White Lady Feminism, Christian Blogging, and the Worst of Both Possible Worlds

Meta discussions about discussions are the worst. I know. So I’m warning you ahead of time, this is kind of one of those posts. But I think there’s also something more important here, so, please, bear with me.

My hypothesis: Much of modern, online feminism suffers from the same pathologies and problematic issues that plague modern day evangelicalism.

As someone who straddles both the worlds of feminist activism and the evangelical/post-evangelical/churchy sphere, I’ve been put in a unique position of trying to work out two ideologies at once and reconcile them to each other.

When I can get the two to reconcile and work together well, I find a vibrant, healthy, awesome community of support that pushes me to be a better person while simultaneously loving me as I am. I don’t view “you can do better” and “you are a person worthy of love” as contradictory messages, due in large part to this reconciliation between two schools of thoughts previously believed disparate. There’s a lot to love in both feminism and Christian theology. The first helps me to fight for my rights, to see myself as a person, to understand the world and the socializations within which I function. The second helps me with the why of things, gives me a steady hope for deeper change, and grounds my love within a theology of community.

But, when either of these two goes wrong, they go really, really wrong. And, remarkably, I’ve noticed that they tend to go wrong in almost exactly the same ways. It’s a disturbing confluence of the problematic nature of ideology embraced above hearing opposition and it is, in many ways, a perpetuation of marginalization and oppression.

It goes like this: prominent person says something controversial or promotes a problematic idea. Criticism comes in – some just downright mean, some hard to hear, and some spot on. Flurries of typing, tweets, and comments result in a sometimes overwhelming response. People post blogs in response, in defense of, in offense of. After about a week, or maybe longer, the meta discussions begin, and almost all of them have the same tune: “We’re broken, we’re bickering, the infighting is killing us, why can’t we all just get aloooong.”

See, for example, Jill Filipovic’s response to criticism of both Sheryl Sandberg and the #femfuture report, in which she accuses critics of going forth in “kneejerk critic” mode, and admonishes them for attacking “successful feminists.”

See, for example, Matt Appling’s post in defense of Emily Wierenga after she posted an “open letter to feminist sisters” and Wierenga’s own posts portraying herself as a persecuted martyr.

Feminism, indeed, offered me affirmation of my questioning that I hadn’t found in evangelicalism. But then I started to notice the same, uncomfortable pattern. “Successful” feminists – including both male and female feminists – would respond to criticism of their movements by appealing to their marginalization, saying that “we need to present a united front! Stop dragging down successful women! No wonder we can’t get anything done.” It didn’t matter what the criticism was – legitimate or not – the criticism itself was a problem. Christians, likewise, play this card, picturing themselves a persecuted minority in a world unfriendly to Christians, and that we therefore must be united as much as possible. It feels, in many ways, like I’ve traded one bad system of thought for another.

This is a problem for feminism in the exact same way it is for evangelicalism – critiquing the tenets or the output of popular persons within the faith is infighting, bickering, failure to present a united front to The World Out There Because They Are Watching.

This rhetoric was incredibly useful for shutting up dissenters when I was a conservative Christian. After all, if I’m a perpetual witness for the faith and I’m not getting along with my Christian brothers and sisters, what impression does that leave of the faith itself? How will we get converts?

But the same thing happens in feminism – we need to be united as sisters because if we don’t, we show the world that Feminists Are Catty and Eat Their Own and Look at Those Terrible Women. If we cannot be a good witness and keep our disagreements quiet, how are we going to get converts?

It’s no coincidence that the person who first made big-f Feminism okay for me was a woman who self-describes as a “feminist evangelist.” The rhetoric of such a movement is remarkably similar to the right-wing Christian rhetoric within which I was raised – it’s all about winning people to the cause, changing hearts and minds, and presenting the best image of feminism we can.

And, in a way, I’m all for that. Making feminism palatable for people who have grown up with distaste for it is part of my motivation in blogging.

BUT, when we prioritize being witnesses for the ideology over being good feminists (or Christians), we end up in a place where we quash discourse, where the appearance of presenting a united front is more important than actually sorting out what it means to be alive. We end up prizing conversion to the ideology over and above a discussion of what that ideology looks like. We end up prioritizing the appearance of being good people over being actual good people.

And these calls for unity tend to follow lines of power. Those spouting these ideologies tend to match the status quo of capitalist power; they end up supporting (even unknowingly) white institutionalized power structures and patriarchy. These calls also tend to flatten all criticism into one furious strain, as though all people offering criticism are simply “haters.” They contain within them a sense of martyrdom, of persecution, of marginalization within a marginalized movement, despite being the one who either started the discussion or who benefits most from the promotion of existing power structures.

Take, for example, the reaction to critiques of Sheryl Sandberg’s ”Lean In” campaign. Many feminist women of color have pointed out that Sandberg’s Lean In really only works for white feminists who work well within masculinized power structures. For Latina feminists, for example, Sandberg’s advice does not quite work as it does nothing to disabuse people of stereotypes of Latina women. It is also only applicable to middle class women who have the means and access to a job that has a corporate ladder. This is an important intersectional critique, because a feminism that is only applicable to women willing to work within white male power structures is a very limited feminism.

Filipovic, however, characterizes the criticism this way:

No one would be expected to speak for all of womankind. Sheryl Sandberg could write a book about gender in the business world without facing attacks from other feminists, criticizing her for having a nanny, for talking to male CEOs more than female domestic laborers, or for not representing working-class women – the takeaway being that Sandberg isn't enough of a caretaker, and therefore not sufficiently feminine. And in a more perfect world (or movement), a feminist book written by a female domestic laborer would get as much traction as one penned by the COO of Facebook.

The solution to those imperfections, though, is not to attack the women who do succeed or stand out. That only creates a movement of knee-jerk critics, who, when presented with a piece of feminist work, engage the "find what's wrong with it" mode.

Similarly, almost any time something problematic by Mark Driscoll or John Piper gets bandied about in the evangelical/post-evangelical blogging world, we get told that we’re ignoring the good things this Man of God does in favor of nitpicking, and that we shouldn’t criticize our brothers. Criticism that is legitimate is conflated “bashing” and “divisiveness.”

The similarities between the two spheres are remarkable. The similarities also mean that a solution is similar: stop caring about unity.

A good movement isn’t built from making sure that marginalized voices wait their turn while the successful white men and women move on and through. A good space for exploring what we think isn’t built from everyone either agreeing or shutting up or even phrasing their criticism in the nicest way possible. You aren’t going to win people over simply by being nice or by getting dissenters to play nice.

Embrace the questioning, embrace the criticism, embrace the messy. The messiness of discussion in both feminism and the Church is important. It is life changing. And trying to quell that by playing the martyr or implying critics are simply jealous simply perpetuates the movements of power we claim to be fighting. Quashing criticism – especially criticism from marginalized voices – in the name of “unity” is just another way to reinforce existing kyriarchy.

Every Christian and every feminist needs to be wary of perpetuating power structures which marginalize. Every Christian and every feminist does not need to agree on every little thing – the spaces between, the gaps and disagreements: that’s where life is.

If our feminism, if our theology, is not going to be bullshit, we need to understand that disagreement, criticism, discussions, and getting called to the carpet are all part of the growing pains that will help us be better. Better as feminists, better as Christians, better as people. But only if we don't throw up our hands and cry "persecution" at the first sign of dissent.

Other People's Reasons and Our Narratives: On the Appropriation of Suicides

[trigger warning: suicidal ideation, description of suicide methods]

In October of 2010, I wanted to kill myself. I started plotting, on a daily basis, how it would happen. I’d stare up at the roof of my apartment building as I walked up the hill toward class, wondering who would spot my body first when I hanged myself using the loose wires up there. Or perhaps I would use one of those toxic bug bombs I still had on hand from when my apartment had become infested with roaches during the summer. I was living in Japan at the time and mercifully didn’t know enough Japanese to buy myself enough drugs to overdose.

2 months later, I quit my job, returned home, and began the slow road to recovery.

It was a dark, terrifying place to be. It’s not something I talk about easily or openly – few people, to this point, ever knew that this was the case and that this was the real reason I left. At the time, I said it was because I had a lack of Christian community around me, that I wasn’t getting the spiritual food I needed and it was leaving me hopeless. This was only a small part of the truth – the real problem was that I was deeply, deeply unhappy, and deeply, deeply broken. Even three years later, I can’t truly tell you what went wrong, other than a pervasive sense of being entirely unmoored from any reality I’d ever known.

I tell you this not to garner pity or to elicit sympathy for my case – I am recovered and I am in a much better place now. The fact that I can even talk openly about it is a sign of a good recovery.*

No, I tell you this because I was triggered – trigger is the only way I can describe it – by an offhand reference in a piece I read this morning, a sublimation of the story of a person who committed suicide into an anecdote about submission.

And I am furious.

Emily Wierenga wanted to talk about servanthood, submission and the feminist conflict. I understand where the piece was attempting to go. But the piece derailed for me when she chalked up her grandmother’s suicide to her grandmother’s inability to submit properly:

My dad was a pastor but when I was a little girl, the church was the only place he was a leader. At home, my mum made the rules. She told my dad when to punish us; my dad would always tell us to go to our mum when we asked for permission, and she ultimately made any decisions affecting the family.

And my dad let her. So I not only didn’t fully respect my dad growing up, because he didn’t stand up to my mum, but I didn’t really trust him to protect me. To come to my rescue if I needed him to. And when I first got married I treated my husband the same way; I bossed him around and got annoyed when he wouldn’t listen to me.

My mum’s mum was that way too. My Nanny and her husband divorced, because he couldn’t please her, and in the end, she committed suicide, because she wasn’t able to get her way and so I come from a long line of willful women.

“In the end, she committed suicide, because she wasn’t able to get her way and so I come from a long line of willful women.”

Perhaps I am too close. Perhaps the memories of lying in my bed at night imagining the different ways I could end my suffering are too stark in my mind. Perhaps those afternoons of pajama clad vegging on the sofa, being utterly and totally incapable of even getting dressed to walk to the grocery store are still too close in my memory. Perhaps I am biased. Surely, that is the pushback I will get here, for telling this part of my story – that I cannot see the forest for the trees, that I’m unable to separate one line from the thesis of the piece as a whole, that her grandma’s suicide isn’t the story she’s trying to tell.

Valid.

But consider this: whose story is it to tell when a person commits suicide? What right do we have to ascribe a meaning to their personal tragedy?

Surely, the appropriation of another person’s story – especially to support a point about selfish willfulness – has to be considered, has to be weighed, and has to be understood. Surely, this distilling of a person’s story – complex, multi-faceted, and ultimately tragic – into one line is a microcosm of everything wrong with how we tell, appropriate and understand each other as people, as complex human beings, as sisters in Christ. Surely, we need to discuss how we talk about and handle suicide and depression.

I cannot begin to imagine how Wierenga’s grandmother felt in her final days. I didn’t know her, and I don’t know her story. But as a person who has been in that dark place, and who managed to get out by the skin of her teeth, it horrifies me to think that someone would use my story to malign me, to paint me as someone who “couldn’t get my own way,” to pretend to understand all the reasons that go into such decisions and such thoughts – reasons I still don’t fully understand myself.

This one line matters because this woman’s story matters. We can talk about the abuse apologism (reflective of John Piper’s “enduring wife” ideas) and the idea of servanthood until we’re blue in the face, but if we’re not willing to honor another person’s story, if we’re not willing to give tragedy the weight that tragedy demands, if we are not willing to see others as human beings and their stories as valid stories that cannot be boiled down to one sentence, then we have failed – miserably – in our duty to be like Christ. When we appropriate another person’s tragedy to build our personal thesis and ascribe our reasons to their actions rather than listening to the stories themselves, we are doing a disservice to our church family.

I will not stand by and watch people who claim the name of Christ shame those who contemplated or committed suicide. I will not be silent in the face of those who would call suicidal people selfish. Because my story, this grandmother’s story, and the stories of countless other people, matter. They are complex, they are human, and they are not ours to play with.

_______________

*If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts and depression, please get help. Here’s a hotline or chat-line you can use.

Carrying the Banner: In Which I Am Brutually Honest

The Church of the Spilled Blood - St. Petersburg

[Trigger warnings: depression, potentially triggering discussion of food, child abuse, corruption]

Working in social justice and feminism can be a bad place to be if you are prone to depression. I’ve learned the gospel of self-care over the past couple of years as an effort to keep myself from slipping into depressive funks that make it hard for me to think or write or do pretty much anything. I’ve written previously about my anxiety issues and their relationship to my need for birth control, but anxiety, unfortunately, is often coupled with depression.

My depression is not at a point where I need medication. This is not the case for everyone who suffers from depression, and I appreciate the good that medication has done for my friends.

I do have to steel myself some days and decide that I won’t be involved in certain discussions because simply dealing with the response takes everything out of me and takes all the wind out of my sails. Working in the social justice realm is hard, taxing, emotional work. Empathy can be incredibly draining and this work often has a high rate of burnout. This post is not a confession of that – I’m actually doing quite well – but rather an opportunity to talk about why this work becomes so taxing and emotionally draining. I also want to offer my solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the fight who are dealing with much worse hardships than I – in the face of the systemic and systematic institutional problems, this work often drains every emotional reserve we have and my fellow fighters have all my love and grace and I hope they remember and know that self-care is necessary.

Here’s why this sort of thing is so emotionally taxing.

I don’t pay a lot of attention to how the Reformed Christian blogging world works or how it connects back to churches. I take ideas as they come, challenge them, and respond as I can and am able. I am much more concerned with advocating for rape victims and empowering women on an individual, personal level than I am with grasping the entire narrative of the institution. Don’t get me wrong here – I am interested in the institutional and systemic injustices and involve myself in rebuking institutions insofar as I see the effects of institutionalized injustice. But studying the functions of the institution itself takes more energy and time than I can often muster.

Looking at the institutional corruption drains me of all activist energy I would have. So I concentrate on empowerment, on helping women find the words they need to understand themselves and to place themselves in context. I understand the institution insofar as it provides context, but part of the brilliance of the institutional injustice is that it is so large, so unwieldy, so incredible that looking at it, to me, is the emotional equivalent of looking at the sun. I can’t do it for too long or I am blinded.

This all shifted with Tim Challies’ post about SGM a couple weeks ago. I knew there was an institutional background that made his post even more hurtful than what it was on the surface, so I started digging. I’ve only scratched the surface, but the mass of money and financial investment SGM has in keeping these events quiet extends well beyond SGM. Tim Challies himself has a business relationship that stands to make money off of SGM continuing to have a good reputation. John Piper and Al Mohler have been either silent or actively throwing their support behind SGM’s efforts, likely because of business relationships. The Gospel Coalition has several SGM people on their board.

It feels like I’m a conspiracy theorist, like I should be writing for The Smoking Gun and appearing in an episode of X Files.

But it’s not. It’s all very real, and it’s all very disheartening.

Ignorance I can handle. Ignorance has the ability to change. Ignorance can be dispelled with the tools at my disposal  - words, a blog, the Internet, and social media. I am, after all, just a writer in Chicago, IL, sitting at my desk with a cat on my knee. Words are what I have.

But malevolent corruption? The voice that says “I know this is bad, but I don’t care because it benefits me”? The institutional protection that says vested financial interests are more important than the lives of children?

That terrifies me. That drags me into despair. That makes it hard for me to even think about cooking myself a meal.

Such is the enormity of the problem before us.

I have come to expect this large scale corruption from such entities as banks and large corporations. I have been primed for those narratives ever since Michael Douglas intoned that “greed is good” in the early 90s. The devil in the marketplace is less enormous. It is expected, and smaller.

The corruption that has caused men of God to ignore abuse, to ignore the cries of children, to claim secular authority and laws as their guides and protectors? The corruption that leads men to “protect their ministry,” even at the cost of children they are supposed to be protecting? The devil of the marketplace that tempts ministers of God to abandon their flock even while they claim they are fighting for their flock’s protection?

I’m floored by it. I cannot comprehend it. I cannot move past it. I cannot align myself with an institutional church because of it.*

But this is why I am a Christian feminist. Not simply because I was raised in the church, but because I believe in the holy justice of God. There are writers and advocates better equipped than I to discuss these institutional issues – men and women to take up the torch when I stumble, world-weary from the exhaustion and the enormity of the journey before me. Men and women taking on States, institutions, and devils in their own worlds. Men and women who bravely speak up when I – even I, who is never at a loss for words – lose my voice.

This is the church I know. The church that preaches justice for the marginalized. The church that does not let anyone fall behind. The church that pushes us to be better people but that understands the enormity of the takes before us. This is the image of God that carries me through the rough patches and the hard times – the Trinitarian God of love who is community in Themselves, the God in whose image we are made. We, the church, are the Imago Dei. We, the people, are his banner carriers. And when one of us falls, someone else will carry the banner while others help the fallen.

Institutions, principalities, powers of darkness fall before us, even as we scrabble for a foothold. Even when these institutions are the church itself. Iconoclasts all, we proclaim justice, enact mercy, and fiercely defend those trampled by the institution. This, this, is the image of God. This, this, is the glory.

_____________________

*My day job is with a large Reformed denomination that is, to my knowledge, not associated with Piper’s denomination. To be clear – I do not work for the same organization. And I need to eat. [To reiterate: I do not speak for my company in any capacity].