Using ‘unity’ and the adjective ‘Christ-like’ to defend injustice is not Christ-like and does not promote unity

Using ‘unity’ and the adjective ‘Christ-like’ to defend injustice is not Christ-like and does not promote unity November 14, 2013

Are Christian conferences sexist?” Jonathan Merritt asks.

Short answer: Yes. They are models of male domination and they are modeled on male domination.

Merritt looks at 34 of the larger white evangelical Christian conferences here in the U.S. and finds that they featured 805 speakers — with only 159 of those being women. “By my count, that’s around 19 percent female speaker representation at these major Christian conferences.”

It’s actually worse than it looks there, because Merritt’s list includes the Wild Goose Festival — a progressive gathering featuring mostly the sorts of people that white evangelical gatekeepers insist no longer be allowed full membership in the evangelical tribe. Take Wild Goose out of the mix and you’re looking at 731 total speakers, with only 115 women — an even more dismaying 16 percent.

Yesterday’s grotesquely comic flameout by Leadership Network conference organizer Todd Rhoades produced at least one happy consequence — it brought Natalie Burris back to her blog to write about “Systems and privilege redux: U.S. Christian conferences.” Burris patiently addresses a few of the most commonly heard defenses of this pervasive male domination in the church:

While many of the responses to Evans’ and Merritt’s critiques were derailing, silencing, and downright condescending, one type of response in particular caught my attention because I believe it’s instructive with regard to systems and privilege. Many were quick to point out that conference planners are well-meaning people and don’t intend to specifically exclude women. A common refrain was that critics don’t really know what goes on behind the scenes in choosing speakers.

This appeal to good intentions and the conference organizers’ well-meaning (but feckless) attempts to do better than they ever manage to actually do might be called the Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game response. Burris notes that as long as the player is still complacently playing the game, the player is part of the problem:

Systems tend to be affected by inertia. Most systems, by their very design, are resistant to changes to their usual state. It is exceedingly difficult to push against the norms inside the system. The system itself does the work for the privileged individual.

Here, the U.S. Christian conferences system works in such a way that the system discriminates on behalf of its individual members against women, LGBTQ people, and people of color, while favoring white, straight men. The individuals themselves (i.e. the conference planners) do not have to be racist or sexist in order to perpetuate inequality. In fact, most participants in a system would vehemently deny that they intend to focus exclusively on white, straight men. One does not have to be a blatant racist, sexist, or homophobe to organize a conference consisting almost exclusively of white, straight, men – the system works it out for you.

This is very similar to what Todd Rhoades said yesterday in his own devastating critique of the Leadership Network’s process. The main difference is that Burris, unlike Rhoades, realizes that it’s a critique.

Writing for Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics blog, Halee Gray Scott doesn’t wield the same tools of systemic critique that Burris uses so well, but her post on “The Church’s Missing Half” arrives at a similar conclusion about how the inertia of an unjust status quo damages the church:

Beyond the question of why this underrepresentation continues to occur, we must also ask the greater question of what we’re missing when we exclude women (and minorities, for that matter). …

A failure to proportionately and adequately represent women is a failure to steward the giftedness of half the individuals in our midst. The spiritual gifts are not gendered. The genesis of leadership is grounded in the spiritual gifts, which are freely given by God without respect to gender, race, or social class. When we don’t showcase enough women’s gifts and voices within the body, we fail to steward the corporate giftedness entrusted to us. Like the unfaithful servant, we bury the one talent entrusted to us. How would the church account for a similar stewardship of financial resources, that half of the resources were burned away?

Scott also makes a good point here:

The myth that no women can lead has been replaced by the myth that only exceptional women can lead, and the rest are left wondering, “What can God do through my life?”

The really skeevy aspect of the whole conversation around the dismal lack of women at Leadership Network conferences, though, has to do with what Burris described as the “derailing, silencing, and downright condescending” defenses of the inert and unjust status quo. This silencing is creepiest when it’s cloaked in pious language and sanctimonious appeals to a “Christlike” meekness and to Christian “unity.”

It seems it’s always those who are being excluded and subjugated who are asked to imitate the meekness of Christ. Those who benefit from unfair systems are never similarly challenged to do so — they’re free to go on imitating Pilate. And it seems that those who wish to challenge injustice are always the ones being criticized for threatening Christian “unity” — as though an unjust status quo and unity were the same thing.

Rachel Held Evans addressed this yesterday in a thoughtful post “On being ‘divisive’“:

Far too often, the “stop-being-so-divisive” line is used by those in power to diffuse, or even silence, difficult conversations about why things might need to change.

A disgracefully divisive display of disunity in Prague, 1989.

In fact, I know from speaking with several survivors that in some extreme cases, this same rationale — “You don’t want to cause division in our church, do you?” — has been used to discourage victims of abuse from reporting their abuse to the authorities.

One of the easiest ways to discredit another Christian is to label their questions,  concerns, or calls for justice as too “divisive.”

Obviously, there are issues of privilege at play here. Because the reality is, some folks benefit from the status quo, and it is in their best interest to characterize every challenge to the status quo as wholly negative and a threat to Christian unity. This makes it difficult for those who perceive inequity within the status quo to challenge it without being labeled as troublemakers out to make Jesus look bad.

In other words, the advantage goes to the powerful because things rarely change without friction. And if friction is equated with divisiveness, then the powerful can appeal to Christ’s call for unity as a way of silencing critics. This was an effective strategy for white clergy who opposed Civil Rights.

She’s also got some smart things to say about being “told that women shouldn’t use social media to advocate for gender equality in the church, but should instead do so quietly within their own congregations.” Yeah, because all decisions about who is seated at the table of power must be made by those with a seat at the table. Any conversation other than the official conversation occurring between the officials with official seats at the official table is thus, by definition, “divisive.”

Replace the word “divisive” there with the word “subversive,” and that’s actually true. Which is why these men are so terrified of women talking to other women on social media.

And it’s also why you won’t find real “leaders” in those official seats at the official table. Preserving privilege isn’t leadership. Nor is it “Christ-like.” Nor is it “unity.”


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