their experiences were being articulated for the first time.
Feminism often begins with women’s experience. But its major concerns are the interpretation of gender and its repercussions, and the analysis of and exposure of patriarchy.

Looking first at gender issues: Nineteenth century movements gave weight to the Enlightenment inspired notion of equality for all autonomous persons, including women. But these ideas were intermixed with religiously inspired notions of women’s unique role, nature and function
Early twentieth century feminism stressed the equality of the genders and the rights of women to equal work and opportunity. Contemporary modifications of feminism have stressed the unique contributions of the genders. Women are in some respects different from men, whether this difference is social or genetic in origin. Carol Gilligan noted the differences in women’s moral reasoning in In Another Voice – women value relationships more than justice and for this reason they always scaled lower than men on scales of moral reasoning. Others like philosopher Virginia Held have developed a new feminist ethics that emphasizes more relation oriented, nurturing values, rather than the long established male values of autonomy.

Behind these debates is the deeper question of where gender differences come from. Emphases upon the different contributions of women to work, philosophy, moral reasoning and theology are held in tension with the parallel insistence that all categories including gender are substantially, if not completely, social constructions of reality. This is still an area of ongoing debate and conversation, because some feminists claim that too much emphasis on how different women are leads to a renewed slotting of men and women into gender-appropriate categories and occupations.

The second key issue is patriarchy: We can define this as that evil, manifest in language, institutions, family traditions, cultural practices and work expectations which subjugates, dominates and excludes women from the public sphere, which caricatures women, and preclude women’s entry into and participation in many roles and occupations. Feminists claim that patriarchy affects the structures of every society in history—at least for the last 5000 years or so--and that patriarchal systems and institutions and habits are perpetuated as easily by the benevolent as the malevolent or misogynist, and in some ways by women and as well as men. We have all probably met kindly men who nevertheless believe that women belong in well-prescribed roles. And there are a great many women who believe this too.

Patriarchy is understood as leading to androcentrism, the structuring of all life and narrative around the experiences of men, and the according of dignity and worth to men and not to women. Contemporary attempts to root out and expose patriarchy in all its lingering disguises--deconstructing and reconstructing androcentric texts, institutions and meta-theories of Western civilization – including or especially the Christian narrative.

Secular feminism, then, can be seen to have largely forgotten its roots in revival Christianity, and is often defined explicitly against Christian faith, especially in its liberal, Marxist or neo-pagan forms.

How, then, do feminism and Christianity relate? Can there be any such thing as Christian feminism?

We have seen that it was Christian women who can be credited with giving feminism its beginnings, even if those origins have been forgotten by the feminist world itself, and forgotten even by more liberal and mainstream feminist theologians.

Feminist theology emerged in relationship to feminism in the early 1960s and 70s, inspired by the twentieth century struggles for the ordination of women in the mainline churches, which began at this time; Biblical passages and traditions which seemed to preclude ordination were re-examined and re-interpreted. Much of the earlier contribution of women to the Church leadership was forgotten at this time. Theological feminism has continued to examine the tradition and the Scriptures. They have agreed with secular feminists that the Bible was written in by human authors coming out of a profoundly patriarchal world-view. Theologians and pastors have blamed women for the sin of Adam and the fall of the human race, over and over again, for example. And women’s reproductive capacities were thought to be more animal-like and thus less spiritual than men’s all the way from the first to twentieth centuries. But feminist theologians, unlike more secular feminists, believe that Christianity can still be believed and salvaged from this patriarchy, that Christianity contains within itself the critique of all its misuses and of all the power structures and ideologies loosely based upon it.

How did this feminist/Christian thing begin? An important milestone in feminist theology is the 1960 Journal of Religion article by Valerie Saiving, which critiqued Reinhold Niebuhr’s analysis of sin as pride. Niebuhr had written a very widely read theology, The Nature and Destiny of Man, in which he emphasizes that sin is all rooted in pride. Saiving suggested that women are tempted not so much to pride as they are to give themselves away in self sacrifice and self effacement – which we will be looking at later in the day – and that the Church has aided and abetted this often destructive sacrifice of the woman’s self. Feminist theology has broadened from this somewhat respectful dialogue to a wholesale restructuring and re-imagining of the traditional theological categories of sin, salvation, God, Christ, eschatology and Church. There is now a wide variety of theological feminists.

But how do more orthodox feminists engage the Biblical text and the tradition? Evangelical or reformist feminist scholarship argues that the demands of the gospel, especially in light of Galatians 3, call for a radical equality in church and in marriage. These scholars do careful textual and historical biblical criticism aimed at elucidating the cultural context of problematic texts, rediscovering women and feminist analogies in Scripture, and critiquing harmful and patriarchal traditions, which have been built upon Scriptural foundations. Christians for Biblical Equality in the US do a great deal of this work. Margaret Fell did this kind of exegetical work in the seventeenth century as did all the Oberlin women in the nineteenth centuries. But it never sticks deep enough or well enough to be taken for granted. New generations of women have to rehearse the old arguments and create new ones.

We might ask the question, then, how can we be feminists and Bible believing? How can we be fully Christian feminists? I believe that we can be, for the reasons given above. When we read the Scripture with feminist eyes we are seeing things anew, and feminists often bring the text alive in a new way. And if we dig back behind feminism we find a very long line of evangelical women who felt called to preach and who argued their position from Scripture.

But there are areas of tensions, and living on this border between feminism and Christian faith is not always easy. Those of us who try to live there are always living on two maps at once, so to speak. There are tensions as we try to do this double living. How do we approach the maleness of Christ? What do we take and what do we reject in feminist approaches to God? Where does our authority lie? Perhaps the most central of all the areas of tension is Scripture itself.

Radical feminist theologians adopt a stance towards Scripture which is inconsistent with an affirmation of its authority; Scripture becomes subject to human judgment and excision at all levels, and is one among many possible sources of inspiration. There is some feminist theology that intentionally goes beyond the boundaries of historic Christian faith. Ironically, then, feminism can also credited with bringing some texts to life in a new way. Filtering Scripture through feminist experience has helped us to see things we might not have seen before. But Christian feminists are always looking both at the experience of women and at Scripture as God-breathed, and able to come from beyond us to be the revelation of God to us. We can’t view ourselves as the ultimate arbiters of Scripture. But we can read and exegete it through our unique experiences of being women in a still patriarchal society.


Questions
 • What does feminism mean to you?
 • What does being a Christian mean?
 • Do you immediately think that Christian feminism is an oxymoron?
 • Do you think the Church is becoming more feminist?
 • Do you think inclusive language is important in the Church and in society?

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