What do you think about the patriarchy?
As in patriarchal Christianity.
I had no idea this was a thing, and I didn’t have a true understanding of the different types of hierarchy in Christianity until a couple of years ago. Then, I was familiar with complementarianism and egalitarianism but biblical patriarchy is a new one.
Fun fact: Last year, I taught school until I was about a week from having a baby. So through an entire pregnancy, I found it much, much simpler and more comfortable to wear dresses and leggings to work. I will never forget the day when a coworker asked me if I belonged to a particular religion that required women to wear dresses.
No. I do not.
But if you’d asked me to define patriarchy in Christianity, I’d have said something about always having to wear dresses or not being allowed to cut your hair.
To be honest, if you follow the biblical patriarchy camp, they tend to go for head coverings and especially head coverings in church.
So I wasn’t far off.
If you tend to follow the traditional Christian circles on social media, you maybe saw that a particular popular pastor in the trad community said that women should not be teaching theology to other women; a woman’s learning and understanding of theology should come from her husband exclusively. This sounds kind of out there and kind of sane all at the same time… it sounds sane only in the regard that a man and wife should hopefully be on the same page, theologically. It’s more than a little out there because this would mean a woman isn’t allowed to pursue theological topics on her own or in an actual Bible study group of women.
If you’re unfamiliar, the example I saw over and over again was “a wife shouldn’t be reading a book about infant baptism if her husband hasn’t read that book first”, because it’s a topic of theological discourse.
This spirals really quickly into “women shouldn’t leave the house”. I wish I were kidding…talk about patriarchy, right?….but it seems that a particular contingent of Christians believe a family having a second car for a wife or mom is a detriment to society because then she leaves the house…
…?
The examples I saw that were necessary for leaving regularly include church and food shopping.
So.
This leads me to an actual Twitter argument I had a month or so ago with a complete stranger. She told me that women are “weird” for wanting to work after they have kids. That they should be content to stay home and it’s really “weird” if that’s not enough for you. “Weird” was the word she used.
Which prompted me to ask all kinds of questions: Doctors? Nurses? Dentists/hygienists? Teachers? Caretakers? Any job that women are generally really well-suited to by nature? Helping professions? I don’t get a midwife? No female post-partum nurses? And, in what world would there be enough people to fill the necessary workforce when 50% of the population is female?
Again, she called it “weird”.
(A complete side-note here is that our baby had the best male nurse ever when she was born. It was a horrific delivery experience and he took such good care of her. He was the only one in the whole situation who made me feel comfortable because he set up the room for her and introduced himself, literally, as the baby’s nurse.
There IS a place for men in these professions. There are not ENOUGH men capable of these professions or of wanting to do these professions. Since we were on a military base, he was in the military. Male phlebotomists on military bases are also always the best ones at the job. Just FYI.)
I’d love to know your thoughts!
Complementarian?
Egalitarian?
BP?
I’m going to leave some sources here if you want to know more, or understand from where I’m forming my own point of view:
Dale Partridge Real Christianity podcast episode #222. and #223.
Haley Williams Kindled podcast episode # 202.
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