By Kristen Pratt Machado
In March, the St. Timothy’s ECW meeting focused on Chapter 27: Women Who Speak in John from Bible Women. I am grateful to the author, Lindsay Hardin Freeman and National ECW President the Rev. Deacon Nancy R. Crawford for bringing this book to my attention.
Women and their role in the church, the Bible, and in society on a whole remain a source of controversy. While the Episcopal Church has been ordaining women as priests since 1976 and installed its first female bishop in 2006, the Church of England just recently introduced its first female bishop with many male members of the discernment process expressing disdain for the elevation of a woman to this high post.
In truth, Episcopalians and Anglicans remain ahead of the curve. Catholicism still bars women from the priesthood, and one of the fast growing religions, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints prohibits women from leadership, recently electing to excommunicate member Kate Kelly due to her efforts to provide equal opportunities for women within the Mormon church.
Evangelical Christianity has its own relationship with misogyny, with many denominations purporting the idea that women must submit to their husbands in order to lead Christian lives. I had a very personal experience with this idea when I tried to address an aspect of my life that remains a struggle — the fact that I don’t get much exercise. While perusing Facebook, I had seen some information about a health and fitness group located in my area that also incorporated Christian faith into the program.
The three dynamic women leading this group were, of course, extremely fit, but also seemed accessible and inspiring. The program offered healthy eating guidelines, recipes, online workouts, and a private Facebook page where members could ask questions and the leaders would post their takes on living healthy, as well as holy lives. This sounded perfect to me.
I could do the workouts at home and I would have support from a group of women on this fitness journey. I enthusiastically paid the fee and started what I hoped would be the path to a healthier me.
And then I began noticing that some of the leaders’ posts were alluding to their husbands as the “leaders” of their families and the importance of submission.
Now these women are highly educated entrepreneurs who are clearly motivated go-getters. I struggled to reconcile this type of talk with the power these ladies emitted. And then one of the leaders wrote a post about how she had struggled mightily against the Christian doctrine that called for her, an accomplished businesswoman and health care provider, to submit fully to her husband. She spoke about how she realized that until she allowed her husband to be the sole decision-maker in her family, she was not following Christ.
This line of thinking deeply disturbed me and I decided that this was not a path to health and wellness that I cared to follow.
The idea that Christianity requires the submission of women to men is, of course, not new. But I was curious about where it originated. The most interesting take I have come across is from Sarah Bessey, a Canadian charismatic Christian, who wrote the book Jesus Feminist (which I highly recommend).
In January of 2014, Bessey wrote a blog post in response to the controversy surrounding actress Candace Cameron who included this gem in her book, Balancing It All:
My husband is a natural-born leader. I quickly learned that I had to find a way of honoring his take-charge personality and not get frustrated about his desire to have the final decision on just about everything. I am not a passive person, but I chose to fall into a more submissive role in our relationship because I wanted to do everything in my power to make my marriage and family work.
Mmm…this is from a woman in her 30s who has earned her own money, achieved success in the entertainment industry, and then somewhat retired to devote herself to motherhood and family (a noble endeavor to be sure).
Then why the need for submission? She espouses that the Bible teaches Christians that there is only one God and there can only be one leader in the family – the man.
Men submit to God, women to their husbands, which, in turn, is also submitting to God. Now, this seems like a lot of hogwash made up by men and I was inspired to read Bessey’s eloquent and informed writing about the topic:
The idea that a man is the head of the home has its roots in secular ancient culture, not in the Word of God or the created order of humanity. And the idea that, as a wife, I would need to ‘become passive’ or smaller or somehow less in order to make my marriage work is damaging and wrong… But don’t get me wrong: I believe in submission. I just don’t believe that our call to submission in marriage is restricted to me. I submit to my husband. And he submits to me, too. And together, we submit to Jesus.
Amen, Sarah Bessey! I highly recommend you read her remarks in their entirely on www.sarahbessey.com. But what does this discussion mean for women of faith who refuse to buy into this patriarchal idea of what a relationship