Why are Teenage Girls “Not Okay”?

Soon after posting my February 16 blog article in which I referred to Diana Butler Bass, I read Bass’s latest newsletter on her Substack blog called The Cottage (which has 32,000 subscribers!) It was partly about teenage girls, which hit home with me. 

Image from Bass's newsletter

Natalie, my youngest granddaughter, turned 13 that very day. I first mentioned her in the blog post I made on February 19, 2010, three days after her birth, and I will probably refer to that article again in an upcoming blog post.

Naomi, Natalie’s sister, is celebrating her 19^th birthday today, so the youngest two of my five granddaughters are both teenagers. They have been, and are, a great delight to June and me. 

“The Girls Are Not Okay” is the title of Bass’s newsletter (click here to read it). Bass was not writing about all girls, and I am deeply grateful that she was not writing about girls such as my granddaughters, who both seem to be well-adjusted young women. But sadly, many girls are “not okay.”

Bass’s article begins by referring to the new study of USAmerica’s teens released by the Center for Disease Control’s Youth Rick Behavior Survey (YRBS), and she reports the findings were “stark and frightening.” She writes that “the crisis is particularly urgent among teenage girls.”*

The YRBS report states that according to the data, “teen girls are confronting the highest levels of sexual violence, sadness, and hopelessness they have ever reported to YRBS.” (A summary of the YRBS report can be found here.)

Interestingly, Bass seeks to link the malaise of teenage girls to an aspect of contemporary society that would not at first glance be considered a cause of that dis-ease.

“White Christian Nationalism” is part of the problem, according to Bass. She refers to “A Christian Nation? Understanding the Threat of Christian Nationalism to American Democracy and Culture,” a study released by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) on February 8 (see here).

That study indicates that White Christian Nationalists, by and large, “believe women must submit to men” and that “society is diminished when women have more opportunities to work outside of the home.” These ideas reflect a belief in “complementarianism,” a widely held view by evangelical Christians.

Bass (who celebrated her 64^th birthday last Sunday) states, “There is little doubt among historians that second wave feminism of the 1970s improved the lives of women and girls in terms of education, health, work, finances, and overall equality.”

She mentions the significance of the 1974 book All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation, authored by Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty. As Bass says, that book “caused a sensation in evangelical churches and theological circles.”

June and I, along with many other progressive evangelicals, read that book with much appreciation during the mid-1970s. But a decade later, conservative evangelical opposition had grown to the extent that an organization to oppose the emphasis on gender equality was formed.

That organization called The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was founded in 1987.** That group was the result of anti-equality backlash, and it forwarded the position of “complementarianism.”

While, of course, there are several other important reasons why so many teenage girls are not okay today, I think that Bass is right in declaring that “evangelical theology” with its emphasis on complementarianism for a generation now “bears a significant part of the blame.”

As Bass gladly notes, formerly prominent Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leader Russell Moore ten days ago now posted “a somewhat repentant editorial against complementarianism” (see here).

Unfortunately, though, the SBC continues to support male supremacy. Just two days ago Religious News Service reported that “Southern Baptists oust Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church for naming a female pastor.” That’s a bad sign for teenage girls in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

 
Strong egalitarian homes with nurturing parents is one of the most important keys to rearing teenage girls who are okay. I am truly grateful that my teenage granddaughters have such a home—and have also been strongly supported by their egalitarian American and Japanese grandmothers.

_____

* Not long after reading Bass’s newsletter, I read “American teens are unwell because American society is unwell,” a Feb. 15 opinion piece on The Washington Post website. It was directly related to the same YRBS report. And then on the morning of Feb. 17, the WaPo posted “The crisis in American girlhood,” another opinion piece regarding the same report.

** In “Fed Up With Fundamentalism’s View of Women,” the eighth chapter of my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism (2007, 2020), I wrote about the founding and influence of this organization among “fundamentalists” (see pp. 240~2). 

Considering Circles

Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks by public theologian Diana Butler Bass is an impressive book that I finished reading a few months ago.* The last chapter is “Circles of Gratitude,” and I have been thinking, off and on, about circles ever since. 

Western society emphasizes pyramids more than circles. Bass (b. 1959) makes this point as she reflects on how she was reprimanded for arranging a classroom in a circle. She then realized, “Circles can be upsetting.” She goes on to say,

For many generations, the structure of Western culture imprinted on our imaginations was that of rows, lines, and pyramids. We were taught that everything was ordered from top to bottom, in vertical structures of family, social institutions, and politics by role, gender, and race (p. 174).

Other societies/traditions are different. For example, in Zen Buddhism what is called the enso circle (pictured above) is considered paradigmatic (see here). At the beginning of “Circles of Gratitude,” Bass cites Tanahashi Kazuaki (b. 1933), a noted Japanese Zen teacher:

The circle is a reminder that each moment is not just the present, but is inclusive of our gratitude to the past and our responsibility to the future.

Also, as explained on this website, “The circle has always been an important symbol to the Native American. It represents the sun, the moon, the cycles of the seasons, and the cycle of life to death to rebirth.”

There has, of course, been some recognition of the importance of circles in both traditional and contemporary Western culture. Most of us are familiar with the story of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. The round table of that 12th-century tale was a symbol of the equality of the knights.  

Although I’m not sure what it signifies, I was surprised to learn that Apple Park, which was completed about five years ago as the headquarters of Apple Inc., is “a perfect circle.”  

So perhaps there has been some recognition in most cultures that circles can represent ideals such as completeness, harmony, and balance. But, still, in much of the Western world, the hierarchical pyramid is often the dominant diagram of relationships.

Perhaps much of the dysfunction, dissatisfaction, and divisiveness in the U.S. currently is rooted in the pervasiveness of over/under relationships. Maybe a paradigm shift to seeing others in a relationship circle would help solve such problems.

Circles can be either inclusive or exclusive. Recently I was reading through my diary/journal for 1982, considering what I was doing/thinking forty years ago. In June of that year, I spoke at the annual Alumni Reunion of my high school. My talk was titled “How big a circle can you draw?”

Of course, I based part of that talk on Edwin Markham’s well-known, four-line poem “Outwitted”:

He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in! **

The following image graphically depicts the difference between the circle of inclusion from not only the circle of exclusion but also from what often occurs not only in segregation but also in integration.

Sociologists have long talked about “in-groups” and “out-groups.” In-groups are homogeneous and tend to exclude those who differ. That is clearly depicted in the exclusion circle. Out-groups might form a segregated circle excluded from the in-group—and if forced to integrate they might still be separated although within the in-group circle.

The inclusion circle, though, is the ideal, although it presents various challenges. But at some point, we all need to learn that, deep down, there is no “them”; there is only “us.”

Can you, can I, draw a circle large enough to include all of us? May it be so.

_____ 

* Since Bass’s book was published in 1989, I was surprised, but happy, to see in last Sunday’s Kansas City Star that it was one of the bestselling non-fiction books in Kansas City last week.

** My blog post for Oct. 15, 2015, was titled “Becoming Inclusive,” and it began with a reference to Markham and his poem. Here is the link, if you would like to look at that post (again).

 

Attacking/Advancing Black History

This month, as is February every year, is widely recognized as Black History Month. But this year, Black history is being both attacked and advanced more than in most preceding years. 

Black History Month was conceived by historian Carter G. Woodson. The son of enslaved parents, Woodson (1875~1950) was the second Black person to earn a Ph.D. (in 1912) from Harvard University, the first being W.E.B. Du Bois.

Woodson established what became Black History Month in 1926, choosing February because of President Lincoln’s birthday on Feb. 12 and Frederick Douglass’s birthday on Feb. 14. (The day and even the year of Douglass’s birth is not known for sure, but his death date of Feb. 20, 1895, is certain.)

Black History Month has been observed annually in the U.S. since 1976. While there have always been detractors, perhaps the study of Black history is questioned/attacked more this year than ever before.

The teaching of Black history is being attacked especially by numerous (almost entirely Republican) politicians. Foremost among those are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is now the frontrunner as the GOP nominee for next year’s presidential election.

A law passed in 1994 requires the teaching of Florida’s Black history in K-12 schools. But DeSantis has mounted an attack on what he calls the “woke mob,” claiming that certain instruction of Black history is the equivalent of political indoctrination.

“Florida’s struggle to teach Black history has become a battle over who controls the past” is a fairly long article by Mary Ellen Klas, a White woman who is a “bureau chief” for the Miami Herald newspaper.

I recommend the reading of Klas’s article, which was posted February 8 on the Miami Herald’s website (see here). Her closing words are from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

DeSantis is by no means the only prominent politician who is trying to control the past and the future by objecting to the teaching of Black history in the present.

In her GOP rebuttal to President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday evening (Feb. 7), Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that “our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race.”

That charge was in keeping with her January 10 “Executive Order to Prohibit Indoctrination and Critical Race Theory in Schools,” in which she claimed that CRT “emphasizes skin color as a person’s primary characteristic, thereby resurrecting segregationist values . . . .”

Southern governors shamefully distort facts to attack the teaching of Black history in their states—and in the nation as a whole.

Black history is being strongly asserted by “The 1619 Project,” a “long-form journalism endeavor” developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, writers from The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine.

The first publication of that endeavor was in August 2019, commemorating the 400^th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the English colony of Virginia.

Its aim was “to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of U.S. history."

Hannah-Jones (b. 1976) was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay in “The 1619 Project.” She was also chosen as first on a list of “The Most Influential African Americans 2020” (see here).

A six-part TV docuseries produced by Hulu debuted on January 26. Hannah-Jones is the host of that series that explores Black history as related to the themes that are the titles of the six TV episodes: democracy, race, music, capitalism, fear, and justice.

There has been criticism of Hannah-Jones’s work, some of it by historians and legitimate. Indeed, there are deficiencies in presenting history in sweeping generalizations and folksy anecdotes. But for the general public, there are advantages to presenting history in such a way.

Most of the criticism, though, has been by right-wing politicians and others who will not acknowledge the reality of systematic racism and also by those who want to preserve white supremacy in the country.

Black History Month is important as a time for challenging the unwarranted prevalence of white supremacy and for advancing acceptance of the reality of systematic racism that has been highly detrimental for so many Blacks in the United States, a reality that dates back to 1619.

Science Always Wins

When it comes to knowledge of the physical world, science always wins. That doesn’t mean that science is always right. Sometimes it is wrong, but science is always open to new information and changes with increased knowledge of the physical world. 

Science has clearly won in many past disputes with widespread traditional Christian beliefs.

1) Science won in the dispute over the age of the earth. The date 4004 B.C. was at the top of the first page of the Bible I had when I was a boy. That was considered to be the date the world was created as depicted in the first two chapters of Genesis.

In spite of a few “young-earthers” still around, most modern people, including most Christians, readily acknowledge the age of the earth as being far, far older than 6,027 years. Science unquestionably won that dispute.

2) Science also won the dispute over the shape and centrality of the earth. Hardly anyone takes the claims of “flat-earthers” seriously; they are treated as a curiosity (as in this article on the LiveScience website).

And despite the persecution of Giordano Bruno (1548~1600) and Galileo (1564~1642), does anyone today (other than perhaps some flat-earthers) affirm the Ptolemaic view that Earth is the center of the universe? Science undeniably won again.

3) Science is winning the dispute over the biological evolution of humans. Partly because of the literal interpretation of the creation story/stories of Genesis, joined with the belief in a “young” earth, traditional Christians long opposed the theory of the biological evolution of homo sapiens.

According to the latest figures I could find, nearly all scientists (97%) say humans and other living things have evolved over time. That is far higher than the percentage of the general public who “believe” in evolution. But the latter will continue to shrink, and science will again be the obvious “winner.”

Science is also winning contemporary disputes as well. Consider just a couple of examples.

1) It will soon be two years since vaccinations for covid-19 began to be used by the general public, but there is a sizeable segment of the population that has spurned the vaccinations. In the U.S., about one-fifth of the population is still completely unvaccinated and fewer than 70% are “fully” vaccinated.

In spite of all the “scientific” tests and precautions taken, many have accepted non-scientific “myths” to discredit the “facts” (see this website, for example) and to refuse vaccination. But science has won this dispute also: there is ample evidence that vaccinations greatly reduced covid-19 deaths.

2) One of the most prevalent, and serious, ongoing disputes currently is regarding global warming. According to this NASA.gov website, “There is unequivocal evidence that Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate. Human activity is the principal cause.” 97% of scientists believe this.

But, the general public’s views are quite different: according to Pew Research only 57% see global warming as a serious problem, and among Republicans that falls to 25% (compared to 83% of Democrats). However, eventually science will certainly win this debate also. Science always wins.**

When it comes to questions of Why? though, science doesn’t have the answer. As I said at the beginning, science wins in matters pertaining to knowledge of the physical world. But there is a “metaphysical” world as well.

The latter deals with reality “beyond” the physical world that can be known by the senses, which is all science can deal with. Science can only examine/explain the nature of what can be seen, measured, and explored by the senses.

“Metaphysics” deals with questions about why there is something rather than nothing, and with matters of meaning and value. This is the world of the three “transcendental” values of truth, beauty, and goodness. And there, science/scientists qua science/scientists have nothing to say.

These values can only be explored by philosophy and/or religion, not by science. So while it is true that science always wins in matters pertaining to the physical world, science isn’t even a player in the more important “game” of life, which is linked to reality beyond, as well as of, this physical world.

_____

** See this related 2017 article, “Climate change deniers, science always wins in the end,” on The Hill’s website. And for the few of you who want to think more, and more deeply, about this matter, I highly recommend the following article in the December 2022 issue of BioScience: “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2022.”