Preaching Submission While Not Quite Living It

The New York Times Magazine has an interesting feature article Housewives of God about Priscilla Shirer, daughter of mega-church pastor Tony Evans. Shirer is a former Zig Ziglar motivational speaker who graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary and is now motivating evangelical women to find and live out their Christian calling, which includes submission to their husbands and male pastors. As the article points out Shirer's lived life with her husband Jerry doesn't look much like a traditional marriage. It appears in many respects that her career and her decisions are the driving force in their marriage. When asked to account for the perception that her life isn't consistent with the message she delivers she gave this example of how she submits to her husband:

Despite this routine, Priscilla insists that she submits to Jerry — especially in the family’s bigger decisions. “If I will follow him as he’s following the Lord, then the responsibility for navigating our family well falls on him, not me,” she said. “Gratefully, I’m married to a husband that values my opinion and values my ideas. . . . We have lots of discussions, there are times of discontent.” She recalled their fierce debate over what to name their youngest son, Jude. When they couldn’t agree, Jerry asked the advice of male mentors he calls his “accountability guys,” “strong Christian guys who I’ve put in my life.” (Promise Keepers and other “biblical manhood” ministries encourage men to form and submit to “accountability groups” to keep one another on a godly path.) When the men ruled in Jerry’s favor, Priscilla relented. “It was a tough pill for me to swallow for a minute,” she said. “But when he told me why, and told me he’d talked to several different people about it that we both trust, then I was able to just relinquish and not be upset. . . . What made all the difference in the world is he cared about what I was feeling.”

The article gives this bit of history about the role of women in evangelicalism:

In centuries past, evangelical women were not meek about their role in church. Early Baptists allowed women to preach during the Great Awakening, and women were among the most influential revivalists during the rise of Pentecostalism at the turn of the 20th century (though gender roles usually remained in force in the home). But many women lost their voice as these sects solidified into male-run denominations. Outside the pulpit, women took the lead in the great Victorian moral crusades and volunteered in droves for foreign missions. During the battles between fundamentalists and liberal-minded modernists in the early 20th century, however, conservative mission boards cracked down on the freedom of female missionaries. Denominations took control of service societies that women had run for decades. Evangelical women could teach children’s Sunday school — as unpaid volunteers — but not adult co-educational classes. They might run bake sales, but men usually decided how the church spent the money they earned.

In the 1970s, liberal organizations like the Evangelical Women’s Caucus embraced much of women’s and gay liberation, but most evangelicals joined a rear-guard action in defense of traditional sexual mores. They argued that “women’s liberation” was a myth: on the contrary, secular feminism enslaves. Women learn to worship the false idols of careerism and independence, brainwashed by propaganda techniques that the Christian author Mary Kassian, in her book “The Feminist Mistake,” compares with those used by Chairman Mao. Submission alone brings true freedom and empowerment. A “submitted woman” can quit struggling to do things God never intended her to do and focus on her feminine gifts. Her gifts might mean a career, as long as she has her husband’s blessing: evangelicals often cite the “Wife of Noble Character” mentioned in Proverbs 31, who “considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard.”

In reality, conservative evangelicals turn a blind eye to “submitted wives” who split household duties with their husbands and hire baby sitters, as long as they recite the slogans of biblical womanhood...

Reading this article I find myself in agreement with KJ Dell'Antonia at Slate:

Shirer's lip service to the idea of male dominance enables marriages that are far less egalitarian than hers. Her message, as Jocelyn Anderson, author and Christian domestic violence victim would say, is "submission, submission, submission." But submission as an option—as Worthen puts it "embrac[ing] the submitted life"—is not truly submission. Deference, perhaps. But calling voluntary deference "submission" is like calling consensual sex "rape" just because there are handcuffs involved. It muddies the waters for everyone, and makes it more difficult for women who face demands for real submission to see things as they really are.

If Shirer's compromise works for her, that's fine. But she should be honest within her ministry and tell the women who flock to her appearances that a "complementarian" marriage works only if it's based on egalitarian beliefs. She's clearly chosen her role. She should use it to ensure that other women know that they also have a choice.

Ban the Burqa?

Claire Berlinski has a thoughtful post in the National Review online about the evolution of her thinking on the veiling of women. She lives in and reports from Turkey. This was her thinking when she moved:

One woman here told me of her humiliation in childhood when her family was ejected from a swimming pool because her mother was veiled. I believed her. All stories of childhood humiliation sound alike and are told in the same way. It was perverse, she said to me, that she should be free to cover her head in an American university but not in a Turkish one. It seemed perverse to me as well. It would to any American; politically, we all descend from men and women persecuted for their faith. I was, I decided, on the side of these women.

...The argument that the garment is not a religious obligation under Islam is well-founded but irrelevant; millions of Muslims the world around believe that it is, and the state is not qualified to be in the business of Koranic exegesis. The choice to cover one’s face is for many women a genuine expression of the most private kind of religious sentiment. To prevent them from doing so is discriminatory, persecutory, and incompatible with the Enlightenment traditions of the West. It is, moreover, cruel to demand of a woman that she reveal parts of her body that her sense of modesty compels her to cover; to such a woman, the demand is as tyrannical, humiliating, and arbitrary as the passage of a law dictating that women bare their breasts.

This is her thinking now:

There are already many neighborhoods in Europe where scantily dressed women are not safe... Parents in these neighborhoods ask gynecologists to testify to their daughters’ virginity. Polygamy and forced marriages are commonplace. Many girls are banned from leaving the house at all. According to French-government statistics, rapes in the housing projects have risen between 15 and 20 percent every year since 1999. In these neighborhoods, women have indeed begun veiling only to escape harassment and violence. In the suburb of La Courneuve, 77 percent of veiled women report that they wear the veil to avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols. We are talking about France, not Iran.

...The debate in Europe now concerns primarily the burqa, not less restrictive forms of veiling, such as the headscarf. The sheer outrageousness of the burqa makes it an easy target, as does the political viability of justifying such a ban on security grounds, particularly in the era of suicide bombings, even if such a justification does not entirely stand up to scrutiny. But the burqa is simply the extreme point on the continuum of veiling, and all forced veiling is not only an abomination, but contagious: Unless it is stopped, the natural tendency of this practice is to spread, for veiling is a political symbol as well as a religious one, and that symbol is of a dynamic, totalitarian ideology that has set its sights on Europe and will not be content until every woman on the planet is humbled, submissive, silent, and enslaved.

...Veiling cannot be disambiguated from the problem of Islam’s conception of women, and this conception is directly tied to gender apartheid and the subjugation and abuse of women throughout the Islamic world, the greatest human-rights problem on the planet, bar none. Nor can the practice of veiling be divorced from the concept of namus — an ethical category that is often translated as “honor,” and if your first association with this word is “honor killing,” it is for a reason: That is the correct association. The path from veiling to the practice of killing unveiled women is not nearly so meandering as you might think.

It could be that I am stretching here, but I couldn't help but read this and think of the Church of the Brethren tradition of women having their heads covered. It is mostly gone but still practiced in some parts of the Brethren world. The argument for it, of course, is that it is scriptural. But the deeper question is how much is this scriptural argument in its context and in its present day practice is tied up with a patriarchal view of women that sees them as either inferior or dangerous?

I am sympathetic to the women who argue from whatever religious tradition that veiling is an act of liberation or personal religious choice. The problem is that there are often men who are a part of these traditions who see it as a woman's appropriate duty to God and religion. And they too often have the power in families and religious communities. Our free choices are rarely as free as we think they are.

Nunsense--the Beauty Pagent!

Here is a very interesting new marketing strategy by an Italian Catholic priest near Naples to improve the image of nuns and to attract more to the service of God. A "Priest of the Month" calendar would also seem to follow, don't you think?

Let's all keep watch for Fr. Rungi's new blog which will reportedly be coming online in a few days as reported in this article by the Associated Press.

And Why Are We So Worried About Gays in the Military?

So much time and attention is paid to whether we should have gays in the military. Yet we never hear the statistics about the percentage of women in the military who are raped. This article is shocking!

Women who are preparing their C.O. (conscientious objection)portfolio in the event of a future draft, should print this article and place it into their portfolio!

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A congresswoman said Thursday that her "jaw dropped" when military doctors told her that four in 10 women at a veterans hospital reported being sexually assaulted while in the military. A government report indicates that the numbers could be even higher.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, spoke before a House panel investigating the way the military handles reports of sexual assault. She said she recently visited a Veterans Affairs hospital in the Los Angeles area, where women told her horror stories of being raped in the military.

"My jaw dropped when the doctors told me that 41 percent of the female veterans seen there say they were victims of sexual assault while serving in the military," said Harman, who has long sought better protection of women in the military.

"Twenty-nine percent say they were raped during their military service. They spoke of their continued terror, feelings of helplessness and downward spirals many of their lives have taken since. "We have an epidemic here," she said. "Women serving in the U.S. military today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq."

As of July 24, 100 women had died in Iraq, according to the Pentagon.

In 2007, Harman said, only 181 out of 2,212 reports of military sexual assaults, or 8 percent, were referred to courts martial. By comparison, she said, 40 percent of those arrested in the civilian world on such charges are prosecuted.

Defense statistics show that military commanders took unspecified action, which can include anything from punishment to dismissal, in an additional 419 cases.

But when it came time for the military to defend itself, the panel was told that the Pentagon's top official on sexual abuse, Dr. Kaye Whitley, was ordered not to show up despite a subpoena. "I don't know what you're trying to cover up here, but we're not going to allow it," Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, said to the Defense official who relayed the news of Whitley's no-show. "This is unacceptable."

Rep. John Tierney, the panel's chairman and a Democrat from Massachusetts, angrily responded, "these actions by the Defense Department are inexplicable." "The Defense Department appears to be willfully and blatantly advising Dr. Whitley not to comply with a duly authorized congressional subpoena," Tierney said.

An Army official who did testify said the Army takes allegations of sexual abuse extremely seriously. "Even one sexual assault violates the very essence of what it means to be a soldier, and it's a betrayal of the Army's core values," Lt. Gen. Michael Rochelle said.

The committee also heard from Mary Lauterbach, the mother of Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, a 20-year-old pregnant Marine who was killed in December, allegedly by a fellow Marine. "I believe that Maria would be alive today if the Marines had provided a more effective system to protect the victims of sexual assault," she said.

In the months after her daughter filed the rape claim, she said, the military didn't seem to take her seriously, and the onus was on "Maria to connect the dots." "The victim should not have the burden to generate evidence for the command," Lauterbach told the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs. "Maria is dead, but there will be many more victims in the future, I promise you. I'm here to ask you to do what you can to help change how the military treats victims of crime and to ensure the victims receive the support and protection they need and they deserve."

Another woman, Ingrid Torres, described being raped on a U.S. base in Korea when she worked with the American Red Cross. "I was raped while I slept," she said. The man who assaulted her, she said, was a flight director who was found guilty and dismissed from the Air Force. Fighting back tears, Torres added, "he still comes after me in my dreams."

The Government Accountability Office released preliminary results from an investigation into sexual assaults in the military and the Coast Guard. The GAO found that the "occurrences of sexual assault may be exceeding the rates being reported."

"At the 14 installations where GAO administered its survey, 103 service members indicated that they had been sexually assaulted within the preceding 12 months. Of these, 52 service members indicated that they did not report the sexual assault," the GAO said.

The office found that the military and Coast Guard have established policies to address sexual assault but that the implementation of the programs is hampered by an array of factors, including that "most, but not all, commanders support the programs."

"Left unchecked, these challenges can discourage or prevent some service members from using the programs when needed," the GAO said.

Tierney said, "what's at stake here goes to the very core of the values of the military and the nation itself. "When our sons and daughters put their lives on the line to defend the rest of us, the last thing they should fear is being attacked by one of our own."