Sexism. misogyny and Church Membership
Barnabas62
Shipmate, Host Emeritus
in Epiphanies
Following the steer from Dafyd in the Hell thread (You support sexism, Gamma) I thought this topic might be worth a whirl here, despite the volume of discussion in the Hell thread.
The Hell thread was based on membership of a Church which does not ordain women. But I doubt whether experiences of sexism and misogyny are confined to the established Churches which do not ordain.
So here is an opportunity to discuss experiences, coping mechanisms, and the tipping point for departure.
The Hell thread was based on membership of a Church which does not ordain women. But I doubt whether experiences of sexism and misogyny are confined to the established Churches which do not ordain.
So here is an opportunity to discuss experiences, coping mechanisms, and the tipping point for departure.
Comments
I don’t think anyone is saying that experiences of sexism or misogyny are confined to any particular groups of whatever kind. The argument has been that those historic Churches which don’t ordain women are institutionally sexist and misogynist and their very existence perpetuates or condones sexism and misogyny in wider society.
So anyone who has voluntarily chosen to join or remain within those Churches is dehumanising women and complicit with misogyny and sexism wherever it occurs.
At this stage, I'm not sure I can add anything beyond what I've written- often clumsily - in Hell.
It would be more helpful I think to have some 'own voice' contributions from women within those historic Churches who are either in favour of women's ordination or who are comfortable with the status quo. I don’t know whether there are RC or Orthodox women here who fall into either of those categories.
There may also be a range of views from Shipmates involved with post-Reformation Churches, some of which don’t share the same views on ordination as the historic Churches or have any concept of 'ordination' at all. And I'd point out that there are differences between the RCs and Orthodox on how ordination is understood but that's by the by.
My thought was "No! this is not right!"
I took myself off for the first time to the Orthodox church in the city (services in English). It was an ordinary Monday evening Vespers, and I was overwhelmed with the feeling: "Yes! this is how worship should be!"
Sixteen years later that is still my church.
I've been thinking about the text (John 6: 67-69):
67 So Jesus asked the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ 68 Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69 We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’
I joined a church that didn't ordain women then but now does. When I joined it I felt called by God to join His church and that therefore I should probably accept what it taught. Now I'm older and uglier I'm glad that my (His?) church ordains women (and has a female Archbishop so it's clearly taking it seriously) but I wouldn't leave the church if it didn't.
If I have accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour, I worship Him and put Him first in all things, and accept that I have no other options than Him because He has the words of eternal life, then I'd be a bit stuck to do anything else. How could I put anything else - even the most important human issue - ahead of that? It wouldn't be logical. Though it would be human.
To take an extreme example, the Bible certainly does seem to condone genocide, but I'm prepared to accept that that may be because when Joshua was written understanding hadn't got very mature yet. My church seems to take that view - so far so good. But if (I believed) God appeared before me and told me to massacre a group of people, what would I do? If I truly believed in what God says Himself to be, I'd be in a position like Abraham called on to sacrifice Isaac and I'd have to at least think about doing it. Which is intolerable but logical.
Supposing the church I attended had some view that I found morally repugnant? How intolerable would that have to be for me to give up the one place that seemed to have the words of eternal life, the Lord and Saviour of my life? So long as there are a selection of churches that feel valid/acceptable, then you can go to another one. That seems to be what was under debate in the Hell thread.
If I were sure that God had called me to go somewhere else, and had told me that the church in question was wrong, then no problem. But if I had to choose between God and literally anything else, based on what the Bible and various theologians say, I would have to choose God, wouldn't I?
Can I ask a very simple question - why? What's "not right" about it? The woman? The tight trousers?
London.
@cgichard’s post shows something important about tipping points and personal responses.
Being in a “lower down the candle” church all my life. my subjective attitudes to the sacraments is quite different. The church that I joined over fifty years ago did not permit women to pray over the bread. We believed in the priesthood of all believers however. Also that our commemoration of the Lord’s supper was an act of remembrance. The bread and the (non-alcoholic) wine remained bread and wine. They did not, in any sense, become the body and blood of our Lord, though we certainly believed He was present in the midst of us. We were more than two or three gathered together.
So from my perspective in those days, the restriction on women breaking bread was inconsistent with the view that they were an integral part of the priesthood of all believers. So I found the restriction sexist.
Because of reforms which I actively encouraged, that restriction no longer exists. We have women in leadership, and women preach and teach. I regard that as much better.
Ah - wrong Archbishop!
Male posters - if you haven't got women's voices to post or center, please consider taking a step back. This thread needs not to be a preponderantly male discussion of men talking about women.
Thanks!
Louise
Epiphanies Host
I think it can be easier for folks from my kind of background to move on so far as the role of women is concerned. A high church episcopalian setting has different, bigger hurdles.
Mind you, there are still churches from a low-church background that I couldn’t join, because of what I see as their sexism. Having worked patiently through the changes in my local congregation, I’m too old to go through that process again! That’s my current tipping point.
Wondering that meself
I swapped to a church which didn't accept women's ordination not because of that but because of a deep sense of call to be there. It was understood from the outset that women's ordination was for relational reasons a non negotiable for me. I was never asked to compromise on that stance. The most was to bite my tongue for the sake of peace when misogynistic views were expressed knowing that the Priest would equally be rolling eyes in private.
I am now in a setting that accepts women's ordination again from a sense of call and I would not have got here without the church in-between.
I have thought deeply on it. The problem in my view is not women's ordination per se. That will be found to be a hollow victory long term. Rather it is the dominance of masculine dominated power structures within the Church. The ordination of women simply shoehorns them into a masculinised role. Power needs to be taken away from the priestly class in my view, then we can have a proper discussion about this.
Sure, but this assumes that you have to be a member of an institutional Church to serve Jesus Christ. As an Episcopalian I do believe that you need ordained clergy of some kind to provide valid sacraments, but many Christians don't believe that.
I think many or most Christians do believe that you need a community of other Christians, if one is available, but that could be a house church if necessary.
There were sneaky ways round it; “giving your testimony” was acceptable for anyone, and I can remember a few occasions when a woman sang a brief solo during the main service and spent about ten minutes beforehand explaining what she felt the Lord was saying through that song and relating it to what she’d been reading in the Bible.
By the end of my first year at university I was going to an Anglican Church instead, having rethought the beliefs I grew up with, and was confirmed a year later. The church I went to had two female deacons (or possibly deaconesses, I can’t remember the distinction) who were excellent preachers with excellent pastoral skills. Their call from God was blindingly obvious and I am sure the church rejoiced when they were finally allowed to be ordained priest a few years later.
Yes - I'm an Anglican. I agree if you believe you can come to God effectively without a church structure then you're sorted.
This. This. This.
This is one of many reasons, not all negative, why I no longer function as an ordained woman.
Gosh, what excellent posts, well done. How roles are demasculinized across the board, I don't know.
That church had a female Vicar, and I recall Uncle H telling me that 'it seems strange to see a woman standing at the altar, but that's probably because I'm not used to it'...
No hang-ups about doctrine, you notice!
Agreed. I don't know, either, but I think it's a task that needs to be done.
Me as well. And I'll point out that including the detail of the tight trousers is one of those very common ways sexism is worked into discussions. There was mention recently in the Styx of "an attractive woman" the poster had met -- that she was Métis was relevant to the discussion of who is and isn't First Nations, but that she was attractive and with her children were not. Individually such things are small, but they add up.
I was raised in a Baptist church that did not ordain women, but I left Christianity for other reasons went I was in college. In 1984, toward the end of my last year in college, I went home for Mother's Day, when the senior pastor preached against women working outside the home. This in a church full of women from the lower middle classes for whom work was a necessity, a church which itself employed a woman full-time as secretary. I thought about walking out, but didn't, as I was no longer in regular attendance and didn't want to embarrass my parents. My mother (who had not held a paid job since her first pregnancy) told me that afternoon that she would have been fine if I had. This episode helped solidify my rejection of Christianity.
When I returned to Christianity nearly 10 years later, I wanted a church as different from that one as possible, and the only person I knew who attended church was Catholic. So I went to church with him and started reading up on Catholicism. The view of Mary seemed problematic. The priest advising me to consider being a nun when I told him I didn't see myself ever getting married was also problematic. I talked about it to an old friend who was Catholic, and she flatly said, "Don't. I was born into it, I'll marry a Catholic, I'm stuck with it, but you shouldn't join." Another old friend, a devout member of a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, said if I liked liturgy but didn't want to be Catholic, I should try the Episcopal Church. I tried it, liked it (including its views on women's ordination), and was confirmed.
This in a more general sense is a why I stopped attending church. My faith was hanging on by a thread, that thread being the choir. The choir director moved practice from Thursday evenings to Sundays at 8 am without consulting anyone but the four paid section leaders. The rector allowed him to make that decision. I already had to be somewhere dressed and ready to go at 8 am five days a week; I wasn't going to do it a sixth day on a volunteer basis. This was the proverbial straw on the camel's back. The larger reason was church hierarchy and how much I had come to distrust institutional hierarchies in general.
“He who would be great among you must become your servant”.
I’m not denying the reality of an empowered priestly class, but there is an injunction from Jesus about an abuse of that power.
I don’t think women will necessarily become shoehorned into a masculinised role but I do accept the argument that a typically masculine understanding of the use of power needs purification. As I see it, we’re called to be servants, not dominators.
I argued in the other thread in favour of purification and repentance from the poison of sexism and misogyny. Surely that can also be applied to the dominant patterns within the structures which support misogyny?
I appreciate that might be a long job.
On a more serious note I think prioritising the 'own voice' here is important so won't say too much. I must admit I'm surprised to hear such a 'low' view of church expressed by US Episcopalian posters as I've generally found them to have a 'higher' view of church than 'low church' Anglicans here in the UK.
I'm not talking about ritual or bells and smells but a view of church that doesn't regard it as an optional extra. If the Church is the Body of Christ - however we understand that - then surely we can't dismiss it so blithely.
It's not that the Church is Christ but it is an icon of Christ according to the understanding within the Tradition I inhabit.
That doesn't mean that the Church always reflects or represents Christ effectively. 'My name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.'
Neither am I saying that God isn't at work outside the boundaries of Church however we understand that term.
In both/and terms the Church is both an all too human institution and a divine one at the same time. Apart from exceptional cases those of us who have or have had a Christian faith have done so because we've met Christians of whichever flavour in some kind of ecclesial/communal context.
It's not just 'Me and Jesus.'
I know it sounds whishty-whishty but there has to be a mystical as well as an institutional element. Churches are more than organisational structures, committees, clerical or ministerial orders and so on.
At least I hope they are.
Established power structures exist, paradoxically, to check the abuse that comes from privatized power.
If you remove the power of priests, I fear you're going to have to establish another kind of priesthood or else something priest-like will emerge to fill the power vacuum.
I like to keep my priests where I can see them, maybe that's what the bright, shiny vestments are for.
@Gamma Gamaliel I think for a lot of women and LGBTQ+ people, a lower view of Church is formed out of necessity unfortunately - because adopting a higher/more mystical view means that God somehow endorses the inevitable bullshit that comes your way.
I still regard it as a serious error of judgement on the part of the priest, who himself was somewhat slovenly even when vested.
Any sense of the numinous was absent.
Thank you. I hope the prats will not always be with us.
But so often this is not what power structures do. They are themselves abusive, or they cover up private abuse. It may be that I've been unfortunate in the power structures I've had to inhabit, but I can't think of a single one that wasn't one way or another abusive of the people at the bottom, or even the middle. Including the church I worked for.
Thanks for explaining. I can see why this would put some folks off. But this seems like an argument for vestments and not unnecessarily bringing in outsiders, not an argument in favor of a male-only priesthood.
Perhaps one of those embedded norms may be associated with the use of power, the application of authority? I keep coming back to some of Jesus’ words from the 20th chapter of Matthew’s gospel.
It will not be so among you. It’s an abuse of authority to “lord it over” others. That surely comes from a sense that “others are less than we are”. The principle seems much deeper to me than issues of vestments, regardless of how they may impact our sense of the numinous.
I appreciate Bullfrog’s point about power vacuums. But I don’t this is an issue over authority per se. Lording over is an abuse of authority. Racism, sexism, homophobia flow from an abuse of power, whether structural or functional.
Right there, found in the very foundational principles of Christianity, Jesus forbids lording over. It’s a fundamentally wrong attitude.
Matthew 26:11 and Mark 14:7 which speak of the poor always being with us are often taken out of context and used as an excuse for not alleviating poverty or tackling its underlying causes. I've often heard 'the poor will always be with you,' without the coda, 'you can help them whenever you like.'
How we go about that is something we could debate elsewhere.
How do we 'help' prats to become less prattish? How do we eradicate prattishness? Can we be tough on prats, tough on the causes of prattishness?
If we remove the causes of prattishness at an institutional level we may lessen the opportunities for prattish behaviour to some extent, but would we remove it entirely?
Which isn't to say we shouldn't try.
On the 'low church / high church' thing I'm not coming from an 'own voice' position on that as I am neither a woman nor LGBTQ+ but would observe that I've met many people in 'higher up the candle' settings who aren't heterosexual males. There are some here aboard Ship.
But I can understand @Pomona's point that a 'lower' view of church is going to be more conducive for many people, and not only women or LGBTQ+ people either.
Mini-Popes seem to crop up everywhere from what I can see. They aren't restricted to episcopal structures - although I'd argue that all churches have bishops of sorts even if they don't call them that.
I've seen congregational structures where a number of dominant individuals or families rule the roost. Which isn't an argument against such structures if people have the conviction that this is the way to go.
Isn’t lording over just wrong? For if we agree on that then we are open to discuss why the long term established churches do not see their restrictions on the roles of women within the church as lording over women. One step at a time.
I think we're all in agreement that lording it over anyone is wrong.
I don’t know of any church that wouldn't say that 'servant leadership' (for want of a better term) is the way to go.
Whether they achieve that or come anywhere close to it is another issue.
A priest telling someone that if they don't want to marry then their only option is to become a celibate monastic is a bloody stupid thing to say whatever our views are on sacramental priesthood or women's ordination.
But yes, of course there's room to discuss why the historic Churches take the position they hold on these things and why they might not see their restrictions on women's ordination to the priesthood as 'lording it over women'. We've been discussing that in the Hell thread already.
That discussion is continuing here. It's not a wriggle to suggest that both you and I step back and allow some more 'own voice' testimony on this one.
I'd be interested in the views of women in RC, Orthodox or traditional Anglo-Catholic settings who have views on either side of this debate. There don't seem to be any of those around aboard Ship these days.
Had it been a man, who was not a member of the congregation, wearing e.g. jeans and a T-shirt, would you have had the same issue? I can understand, and sympathise with, what you are saying about "implied disrespect for the holiness of the altar area" but in that case the sex of the person seems not to have been the main issue.
Could you unpack this a bit further, @cgichard?
Anyway, for me it was a tipping point on top of previous dissatisfaction with that church on other grounds.
I fear there may have been a flash of ankle.
There was a scene in the recent The Other Bennet Sister in which Mary felt flustered when she saw Tom roll his shirt sleeves up to the elbow. I'm sure I was not the only women to "get" why Mary felt flustered! But Tom was entirely oblivious to the fact that he was "flaunting his sexuality."
Women are supposed to police their clothing and take responsibility for male sexual response. Men are expected to neither take responsibility for their own responses, nor police their own clothing.
All sorts of female clothing is sexualised by men. School uniforms? Nurses' uniforms? What was she wearing? Was she "asking for it?" Random bits of the female body are deemed sexual, and we have to police our clothing accordingly.
How tight is "too tight" and therefore sexualised? How baggy do our clothes have to be to be "not sexual".
This week there were some happy photos of Zohran Mamdani in a swimming pool splashing around with his wet shirt clinging to him. Do you think a female mayor of New York could have done that? Of course not! She'd have been "flaunting her sexuality"!
Happy to step back!
En passant, the recent exchanges have been illuminating. And I’m glad for your highly expected confirmation re “lording over” leadership. The links with male privilege insights are very obvious.
It's not as if it's only a bloke wearing a giant cod-piece who is going to give off sexualised signals.
She wasn't "flaunting [her] sexuality", she was just wearing clothes.
"The male gaze" is a film theory term and specifically refers to the camera's gaze (within a film) assuming that the viewer is male. It cannot apply to real-life people, because it's vey specifically about interacting with the camera within the context of a film. I do agree with your comment in general.
Honi soit qui mal y pense - evil be to him who evil thinks...
There was a time when a woman was not permitted to enter the sanctuary or to go beyond the communion-rail - at least, according to Ritual Notes, a manual for Catholic-minded Anglicans.
I think usage has expanded, by analogy, to how culture treats and talks about women's bodies and attire in general.
Yeah, and it derived - in part - from Satre's idea of 'the gaze', so the expansion isn't a reach.