Asbury’s “Equal but Different” Story
A new book belongs your shelf next to Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Beth Allison Barr. Like those two authors, Lisa Weaver Swartz takes on the masculinist, complementarian culture of America’s evangelicalism. Her book is called Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power.
Every page of her chapters prompts ponderings for me about Northern Seminary. I wonder how we would turn up under Weaver Swartz’s careful analytics.
In our previous exposition of her book, we looked at the Equality Story, which she labels as “genderblindness” in church and public. What matters most are the gifts of an individual person, the skills, not a person’s gender.
In today’s conversation piece we turn to the “Difference Story.” At Asbury Seminary, as Weaver Swartz gleans it from both student interviews and material culture, there is a noticeable “private gendered difference.” At one point she describes it as “genderblind equality in public and difference within marriage.”
A question lurking for me as I read this section in her book was this: Can one maintain difference between genders and be genderblind consistently? Or, Are there “innate gender binary differences” or not?
One message was consistently stated by the students: there is a clear gender difference but just what it was is not clear.
Lurking in this discussion, so I think, is a complementarian reality that does not mesh with the Equality Story. Put differently, many of these students, and some faculty, are more complementarian than they know and can admit. Their inability to define what constitutes the differences expresses some discomfort with the admission of gender difference. Many of these students were nurtured into adulthood in an evangelical world captured by the rise of complementarianism’s formation from the 1970s on. (SMcK: Anyone remember Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman? The 70s launched the ideas and books that gave rise to the complementarian movement, some of which was a reaction to the Equal Rights Amendment). Put differently, the equal relationality of men and women recognizes the contrast between them.
Many of the men thought the NT teachings on marriage press home the need for men to have humility and for both to be mutually submissive. Yes, some student adhere to the essential leadership of the husband in the marriage.
SMcK: marriage is not the union of roles but the working out over time of a loving relationship that exploits the giftedness of both husband and wife.
A key theme in her narrative is that the Equality Story moderates the Difference Story, which means there is “a sense of deep responsibility for upholding differences they cannot quite identify.”
Marriage marks the differences: heteronormativity rules the narrative, constrains the discussion, and shapes formation at Asbury. She participated in a “Holiness in the Body” series of sermons by the president, Timothy Tennent, as well as by a Catholic expert on Pope John Paul’s famous Theology of the Body. Running through the series was gendered difference and heteronormativity.
The campus embodies the Difference Story and the Equality Story. There is a “firm gender binary while safely removing its salience from public, church spaces where it might threaten Christian unity.”
In addition to the Equality and Difference Story at Asbury Seminary, Lisa Weaver Swartz identifies and (more) briefly explains the evangelistic, global Mission Metanarrative. “The Whole Bible for the Whole World” says it best.
Noticeably, the Mission Metanarrative anchors itself deeply into a Bible story that begins in creation and ends in New Jerusalem that is also a deeply Equality Story. Created in unity and finally redeemed into an eternal unity.
Okay. What I believe is missing in this entire discussion is the following. I'm a woman who has fought for equality since the 1980s. I know the battle-lines in my bones. But I have since come to believe that God created the two sexes to be complementary: women and men ARE different in some important ways and God's call is to respect and cherish one another for those differences. But for most folks the issues aren't clear-cut and genuine humility has to be part of the equation. There's entirely too much one-upmanship in the whole complementarian/egalitarian war. Both men and women must acknowledge that in a sense in ministry it really does take two (one of each) to tango. God had a great idea, but we continue to miss the central point.
I just finished reading Swartz's book. The main problem with genderblindness isn't so much that egalitarians don't have a clear vision of male & female differences while insisting on those differences to uphold heterosexual marriage (although that does come up), but rather, that genderblindness effectively squashes the differences in male & female experiences within Christian communities (including social pressures, ministry, institutional power and decision-making, Bible interpretation, theology, use of time, etc.).
Highlighting these differences in Christian egalitarian communities is thought to be an affront to Christian unity. Female seminarians and pastors are expected to not have a problem with taking on the "second shift" (household labor) that disadvantages their opportunities to pursue their studies & vocation. They're constantly scrutinized for their clothing, their motives for pursuing ministry, their attitudes and affect, all while they're far less likely to receive mentoring and encouragement to pursue ministry in the first place. The burden of "unity" essentially falls on the women to not bring up such disparities, lest it make the men uncomfortable that their theologically egalitarian seminary still revolves around men, in many subtle ways.
FWIW, I think male + female co-leadership at every level in the church (pastor, elder, biblical scholarship, theological teaching, etc.) is necessary, BECAUSE of women's different experiences.
It would have been interesting have had at least one additional chapter on how male experience has been allowed to interpret (and distort) Scriptural narratives. If the Bible is the Spirit-inspired account of God's dealings with humanity--both male & female, who are equally filled with the Spirit--then how can we interpret male & female stories accurately while entirely missing a female lens?
Stories like David-Bathsheba, Tamar, the Samaritan woman at the well, Joseph & Potiphar's wife, etc. etc.