Four Feminisms: Atheist, Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant

Several months ago I was asked to participate in a new Patheos project: Four Feminisms. This project involves four feminist bloggers engaging in conversations on various topics. The goal is to bring feminists of various backgrounds—one atheist, one Muslim, one Catholic, and one progressive Christian—into conversation with each other. Our editor then turns these conversations into blog posts. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the process thus far! We have completed three posts: one an introduction of sources, one on sexual assault, and one on women in leadership positions. I’ll give a brief sampling of each, but I’d encourage you to peruse them all!

Introducing Four Feminisms

Samar: I’m not sure if I found feminism or if it found me, but what I do know is that my mother, a physician and active member of the Muslim community in Cincinnati had a formative impact upon on me as a child. Growing up, I both struggled with and adored the fact that my mother worked while most of my peers had stay at home mothers. … Fast forward several years and my work in anti-sexual violence advocacy, as well as my own personal journey as a woman pursuing a career, having children (especially daughters), and then subsequently becoming a single mother only further cemented the need for a feminism that helped me to navigate my own needs and life experiences as a Muslim woman.

Erin: I grew up in a small town in southeastern Kentucky. My Disciples of Christ church was progressive for that area. So I grew up pretty sheltered from the fundamentalism of that area. When I was a teenager, I would bring friends to church and they’d be like “your mom serves communion?? That is so cool.” And I was flabbergasted—I had no idea that this was not the norm. So that’s when I became a feminist. I just could not believe that all the other churches in town did not quite think women were whole people and that all of my friends had grown up thinking that’s just how things were.

Rebecca: I’d like to say, one morning I woke up from uneasy dreams and discovered I’d become a feminist (paraphrasing Kafka)—but it was a lot longer and more complex than that. Initially I bought into a lot of stereotypes about feminists, or “straw feminists”—typical when moving in more right-wing religious circles. It took a long time for me to admit that my personal discomfort with masculinity politics and narratives about the kind of being I was supposed to cultivate wasn’t just personal….it was part of a larger movement. Other women had these same thoughts and feelings! It was humbling. …

Libby Anne: … Even though I now believed that all adults were capable of making their own decisions and that men and women should be equal decision-makers in marriage, I still believed that women should stay home and care for the children while men went out and earned the money. I thought things were just naturally best that way, that’s how people were suited. This is going to sound ridiculous, but what changed is that I had to bring in extra money to supplement my husband’s income for a time, and I found that I loved working and my daughter loved daycare, and I couldn’t believe it. We were so much happier. I don’t remember when I first used the label “feminist,” because like Erin I had a lot of stereotypes, but that was really when I tied my last loose ends up.

Sexual Assault and ‘The Other Trumps in Our Lives’

Samar: … I think it’s fascinating to draw parallels between the ways in which members of the Republican Party are looking at Trump’s behaviors — are acknowledging that it’s abhorrent — yet are willing to still back him because they are evaluating that their party goals are more important. I see so many similar patterns in the ways that community leaders and members are often willing to overlook patterns of abuse due to the ‘calculations’ that they project are in the greater interest of the institution involved, or even the community itself. But it’s fascinating that this is what’s destroying his campaign. That is the irony in all of this.

Libby Anne: Samar, I’ve also seen the calculated aspect you’re talking about—when a religious leader offends, his defenders talk about the importance of his ministry, about all the souls it has won, about the importance of protecting the image of the congregation or ministry, etc.

Rebecca: I’ve seen this too. Preference for an institution over the wellbeing of an individual life is almost the norm, and as a Christian this appalls me. It’s the rationale for cover-ups of sexual assault at educational institutions—even threats of expulsion, should women report assault. The idea that the end justifies the means is theoretically denounced as utilitarian, and yet this is the principle that’s being acted on. This attitude coming from religious leaders who are involved in the pro-life movement has been especially damning, because they seem to imply that women’s rights and dignity just don’t matter compared with a theoretic pro-life principle that is laughably now represented by someone with zero respect for lives at all.

Women in Politics and Beyond

Rebecca: We were very political growing up, even though very isolated. I think it’s a familial obsession. I can’t really imagine not having an interest in the laws and culture that affect how I live, how I exercise my rights, the safety of communities and the environment. I’m not good at being an ivory-tower academic: if I study ethics, and the nature of friendship, and ecology, all that has to transfer into the way I relate to the larger culture. So being a feminist is kind of a logical outgrowth of that, because injustice towards women not only directly harms our ability to flourish; it’s, connected with so many other wrongs in our culture.

Samar: That’s fascinating to think about the role that upbringing has in making people comfortable with these complex issues of identity. Growing up, I similarly was raised in a home that was very political. Everything was political even when it wasn’t. Similar to what both of you were saying, there wasn’t a separation between my values and how I desired or wanted to live. I wanted – actually needed – the values I was learning about to be expressed in the world I lived in. I’ve never been interested in theory or ideas existing in ivory towers with no real world implication. That’s never even been an option for the kind of work I’m interested in as it relates to feminism and American Muslim communities.

Libby Anne: Even though I’m no longer an evangelical, I wonder sometimes if the emphasis on being part of the solution to the problems in politics and culture helped me as I embraced feminism upon adulthood. There was always a tension there, being told that there were these huge societal problems that we desperately needed to fix, but also that my role as a woman was in the home, raising children. There are some models within evangelicalism for female leadership, such as Deborah in the Old Testament, but those were always presented as second best to male leadership, and only to be undertaken when there were no men there to do so. That didn’t exactly mesh with my passion and drive. I never felt second best.