The Written Word: Is it Now and Everafter?
Janet: “Because I’m a girl… doesn’t mean you can say, when I’m outraged, I talk too much...” This starts my anthem poem. It was written after years of being told I talked too much, babbled, didn’t make sense. So said husbands, male marriage therapists, my grandfather when I was the age to be married off to a dairy farmer. I think talking was a pretty good trait, I didn’t end up on a farm.
I learned that to be a good wife, I needed to hold my tongue. Then I heard the metaphorical stories and direct quotes that proved the point:
Revised Standard Version (RSV) Timothy 2:12
"I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent."
But the woman quoting Timothy, was my college educated grandmother. Everyone agreed that grandfather had the last word, but that word came after vigorous negotiation with his daughter, my brilliant aunt Thelma Eugenia, and his wife Edna Pearl! My grandmother was a woman on the farm. She knew her role and executed it with vigor. Thelma became an educator. It always surprised me when grandmother feigned meekness or lady like behavior. She was a lion and that behavior looked like selling out.
Does this go back to Eve – the one who transgressed and gave Adam a free pass for now and ever after?
I wondered how this kind of suppression relates to “rape culture,” one of the subjects we write about. How we, who are assaulted, blame ourselves. Was it the joke I told, the backless dress she wore, being a flirt, or a “prick tease,” or drinking too much, or worse, the morning walk of shame.
It took me to Katie B Edwards, a remarkable woman who studies this very thing.
Marie: For some years, I was a work-at-home mom. Still today, I deeply believe it was a great privilege to serve my family. To see my family wake up each morning, to provide the warm place they would come to after a difficult day at school or at the office. This is something I value highly. Not all biblical values need to change. However, there is an intersection where, if this picture goes slightly askew, dominance weights it too much toward one side.
A biblical worldview permeates our culture without a doubt. It stays with us the way a root fire continues after a wildfire has been extinguished. The bible supports that men are dominant, to be revered – respected.
Make it stand out
Quiet are the voices that say the man should have earned and be deserving of respect.
Quiet are the voices that say the man should be qualified to lead a family with integrity.
Decades ago, to preserve the family unit and sometimes the family fortune, marriages were arranged and strict rules were to be followed within the unit. Divorce, not acceptable, children outside of marriage, banished, and both men and women struggled within the strain. A blind eye was turned toward rape and it was thought of as something that men just had to do sometimes. Centuries later, some of those ideas and culturally accepted values still surface.
How would it be for a man to experience push back and then simply use brute strength to get a point across? Once fear is in place, it’s easier to use that repeatedly. And harder to gain legitimate respect.
Just like Janet’s grandmother, I learned about negotiation within the family. And when negotiation wasn’t enough, I kept my head down and I’d proceed quietly. We were taught that to be quiet was a good trait. Silence and sacrifice were praised. Male voices are always heard; always carry more credibility. So, what happens when this intersects with dominance, and unacceptable behaviors like violence and rape? The male voice is louder, the male voice is believed.
OSV Interviews Jamie Danielle Portwood
Programming Director Writespace Houston
OSV: Were you raised in a Christian Evangelical community?
JDP: I was raised on the fundamentalist side of the Evangelical church in many churches across the country. We went primarily to Calvary Chapel churches, but we also went to Assemblies of God and other nondenominational churches. I always say that you could be more Evangelical than I was, but you’d have to be the preacher’s kids.
OSV: According to our research, women have a distinct role in that community. What was your experience?
JDP: “Traditional” wives are upheld as the godly ideal, and the way that ideal looks is a woman who finds her greatest fulfillment in being a wife and a mother. There is a biblical order that God set up and therefore there is no arguing with it. God is the head of the husband, who is the head of the wife. She submits to him. I cannot tell you how many sermons, bible studies, and women’s conferences I have been to that taught on the theme of submission to the husband. Yet, I can say, truthfully, that I have never heard a sermon or bible study series on “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her . . .”
The churches I grew up in called it submission, but what they were teaching was subjection. I was taught that my husband had the final word, and he was taught that I was his helpmate. I existed and was created to make his life easier.
OSV: How did men act toward you as you matured in the organization?
JDP: I cannot tell you how many times I was pulled aside by youth pastors or the women they had tapped to do it because they were so “progressive” to tell me about the gift from God that my beauty was but how I needed to take the responsibility for it seriously. Boys were going to want me, so I needed to be careful, modest. I had to say no.
The first time was when I was fourteen. I had held hands with a boy and was such an innocent that I was excited a boy wanted to hold my hand. Both of us were innocent, but the youth pastor pulled me out of the group and handed me off to a woman who gave me that speech for the first time. That was not first the first youth pastor who sexualized me.
OSV: Did you experience a desire to gain experience that would lead to a leadership role in the Evangelical community? If anything, what stopped you?
JDP: I believed wholeheartedly in what I had been taught and wanted to submit. I wanted to be pleasing to God and they taught me that being submissive to my husband and submissive to the authority of the church was pleasing to God. Because of the way I looked, the way I sing, because I am educated and intelligent, I was given places of leadership on the praise team and teaching the women’s Sunday school. So, I had leadership in a way that kept me under the authority of men.
No men in the churches that I went to would have allowed me to be in a leadership position above them. That would have been ungodly, out of order.
OSV: When did it happen that women needed to be circumcised, covered, removed and silenced in any society?
JDP: That’s been going on for thousands of years. It’s only relatively recent that Western Christian women left off the covering of their hair when they were married. Those hoods they wore in the Tudor era covered the hair to preserve modesty.
As for being silenced, I feel like we are finally reaching the time when we will be heard no matter who tries to silence us.
OSV: The Old Testament is clear about the role women play in society but that wasn’t our first recorded history. In your studies, did you discover when that changed?
JDP: What is interesting is that there is no law against a woman leading in the Old Testament. In the book of Judges, in the time when a judge anointed by God ruled the Israelites, God anointed Deborah. When Isaiah was a prophet in the land, King Josiah went to the prophetess Huldah to inquire what they should do with the books of law that had been found. In Proverbs 31, the treatise on the woman you should bring home to mother, that woman conducts business, makes decisions for her household, is in charge of how her entire house is ordered.
It’s not the Old Testament that put woman in a place of subservience. It was the culture and the traditions of the time. I think the problem has been viewing the time of the patriarchs as somehow better or more holy or closer to how God created things to be. The patriarchs are examples of what not to do, not some ideal that we should aspire to.
OSV: Given the power men have over women in the religious community is assault an issue?
JDP: How can it not be when men are raised believing that women are less than and lower than they are? . Women are taught that their bodies belong to their husbands and that God requires them to submit to their husband’s “needs.”
One of the last times I was in church, I told the Southern Baptist preacher, who had just given a sermon on how God hates divorce, that he needed to make sure women understood that God would not have them stay in an abusive relationship... He said that he agreed with me but he couldn’t say everything from the pulpit. Statistics state that one in three women sitting in his pews are in abusive marriages, so maybe he needs to look again at what he had time to say from the pulpit.
OSV: Where can women go to report assault?
JDP: My ex-pastor said, “even if he were hitting you, that is not a biblical reason for divorce.” Many leaders in the conservative church espouse “stay and pray” for women in what they term “difficult” marriages, and I would call abusive.
OSV: Do you think anything is changing?
JDP: Yes. And no. There are churches that are progressive and are moving toward equality and pushing back against the Religious Right and that conservative Christianity that is the holdout against any gender equality or racial equality or LGBTQIA+ rights. In those spaces, progressive is a dirty word and is immediately judged as evil or a watered-down version of the bible.
So, it really feels as though there are church spaces that are growing and progressing toward equality and then there are the spaces that are staunch holdouts against those very things.
Thank you Jamie for your frank and open interview. We hope our readers ask themselves how to support women in their church by listening to what they have to say. We must support each other while our culture and society struggles to evolve.