{"id":45666,"date":"2019-10-30T07:47:47","date_gmt":"2019-10-30T11:47:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?p=45666"},"modified":"2019-10-30T07:47:47","modified_gmt":"2019-10-30T11:47:47","slug":"pastor-finds-feminism-in-prodigal-son-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2019\/10\/pastor-finds-feminism-in-prodigal-son-story.html","title":{"rendered":"Pastor Finds Feminism in Prodigal Son Story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Earlier this month, a Tennessee pastor opined on the story of the Prodigal Son. Feminism. He found feminism in it. Seriously, what the heck<\/a>. Here is what he said in his sermon:<\/p>\n

I read the story, and there\u2019s a partner missing.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve looked at it every which way \u2014 I\u2019ve turned it sideways, and I\u2019ve looked at it backwards and read it \u2014 I mean, somewhere, there\u2019s a parent missing. You say what you want to, but mama ain\u2019t nowhere in this story.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know, she might have been getting her nails done. She might have been at the tanning bed. She might have been working out. You know, a lot of mothers today are more interested in their figure than they are their family.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a disgrace, ma\u2019am. Amen! You spend more time in the gym than you do in the kitchen, something\u2019s wrong somewhere. Oh yeah!<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know where mama was. She might have been at a women\u2019s meeting. I don\u2019t know where she went, but I know where she wasn\u2019t! She wasn\u2019t in this story!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m going to assume that he knew that there weren\u2019t nail salons, tanning beds, or gyms when the New Testament was written. Because if not, that\u2019s just a level of willful ignorance I can\u2019t deal with today.<\/p>\n

They also didn\u2019t have women\u2019s meetings. At least, not feminist<\/em> women\u2019s meetings. A lot of things were divided by gender back then, so it\u2019s entirely possible that women, for example, went to the temple separately from men, maybe during separate hours. Or through a separate gate. Or not at all, what do I know! I am not an expert on this historical period in this specific area of the world.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s talk about gender and parenting. Up until the last two centuries, women in many parts of the world often had little to do with raising their sons after they were old enough to tag after their fathers. And in the story about the Prodigal Son, both sons were fully grown\u2014old enough to leave home.<\/p>\n

The current role of mothers in our society vis a vis raising children is a new invention that is fundamentally different from most of what came before. For centuries and millennia before, women\u2019s time was taken up primarily with the running of the household. Children were around,<\/em> but mothers were not providing the sort of intensive parenting expected of mothers today. Once children were five or six, boys were expected to work with their fathers and girls were expected to assist their mothers in running the household.<\/p>\n

Before running water, electricity, and mass consumption, running a household involved far more work than it does today. Grocery shopping had to be done every day\u2014they didn\u2019t have refrigerators\u2014and laundry had to be done by hand, as did soap making, etc. In addition, households were often centers of enterprise (this includes the one in the Prodigal Son story), and this required feeding and clothing hired people as well.<\/p>\n

Take a look at Proverbs 31<\/a>. You know what\u2019s shocking about it, from a modern perspective? The only mention of the Proverbs 31 woman\u2019s children\u2014the only hint that she has children at all\u2014comes at the end, when they rise up to call her blessed. The rest of the story is about her wisdom managing the household\u2014making purchases, engaging in commerce, buying and selling land, providing food for her servants. There is not even a mention<\/em> of her engaging with her children\u2014and yet they rise up and call her blessed.<\/p>\n

Women were simply not expected to engage in the sort of intensive parenting expected of mothers in our society today. Further, once sons were old enough to be useful, they tended to assist the father in his work, rather than hanging around with the women, who were busy getting shit done\u2014and by that I mean doing all the \u201cwomen\u2019s work\u201d involved in running a household. A grown or half-grown son would have spent far more time with his father than with his mother. It\u2019s not surprising the primary character in the parable of the Prodigal Son\u2014the one who interacts with his wayward grown son\u2014is the father.<\/p>\n

Now, could the mother have been included? Sure. She would doubtless have been grief-stricken to have one of her adult sons lost to the family. Parents back then were just as attached to their children as parents today. Even if she wasn\u2019t engaged in the sort of intensive parenting we do today, the Prodigal Son\u2019s mother would have loved and cherished her son, and would have had a relationship with him. Why, then, is she absent?<\/p>\n

The story of the Prodigal Son is a parable. There\u2019s nothing in the story to suggest that Jesus was trying to make a point about those feminist Judean women who are off at the nail salon when he didn\u2019t include the mother. People get left out of parables all the time, because parables are designed to make a specific point<\/em>. There\u2019s no need to include figures that aren\u2019t needed to make that point.<\/p>\n

Parables tend to be told simply, so that the point they\u2019re making doesn\u2019t become overcomplicated. The smaller the cast of characters the better. Listeners would not have needed to be reminded of the mother\u2019s grief to understand the father\u2019s. Most people understand this. When I looked up Christian commentary on this parable, several sources said that the father was the stand-in for both<\/em> parents.<\/p>\n

If Jesus had been trying to make a point about the mother, that point wouldn\u2019t have lain undiscovered until a Tennessee pastor saw an opportunity to make a jab at the women in his congregation for getting their nails done.<\/p>\n

You know who would have really shocked our Tennessee pastor? The Proverbs 31 parent, spending all that time buying and selling and sewing and trading and engaging in commerce, to the extent that caring for her children is such an afterthought it is\u00a0not even mentioned.\u00a0<\/em>Huh! It\u2019s almost like ideas about motherhood change from time to time and we shouldn\u2019t assume our norms were true in the past! Weird how that works!<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have a <\/b>Patreon<\/b><\/a>! Please support my writing!\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Jesus had been trying to make a point about the mother, that point wouldn’t have lain undiscovered until a Tennessee pastor saw an opportunity to make a jab at the women in his congregation for getting their nails done.<\/p>\n

Click through to read more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":45858,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[978],"class_list":["post-45666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-evangelicalism-fundamentalism","tag-new-testament"],"yoast_head":"\nPastor Finds Feminism in Prodigal Son Story<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"If Jesus had been trying to make a point about the mother, that point wouldn't have lain undiscovered until a Tennessee pastor saw an opportunity to make a jab at the women in his congregation for getting their nails done.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2019\/10\/pastor-finds-feminism-in-prodigal-son-story.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pastor Finds Feminism in Prodigal Son Story\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"If Jesus had been trying to make a point about the mother, that point wouldn't have lain undiscovered until a Tennessee pastor saw an opportunity to make a jab at the women in his congregation for getting their nails done.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2019\/10\/pastor-finds-feminism-in-prodigal-son-story.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Love, Joy, Feminism\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-10-30T11:47:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/166\/2019\/10\/merciful-father-2629952_1920.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"576\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"768\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Libby Anne\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Libby Anne\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2019\/10\/pastor-finds-feminism-in-prodigal-son-story.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2019\/10\/pastor-finds-feminism-in-prodigal-son-story.html\",\"name\":\"Pastor Finds Feminism in Prodigal Son Story\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2019-10-30T11:47:47+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-10-30T11:47:47+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#\/schema\/person\/fae465c1bbb5cbdf26c9e73bfd1b73d2\"},\"description\":\"If Jesus had been trying to make a point about the mother, that point wouldn't have lain undiscovered until a Tennessee pastor saw an opportunity to make a jab at the women in his congregation for getting their nails done.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2019\/10\/pastor-finds-feminism-in-prodigal-son-story.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2019\/10\/pastor-finds-feminism-in-prodigal-son-story.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2019\/10\/pastor-finds-feminism-in-prodigal-son-story.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Pastor Finds Feminism in Prodigal Son Story\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/\",\"name\":\"Love, Joy, Feminism\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/#\/schema\/person\/fae465c1bbb5cbdf26c9e73bfd1b73d2\",\"name\":\"Libby Anne\",\"description\":\"Libby Anne grew up in a large evangelical homeschool family highly involved in the Christian Right. 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