The Boxing of the Women
In Which The New York Times Tries To Explain Why Women Are Leaving The Church
Bit late to the blog this morning from leaving Matt off for the first day of the ACNA’s Provincial Assembly, and the general effort of gathering my wits. If you are of an Anglican persuasion, you might be joining me in spending too much time on Twitter today, hoping for tidbits of news. The hashtag Stand Firm is using, in case you want to watch it as it goes by, is ACNAPA24, and, of course, you should follow Jeff Walton. If I hear anything interesting, I’ll probably start a chat on Substack for all you paying subscribers.
But because it’s only 9:30 in the morning and nothing, per se, has even happened, in the spirit of remembering that any organization that is not explicitly and thoughtfully reforming itself all the time will fall into decay and error, I thought it might be interesting to take a gander at this piece in the New York Times from a couple weeks ago. It’s about how young women are, in their words, “fleeing organized religion.” This, announces the writer, was “predictable.” It starts out this way:
Alexis Draut, 28, was raised Christian in Kentucky. Her parents took her and her sister to nondenominational megachurches that adhered to a lot of Baptist and Pentecostal ideals, she said. As a kid, she loved the way every service felt “like a concert,” filled with music and light, and she made loads of friends through church. She went to Berry College in rural Georgia, a place that she described as “steeped in Southern culture, where religion is incredibly important.” But even surrounded by believers as a college student, Draut began to question some of the values she was brought up with. Specifically, she took issue “with the sexism, with the purity culture, with being boxed in as a woman.” She couldn’t stomach the notion that “you only have these specific roles of childbearing, taking care of the children, cooking and being submissive to your husband,” she told me. “That was also around the time that Donald Trump was elected president,” she added. “So I didn’t want to associate with that kind of evangelicalism.”
If there is one wearying trope that has fully and finally settled itself into the American conscience, it is that Mr. Trump is a sufficient excuse to throw over all affection for the Lord Christ. No matter how often I hear it—and it is almost every day at this point—I can’t help but wonder at the majesty and purposes of God. For if it had been me, I wouldn’t have done it this way. I would not have sent one like Mr. Trump to be the catalyst to reveal the spiritual rot at the root of the American tree. I am like Job, exhausted by the constant lecturing of, in his case, his “friends,” in my case, everyone who digs deep to find their own righteousness through the easy and simple business of deciding who not to vote for.
What’s really funny, though, is the idea that any woman in these decadent and disappointing times is “boxed in” or that any Christian denomination would do that, if it even occurred to them.
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