This is a thought I’ve been wondering about every time the issue of men and women in the church comes up and is written in the spirit of thinking out loud trying to follow the contours of an idea rather than having reached any firm conclusions about it. Go easy on me where I’m wrong.
I’m not evaluating the biblical texts here, whatever your views about those they are not in view, what is in view are questions about history, technology & timing.
We are all bound to time and place, but often in order to strengthen our arguments (whichever view you hold) we seek to connect our time with earlier times and places. It’s common in debates about modes of baptism, for example, to point back to the practices of the first church to reinforce the claims of our practices today. If we can establish a chain of practice, and especially an unbroken one, then we think this gives weight and credence to our position. They did this, they didn’t do that – we do this and we don’t do that.
The same thing happens in the debate between egalitarians and complementarians and in this the latter probably have the upper hand. Egalitarians concerned about Biblical warrant argue that the New Testament does support their view but they don’t have an unbroken chain of practice. Far from it. So while they must argue that the Spirit is now leading the church in this direction and evangelical egalitarians argue it is back to the intent we read in the New testament, they must face the challenge of why the Spirit didn’t do this earlier and why patriarchy was so quickly able to reassert itself over the bride of Christ.
This leads me to wonder whether Christian egalitarianism (and the secular sort as well) is really only truly possible at this moment in history. For a whole host of reasons at no other point in time other than right now, and even then not universally so, could egalitarianism be conceived of as a valid option for society, for homes, for nations, for churches. Beth Alison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood clearly shows that while there may have been female leaders throughout church history they have also been rare, always a tiny minority. Misogyny is a lazy and partial explanation for why that is so.
Instead is it the case that it is only when certain very specific conditions are in place can egalitarianism, in society and the church be possible? Again this is not about whether it is true, whether it is biblical or whether it is desirable but whether it is possible.
What conditions does egalitarianism rest on? Marg Mowczko, who is a very articulate exponent for egalitarianism says,
Christian egalitarians use the word “equal” because we see that there is a “level playing field” in Jesus’s kingdom. Jesus taught that in his kingdom, the humble are lifted up, the lowly are the greatest, and the last are first. In other words, there is a levelling: we each have the same status, the same rights, and, ideally, the same opportunities. This “level playing field” is free from hierarchies, castes, cliques, and other artificial social distinctions which favour some and discriminate against others, distinctions brought about by various prejudices such as snobbery, misogyny, racism, and various personal preferences.
The problem is that while Jesus and Paul (in Marg’s view) intended for there to be a ‘level playing field’ of status, rights & opportunities, history has taken its sweet time to get with the programme.
A few examples. Firstly, safety and security. It can still, sadly, be dangerous for women to walk home at night even in developed societies with lighting, policing, mobile coverage to call for help and affordable transport options. In far too many places still a female traveller has to work much harder to maintain her safety and is safer when with female companions and safer still with male ones. If it remains dangerous today, well you can multiply those risks as you head back in time.
Have women travelled throughout history? Of course, but which women? Phoebe travelled to Rome but she didn’t go alone and she might have been wealthy enough to pay for the trip. Security & safety meant there wasn’t, and in some places today, still isn’t a level playing field when it comes to travel. Just ask the women of Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan.
Education is another area where a level playing field in society has been a while coming and this historical disadvantage for women kept many of them from being seen as community teachers.
And then there is the most important condition: widely available birth control.
There is a reason why there have been no true matriarchal societies and extremely rare even to have matrilineal or matrifocal societies. Biology. Childbirth and high rates of childbearing has always limited the ability of women to exercise community leadership.
Few inventions (and as Mary Harrington points out one that is designed to interrupt otherwise healthy fertility) have had such a profound societal impact as (mostly) reliable birth control, the ripple effects of which we are still experiencing in all sorts of ways.
The moment the cord is cut between sex & pregnancy, it is also cuts at the one between women & motherhood. And that cuts the ties between a woman & the home. Now for almost the first time in history there is, in at least some but not all places, the choice not to be a mother.
The ability to control whether to be pregnant and how often to be pregnant has vastly reshaped the life horizons of millions of women. And as a result careers, jobs & vocations that were previously limited became much more widely available.
But the pill wasn’t the only necessary technology. There needed to be other technologies that created mass work that while still physically demanding could be done by anyone, tools that removed much of man’s strength advantage. The age of the machine, the democratization of education and the shift to knowledge work has benefited women far more than men.
But there are other deep trends too. In western society what is the purpose of people? Well, it depends on who you ask of course. But it seems to me that if you ask policy makers at all levels of government it would probably come down to economics, what you produce, your contribution to GDP, your economic value. Take this paragraph:
One of the stated goals was to get fathers more involved in care work in the home… and at the same time make it possible for mothers to work more or go back to the workforce sooner,” explains Ylva Moberg, a researcher at the Swedish Institute for Social Research, part of Stockholm University.
Sweden: Where it’s taboo for dads to skip parental leave
Ostensibly, there’s a social goal here: involving fathers in family care. However, that goal is merely a byproduct of another goal: getting mothers to work more and return to work sooner.
Even in a place like Sweden with the world’s most generous parental leave system things are not perfect because the split is not yet 50/50.
“Sweden lives a bit on old merits, I think. We cannot achieve equal workplaces if we do not start sharing equally at home.”
The goal is clear: equal workplaces. And the blame why it isn’t equal is mostly put onto men, and not once does it consider the possibility that at least some women might WANT to invest their time into raising their children in their earliest years.
The BBC article hides economic goals behind worthy sounding social goals but The Economist doesn’t bother with those.
But almost everywhere women’s careers suffer after they become parents…But many do not rejoin the workforce at all, even a decade on. This has been dubbed the “motherhood penalty”.
How motherhood hurts careers
The article headline is revealing. I suspect it didn’t occur to them to write it the other way around: how careers hurt motherhood.
At the same time policy makers are increasingly troubled by declining populations. Some think this is a bigger problem than climate change. All over the world fertility rates are falling, many countries have peaked their populations and are on the long slow road to shrinking and this has significant economic consequences.
It is an interesting conundrum. Women in the workplace has undoubtedly led to an increase in economic prosperity but fewer overall people seems to be much worse. No one has yet cracked the code of how to have even a stable population while at the same time maintaining women’s equal access to a career.
Even in the Nordics with their generous parental leaves, birth rates are falling. This is one reason why the future is African and as an aside it’s interesting that Africa (and other places with high birth rates) are very religious as well as very poor.
A woman who is bound closely to her home for a decade or more caring for say two or three children needs, or at least greatly benefits from, having a stable partner as provider. This binding to the home and all that is home adjacent creates boundaries and limits on time and opportunity.
All that to say that the tight connection to the home restricted women’s ability to get an education or the freedom to travel or gain status or anything that community leadership would traditionally have valued. It is only in the last 60 years or so that enough of those social conditions have changed sufficiently to allow enough women to gain almost all the status, education, freedom and financial stability needed to become political, business, academic or spiritual leaders en masse. Everything, everywhere, all at once. That shift is not yet complete nor evenly spread and nor is it inevitable that it remains that way (see population decline). From the perspective of community leadership it is only now plausible to think that egalitarian leadership is possible and desirable.
The leaders we choose often reflects the priorities and needs of the community. For thousands of years leaders needed to be warriors to protect or they need status to prosper their and that would invariably have been a man, the occasional Boudicca not withstanding.
If your community needed someone with wealth, connections, or even the ability to leave the home to go and represent you wherever power lay then that requirement almost always favoured men. If your community needed a leader with education, one who could say, read the Scriptures, well again that favoured men. Christian communities also wanted leaders of good character and in the role of deacon would have had the most faithful women at their disposal but they may have also wanted someone who could read, travel, represent, or if need be protect the community and and men had the upper hand for all those requirements.
Biology was mostly destiny until about 20 minutes ago and only until it wasn’t could full blown egalitarianism stand a chance in society or the church. In other words, there was no level playing field and whatever you think of Galatians 3:28 the church communities of generations past could have done little to change this fact. They remained subject to the same set of conditions as everyone else.
Do I have a conclusion here? All tentative. While it is reasonable to criticize theologies which described women as below-par men perhaps it is less reasonable to criticize the church of ages past for not having the technology, wealth, or social structures to release women into wider leadership roles. In other words if something was holding women back it wasn’t the church. Or at least not just the church.
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