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.
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| 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 19th 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 64th 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).
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).
The first comments received this morning are from local Thinking Friend Sue Wright. She writes,
ReplyDelete"Great blog— but one that should be totally unnecessary. Sad how certain backward church officials want to keep women in the Dark Ages. I understand that some seminaries only offer classes to women in how to support their pastor husbands by looking perfectly dressed, serving the right food and keeping a clean house. Wrong!
"Looking back at the childhood churches I attended, I remember that women were only permitted in the pulpit if they were at a church to speak about being missionaries. They couldn’t pastor a church. Frankly, the best preaching I’ve heard lately has come from women. I am so thankful my church not only permits it, but encourages it."
Thanks for your comments, Sue. -- Back in the '70s, a woman missionary colleague told about being back in the U.S. and asked to speak about her missionary work in a Sunday morning worship service--but she was informed that she could not stand behind the pulpit to give her talk! (This likely happened in many SB churches.)
DeleteThen I received the following comments by email from Thinking Friend Ron Kraybill in the D.C. metropolitan area. He asked me to post his comments here, which I am, of course, happy to do.
ReplyDelete"Thank you, Leroy, for this post. I was in college when feminism began awakening me to destructive aspects of the evangelical tradition I'd grown up in. That awakening was one of numerous factors that have moved me across the years to say, ever more vehemently, I am NOT an Evangelical. While there are wonderful individuals within it, as a social and political force Evangelicalism increasingly has become a force of deceit, manipulation, and oppression. It is the modern world's active representative of things Jesus railed against until they finally silenced him (they thought!)
"In a different direction, as father of three sons and three daughters, now approaching 70, I have given much thought and attention across the years to the challenges of growing up. Because I spent so many years concerned about the challenges of girls and assuming "the boys will be fine", it took me a long time to recognize there is another worrying dynamic afoot. Challenging though things are for girls (and acutely so for pockets of society such as Evangelical communities), broadly speaking it is actually boys who are now most at risk. Measured by things like dropout rates, college attendance, depression, drug abuse, and suicide, it is BOYS who truly need special support right now.
"Men, generally speaking, have lost the special privileges older men were raised to believe are part of the natural order and have been floundering for years. But it is the sons and grandsons of middle-aged and senior men who are paying the biggest price for the difficulties of men in coming to terms with the changes required by egalitarianism. Many are truly lost and it worries me that there is almost none of the warm-hearted solidarity and encouragement extended towards them that feminism has provided to girls now for many years.
"That is not to say, 'All is well for girls now'! Rather I'm saying we need to wake up to the dual challenges at hand. Many progressives of my generation, I think, are anachronistic, fighting ancient enemies that are not yet fully vanquished but blind to equally threatening new ones and impervious to the systemic requirements of transformative change.
"Especially in the realm of gender relations, none is free until all are free. While maintaining the attention we have given to supporting girls now for some decades, we need to now also turn our hearts to the plight of boys."
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Ron, and for calling attention to the problems with young men as well as young women. I had been under the impression that a large percentage of teenage boys along with young men are currently having a tough time--and that is probably quite true.
DeleteHowever, the title of the Feb. 13 study that Bass linked to (at the link in my blog post) is, "The CDC report shows concerning increases in sadness and exposure to violence among teen girls and LGBQ+ youth." I didn't deal with the latter issue (mainly because of length considerations), although Bass did write about that to some extent. The only reference to boys in the CDC report says, "Alcohol use is also higher among girls than boys."
This is not to say that what you say about the problem of boys/young men is not a real and serious one. But in spite of its seriousness, it may not currently be as grave as that of girls and young women.
When I joined a fundamentalist church at 17, I didn’t know any other Christianity, and my background did not prepare me for the psychic cultural rot in the world of fundamentalism/evangelicalism. I was preaching a year later, but I was also an avid student in college at the time, so I was learning fast. I began to run into resistance and criticism fairly early. I had a license to preach from my congregation, but when I took a stand one evening in support of interracial marriage, my pastor was quite upset with me, and he told me that he and the deacons wanted to talk with me anyway. They had been concerned about me. As I write this, I find myself laughing. Fortunately, I discovered other Christianities and got out of that rot. Otherwise, I probably would have left Christianity altogether. —Anton Jacobs
ReplyDeleteAnton, as you know, we have similar backgrounds, but maybe because I am several years older than you my experience was somewhat different. My home church was certainly conservative, but not strongly fundamentalistic. And as I began to grow in my understanding of Christianity, I had college and seminary professors who encouraged/supported that growth. So I never had to discover another Christianity. Rather, as I increasingly became "fed up with fundamentalism," as I expressed in the title of my book first published in 2007, I could affirm the fuller/deeper understanding of the Christianity that I had developed through the years--and which was mostly supported by Second Baptist Church here in Liberty, which June and I joined not long after moving to our retirement home in 2005.
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DeleteA few minutes ago, local Thinking Friend David Nelson shared these pertinent comments:
ReplyDelete"Thanks for reminding us that some religious messaging is not only inappropriate but is also evil. When teen girls are endangered by evangelical conservatives, we all must be alarmed. The human family is too precious to tolerate hate that hurts others. I too have teenage granddaughters. I too value the wonderful diversity of the human family. I too will put my stake in the ground of honoring and partnering as allies with all other members of our human family."
My SS class/book club is reading Rosemary Radford Ruether's "Sexism and God-Talk" and this Sunday we will Zoom about Chapter 4 "Anthropology: Humanity as Male and Female." She looks historically at Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Barth. She looks at sexism in both "the image of God" and in eschatology. She found pitfalls at both the beginning and the end, as well as in the now. She looks at different forms of feminism in eschatological, liberal, and romantic theologies. She tries to find a synthesis of the best to find a better way forward.
ReplyDeleteWhat strikes me is that her 1983 book still resonates well on the divisions in our society today. I will admit that her analysis of liberalism rang largely true with me, while the different flavors of romanticism seemed deeply rooted with the various models, especially conservative, that make many of us uncomfortable today. In conservative romanticism she found a viewpoint that valued women highly within the confines of home, but considered men more suited to the harsh conflict of the fallen world. She concludes, "Conservative romanticism thus opposes equal rights of women in the public sphere in the name of the higher and purer goodness of woman as homemaker." (page 106) Reformist romanticism feels that the division proposed in conservative romanticism will not work, and therefore sees a need to try to reform the secular world as well. "In its more visionary moments, reformist-romantic feminism glimpses the contours of a new society characterized not only by honesty, purity, and cleanliness but, above all, by peace." (page 107) Finally, there is radical romanticism, which "repudiates male culture (including patriarchal religion) and withdraws into the female sphere as a separatist enclave of female values." (page 108)
Now Ruether is not espousing any of these points of view, but rather uses all of them as raw materials she seeks to synthesize into a new vision of fully functional equality. I have belabored this a bit to make the point that the public struggles we experience today on feminist issues from women in ministry to reproductive justice is not happening in a vacuum. They are just the most recent evolutions of a theological struggle that has gone on for thousands of years. We cannot afford to ignore history. Indeed, we must learn better than anyone if we are to find a way to succeed, and to find a theology that can prevail. For teenage girls, for the environment, for so much more, we must find The Way.
Thanks much, Craig, for sharing this helpful analysis by Rosemary Radford Ruether. She certainly was one of the primary theologians who advocated for gender equality. I am also happy that your SS class/book club is now studying Ruether's important book. (Many of you other readers will remember that I posted an article about Ruether last November, see https://theviewfromthisseat.blogspot.com/2022/11/in-grateful-memory-of-theologian-named.html .
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