Saying The F-word In Church

I want to highlight an exciting event this week in part of the evangelical Christian blogosphere: the Feminisms Fest series hosted by Danielle at From Two to One, Preston Yancey, and J.R. Goudeau.

What makes this extraordinary is partly the substance of this conversation, but more than that it’s the location of this conversation.

This is taking place within the evangelical Christian world — a part of the church where feminism is often presumed to be a threat, an enemy, or at best a dangerously “controversial” idea. In much of the evangelical subculture, it’s not considered necessary to argue that feminism is bad, or to defend the assumption that feminism is bad, that’s just a given. In that subculture, describing an idea, or a policy, or a person as “feminist” is a form of condemnation.

And yet it’s there — within that subculture — that this Feminisms Fest conversation is taking place. That’s a beautiful thing. So is the bottom-up, not-waiting-for-permission aspect of this conversation. It only takes a spark to get a bonfire going.

This is kind of a big deal.

Here are a handful of links to some of the Feminisms Fest posts that have come through my RSS reader in the past few days. These link to dozens of others by a host of other wonderfully dangerous women writing from within and around the evangelical blogosphere. Give ’em a read.

This is good news. This is a kind of Jubilee.

• From Two to One: My Feminist Coming of Age Story

• From Two to One: Why Wouldn’t Feminism Matter?

• From Two to One: Mainstream Feminists Need Religious Feminists

• Love Is What You Do: Feminisms and Me

• Love Is What You Do: An Empowered Woman Is a Sight to Behold

• We Mixed Our Drinks: Ten years of feminism

• We Mixed Our Drinks: Feminism: what’s at stake?

• Christ and Pop Culture: The F-Word: Why Feminism Is Not the Enemy

• Unchained Faith: What Feminism Means to Me

• Unchained Faith: A gift for my children

• Unchained Faith: The Road Behind and the Road Ahead