The Secular Initiative
The women’s liberation movement—or second-wave feminism, as it came to be called—began about the same time that Liberation Theology did. At first glance their emergence in the early Sixties on separate continents appears to be no more than historical coincidence. For one thing, religion is barely mentioned in the women’s movement’s founding document, The Feminine Mystique. Author Betty Friedan was a secular Jew, as was the movement’s later and most visible leader, Gloria Steinem. Neither, in my occasional conversations with them, betrayed a knowledge of or interest in religious questions. Like a great many feminist leaders, the movement was their religion.
For another, the women’s movement was not, at least at its inception, concerned much with the poor. The women Friedan wrote about were upper-middle-class, well-educated housewives like herself. Their “problem that has no name,” as she called it, was the psychosocial malaise that came as a consequence of their thralldom to the “feminine mystique”—the confinement of women’s roles to marriage and motherhood in “the comfortable concentration camp” of suburban life. Her one mention of religion was to criticize Judaism and Christianity for sanctifying these confining roles.
When I first read The Feminine Mystique, it struck me as yet another journalistic polemic against the flaccid Fifties and the putative emptiness of suburban life. Friedan, who soon divorced and moved back to the city, seemed to know nothing of the corresponding male mystique by which a “working wife” implied a husband who could not live up to a man’s duty to be the sole support of his family. Her haughty dismissal of “housewives” as vapid consumerists overlooked the division of labor in which wives managed the household spending from the husband’s paycheck. I was certain she had never met the factory worker who turned over his wages at week’s end to his wife, and then was handed his allowance for a Friday night at the bar with his buddies from the day shift. Who, in short, was the empowered marriage partner—the one who made the money or the one who controlled how most of it was spent?
But of course I was reading Friedan’s book from a man’s perspective.
The Feminine Mystique became a feminist classic mainly because so many highly educated, well-provided-for wives read their stories into its pages—much like religious folks read their stories into the Bible. Friedan’s timing was perfect: the postwar boom in higher education was producing an educated elite of women with few career options outside of nursing and teaching. Friedan’s vision imagined a society of equals, not only in the home but also in law offices, architectural firms, and hospital operating rooms—Smith and Vassar graduates alongside men from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. It was difficult to justify the higher education of women—and this was Friedan’s most salient argument—if most of them ended up trapped like Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
As it progressed, the women’s liberation movement developed a set of practices much like those I’d seen in Latin American Liberation Theology. Consciousness-raising was the most obvious. Gathered together in homes or other feminist base communities, often around texts like Friedan’s, women shared their personal stories and became programmatically aware of the larger, male-dominated structures that oppressed them. Feminists also formed alliances, not only among themselves, like the National Organization for Women (NOW), but also with the Democratic Party, which, especially after Roe v. Wade, became the movement’s political party of choice. As in Liberation Theology, gaining political power was central to the feminist cause.
The initial goals of the women’s liberation movement were modest and practical: equal opportunity in education and the workplace. These were goals that even women who did not identify with feminist ideology could share. But once doors were opened to them in corporations and the professions, women did not change Wall Street, or law or medicine, much less make them more humane, as some feminists had prophesied. Rather, the discipline of the marketplace and the demands of competition changed them, as social historian Christopher Lasch predicted.1 This would not be the case when religious feminists took on male privilege in the church.
The first hint I got that there was something called feminist theology in the making occurred in November 1971—which may have been the first time Harvard theologian Harvey Cox ran into it as well. Cox had a number of women in his popular class “Eschatology and Politics” at the divinity school. During one class session the female students hooted on party-favor kazoos every time Cox or any of the male students used he in reference to God or mankind to mean the human race. Cox was usually well ahead of the curve in sniffing out the next trend in theology, but he apparently didn’t realize it was happening on his own turf. It wasn’t merely “pronoun envy” (as some Harvard anthropology professors slyly suggested) that roused his female students’ ire. As one of those students put it in an interview with me, “The education here is geared for males, with a view toward their working in a male-oriented church with a male-dominated theology, male symbols, and a male God.”
Sex and Religious Symbolism
This much Cox’s students got right: whatever else they may be or do, religions are powerful symbol systems that shape the consciousness of those who live in their embrace. In the myths and stories, images, and rituals of these systems, the polarity of male and female sexuality is deeply inscribed and variously expressed. What Cox’s students had yet to understand is that religious symbol systems are not simply mirrors reflecting social norms and structures. Religious symbols can subvert as well as reinforce social hierarchies, which often happens in populist and apocalyptic religious movements. Nor does the worship of female deities make for more egalitarian societies. Athena was the (bisexual) goddess of both militaristic Sparta and democratic Athens, where only men could vote. In Hinduism we find males worshipping female deities and female devotees of male deities with no difference in social norms. As historian Caroline Walker Bynum and other scholars have pointed out, even in male monotheisms, men and women can and do invest the same religious symbols with different meanings.2 In short, where “God is male,” it doesn’t always follow that “males are gods,” as Mary Daly, an early and hugely influential feminist theologian, insisted.
In the Catholic symbol system, the one that I know best, God is always masculine—“Father”—but the body of believers (men as well as women) is always feminine: “Holy Mother the Church.” While Catholicism’s most consequential theologian, Thomas Aquinas, was rigorously adversarial (masculine) in writing his Summa Theologica, Catholicism’s most popular saint, Francis of Assisi, was frankly feminine in submitting himself to God through devotion to “Lady Poverty.” In traditionally Catholic cultures, devotion to the Virgin Mary is more pronounced among men than women. There is much sociological truth in the old line about Italian atheists: they will insist there is no God, but will swear that Mary is His mother. Mom rules.
The relationship between gender and leadership is also complex. Men have always exercised institutional authority in the Christian church. In this respect, emergent Christianity echoed the gender norms of the wider society, initially Jewish, then Greco-Roman: there were few Cleopatras in the ancient world in which Christianity spread. On the other hand, Christian marriage accorded women greater dignity than they had in Roman society and protected convert wives from abuse, especially forced abortions and infanticide by the all-powerful and child-averse Roman paterfamilias.3 With the rise of monasticism, women found in religious orders the space to develop their own forms of power as well as specifically female forms of spirituality. Thus, speaking safely from within her own sphere of influence, a Catherine of Siena could freely criticize a sitting pope—something precious few bishops, even now, would dare to do. And in the nineteenth century a teenage nun behind cloistered walls, Theresa of Lisieux, could compose a spiritual autobiography that would move another pope to declare her a Doctor [sic] of the Church. In the pyramidal structure of the Catholic Church, only males can be popes. But in the culture of Catholicism, saints vastly outweigh popes in symbolic power and influence. Over the last nine centuries only five popes have been canonized saints (the last two in 2014)—fewer than the number of women (mostly nuns) canonized annually in recent years. None of this should be surprising in light of the inversion of status that runs through the Gospels: “The last shall be first, the first last.”
The Protestant Domestication of Religion
As we saw in Latin America, revolutions in religious structures entail revolutions in religious symbolism as well. In the parts of Europe where the Protestant Reformation took hold, the reformers rejected more than just the authority of the pope and the pyramidal structure of the Catholic Church. They also emptied the monasteries and convents, where specifically male and female forms of spirituality were nourished, and they destroyed the richly symbolic statues and stained-glass windows through which the illiterate faithful were catechized in the stories of Mary and the saints. Martin Luther’s marriage to a former nun symbolized the eventual emergence of godly homes—mother-centered households that fathers tutelarily ruled—as a new center of Christian formation alongside the local congregation. This was the domesticated Christianity that crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims. Once the Puritan yoke of minister and magistrate collapsed and church and state were separated, competing Protestant denominations emerged as diverse families of faith and the voluntary Protestant congregation became, in effect, an extension of the home.
Thanks in part to feminist historians like Ann Braude, we now know that from the colonial period forward, women have constituted the majority of religious participants in the United States. Already in the seventeenth century, the great Puritan divine Cotton Mather could complain that “there are more godly women in the world than godly men.”4 In the eighteenth century, the experience of personal conversion promoted during the Second Great Awakening entailed an emotional surrender to Christ that was more attuned to female than to male piety. In the middle of the nineteenth century, liberal Protestant clergy, in league with the female majority in their congregations, elevated women as the exemplars of Christian virtue. But there was little that was virile in the virtues upheld. In reaction to this feminization of the churches, thousands of white males retreated to the masculine fellowship and quasi-religious rituals of the Freemasons, the Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, and other fraternal orders. By 1900, notes historian David G. Hackett, there were more fraternal lodges in Boston and other American cities than there were churches.5
With the Protestant churches as their base, women formed their own seminaries for training nonordained church workers, their own foreign missionary societies, and interdenominational domestic movements, such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, that aimed to reform and purify the nation’s unruly, male-dominated public life. Inevitably, the question arose: since women were evangelizing society in all these ways, why shouldn’t they do so from the pulpit?
Bodies in Christ
As recently as 1965, it was as rare to see a woman in the pulpit as it was to see one on the train during my morning commute. The American Association of Women Ministers had but four hundred members and the number of fully ordained women graduates of accredited seminaries, most of them Methodist, Presbyterian, or United Church of Christ, was fewer than one thousand—less than one percent of the mainline Protestant clergy. Denominational seminaries were good places for devout Protestant women to meet God-fearing men: as a result, more female seminary students married male classmates than graduated with degrees of their own. And afterward, these wives found that they had effectively married their husband’s congregation as well.
Although the Reformation had proclaimed the priesthood of all believers, most Protestants took the Pauline prohibition of women preaching in church to also mean that women were not meant to be leaders of a congregation. Women with seminary degrees tended to go into religious education or music ministries or followed their husbands into foreign missions. Those who did get a call to the pulpit faced wives as well as husbands who preferred as pastor a model married man with model children and a model wife to match. Though the rule is unwritten, marriage has always been nearly as necessary for ordained Protestants as celibacy is for Catholic priests. Even now, an attractive young bachelor—never mind an attractive young single woman—is apt to be regarded as an unwanted congregational distraction. In Jewish congregations, the preference for married rabbis was historically even more pronounced because celibacy has no place in Judaism.
But out in rural and other less regimented regions of religious America, there were in the early Sixties another three thousand or so women preachers. Most of them were self-anointed evangelists of a Pentecostal, independent Baptist, or nondenominational bent—women who simply heard a call or found that the Holy Spirit had endowed them with the gift to heal. Like their male counterparts, they created their own constituencies through their personal charisma in the pulpit. Dramatic rather than demure, they embodied the kind of divine power that they offered to those who listened to them.
As it happened, my first encounter with a woman preacher was with one of these. The experience brought immediately to mind what Samuel Johnson had famously (and rudely) said of women preachers, “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” But then the dyspeptic Dr. Johnson had never met a woman preacher like Kathryn Kuhlman.
The famously flamboyant Kuhlman was well into her sixties when she swept into my office in 1974 to promote her upcoming healing service in Los Angeles. She was slim and enduringly sexy with a flashing smile and radiant red hair set off by a bright blue outfit that shouted Rodeo Drive. Kuhlman was escorted by her musical accompanist, Dino, a handsome Italian stud half her age. The way they giggled and played off each other made me think they might be lovers, too. Kuhlman wanted me to know that she was an evangelist just like Billy Graham, and indeed in her prime she had drawn crowds the match of his. Both were stand-up solo performance artists who augmented their preaching with the language of the body. But whereas the Hollywood-handsome Graham deliberately tried to suppress his manifest sex appeal, Kuhlman acknowledged hers in wispy floor-length gowns that clung just enough to shadow forth a body any model would envy. She healed by touch. Kuhlman knew where her pulpit power lay, and it wasn’t just with the Holy Spirit.
Like her equally famous precursor, Aimee Semple McPherson, Kathryn Kuhlman was an outlier among women in the pulpit, able to be both spiritual and alluring in ways that other female pastors could not. Most of the congregations that accepted women as pastors were small—typically fewer than two hundred members—and as emotionally volatile as an intimate extended family. There were boundaries to be maintained, taboos to observe. In an article for Newsweek, women pastors told me how they had to watch the language spoken by their clothes. They didn’t want to call attention to their bodies, but neither did they want to appear altogether sexless. The challenge was to choose their wardrobe, accessories, and the like (should the pastor wear perfume?) so that they were neither more fashionable than the women in the congregation, nor too plain for their husbands. Above all, they did not want to appear seductive, even on social occasions. “Matronly” with a string of pearls was the safest look. And so, when I began to read achingly tendentious books on “the theology of the body” by feminist theologians who seemed to be just discovering theirs, the one dimension missing from their discourse on the meaning of the female body was the erotic.
In sum, there were a number of reasons why large numbers of women, especially those of an independent feminist bent, did not seek ordination to the Protestant ministry, even after most mainline denominations decided to accept them. The pay was low, the welcome uncertain, the prospects of ecclesial advancement dim. Eventually, some of these disincentives would fade, but not before another, highly symbolic barrier was breached.
Women as Priests
As late as 1970, the one mainline Protestant denomination that still refused to ordain women was the Episcopal Church. It was also the one Protestant church that retained the pre-Reformation concept of the priesthood and the sacramental and ceremonial functions that go with it. On this view, the priest is not just a minister licensed to preach and pastor, but a “second Christ” empowered by holy orders to preside over the Eucharist as Jesus did. Similarly, an Episcopal bishop is not just an administrator but a successor to the Twelve Apostles. Although Episcopal priests usually married, unless they were gay (as, it turned out, a great many were), as celebrants of the liturgy and conferrers of sacraments they were set apart from the laity in the same way as priests in the Catholic and Orthodox churches.
But unlike the Church of Rome, the Episcopal Church is governed by a two-tiered legislature—a House of Bishops and a House of Deputies (clergy and lay representatives)—with the power to alter canon law. To change the canons prescribing males-only clergy, however, would not only risk estrangement from the wider Anglican communion, but also rupture ecumenical relations with the oldest and largest Christian bodies in the world. Indeed, it was precisely its claim to continuity with the “fathers” of the early church that gave Anglicans everywhere their distinctive identity as a bridge between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions.
To the Episcopal women who wanted to be priests, the argument from tradition only proved that the tradition was inherently sexist, a sin that by the Seventies ranked right up there with racism as a form of discrimination. To them, and to those bishops sympathetic to their cause, the only tradition that mattered was the prophetic, exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr. The barrier they hoped to breach was more than merely canonical: it was the symbolism embedded in the church’s sacramental system. To see a woman stand at altars where only men had stood, robed in vestments that only men had worn—in short, to see a female take the place of Jesus at the Last Supper—was to destroy the symbiotic connection between Jesus and gender that privileged males over females in the church. This was something that the ordination of women in the less liturgical Protestant churches could not do, and success would enhance the validation of women clergy everywhere. For all these reasons, therefore, the struggle over women’s ordination in the Episcopal Church acquired importance for constituencies far beyond the relatively small (2.9 million at the time) membership of a single denomination.
Adapting tactics from the women’s movement, female deacons and other women in the church formed committees and caucuses like Women’s Ordination Now (WON, a reversal of NOW) and lobbied progressive bishops who had embraced the prophetic position on civil rights. One of these was Paul Moore, bishop of New York, who personally favored women’s ordination. But in 1973, when five women presented themselves to Moore at an ordination ceremony for five men, Moore passed them by. Moore was also a Marine veteran of World War II and to violate laws he was pledged to uphold was something he was reluctant to do. A year later in Philadelphia, however, three retired bishops stepped forward and ordained eleven female deacons to the priesthood. Not surprisingly, the bishops defended their “irregular” ordination ceremony as a prophetic act: “It is our obedience to the Lordship of Christ, our response to the sovereignty of His Spirit for the Church,” they said.6 What they didn’t say is that as retirees they faced no canonical sanctions.
The purpose of ordaining “the Philadelphia Eleven,” as they inevitably called themselves, was to present the reluctant laity with a fait accompli. As the Bishop Pike affair demonstrated, Episcopalians were deeply averse to public scandals, and the women’s ordinations, valid though illicit, threatened schism in the church. To emphasize this possibility, the newly ordained women immediately embarked on a liturgical tour, celebrating Holy Communion in several cities. Against those who found women at the altar symbolically inappropriate, one of the women insisted that it was men who were miscast at the altar. “What the priest does,” said Suzanne Hiatt in a press interview, “is first of all he dresses up in a long dress and then, in giving communion, he prepares a meal and then he does the dishes.”7 In other words, the Eucharist is just another church supper.
The strategy behind the illicit ordinations was to pressure undecided delegates to the church’s 1976 General Convention to change canon law. And that, after much public acrimony on both sides, is what the ordinations accomplished. The next push of the envelope came a year later when Bishop Moore re-won his liberal stripes by ordaining Ellen Barrett, the church’s first openly lesbian or gay priest. The consecration of women as bishops followed soon enough and in 2006 one of them was elected presiding bishop of the church.
The ordination of women as Episcopal priests produced powerful reactions outside the United States. After sixteen years of public debate and acrimony the General Synod of the Church of England agreed, by a margin of only two votes, to follow suit. This caught the Vatican’s attention: in 1994, Pope John Paul II, responding to the Anglicans’ action and to similar demands from within his own church, declared that “the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.”8 His reasons, based mainly on the maleness of Jesus and of Jesus’ chosen inner circle of the Twelve Apostles and the constant tradition of the church, did not convince those scholars who think the gender of Jesus irrelevant or that the early church fathers had suppressed a tradition of female leadership in the early church. As for feminist Catholics, John Paul’s effort to settle the issue by papal fiat was taken as yet another example of the male authoritarianism that they considered a consequence of sexism in the church.
My own reaction was that the pope had done the right thing for the wrong reasons, and in the wrong way. The ordination of women would have produced organizational chaos in a church that had yet to absorb all the reforms of Vatican Council II. There is, after all, no precedent for a Christian priesthood composed of celibate males and females, much less for his-and-her rectories. Would women’s ordination, then, require a married priesthood as well? That change alone would entail a century of paralyzing retooling and reshaping of an international organization that has long depended on the energy, labor, and evangelical commitment of celibate nuns and priests. These were the sorts of practical issues that proponents of women’s ordination refused to address. On the other hand, by refusing any sort of patient research and reasoned discussion of such issues, the pope did the church no long-term favor. Given the continuing crisis in priestly vocations, the time approaches when the survival of the priesthood itself may depend on widening the circle of acceptable applicants.
The battle for women’s ordination belongs to the early phase of the women’s liberation movement, with its emphasis on equal rights and opportunities. The result was hailed as a victory for “inclusivism.” But one had to look inside the nation’s seminaries to understand what the ensuing feminization of the clergy meant.
The Minister as Mom
As I noted in Chapter 4, the mainline Protestant ministry once rivaled law, medicine, and business as an attractive option for young college graduates. Students entered prestige divinity schools like Harvard, Yale, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt, and Union Theological Seminary to become either clergymen or scholars of religion. But every year these elite schools also attracted a cohort of men just back from fighting wars, or hoping to avoid having to, who wanted to spend a year or two deciding what to do with the rest of their lives. Vice President Al Gore was one, and so was another Democratic presidential hopeful, Gary Hart.
Over the next two decades, however, the student bodies at these institutions underwent dramatic change. Gradually, women students outnumbered men at nearly all of them. Women achieved pluralities at many denominational seminaries as well. This trend was in part a strategy for institutional survival. “If we had to depend on the number of men coming to seminary,” acknowledged David Ramage, president of McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, “we’d be in a bad way.” (Even the leading Catholic schools of theology, once males-only enclaves, accepted female theology students and faculty to offset the steep decline in candidates for the priesthood—and to give the seminarians the experience of women as colleagues and teachers.)
The quality of the student body changed as well.9 Like the men before them, the brightest and most ambitious women went right from college into graduate studies in law, finance, and other high-paying, high-status professions. Of course, some of these gifted female students did opt for a divinity degree instead. But on average, most divinity students were a decade older. That did not mean they were necessarily more mature. Many were seeking second careers, often after having failed to find success or fulfillment in the first. Many of the women, in particular, were divorced. Often they were single moms as well and quite a few were middle-aged. In the Seventies and Eighties, I was occasionally invited to lecture seminary students, and I was struck not only by the number of women in the audience but also by how many seemed to be on a spiritual search. My impressions were confirmed by a number of people who work with seminarians.
From his twenty years of counseling ministerial candidates, psychologist L. Guy Mehl, who was also a Lutheran minister, found that many of the women he saw “had been sexually abused, many had been addicted or come from families in which addiction was present.” Even among the healthy-minded women students, Rebecca Chopp, the dean of faculty at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, noted a difference between male and female students. The latter, she wrote in Saving Work: Feminist Practices of Theological Education, “come to theological education out of deep changes in their lives and culture.” More specifically, they “come for the space and time it gives them and to gain valuable resources for living their lives.”10
Accordingly, seminaries had changed to accommodate this therapeutic demand. By 1994, psychologist Joseph P. O’Neill, a principal research scientist at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, found that “most theological schools are ‘open admission’ institutions that rarely reject anyone who is of sound mind and with a bachelor’s degree.” Indeed, in a survey of ordination practices in the United Methodist Church, by far the largest mainline denomination, O’Neill found that the church ordained 71 percent of those candidates for whom psychologists had recommended that ordination be deferred, and a third of those whom they had recommended be rejected without reconsideration.
The effect of such practices, according to O’Neill, was what he called “the de-professionalization” of the clergy. He cited one study that compared students at a Protestant seminary in Chicago with students preparing for careers as doctors and nurses. That study found that early on the students in medicine adopted “a cloak of professionalism” while the seminarians did not. Seminarians were less interested in displaying the knowledge and skills of their own profession than in being “the right kind of person.” In short, the ministry was becoming “a profession without authority” where the pastor as buddy, the minister as mom, were the preferred models. O’Neill attributed this transformation to the “effect of the huge increase of female candidates on the culture of Protestant seminaries.” Women, he argued, are much more likely than men to create community by sharing personal information about themselves. And by the sheer weight of numbers, he added, women “are socializing the male seminarians to do the same.”11
A great deal of what got shared was feminist resentment of religion’s oppression of women. That much was clear from reading divinity school bulletin boards, where the student body’s informal curricula are always on display. There I would see notices for meetings of the pro-Bible feminists, the anti-Bible feminists, the Third World and womanist groups, and lesbian caucuses. As the co-director of the Center for Religion and Women at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley put it: “You either come here because you are a feminist or you leave as one. You can’t escape it.”
In short, the formation that took place in seminaries became both highly therapeutic and relentlessly anti-authoritarian. What mattered were relationships and the authenticity of personal experience. It was in this academic environment that feminist Liberation Theology was born.
The Bible as Androcentric Text
In the form in which it first emerged, feminist theology was Liberation Theology by and for women. (Given time, it would liberate men as well.) And as in other social movements, the first voices were the most radical. If in 1963 Betty Friedan wrestled with “the problem that has no name,” by the Seventies the first generation of feminist theologians—principally Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, all of them much-aggrieved Catholics—knew what the problem was and named it “patriarchy.” As they defined it, patriarchy was the original sin of the Judeo-Christian tradition, one that begat all sorts of other evils: sexism, authoritarianism, a preference for hierarchy over egalitarianism, rape of the earth as well as of women, alienation in various forms, hyperrationalism, androcentrism, phallocentrism, heterosexism, mind-body dualism, idolatry, militarism, classism, etc. This litany of accusation was no different from those heard in women’s studies courses, except in one respect. In feminist Liberation Theology, all of these evil isms were sanctioned by a single sacred source: the Bible.
Written, edited, and translated solely by men, the Bible could be read—and dismissed—as the religious projection of patriarchy. Indeed, by the early Eighties, Mary Daly had concluded that the Bible was beyond feminist redemption and proclaimed herself a post-Christian feminist lesbian—much to the discomfort of the Jesuit administrators at Boston College, where she was a tenured professor. Other religious feminists decamped to countercultural goddess-worship and Wicca covens in an effort to create women-centered religions. The most influential feminist scholars, however, were determined to reclaim the Bible as a user-friendly text for women’s liberation.
In 1983, Ruether published Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology and Schüssler Fiorenza published In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. Between them, they laid out an agenda for radical reinterpretations of the Bible aimed at both validating women’s religious experience and rescuing the Bible from its patriarchal bias. Theirs would not be the disinterested scholarship favored by males in the academic guild—a false neutrality, in their view, that masked patriarchal assumptions. Instead they called for an engaged scholarship of liberation for the benefit of what Schüssler Fiorenza described as “an ekklesia of women who, in the angry power of the Spirit, are sent forth to feed, heal and liberate our own people who are women.”12
The basic feminist liberation approach to the Bible involved variations on a four-step praxis of interpretation: begin with women’s long experience as “the oppressed of the oppressed”; submit biblical texts to a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (systematically question and subvert the Bible’s patriarchal bias); employ a “hermeneutics of retrieval” (recover the suppressed history of women in the Bible as well as the Bible’s repressed feminine images of God); and deploy the results toward the liberation of women’s experience of religion. Obviously, this approach inscribed a closed hermeneutical circle that in principle brackets male experience—which may be why the men who edited the major theological journals tended to invite only women to review books on feminist Liberation Theology.
Recovering the suppressed history of women in the Bible, especially those of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), is a daunting challenge. Of the 1,500 or so characters named in its pages (the number varies depending on which set of canonical texts are used), only about 10 percent are women.13 A few, like Deborah, Esther, Judith, Ruth, and Susanna—the latter four the only women with a biblical book of their own—immediately stand out as examples of courageous leadership when compared to the faith of weak and vacillating men. Even male readers can admire them. But because they were recognized by the male compilers of the Bible, these women did not yield the history of male suppression that feminist Scripture scholars wanted to uncover.
Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron, provides a more promising case of patriarchal suppression. In the book of Exodus she is called a prophet (as are a few other Old Testament women), which feminist exegetes took to mean that she was a serious rival to her brothers and an early example of a powerful woman leader. In Numbers, Miriam reappears in a scene where she and Aaron question Moses’ authority. That God steps in and punishes her, but not Aaron, was a sign to feminist interpreters that a pro-Moses party among the Hebrew Bible’s male editors deliberately excised an earlier and more positive memory of Miriam among the ancient Israelites. Thus, if feminist interpreters could prove that women as well as men once were prophets, so the argument ran, the Bible could be rescued for use by women and the conspiracy of its male editors exposed. But given that the Bible represents the only memory we possess, even the existence of Miriam—not to mention other characters in these stories—lacks corroborating evidence. Under these circumstances, the temptation to imagine what might have been remains a serious occupational hazard—one that Harvard’s James L. Kugel, a renowned historian of biblical interpretation, acknowledges “has a very distinguished history going all the way back to the third or fourth century BCE.”
Since much more is known about society in first-century Israel, the New Testament is less intractable for those who want to recover the roles women played in the Jesus movement. The Jesus of the Gospels is remarkably open and at ease with women. Indeed, although he chose only men for his inner circle of “the Twelve,” the women in his outer circle of disciples are more steadfast. So much for titles.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza knows this material well. She was trained in Germany in the 1950s, a time when universities there were still mandarin male enclaves where women were rarely seen, much less listened to. That may partially explain why her books display so much intellectual hauteur, and also why she considers herself a “resident alien” in the guild of Scripture scholars. In Memory of Her was the opening salvo in a sustained effort to prove that the earliest Christians practiced a “discipleship of equals” that included women as missionaries, preachers, and leaders of house churches—in a word, that they, too, were apostles just like the men, and deserving of the same august respect.
Of these women, feminist pride of place belongs to Mary of Magdala: after Mary the mother of Jesus, she is the woman most often mentioned in the New Testament. In the Gospel According to John she is the first of Jesus’ followers to experience the risen Christ and the one who informs Peter and the other male apostles of the Resurrection. For this reason, even the androcentric Christian tradition cherishes Mary of Magdala as “the apostle to the apostles.”
But in feminist liberationist construction, Mary of Magdala emerges as a rival to Peter in a male-female struggle for leadership of the post-Resurrection church. Much of the evidence supporting this view comes from the “Gospel of Mary,” one of several Gnostic texts that were not included in the biblical canon. Feminist scholars regard this exclusion, plus the fact that the party of Peter actually won out, as evidence that hierarchy itself is a male malformation imposed on the more egalitarian and gender-inclusive community intended by Jesus himself.
God/She
The other major quest of feminist biblical criticism has been to mine the text for feminine language and images of God. Since the ancient Israelites were alone among Near Eastern peoples in rejecting worship of female deities, the Hebrew Bible offers few examples for feminists to build on. Most are similes that analogize some aspect of God or His activity to women’s experiences. But nowhere in the Bible is God referred to as “She,” much less called “Mother.”
There was a reason for this male monotheism, and it wasn’t just a male effort to project onto God the patriarchal structure of Israelite society, as feminist theology tends to argue. The God who emerges in the Old Testament creates by verbal fiat; unlike nearly all the gods of the ancient Near East, “He” needs no female consort. This God is altogether separate from “His” creation in a way that a mother cannot be separated from the children she brings forth from her womb. He is “holy” (at root, holy means “separate”) and he is “one”—the “Holy One” who is personal yet totally other, beyond male/female contrarieties, beyond nature—beyond, in fact, human naming. To call this God “She”—the only other pronominal option—is to evoke a range of ideas that were foreign to the Hebrew understanding of what God is and is not. These, then, are some of the reasons why Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are, even now, the only major religious traditions that do not use feminine words and images for God.
For their part, Christian feminists had to contend with the symbolism of a triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Some early feminist exegetes claimed that within the Trinity the Holy Spirit functions as a nurturer and thus represents the feminine principle or aspect of God. But what to do with Jesus, who was indisputably male? Sandra Schneiders, a Catholic nun and seminary professor, argued that by taking flesh as a man rather than a woman, Jesus assumed the burden of “belonging to the oppressor class,” which he then subverted by behaving in a nonpatriarchal way—“nonaggressive, noncompetitive, meek and humble of heart, a nurturer of the weak”—all traits Schneiders took to be feminine.14 This rendering of Jesus as essentially feminine overlooked his aggressive, agonistic, and divisive behavior—all masculine traits. Nor did it answer Rosemary Ruether’s pointed question, “Can a male savior save women?” No, it seems, if he is understood in male-only terms as the Son of the Father.
Here Ruether, Schüssler Fiorenza, and Fordham University’s Sister Elizabeth Johnson proffered a bold feminist alternative. They fastened on the female figure of Sophia, from the Greek word for Lady Wisdom, a female personification found in Proverbs and other canonical and noncanonical Hebrew texts. Sophia creates, redeems, establishes justice, gives life, and protects the world. This, of course, is what God does. Thus, instead of proclaiming Jesus Son of the Father, both patriarchal terms, Christian feminists advanced the option of proclaiming him the incarnation or manifestation of Lady Wisdom. Hence, in the title of one of her books, Schüssler Fiorenza avoids the masculine altogether in naming Jesus “Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet.” Others proffered “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer,” a Trinity of function, or “Mother, Lover, Friend,” a Trinity of bonding.
All of these proposals, it should be said, were advanced through impressive displays of scholarly acumen. On that score alone they commanded—and were accorded—academic attention. As with women’s studies and gender studies, feminist theology became a discipline of its own, complete with specialized curricula, academic journals, and professors occupying endowed chairs.15
But the purpose of feminist theology was not only to make room for the suppressed voices and experiences of women in the past. It also aimed to create a contemporary movement of “self-identified women and women-identified men” transcending denominational boundaries.16 Without independent worshipping communities, there could be no feminist revolution in a church or synagogue no matter how many women were ordained. These communities were christened “women-church.”
“The Hot Blood of Our Wombs”
Rosemary Ruether recognized early on the need for forming “autonomous feminist base communities” where liberation from sexism, racism, militarism, and other isms could be lived out as a model for what the whole church might someday become. A veteran of movement religion, Ruether had been very active in the civil rights cause, in the Catholic resistance to the war in Vietnam—one of her early books was dedicated to Daniel Berrigan—and in liberation movements in Latin America, where I first met her. For women-church she composed a handbook of liturgies that included a “Coming Out Rite for a Lesbian,” a “Rite of Mind-Cleansing from the Pollution of Sexism,” liturgies for celebrating the onset and cessation of menstruation, a “Liturgy of Healing for a Battered Wife,” and similar rites.
Apart from operatives like Ruether, I confess I never met any self-identified women, much less women-identified men, who belonged to women-church communities. But then neither my wife nor I was an ideal recruit. The movement seemed to thrive on the margins, the last dogged expressions of the Sixties commune culture. The likeliest recruits were liberal Catholic nuns embittered by their church’s denial of ordination to women and by their own inability to attract like-minded younger novices. So were members of peace and justice groups (again, mostly Catholics) for whom the oppression of women had become the social justice issue. Certainly, women who studied under professors like Ruether and Schüssler Fiorenza were encouraged to build their own women-church communities. By 1993, there was a women-church network large enough to attract 2,500 representatives to a third national conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. According to a report in the New York Times, “quite a few” of the attendees “were nuns, and gray hair predominated.”
The idea of celebrating women-centered religious symbols and rituals found wider support among ecumenical church agencies and many mainline Protestant denominational leaders, both male and female, for whom gender as well as racial inclusiveness had become central to their Christian witness. In 1993, the World Council of Churches sponsored a Re-imaging Conference in Minneapolis, which drew several thousand women from mainline churches. Among the conference icons were reproductions of Christa, a bronze sculpture by artist Edwina Sandys, an American granddaughter of Winston Churchill, which displays a nude woman crucified on a cross. The sculpture, which had already been on exhibit in the sanctuary of St. John the Divine in New York, captured exactly the twin modalities of the feminist theology: woman as victim of male oppression and woman as Our Savior from the sins of patriarchy. In their worship sessions, conference participants pointedly avoided prayers in the name of Jesus, opting instead to address God as Sophia. Rituals included a closing ceremony of milk and honey and evocations of the life-giving powers inherent in “the hot blood of our wombs” and “the nectar between our thighs.” Most of these women, it should be said, were proper middle-aged churchwomen from small mainline Protestant congregations in the middle of America.
Words and Music
Beyond these sometime gatherings, the deepest penetration of feminist theology into American religion was through the inclusive language movement. In the early Eighties, the National Council of Churches published an inclusive language translation of the lectionary, the scriptures used for worship services by member denominations. Masculine pronouns for God were eliminated (although, oddly enough, Satan, who is also without body, remained “he”). References to God the Father included “and Mother” in bracketed italics to retain the sense of parenthood without the patriarchal connotation. Similarly, “Son of God” became “Child of God.” The pre-Resurrection Jesus kept His personal male pronoun but the post-Resurrection Christ did not—the point being that His glorified body was genderless.
To my ear, the new lectionary represented a kind of linguistic “stripping of the altars” that once again minimized the body and its symbolism. But despite considerable grumbling from the pews, most mainline Protestants seemed to tolerate this new way of hearing God’s word. Singing inclusive-language hymns, however, was something else.
Hymns are the soul music of Protestant Christianity; they also constitute a prime unbroken chain of religious witness linking the individual Protestant of today to the gathered saints who preceded them. By the early Nineties, however, most liberal mainline denominations had authorized collective surgery on their hymnals, eliminating some old standards as sexist and rewriting many others to make the raised voices of the faithful conform to liberationist canons.
The New Century Hymnal, published by the determinedly inclusive United Church of Christ, went the furthest to “bring Christian hymnody and worship into the next century”—chiefly by suppressing masculine referents to God. Thus the revised “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” no longer resounded with the familiar “He.” A frankly feminine medieval hymn, “Mothering God, You Gave Me Birth,” replaced the frankly masculine standard, “Praise the Father Giving Life.” In “Silent Night,” “Son of God” was neutered into “Child of God.” “Be Thou My Vision” no longer exclaimed “Thou My great father, I Thy true son / Thou in me dwelling, and I with thee one.” The revised lyrics now read like a Valentine to an androgynous parent: “Mother and Father, you are both to me / now and forever, your child I will be.” And so on. There could be no “Glory to the new-born King” in “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” because kings represent male hierarchy. Indeed, after much internal debate the editors concluded, for the same reason, that no hymn should praise “the Lord”—which, of course, is what Christian hymns are all about.
Obviously, there was more than pronoun envy at work in the revised hymnals. By suppressing some symbols and introducing new ones, the hymn doctors were promoting a new form of Christianity. Or so their critics argued. The most vociferous objectors were African Americans, whose precious store of spirituals and gospel music were promptly put off-limits to ideological redactors. Indeed, the black churches had good reason to resist the whole feminist liberation project in religion.
Matriarchal Muscle
As polls routinely confirm, the most religious group in the United States is African Americans. Apart from black Muslims, nearly all of them are Protestants, and among these the largest single constituency is Baptist. Among all American clergy, black ministers are the most politically involved, a reflection of the historic importance of the church within black communities. Only about 5 percent of black clergy are women, and most of these are Pentecostal. Yet statistics show that at least 70 percent of black church members are women. If the person in the pulpit were the only measure of power in religion, then the black church, with its deep roots in the Old Testament, would be the most patriarchal form of American religion outside Mormon Utah.
But if we look inside black congregations, we can see how much patriarchs must defer to matriarchs. Here is how the late C. Eric Lincoln, one of the great scholars of black religion, distilled for me the dialectic of gender and power in the black church:
The well-managed black church is an organization of subgroups in which women predominate and wield their own power. Women raise the money and, though men dominate the church boards of trustees, it is their wives who effectively determine how it is spent. 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. On Sundays, the Mothers dress distinctively in white and preside from a special section—opposite the “Amen corner” where the male trustees sit. The minister who has the Mothers on his side is virtually unassailable, and woe to the minister who doesn’t.
Black women have sound sociological reasons for preferring men in the pulpit. Given that 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers and that more than half these kids will grow up without a father in the house, black mothers and grandmothers want their children to see in a pastor the disciplined father figure who is missing from their homes. This is of special importance to mothers of boys. In the inner city, where most black churches are, 60 percent of young African American males have no contact with the church—a 20 percent increase since the civil rights era. Indeed, in the black church’s turf war with the black Muslims, the latter’s persistent taunt is that Christianity is a religion for women.
The role of women in black Christianity flows out of a subject people’s historical experience. But how different is it from the roles women play in white churches and synagogues? For that we have to look inside the local congregations.
Half the World
According to a Chinese proverb, women hold up half the world. But in American religion, women also shoulder most of the weight. As any rabbi or Christian pastor can attest, women typically outnumber men two-to-one at worship services. Moreover, since women live longer than men, in aging congregations—about a fourth of those in mainline Protestant denominations—women represent 80 percent of the adults sitting in the pews. And that is just on weekends.
From Monday to Friday, pastors live in a world bleached of men, especially in the suburbs. Even now that most mothers hold jobs outside the home, women still dominate the church committees, the prayer groups, the Sunday schools, the Bible study groups, the office staff. Women maintain the prayer chains for the sick and dying and the day-care centers for children for “working” mothers. Of the thirty thousand Catholic lay ministers created to offset the steep decline in priests, eight out of ten are women. Conversely, the hardest challenge facing most pastors in any church setting is finding ways to draw men into active participation beyond the parish finance committee and the apparently gender-specific brotherhood of church ushers. William Willimon, a longtime Methodist minister and dean of the chapel at Duke University, spoke for legions of clergymen when he said, “No one told me when I left the seminary that most of my time would be spent with women.”
One reason for this is that nurture of the young is a large part of what goes on inside religious congregations. (In liberal Protestant congregations, therapeutic functions in the form of pastoral counseling and twelve-step programs for adults occupy much of the other weeknight activities.) If we ask how children typically “get religion,” the answer is through the aegis of women, not men. Synagogues fairly bustle with mothers preparing the young for their bar or bat mitzvah. The same is true of Catholic parishes where nuns and (more often) laywomen prep children for their First Holy Communion and the sacrament of Confirmation. The pastor or the rabbi is the chief executive in a congregation, but to the young he is like the principal of the school: a more or less remote authority figure, depending on his personality. As with popes and saints, authority and influence are not correlative. In religion, unlike business, those who do the formation are more significant than those who run the show.
Parents, of course, are the prime conduits for passing on religious faith. But within the family, the significance of gender is reversed. Sociologists report that the best predictor of whether a child will remain religious as an adult is the piety not of the mother—for children take that for granted—but of the father, because he is not expected to be religious. That is, if the father demonstrates that religion is important to who he is and how he lives, the child—especially the male child—is much more likely to be religious upon reaching adulthood.
From the perspective of actual congregational life, therefore, the irony of the feminist liberation movement was this: it sought to further feminize territory already dominated by women and domesticated by their interests. By the mid-Nineties, the feminist effort had produced very mixed results. On the one hand, the culture of seminaries, where half the students were women, continued to be far more relational and therapeutic than those of other professional schools. On the other hand, few clergywomen received a call or appointment to serve as chief pastors of large, “tall steeple” congregations. This “glass ceiling” suggested that many people in the pews—men and women alike—sensed that the pulpit and the altar were the last bastions of male presence in the church.
Inevitably, feminist theology went the way of the Latin American variety: it became an academic specialty. The second generation of women scholars tended to focus less on uprooting patriarchy in the Bible and more on providing women’s perspectives on specific biblical texts that traditionally had been interpreted with only male experience in mind. Indeed, some feminist theologians even returned to medieval monastic sources for fresh forms of female spirituality.
For all the heat it caused at denominational conferences and seminary classrooms, the feminist assault on religious patriarchy had a spectacularly short shelf life—especially in comparison to the stunning feminist successes in Democratic Party politics and in the departmental politics of the once-patriarchal academy. Once women were granted ordination in Protestant and Jewish seminaries and moved up the clerical ladder, the only remaining issues were equal opportunity and gender parity at the top. However, the emergence of women as bishops in the Episcopal Church, for example, did not stanch its hemorrhage in membership. If anything, it has enhanced the feminization of institutional religion in this country. The Catholic Church’s rejection of female ordination to the priesthood continues to rankle many Catholic women, and many priests continue to support women’s ordination in the name of social justice. But neither Rome nor the Orthodox churches have witnessed mass defections of women, which some feminist organizations predicted. On the other hand, the abject failure of the leaders of Catholic religious orders to attract women to their ways of life and service has brought most religious communities of women in the United States to the brink of extinction.17
Feminist theology survives as a curricular option in divinity schools and remains a touchstone for various subgroups within academic associations like the American Academy of Religion. But, like gender studies in universities, feminist theology speaks to a dwindling audience among educated women. Preoccupied with texts and dependent on maintaining a steady sense of female oppression, feminist theology was never designed for mass support like other forms of movement religion. Neither could it cross the generational divide. What the baby boomers were looking for from religion had nothing to do with ancient texts, gender wars, or institutions. What they wanted was something personal, immediate, and transformative: the experience of their selves as sacred.