GENDER & RELIGION
Woodward, Kenneth L.
SENDER & RELIGION Who's really running the show? enneth L. Woodward Annul me in my manhood, Lord, and Make me woman-sexed and weak, If by that total transformation I might know Thee more. The...
...Never mind, in other words, that the two acolytes, two readers, and four eucharistic ministers up there in the sanctuary at Saint Mary's Catholic Church are women...
...In short, these Evangelicals are responding in their own time and way to the feminization of religion that scholar Ann Douglas described...
...Sunday school is perhaps the major enterprise one finds under the roof of a Southern Baptist church...
...And their latest enterprise is the Christian Men's Movement...
...In this context, I was struck by a passage in Elizabeth Johnson's widely acclaimed She Who Is (Crossroad, 1991...
...Those Catholic churches which most resemble the "community" that Catholics always talk about but seldom achieve are ones with parochial schools attached...
...Surely there is need to incorporate, expand, and deepen what is feminine in religion...
...Synagogues, for instance, fairly bustle with women preparing the young for their bar or bat mitzvah...
...Can this be right...
...You're much more likely to find a women's spirituality group than a men's spirituality group...
...Yet what we find in Catholic churches is usually a suffering Jesus on the cross, though without the barely covered phallus that we find in Renaissance paintings...
...And even though ordination is forbidden to women in the Catholic church, there are already more women than men working as professionals in the ministry of the Catholic church in the United States...
...One has only to consult such fine works of historical retrieval as Caroline Walker Bynum's jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (University of California, 1982) to see that the relationship of the masculine and the feminine in religion is such that stark polarities do not do justice to the facts...
...The pastor as buddy, the minister as mom, are the models...
...In sum, "women bring what they know to a situation and it becomes transformed...
...The pastor, usually a man, may exercise authority in the congregation, but to the young he is like the principal of the local elementary school: a remote authority figure...
...they are changed by the professions, and if they do not perform well they are out...
...In the United Church of Christ, there are 535 male seminarians and 531 female...
...And that's just the weekend...
...If we consider only the prestigious, national, nondenom-inational divinity schools such as Harvard and Yale, women outnumber male students...
...Americans, when they get religion, get it primarily through the aegis of women: mom, most of all, but also the Sunday school teacher, who is usually a woman, or in the case of Catholic parochial schools, Sister Mary or her female lay alternative...
...But that too, is changing rapidly...
...Another reason for this opposition is that so many black families lack fathers that the women want their children to see in the minister a disciplined father figure...
...I recognize that in her very interesting exercise in reconciling feminism with Catholic tradition, Johnson is pursuing a conservative, not liberal, much less a radical strategy, as feminists construe these terms...
...Finally, following the model of all twelve-step programs, these men are expected to find a male faith partner with whom they share their temptations and weaknesses...
...Seminarians were less interested in displaying the knowledge and skills of their own profession than in being "the right kind of person...
...Clearly, Promise Keepers has been listening to contemporary pop psychology which holds an article of faith that what is wrong with men is that they do not show their emotions as easily as women do...
...In religion, those who do the formation are in fact more significant than those who run the show...
...Too often, when Roman Catholics-including bishops-discuss issues like the ordination of women, they fail to look at the Protestant experience...
...Some seminaries have housing especially for homosexuals...
...So it pays a journalist to watch where these Evangelicals put their time, money, and effort...
...And it is the same image: of an old man holding up the hands of a crucified Christ with a dove flying above the crown of thorns...
...Although there are no hard-and-fast statistics, pastors I talk to say that women usually outnumber the men three-to-one...
...And churches, as cultural historian Ann Douglas has demonstrated, played the central role, from the middle of the nineteenth century on, in what she calls "the feminization of culture...
...Many of the counselees are couples, but most are women...
...One finds in this poem, as in the entire body of Eversori's work, echoes of the psalms, the Song of Songs, of Augustine's Confessions, among other cornerstone texts of the Christian tradition that yoke the erotic with the mystical...
...Like the suburbs in a John Updike novel, the weekday world of American religion is a world without men...
...There were single-sex choirs...
...What's important is that the single male among them is the presiding priest...
...What Bynum also finds is this: that women's symbols and myths tend to build from social and biological experiences...
...The movement's primary organization, Promise Keepers, was founded five years ago by Bill McCartney, a former Catholic who was the coach of the University of Colorado football team...
...The Promise Keepers meet in stadiums, where tens of thousands of men shout "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus" while doing the wave and chanting "we are the brotherhood, we are connected...
...Whatever the merits of this approach to theology and religion, what interests me is whether this hermeneutic of suspicion aligns with what I see of gender and gender relations among ordinary church folk...
...Obviously, space does not permit analysis of gender and power in every American denomination...
...Women's mode of using symbols seems given to the muting of opposition, while men's mode is characterized by emphasis on opposition, contradiction, and conversion...
...And as we can see in the exponents of post-Christian feminism, those limits have already been breached...
...I've long observed that Evangelicals are quick to recognize new markets and to exploit them...
...And, fair or not, nurture is perceived as something feminine...
...Now I'm sure you've heard that despite all this women in the clergy still face a "glass ceiling," as Joan Brown Campbell, the general secretary of the National Council of Churches, recently put it...
...In American religion, women have always made up the bulk of Christian congregations...
...She blames sexism for the fact that too few women are accepted as head pastors, and almost none at prestige churches...
...Many of the women, in particular, are divorced, quite a few are middle-aged, and many are single mothers...
...I was reminded of this prior "feminization" while doing an article for Newsweek on the rapid growth of the "Christian Men's Movement" among Evangelicals...
...But I myself have seen little movement among women to break up the brotherhood of ushers...
...And among Lutherans there were the brotherhoods...
...Women raise the money and, though men dominate the church boards of trustees, it is their wives who effectively determine how it is spent...
...But statistics alone do not tell us very much...
...What I mean by the terms "masculine" and "feminine" will, I hope, become apparent as I go along...
...Indeed, in all the focus on pedophilia in the Catholic priesthood, attention has been diverted from the virtual explosion of sexual seductions involving male Protestant clergy...
...I think the reality of congregational life is more complex than that...
...That's up from 10 percent in 1972...
...This essay is adapted from a speech given at Loyola University in Chicago...
...degree has risen by less than 5 percent over the same twenty-one-year period...
...The Good Shepherd and the Good Samaritan predominate with Jesus looking for all the world as if he were a permanent-wave advertisement...
...It is there that the word is heard, sacraments celebrated, connections made, marriages blessed, children baptized, loved ones buried...
...In those denominations where women take an active role, Chopp goes on, they have helped reshape the church's image as a "community of local belonging, of friends...
...But, Ah, you might say: It is the pastor who has the authority and therefore wields the power, and since most pastors are male-all of them in the case of Roman Catholicism-that is what is important and unjust about American religion...
...I have spent time on the Protestant experience because I want to indicate not only what is happening among our Christian brethren but also to suggest that the loosening of this dynamic tension may be one reason why mainline denominations are in such dire straits...
...And not surprisingly, women entering seminaries are on average better educated than the men...
...It may be that Ong's reflections apply only to Catholics, or perhaps only to those Christian traditions whose high sacramentalism involves deep structures of the masculine and the feminine...
...Men were heavily recruited, though not always successfully, to teach adolescent boys in Sunday school...
...Surely there is need to incorporate, expand, and deepen what is feminine in religion...
...The pastoral challenge facing most clergy is to find ways to draw men into active participation...
...Arguing from what she calls a "feminist" perspective, Douglas deplores the effects of all this on women, but she is curiously silent on its effect on lay men...
...Not surprisingly, Protestant seminaries are also home to large numbers of lesbians and gay men...
...On Sundays, the Mothers dress distinctively in white and preside from a special section of the church- opposite the 'Amen corner' where the male trustees sit...
...Divorce and single motherhood are major factors working against acceptance of women as pastors...
...These, they say, exclude, deny, and oppress women...
...I can only conclude that if these churches are having difficulty attracting men, then the feminization of American religion is by no means confined to those liberal mainline denominations that ordain women...
...And that does not include those studying for degrees in Christian education, in which women also predominate...
...The transformation is already occurring in many mainline denominations...
...Among black Baptists, power belongs to "the Mothers," a group of older women who have been in their congregations for decades and constitute the heart and soul of the church...
...But the difference between male and female seminarians that I find most interesting is in their attitudes toward authority and its exercise...
...ly be described as masculine, no matter who in the hierarchy is calling the shots...
...Here I want to draw on a very illuminating research paper by O'Neil...
...The goal is not female domination, but the liberation of men and women from androcentrism and its attendant evils...
...And he adds that, by the sheer weight of numbers, "[women] are socializing the male seminarians to do the same...
...That is what William Everson was struggling with...
...I stopped and asked myself: What male imagery...
...In a pagan society that disparaged women, undervalued marriage, and regularly resorted to abortion and infanticide, Christianity extolled marriage and family life, protected and enfranchised women as members of the community, denounced abortion as murder, and readily encouraged their surplus of women to take (and domesticate) pagan husbands, who were notoriously inhospitable to both marital fidelity and family creation...
...Moreover, I would argue that in the everyday life of most Americans today it is the female, not the male, presence that is most noticeable-and, in ways that feminist scholars choose not to notice-also the most powerful...
...The first thing to notice about the Christian Men's Movement is its connection with sports...
...Although Protestants accept divorce for themselves, they'd rather not have it in their ministers...
...None of this augurs well for the masculine presence in the ministry-if by masculine we also mean heterosexual...
...That is not the case today...
...To turn one final time to Caroline Walker Bynum, this time as editor of a book of essays, Gender and Religion (Beacon Press, 1986...
...Rebecca Chopp, dean of the faculty at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, draws remarkably parallel conclusions in her Saving Work: Feminist Practices of Theological Education (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995...
...The distinctions may be more or less arbitrary, but they are no less significant for being so...
...In short, the original sin was not pride but patriarchy, and from it has come all manner of evil: sexism, racism, clericalism, ageism, classism, conflict, leadership by hierarchy-even the rape of the environment...
...Americans, are most likely to turn to church-usually after a long period of drift-when they become parents...
...Much the same point has been made by Walter Ong, surely one of the great Catholic intellects of our time...
...Especially in the African-American community, which is the most "churched" community in the United States outside of Mormon Utah, adults use the church to help them in the rearing of their children...
...The issues surrounding the relationships between gender- both genders-and religion are complex, deep, and of long standing...
...Nearly 90 percent of Americans claim at least nominal alKenneth L. Woodward is a senior writer and longtime religion reporter for Newsweek...
...No, what seems to bother feminist theologians is the masculine language and verbal icons used in reference to God...
...Remember, too, that most of them do not ordain women and take seriously the Pauline statements about male leadership in the church and in the home...
...One study compared students at a Protestant seminary in Chicago with students preparing for careers as doctors and nurses...
...One has to travel far, to the Uffizi Museum in Florence, to the Cathedral in Prague, or to the Franciscan church in Cracow, to find the most prominent Western images of the Father...
...but not by much...
...Which brings me to another level of observation: most of what goes on within church buildings is related to the nurturing of the young...
...Indeed, it constitutes a female hierarchy within the church...
...The study found that early on the students in medicine adopted "a cloak of professionalism" while the seminary students did not...
...Whatever else it is, religion is a symbol system and to change the symbols is to change the meaning that religion expresses...
...In short, the study finds the ministry becoming an oxymoron, a "profession without authority," a profession bent on erasing the distance between clergy and laity...
...As sociologist Rodney Stark demonstrates in The Rise of Chris-tianity (Princeton University Press, 1996), early Christian communities were disproportionately female...
...Not only is feminist theology widely taught in seminaries, but the informal curriculum is also frankly and ideologically feminist...
...Among Universalist-Unitarians more than half of the clergy are women...
...Indeed, much of Christian tradition can be read as a continuing conversation about the meaning of male and female as it relates to God, who is beyond gender...
...They do not tell us anything about the quality of today's seminarians, their attitudes toward ministry, or about the culture of divinity schools...
...According to psychologist Joseph P. O'Neil, principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, "Most theological schools are 'open admission' institutions that rarely reject anyone who is of sound mind and with a bachelor's degree...
...The average age of all seminarians has increased dramatically-at Yale Divinity, it is thirty-four-but that doesn't always mean they are more mature...
...When Saint Paul wrote that "in Christ there is neither male nor female," he was not suggesting thereby that gender differences do not exist...
...And if we look inside Protestant churches on Sunday, we find that most of the people in the pews are women...
...In the inner-city, where most black churches are, the priority is wooing young males to the church...
...Says Lincoln: "The minister who has the Mothers on his side is virtually unassailable, and woe be it to the minister who doesn't...
...Many are entering second careers, often after failing to find either success or fulfillment in their first choices...
...But I was struck by her negative references to the male images of God one finds in Christian art and churches: especially of Jesus as "the visible image of the invisible God" who "is used to tie the knot between maleness and divinity very tightly...
...The second thing to notice is the promises they make: to be responsible to God, to their wives and children, to the church, and to each other, in that order...
...Already, 260,000 local congregations have tapped Promise Keepers as a way of encouraging greater male participation in congregational life...
...That is, if the father demonstrates that religion is not foreign to what a man is and does, the child-especially the male child-is much more likely to be religious upon reaching adulthood...
...From this brief survey of congregational life, I think it not at all an exaggeration to say that the altar and the pulpit represent the last bastions of male presence within American Christianity...
...And it is from the dialectical relationship of masculine and feminine, he argues, that the church receives much of its dynamism and energy...
...Only men could serve on the vestry, for example...
...Among Presbyterians, United Methodists, and Episcopalians, men outnumber the women Whatever else it is, religion is a symbol system and to change the symbols is to change the meaning that religion expresses...
...Essentially, I want to call attention to those aspects of American religious life that privilege the feminine rather than the masculine...
...Women, he argues, are much more likely than men to create community by sharing personal information...
...My aim has been to keep an eye on what is going on...
...As I read it, the message of the Christian Men's Movement is this: Following Jesus is not for women only, nor is it merely a spectator sport, which it tends to become for men in our domesticated, mostly female congregations...
...But I want to note in passing that within the United Methodist church, second only to the Southern Baptists in terms of numbers, women exercised enormous power long before ordination was open to them...
...The third feature is key...
...To the psyche, Ong remarks, the church is always and overwhelmingly feminine-Holy Mother the Church...
...Women who enter these professions do not change them...
...But running a parish or congregation is not the same as sustaining a family...
...Leaders of the movement expect men to exhibit manly virtues and recognize these virtues as Christian...
...Because of their power, and because of the importance of the Old Testament in black religion, the Mothers oppose women preachers...
...No one told me when I left the seminary," says William Willimon, a longtime Methodist minister, now dean of the chapel at Duke University, "that most of my time would be spent with women...
...This is not a new phenomenon...
...Most of these observations are sociological...
...Although men still outnumber women three-to-one in the mainline clergy, seminary statistics suggest that the future belongs to women...
...And in much of that tradition, it is male-not female-sexuality which is problematic for those who would open themselves to the divine embrace...
...Like its counterparts in other disciplines, feminist theology places gender at the center of inquiry, employing a hermeneutics of suspicion toward religious texts, and a strategy of retrieval to uncover the experiences and roles women really played in, say, the early Jesus movement...
...Catholics, I think, can gain some perspective on their own experience by looking at Protestantism, and especially at what I call the feminization of American Christianity...
...Now what is remarkable about this ancient image of the Father is that he reminds us not of a man, but by his posture of receiving the Christ on his lap, he is in the spitting image of that far more prevalent figure, the Pieta...
...And it is through the children, I would argue, that churches reach most adults...
...Women dominate the church committees, the prayer groups, the Bible study groups, the Sunday schools...
...Particularly for the Protestant majority, the local congregation is the church...
...But there are limits...
...That is, churches address adults essentially as parents...
...Isn't it possible, for instance, that in the realm of religious experience male-ness is at least as problematic as femaleness...
...And the hand that rocks this cradle is, invariably, a woman's...
...In short, religion in American life is not only privatized...
...Are symbols nothing more than reflections of a social structure that privileges the men at the expense of women...
...If we look closer, through the eyes of a leading black scholar like C. Eric Lincoln of Duke Divinity School, we see that "the well-organized black church is an organization of subgroups in which women predominate and wield their own power...
...Let me sum up: On the local level, women predominate, and what takes place inside churches is mainly though not exclusively focused on the nurturing of the young and the support of family life and relationships...
...It is, I believe, a genuine response to the alienation of men from the feminization of Evangelical church life...
...Among the Disciples of Christ it is much the same: 237 women and 351 men...
...From Monday to Friday, much of a Protestant pastor's time is spent in counseling...
...Like it or not, congregations are also institutions that require the exercise of authority and demand that some distance be observed between those who stand in the pulpit and those who sit in the pews...
...But religion is different...
...She cites her own work as an example of what she means: she points out that to Christians in medieval Europe, "God was sometimes seen as a bridegroom to whom all souls, no matter what sort of sexual body they inhabited, related as a bride...
...In sum, the glass ceiling may in fact be a glass door which women choose not to open because of the way in which they prefer to operate as clergy...
...it is also domesticated, identified with the side of life away from work, from the civic and the public...
...Do they really reinforce a male-dominated society and church...
...And what of the much maligned God the Father...
...Men are urged to confess their sins in small groups of strangers, to weep, emote, and show their vulnerability...
...My concern is not with theory or theology but with the atmosphere of ordinary American churches as I find them...
...But there was little that was virile in the virtues upheld...
...The poet William Everson died in 1994 at the age of eighty-one, a wispy, Whitmanesque figure from the Beat Generation...
...And when you look again at Catholic iconography, what do you see...
...In that overwhelming feminine environment, he believes, the all-male clergy function as a countervailing force...
...He gets no pictorial representation at all...
...Jews traditionally manage the problem by allowing only men to form a minyan...
...There we read that religious symbols are inherently polysemic: that is, they have "the capacity to refer to many levels of human experience" and also "the capacity to bring users of symbols to appropriate that to which the symbols point...
...But to be clear I want to state at the outset that I do assume that there are differences between men and women, rooted in biology, and that, as a consequence of these differences, every culture makes distinctions between what is masculine and what is feminine, including the cultures of churches...
...In her book by that title (Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), Douglas examined how the liberal Protestant clergy, in league with women, sentimentalized American culture and transformed women into the exemplars of virtue...
...Anyone acquainted with Episcopal seminaries, for example, can tell you which ones cater to lesbians and gays...
...It used to be, of course, that in both Protestant and Catholic congregations certain roles were reserved for men...
...But is sexism the only or even the major reason...
...There are very few female clergy in the black church-about 5 percent-and most of those are in the Pentecostal tradition...
...In those Protestant churches that accept the iconic, one typically encounters-especially in Methodist churches-a very androgynous if not altogether feminized Jesus...
...Keep in mind that Evangelical Protestants constitute the largest religious group in the United States-and the most committed...
...Consciously or unconsciously, the movement also validates an insight which sociologists confirm: The best predictor of whether a child will remain religious as an adult is not the religiosity of the mother-for children tend to take that for granted-but of the father, because he is not expected to be religious...
...away from the side which, rightly or wrongly, is identified with the masculine...
...I will focus mostly on that experience...
...Meanwhile, the number of men studying for the M. Div...
...They are also apt to be older and to have children...
...He is the not androgynous Christ of sentimental Protestant iconography, but a mighty king and warrior, a leader of men and a willing Savior, a wild man with a redeeming purpose-and also the best buddy a guy could ever have...
...Scholars estimate that 60 percent of young African-American males have no con-tact with church-up from 20 percent just a generation ago...
...These are the homely facts of American religious life, far removed from robust themes of liberation and empowerment...
...And what I find in them is the gradual disappearance of anything that might adequately be described as masculine, no matter who in the hierarchy is calling the shots...
...Hence they do not tell us much about the feminization of the ministry...
...But they well describe the environment of religion as it is experienced by the majority of Protestants...
...Here we see that the black pastor is a powerful figure, not only in the pulpit but in politics and in the wider African-American community...
...But Johnson is a Catholic and I assume it is Catholic churches she has in mind...
...Known as Brother Antoninus, Everson spent thirteen years as a member of the Dominican order where he published the poem whose opening lines I quote above...
...Indeed, within the liberal mainline Protestant denominations, we are witnessing the rapid feminization of the clergy...
...The Episcopalians, for example, have 248 women studying for the priesthood, and 323 men...
...They "come to theological education out of deep changes in their lives and cultures," she asserts...
...Evangelicals have noticed this, too, and for the last fifty years, through para-church agencies like Youth for Christ, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and a whole Vatican-full of similar organizations, Evangelicals have focused on recruiting, organizing, and catechizing the young outside of congregational structures...
...What I mean by "feminization" is not simple...
...Indeed, you don't have to be a sociologist to recognize the basic rhythm of American church membership...
...A generation ago, the Protestant ministry rivaled the law and medicine as attractive options for young men...
...O'Neil candidly speculates that this deprofessionalization of the clergy, as he calls it, is "the effect of the huge increase of women candidates on the culture of Protestant seminaries...
...The poem was inspired by a passage from Teresa of Avila, in which the redoubtable doctor of the church reports that, in her judgment and that of a holy priest of her acquaintance, women are more receptive than men to divine initiative...
...In it, he reviews several studies of seminaries and seminarians, both Protestant and Catholic, and combines these with his own research...
...It is hard to imagine a culture that is not gender inflected...
...Everywhere and always you will see a Madonna...
...Among Catholics, the men were encouraged to make retreats with other men...
...Most American Christians, of course, are Protestants...
...Fourth, the movement is, in keeping with much of contemporary church life, highly therapeutic...
...For most Americans, religion is rooted in the local congregation...
...Jesus, the movement insists, is a man's man...
...The church as a profession is not like the law, medicine, or finance...
...The organization United Methodist Women is, arguably, the most powerful single group among the denomination's various boards and agencies...
...But today exclusively male roles have virtually disappeared, while the sisterhoods, as at Jewish temples, are thriving...
...Further, they form small male-bonding groups in order to spread the men's movement in local churches...
...Today, much of that conversation is confined to women and to "women's studies...
...In his penetrating book Fighting for Life (Cornell University Press, 1981), Ong considers masculine and feminine as human contraries, finding in the former a need for agonistic experience, opposition, and "ritual contest" that shapes maleness from "its biological base to its human heights...
...For example, the major reason why the liberal, mainline Protestant denominations are in deep decline is their failure to raise their own children in the faith...
...Catholics who fear the celibate priesthood is attracting too high a proportion of gay men should look at what is happening-what in fact has been institutionalized-at interdenominational and mainline Protestant seminaries...
...Women...come for the space and time it gives them, and to gain valuable resources for living their lives...
...When Joseph shows up, he is usually depicted as an old, sexless man...
...And that environment is perceived, at least by males, as essentially female...
...Surely Johnson cannot be objecting to that...
...These concerns were salient long before the advent of gender studies...
...Is male sexuality a barrier to whole-hearted surrender to God...
...Women, she observes, enter seminaries for different reasons than men...
...According to the 1994 figures from the Association of Theological Schools, 37 percent of all the students now studying for the Master of Divinity degree-the ordination track-are women...
...Let's look, for example, at the black church in America, which, in terms of numbers essentially means the black Baptist tradition...
...It raises and spends millions every year with no interference from the hierarchy...
...Unlike Catholics, Protestants prefer that their pastors not only be married but that they set an example of married fidelity and virtue...
...Let's look at the figures...
...A good indication of this change is that admission standards are lower than in the past...
...Congregations that are 80 percent women are not unusual, particularly an aging congregation, since women live longer than men...
...But sociological change has deep psychological impact...
...Do they really...
...During the week, pastors live in women's world...
...But there are limits...
...men's symbols and myths tend to invert them...
...In other words, to be a man is to take charge, lead, protect...
...He is the author of Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn't, and Why (Touchstone...
...legiance to Christianity...
...And they did that by relying on their " gut feelings," that is, by displaying their personal rather than professional skills...
...So it is not at all surprising that O'Neil finds that women seminarians, far more often than men, opt to go into pastoral counseling and chaplaincies where small-group or face-to-face encounters make up a large portion of the work day...
...Indeed it is...
Vol. 123 • November 1996 • No. 20
