Where will this end? And more importantly what's happening in
so-called Complimentarian circles that suddenly career women have become
normative?
Do I doubt the ability of women? By no means but that's not
the point.
My wife has received considerable flak for her decision to
marry, bear children and keep the home. She was the class valedictorian and
people have smarted off to her about her choices in life. One particularly
nasty fellow who was in charge of a local scholarship committee quipped that
they shouldn't have bothered giving the award to her... indicating that she squandered
her life and talents and her college degree was wasted.
Even within the church there are occasions for bitterness.
One mother of similar age is an accomplished musician and travels several days
a week to run workshops and perform. Given her status she probably commands a
lot of money and can make more in a few days than her husband does in a week.
She leaves her young children off with family or the husband and drives
sometimes 1-2 hours away or more. Then in church gatherings she performs her
music and receives great accolade. I use the term 'perform' deliberately in
this case. Musically she is quite impressive. No one would dispute that.
Now granted these people I'm speaking of (though of Reformed
background) do not hold to their Confessions when it comes to worship and believe
she is honouring God in her performance. Obviously their 17th
century theological forebears would differ. This woman, who I admittedly don't
know very well, is praised as a wonderful mother and a wonderful person.
I am not going to judge her heart. I have no idea what's
happening there. As far as her kids, they don't behave in a way I see fit but I
will again grant that there are different notions of what constitutes proper
behaviour for a child. She receives praise because everyone wants to hear her
play on Sunday morning and she's respected because she certainly has gone far
in her musical career. Obviously had she not married and had children she could
have gone much farther. So indeed I am sure there's been some struggle and
undoubtedly a bit of schizophrenia in trying to keep it all together. I've
known more than one Reformed woman who is torn. Her parents push for
middle-class success, standards and respectability but at the same time you
can't really have it without sacrificing much in the way of domesticity and
motherhood. Without meaning to, many conservative Christian parents have
instilled the feminist impulse (and the consequent seed of bitterness) in their
daughters.... all in the name of respectability.
This woman is praised for having found the balance. Now my
wife minored in music at college and as a teenager she was often compelled to
perform in church. In adulthood she became convicted this was wrong and
eventually embraced my view that musical accompaniment really has no place in
New Testament worship... let alone performance.
My wife could have gone somewhere with her music. She was
certainly told as much from her professors. She chose to marry and be a wife
and a mother and thus understood that particular life-path was effectively
over.
Likewise I always dreamed of becoming a helicopter pilot and
specifically wanted to fly in the bush, in remote areas. Without going into the
details of my background I will say this... I had a taste of the life and knew
what it was like and I wanted it. I got my pilot's license when I was 19, and
was working toward a commercial license with a helicopter rating.
But then I became a Christian and I looked at life
differently. Suddenly pouring over all those manuals and books no longer
interested me in the same way. I wanted to do something different with my life,
something for the Church. Even then I was not swayed by the faulty and worldly
reasoning of Dominionism which would say I can build the kingdom through
commercial flying, through hauling cargo to the backcountry.
Can a Christian do that job? Yes I suppose. But I wanted to
marry and the 'girl in every town' lifestyle of most of the pilots no longer
appealed to me. In fact I knew that kind of on-the-road lifestyle would be
potentially dangerous for the soul and of course one would never be able to 'be
there' for one's family nor be part of a church. My Christianity came first, so
I gave it up and moved on with my life.
My wife did the same. She still enjoys the music and has
enjoyed teaching it to our daughters. Could she someday be part of a low-key
small town group that performs music? Perhaps, but the idea that she would
continue to pursue it, leaving her children and husband at home multiple days
and nights per week was not an option.*
If she's bitter (which she's not) it's because of this. She
has to listen to others in the church praise this other 'successful' woman when
she knows she could have effectively done the same and yet chose not to out of conviction. And yet, the truth is
most of the people in addition to loving the performance think well of the
family for their respect and status and certainly the lifestyle the income
affords. We're considerably poorer and yet no one, not even family members who
praise this woman are able to put it together. We've struggled to keep my wife's
instruments in good repair and of course I haven't flown an airplane in
decades. It's one thing to run an aircraft for a living but as a hobby, it's a
rich man's game.
And yet why can't friends and family members put it together?
Who has demonstrated themself to be obedient? I would argue my wife has. She
seeks no accolade but at the same time grows weary of hearing how 'great' the
other party is. It's bad enough trying to be an anti-feminist woman in the 21st
century but when what is essentially feminist behaviour is celebrated... it's a
bit much.
Of course this other woman had a top notch education and prior
to marriage she had a taste of the professional world and what it had to offer.
Her Reformed parents spent a lot of money on her education. Was she really
going to just give it all up? She should, but it's not realistic is it?
I argue that feminism has entered conservative circles
through the values of the middle class. Always seeking respectability this
class is unwilling to be deemed as 'weird' or 'strange', out of step or
archaic. Since a lot of Evangelicals and particularly Reformed believers make
good money the fact that their wives stay home is deemed 'acceptable' because
they're still able to maintain the lifestyle and standard of living. When it's
not acceptable is when you're working class or poor and your wife stays home. Then people react and look at you strange
and you are judged as immoral. I can testify that it's not always a fun
position to be in.
Evangelicals and Confessionalists are willing to break with
society... to a point. And that is the point.
They reject hard feminism and much of what it entails but
they have largely embraced soft feminism. In today's Evangelical circles this
means acceptance of the house husband, the stay-at-home dad. I guess people
have forgotten what an object of ridicule John Lennon was back in the 1970's
for doing the same thing. He even wrote a song about it.
And yet today this has become normative and accepted in
Evangelical circles. If Confessionalists are allowing women to teach in their
seminaries and are normalising women in authority... under the greater umbrella
of Church activity, then they're on a bad road. And where it will end... no one
knows.
Similar issues have been raised with regard to Christian
women in politics. The answer for me is easy. Christians shouldn't be involved.
And yet obviously Evangelicals and Confessionalists disagree with my views.
That said, the candidacy of Sarah Palin generated some division even among them
in 2008. Her defenders argued she wasn't running for an authoritative office in
the Church. Her opponents said Christian women shouldn't be seeking authority
and a few brave souls were even willing to point out that she was abdicating
her responsibilities as wife and mother. Both points made by her opponents are
true. Whether Palin or Huckabee-Sanders or any of that lot are true Christians
or not I leave for another discussion. But the simple fact of the matter is
they (apart from being rotten wives and mothers) are in sin and are promoting
feminism within the Church. Much more could be said about the likes of
faux-feminine feminists like Ann Coulter, Tomi Lahren and other Right-wing
hussies who pretend in their wantonness to be anti-feminists but in reality are
using their charms to earn money and gain a voice. It's a different type of
feminism, one that would abhor deBeauvoir or Freidan and yet Third-Wave 'girly'
feminist values are just as anti-Christian as their predecessors.
This commentary will strike many as deranged and yet I can
safely say that were this read forty years ago no one in conservative Christian
circles would think so.
Why is that? Are we only talking about subjective cultural
values or some kind of generation gap?
Or, has something changed? Something in principle, something
ideological? Now I don't think everything was bliss in the 1970's or even the
1920's. The family has been under assault for generations and its enemies are
myriad and they're not just coming from liberal quarters.
And yet there were still basic notions, sensibilities and
core values which many Christians still held into the 1970's that were all but
abandoned in subsequent decades... bringing us to today. What little of the old
values that remained effectively died off with the older generation.
Again, the 20th century values of Christian
conservatives are not always in line with Scripture but on questions of the
family, the role of women and the understanding of gender roles, they at least
stand (more or less) in line with historical Christianity. Today's ascendant
and waxing feminism does not. It is entirely novel.
I am willing to question historical norms and yet I also
believe that most teachings have been held at some point in the past. In other
words though my own views may be out of the mainstream and seem extreme and
fringish to some, there are historical precedents. Do they always fit together
in some kind of organic continuous chain leading up to the present? No, and I
think those who think in such terms err.
I don't hesitate to reject something like Christmas and even
though it's been around for 1700 years I can still point to the New Testament
and the Early pre-Constantinian Church and safely say they did not celebrate
it. It was a novelty born of the 4th century and an unbiblical one
at that.
Additionally I can point to a minority of figures in Church
history that have rejected it. My position may be a minority one but it's not
novel.
Modern day feminism is a novelty born of the Enlightenment
and in many ways was and is a reaction to some of the problems generated by
industrialisation. It's not hard to see why it came about and why so many
people have embraced it but that doesn't make it right.
Finally as a writer who often appeals to the pre-Magisterial
Reformation Protestants I feel compelled to address the question of Waldensian
women preachers. You will often find this mentioned in history books. Some do
so with a sort of praiseworthy implication, suggesting they were ahead of their
time in more ways than merely their rejection of Roman Catholicism.
As is usually the case, it's not so simple. When the names of
Waldensian preachers are given, they never include women. None of the leaders
seem to have been women. So what's happening? I cannot be absolutely sure as I
don't really believe there was a monolithic Waldensianism but rather Waldensianisms... different groups who
shared common traits centred around problems with Rome and a call to rely on
the Scriptures for authority. Some groups took this more seriously than others.
Others lived in more dire circumstances than others. It's not
hard to imagine that underground life afforded or even necessitated occasions
for Waldensian women to teach, especially other groups of women and children. The
latter example might be called preaching and it is of a kind, but it's not the
same. I'm not saying it's right or ideal but I'm saying it's easy to imagine it
developing. There are modern parallels. Did some Waldensian women teach mixed
groups of both men and women? It's possible but from what I've read I believe
the records are somewhat ambiguous on this point. The idea that women and men
were absolutely equal in their community is fallacious. Again, where are the
women leaders? When they gathered were they just as happy to have a woman
preach as a man? I see no indication of it. Where are the women barbes, the itinerant pastors? Given the
designation is masculine and there seems to be no suggestion of a female
equivalent is telling. I would argue that so-called Waldensian 'women'
preachers is based (at least in part) upon a misunderstanding and did not
constitute what many people seem to suggest.
Women have a glorious role to fulfill in Christ's Church but
formal teaching isn't one of them. Christian womanhood precludes a non-domestic
career.
These are ideals. The real world is often messy. There are viable
questions about women who are barren, celibate, as of yet unmarried, empty
nesters, widows and single mothers. These questions in some cases can be easily
answered but often the answers are dissatisfactory and are thus all but
summarily rejected. Others allow exceptions to become the rule. In other cases
there are no good answers and thus the Church must do all it can to help.
Ideally single mothers would marry if they can. Sometimes they may be barred
from re-marriage due to the circumstances of the divorce or separation. In that
case they will have a hard row to hoe and yet if they wish to maintain their
testimony they must reject the temptations of feminism and certainly its
values. They must testify and witness to the world, the Church and certainly
their children. And the Church needs to do its part and yet is (for the most
part) unwilling as such an ideological turn would open the financial floodgates
and necessarily change the way in which the Church presently disperses its
funds.
I would urge Biblically minded Christians to re-think these
issues.
Continue reading: The Feminist Surge (An Addendum)
Continue reading: The Feminist Surge (An Addendum)
*Can a wife never leave her husband and kids? Some think so
but I don't. In some cases my sister-in-law wants to go shopping and wants my
wife to come along. I don't want to go and yet I know my wife wants to go and
will enjoy the experience as well as the time with her sister. Due to where we
live they'll be gone for many hours and I (and perhaps some kids) will be left
on our own for dinner etc. I wouldn't want it to be a regular occurrence but
occasionally it's fine and I would rather let her enjoy the day (and check the
box) than have me tagging along making her stressed and me miserable.
I know some women who would never do this under any
circumstance and I know others who would be angered at the very suggestion that
there might be a problem with it. I reject both views.