You can imagine the internal contradictions and personal dilemma that emerged when the brutal facts of racism, poverty, and war intruded upon my consciousness and began to make cracks in my comfortable and secure worldview. Becoming sensitized to a new view of reality, a different picture of the world, was a deeply personal experience for me and others like me as we struggled to repudiate our past and join “the other side.” We began to recognize our own class, race, and nation as the oppressor while finding the oppressed to be poor, non-white, and outside of the American Way of Life. Thus, in the youthful stages of our rebellion, we tried to forget who we were and saw ourselves as defending the cause of the poor, the blacks, the Vietnamese.
However, it was not until we began to see “their” struggle for freedom and liberation as “our” struggle also, not just the battle for someone else’s rights, that we began to understand the meaning of liberation. As long as I was struggling only on behalf of another without seeing that struggle as integrally related to my own freedom, I would never experience healing and integration in my own life. The black struggle for freedom and human dignity was teaching us whites that racism had two victims: those who experienced the destructive consequences of subjugation and discrimination, and those whose lives were distorted and stripped of their own humanity by being infected with the mindset of dominance and racial privilege. Similarly, while Americans tried in vain to pound the Vietnamese into submission, one could see in our victims a sense of courage, commitment, and common spirit almost absent from a people who had come to rely upon their mechanized firepower, their frenzied consumption, their protected sense of national self-righteousness. Again the oppressed had taught the oppressor the truth about themselves, the truth about their nation.
Through all that some of us have begun to see that liberation must be on our agenda as well. That realization is quite compatible with the gospel message, which proposes that all humanity need to experience the liberation and transformation that Christ can bring. Evangelism, biblically understood, is the sharing of the good news of the gospel by those who are already experiencing its liberating power in their own lives. Someone has put it well by describing it as beggars telling other beggars where to find bread.
Unfortunately, few of us men have applied these lessons to the movement for women’s liberation and the clear implications in that for ourselves as men. The subjugation of women by men -- economically, politically, educationally, sexually, religiously, in personal and family relationships -- hardly needs any more documentation. However, whenever the facts of this history of oppression are raised, it occasions a strongly defensive male response that demonstrates how easily men are threatened by the suggestion of change in the traditional relationships between men and women. Despite liberal and radical rhetoric, this defensiveness and fear of change is characteristic of most all men regardless of their place on the political spectrum.
I am convinced that men are basically insecure in the traditional male role that is provided by our socialization as boys and men. Further, I believe this insecurity to be good and indicative of the fact that the traditional male role is inherently fragmenting, constricting, and incapable of fostering whole and integrated people. The hidden emotion, the rugged self-reliance, competitive toughness, the dominant leadership, the protected ego, the sexual prowess, and the calculating ambition of the successful male is an affront to the person and teaching of Christ. If we believe that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of God and the embodiment of a new humanity, then we must take seriously the kind of humanity he exemplified.
The New Testament records present us with a picture of Christ as one who was sensitive to and in touch with his intellectual, emotional, and physical being. He led a hard and physical life, his insight and teaching profoundly penetrated the masses of people and the intellectual climate as he swept aside the leading intellects of his day. His love and compassion for the brokenness of the world astounded those around him and resulted in a cross. He continually refused to conform to prescribed roles and patterns of relationships and contradicted the expectations of those around him. He rejected the roles of political leader and military conqueror but instead “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.” In the cross, he showed a different way -- the way of servanthood and suffering love. In the resurrection, he demonstrated the power and victory of that way.
Further, Jesus was a feminist -- that is, a person who stands for the equality of women with men, who treats women primarily as full human beings and willingly contravenes accepted social patterns and roles in doing so. The gospel accounts give no evidence of Jesus ever treating women as inferior to men, and his equal treatment of women is even more significant when seen against the severely restricted position of women in Judaism of that time.
Most contemporary pulpit preaching and theological commentary on the "place" of women in the church, family, and society fails to come to grips with Jesus’ treatment of women. His nonconformist views and practice get passed over in the hurried attempt to get to the Pauline material. Even with Paul’s teaching, clear theological statements of male-female equality (Galatians 3:28, etc.) are neglected, as is the apostle’s frequent recognition of women as leaders in the churches. Rather, the passages with instructions to specific situations in young churches are ripped from their historical and cultural contexts in an effort to invest them with universal significance and application. Also conveniently forgotten is the major leadership role that Christian women and men have played in feminist movements of the past, movements that often argued from a biblical and theological basis holding fast to the spiritual fact of men and women as equal bearers of God’s image. We easily forget how the Bible has been distorted and manipulated to serve the interests of a dominant group in justifying racism, war, and all sorts of human atrocity.
Much work is being done by evangelical feminists to expose the falsehood of the traditional arguments that maintain the inferior status of women. Some of that work is reflected in this issue of the Post American. But the real question, as always, is one of will. Are we willing, especially as men, to abandon our position of privilege and dominance over women? Are we willing to allow women the full expression and free exercise of their gifts and persons and, in the process, find a greater measure of freedom and expression for ourselves? Two Christian women I know recently went to a major evangelical seminary to make the case for a biblical feminism. Their carefully reasoned exegetical, historical, and socio/cultural arguments were met with an intense opposition that reflected the high degree of anti-intellectualism and personal insecurity that still characterizes the male leadership of the church. Christian women must daily face the insensitivity of words and attitudes of “progressive” male leaders who would refrain (at least openly) from making similar statements about racial minorities. As men, our continued blindness and open insensitivity to the oppression of women is no less sin than our participation in racist attitudes and practices. Anything less than a recognition of the full equality of women with men is an expression of our failure to comprehend the love of God and the meaning of God's creation.
I am arguing not that men “give women that which they deserve,” but that men realize that this is our struggle too. If we continue to perpetuate present patterns and attitudes, women will face a constant fight to protect their personhood and men will continue to be imprisoned in the roles that fragment our lives and rob us of much that we need to be fully human.
This must be my struggle, too, if I ever want to be freed from the fear of sharing my emotions, my fears, my tears openly with others; if I ever want to work and struggle with women on an equal basis; if I ever want to commit myself to a marriage relationship and not destroy two people in the process; if I ever want to be more than a bread-winner and a hero to my children; if I ever want to be a father who can love as much as a mother; if I ever want my son to know that he can be something more than a “ good little soldier;” if I ever want my daughter to be allowed to be all that she was meant to be; if I ever want my wife to be treated with respect; if I ever want to live where the relations between men and women aren’t so completely distorted or politicized in a way that we are all ripped apart from each other still further. Most of all, it must be my struggle if I am serious about following the one who “proclaims release to the captives” and "sets at liberty those who are oppressed."
Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.
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