Why My Imago Dei Loves The Patriarchy

Is Shiela Gregoire right that functional marriages are necessarily egalitarian?

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Today I want to take up my keyboard and briefly consider Shiela Wray Gregoire’s allegation (is that the word I want?) that those who say they believe in “hierarchical” (her word) relationships, but nevertheless have good and happy times together, are, in fact, functionally non-hierarchical. To put it another way, she says that the degree to which any relationship is healthy and functional, it is necessarily non-hierarchical. The words she’s trying to avoid using are “complementarian” and “egalitarian.” She makes this claim in chapter six of She Deserves Better, but I’ve heard that she’s made it in other places as well.

I have, as you can imagine, some thoughts about this. I can’t possibly put all of them into a single blog post, so I will try to limit myself to three of the many that I have. Perhaps another time I will be able to put down a few more.

The first thought is that I don’t think Gregoire is trying to be bad. Looking at the lay of the land, she is trying to interpret the data to the best of her ability. The problem for almost all people pondering the divide between those who say that men and women “complement” each other but are different, even “hierarchically different,” and those who say that men and women are ontologically the same and therefore equal and must therefore access the same roles and responsibilities, is that they—and by they, I mean we—are living in a technological and plastic world.

All of us, no matter where we land on the issue, are surviving on the vague cultural memory of a time when men and women were functionally quite different from each other. Women, in the past, could not live as though they were men. They couldn’t have the same jobs or wear the same clothes. This was not because of the boogyman “patriarchy” but because their biology really did “determine” their lives. They would have babies if they had sex with men. That was a thing that could happen. Now they can have sex without having babies, and so there is really nothing essential to distinguish them from men (I mean, I think there are a few things, but functionally, those things are increasingly culturally meaningless).

We—even if we completely disagree with each other about this—are all being spiritually sustained upon the vaporous memories of the past. How one tells the story of the past shapes how one makes sense of the present. Gregoire, and others who think the “hierarchy” should be pitched in the river, are doing the best they can with their ideological limitations. They are, it seems to me, idealists. Misunderstanding the past, they think the present can be made into something new.

Whereas, from my point of view, “complementarians”—people who admit that men and women are not the same and that hierarchies exist everywhere (even when you pretend they don’t) and are not necessarily bad—are living in reality and are, in a good way, not devoting themselves to the futility of a potential, if you just work harder, if you just press further, just over the horizon, utopia. The fraught utopian categories constraining people like Beth Allison Barr (who said that the reason there is still sexism in some “egalitarian” places is that they haven’t completely dismantled the “whiteness” of the patriarchy) may seem reasonable, but they are only sand. The line is always moving. You think you’re about to get there, but then, oops, too bad, you still have more to do.

My second thought is that to say that “complementarians” who have good marriages are just functionally “egalitarian” is to have already adopted a plastic/trans view of the person based on caricatured gender characteristics rather than real ones. This is ironic, because egalitarians often complain about gender stereotypes. In reality, Gregoire et al have an excessively unnuanced and unwinsome view of personhood and marriage. There is only one kind of hierarchy, for them—the authoritarian kind. There is only one way of being a person, the “equal” kind.

Whereas, in almost every hierarchical relationship—parent and child, professor and student, clergy “person” and congregant, boss and employee—the two people can either communicate well or communicate badly. All kinds of toxicity can enter a relationship. One member might be co-dependent. One might be a narcissist. One might have a hidden addiction. But the two people could also have a good relationship, despite the power differential, if they both know how to act like people. A parent can listen to a child who can express her thoughts and feelings. A boss can take the point of view of the employee into consideration when making his five-year plan. A professor can throw the floor open for questions and be surprised by the intelligence of the occasional pupil. I mean, this is literally a thing that happens. And—here is the essential point—no one should say that an employee is ontologically inferior to the boss, though, of course, they do not have the same position in the relationship.

What is really toxic, though, is when the employee or the child or the student minces into the faculty lounge or the kitchen or the break room and tells everybody else what to do. That’s pretty awful. Although it is increasingly our “lived experience” as a culture.

Ok, so, and this is my third and final thought for the day, marriage is not like those other hierarchies. The husband is not the boss, nor the parent, nor the professor. He may be all of those things during the work week, but he is not them positionally in relationship to his wife. Marriage is—get this—a different kind of intimate relationship that paints a very mysterious picture, a strange and alarming picture of the most hierarchical of all cosmic relationships, that of God and his people. How can God, of all Beings, even have a conversant relationship with a fallen and sinful creature? Surely the creature will die before such an awesome and holy reality.

And yet the man does not die when he rustles through the pages of the prayer book. She is not immolated when she stands up and goes forward to take communion. How is this?

It’s the whole point of all the scriptures. It is the story of salvation. The man and the woman, when they join themselves together in holy matrimony, refer to the great mystery of God coming to redeem and then commune with the people who had no hope of such a prospect. The husband listens to his wife because Jesus always listens to the Church when she prays. The wife listens to the husband because the Church always listens to Christ when he speaks.

And I always wrangle with Matt on every single subject because I like him. I’m interested in who he is. But I don’t tell him what to do—except when he doesn’t know what to do and comes to me for help. And likewise. We are always coming toward each other, trying to understand, trying to find communion, both limping from the wrestling with God and each other and ourselves. We are not the same. And yet we are both the same. We don’t have the same tasks, and yet we are oriented toward the single task of obedience to Christ.

If you think that’s “egalitarian” it is because you have misunderstood the nature of the Church’s relationship with God. You’re right, it is by no means authoritarian. It is not toxic. It is not wicked. Rather, it is intimate, kindly, forbearing, forgiving, holy, and, yes, obedient.

So anyway, I gotta go do other stuff. Have a nice day!