Looking beyond feminism: What Christianity and feminism have in common
A grade 12 student of mine amazed me recently in her critique of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. “It was visionary for his time”, she quipped, “but we can’t stop there. We need to have an even bigger vision today.”
Like King advocating eloquently for the black American, the world’s women desperately needed heroic female visionaries to close the gap on equality. The waves of feminism fought, and, for a large part, won an uphill battle. I’m not about to say the fight is over, nor diminish the pervasive subtleties that characterize women’s challenges today.
Feminism was a good thing; necessary in order that women could enjoy the freedoms they do in Western culture. Some of these freedoms have impacted other cultures. However, feminism is deeply misunderstood. It’s caricatured and blamed for the breakdown of marriage and society. One well-known Evangelical suggests that feminism turns women into lesbians who hate their husbands and kill their children.
These narrow-minded and ill-informed views couldn’t be more wrong. Feminism neither destroyed marriage nor created abortion. Women’s rights is not some kind of culprit. Marriage has been deeply broken for a long, long time, and children die where patriarchy reigns like a lion. These problems have existed since original sin, with a refusal of responsibility and the start of the blame game.
But feminism won’t save the world. It won’t accomplish everything it wants to accomplish. That is because what it is fighting against is a more pervasive and transcendent evil that has been at work throughout time.
Read deeper into the Genesis 3 account. Whether this story is literal or figurative, it portrays fundamental truths about humanity. Who is the perpetrator of sin in Genesis 3? Not woman. She did not invent temptation! Notice further that “the man was with her” and went along with it. Man didn’t stand up for the victim. He blamed her after things came crashing down. This game of blaming the victim continues to this day. A woman is raped, and we want to know what she was wearing, whether she had drank, or in what part of town she was. The perpetrator completely drops off the map and the woman is identified as blameworthy.
This is where you come in, especially if you are a man. Man and woman have been playing the blame game for a long time now, but this isn’t a war. We’re on the same side. If we fight against each other rather than join forces, it will never end. We need to start seeing that gender issues are not women’s issues. Gender is something we all have. And the gender issues that face our world are ones that can only be addressed if both genders co-operate.
Violence against women is distressingly prevalent in our culture. Most of us are virtually complicit as women are patronized, underpaid, underrepresented, silenced, and objectified, let alone abused. Men who stand up against the status quo are seen to be in the minority, effeminate, over-sensitive, and slapped with a variety of other colourful designations. What we need are men and women who care deeply about the human race and see the sense in advancing freedom, compassion, and equality for everyone. If you’re a guy, are you willing to speak up and tell your friends it’s not cool when they degrade a woman or objectify her? If you’re a woman, are you willing to stand up for yourself by having a heart to heart with men or women in your life who need to know the impact of their words and actions?
Strangely enough, for all that feminism and Christianity have in common, some Christians are the most ardent opponents to women’s rights.
What do Christianity and feminism have in common? A desire for fullest human flourishing, freedom from all forms of oppression, and compassion for the powerless. Both Christianity and feminism aim at justice and self-reflection. Both involve seeing the other as an equal.
The Gospel of Jesus carries no extra labels — His Gospel is greater than any ideology. To think Jesus was a feminist is to think too small. Jesus is a greater way than Feminism.
It is okay for Christians to be feminists, but not as their primary identity. One’s identity as a Christian is greater than one’s identification with feminism, conservatism, environmentalism, veganism, socialism, or any other ideology you can name. All ideologies must bow before the name of Jesus, else they transgress into the realm of idolatry, taking precedence where only God ought.
In the book of Revelation, Jesus proclaims, “See, I make all things new”. Jesus’ vision of a renewed cosmos outshines even the most complete of feminist visions. Paul took this pretty seriously, writing: “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:4).
If we take the Gospel seriously, His good news touches all areas of life. Everything is permeable to Jesus — architecture, art, relationships, memory, education, technology, everything. The Gospel presents humanity with a cosmos that is diametrically different to what exists in its absence.
Photo by bobtravis, Flickr (cc)
