Guest Post: God as an Old White Dude on Jeopardy

Amy Mitchell is a homeschooling mom blogging about church, culture, and spirituality at http://unchainedfaith.com/  In her spare time, she dabbles in cheesy fiction, which you can read at http://lovewhineandcheese.wordpress.com/

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I’ve called myself a Christian for more than twenty years.  For the better part of that, the image in my head when I thought of God looked very much like this:

[image description: a cartoon from Gary Larson's Far Side comic. God and a man are on the game show Jeopardy. God is a large, white man with a flowing beard and long white hair. God's score is 1065. The man's score is 0. The caption reads: "Yes, that's right! The answer is Wisconsin! Another 50 points for God! And ... uh-oh, looks like Norman, our current champion, hasn't even scored yet!"]

Regarding this cartoon, Gary Larson wrote,

“First, I made God look the way I think most of us are pretty sure he looks.  Secondly, I made sure he was really winning hands down.  Even if Norman had only ten points it would have meant that he beat God to the buzzer at least once, and someone would have gotten mad.”*

God didn’t start out looking that way to me.  When I was around eight years old, I began to develop a concept of God.  Somehow, I had decided that God must be more than some nebulous cloud or an energy force—God must be a Someone.  I remember sitting in my mother’s sewing room, the whir of the machine and my mother’s soft humming in the background while I stretched out on the floor reading.  I looked up from my book long enough to ask, “What’s God like?”

My mother gave some wholly unsatisfying answer about God being everywhere and in everything.  Even at that age I thought that was stupid.  I decided she must be wrong, but I filed it away for later contemplation.

By the time I was fourteen, I was attending a Presbyterian church.  Somewhere around then, God became the image above.  I’m sure this must be at least in some way due to the language used to describe God: He, Father, Lord.  I also had a sense of God as Cosmic Know-It-All, and that He was reading my every thought (often disapprovingly).

It didn’t help matters that in college, I met many people for whom that picture of God was deeply meaningful.  My roommate had never had a father in her life—she had been adopted by a single woman.  She used to refer to God as “Daddy,” and for her, the idea that God was, in some way, a replacement for the earthly father she lacked was important.  I, on the other hand, couldn’t relate to that at all, no matter how hard I tried.

For a long time, I thought of God as Someone who cared very deeply about whether or not I was committing particular sins.  He was interested in things like how much money I gave to church and what I was doing with my genitals, but He couldn’t be bothered with whether or not I was carrying out the commands for peace, justice, and love.  Partly because of that and partly because I tend toward an intellectual view of spirituality anyway, I could talk about God, but I felt very little connection.

It took involvement with a much more conservative evangelical church to jar me out of complacency.

The strange thing about it was that if I believed even half of what I heard at that church, I would have come away with an image of God that was far less grandfatherly than what Gary Larson had in mind.  Week after week, the message was, “God loves you, but he has Expectations for how you live your life—and you’re failing.”  It was a more extreme version of what I’d always heard in church.  There was the usual droning about sex and who puts what were and when and the constant finger-wagging about tithing and supporting the church’s financial needs.  On top of that, however, was an overlay about who I am as a woman and what my role should be in and out of the church.

“God is male. Jesus is male. We don’t know about the Holy Spirit, but probably male.  The Church is female.  Therefore, in a perfect parallel, God made men first and women to submit to them.”

Officially, of course, the church claimed that God wasn’t male or female.  But every last bit of the theology pertaining to women indicated otherwise.  For the first time, I began to see what was wrong with the picture of God I carried around with me.  I thought, If God is really an old, white man, then everything I hear about the limitations on women must be correct.  Since those things are not true, God can’t possibly be male.  I had already given up on a good bit of the conservative evangelical theology, so it wasn’t hard to let go of my image of God.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of guidance at church in sorting this out.  The world is wide, though, and I began to read.  I read books that didn’t include gendered pronouns for God.  I read books in which God was not staring down at me from Heaven, arms crossed and a scowl on His face, disapproving of my actions.  I “met” people online who had vastly different ideas about God than the ones I’d held for so long.

I stopped being sure there was such a thing as God.  It felt like a dark, dank cave, cold and lonely.  It was in that space that I begged God to be real again.

The very first spark of believing again came in a strange form.  I was at our local science museum with my kids, and we watched this multimedia presentation there.  In it, the museum’s paleontologist said that our region was once under a tropical sea—the evidence of which is our vast rock salt reserves.  It may not sound beautiful to you, but it absolutely amazed me.  My first thought was, How would that even be possible if not for the power of God?

We all find beauty, meaning, grace, and love in different ways.  For my daughter, it’s in the natural world and our furry, feathery, and scaly friends.  For my son it’s in music, movement, and the relationships he forms with others.  For me, it’s in the wonder of creation—all of it, from whatever started the Universe to the geological history of this planet, from the outer reaches of the galaxy to the possibility that We Are Not Alone.  Like my children, I also find holiness (and perhaps an imprint of God) in nature, art, and people.

Today, I’m not sure what my image of God is, but I know I sense God’s essence in so many things, and I believe that’s enough for now.

*Larson, Gary.  The Prehistory of the Far Side. Universal Press, 1989.

Guest Post: When God Is Man, But You Are a Woman

(My apologies for this post being a couple days late this week. There was a scheduling hiccup on my end. But this post is definitely worth the wait.)

Danielle L. Vermeer is a social impact consultant by day and blogger on the intersections of marriage, faith, and feminism by night. A Christian feminist and longtime advocate in the anti-trafficking sector, she is passionate about amplifying the voices of women and girls and sharing stories of hope and healing. She and her husband are on a journey of two becoming one and live in the Chicago suburbs with their adorable baby-dog. Connect with her at www.fromtwotoone.com or on Twitter at @fromtwotoone.

They told me that God must be a man because men are more powerful.

I was six-years-old in the middle of playing basketball in my driveway with my next door neighbors – two boys a year older than I – when they confidently asserted their theological conclusion. Frizzy-haired, lanky, and stubborn as an ox, I retorted that God isn’t a man because God isn’t a person. God is God. They scoffed at me for not knowing what I was talking about and then we proceeded to go on with our game.

They told me that God must be a man because Jesus came to Earth as a man.

Growing up in the Catholic Church, I was taught that only men could be pope and bishops and priests and deacons and even altar servers.* Contrary to the evangelical debates on women in church leadership, the Catholic Church basically taught us that since Jesus was a man, only men could represent Him on earth in the sacraments and other important functions of religious life.

They told me that God must be a man because God calls Himself Father and Jesus calls Himself Son.

In the Catholic Church, we made the sign of the cross in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, not in the name of the Mother, and the Daughter, and the Holy Spirit. In some evangelical churches I attended, contemplating the (traditionally/stereotypically) feminine characteristics of the Divine was akin to heresy. God was Father. Jesus was Son. Period. No questions asked. Since the parts of Scripture that characterized God and Jesus in more feminine terms were exceptions to the rule, the rule was upheld in a remarkably literal fashion.

They told me that God must be a man because as husband is to wife, Jesus is to His Bride the Church.

When I splintered off from the Catholic Church during my preteen and teen years, the evangelical churches and camps I attended stressed the complementary relationship between men and women. They derived much of their theology from Genesis in which God created mankind in His image, male and female He created them. And since the male was created first and the female sinned first, they contrived that the man was to be the leader and protector of the more easily-deceived woman.

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From my girlhood to my womanhood, I got the impression from both the secular world and my church traditions that all people were created equal, but men were just a bit more equal. Because if men are associated with power, salvation (Jesus), authority (God), and leadership (Church), then where does that leave me as a woman?

When they said that God must be a man because men are more powerful, they were implying that women were less powerful and inherently more vulnerable. While female people around the world are more vulnerable to abuses of power precisely because they are female, this is not a system ordained by God. Patriarchy is the not the result of men being made in the image of God, but rather of men wanting to be gods in power and authority.

When they said that God must be a man because Jesus came in male form, they were implying that the female form was not worthy of the Incarnate God. They were, of course, forgetting that Jesus incubated and was birthed through the body of a female, that God’s choice of a young, unmarried woman to bring forth the Messiah was not only a slap in the face of patriarchal norms about women, but also completely defiant of human logic.

When they said that God must be a man because God calls Himself father and Jesus calls Himself Son, they are ignoring the intensely patriarchal context of the time in which protection and inheritance passed exclusively through men. But they also are downplaying how Jesus consistently subverted the prevailing norms of the day when relating to those considered less than – women, the disabled, foreigners, children – basically anyone who who do not fit into their narrow definition of person.

When they said that God must be a man because of those verses in Genesis and Ephesians, they are literalizing metaphors – communicating truth through symbolism – that ultimately are profound mysteries to us. Paul even says so explicitly after the analogy of husbands and wives being like Christ and the Church. And as for Genesis, the Hebrew word for “female” – in some cases meaning to be perforated, punctured, bored through, or screwed – is an anatomical description from a contextualized era in which women were not considered fully human, not an ontological truth about women’s role in all places and in all times to be (passive) receivers of “something bigger than ourselves.” Elevating literal interpretations of the intended figurative translation results in false theology that says women are held accountable for their submission to their husbands while men are held accountable for their submission to God.

That’s not who I know God to be.

God is not powerful or authoritative or protective or a leader because He is like a man. God is the Father who passes on inheritance of eternal life through the Son Jesus. God is also the Mother hen who gathers her chicks under her wings.

God is all of these things and more because God is above and beyond and encompassing gender of all kinds.

Growing up, I essentially learned that if God is male, then the male is God. But as I’ve grown in wisdom and stature as a Christian and a feminist, I’ve come to rest on a profound truth: that I am made in the image of God both irrespective of and precisely because I am made female.

Guest Post: The Ever Changing Faces of God

Dani is an obsessive geek, skeptical feminist, graphic designer and struggling writer over at crooked neighbor, crooked heart.
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Trigger warning: self harm, sexual assault

"I did it to myself. Mea culpa, mea culpa."

I would rock back and forth, muttering those words to myself, scratching my arms and legs until they almost bled, eyes squeezed shut to keep out the images I'd just emblazoned into my mind.

You're a girl, I scolded myself. Girls aren't supposed to want sex. You're nothing but a filthy whore. You're robbing your husband; you'll have nothing to give him. You're disgusting and vile and worthless. Only evil women have desires like this.

You see, believing that my highest calling was to be a wife and mother, it occurred to me that I was ill-prepared for the physical intimacy that marriage entails. Since I was told that frequent good sex was something I owed my husband, and since sex is generally a taboo subject in conservative Christianity, I did what I thought was the most reasonable thing for me to do. I decided to learn about sex from the privacy of the internet so I would be prepared when I got married.

What started as an educational exercise, however, turned into something I thought was a fight for my eternal soul.

I begged God to take away my desires. I begged, pleaded, screamed, wracked my body with temporary scars and shaking sobs. And yet they remained. I hated myself. I thought this must be my thorn in the flesh, and in some moments I even hated God for making me this way if there was no release.

And God was someone who would first make me a sexual being, then condemn me for it. He gave me desires and needs without the means to fulfill them or the decency to end my suffering.

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"Your...hair...smells...good," he breathed into my ear. I'd stopped struggling — he was surprisingly strong for someone wheelchair-bound. My breast throbbed with pain as his grip tightened, my back twisted oddly as I was being pulled halfway painfully into his lap. His guardian and our professor sat across the room, talking, oblivious.

It took a long time for them to notice. Even then, my teacher did nothing — my attacker’s guardian was my salvation. As he was being pried off of my body finger by finger, he stretched to kiss me. "I don't want this to be my first kiss!" my brain screamed as I tried to twist away. He managed to plant a kiss on my jaw anyway. It occurred to me that perhaps this was God's punishment for my sexual desire — that my sexual desire made me a sexual object to be consumed against my will.

The next class, my teacher caught up with me. "So, he has wandering hands, huh? He apparently has a way with the ladies."

I was horrified. Shaken. Enraged. Confused. Terrified.

He saw...and did nothing.

And I couldn’t shake the image of God as that teacher, watching silently from across the room, doing nothing.

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I had just begun dating my husband, and I was quickly becoming terrified at his level of commitment to me. I tried to push him away as hard as I possibly could with the only thing I knew would surely be repugnant enough to open his eyes. I launched attack after attack, explaining how unlovable I was, how dirty I was, how worthless I was.

He batted it all aside with kindness. He spoke life and truth into my wilderness of self-hatred. He didn't see me as a project. He didn't see me as a collection of moral failures. He didn't even see me as an object for his pleasure. He saw me as a person, full of inherent worth. He saw me. And he loved me.

It took a long time to accept his love. But when I did, all I could think was, "This...this must be what Jesus is like. This is what people mean when they talk about a God of love. I haven't seen it before. This is grace, this is peace, this is hope, this is love. I understand now."

He was the first person for whom love did not include shaming or controlling me.

And God started to become someone I could love, trust, and believe in.

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That is...until we had sex.

"Your relationship is ungodly," my friends told me. "If he was the one God wanted for you, he wouldn't have tempted you to sin like this. The fact that you gave in to it shows you're not ready for a relationship, let alone marriage."

And I was confused, so confused. Would God really want to take away the one person who most convinced me of His goodness, simply because we made love? People kept telling me how sex before marriage could never be about love — it could only be about sinful lust and defying the work and word of God. But my experience was completely the opposite. Having sex with him had been the most loving, healing thing I had experienced in my life. And yet it was evil?

And God was someone for whom good and evil could be arbitrarily defined, no matter the consequences to His followers.

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"You do have some polycystic ovaries."

My breath caught in my chest and I stared at her, not quite ready to understand what she was saying. "You mean...you mean I have PCOS?" I somehow managed to keep my voice steady.

She didn't quite meet my gaze. "Yes. We'll continue with your birth control, and when you're ready to talk about having kids, come in and we'll see if you can."

I felt dizzy. My mind flitted back to a sermon that a trusted mentor once gave about Hannah and Elkanah. He posited that Hannah should have been content with Elkanah's love and not continued to ask God for children. That when women were barren in the Bible, it was God that had closed their wombs and they should unquestioningly accept God's judgment in their lives.

And God’s judgment seemed clear. He was holding all of my sins against me, and I was found lacking.

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After years of squelching doubts and emotions and fears, I finally began talking.

I began to tentatively share my questions, my problems, my fears with a small but growing group of people. They told me about a God who really doesn't hold past sins over our heads to beat us with. They told me about a God who understands fear, anger, pain, and doesn't shame or punish for those feelings but instead listens, loves, cherishes, and comforts. They told me about a God who isn't abusive, who isn't capricious, who isn't cruel. I hardly dared to believe them.

But there it was, that seed of hope.

And God became someone I really felt I could wrestle with, because He might really want to engage my heart and mind, no matter what that meant. Even if it meant waiting until I was ready.

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"My friend called me, wanted me to come over to see him at his house. I hung up the phone, and walked to the front door, and stopped. God wouldn't let me leave."

My head was pounding with a migraine that made lights blindingly bright, sounds unbearably loud, and made my stomach lurch. The preacher’s voice droned on, each rise and fall of his tone piercing my head. I held onto my husband for dear life, my only physical stronghold in an environment that made me taste fear.

"The Holy Spirit finally released me, and I walked over to my friend’s house to find people sitting on the front porch, crying. He just shot himself." My stomach lurched again, and I felt my husband stiffen beside me. "He'd been sitting in his room by the window with his gun, waiting for me. God worked salvation in my life that day. If I'd arrived any earlier, he could have shot me."

By the time the closing prayer had been uttered, I was being steered to our car — I was shaking uncontrollably from pain and rage, afraid I would be sick or pass out.

But as we drove away from the church building, my head eased, then stopped hurting altogether. My stomach calmed. Lights became normal, sounds became bearable.

And it hit me like a ton of bricks, how emotionally and physically toxic that environment was.

I looked at my husband and said, "I think this is our last Sunday."

His jaw was set grimly. "I wholeheartedly agree."

And for one day, I was convinced that God was not the monster that this man was preaching. I didn't know what He was exactly, but I knew more than I knew anything that He was not someone who would sacrifice life like that.

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Now? I struggle daily with my view of God. I suppose it's only natural, considering the many faces He has had in my life. I'm still sorting through them all. Some days, I don't even think He has a face. Some days, I don't think He exists — or exists in a form that isn't pure evil. 

But the struggling is worth it. Because it's finally allowed. I've seen goodness and kindness in people that makes God seem so near. I've seen interpretations of Scripture that seem like they can override the way I was taught to read and understand the Bible. I catch glimpses of a God who isn't a narcissistic sociopathic monster, and those glimpses are enough to keep me searching.

And so now, God is a mystery. But I am resting in that mystery, in the in-between of the faith of my childhood and the faith of my adulthood, waiting.

And I think He's okay with that.

Guest Post: The God Who Speaks English

Today's guest post comes from perfectnumber628. Perfectnumber628 grew up evangelical Christian in the northern US, and is now trying to move to China. She blogs at http://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/ about Christianity, feminism, Chinese, and everything else.

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I thought God was white.

Of course I didn’t actually think God was white. If someone would have asked me, “is God white?” I would have laughed and said of course not. God doesn’t have any race, because God’s not a person, obviously.

But I still subconsciously thought God was white. And American. And a lot like me.

I grew up in a white, Protestant, suburban church in the northern US. It’s a great church, but the lack of diversity seems to have given me a very skewed view of who God is. I subconsciously assumed God was like my pastors and Sunday school teachers- white, American, native speakers of English.

But everything changed when I went to China on a mission trip.

I encountered a culture totally different than anything I had ever experienced- and a God who was already alive and active in that culture. I encountered a language I couldn’t understand- and a God who was worshiped in that language by my Chinese brothers and sisters. I encountered cultural differences and misunderstandings- and a God who understood everything that I couldn’t.

But more than that, I felt like I had discovered a whole new world. China was so different that it was hard for me to even believe that both China and the US could exist at the same time. So amazing, so fascinating, that I felt I had no choice but to dedicate my life to learning the language and culture, and hopefully someday I’d go live there. (And “learning the language and culture” is exactly what I’ve been doing in the years since then.)

But how could God understand what I was feeling?

In China, I’d seen another side of God, but I still had this subconscious assumption that God was like the people at my church. People who thought it was brave of me to go on a mission trip to somewhere so weird and different. People who reacted with surprise when I told them I planned to move to China. People who, after I had learned Chinese, were astonished that it was possible for someone like me to learn Chinese. People who thought that obviously I was supposed to live in the US, and the only reason to move to China was if God forced me to go there as a missionary. People who thought the US was obviously the best country.

(And actually, for some of those descriptions, I’m not really talking about “people from my church”- I’m talking about ME.)

I thought God was a white American man, with headquarters in the US and a plan to send people out from there to the less awesome parts of the world, because apparently God’s required to love those people too, even though they’re not American. I thought God’s first language was English and he learned the other ones in school. I thought God visited all the other countries and had a good time, but spent most of his time in the US. (And like I said, all of these horrible, racist, blatantly wrong ideas were totally subconscious. I totally didn’t know I thought of God that way- until going to China changed my life.)

The truth is, my God is the God of the whole world. But subconsciously I still fear that it’s not true. I fear that God doesn’t understand- because it seems like nobody understands. Because I don’t even understand. I just know I need to go to China.

My God is the God of the whole world, with absolutely no special preference toward the white American English-speaking subculture that I come from. According to Christianity, this has to be true- but I still struggle with it. I still struggle with this image of a God stuck in a white American church.

But that fake God won’t stop me. Soon, I’m moving to China, and I expect to find God already there.

Guest Post: Poisoning the Well

Today's guest post comes from one of my favorite people, Grace. Grace is a former evangelical Christian, recovering academic, spouse to a pink-haired musician, and mama to a wise-cracking 4-year old. She's the founder of the religion and gender blog Are Women Human?, and a writer and commentator on media and culture from a black, Nigerian American, queer feminist perspective. Say hi to her on Twitter at @graceishuman. _____________

My spiritual history looks like a classic evangelical cautionary tale. I was raised in “bible-believing” churches that were extremely conservative, politically and theologically. By the time I graduated from college (a “secular” school far enough, at least, from home,) I was a political moderate and emergent-ish Christian, pretty close to universalist on the question of salvation.

A year later, my husband and I were attending mass and on our way to officially joining the Catholic Church. After a few years as devout and liberal Catholics, we both went through a period of intense spiritual doubt, triggered by becoming parents, and realized - though not quite at the same time - that we no longer believed in God at all.

To some, our story is confirmation of all they fear about “liberal theology”: that it is, as Erasmus Darwin once said of Unitarianism, a “feather-bed to catch a falling Christian.” We didn’t head down the slippery slope to apostasy so much as tumble to the bottom at breakneck speed.

From where I stand, though, this path was created not by my exposure to different Christian traditions and other faiths. It was created by the rigid, exclusionary faith I was raised with - one that left little room for growth, adaptation to new information about the world, or questioning. Underlying all this was the image of a God who demanded “love” in the form of fear and complete obedience, and whose “justice” meant harsh punishments for minor, arbitrary sins.

In retrospect, my spiritual wanderings were an attempt to make sense of the inherent contradictions in what I’d been taught about God. The more I learned about myself and others, about the world, the less I could reconcile fundamentalist claims of divine love and justice with the actions and consequences claimed in their God’s name.

I guess things began to get shaky when I started attending public school, in 9^th grade. I can already hear the knowing comments - public schools are cesspits of iniquity and lefty brainwashing, after all. But the challenge wasn’t liberal indoctrination; I was quite set in my beliefs. No, the problem was that I made friends who weren’t Christians, or the right kind of Christians, for the first time, and they were nice people. Many of them seemed to embody real kindness and love better than I or most “bible believers” I knew.

How to reconcile this with the dogma that they were all condemned to eternal torture because they believed the “wrong” thing? I couldn’t. Instead, I found comfort in a theology of salvation cobbled together from Lewis and L’Engle. A loving and just God would want salvation, not hell, for as many people as possible. He would honor a good life, lived in good faith, Christian or not.

Each successive step outside my Christian bubble chipped away at the image of God as judgmental patriarch. My very first night at college, I met someone who was openly lesbian for the first time. Much to my confusion, she was also a devout Christian. Another puzzle. I met all sorts of people I’d been taught were “worldly,” incapable of true good, enemies of the family, haters of God: Muslims, liberals, feminists, atheists…It didn’t take long to realize I had been egregiously lied to about who these people were. And it made me wonder all the more if I’d been lied to about who God was, too.

My faith looked very different by the time I finished college. I no longer believed in demons - folks who grew up Pentecostal know what a big deal this is. I was iffy on the Devil.  I was pretty sure God condemned very few people to hell. The Hitlers and Stalins of the world, sure. But everyone who wasn’t a “true” Christian? No. More than that, I was certain that love in action and treating others as I wanted to be treated were at the heart of the Gospel. And a God who wanted people to live according to this Gospel would be more concerned with whether people showed love to others than with, say, who they slept with.

In a sense, Catholicism allowed me to keep my faith for a time. It seemed to resolve the contradictions between worshipping a Christian God and my growing convictions about social justice. Whatever else one says about the Catholic Church, they have a robust, diverse social justice tradition that allows liberals and progressives to continue to call the church their spiritual home even as they disagree strongly with some of its leadership.

I ultimately left the Church, not because of any particular issue with it - though I certainly had serious disagreements on LGBT issues, and on gender justice more broadly. Rather, the birth of our daughter brought up, for both my husband and me, memories of our religious upbringing in conservative churches. We both remembered being terrified of God, terrified of hell, just terrified in general. We didn’t want that for our child. But somehow the idea of raising her to believe in a truly loving and just personal God didn’t make sense. I could no longer sustain the belief that such a God existed.

I’m not talking about scientific probabilities, though I think the odds that a personal God exists are vanishingly low. What I mean is that the God I wanted to believe in, a loving, kind God who was slow to judgment, was still haunted by the God I was taught to believe in. I couldn’t shake off the message drilled into my head as a child, that people abandon “difficult” and “challenging” faith in a divine judge because they want a God who signs off on whatever they do.

I knew, intellectually, that this wasn’t true. Neither my one-time faith as a liberal Christian nor my current agnosticism came out of a search for a philosophy that would allow me to indulge my whims. I was in search of a God who was truly love, not just the assertion of it. But the longer I tried to hold on to belief in God as Love, the more it felt like a cop out. Like I’d made for myself the kind of God I wanted.

The God I was raised to believe in was an abuser wrapped in the trappings of divinity. I couldn’t believe in him. But I couldn’t believe in a God who was anything else, either.  The faith handed down to me was a house of cards that threatened to blow over if any single tenet was less than entirely true, and its cornerstone was a poisonous image of God.

I don’t wish I hadn’t been raised Christian. This might surprise some people to hear. I wish I’d been raised with a more expansive, less fearful faith. The cramped, narrow Christianity I was raised with ended up killing my faith in God. That’s the danger in what you teach your kids about who God is: they just might believe you.

Guest Post: God in Reeboks

Through the Account and Countenance Series, I'll be featuring (via guest posts) the stories of various people and the images of God their churches left with them. Today's post comes from Sarah Moon. Sarah is a Women's and Gender Studies student and she blogs at Sarah Over The Moon. ___________

[Trigger warning: domestic violence, verbal abuse]

I’ve heard Christians say before that Jesus was just “God with sandals.” If this is true, then Jesus, for me in 2006, was an 18 year old, 6’4” football player who could bench press about 250. The Jesus of the Bible didn’t exactly line up with the God I had been raised to worship in my fundamentalist churches. Don (not his real name), on the other hand, did.

Don loved me, and he loved me like God did.

In God’s eyes, I was a worthless sinner. Any good I might do was nothing more than filthy rags to God. God’s spokesmen (Baptist church pastors, of course) were constantly reminding me of this. If I were truly humble, I’d realize the wickedness of my own heart and stop trusting myself, my emotions, my thoughts. I’d stop trying to be independent and I’d put my future in God’s loving hands.

But that God was so great, He loved me despite my worthlessness. As long as I stayed close to Him, I could have value—not in who I was, but in who He was.

Don thought the same of me. Much like God, Don saw all my sin as alike, so my tiny sins like taking a shower when Don asked me not to, or accidently drawing the attention of other men to myself were enough to make him want to spew me out of his mouth. He told me so, constantly. He told me what a whore I was, how stupid I was, how worthless, how helpless…

But Don was great. He loved me anyway. He reminded me of how grateful I should be for that—how I should never question his goodness because I deserved far worse. But if I stayed with him, I could have value.

Both had ultimate control over my life. If God (through his spokesmen) told me to do or not to do something, I didn’t get to ask why. My money, my property, my time and even my life belonged to Him. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.

Don too. He took the little bit of money that I made teaching piano lessons because I was his property and therefore it was his money too. He threw my makeup bag out of his car window when I told him I didn’t want to stop wearing the eyeliner that he thought made me look “too sexy.” He kept me on the phone for hours, even when I begged him to let me go so I could do my homework. I was his property and anything I had was his, too.

The wrath of one could send horrible diseases, car wrecks, natural disasters, and school shootings. The wrath of the other just a storm of angry words and hand-shaped bruises in places where clothes would always cover them.

One told me “Love me, or I’ll send you to be tortured for all of eternity.” The other told me “Love me, or I’ll blackmail you, yell at you, hurt you, kill you.”

This was my God and Don was just God in Reeboks.

Don was abusive. It took me several months to break up with him and several more years to fully admit the extent of the abuse.

Why was it so hard for me to admit that such an obvious case of domestic terrorism was abuse and not love?

Maybe it’s because admitting that Don was abusive and unloving meant admitting that the God I worshipped was abusive too.

I look around me, years later, and I see a Church that is terrified to look its theology in the face. I see a Church that is somehow okay with having two drastically different definitions of love—one for humans and one for God. I see a Church that holds God to a different standard than they hold human beings.

I see a Church that thinks it can do this and still speak out against abuse and to me, it will never make sense. I can no longer listen to a pastor call abusers evil and then turn around and sing a hymn to the wrathful, jealous God who can save even a helpless, hopeless, worthless wretch like me.

These dueling definitions of love have to end. God doesn’t get God’s own definition. God doesn’t get to do whatever God wants and call it love.

Reading All About Love by bell hooks has helped me expose the lie of a God (or a human) that can be both loving and abusive. In this book, hooks states that “love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of [love].” Hooks goes on to say that many of us are afraid to embrace a definition of love that does not allow abusive behavior, because confronting lovelessness is too painful.

Is that why the Church is afraid to examine the ways that our theologies let God get away with abuse? Have we so entwined love and abuse that we cannot imagine the implications of separating them? Are we afraid that holding God to the same standard of love that we would hold a human partner to will kill our faith?

Coming to a place where I admitted that the God I worshiped wasn’t a loving God was painful. Maybe even more painful than coming to a place where I admitted to myself that Don never loved me, either.

But in admitting the absence of love I’ve learned (and am still learning) to recognize true love wherever it exists.

If the Church wants to know a God who is love, the Church cannot continue to worship a God who abuses. An image of God that looks just like the Dons of the world can never teach us to love, can never be love.

Let us echo the words of bell hooks over, and over, and over as we seek the God of love.

“Love and abuse cannot coexist.”

Guest Post: Failing to Learn from History

Today's guest post comes from my friend, Heretic Husband. Heretic Husband blogs anonymously because he writes about his former church and his extended family. He lives at an undisclosed location in the Northeastern United States with his long suffering wife of eleven years, two daughters (aged four and eighteen months), and cat.  He enjoys writing stories, writing computer software, and making people laugh. Today, he bring us a post about how not listening to women can cause churches to repeat mistakes.  

When I saw that Dianna was asking for guest posts about women and theology, I almost didn’t respond.  Not because I didn’t want to write about the subject, but because I didn’t think I had much to say.

I don’t have any interest in examining the Bible’s view on women (and even if I did, bloggers like Dianna and Rachel Held Evans have done a much better job of that).  I’m not a woman, so I can’t write about personal experiences of discrimination.  For crying out loud, I’m a straight, white, married, middle class, cis gendered male.  I can even pass as Christian if need be.  I’m about as privileged as you can get.  I’ve never been discriminated against, and probably never will.

However, when I mentioned this to my wife, she thought I should definitely write a post.  She told me that people like me who are in positions of privilege need to speak out for those who are not .

Great, but that still left me without much to say.  Because, my thoughts on women and theology can be summed up thusly:

Really, this is still an issue, folks?  In 21st century America?  We’ve got a female Secretary of State, female astronauts, female CEOs, female Congresspeople, female police, female soldiers...theological equality between men and women in the church should be a no brainer.

You see?  That’s not much of a post, unless one is on Facebook.  I could condense it down to a tweet with a little effort.  I mean, I don’t even have an argument, really.  I don’t have an argument for why seat belts are a good idea, or why pizza is delicious, either.  For the same reason - I never thought I would need one.

So I’m not going to make an argument.  I’m going to tell you a part of my story (and my wife’s story).

Until recently, my wife and I attended a fairly typical evangelical church.  This church experienced many problems with its leadership, all of whom were men (except, of course, for the children’s minister).  Women in this church are allowed to fill many roles.

Just don’t ever call them leaders.

About a year ago, the church began experiencing problems with the pastors.  First, one was found to be having an affair, and upon investigation, it turned out to be his second affair.  Another was divorced by his wife.  A third was in some kind of “inappropriate relationship” with his secretary.  We were assured it wasn’t sexual.  The secretary was fired.  The pastor in question lawyered up and refused to take any responsibility.  He still has his job.

When news of the affair broke, the head pastor (not the one having the affair) told the small group leaders and their wives personally.  He also said that he was going to be very upset if anyone told him that they had seen this coming.  No one had seen this coming, he told us.  No one.

Only he was wrong, you see.  People had seen this coming.

Unfortunately, they were people with vaginas.*

There were toxic patterns evident in the church’s leadership.  This became apparent when an internal investigation team was formed to see if the pastor having the affair had had other affairs with women of the church in his past (this is what brought the previous affair to light).  The team was made up of members of the church (both men and women).

Most of the people who noticed the patterns were women.  The problem was, they didn’t feel comfortable talking to the male leadership of the church.  They were afraid of being seen as gossips or troublemakers.

I don’t claim to speak for women, but I know that I wouldn’t have had the same fears.  Most Christian men I know wouldn’t either.  That’s not a judgement on women, it’s a judgement on how men in the church treat women.

Even after multiple crises, the leadership still doesn’t see the need for change.  The head pastor did eventually invite some women to talk about the possibility of female elders, but the discussions went nowhere.  He just couldn’t see any examples of female leadership in the Bible (those were his exact words).

A church consulting firm was brought in and recommended some changes (I’m not privy to what they were, or if one of the suggestions was female leadership), and the pastors have already said that some of the suggested changes won’t be happening.

I think the leaders honestly do see the need for women to have a voice.  They just don’t know how to let them have a voice without giving them any authority.

Because that’s not possible.  But they don’t see that.

When I was a co-leader of my small group, we had a meeting about how to give women more of a voice in the small group ministry.  The entire time, we danced around the subject that no one wanted to discuss:

Why was I the co-leader of my small group?  Why wasn’t the leader’s wife the co-leader?

And why were there no small groups led by women?

The problems in this church might have happened even if women did have an equal voice.  But that’s not the point.

The point is that women need a voice.   And within a patriarchal church, the only way that can happen is if the men already in authority give it to them (unless the women seize power in a bloody coup, which probably wouldn’t be super Jesus-y).

I don’t know what it’s going to take for that to happen.  I was really hoping that the disaster at my former church would be enough.  But it wasn’t.

It’s been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Luckily, the leaders of my former church don’t need to learn from history because they think they are doing things God’s Way.  Never mind the fact that there’s been intense debate throughout history (sometimes armed debate) on what God’s Way actually is.

If I had faith, I would pray for something to happen, for God to do something.  Instead, I’m doing something about it by telling this story.  It’s a small something, to be sure.  But I don’t know what else to do.  Telling stories is what I do, and I will continue to do it.  Even if it makes some people angry.

____________

*Editor's note: not all people with vaginas are women, but in this case, specific cisgender women are being referred to.

Guest Post Over at Flyover Feminism

I have a rule – it’s not always hard and fast, but it’s a rule. No one is allowed to make fun of South Dakota unless they are from there or have lived there for an extended time. Honestly, it’s an easy state to make fun of, but if you haven’t been there except on vacation, there’s a good chance you’ll simply reinforce the idea that South Dakota is merely backwards and full of hicks, rather than actually being funny. Boasting a population barely large enough to qualify for a representative, South Dakota is best known for a giant shrine to Presidents Past, and even then, most people aren’t aware which Dakota it’s in. But those from the state know our homeland well and love it. Just as a parent is only allowed to make fun of their own child, South Dakotans are fiercely proud (and sometimes fiercely cynical) of their little state.

South Dakotan liberals are a unique, small group of people who also have a fierce state pride, though it is frequently tempered by disappointment in an ongoing conservative government. There is a sense of dread any time South Dakota ends up on the national scene, because it’s usually for some horrific miscarriage of justice performed by our government.

We know it doesn’t help our image outside the state when the only national stories are that we have a three day waiting period for abortion; that we tried to propose a law that would make it legal to kill abortion providers; and that we have tried to ban abortion wholesale not once but twice (and almost succeeded, both times). This is who our government has proclaimed us to be – indeed, members of the South Dakotan Republican party have openly stated that they want South Dakota to be the state that gets Roe v. Wade overturned.

[Read the rest over at Flyover Feminism, a new project in collaboration with Jessica Luther, Melissa McEwan, and Garland Grey.]

No Crying in the Pulpit: A Guest Post

Today's guest post comes to us from Megan at Steeples and Stilettos. Megan is the Discipleship Pastor at a multi-site congregation in Arizona. She is ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ECLA). I asked her to write about some of her experiences as a woman called to be a pastor, and here is what she had to say. ______________

I have this rule: no crying in the pulpit.

It came about while I was in college. I knew that after college I would be going to seminary and I paid close attention to how different pastors preached and taught and lead. I was collecting role models for my own ministry.

One Sunday morning at our campus church service, the preacher was sharing that enough donations had come through to fund a mission trip that was happening later that fall. As she shared this story, she cried. She was so overwhelmed by emotion that she had to stop to compose herself a few times. As I watched her, I found myself not really wanting to listen to the rest of her message. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why but I decided then and there that I would never cry in the pulpit.

So here I am, a new pastor, in a new congregation, working hard to prove that I belong there. I am the first ordained woman on pastoral staff and everyone besides my husband (also a pastor on staff) is 65 or older. In fact, the congregation is made up of mostly retired folks. I didn’t know how hard it would be to find my place.

There’s a long list of things that, perhaps naively, I never expected to encounter in my ministry. I introduce myself as Pastor Megan but I’ve been called young lady and little girl more than I can count. I once was referred to as “Mrs. Eric” by one of the volunteer secretaries as I was holding office hours. I get comments all the time about my hair, my earrings, my shoes and anything else related to my appearance. Folks with hearing aids (that sit in the far back pew) often tell me that they can’t hear me when I preach because I have such a high voice. (My speaking voice is pretty low. A soprano I am not.) The list could keep going, but I digress

One afternoon, another pastor on staff came into my office to share some advice with me. He had heard about a meeting where I had shared my call story. One of the folks at that meeting had come to him concerned that when I shared my call story, it wasn’t personal enough. They wanted more emotion I suppose instead of the facts of the story. He proceeded to tell me his call story and suggested that instead of whatever I had planned to preach on that week, that I tell my call story instead, injecting a little more emotion into it.

And while we were on the subject of preaching, I really needed to add more of my personal struggles and issues into my sermons. Didn’t I know that he and my husband were the favorite preachers around this place? They were the favorites because they shared such personal stories and as they told these stories they often would get so caught up in them that they became emotional to the point of tears. Why don’t I try that?

Why don’t I try that? Because I have a rule, no crying in the pulpit.

I don’t cry in the pulpit because I’ve come to learn that if I cry in the pulpit I am giving away my authority. Showing emotion, especially crying, is a stereotypically female behavior and is also stereotypically seen as weak. If I were to cry while preaching, I would reaffirm these notions. I wouldn’t be taken seriously as a leader or a preacher. What my colleague didn’t realize is that his biological status as a male gave him the privilege to let down his guard and show this weakness. He didn’t realize that the world of ordained leadership is still very much a man’s world. The reality is, most young, clergy women will leave the ministry within the first five years of being ordained. Why? Because everyday is a battle to prove that we belong in this profession too. Because people pay attention to our hair and our shoes more than the words coming out of our mouths. Because we constantly have to defend our calling to ministry.

I am a pastor because I am called.

I am called to do this work for all the women throughout history who felt called but were denied because their gender disqualified them from ministry.

I am called to do this work for the girls and young women who need a strong, female role model.

I am called to do this work to give voice to the others on the margins who have been silenced

I am called to do this work to help tear down the boundaries and dismantle the stereotypes so that we all might have the privilege of living into the fullness of who we were created to be.

I may not cry in the pulpit, but I will certainly cry with you when everything seems to be falling apart. I will also sing with you, laugh with you, eat with you, and pray with you as we walk together through this life of faith.

Guest Post: Queering Virginity

Today's guest post is brought to you by Grace, who blogs over at Are Women Human? Grace and I met about a year ago through both commenting at Jesus Needs New PR and I'm really grateful for her insight into the intersection between sexuality and fundamentalism and feminism.  

Trigger warning: discussions of sexual contact that may be triggering for survivors of abuse.

One problem with the evangelical concept of sexual purity that's not often discussed is the way it completely erases anyone who isn't a straight, gender conforming man or woman. It's not a problem that's restricted to talking about virginity, of course. It's pervasive in just about any conservative evangelical discussion of gender.

Take, for example, Don Miller's generic, narrow-minded stereotyping masquerading as  relationship advice and a magical formula for all "good" love stories:

1. Boy meets girl.

2. Boy falls in love with girl.

3. Girl is a bit hesitant knowing her heart is tender and could get hurt.

4. Boy proves himself strong enough to handle and defend her heart.

5. Girl trusts boy and they live happily ever after.

All love stories are different, of course, but these are central themes that weave in and out of the good ones. And if they don’t, the stories are normally tragedies.

There are a few assumptions - erroneous, as it turns out - that Miller had to make before arriving at this simplistic formula.

1) Everyone in the world is either a "boy" or a "girl."

2) All boys are attracted to girls, and exclusively to girls. All girls are attracted to boys, and exclusively boys. Everyone else either doesn't exist (cf #1), or their love stories are tragedies. Perhaps God doesn't care about them enough to want them to have non-tragic love stories.

Can I just note briefly the infantilizing nature of Miller's terms here? It's just one instance of the disturbing tendency of evangelical relationship gurus towards cutesy language that implicitly downplays the seriousness of what are ultimately weighty choices with longterm, irreversible consequences. Marriage is not for "boys" and "girls." Marriage is for grown people.

But back to the idea that everyone must either fit into the "boy" or "girl" box: as Dianna has explained before, this assumption is based on a confusion of assigned gender, usually based on anatomical sexual characteristics and externally assumed or imposed by family, medical authority, and/or society at large, with actual gender identity - i.e., our internal sense of ourselves as male, female, both, or neither. This is a cultural assumption so strong that we punish in various ways anyone whose existence or identity might make us question it: both trans* people, who identify as a gender other than what they are assigned as birth, and intersex people, whose biological sexual characteristics (e.g., genitalia, sex chromosomes, or hormones) don't fit with what's considered "normal" or expected for their assigned sex.

To accept Miller's platitudes as the basic ingredients of a "good love story" requires accepting that diversity in sex, gender, and sexuality simply don't exist. There's no place for intersex people, for trans* people, or for queer people in this model. Boys can't love boys, girls can't love girls, and there's no love to be had at all for people who aren't boys or girls.

The same problem exists with mainstream understandings of "virginity" that conservative American Protestantism pushes to the extreme of the sexual "purity" movement. As with Miller's vision of the good romance, virginity and sexual purity are constructs that really only apply to heterosexual, gender normative relationships between people with anatomically normative bodies.

This might seem obvious. The same sexual purity movement sees non-hetero sexuality as a sin. The same movement also believes that their beliefs about how gender should be assigned are divinely inspired. Therefore it's a sin to have a gender identity that doesn't match your assigned gender, and really especially sinful to take steps to bring one's physical appearance and characteristics in line with one's gender identity. Well, if you're trans, anyway. Putting on makeup and a dress to "be more feminine" is fine if your assigned and actual gender are both female. Because of course, just being perceived as your actual gender isn't enough to be a "real woman," you also have to act like a woman. Go figure!

Like I said, given that conservative Protestantism is so hostile to queer and trans people to begin with, it might seem a bit obvious that its model of virginity and sexual purity isn't really for queer or trans people. Fair enough. But I think there's more going on than just that hostility.

The thing is, the prohibition and erasure of non-normative sexualities, genders, and bodies isn't just about forbidden sex acts or identities; it's about the ways in which they undermine prescribed gender roles and expected gender performances in normative heterosexuality. Because what we think constitutes "normal [straight] sex" is very often really about what we think constitutes "normal" gender.

To get into this, I'm going to have to talk in a bit of detail about our cultural assumptions about sexual mechanics and roles and how that relates to gender. Bear with me on this. If it's a bit uncomfortable to read, for what it's worth, it was a bit uncomfortable to write!

Specifically, our concept of virginity, having it and losing it, reduces sexual acts to a moment where one person's body is penetrated by another person's body, we invest that first moment of penetration with a huge amount of meaning. Before that moment, you're a virgin. Afterwards, you're not one. That's it.

In addition to this, there's the assumption of binary, complementary, static roles in sexual contact. In that central moment, one person gives and is active, the other receives and is passive. These roles are seen as static not only within specific relationships, but across categories of people. And there's also a perceived power dynamic where being penetrated is as the weaker position, the weaker role, while penetrating someone is the stronger role and in some way an act of power over the person receiving.

Unsurprisingly, both in general understandings of virginity and in the sexual purity movement, the assumptions are that in a heterosexual relationship, the proper and natural order of things is for the man to be in the "active" role, and the woman to be in the passive, receiving role. Men are not supposed to receive. Women are not supposed to be active.

And of course, there are also assumptions here about what the bodies of the people having sex look like. Man = penis, which goes in vagina, which = woman.

Queer, trans, and intersex people screw with all of these assumptions about what bodies and sexualities are supposed to be. Men can have vaginas or genitalia that aren't easily labeled. Women can have penises, or genitalia that aren't easily labels. Men can be in the receiving role. Women can be in the active role.

And this really, really bothers a lot of people. It's reflected in the specifically sexualized ways hostility against queer, trans, and intersex people manifests. For example, our culture equates being a gay man with being weak because we implicitly, and often quite explicitly, associate gay sexuality with being in a receiving sexual role perceived as weaker. We tell jokes that are built on the assumption that having sex in a particular way is an act of humiliation.

Lesbian women, especially those whose gender expression is butch, are stereotyped as women "trying to be men" - aspiring to a higher and stronger position than where they should be. They're told that being with a "real man" would change their sexual orientation - a veiled assertion that the "right" kind of sex, which would put lesbian women back in their "proper" passive, receiving roles from men, will turn them into "real women."

Anti-trans hatred and discrimination against intersex people have similar roots in this idea that "real men" and "real women" look and act a certain way, that masculinity is superior to femininity, and that agency is masculine while passivity is feminine.

As Dianna has been explaining, these are the same assumptions underlying the purity myth. Queer, trans, and intersex people don't fit into the purity model not only because their identities are seen as sinful or anomalous, but also because their very existence overturns these hierarchies of gender and sex roles that are built in to the concept of virginity.