By Dennis Gruending

 A group of the world’s most respected Elders says that religions frequently oppress women and that it’s time for faith groups to change their ways. “Religion and tradition are a great force for peace and progress around the world,” the group said in a statement issued in July 2009. “However, as Elders, we believe that the justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a higher authority, is unacceptable . . . We especially call on religious and traditional leaders to set an example and change all discriminatory practices within their own religions and traditions.”

The Elders include Nelson Mandela, former Irish president Mary Robinson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, Kofi Annan, Graca Machel, Gro Brundtland, and former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. Mandela brought the group together in 2007. He said that as former leaders no longer in office they could “speak freely and boldy” to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity. They have visited and supported peace initiatives in Cyprus, the Middle East, Zimbabwe and Sudan, but now they have turned their attention to equality for women and girls – and upon the role that religions play in prolonging the injustice.

Carter quits Baptists over women’s ‘subservience’

Jimmy Carter is among the most outspoken of the Elders on this point. A lifelong Baptist who continued to teach Sunday school even while he was president, Carter made a painful decision to leave the Southern Baptist Convention in July 2009. He said that his action became unavoidable when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses, decided that women must be “subservient” to their husbands and prohibited from holding most church positions. Carter wrote at the time that, “Women and girls have been discriminated against for too long in a twisted interpretation of the word of God.”

Carter developed his theme further in December 2009 when he spoke, via teleconference, to a gathering called the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia. “The plight of abused women is made more acceptable by the mandated subservience of women by religious leaders,” Carter said. He reminded his audience that in the Christian scripture, St. Paul wrote (in his letter to the Corinthians) that “there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Carter took another swipe at the Baptist convention and also at the Catholic church, the two largest religious groups in the U.S. “The Roman Catholic Church and many others revere the Virgin Mary but consider women unqualified to serve as priests,” he said.

Dueling philosophies

There is a philosophy called complementarianism, which holds that God has ordained some forms of leadership (such as being a priest, pastor or elder) as exclusive to men. The counter concept is known as egalitarianism, or biblical equality, which holds that all human persons are equal in fundamental worth and moral status. The logical conclusion here is that both men and women are fit to hold any and all offices within their churches, not to mention their role in secular society. The debate often centres around the interpretation of certain Biblical passages. The complementarians like to quote portions of Genesis, where Adam was allegedly created first. Those who hold this philosophy justify the exclusion of females from leadership due to the deception of Eve by Satan, which resulted in the fall. There are also New Testament passages, including some by St. Paul, about women covering their heads, or wives being submissive to their husbands. These time-limited passages are read to restrict leadership to men.

Carter and his fellow Elders will have none of it. The Scriptures, Carter said in his Melbourne speech, were written when male dominance prevailed in every aspect of life and so it is not surprising that they reflect a dominantly male point of view. “I realize that devout Christians can find adequate scripture to justify either side in this debate,” he said, “but there is one incontrovertible fact concerning the relationship between Jesus Christ and women: he never condoned sexual discrimination or the implied subservience of women.”

Women and the church

The Catholic church is perhaps the most prominent example of complementarianism. Its leadership also clings to the position that because there were no women among the first apostles there can never be female priests. In a church whose decision-making is dominated by clerics, that means women are forever excluded from leadership. The last two popes have said the matter is closed and cannot be discussed. Pope John Paul II was not amused when, on his visit to the United States in 1979, Sister Teresa Kane, president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, challenged him publicly on the church’s treatment of women. The Vatican continues to rail against feminism and in July 2009 it announced a sweeping review of congregations of religious sisters in the United States. Some sisters fear that the Vatican is trying to shunt them back into the old ways.

Catholics and Southern Baptists have plenty of company in their opposition to having women participate in leadership. Pope Benedict recently agreed to welcome as Catholics those traditionalist Anglican priests who are disgruntled with their church. I had assumed their greatest objection would be that some Anglican congregations support same sex marriage or are willing to consecrate gay bishops. I have been surprised to read how often the unhappiness of disaffected Anglican priests is based on their opposition to the ordination of women.

In Canada, the United Church had its debate about women’s ordination in 1936. Yet, as recently as 2006, the Canadian Mennonite Brethren spent much of its national conference debating whether member churches should be free to call women to serve as ministers and pastoral leaders. The resolution was finally carried with 77% voting in favour. The Christian and Missionary Alliance (Prime Minister Harper is a member) will not ordain women and has had an on-again-off-again debate for more than 20 years about whether women should be allowed to serve as Elders in the church.

High stakes

There is more at stake here than another odd quarrel among church members that has little to do with the secular world. Every society has its creation myths and often they are powerful in ordering social and personal behaviour. Catholicism is the world’s largest Christian religion and wields considerable power and influence. The Vatican even has permanent observer status at the United Nations. Catholics compromise the largest church in the U.S. with 70 million adherents. The Southern Baptist Convention, with 16 million members, is the second largest religious group, and is growing rapidly. The leadership of both churches has veered to the right in recent years. Both, for example, opposed President Obama’s 2009 health care reform on the basis that it might lead to the state paying for abortions.

Church leaders are saying that women are not welcome to participate at all levels in their churches, or that women must be subservient to their husbands. That sends a strong signal to all of society’s institutions, from home to school, to boardroom and legislature. The message that women must be subservient and cannot lead is potentially of enormous consequence in the secular world. It is there, Carter said, that progress is being made and he fears that gains could be reversed. “It is ironic,” he added, “that women are now welcomed into all major professions and other positions of authority, but are branded as inferior and deprived of the equal right to serve God in positions of religious leadership.”
In fact, Carter fears that religious discrimination against women helps to create a general environment “in which violations against women are justified.”

These violations include widespread physical assault and the sexual abuse of women and girls; the use of rape by soldiers as a tactic of warfare; the recruitment of an estimated four million women and girls each year into the sex trade; restriction (mainly in Muslim countries) placed on the movement, education and social interaction of girls and women. We are mistaken if we believe that violations exist in faraway countries but not in our own. Carter could have said that 520 Aboriginal women have been murdered or gone missing in Canada, half of them since the year 2000, or that men with guns murder about 30 women each year in our country.

So the Elders have spoken. Carter, Mandela, Tutu, Robinson and the others present a formidable counterweight to blind tradition. They are immensely respected for their achievements and their integrity. They say that they are fully committed to the realization of equality and empowerment for all women and girls. They call upon all leaders, religious and secular, to promote and protect those inalienable rights. Theirs is a powerful message.

By Dennis Gruending

I have been posting to my Pulpit and Politics for just over two years now and it has been a rewarding project. Not long ago the trusty software that counts visits to my blog clocked 50,000 – not exactly a blockbuster but nonetheless significant. I am also pleased that in the Canadian Blog Awards for 2009, Pulpit and Politics placed second in the Religion and Philosophy category. In 2008, it placed first. The awards are based solely upon the number of votes received, so thanks to all of you who cast an online ballot for Pulpit and Politics. The blog is satisfying for a number of reasons. There is an intellectual challenge, which involves a lot of reading, watching and listening. There is the writing, which I love to do. Also, I enjoy the thoughtful responses that I receive from many of you. Often those remarks are posted to the Comments section on my blog, but even more often they take the form of personal email messages from those of you who do not want to have your comments or names posted for all to see. Each of your responses is welcome – including those that are critical of what I have written.

God is Back

I said that I enjoy the reading. Other than my occasional forays into the suspense novels of John Le Carre, Ian Rankin, or various Canadian writers, I like to organize my reading around social and political themes. My stated ambition in creating Pulpit and Politics was to explore the connection between religious faith and public life. This is a broad theme and there is much good writing to support its investigation. In one of my first blog posts, in November 2007, I reported on a special 18-page section in The Economist magazine called In God’s Name: A special report on religion and public life. Editor John Micklethwait said then, “In the 20th century people, particularly among the elites, tended to think that religion was disappearing. That obviously hasn’t happened.” With the exception of Western Europe, he said, “religion has forced itself dramatically into the public square.”

This year Micklethwait and a fellow writer Adrian Wooldrigde delivered a book called God is Back, which extends The Economist’s earlier investigation. The book opens by describing a meeting of Chinese Christians in a house church in Shanghai, attended by a group of young professionals with Blackberrys on their belts and their BMWs parked on the street outside. They believe, among other things, that religion and personal prosperity go hand in hand, because of the disciplined lives that Christians are called to live, and because co-religionists create communities in which people are prepared to support and help each other. There is some truth to that, I suppose, although I much prefer religious faith with a broader perspective. |God is Back then looks into the social and political effects of religious faith in Europe (where it is declining), in America (where it is reviving), and in the Muslim world (where it is thriving but uncertain how to deal with modernity). The authors are quite sanguine about the prospect of greater Christian involvement in the public sphere but they appear more concerned about Islam.

Black Mass

Another writer who I encountered (again) this year is British political philosopher John Gray. He is much more pessimistic in his critique. In his book Black Mass, Gray insists that totalitarian movements, including communism and fascism, were based upon utopian visions that have their roots in religion. “The very idea of revolution as a transforming event in history is owed to religion,” he writes. “Modern revolutionary movements are a continuation of religion by other means . . .With the death of Utopia, apocalyptic religion has re-emerged, naked and unadorned as a force in world politics.”

American Fascists

Another book that is dark in its reportage and analysis is American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America by Chris Hedges. He believes that the Christian right in the U.S. wants to turn the country into a theocracy governed by Biblical principles as they interpret them. The movement calls for Christian “dominion” over the nation and eventually over the earth itself. “Under Christian dominion,” Hedges writes, “America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, and the media and the government proclaim the good news to one and all. Labour unions, civil rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship.” Hedges believes that this movement in stronger than most of us think, and that it has fascist tendencies. Reviews of Hedges’ book in the New York Times and in the publication Foreign Affairs charge him with over-reaching in his analysis.

Gray makes the point that various religious utopian movements are relatively harmless to society when they consist of small and marginal groups, but become menacing when they achieve power and influence. Obviously, Hedges believes that with Dominionism that movement has arrived in the U.S. There are Dominionist groups in Canada as well although they remain marginal to public discourse. The youth group that organizes events called the Cry each year in Canadian cities is one example, as is a group called the Watchmen.

Feminist Theology

I used the In God’s Name article from The Economist in preparing a 12-week course that I gave at the Ottawa School of Theology and Spirituality early in 2009. (The school is offering winter courses again this year beginning on Monday, January 11 for the information of those of you who live in the Ottawa area). My courses in 2009 allowed me to pull together the disparate threads of much that I had read in the previous year or two and place it into the lecture and discussion sessions that we held. It became clear in my research that men dominate writing and scholarship about religion and public life in Canada. I began to look for a good resource that was written by women, and I found one in a book called Feminist Theology with a Canadian Accent. It’s a collection by a number of Canadian women writers, and one man.

I found the chapters on ecology written by Heather Eaton and Jessica Fraser to be excellent. Fraser, for example, talks about the importance of ecological literacy, arguing that each of us must learn more about the ecological context in the communities in which we live, whether it’s learning more about geology or biology, or measuring our ecological footprint — how much gas we use in our cars, how much we fly, how we heat and insulate our homes. These writers say that we must take heed of the ecological crisis and somehow make that central to our lifestyle, our activism and our theology. I believe that we have done a poor job of this in our churches and our society in general.

Now or Never

An Australian scientist named Tim Flannery, who appeared at the Ottawa International Writers Festival in October, buttressed that point for me.  Flannery has written a book about climate change called, Now or Never: Why We Need to Act Now to Achieve a Sustainable Future. Flannery writes, “With global food security at an all-time low, and greenhouse gases so chocking our atmosphere as to threaten a global climatic catastrophe, the signs of what may come are all around us.” Flannery did not once mention God in his appearance, but upon purchasing and reading his book I was surprised by how clear he is that our scientific crises are at base deeply moral crises. But what, exactly, do we do?  Flannery deals with practical topics such as the practicality of electric cars; whether or not people should stop eating beef; about how we can bring back tropical rain forests; and upon whether the Canadian government’s focus on carbon sequestration rather than upon reducing our carbon emissions is responsible public policy.

I ended the piece on Flannery’s book by writing that “no church that I have attended has placed an emphasis upon the urgent need for environmental stewardship.” A number of you either left comments on my blog or sent me email messages to say that your parish or congregation is, indeed, making environmental sustainability a priority.  Someone even sent me a list of web addresses for faith groups and organizations working on environmental issues. Thanks for that. I hope that we will continue our conversations in the months to come. Happy New Year.