Why Christians need feminism

I read two articles that kind of circle around the same topic and I want to try to deal with them both here, but forgive me if I run long(er than usual). This is a complicated topic, but it basically comes down to the role of feminism in the church. The first thing I ran across is an article written by Hannah Anderson and published in Christianity Today about why Hannah does not consider herself a feminist. The other is a response to a heartbreaking letter that John Shore received from a woman whose pastor told her she should have let her rapist kill her rather than be raped because it was better to die a virgin. These are two pretty bold examples of what's wrong with how the church has traditionally thought about sexuality.

The church has had a pretty backwards view of women. Although some people blame the church for society's continuing struggle to acknowledge the autonomy and intrinsic worth of women, I think it's the other way around. Ancient societies were horribly patriarchal. The Bible is rife with examples of women being treated like property and that's really unfortunate, because I don't think the Bible was ever intended to be used as a guidebook for how to oppress women. The Bible represents this view because this was the pervasive view of the world at the time. As far as I know, every ancient society in this part of the world saw womens' worth as based on their fertility. At the time, it kind of made sense. In nomadic and agrarian societies, if you didn't have children, you didn't survive and your wealth went to nobody. Women were essentially the best way for that very rudimentary economy to work and thus became more or less a commodity. The fallacy is that the Bible somehow tries to write this understanding of women in stone. Quite the contrary is true.

Look at a well known passage in Deuteronomy 22, which talks extensively about what should happen when certain sexual laws are broken. The best known is verse 28, which says: "If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives." This sounds AWFUL. What woman wants to be married to her rapist forever? It sounds like an atrocious command! But if we can get past the gut reaction and think about it in context, reflect on what would have likely happened. A young virgin is raped by a stranger while she's out and about. Now the value placed on her by the society has been taken, and she can not be married. Her father has to take care of her forever unless a man will agree to marry her anyway, which is unlikely if people know that it happened. Either that or her father rejects her and she is forced to become a prostitute. The law is there not to punish the woman for being raped but to protect her and her family. If a man thinks he's going to get a byblow and have no consequences, he'll just rape a woman without thinking about it. If he is suddenly going to have to pay money and take on an additional person to feed and clothe and treat like a wife (not a servant) for the rest of his life, it might not be worth his while to do it at all. So not only does it protect that particular woman from a life of destitution or prostitution (and her family) but it protects women from being raped in the first place by giving rapists a consequence. It sounds backwards to us, but it's actually rather progressive. That would be like telling frat boy date rapists that if they sleep with a girl that they will have to pay her tuition and child support for the rest of her life. They might think twice, yeah?

Okay, so the Bible does not always present the most forward thinking perspective on women. Some passages in the New Testament are especially troubling. Paul is often used to justify the submissive position of women within a marriage (though that is also a misreading in my opinion), but at the same time, Lydia hosted a whole church, Philip's daughters prophesied (preached), Prisca was a teacher, and some of the most central characters in the synoptic gospels were women. Even in the midst of a context that is not very friendly to women, we see women as valuable leaders in the church. That was the forward-pushing precedent the Bible tried to set within a very difficult context.

So what happened? Well, the Gnostic movement is kind of a big one. I don't have a source on this one except Lois Farag, a professor of early/medieval church history at Luther Seminary, but gnosticism can be traced to two big problems, one intended, the other an inadvertent result of what was labeled heresy. Gnosticism is a mystical movement which predates Christianity, but which also embraced it after its inception, and it holds that the worldly and physical should be rejected and the spiritual, otherworldly should be aspired toward. Misapplied to Paul's doctrine of the flesh/Spirit, it was really easy to say that the body is evil and leads us to evil and the soul is pure and leads us to God. There are a host of theological problems with this stance, starting with the very embodied nature of the Spirit of God from the earliest Yahwist tradition and moving into the fact that Paul was talking about flesh and spirit in a way that was never intended to split them apart but rather to talk about the two realities we inhabit fully at the same time, but the result is that the gnostics promoted this idea and it kind of stuck. Bodily things (eating, sex, etc) are evil, and an ascetic life is to be embraced in pursuit of the intellectual and spiritual things. This leads us to think of our bodies and their natural functions as sort of less, and something which need to be dominated and controlled. The other problem is that, with their emphasis on the spiritual, the Gnostic Christians often put women in leadership roles, but because they were heretical in other ways, their organizational structures were more or less rejected and so women in leadership was also rejected (and this rejection was canonized in the exclusion of women from the roles of clergy in both the Catholic and Orthodox traditions). So we have our orthodoxy rejecting the role of women at the same time that some of the ideas about bodily things being less or even dirty sneaked into our thought, and suddenly women, who are much more at the mercy to their bodily happenings (menstruation, childbirth, etc) are cemented into the very inferior role that the gospels and epistles tried so hard to reject. Crap--thanks, gnosticism!

This has played an enormously detrimental role in how we think about sex. If sex is something that we tolerate merely for the sake of procreation (because it's a lower thing), and women are kind of seen as property for a host of reasons, all of that becomes entangled and starts to congeal into some really harmful ideas about sex. Sex is lesser, women are less, women's value culturally came from their ability to procreate, therefore women's sexual lives are a dirty necessity that need to be protected at best and subjugated at worst. That's why girls like me grew up hearing from our church that if we let somebody sleep with us, we would be worthless. That's why women are shamed for daring to be sexual beings of their own right. That's why women who are raped hear horrible things like the woman in the letter linked above. That's why men still feel entitled to take sex from us. That is why we need feminism.

Contrary to what the author of the Christianity today article says, feminism isn't the acknowledgment that women are human beings. We know that. We're not cows or grasshoppers. Feminism is about fighting these myths about womanhood and sexuality that are pushed on us from everywhere. Feminism is about acknowledging that we are created with desires and hopes and fears and dreams just like men, and that we have autonomy over all of those things. It's not about not needing men, as she asserts. People were created for companionship, friendship or romance, gay or straight and everything in between. Feminism is about claiming a space for ourselves within God's kingdom where we all equally participate in bringing about God's promised future. We need it because we still tell our little girls that their value comes from whether or not they keep their knees together, and that is a lie. I'm not saying that promiscuity is a good thing. I think sex is something to be cherished between people who are deeply in love, and preferably who are or will be married to one another because it is a way to protect your hearts. But what I am saying is that regardless of your gender or sexual relationships or ability to have children, your worth comes from Jesus Christ who called you and named you a beloved child of God. And until we tell our daughters that and believe it 100% and live it, we as Christians need feminism. So I'm sorry, Hannah Anderson, but I think you are wrong, because men are still telling young women that it would be better if their life ended than for them to be raped, and that's not okay. That is why I am a Christian feminist, and that's why you should be too.