Let me be a woman: Taylor’s version

What I wish Elisabeth Elliot had said

I have a new piece up at Comment. Let me know what you think.

When I began training as a theologian 15 years ago, I knew one thing for sure. I wasn’t going to be a lady theologian. I mean, obviously I would be- I am clearly and obviously female and had no plans to change that. What I meant is that I didn’t want to always be speaking for women, when it came to theological things, nor did I want to always be speaking about “women’s issues”. If feminism had done one thing for me, it should have freed me from always being the one to speak about bodies/sex/gender. By refusing the association of my own body as the “natural” one to care about such things, I thought the matter was settled.       

I adopted, in turn, a certain sort of pugnaciousness that truly has always come naturally to me. I was a willful child and was, to quote another great female mind, “born this way”. And yet belligerence can serve as a sort of shield, especially to those who are as obviously female as I am. I once was described in a graduate seminar as “like a junkyard dog”; this was intended to be dismissive, I think, but to me it was a badge of honor. I specialized in systematic theology and for many years would indicate this early on in conversations about my work. Part of this has to do with theological priors; doctrine precedes and is always prior to practice; “gender” is a topic relevant to Christian practice, not Christian doctrine (that’s a big claim but a considered one). And yet some of this was about being taken seriously. Maybe if I trained in the most rigid, masculine field available, I’d be able to think mostly about the deeper things of God.

I was trained by old school feminists, the kind who wore sensible shoes and took no bullshit. These women were physically strong and competitive and tough as nails, the type of women who would give you a lecture and then whip you at tennis. They’d had to master their discipline twice as well to be taken half as seriously. Many of them decided not to have families in order to focus on their careers, and they often treated their students as substitute children, affording us affection and scolding and cookies on occasion. I loved them.

         I wasn’t meant to be one of them, however, and I’m not sure that option is open to women anymore. More women than men now exit graduate programs in theology, and seminaries are nearly proportionate among the sexes. Even the most rigid of denominations have opened their programs to women- I was stunned at last year’s professional conferences at several women who introduced themselves as “PhD candidates at [a Southern Baptist seminary]”. I had to wonder if they knew what that meant, to someone like me. The landscape has changed fundamentally.

         Women of my age were told that they were just as good as men, and that the odds were in our favor- everyone wanted more women in their programs. But now that the women have arrived, having been told that they were “just as good as men”, the affordances have not stopped coming. Being female is still considered a benefit in admissions and for many religious jobs. The playing field is not just level, it is now slanted toward female talent. Them’s fighting words, I know, but the data bears this out.

         And yet I find myself still needing to think and talk about women’s issues. How can this be? What sort of issues can we possibly still have? Here’s how I see it- I think cultural expectations of women’s participation have made uneasy bedfellows with religious expectations of women’s conduct. Though we have been told we are just as smart and qualified as men when we enter religious spaces, we are primarily expected to be soft, gentle, and nurturing once we get there. And pretty, if you can manage that. This is especially true in our increasingly online culture, where traditional forms of beauty have an obvious benefit.

         This creates a lot of cognitive dissonance for women like me. I can be competent but I also have to be “nice”? I can be qualified but have to also pretend not to be, in certain settings? I am a professional woman but might also have to host a luncheon from time to time?

In Elisabeth Elliot’s correspondence, she writes regularly of the difficulty that she had writing once she married. She found herself preoccupied with housework, house organization, house maintenance, and throwing endless dinner parties. She made herself sit at her desk two hours a day, but for a season she couldn’t give her writing much more than that. For Elliot, the social expectations of a wife were quite rigid. She would need to be the social ease to her husband at functions, would host the guests he wanted to visit with, and would travel with him as his companion. It didn’t matter that she was a published author in her own right; in these settings, she would be Mrs. Leitch.

         It’s these jumbled expectations that I find still pertain to women’s lives. I find myself regularly having to be either the intellectual version of myself, or the social wife. It’s hard to integrate the two, but we desperately need to try. Obviously I know that most people don’t want to talk about metaphysics in social situations, I’m not a dummy. But the fact that I might be primarily expected to either give a lecture, or clear the table, depending on the evening, well, it can make you a little dizzy. In religious spaces, I find this is still often the case.

I wish Elisabeth had reflected on the wide variety of experiences her life had afforded her and stated that “being a woman” can look like a variety of things, depending on the setting, and that there is no one God-given way to be one. I wish she’d noted the ways that “being a woman” contributed to her skills- as a missionary and as a creative writer. I wish she’d reflected a bit more on the constraints that her marriage placed on her, and asked whether she might have skipped a few dinners in order to focus on writing- and that skipping a few social settings wouldn’t have made her less a woman. I wish she’d noticed the way her writing and speaking voice- at times both gentle and direct, deferential and bellicose- reflected the variety of ways women do and should communicate.

         If I were updating Elliot’s Let Me Be a Woman almost fifty years later, I’d do a lot of things differently. In fact, I’d like to chart a new course for thinking about men and women in the church. Here is where I am starting.

1. As the great

   Sarah Hinlicky Wilson Stories
   said to me once, genitals are involved only when genitals are involved. This means that when it comes to sex and procreation, it matters quite a bit how we think about bodies and their functions, but otherwise these discussions should fade into the background. Both Humanae Vitae and Josh Butler have gotten this wrong, treating social relationships as if they directly relate to sexual ones. We don’t need to be using our view of genital relations to interpret general relations between men and women. That’s making genitals matter when they don’t.

2. Things can be good without being God. My best teacher told me once that religious people have a tendency to take good things and make them God- sex, church, liturgy. We have to learn how to receive good things without demanding that they hold a greater symbolic meaning or a “key” to reality. I’m mostly talking about sex, here- let the reader understand.

3. But bodies themselves do matter. It’s become common to say “but that’s so gnostic”, with a dismissive wave, like it answers every problem that Christians have. The logic goes that Christians have adopted an unthinking view of the body and of matter that treats it as base material to be discarded. The “gnostic” view is that only souls are saved, not bodies. There is an important corrective here- matter and bodies are good, and they too are included in the redemption of all things- but I actually don’t think it gets you all that far. In fact, I think implicit in it is a version of the problem I mentioned above. We don’t need bodies to be “saved” to say they are “good”. We might say simply that they are created. Building a Protestant view of things based on salvation and not on creation is a perennial problem we have. We should fix this.

4. We can’t treat the eschaton like a place to put lost things. Relatedly, I read a lot of gender theory from Christian writers and almost always “the eschaton” is offered as the final answer to the mystery of gender. It feels like everyone is punting the hard questions, trusting that we’ll get the right answer after we die. But eschatology should play a more active role in constructing our beliefs about bodies- it’s not simply, to quote Mary Poppins, “where the lost things go”. I have a piece commissioned on this that I’ll link in due time, but we need to get this right in order to think well about gender.

5. Natural law is probably not the most helpful here. “Natural law” allows for a certain built-in order in creation that speaks to its intent or purpose. Its function determines is value. My concern is not that it stigmatizes deformity as much as that it takes a function and not systems view of reality. The order to which a thing is directed tells you something about what it is. But there are broader systems in which a thing participates that grants it a reality or presence that expand beyond the thing it does, and ways in which these systems also tell truths about what a thing is. Some of this is tied into an implicit technological critique and I don’t think a natural law view allows for that adequately.

6. The Bible is good on this, actually! I can’t believe that I am going to argue that for an understanding of gender, we should go to the Bible. It’s just been done before, ya know? But I think we can turn to both Leviticus and Proverbs, and Mark and Ephesians, to think about what the relationship between men and women looks like in a way that takes seriously what is given (“natural”) and what is made. I think we can do this in a way that offers difference without positing hierarchy, while honoring the concrete ways that difference pertains. (Words that I am avoiding- complementarity, equality, “roles”).

7. What it tells us is that you are a living sacrifice. The big picture story about the Christian life is about being a living sacrifice. That means that everything that we are is an offering, primarily upward, back to God, but outward, too. There is no thing that you are that tells a truer story than this story of being offered. (This is the thesis of my next book).

8. Real things are good, and good things are real. There need not be a hidden meaning behind the stuff of the world in order for the stuff the world to be meaningful. The earth is full of the glory of God; that is enough.

All of these things together, I think, can give us a truer view of what it means to be a woman, or a man. Gender is derivative theologically, but it does benefit from some thought. Let me know what you think.