Christian Feminism Today

Dear Kimberly,

After reading your September 14 post, I purchased Elisabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity. I didn’t want to discuss something that I hadn’t even read!

As you know, I had read all of Elliot’s books about her missionary work and many of her other writings from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s; and she and I had kept up an occasional personal correspondence for ten years. But I had not read this particular book, nor even knew about it, until you and I started writing to each other.

I remember your telling me about how much the book had meant to you during your teenage years when conservative Christian leaders were urging young people to embrace its teachings “as though it were right up there next to the Bible.”  And judging from many of the comments on the Web right now (for example, on sites selling books and soliciting readers’ reviews), Passion and Purity is still similarly esteemed by many. So it was interesting to hear how different your feelings were upon rereading the book as an adult.

So much to talk about

There is so much we could talk about now that I have read the book, too; but three main topics jumped out especially:

1. Human sexuality in relation to our Christian faith

2. The paradigm that informs Elliot’s worldview and explains much of her opposition to gender equality

3. “Slippery slope” arguments and fears

Then and Now

Also, because you and I, Kimberly, as two women born almost a half century apart, are engaging in an intergenerational dialogue, I thought I might be able to provide some generational perspective on Elliot.  She is essentially part of my generation, having been born just nine years before I was, and we had similar backgrounds in our understanding of the Christian life. Yet, as you know, she and I have gone in very different directions on gender equality and other issues. It might help to have some background.

Sexuality and God

I’m guessing that one reason Passion and Purity was so meaningful to you as a teenager was its message that our Creator is a personal God who cares about every part of us, including our sexuality, and that we can prayerfully seek God’s guidance in all aspects of our  lives.  I believe that, too. This image of God is not a punitive one, but rather a view of God as tender, wise, and caring—a God who wants the best for us.

When you read the book this time, however, parts of it struck you differently because I think you ran into some of the problems that occur when an author uses her or his own life story as a vehicle for moral advice and urges others to follow the same model.  Reading it with new eyes made you aware of some attitudes  and actions you definitely didn’t like.

For me, reading the book was like a journey back in time—a time before TV discussions about casual hook-ups or movies showing couples expecting to hop into bed together almost immediately upon meeting—sometimes before they knew each other’s names. A time before communication occurred through texting, the Internet,  short “tweets,” and social networking.  A time when many couples who, while preparing for mission work and other ministries, found their friendships deepening into love just when they would be facing long separations and would be able to communicate only through lengthy letters, as was true of Jim and Elisabeth.

Letters were a way to express both feelings for the loved one and one’s own personal faith journey.  They helped many couples to get to know each other on a deep level, in spite of frequently long intervals between letters.  Often mail had to be transported over great distances, such as when Elisabeth and Jim were separated by the Andes mountains and carriers traveled on foot or on horseback. (Unfortunately, apart from these natural physical barriers, as you pointed out, it was Jim who controlled the courtship and was the major decision-maker about whether, when, and how often the couple corresponded or got together, regardless of how his “Bett” felt about it—a pattern she accepted as part of the paradigm she espouses. More about that later.)

Memories of another era

In reading the story, I couldn’t help but reminisce, however.  I was a student at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago about seven years after Jim and Betty had met at Wheaton College (Illinois), so there was an overlap in both our time periods and the Christian fundamentalist culture we moved in.

I, like many others who were studying in conservative Christian schools at the time, was memorizing the same hymns, reading many of the same devotional readings as Elisabeth quoted, and applying many of the same Bible verses to my life. And I have a box of similar letters exchanged between my future husband and me, illustrating how romance and spiritual life were personally intertwined and discussed in depth.  So, as you can probably see, much of the book was very familiar to me.

Like Elisabeth Elliot, I remember hearing a guest lecture on sexuality by the Rev. Stephen Olford, a prominent preacher and orator at the time. I remember his telling Moody students that we should forget about embarking on any kind of ministry unless we had a complete answer before God about our sex lives.  (In view of the sex scandals among all too many Christian leaders in our own time, that would seem to be sound advice!)

What evangelical young adults were reading

There weren’t a lot of conservative Christian books on the topic available during that time, but just as you read Passion and Purity as a young person in the 1990s, Kimberly, many young persons of the late 1940s and 1950s tended to look for guidance in two slim books, both coincidentally published in 1948:Heirs Together: A Christian Approach to the Privileges and Responsibilities of Sex, published by the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, and The Sanctity of Sex, published by Good News Publishers.

(The assumption in most materials published at that time was that everyone was heterosexual.  Homosexuality was seldom discussed and not at all understood; and if it ever was mentioned, it was called a terrible sin that faithful Christians would avoid.  But attitudes in the secular society at that time were no better.)

For real-life examples of a Christ-centered courtship, we drew inspiration from books such as The Triumph of John and Betty Stam, the story of a young couple who had met at Moody Bible Institute, served together as missionaries in China, and were killed by the Chinese Communists in 1934.

“Higher life” teachings as they were applied to romantic relationships

The particular “brand” of evangelicalism that both I and the Elliots experienced was rooted in the British Keswick holiness movement taught at the Keswick convention in England’s Lake District. The emphasis was on what was known as the “higher life” or “deeper spiritual living.”

Thinking back on this and analyzing what we learned and absorbed through this influence, I see that when it was applied to issues of love, romance, and sexuality, the Keswick model primarily emphasized these principles:

• concern about finding God’s will in the choices of both Christian service and the right life partner,
• an expectation that there would be spiritual struggles while making these decisions,
• caution lest we fall into idolatry by exalting the loved one to a higher place than God in our lives,
• the practice of self-discipline and deferred gratification in the physical expression of love.

You can see all of these standards coming through in Passion and Purity as Elisabeth Elliot recounts her and Jim’s courtship.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that their experience was really not that unusual in this particular evangelical subculture. Many of us followed similar  guidelines in which couples, moving toward marriage, first kissed each other at the moment they became engaged. (I don’t recall, however, ever hearing any teaching quite as extreme as is promoted in the 1998 Dave Christiano Christian film,“Pamela’s Prayer,” where a young girl is constantly admonished by her father to steer clear of even so much as a kiss until the minister at the wedding ceremony pronounces, “You may now kiss the bride.”)

The 1948 book mentioned earlier, The Sanctity of Sex, for example, was a bit more realistic in suggesting that the engagement period should be not only a time of deepening friendship and growing knowledge of each other, but also “the time to discuss in a prudent and godly manner, matters of sex; so that the final experience of marriage brings no shock, but is the physical consummation of the spiritual unity already established. . . .A measure of caressing and petting is legitimate, but beware of one touch leading to another and of any handling or stimulating of the erogenic zones. . . .Let each betrothed pair enjoy the sacred liberty of courtship in its pure and fullest measure, but keep watch also for the moment when the least suspicion of embarrassment arises” (p. 59). Exactly where the lines would be drawn would be up to the couple, not by a formula or prescribed set of rules.

As you can see, this was a very different world from the social and sexual culture of today.

Paradigms

You said you were troubled by the controlling attitude Jim Elliot displayed in Passion and Purity, and you wondered how Elisabeth could acquiesce so readily to his delays, demands, and criticisms in spite of feeling hurt.  Some of that deference comes from the way certain Scripture passages were interpreted to teach male headship and female subordination. But much of it comes from her own embellishment of such teachings, laying the groundwork for the incorporation of specific extra-biblical sources she appears to have added over the years.

“Mutual submission (God knew when He set up His hierarchy) will not work,” Elisabeth declared in her scathing critique of the first Evangelical Women’s Caucus conference in Washington, DC in 1975. She had attended and covered the gathering as a correspondent for The Cambridge Fish, a quarterly newspaper of conservative Christian commentary then published in Massachusetts by a group called the Cambridge Fish Fellowship.  They took their title from the fish symbol used by early Christians as a secret code to identify themselves as followers of Jesus.  In her article about the conference, she wrote:

For the tremendous hierarchical vision of blessedness—often compared to a Dance in which initiation and response are the movements—the feminist substitutes a vision of blessedness which holds all human beings on a level plan—a faceless, colorless, sexless wasteland where rule and submission are regarded as a curse, where fulfillment depends on the denial of that “graduated splendor” which we see in all creation, of which the differentiation of male and female is earth’s most splendid.  (From“Feminism or Femininity,”Cambridge Fish, Winter, 1975-1976, p.6 ).

Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, a literature professor and noted Milton scholar and author, responded in the next issue. She pointed out that Elisabeth Elliot’s views in that article were “based far more on Medieval and Renaissance Neoplatonism than on the Bible. And particularly in her assertion that God knew mutual submission would not work, she has placed herself in overt contradiction to the entire emphasis of the New Testament where human relationships are concerned” (Cambridge Fish, Spring/Summer, 1976, p. 3).

Dr. Mollenkott was referring to a paradigm embraced by Elliot, a paradigm rooted in ideas of Plato and Aristotle, which by the medieval and Renaissance periods had developed into a vision of the social order as a mirror reflecting the supposed hierarchical order of the universe.

Chains

Understanding that paradigm can help us understand the whole system on which Elliot bases her ideas of male-female relationships and why she is so adamantly opposed to feminism.  Take away the paradigm and everything falls apart.

The paradigm, sometimes called the “scale of nature,” or “the Great Chain of Being”  (see Arthur Lovejoy’s classic book by that title), offered a picture of the cosmos as a great chain stretched between heaven and earth, with graduated links from Perfection (in religious terms, God) down through the lowest possible form above nothingness.

The idea was popular into the 18th century and was used to justify an unequal social order by appealing to the claim that “the universe is a system whose very essence consists in subordination,” as Soame Jenyns wrote in 1757.

“According to this conception,” explained C.S. Lewis in his Preface to Paradise Lost, “. . . . Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.”

This “chain” metaphor was used in preserving economic and social inequality, including justifying slavery and the concept of racial inferiority.  Divine Providence was said to have designed a place for every created entity, and it would be violation of that divine order to leave one’s designated place out of a desire to enjoy equality with those assigned a higher place on the scale.  (For more about this, see my essay, “The Great Chain of Being and the Chain of Command,” in Kalven and Buckley’s 1984 book,Women’s Spirit Bonding.)

The Re-emergence of the “Chain of Being” Idea

What does all this have to do with Elisabeth Elliot?  Because we need to recognize the infusion of the chain-of-being philosophy into her writings, even when she is claiming to be presenting “what the Bible says.”

You can see this in her “graduated splendor” comment in the Cambridge Fish article quoted above.  You can see it in Passion and Purity where she claims, “We all crave order, design, harmony. The way we live and behave ought to have some congruence with the fundamental order of the universe.”  To make her point, she adds, “Is it significant at all, we may ask, that it has, until very recently, seemed incongruous for women to lead and men to follow?”  In her mind, female leadership is a violation of the hierarchical pattern of the cosmos.

We see the influence of her philosophical model when she says everything in life stands for or represents something else, serving as a kind of mirror reflecting a divine order.  We see the paradigm’s influence again when she says men were created to initiate and lead, and women were created to respond and follow—and that this principle means that a woman should not even ask a male friend out for coffee. The man must always be the initiator.   She even claims that such an initiation-response distinction is built into the design of the male and female reproductive organs.

She is teaching a particular system of thought as though it is a biblical mandate.

In Sunday school curriculum that she wrote in 1975, she was explicit. She spoke of God’s establishment of  “a hierarchy of beings under God” from the highest order of angels through “paramecia and microbes and who knows what yet undiscovered beings? Every creature is assigned its proper position on the scale.”

I referred to this material in my chapter in Women’s Spirit Bonding, where I wrote:

She emphasizes that “every creature—whether the horned ox or the scaled fish, the man or woman, the clam or the archangel—glorifies God by being what it is, by living up to God’s original idea when he made it.” Elliot says that she understands that “women, by creation, have been given a place within the human level which is ancillary to that of men,. . .an inferior place within the human locus.” She hastens to point out that by “inferior” she is referring to position and not worth.    (Excerpt from Letha Dawson Scanzoni, “The Great Chain of Being and the Chain of Command,” in Women’s Spirit Bonding, edited by Janet Kalven and Mary Buckley, Pilgrim Press, 1984, p.45, quoting Elisabeth Elliot Leitch, I Am Somebody, a curriculum booklet for the Sunday school Lifestyle Course series published by David C. Cook Publishing Company, 1975. [For a short time, she added her second husband’s surname, Leitch, though later dropped it to return to her own better-known name.])

A revival of the “chain of being” type of thinking seems to occur in times of social change—when the status quo is questioned and hierarchical arrangements are challenged by efforts to implement justice and equality.  Some variation of it may emerge in different forms.  I’m sure you can think of ways this philosophical outlook figures into aspects of the economic, religious, and political situation today.

Slippery slope anxieties

Those who want a static view of social order, with a designated place for everything and everything in its place and who operate on the assumption that all the answers are already in, do not encourage questioning.

So in an attempt to prevent change, they will often use another metaphor, “the slippery slope.”  Dare to question the foreordained-place-for-everything idea, abandon this or any other paradigm or a particular biblical interpretation, suggest a new way to think about something, and you will slide down a slippery slope leading to __________.  The blank may be filled in with words assumed to incite the most alarm among particular  groups in different times and places.  It’s a scare tactic—a method of control.

In a future discussion, I hope you and I can talk more about how the slippery slope argument operates — especially among many conservative evangelical Christians, as some of our readers noted with their excellent comments after your most recent post, Kim. I had hoped to talk about that right now, but space will not permit all that I would like to say.

But I do want to say this: You mentioned in that post that you were especially appalled at Elliot’s claim that feminism can lead to homosexuality, incest, and bestiality, and in essence eventually leads to the fall of the universe. As you pointed out, such statements bear false witness against both feminists and lesbian and gay persons. It is sad to see this tactic used again and again to warn people away from feminism while also at the same time vilifying LGBT people. Such vilification is all the more disturbing in view of the recent reports of so many tragic suicides by gay young people.  I hope you’ve had a chance to watch the video of the gay city councilman in Fort Worth who tearfully told his own story because he wanted to offer hope and help to young people who are bullied and harassed because of their sexual orientation.

On a related note, I noticed in another  book by Elisabeth Elliot that you told me about (The Mark of a Man: Following Christ’s Example of Masculinity, 1981) that she takes issue with  Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? A Positive Christian Response, the book I coauthored with Virginia Mollenkott, which is based on the Scriptural admonition to love our neighbor as ourselves. Elliot says that she considers our positive acceptance of the committed love relationships of same-sex couples to be a “rearrangement of society,” which is “not an improvement, but a profound disorientation of God, man, and the world, leading finally to disintegration and chaos” (Mark of a Man, p. 31).  She predicts, probably tongue in cheek, that books will eventually be written with titles like, “Is the pederast my neighbor?”  Slippery slope panic could not be more clear.

Well, I’d better sign off.  This is much longer than intended, especially since in your last post you told our readers that we had agreed to start writing shorter posts and making sure something new was up on this blog monthly.  Well, at least, by getting this posted in October, I fulfilled the monthly part, if not the “shorter” part of our agreement!  Did you see the recent Slate article about the blurring of distinctions between blog posts and articles?  I guess this one could be categorized as an article.  You can tell I’m from the generation of long letters!

Hope your studies at Yale Divinity are continuing to go well.

Your longwinded but loving friend,
Letha

Hi Letha,

As you know, I’ve just returned to school, after spending a summer working in the Pacific Northwest. It feels good to be back at the academic tasks. I love the possibilities of the month of September—ever since I was a young girl, I have delighted in this season of new beginnings and fresh notebooks.

 The Stories We Tell

Letha, there was so much in your last letter that I could comment on, but I would like to focus my post by reflecting some on your section about Elisabeth Elliot. As you know, I did an extensive research project on her work last fall. I believe that she is such an important figure in 20th century American religious history, and yet there is almost no scholarship on her. For evangelicals of my generation, she had enormous influence on our ideas of gender and sexuality. Her book, Passion and Purity, was next to the Bible in importance for many of us. For those who have not read that book, it tells the story of her courtship with Jim Elliot; it was published many years after their marriage and his death in Ecuador while doing missionary work.

For my research paper I chose to re-read Passion and Purity, along with several other of her texts and radio programs. I was specifically examining her representation of feminism. In Elliot’s world, God arranged laws according to a hierarchical binary of men and women. If feminists had their way, according to Elliot, the whole cosmos would come unraveled—for feminism led to homosexuality, which led to incest and bestiality (in that order). She created an entire drama in her representation of feminism and gay and lesbian people.

No wonder sociologists find that many fundamentalist and evangelical women are so outspokenly anti-feminist in their language, even while seeming to adopt so many feminist values under the surface! The story that is told about feminists by people like Elisabeth Elliot bears such false witness against feminism (not to mention gay and lesbian brothers and sisters), that who would want to self-identity with a group that supposedly leads to bestiality and the fall of the universe?

Just like the Bayly Blog that accused you of promoting “sexual immorality,” Elisabeth Elliot was often so quick to effectively “other” those who disagreed with her. (And I must say, I was deeply grieved to read the Bayly Blog and its words toward you. I was left asking why Christians can be so unkind.)

A Space for Compassion and Psychological Reflection

I have to say, though, that the more I read Elliot’s writing this past spring, the more I saw her own pain and felt a growing compassion for her. When I re-read Passion and Purity I was actually appalled at how her boyfriend/husband Jim had treated her. Here was a relationship I had idealized in my teenage years, and yet when I read the story now (especially having a psychology background), I am deeply disturbed at all the ways he led her on, criticized her, refused to commit to her, and yet spiritualized all his actions. The story somehow seemed so romantic when I was sixteen; now it seems to verge on emotional abuse and manipulation. But Elisabeth had a way of narrating the story that made one want to live the story. The story is written in such a tantalizing and dramatic way: one feels that if you do everything as she and Jim did, that you will be swept into a passionate, adventurous life. Assuming, of course, you can put up with five years of ambivalent courtship in which you never quite measure up to the expectations of the person you love! (I never noticed when I first read the book the moments of criticism that Elisabeth endures from Jim.) And since the book stops at the wedding night, it is left to the imagination to consider what the substance of true commitment and relationship actually is.

A generation of young evangelicals imbibed this bestselling book. Dozens of other books were inspired by Elliot’s genre of Christian dating manual, including the popular I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris. We are left to reflect on what is the psychological, spiritual, and emotional impact of internalizing such stories? Stories that seem to cover up as much as they reveal; stories that are shaped to sell within a very particular evangelical culture and publishing industry.

I have to be honest, Letha: when I re-read Passion and Purity or study certain aspects of what is taught in the name of evangelicalism, I feel a toxicity run through my body. There is so much dysfunction within religion that passes for spirituality. There is so much pain that gets buried under polished narratives.

Dwelling on Goodness

As I sit down to write, I’ve just come from an evening church service. We are a tiny congregation of about 40 people, and service is held in a beautiful stone chapel on the “old campus” at Yale. I am taking a class in meditation this term, and I already feel an increasing ability to center, pause, and worship when I am in service. The time tonight felt so restful, and I just said a prayer of thanks to be able to participate in such warm community.

As I have meditated and prayed this past week, I keep getting an image of the root system of a tree. I want my “root system” to be deeply planted in all that is nourishing and good. Cultivating that kind of root system requires a space of prayer, play, rest, and reflection that is difficult to find in a graduate program. This semester will be awfully intense (PhD applications are due!), but I feel as though if I don’t learn how to be “rooted” now, then I never will. And reflection and meditation are beginning to feel more and more important for me; all the theory, scholarship, and knowledge in the world doesn’t matter a bit, if we don’t actually know how to be nourished by goodness.

Your words about Martin Ginsburg and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg were so nourishing to read because I spend so much of my time looking at what is not right with relationships. Reading about partnerships that are actively committed to mutuality and partnership is such a gift to me. I am realizing that I need to spend more time envisioning and reflecting on such goodness.

Final Thoughts

Letha, our readers might be noticing that this is a much shorter post than usual. (I confess, part of that is due to the 300 pages of reading I have yet to do for tomorrow.  But, mostly it’s due to your and my decision to write shorter, web-friendlier letters. In writing shorter letters, we hope to post more consistently (at least once a month). So, while we’ve had some long spaces between posts this summer, we hope to get back into our regular monthly schedule. Thanks to our readers for their patience!

Love,

Kimberly

Dear Kim,

It was wonderful to see you at the EEWC-Christian Feminism Today Gathering in Indianapolis a few weeks ago and to continue these intergenerational conversations before a live audience!

I know that we were both disappointed that Erin Lane Beam, the advertised third member of our panel, was unable to be with us (due to her grandmother’s death), but I was glad that you and I could talk about some of the topics the three of us had discussed in our planning session via a three-way phone call a few weeks before.

Looking Ahead

I hope over the months ahead, you and I can share some thoughts about these subjects right here on our 72-27 blog — topics such as relationships, gender inequities in pay, time pressures, balancing work with personal and family life, sexuality,  body image and fashion, social activism, the intersection between gender discrimination and other forms of discrimination, inequities in the church, different expectations for each gender from childhood forward, and some ideas about what second and third wave feminists would like to give to and receive from each other.  Those are some of the topics that come to mind at the moment. Maybe you remember some additional ones.

The Ginsburg Marriage

A couple of weeks after the conference, I was reminded again of our discussion of male-female relationships in dating and marriage when I heard an NPR piece about the long marriage of Martin Ginsburg and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Did you happen to hear it?   It’s available online in both audio and transcript form.

Martin Ginsburg, a Georgetown University tax law professor and one of the top tax lawyers in the U.S., died of cancer on June 27, at the age of 78 — just four days after the couple had celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary. Shortly before his death, he told a friend, “I think that the most important thing I have done is to enable Ruth to do what she has done.”

The couple had met on a blind date at Cornell University when he was 18 and she was 17. They married after her college graduation (a year after his), and were both accepted at Harvard Law School.  In addition to a difference in personality (he was outgoing, she more quiet and introverted) “the Ginsburgs complemented each other in ways too numerous to list,” said National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg in her report.

According to the obituary written by T. Rees Shapiro for the Washington Post, “the foundation of their relationship, they both said, was mutual respect and equality — and a willingness to share domestic duties.” (Martin, in fact, became an outstanding cook and prepared most of the family’s meals. It was a standing joke in the family that Justice Ginsburg couldn’t cook and that even while their children were quite young, they voted for her to be banished from the kitchen.)

Shapiro quoted Ruth Bader Ginsburg as having said that Martin Ginsburg was “the only man I dated who cared that I had a brain.”  The article went on to report Mr. Ginsburg’s having said that “he was proud of his wife’s accomplishments and had no regrets about the compromises they made for each other.”

Contrasting the “Ginsburg Way” and the “Complementarian” Way

I was especially struck by Nina Totenberg’s sentence: “The Ginsburgs complemented each other in ways too numerous to list.” I think it struck me so powerfully because its point about complementing was such a stark contrast from what has come to be called complementarianism, a teaching that’s being heavily promoted in many conservative Christian circles today. I know you’re well aware of it, Kimberly, since you’ve often run up against it in your own experience.  Anne Eggebroten has an excellent critiqueof the philosophy behind this movement in the July, 2010 issue of Sojourners.

Complementarianism

“Complementarianism” is just another name for patriarchy, although the newer term sounds less harsh. Complementarian spokespersons take care to emphasize equality in the spiritual worth of women and men while at the same time emphasizing differences in the roles they are assigned to fulfill, especially in the home and church.  Men are said to be created to be the leaders, and women to be their complements, helping and supporting them in their work and never forgetting that the men are in charge.  The model is hierarchical.

But conscious of the times in which we live, many of those who espouse this theological ideology try to soften the teaching by saying complementarianism doesn’t limit anyone but just recognizes God-designed distinctions.  Jonathan Leeman, who promotes complementarianism, claims that egalitarianism(the contrasting idea that men and women are to be regarded equally in all aspects of life)  leads to the “homogenization of men and women.” He believes that the notion of gender equality is popular because it’s a way of avoiding the risk of offending anyone since everyone is treated the same. “But what if God created men and women differently?” he asks. “What if it’s not a question of limitations but a matter of distinct purposes for different parts of the body? I guess you could say that the eye is limited because it cannot hear. Or that the ear is limited because it cannot see. But that would be missing the point, wouldn’t it?”

Of course, Kimberly, the point is the same as what you and I have discussed so often. It harks back to the ideology of “separate spheres” that was so prominent in previous centuries to keep women from access to higher education, property ownership, voting rights, career achievements, and so much more.  Not that complementarianism (as usually presented today) calls for a retrogression in those particular areas. But it’s a repackaging of an old idea nevertheless.

Owen Strachan says that complementarianism is a biblical truth rooted in the first three chapters of Genesis and claims that “gender is front and center in creation, the fall, and the curse.”  Here’s his explanation:

“In the wise and gracious design of God, women are ‘helpers.’ They are to be wives and mothers, the bearers of children. While men lead, protect, and provide, women come alongside and support them. Sadly, after the fall the two vie for each other’s roles, men either becoming abusive or seeking to divest themselves of leadership, while women elbow for the primary role and threaten dissension.”  Owen Strachan, “The Genesis of Ecclesial Womanhood.”

Complementing and Complimenting in the Ginsburg marriage

What we saw in the descriptions of Martin and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s marriage was a totally different kind of complementarity because it was not gender-based.  Rather it was based on the respective talents, interests, and personalities of two unique individuals. Neither spouse expected or demanded certain actions of the other just because “he’s a man,” or “she’s a woman.”

In the case of the Ginsburgs and how they complemented each other, news reports spoke about one person’s extroversion and the other’s introversion and how each individual’s personality was enhanced by the other’s.  Both partners saw their marriage as being built upon “mutual respect and equality — and a willingness to share domestic duties.”  They shared in parenting and they shared in each other’s career interests.  They each compromised for the other as necessary, never expecting that one or the other was required by gender to always be the one to yield or to act a certain way. They were there for each other through their respective dealings with cancer.  (Justice Ginsburg herself had surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2009 and colon cancer ten years earlier. And when Martin Ginsburg had undergone treatmentfor testicular cancer during their student years at Harvard law school, his young wife was by his side, helping him keep up with his studies and taking notes in his classes.)

Not only did they complement one another, but they complimented each other to the very end.  In so doing, they fulfilled what marriage researcher John Gottman lists as number 2 of the “seven principles for making marriage work.” They nurtured the fondness and admiration each had for the other. They were generous with compliments.

Justice Ginsburg called her husband “her biggest supporter” and her best friend. She praised him for his help throughout her career.  He spoke of having admired and loved her ever since they had first met. He voiced his pride in her achievements. Among the memories and condolences listed on the Georgetown Law Center’s website was a comment by one of his colleagues, Professor Emma Coleman Jordan, whose office was next to his. She wrote:

“As a next door neighbor, I saw most of the postings on his office door. They invariably included some reference to Ruth, like the news clipping from many years before that announced Ruth’s selection as the first tenured woman on the Columbia Law faculty, or the misaddressed invitation to ‘Justice and Mrs. Marty Ginsburg.’ I will always remember Marty as the most adoring husband I have had the privilege to observe. He was more than a feminist, he embodied the ideal of marital equality and we are all the better for it.” Prof. Emma Coleman Jordan, posted on “In Memory of Martin Ginsburg,” Georgetown University Law Center’s website, June, 2010

In the comment of another colleague, Professor Mitt Regan, was this observance:

“Especially remarkable, [Martin Ginsburg] was a man secure enough to support and help nurture his wife’s accomplishments, at a time when he easily could have treated his career as the more important one. In this respect he set the bar so high that more than a half-century later few of us are able to meet it.” Prof. Mitt Regan, posted on “In Memory of Martin Ginsburg,” Georgetown University Law Center’s website, June, 2010

According to Gardiner Harris’s report in the New York Times, Martin Ginsburg had said at the time of Justice Ginsburg’s Supreme Court nomination, “I have been supportive of my wife since the beginning of time, and she has been supportive of me.  It’s not sacrifice; it’s family.”

Competition and Conflict

In contrast to the view of marriage just described is the view in which male-female relationships are considered to be competitive.  Remember the comment of the complementarian theologian quoted earlier who said that part of the curse in Genesis was that women would “elbow for the primary role and threaten dissension”?

Of course, the complementarian would say that if women would just accept their place, this wouldn’t occur.  The problem is, it does occur any time there is concern about the protection of a man’s ego in a way that limits a woman’s living up to her full potential.

You probably remember my spring edition of Web Explorations in which I included  a paragraph about the media’s coverage of the recent Pew Study that found an increase in the percentage of men married to women who earned more than they (the husbands) did.  Some of the reactions to the findings raised questions in my mind about competition in marriage.  I’ll repeat that paragraph here for our readers who may have missed it:

Pew Study on wives out-earning husbands 
How is marriage affected when a wife out-earns her husband?  These comments from various scholars center around a Pew report released in 2010.  This report on husband-wife income comparisons is interesting to read and contrast with some traditionalist viewsvoiced by conservative Christian author Elisabeth Elliot during the 1990s as she cautioned wives about competitiveness in marriage. Or with this negative assessment from an anti-feminist Christian blog more recently.  It makes me wonder why a husband and wife must be seen as competitors.  Why must a marriage relationship be seen as a contest for power and superiority?   Why can’t the income that each spouse brings into the relationship (regardless of the amount) be seen as contributing to the whole and as an asset to their marriage and family, rather than being part of a race in which the individual spouses aspire to one-upmanship?  (Excerpted from Letha Dawson Scanzoni, “Web Explorations for Christian Feminists,” Spring, 2010.)

In phone conversations, you and I have already discussed the reference to complementarian writer Elisabeth Elliot’s archived radio program in which she admonished wives to be careful not to let their career achievements overshadow those of their husbands. Widowed twice, she said that the man who was to become her first husband had found it difficult to see her outpace him in Spanish language studies in their preparation for missionary work — that at one point he had actually cried because he found it so difficult to master what came so easily to her. She explained this was just a matter of different gifts.

She said in her second marriage she made sure her husband’s work and schedule always came first but that one day she was surprised to learn that her husband was counting up the royalties he made from his writings and comparing them to the royalties she made. She said she feared this could get out of hand but, in her words: “Well, the Lord took care of all that in a way that I certainly would never have imagined or asked for. And my husband got cancer and very soon became unable to do either the speaking or the writing, and died when he and I had been married just a little over four years.”  (Since this was an extemporaneous remark made as part of an unscripted radio talk, I don’t think she meant it to come across to her audience in quite the way it probably did, and she didn’t mention whether she had asked her husband why he was making those calculations. It could have been for a reason as benign as tax purposes.)

Elliot went on to say that her third husband had no problems with the greater attention given to her and her work and that “he is a big enough man to realize that God gives different gifts to different people.”  She said her main point in this radio talk was that a wife should be sensitive to the feelings of her husband.

But of course, we should all be sensitive to the feelings of others.  The problem is that in trying to stay true to the complementarian ideology that she has emphasized in her books, she was putting gender as the foremost consideration and building on her belief that it is the wife’s duty to be subordinate to the husband. Thus, wives are urged to be sensitive to husbands’ feelings about wives’ work and achievements, but nothing is mentioned about the reverse. (At the same time, her recognition of individual gifts seems to indicate an underlying struggle in her reasoning).

The other blog post I mentioned in my Web Explorations excerpt linked to the story of an executive director of a nonprofit organization who was offered a significant pay raise for her outstanding work.  But she kept refusing the additional money. The board was puzzled until she finally explained that because of having made a commitment to Christ, she never again wanted to earn more than her husband.  She said, in her resolve to obey God, she wanted nothing to stand in the way of her submissiveness to her husband.  So therefore she could not accept a salary increase.

I couldn’t help but wonder why both she and her husband could not have viewed such a pay increase as an asset to the family unit, rather than something that would exalt her and diminish him.  But the underlying reasoning illustrates the difference between complementarian theology and the egalitarian ideology exemplified in the Ginsburg marriage.

(As an aside, the writers of this second blog apparently noticed my link to them and added a new prologue to the particular post to which I had made reference with the story just cited.  They hastened to warn readers that I was somehow dangerous and accused me of having “betrayed biblical Christian faith” in order to “promote sexual immorality,” citing as proof a talk I had given to an inter-faith group on how the principles of justice, compassion, and humility from Micah 6:8 could be applied to religious discussions of same-sex marriage.  What troubles me about such tactics is that rather than discussing and disagreeing with a writer’s ideas or even sticking to the topic at hand, such religious leaders attack the person’s integrity and question her or his Christian commitment, citing as proof of supposed apostasy something that doesn’t fit with their litmus test of acceptable views on some social issue or biblical interpretation. I think such unloving tactics must grieve the heart of God.)

Your Pedagogy Post

I know I have changed the subject from our prior discussions, Kimberly, and introduced an entirely new topic. I felt we had covered the previous topic quite well for the time being. But I want you to know I thoroughly enjoyed reading your last letter (June 14 post on this blog) as you added some really excellent thoughts to our discussion about pedagogy and creative approaches to lifelong learning.

I also appreciated your related essay on “Re-Dreaming Education” on your new personal website.  Have you noticed how frequently you and I talk about dreaming and re-dreaming, Kim?  It’s not that we are unrealistic visionaries, but we both like to dream about what could be and what we can do to help turn the “could be” into an “is” or a “will be.”  I know you are still wrestling with career choices, but I’m sure you’ll make a difference in the world regardless of the path you take — whether it’s through a teaching career in academia (with all the accompanying pressures you’ve worried about) or whether you do your teaching through your writing.  Most likely it will be both.

In all of your reflections on pedagogy, you’ve been emphasizing self-knowledge as well as subject-knowledge, and an openness to the human experience, including the questions, skills, and personal knowledge that students bring to the classroom, thereby assuring that the process of teaching and learning is interactive and occurs in relationship.  I like that.  And I think that you and I practice such an exchange right here in these letters, continually learning with and from each other, rotating which of us is the teacher or the learner at any given time, in any particular paragraph, without even being aware of it. There’s an ongoing reciprocal giving and receiving, as there should be in any rich relationship.  “Just as iron sharpens iron, friends sharpen the minds of each other” (Proverbs 27:17, CEV).

All for this time.

Your friend,
Letha

Dear Letha,

 Thanks so much for engaging my thoughts and struggles regarding the process of learning. Your articulations about what it means to be a lifelong learner, which you raised so well in your last letter, beautifully describe what I have always admired about you. You keep learning every day—every hour, really—of your life journey, and it shows in the way you approach topics with creativity, flexibility, and a vast array of knowledge. You have well thought out positions, but you are not rigid—you always seem so willing to engage another’s unique thought process. You embody your own excellent advice to “think critically, question constantly, learn continuously, and see connections.”

You’ve been such a support all year as I have transitioned into my experience at Yale, being there every step of the way as I have immersed myself in the academic life while simultaneously questioning the academic life. As you know, at one level, I’ve found the production of knowledge inside the academy to be simply gorgeous; but at another level, it often comes freighted with serious problems: namely, a mind/body split that effects self-care, and an elitism enmeshed with racist/classist/sexist structures.

As I build on your thoughts in your last letter, and contribute my own thoughts on ways to improve higher education, first, I want to reiterate how much of a blessing it has been to be in school this past year. My critiques of higher education are not so much about Yale, but rather about deeply ingrained western values that are part of the air we breath in the academy. I’ve been incredibly blessed by my classes and my professors here—I just think that in all that I am learning, especially some of the principles within feminist theory, I am being invited to think in news ways about how education could look different as we press into a new century.

A New School

In terms of thinking through pedagogy, you had asked if I have read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.Yes! I love this book. My copy is well-worn. He’s the one that first stimulated me to think pedagogically when I read his book several years ago. I just reread him this semester as I’ve wrestled through feminist theology and Letty Russell’s use of his ideas. Through Freire and other writers, I have come to believe (rather passionately!) that there are Copernican-sized revolutions that we are on the verge of as a society that will require different approaches to learning.

I’ve also been fortunate this year to have dialogued at length with my good friend Nick Vu about the meaning of education. Nick is a longtime friend from Seattle and a former full-time teacher. Now, his main job is working for Intellectual Ventures, a company in Seattle with funding from Bill Gates that attempts to invent all kinds of amazing things, like lasers that kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes (click here to see their Ted talk on malaria). Check out their website to see more about their range of projects.

Nick and I both care a great deal about learning, and we have had a series of stimulating conversations about a hypothetical school we would like to start one day. Imagining creating a school has been a good exercise of the imagination for me. As my phone conversations with Nick have intersected my classroom learning, I have come up with the following working principles that seem important to me about the process of learning. They seem to connect with ideas you raised in your last letter.

Recognize that Intersectionality Requires Interdisciplinarity

As your link about Bolivian activists and coal mining showed so well, the pressing issues that need to be solved in our world are intersectional issues. (I recently blogged on this idea for Sojourners.) Complex issues will require people  who are not just trained in one specialty, but also people who can draw connections across various disciplines. There are problems waiting to be solved that need the combined skill sets of a historian, a poet, a theologian, and an environmental scientist.

Of course, there will always be something invaluable to being highly specialized in one subject matter, but often specialists are not trained in the art of collaboration. We need people who are trained in collaboration—who can connect the dots among various ideas. But connecting the dots is difficult, especially because each discipline has such different—and ingrained— ideas of what constitutes knowledge in the first place.

For example, while taking classes in feminist philosophy of religion, African American poetry, and U.S. religious history this semester, I realized how each field has its own assumed values system and epistemology. The ways of knowing utilized in each discipline are not necessarily named up front, but they are part of the machinery running the methodology. Because of the different approaches to knowledge I was experiencing, I felt a kind of culture shock as I went to classes everyday. I had to give myself little reminders as I walked into each class. For instance, if I was in a class that used a lot of feminist theory, I knew I could talk about my own social location in my work. If I was in a class that was all about being “objective,” I knew I would have to push knowledge of subjectivity to the margins and draw on other ways of looking at data.

Being amongst various departments, I experienced why it could potentially be so difficult for specialists in different disciplines to work alongside one another. First, one has to be multilingual among the epistemologies, terms, assumptions, and archives. Therefore, someone trained in connecting the dots might not be “the” expert in quite the same way as another specialist. Instead, expertise would be found more in one’s ability to ask questions, collaborate, and synthesize subsets of knowledge.

Regain the Practice of Being a Beginner

Which leads me to one of the most important aspects of interdisciplinary work: it fosters the practice of being a beginner. If I were to hypothetically devise curriculum for an experimental school, I would place a great deal of value on the art of practicing  being a beginner.

In my friend Nick Vu’s lab, he works with a diversity of leading experts in their field who are working together on major projects; the experts love teaching one another about their respective lines of work. It is assumed that they have to ask questions all the time. This lab seems to be a good example of specialists who are not afraid to be beginners everyday.

Within the academy, though, I suspect that it is harder to ask questions and reveal oneself as a beginner. It is easier to stay in the comfort of our own field, so that we don’t have to admit what we don’t know. Specializing grants the feeling of security and confidence. Working between disciplines means we must be brave enough to ask questions and patient enough to embrace interdependency and collaboration.

View Relationality as Being as Important as Rationality

Collaborating well across the disciplines thus also requires a kind interpersonal agility, a skill which is connected to self-knowledge. If we don’t know ourselves well, we won’t have an awareness of our patterns of relating to the other. Knowledge of interpersonal styles of relating, though, does not seem to be a primary point of concern in many forms of higher education. The emphasis on rationality in the western, intellectual traditional often leaves behind the skills of relationality.

Before my current program, I came from a small school in Seattle that trained students to be therapists, and thus it placed primary value on inter-personal and intra-personal knowledge. My professors were psychoanalysts and therapists, and they asked their students to delve into the unconscious self and figure out what was there and why it was there. We did intense work understanding our own families of origin and personal narratives, and we received a great deal of feedback on how other people experienced us while in relationship with us. While the program lacked academic rigor in the traditional sense, it demanded a kind of inter-personal and intra-personal rigor that was invaluable.

While I love the rigor that is applied to critical thinking at Yale, I am left envisioning what Yale would be like if that same kind of rigor were applied to self- and inter-personal knowledge. For instance, in my U.S. religious history class, one of my professors shared with us that it took him quite a while in his career to realize that he hadn’t picked his research “objectively.” His research came out of deeply rooted questions based on very personal life experience. Yet, in his graduate training, he had not been encouraged to see the connections between his “objective” research and his own  life story. This discussion in class came at the very end of the semester, and it was a relief to me. I had often felt as if historians maintained a pretense of objectivity. It was nice to finally hear that we can actually do better research if we are self-reflective in the process. Knowing ourselves better will also translate to being better collaborators.

Place Value on Self-Reflection, Self-care, and Play

Finally, I see it as a significant problem that the schedule of a typical academic life leaves little space for self-reflection, simply because students and professors are usually rushing from one deadline to the next. I can count on one hand the Friday nights this year that I’ve spent not in my books. There is always more reading and writing to do. It is so difficult to take a Sabbath—to spend a day journaling, or an afternoon having a tea-party, or a lingering Saturday with no agenda.

I remember your telling me once, Letha, that maybe I should take a break from my writing and go to one of my favorite vintage stores and just try on hats for fun. (I love hats!) You suggested that in giving myself time to play, I would be fostering space in my life to reflect creatively and potentially synthesize ideas in new ways. I think that in giving ourselves spaces to rest and play, we also allow time for self-reflection that is actually critical to our academic work.

Letha, these are all just beginning thoughts on the principles that I want to inform both my learning and my pedagogical approaches. These ideas are nascent, and seem always to be growing and changing in my mind. But your previous letter stimulated my thinking and encouraged me to share.

I can’t believe I get to see you this week at the EEWC conference! I look forward to continuing these conversations in person. I also look forward to participating with you and Erin Lane in our intergenerational feminist panel on Friday night.

Your friend,

Kimberly

Dear Kimberly,

I was moved by your March 30 post as you continued our discussion of empathy and othering.  Our conversation seems especially timely in view of  a number of events that have occurred since you wrote that letter: the death of civil rights leader Dorothy Height, the passing of the harsh immigration law in Arizona, the convening of the World People’s Summit on Climate Change in Bolivia, to mention just a few.

All of these events relate in some way to what you were talking about in your letter.  I could hear and feel your frustration and irritation—even stomach-churning reactions—in response to certain book lists, syllabi, or discussions in your classes. On the other hand, from our various phone conversations, I know that other courses and classes did not disappoint you but rather stimulated new research ideas, introduced you to greater diversity, and enabled you to see connections between race, gender, and sexuality. Your thoughts after reading Jonathan Freedman’s Klezmer America make that clear.  You seem to be in a new stage of awakening, Kim.

But what I want to talk about here is this paragraph from your letter.  You wrote:

“Letha, perhaps you might have some advice on this for me? I feel as though I am in a rich stage of learning, but everything feels disrupted. I don’t know so many of my new reference points. I do know that gender must be studied within the complexity of so many other things—racism, heterosexism, classism, colonialism—and yet the task can feel overwhelming to me. There are ever so many moments of feeling like a beginner all over again.”

My advice is summed up in the title I’ve given to this post: Think critically, question constantly, learn continuously, and see connections.    Let me explain.

Think Critically

You’re already thinking critically, because you are mentally analyzing, arguing with, debating, and questioning many of your reading materials. You’ve been examining your course syllabi and looking over your assignments with a critical eye. And you’ve been bringing to them certain expectations based on what you’ve already been thinking about over the past several years, along with trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together and where you go from there.

What’s exciting is this: If some of your expectations and hopes are dashed and you’re concerned that certain perspectives may be missing in the course assignments, don’t despair. You can be the one to supply what’s missing—not necessarily to challenge your professors but rather to contribute to and enhance the materials already on the list. You can be the maker of your own expanded list. You can be the supplier of your own learning resources.

One way would be to think about what you would be doing and what materials you’d be recommending if you were teaching a particular class.  It’s possible you will be teaching such a class someday.  Or if you don’t go on to a classroom career, you’ll be teaching others through your writing, as you’re already doing!

You said you feel “like a beginner all over again.”  But that’s OK.  We’re all beginners over and over again as we come into contact with new information, face new challenges, ask new questions, and look for our own answers.

Question Constantly

Constantly asking new questions is crucial.  Think about the curiosity of a small child.  Kids are always asking “Why?”  When we read or hear new ideas we, too, need to be asking why questions.  “If this is true,why is it true? How can I know this is true?  What is the evidence?  How does this fit with my own experience and the experience of others that I know?  How might it fit with the experience of others that I don’t know? And how can I learn about their experiences so that I can practice true empathy?  And what does all this mean in the total picture?”

You and I are writing these letters from the standpoint of our Christian feminism. Feminism has questioning at its very roots. Seeking gender equality has always involved the questioning of tradition, the questioning of the status quo, the questioning of the limitations that have been placed on girls and women historically—even though we who are female are persons who make up half of humankind and who have brains and desires to learn and grow and achieve no less than is true of men (who have also been affected in different ways by cultural and religious expectations).

My first articles on Christian feminism, published in 1966 and 1968 sprang from my own questions. In fact, the first of those two articles was written in a way that consisted mainly of questions—questions that I was raising to challenge conventional thinking on the roles of women in the church, particularly within the evangelicalism with which I identified.  I didn’t feel the questions were being asked at the time so thought I’d raise them myself. Maybe that was presumptuous of me, but I wanted to get the discussion started at least!

We both know, however, that questioning is not always welcome in Christian circles.  From what you’ve told me, I know you were aware of that even as a teenager.  Often the assumption is that all the answers are already in and that questions should be discouraged—that walking by faith somehow disallows questioning.  Questioning is often viewed as doubting God.  After all, someone may argue, the first recorded question in the biblical story is the tempter’s “Yea, hath God said?”   But the Bible contains lots of question marks. Questions are how we learn.

Jesus asked a lot of questions as a way of teaching his followers, and he also answered a lot of questions that his listeners posed to him.  True, some questions were trick questions by certain religious leaders who wanted to trap him (which he handled in ways that always amazed them), but there were also many questions that were asked out of a sincere desire to learn from Jesus.  Jesus never discouraged that but encouraged his followers to find new ways to read, understand, and apply the truths of Scripture. “So he told them, ‘Every student of the Scriptures who becomes a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like someone who brings out new and old treasures from the storeroom” (Matthew 13:51, CEV).

Some of your questions may be leading you to discover “new treasures,” Kimberly —new insights and new ways of interpreting Scripture and applying it to our times with all their challenges.

So never despair when you think that too many questions are being left unanswered or may not even be raised in some of your classes in the way you’d like them to be.  It just means that you have the exciting task of finding your own answers!  You have the task of filling in the gaps. And better yet, you can then communicate your answers to others.  As I mentioned earlier, most of my own writing originated in seeking answers to my own questions and then sharing my discoveries and thought processes (and sometimes further questions) through the articles and books I wrote.

I think you’re already finding this to be true in your own life and writing.  Don’t ever, ever let your questioning stop, Kimberly!  Embrace the questioning, and think of life as an ongoing adventure of finding answers.

Learn Continuously

You might wonder why I chose the word continuously rather than continually. But I mean it in the sense of never stopping.  Unceasing learning is like unceasing prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17).  To “pray without ceasing” means being aware that we are constantly in communion with God, constantly in God’s presence, constantly in a conversation with God (Psalm 139).

Learning is like that. It means keeping our eyes, ears, hearts, and minds open constantly so that we are in some sense interacting with every new piece of knowledge that comes into our lives—whether through what we read, hear, or see through various media, or whether it’s through direct interactions with people who enter our lives or even just cross our paths.  Everything can contribute to our experience of learning.

But as you’ve been realizing, learning is incomplete if we don’t listen to the voices of those whose background and experiences are different from our own. And I know you want to hear those voices, which is why you were so disappointed when you looked at that one syllabus and didn’t find books fromwomen whose racial and ethnic backgrounds are different from your own (although you did find some of their articles, if not books, on the list). And as you said, the male authors of the books listed were not from the dominant culture but provided voices of minorities.  (Of course, even that kind of inclusion in school curricula was way too long in coming!)

But here is where your own task of filling in the gaps comes into play.  Look for works from such missing authors on library shelves and in bookstores. And the Internet is such a wonderful way to hear such voices (even their actual voices) through audio and video resources.  (I have thanked God— and I mean that literally—that I have lived long enough to experience all the rich resources available online.  It’s like having a world library right at my fingertips every day!)

Take, for example, the three news items that I mentioned at the outset of this letter: the death of Dorothy Height, the Arizona law on immigration, and the World People’s Summit on Climate Change. We can learn so much about them just from what’s available on the Internet outside of the classroom, including excellent primary sources.

Dorothy Height was an important leader in the civil rights movement and in the women’s movement.  Yet, she was lesser known than many others.  But we can learn so much by becoming aware of her accomplishments, her struggles, and her overcoming of obstacles as she faced both the gender and racial inequities in our society.  We can listen to her tell about all this in her own words!  Take some time to click on this link and listen to these video clips of Dorothy Height as presented by the National Visionary Leadership Project, which makes available primary source material by recording and preserving the wisdom of African American elders so that their experiences and wisdom can be passed on to younger generations.  The brilliance and resilience of Dorothy Height comes through, for example in her stories of the sexism and racism she had to deal with, even as a teenager.  And they can inspire all of us.

Or take the recent immigration issues in the news.  How do we relate these attitudes and actions to our efforts to see the interconnections between race, gender, classism, and all the other concerns you mentioned?  In all of these matters, we always need to keep before us the human face of all those involved as we try to sort things through. Some materials and links provided by Sojourners can be very helpful in that regard.

Or to take still another example, Kimberly, when you talked about economic classism and colonialism (which is really about systems of privileged “haves” with the power and wealth to dominate over the “have nots,”), I couldn’t help but think of the brilliant pedagogical theories of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Have you read his Pedagogy of the Oppressed? He said that “the oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. . . everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal. . . .To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the ‘others,’ of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversion” (pp. 44-45 in the 1986 edition).

I’ve been thinking again about some of his ideas recently since learning about the World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.  I chanced upon a public radio broadcast about it in April. (You can watch it as well as hear it and read it on the link above. As a feminist, you may especially want to listen to the answer given when a woman was asked how women in particular have been affected by soil and water contamination.) It is crucial to hear from indigenous people themselves as they tell in their own words how they are directly affected when powerful interests, driven by greed and a sense of entitlement, disregard what their actions are doing to human beings and the planet on which we live.  It’s painful to hear ordinary people tell how exploitative mining and deforestation have impacted their lives and livelihoods.

Part of our learning continuously through life is opening our minds and hearts to those who propose a different way to regard and treat Mother Earth (or “Pachamama” to use their term), the home God has given all of us to share together.

See Connections

Kim, I know it’s not difficult at all for you to see how all of these news items fit together as part of our discussion on empathy as an antidote to othering.   I’m sure you can see the connections immediatelybecause you’ve so often told me that intersectionality is one of your biggest concerns as a feminist of faith.

And that brings me to my final point. If, in a sense, we’re going to be our own educators throughout life by thinking critically, questioning constantly, and learning continuously, we also need to always be on the lookout to see connections–associations.  How does everything we read, or hear, or experience fit together?

We will find ourselves constantly thinking, What is this teaching me?  What are some ways that “this” might relate to “that”?  How does what I am seeing, hearing, observing, reading, watching relate to a particular teaching of Scripture?  How does this illuminate some aspect of feminism?  How can I keep from compartmentalizing and instead make sure that all that I experience in my daily life and learning is not separated from my faith and my feminism and to other aspects of social justice?

As we live consciously in an “always looking for connections” way,  we are likely to find that something we hear or see that might seem to someone else to be totally unrelated suddenly provides us with a new insight, a new way of understanding, a fresh illustration of a particular concept or theory.  Seeing connections is a main component of creativity.

Speak Out and Share

But we can’t stop with only seeing connections with and between ideas.  Both you and I also care deeply about another kind of connection– connections with people.  Our various writings are one way we can speak out and share with others what we have learned. This blog not only provides a way to communicate with each other as friends across the generations but also connects us to readers scattered in various places.  At the close of your last letter, you spoke of your gratitude for our readers’ comments and assured them we read every one.  I echo what you said.

And incidentally, if any of our readers are able to attend the EEWC-Christian Feminism Today Gathering in Indianapolis in June, we would love to meet you in person, as we present an “Intergenerational Christian Feminist Dialogue,” along with Erin Lane (Beam), on Friday afternoon, June 18, 2010. You can find full information through this link.

Kim, I’m so glad that your schedule has worked out so that you can be there, and I’m really looking forward to seeing you again and working with you there!  I think many of our readers may be surprised to know that even though we’ve been in touch constantly through email and through occasional phone calls, you and I have only ever met once in person.  That meeting, too, was at an EEWC conference in Indianapolis, as our “About 72-27” page explains.  Maybe we can have another milkshake at the sidewalk cafe again this time!

As always, I look forward to your response to this post and to your thoughts about what I guess amounts to my personal philosophy of lifelong learning!  See what happens when you ask for my advice about something?

Your friend,
Letha

Letha,

Your last post, in which you illustrated so well the harm of “othering,” named a topic that is more and more becoming a core theme in my studies at Yale. As you know, I’ve been studying U.S. history quite a bit (as I am considering going into American Studies for PhD work). It seems that the more I learn about U.S. history, the more I see how “othering” has always been used in order to buffer certain powerful groups. It’s as though “in-groups” are defined more by how they exclude and misrepresent others than by their own actual identity. Their identity is not being one of “them.”

 For instance, this week I have been reading Jonathan Freedman’s Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity. (It’s not exactly a quick or easy text, so I wouldn’t recommend it for a leisurely Saturday read!) While I won’t summarize all of his arguments here, one idea he developed quite well was showing how “whiteness” was often policed by casting aspersions on the supposed “sexual transgressions” of the non-white “other.” For instance, stereotypes of Jewish men have often cast them as either effeminate or hyper-sexual—and therefore outside the bounds of proper “whiteness.” It seems quite significant to me that attacking Jewish men’s masculinity and sexuality was part of racializing them as “other” to white. Freedman helped me see, once again, that race, gender, and sexuality are always inscribed on one another.

In fact, I am growing more and more convinced that within U.S. culture, gender and sexuality can’t even begin to be parsed out without also incorporating a thorough race analysis. But, because my education has been so lacking in studying race relations, I’ve needed to be intentional about doing that work while here at Yale. To be honest, much of my self-taught feminist studies up until a few years ago rarely incorporated a good understanding of race and gender. Now that I am in school studying feminism, I’ve experienced writers who are much more diverse. Yet, even here, too often the syllabi are still heavily weighted with white voices or male voices.

A Look Into the Classroom

For instance, at the beginning of the semester, I had signed up for a class on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement because, in particular, I was really desiring to hear the voices of black women writers talk about history. When I got to my first day of class, I saw that on the syllabus all the required textbooks were written by men. To be fair, there were important scholarly articles written by women, but not one book. When we buy books, we are supporting the authors, and we are encouraging publishing houses to publish these authors. I actually felt sick to my stomach looking at my syllabus. How many times have I looked down at a syllabus that is not supporting women writers?

I mustered up the courage to ask my professor, in as respectful a tone as I could manage, why we weren’t required to buy any texts by black women writers? He said, a bit annoyed, that if I read my syllabus more carefully, I would see that there were “moments” of women writers on it. He was right—there were moments—but my question went deeper than that. It is painful enough to me that black women are too often marginalized in my feminist theory class, but then to step into a class on the Civil Rights Movement and find the same thing happening was almost too much to bear.

I’ve always thought that looking at an academic syllabus is a good case study for recognizing whose voices get heard and whose voices are not given space to speak on their own, but must be represented by the more powerful group. I recently reviewed some of my syllabi from college and gasped out loud—it seemed I had majored in the thoughts of dead white men! Most of my classes were loaded with patriarchal, Euro-centric writers. This is how “othering” happens—select powerful groups get to define history, religion, science, etc., while other groups must be defined by the words of the more powerful group.

In the end, I decided not to take the Civil Rights class for this semester, and I signed up instead for a class in contemporary African American poetry. Needless to say, I am utterly in over my head. It is definitely the most challenging class I have taken at Yale, because I know so little of the history, the struggles, and the reference points these poets are writing about. In retrospect, I realize it was probably a sign of my white privilege that I thought I could step into a graduate level seminar on African American poetry! Every week when I sit in this class, I feel disoriented, anxious, and confused. I am experiencing what it is like not be in the “in crowd”—what it feels like to be a beginner. Perhaps most importantly, the class has helped me come face-to-face with how much of my education has “othered” the history, the theory, the experiences, and the art of African Americans.

The class has been particularly challenging because not only is the poetry itself difficult to understand, but also what I am learning from the poetry seems to “disrupt” quite profoundly the material in my other classes. For instance, when I am reading Gyn/Ecology by Mary Daly in my Feminist Philosophy of Religion class, what feels loudest in the text is her marginalization of non-white voices (and I realize that even using that category “non-white” is problematic language in itself). I really struggled to hear and understand Daly in that book, because my attention was drawn to how often she used “women” as a group and failed to articulate the differences among women. I kept thinking of all of Audre Lorde’s critiques of her! (See, for example, Lorde’s “An Open Letter to Mary Daly” in Sister Outsider.)

Letha, perhaps you might have some advice on this for me? I feel as though I am in a rich stage of learning, but everything feels disrupted. I don’t know so many of my new reference points. I do know that gender must be studied within the complexity of so many other things—racism, heterosexism, classism, colonialism—and yet the task can feel overwhelming to me. There are ever so many moments of feeling like a beginner all over again.

More Thoughts on Empathy

To close this post, Letha, I wanted to re-visit your ideas in your last letter on empathy, particularly as they applied to the man who wrote a letter to you asking for you to understand his struggles. If there is something else I am learning from this poetry class, it’s that I want to be the type of person who can make space for others who feel like beginners or who I might perceive (fairly or unfairly) as beginners.

For instance, I will often encounter men and women who seem to be in the earlier stages of a feminist journey, and who might not feel understood by those who have been thinking about these issues for longer. (Not that the man who wrote to you was necessarily a “beginner” at feminism—your reception to his letter just reminded me that people are coming to this topic from very different places and need kindness.) I felt like his letter carved out a courageous space for him to share exactly where he was at, and that process itself seems so important to genuine growth. I admire him for writing you that letter and sharing so vulnerably his own struggles; and, of course, I have always respected how willing you are to meet people just as they are. I think that it is in the midst of that mutuality that we learn from each other.

Perhaps in the last few years, I wasn’t quite sure how to show empathy to men who were struggling with egalitarian ideas. I am realizing in retrospect that too often my attempts at empathy were more often a subtle coddling, if that makes sense. I didn’t want to offend them or make things uncomfortable. I was afraid of speaking honestly and directly. I was also wanting to avoid conflict because I was needing to protect myself a great deal. My feminist ideas were still tender, and I was still quite tentative in being able to see and name the harm that comes within systems of male entitlement.

For instance, in my last graduate program, I had many moments with one particular male professor who I knew at the time was dismissing my voice, but I didn’t know how to negotiate the moment. I admired and respected him, and it was hard for me to believe that a man who had been such a blessing in my life could also be living out such harm in a patriarchal system. But, the truth was, he was living out harm! And while I know that he is a good man and a brilliant teacher, over and over again he lives out patterns of male entitlement by marginalizing feminist perspectives. His interpretations of the Bible, in particular, seem to not have engaged any feminist scholarship in the last 20 years!

My point is that I want to learn how to have a strong voice, while simultaneously showing genuine empathy and grace, in order that people might feel comfortable being who they are around me at the same time that I would feel comfortable being who I am—with all my feminist convictions!

 Final Words

I better finish up this letter. It’s a lovely rainy day in New Haven, and I need to get going on my study of poetry for the day, as well as write several papers whose deadlines loom. Before I close, though, I wanted to thank our readers for their comments on the last post. I really wish I had time to offer individual responses here, but even though I can’t do that right now, I want our readers to know that you and I read their words carefully and always appreciate all of the insight and diverse perspectives.

Your friend,

Kim

Dear Kimberly,

I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy lately, and it ties in with something you referred to in your December 1 letter — the concept of “othering.” I guess I’ve been thinking about empathy (or the lack of it) for many  reasons. On the one hand, I think of the tremendous outpouring of compassion for the suffering people of Haiti after the earthquake; and on the other hand, I think about the callous attitudes of many powerful leaders of large financial institutions and corporations who seem unable or unwilling to mentally put themselves in the shoes of millions of people who have had to deal with job loss, mortgage foreclosures, and  lack of health care in the midst of the current economic crisis.

The Importance of Empathy

A couple of movies I saw recently also deepened my thoughts about how we need empathy in so many areas of life. One film was Amreeka, the story of a Palestinian divorced mother and her teenage son who moved from the West Bank to America in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. You can view the trailer here. Their story is so warmly told that I couldn’t help but feel with them and identify with them (what empathizing really means) as they negotiated the struggles that immigrants experience—particularly those from the Middle East in these times of so much fear and suspicion.

The other movie that made me think about the need for empathy was A Single Man, based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel about a single day in the life of a gay college professor eight months after the sudden death of his life partner.  As the professor continues to grieve his loss and reminisces about the deep love the two men had for each other in their 16 years together, he ponders how life can go on.

In one of the flashbacks, he is shown receiving the phone call from a relative of his partner who breaks the news of the fatal car crash.  The relative says he is making the call secretly, away from other other family members who had no intention of letting the professor know of the tragedy. In the midst of the shock,  the professor is also notified that he is not welcome at the “family only” funeral which will be arranged by the partner’s disapproving parents.

Watching the pain on the professor’s face, I remembered other similar stories that have been told to me over the 35 years since I first began writing on this topic in a college textbook chapter, articles, the bookIs the Homosexual My Neighbor? and more recent writings. In one case that I heard about, a Christian lesbian committed suicide after constant castigation by her religious fundamentalist parents, who, after her death, made clear to her grieving partner and all the gay friends of the couple that they would not be permitted to attend the funeral.  (They had their own memorial service later.)

As I watched that scene in A Single Man, I wondered where is empathy?  How could the partner’s parents be so cruel?  Couldn’t anyone who has ever lost a loved one try to at least imagine the pain of the grieving partner left behind, someone who had been as close as any heterosexual husband or wife?

Australian folksinger Judy Small once recorded a song called, “No Tears for the Widow.” (It’s on Judy’s 1990 album, “Snapshots,” and although no longer available in earlier formats, it can be digitally downloaded through ITunes.)  The song starts out with the story of a woman who loses her husband after a 30-year marriage and receives loving condolences in cards, visits, gifts, and the kind words of people who come to pay their respects and weep with her at the well-attended funeral. Her grief is understood by everyone, and there are “tears for the widow who has lost her love and must carry on alone.”  As painful as it is, she is aware of her marital status before the world and sadly begins writing the word widow when she fills in forms.

Then, in the song’s second stanza, Judy sings about another woman who loses her longtime partner after an extended battle with cancer.  This time, because the partner is a woman, the grief and anguish of the one left behind are ignored, except for a small circle of close friends.  At the funeral, the woman who died is described as a wonderful single woman taken before her time.

But in this second story, there are “no tears for the widow.” She  leaves the funeral parlor, goes to the home the two women had shared, and sobs alone into the night.  Like the heterosexual woman who lost her husband, she, too, has “lost her love and must carry on alone,” but her grief is not acknowledged. She continues to write “single” in forms asking marital status, while inwardly raging at society’s failure to recognize that she has lost her next of kin.  (The song goes on to point out that women in her situation may even lose their home to the claims of the deceased partner’s relatives. Vanessa Redgrave won an Emmy award a few years ago when she played an aging widowed lesbian to whom this happens in one of the short stories on the HBO presentation, “If These Walls Could Talk 2.”)

Why does all this happen? Because, says Judy Small’s song, “marriage is a special word and only meant for some.”  As I listen, I wonder again, where is the empathy?  Why can’t people understand what the word family really means?  As you know, we recently published in Christian Feminism Today the story of a couple whose 35-year marriage was made void by a legal decision about same-sex marriages.  And yet those who work so hard to prevent the legal recognition of these marriages (and are upset because some states have decided differently) just don’t seem to get it.

Othering

Your December 1st letter was so creative, Kimberly, in linking together the internalized gender restrictions of the Victorian era with the often unrecognized sexist elements in the Twilight books and films today. So I don’t think there’s much I can add to what you wrote there; you’ve already said it so well!

But I want to pick up on something else you wrote in that post because it shows how the empathy I’m discussing here is so often blocked by “othering”—the categorizing of people into “those like us” and “those other people”– people with whom we can contrast ourselves.

You wrote:

For instance, in mid 19th century America, the constricting “ideal” of Victorian, “pure,” white, upper-class womanhood was built upon not being the woman who was “othered”—the lower class working woman, or the African American woman whose body had historically been represented as all-sexual by the power lusts of white slave-owners. (December 1, 2009 post by “27”)

As you indicated, people that we humans place in the category of “other” (“them” or “those people”) may be perceived as different because of race, ethnic background, religion, class, sexual orientation or identity, ableness, body size, age, or anything else that causes us to consider them different from us and therefore perhaps less important, less worthy, less deserving of power and privilege. In other words, differences are easily viewed in terms of hierarchy — “better than,” “ less than.”

Jesus once told a parable about two men who went into the temple to pray. One was a self-righteous religious leader whose prayers consisted of boasting about all the wonderful religious deeds he had done and how different he was from other people.  He named the categories of people he was thankful he wasn’t like. Then, glancing toward the other man, who belonged to one of the most intensely despised categories of that society, he added a p.s to his prayer to notify God of his gratitude that he wasn’t like that man over there (“the other” personified).

The man from the despised group, for his part, felt unworthy even to look toward heaven as he prayed, but simply pounded his chest and prayed that God would have mercy on him because he was a sinner. Jesus said it was this second man, not the self-righteous one, who had pleased God.  Jesus concluded that “if you put yourself above others, you will be put down, but if you humble yourself, you will be honored.” The Scripture says that Jesus told that story “to some people who thought they were better than others and who looked down on everyone else.”  (See Luke 18:9-14. I quoted from the Contemporary English Version [CEV].)

I think it’s a good idea to keep that parable in mind any time we find ourselves tempted to engage in thoughts words, or actions that indicate we are “othering.”

Othering can block empathy by convincing us that another person or group is so different from us that they couldn’t possibly be feeling the way we would feel if we were in the same circumstances.  They are therefore perceived as undeserving of our kind thoughts, actions, and identification with them.  Somehow our common humanity is forgotten when we engage in othering.

Othering, Empathy, and Gender Issues

The way persons think about each other because of gender differences can also create a negative “us” over against “them” attitude, as you and I have been discussing in this blog from the beginning, Kimberly.

There is no denying some obvious biological differences between women and men. But as we’ve both written so often, those biological differences are too often dragged out as justification for hierarchical arrangements and inflexible role assignments in the home, church, and society. This is done by ignoring how much the sexes have in common as human beings with the needs that all humans have in both thework-and-activities side of life (what sociologists speak of as the “instrumental” aspects) and the love-and-relationships side of life (what sociologists call the “expressive” aspects). I wrote about this in apost on “Human Being, Being Human,” during our first year of this blog, so won’t say a lot more about it right now.

But I started thinking about that again recently as I have seen the recent media attention to a new Pew study that underscored some changes in the economics side of marriage.  Data analysis showed that the percentage of husbands whose wives earn more than they do and whose education is higher than theirs increased significantly between 1970 and 2007. And the percentage of women who are married to men whose earnings and education are lower than theirs has likewise grown during that time period. What this means, according to the Pew analysis is this:

From an economic perspective, these trends have contributed to a gender role reversal in the gains from marriage. In the past, when relatively few wives worked, marriage enhanced the economic status of women more than that of men. In recent decades, however, the economic gains associated with marriage have been greater for men than for women. (From the executive summary, by Richard Fry and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research Center, January 19, 2010.)

Some headlines in the popular press have given the impression that it’s all about men seeking rich wives, with “sugar daddies” being replaced by “sugar mammas.” But the trend really just indicates that increasingly the conventional marriage agreement is changing. It used to be that (pardon the old cliché) husbands brought home the bacon and wives cooked it. Now more and more couples, whether by choice or economic necessity, are finding they have entered a new marital bargain in which both spouses bring home the bacon (maybe a vegetarian version or turkey bacon to avoid raising cholesterol!) and both symbolically share in the cooking, as well as parenting, and other  household responsibilities.  As long as it is their mutually-decided arrangement, it doesn’t really matter who earns the higher income — or even which of the two spouses, at any particular time, might have to be the only income earner. What is really tricky is that there still needs to be an equitable bargain or exchange so that one person doesn’t end up being both the primary earner and the primary person taking care of the household.

Even though vast societal changes are taking place in that regard, many of the issues that you and I have so often discussed here on 72-27 continue to be very hot topics — especially when it comes to ideas about gender-based division of labor, conflicts between career demands and household tasks, and traditional expectations from church and society. For an extreme case that illustrates the problem, check out this letter from a young wife and the accompanying comments that were posted just this month on“The F Bomb” (“F” for feminist) — a feminist blog started by a teenager for and by young feminists.

Facing Changes in Our Lives with Empathy

Change can be scary and unsettling, and changes in gender roles seem especially so.  And once again, this is where empathy comes in.  Years ago, I wrote an article for Christianity Today magazine titled, “How to Live with a Liberated Wife (June 4, 1976 issue). (I recently discovered that portions of it have been included in The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History in Documents, by Nancy MacLean, Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2009.)  I was writing in the heyday of the women’s movement (then often called “women’s liberation movement”), which later came to be referred to as “second wave feminism.”

As a literary device, I wrote the article in the form of a letter to a young husband whose wife’s feminist ideas were frightening and confusing to him.  I called the husband “Doug” and his wife “Jan.”  The couple were a composite of many Christian men and women who had expressed these anxieties to me during my speaking engagements.  In the article, I was trying to help men to understand what their wives were going through as they said they wanted to go to college, or finish an interrupted degree program, or take a job, or simply expressed their feelings that they couldn’t feel fulfilled unless they could look forward to something more than a lifelong career as a housewife.  It wasn’t that they didn’t value caring for a home and family, but they wanted something more than that identity alone, and they wanted the chance to live up to their full human potential just as their husbands wanted to live up to theirs. These were big issues back then and considered revolutionary.

My article was basically encouraging husbands to engage in empathy and put themselves in their wives’ shoes, and I based my article on various Scripture passages.  If we are to practice the Golden Rule of doing unto others as we would have them do unto us, we need to try to understand how we would feel ifwe were dealing with what they are dealing with and then think about how we would want others to respond to us.

Empathy as a Two-Way Street in Close Relationships

Soon after the article was published I received several letters, but one handwritten letter struck me especially. It was from a real life “Doug,” though of course that wasn’t his name. “When I identify with Doug,” he wrote, “I feel fear, uneasiness, anxiety, and I feel alone: ‘Will Jan pull away?’  ‘Doesn’t she need me anymore?’ I cry out to be understood. The situation is changing. Our lives are changing.”  He went on to describe his feelings of frustration:

You didn’t speak to my needs and fears but to Jan’s; you didn’t attempt to explain my bondage, but how women have been bound. . . . I believe there is no essential difference in the dynamics of male and female personality and potential. I do have the same feelings as a female has, but our society labels me ‘unmanly’ when I express them. . . .Letha, I, a man, need love, understanding, and someone to speak to my conflicts and fears. I, also, need help in becoming all I am meant to be.

My heart went out to him in his emotional pain, Kimberly, and of course I sent him a personal reply with further thoughts and some books he might want to read.  But his uneasiness demonstrates that empathy needs to work both ways in a close relationship.  That isn’t always easy, but it can go a long way toward closing the gap between the perceived “otherness” of women and men, because rigidly prescribed roles and expectations imposed from the outside hurt both.

Well, it’s time for me to sign off, but before I do, I want to apologize to both you and our readers for not keeping up my end of the conversation by writing this post earlier.  As you know, in the time since my last post here, not only have you and I both had holiday travel and additional professional and academic writing responsibilities and deadlines to attend to, but I have also had two cataract surgeries as well as publishing the latest issue of Christian Feminism Today, writing a new edition of “Web Explorations for Christian Feminists,” and updating the EEWC-CFT website, which I hope our readers will visit – especially to see your thoughtful review, Kim, of Where Am I Wearing?

I’ll be looking forward to your next letter and any thoughts you have about what I’ve written here.  I hope your studies at Yale are continuing to go well and that you’re finding a little time to relax amidst the pressures.

Your friend,
Letha