Sometimes when it’s raining and the sun is shining you'll hear people describe it as "the devil beating his wife." This is a weird aphorism. But the idea is that rain when the sun is shining is unexpected and rare. Which means we can infer that it is unexpected and rare when the devil beats his wife. The saying is so old that what’s right and wrong have flip-flopped. Back in the day, God-fearing men beat their wives all the time. Only a bad man, or the literal Devil, would fail to participate in the practice.
I’d rather be hit very rarely by someone who hates me than hit all the time by someone who loves me, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this. And yet, somehow we don’t have a 2,000-year-old thriving women-led Satanic church.
Instead we have dudes continuing to insist that whatever they want to do is what God wants, and women should just be happy doing the scut work. The Southern Baptists have yet again made it super-duper wrong for women to be pastors. The New York Times reports: “Delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in New Orleans approved an amendment to their constitution that their churches must have ‘only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.’”
I checked my Bible, and it still says that after the Resurrection, Jesus appeared before Mary Magdalene and told her to go tell the disciples what Jesus said, which makes it continually surprising that women still aren’t allowed by most of Christianity to go tell people what Jesus said.
That’s not the funniest part, though. The funniest part is Pastor Scott Brown, head of the First Baptist Church of Bullard, Texas, being cursed with a flicker of awareness of how women might feel rejected by the church. Brown says: “I thank the Lord for women in our churches. Because a lot of churches would not survive if it were not for women serving, teaching classes, and being on committees. But we believe as Southern Baptists wholeheartedly that the pastor of the church, the one who declares the gospel from the pulpit and shepherds the people, ought to be a man based on our belief of Scripture.”
Ah yes, the old Sunday School gambit. Women should be satisfied helping kindergarteners glue cotton balls to cardboard lambs while men talk to God.
No, no, I take it back. It is very funny to hear pastors straight-up admitting that churches can’t function without women, while still claiming that men have to be in charge.
But it’s not the funniest thing. The funniest thing would have to be these men arguing about how necessary it is for them to be leaders — because they’re the ones God wants in charge — while they’re wrestling with what their leadership brings, which is apparently a lot of child sexual abuse and the sexual abuse of women.
Sure, Baptist women can submit to male authority, but to what benefit? Seeing the rapes of their children go unaddressed? Obviously, this is a problem larger than the Southern Baptist Church. Men throughout our society want to be given authority over women and children, but they suck at wielding it. And yet they want us to go ahead and submit before they know what they’re doing or what they want. They’ll learn on our backs. Ask anyone who's into sexual power play and they’ll tell you the surest way for people to get genuinely hurt and traumatized during a session is for the person wielding the whip to be just trying shit out to see what happens. Authority without experience and thoughtfulness is damaging to the people under it and the people exercising it.
My middle name is Teckla. My parents named me after my mom’s grandmother, and they assumed the name was Swedish. Thecla is actually the name of an early Christian woman. To make a long story short, Thecla heard Paul preaching, was like, "Yep, this sounds right, I’m a Christian." Then she refused to marry the dude her parents wanted her to marry, because he wasn’t a Christian. She went around with Paul preaching and then baptized herself in a pool of killer seals. Modern-day Christians are out here debating whether to do infant baptisms or if the baptism should be by sprinkle or by dunking, and back in Thecla’s day it was, “Do you want the pool with the killer seals or no?” Then she went off to live in a cave.
Since the early days of the Christian church, men have been pointing to Paul, saying Paul says women need to shut up and not preach — and women have been asking why, then, didn’t he ever condemn Thecla for preaching in public? Why did he let her travel with him?
The story of Thecla and Paul was so popular and resonated with so many Christians that Thecla was very early on made a saint. Whole movements and religious communities sprang up in devotion to her. Still, she has remained a pain in the ass for male leadership in the church. If Paul says only men can preach, then why was Paul mentoring Thecla in how to be a preacher? For almost 2,000 years the church has been trying to figure out how to harness and benefit from the excitement and energy women preachers bring to the church without actually having to acknowledge us as preachers.
In 1969, the Roman Catholic Church demoted her. Sure, she was still a saint, but her feast day (Sept. 23) was removed from the church calendar (among others). Orthodox Christians still fully venerate her. Protestant Christians mostly don’t know of her at all.
Josh Ritter has a song about the fraught place of women in Christianity, “Girl in the War.” The conceit is that Peter, Jesus’ disciple who was the foundation upon which the Christian church was built, and Paul, who was the early church leader most responsible for the spread of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean world, are discussing the price of how they’ve chosen to shape the church. The song starts, “Peter said to Paul, ‘You know, all those words we wrote are just the rules of the game and the rules are the first to go.’” Then Peter says, “I got a girl in the war, man, I wonder what it is we done.” In other words, Peter and Paul set up a system that hurts people Peter cares about, and Peter wonders if what they did was right. Paul tells him to just buck up and commit himself to a vision of God that isn’t the peaceful guy Peter knew, but is instead a monster who will harm him if he doesn’t go along with the game.
It makes me cry just to think about it.
Anyway, long column short, Southern Baptist women, I am so sorry. We have a long tradition of attributing things that are self-evidently harmful to women to God and goodness (e.g., beating your wife) and things that are self-evidently good for women to the devil (e.g., not being beaten by your husband). Then times change and we pretend like we were always on the side of not harming women, though we rarely were. I know this is painful. It’s been painful to watch. But you’re not alone, and you’ve never been alone. You stand in a long tradition, from Mary Magdalene preaching, “Hey, everyone, let me tell you what Jesus just told me!” on down. Unfortunately, you also stand in the long tradition of refusal of church leaders to recognize that leadership.
As Josh Ritter asks in another song, “What kind of god would ever keep a girl from getting what she needs?” The girl in the song says, “If you want to see a miracle, watch me get down.”
Baptist women, if the miracle of you won’t be recognized by your fellow Baptists, come hang with us. We are out here, already dancing, and we are waiting to see what happens when we watch you get down.
