If you are strong of stomach and not faint of heart, if you wonder why I go on as I do about “Christian” patriarchy and the evils thereof, you might want to check this out:
http://sojo.net/blogs/2012/11/09/rock-slut-vote
A Christian Men’s Defense League? Really? That seems to be a bit like having a Bully Defense League, given the tremendous inequality in society that men, particularly Anglo men, most of whom identify as Christian, benefit from.
I’ve spent years proclaiming the Biblical mandate that the Church be the one place, or, better, the first place, where distinctions of gender, race, and class are never an impediment to the full use of any man’s or any woman’s Spirit-given gifts. After all, I live in one of the primary Ground Zero areas in the U.S. of Christian Masculinism and Reformed Patriarchy; I’ve seen and experienced the worst of the worst Scriptural exegesis and practice, and I’ll forever be committed to combating it. Our local patriarchs don’t use “slut” all that often, but their sentiments seem distressingly in line with the grotesque overflow of testosterone represented above. Flowery rhetoric is as unable to disguise contempt as rose linen spray is at freshening a fouled diaper.
Of course most complementarians don’t use language like this, and for that I’m grateful. But wrong theology and worse practice leads inexorably to excesses like this. That’s what happens when the exegesis that comforts the comfortable and encourages the oppressor is taken to be the only correct, only acceptably evangelical, exegesis. Once they’ve opened the door to erroneous teaching, good-hearted complementarians must acknowledge that those who seek Scriptural validation for their worst behavior will rush through it — producing, as is the case here, vile commentary that differs only in tone and vocabulary from the message of some of their comrades.
A Church that denies women the equality Christ died and rose again to give them is a Church that views women as less-than — less worthy, less valuable, less gifted, less made in the image of Yahweh. That leads to the view that a man’s “sisters in Christ” are women first and only incidentally full members of the family of God, bound together in living out the Gospel. What’s the result? A Church weakened, disobedient, compromised, and impotent, limping along with only half of its God-given energy, trying to attract a fallen world to a Body in which one half either ignores or disdains the other.
I’ll write more — no, I’ll write forever — about this, but I’ll end with this as an antidote to the toxic words above. I pray our putatively “Christian” brothers who wrote the garbage above will understand that there’s nothing wrong with rabble-rousing and disturbing the peace of the rest of the world. But it must be for the good of the Body and come from the potency of a heart devoted to Jesus, not from the fragile potency of another organ devoted to the perpetuation of male privilege: