What IS it with those Baptists?
And why do they want to keep women in the pews?
Delegates of the Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans voted this week to shrink the role of women leadership.
The convention voted to uphold the expulsion of women-led churches, including the megachurch, Saddleback Church, which had sought a review of the earlier decision to remove them from the convention because they put women in leadership positions. The church decided to do this rather than focusing on the sin in their camp around the mishandling of sexual abuse allegations by (male) clergy, and racism, among other challenges.
So what is it with the Baptists? What is it with the church of Christ, Evangelical Wesleyans, the Roman Catholics? Something like two-thirds of religious American women belong to faith groups that do not ordain women. And why? The Bible does not support this kind of misogyny. Jesus was a radical for his time and ours. Denying someone a seat at the table is the opposite of Christianity.
And yet it continues and in this case, the Baptists turned their clocks back to the 1920s and have opted to continue to form a foundation for the worst kind of woman-hating. I mean, if God doesn’t think women are equal to men, what’s to stop mere mortals from creating policy around that?
Nothing. That’s what. And so it goes.
So what does a faith group lose when they do not embrace equality? They lose relevance. They lose members — like me. See me waving? In my early 30s, I found the exit and ran through it. I cannot say that I will ever go back. I certainly won’t return to the pew I left, exclusionary and anti-woman place that it was. God doesn’t want this, and neither do I.
Misogyny, bringing back child labor, racism, they are all making a comeback here in Gilead, and all this time foolish me thought “The Handmaids Tale” was fiction?
Keeping women in the pews is a great example of how the norms of "civilization" are shown in the Bible to be constantly pulling back against the radical inclusion of God's ideal world. The authentic Paul named many women as leaders in the churches he founded and visited, and he wrote that "... there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." But the patriarchy latches onto the lines that were probably meant to address a particular question from a particular congregation. Jesus spoke to women and even let them touch him, which was shocking to both the Jews and Romans in the culture of his time and place.
The literalists like to point out that Jesus never called any women to be his disciples. Well, he never called any Polish or Italian men, either. How literal do we want to get? In the Orthodox Church, Mary Magdalene was never disparaged as a prostitute as in the Western Church, but is honored as the "Apostle to the Apostles," because all four Gospels place her at the empty tomb, and in John's Gospel she is the only person, man or woman, there. She's the one who goes to tell the men, who are in hiding.
In Texas where I grew up, one of the jokes was that Baptists don't drink ... in front of each other. It matters not at all to me what the SBC does. The further down the path of Biblical literalism they go, the more irrelevant they become in the 21st century built on the insights of modern medicine, astronomy, physics, biology, technology, etc.
The late Bishop John Shelby Spong wrote that, "A literalized myth is a doomed myth." He couldn't be more right.