Anglican Tipping Points

Wither Shall We Go, ACNA? To the Lord? Or Into the Howling Wilderness of Self-Actualization?

it may be Noah wheeling his wife into the Ark - 1899 The Grotesque In Art

How did the State of the Union go? Didn’t stay up and have yet to scroll through all the clips online. Was too busy gawking at a lot of insane Candace stuff. Also, my youngest child decided to drop everything and knit a sweater, which none of us have ever done before. It came out twice the size indicated on the pattern, so that was exciting. Still no baby.

While I was casting about for novel and interesting subjects to write about, Whistleblower over on X posted about the same thing we’ve been talking about for almost two weeks now. Here is what he posted:

EXCLUSIVE: Andrew Bauman isn’t the only one accusing you of ABUSE if you oppose WO. “Mtr Heather Matthews” [sic], an “Imago Dei” panelist, says “any belief” that restricts women from ministry is sexist. So @the_ACNA‘s event WAS intended to advance the premise of Bauman’s book.

Heather Matthews is featured on the poster for the event that so many of you have signed up to attend tomorrow:

So I clicked through to a site called CEB International, to an article by Matthews called “Sexism,” Not “Theological Differences.” Let’s take a gander at some of the bits. It starts out this way:

On Sept. 23, 2024, the New York Times published an article that reported, “For the first time in modern American history, young men are now more religious than their female peers.” The article cites a study by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute. According to this study, 65 percent of young women do not believe that women are treated equally in the church. The article states, “For girls and young women raised to believe they can do anything men can do, this message is becoming more difficult to digest.” As a result, in recent years many young women have left the church and many are not coming back.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, because it seems to me that while one can be grateful that young men are coming to church in record numbers, it is, nevertheless a great tragedy that young women would leave, or never try it at all. After decades of complaints that the church feels too “feminine,” that there is too much lace and too much gossip, suddenly the script has flipped and now women find it too male-dominated. How did it come to this? Matthews goes on, through this piece, to craft an explanatory narrative from one increasingly outdated and narrow perspective. It is because of “the patriarchy,” full stop. No other factors may be considered:

The article continues, “For most young women who leave it’s not about any one issue . . . Rather it was a steady accumulation of negative experiences and dissonant teachings that made it difficult or impossible to stay.” With this article, the secular news media is picking up on a phenomenon that is no secret to women: The church is a place where sexism exists, even thrives.

The only way to make such a claim is to change the definition of sexism. If sexism means the mistreatment of women, then the church is manifestly not a place where that is occurring. The church, down the ages, has not been a place characterized by the abuse and mistreatment of women. On the contrary, feminine piety has been the mainstay of the Kingdom of God since the very moment Jesus first tied on his earthly sandals, if not before. The church has always been a place of solace, of comfort, of hope, of care and protection for women. When the terrors of war, illness, and economic ruin tore away their husbands, fathers, and sons, women could go to the church and find that God heard their complaint, that he provided for their needs, that they were welcomed as children whom he loved.

But then, of course, the lie that women could not be whole and loved unless they were “equal” to men took over secular society. It wasn’t a hard lie to embrace when work itself had been so profoundly corrupted through industrialism, and then identity and family affection unraveled through the sexual “revolution.” When the “problem” of women’s fertility was finally “solved” by first the pill and then by abortion, there was really nothing left. The church stood by flapping uselessly on the margins, trying to interest lonely and embittered people in a God that almost no one remembered. Meanwhile women learned to adjust themselves to the angular world of men.

For women who have been formed and shaped spiritually by the world, when they do come to church, they are horrified to discover that assumptions of secularism conflict almost totally with the principles of the Kingdom of God. It should be no surprise that many of them would find their only sense of meaning, identity, or purpose in the pulpit and behind the altar and be aggrieved to have to encounter anyone—man or women—who disagrees with them.

All of this history is available to consider in many and sundry places, and I continue to be frustrated that so many within the ACNA are not privy to it. Whole dioceses have embraced the explanatory narratives offered them by the secular press and the academy. Which is to say that Matthews in this piece, without any question, embraces the redefinition of the word “sexism:”

While in the past women might have ignored these negative experiences, women today label them as sexism, no longer willing to tolerate the blatant disrespect, inequality, and abuse that are commonplace in many churches.

I can only speak from my own experience, but “blatant disrespect” is the predominate posture of both men and women in modern society. A lot of women, in my experience, are blatantly disrespectful to the men in their lives, and don’t even see it. Likewise, men are often torturously disrespectful to women.

Nevertheless, I don’t trust that every person who thinks she has been disrespected actually has been. Such a claim, lumped in next to “abuse” is far too subjective to be accepted on it’s face. Next to disrespect, Matthews puts “inequality.” The question has to be asked. Why does she expect that “equality” is necessarily a good?

In times past, people intuitively understood that inequality was the birthing ground of honor. Respect and honor were taught and practiced beginning in early childhood when it was assumed that the child owed respect to her elders. Showing honor both to one’s social superiors, and to one’s social inferiors created a sort of tapestry of social integration. In Christian terms, respect is the ground, the bedrock of amicability and kindness. It is accomplished as each member incorporate counts every other member incorporate not as an equal, but as more significant than themselves. By contrast, the product of “equality” in modern anti-culture is blatant disrespect.

When a woman comes along and demands “equality,” she is trading away the ancient magic of deference, respect, and honor due her by men for the experience of being treated as “equal.” And, wouldn’t you know it, she doesn’t enjoy the experience. She still wants the deference, because equality, especially when you grasp it, is excessively lame and unpleasant.