"Falling into the Holes in Their Own Thought"

(Cross-posted from Bible Literature Translation)

I have been following a blogsphere conversation that Bible Literature Translation (among others) has been involved in, particularly in its Noting Abusive Theologians post, where blog contributor GaudeteTheology noted:

In my class on the History of Systematic Theology, my classmates and I were shocked to learn from our professor (not from any of our books) that Paul Tillich had extramarital affairs, including sexual contacts with his students which certainly today would be considered sexual harassment at best, abusive at worst. It generated an important discussion about the extent to which we could rely on the intellectual work of a theologian whose life showed such serious failings in his ability to “walk the talk,” on the one hand; and the extent to which all of us are sinners, and thus all theologians are sinners, so why do we expect anything different, on the other. . . 

(I do not recall whether the discussion broke out along gender lines; I do recall that another woman student and I were among the most vocally horrified, and that our professor, a man, was rather strongly making the case that we shouldn’t be surprised or concerned.)

[M]y immediate response to learning of this theologian’s persistent sinful patterns of behavior was to question whether and how it reflected on the value of his theology. It seems a screamingly obvious question to me.

This last week Fred Clark at Slacktivist contributed more to this discussion.  Clark's post is in response to Roger Olson's recent question, "Should a theologian's life affect how we regard his/her theology?" Leaving aside for now the issue of whether all sins should be viewed in the same light (whether we should, as Clark thinks Olson does, put excessive beer-drinking in the same category as advocating the slaughter of peasants), I found Clark's post very helpful in providing an alternative to either dismissing a person's theology because of his personal life, or dismissing a person's personal life because of her theology.

Clark says:

It is, rather, a vitally important matter of identifying the way these men fell into the holes in their own thought so that we can avoid falling into those holes ourselves. We can’t shrug off Yoder’s sexual abuse or Jefferson’s slave-owning as, in Olson’s compartmentalizing phrase, “sides to their personal lives that we cannot be proud of". . . 

Did Luther’s anti-Semitism “affect” his theology, or did his theology foster his anti-Semitism? Yes, both. Did George Whitefield’s slave-owning shape his otherworldly revivalism or did his otherworldly revivalism rationalize his slave-owning? Yes, both. 

The inability to recognize that cause and effect can flow both ways makes it unlikely that Olson will be able to “use it but highlight those areas” where the taint of this “scandalous action” can be identified as a discrete, separate compartment of thought. That’s not how humans work.

I think it is important to avoid the ad hominem fallacy when considering this question. After all, the truth or falsehood of a statement is not changed by the nature of the person who makes it. But (and this is an important "but") individual statements of truth or falsehood don't exist in a vacuum. They are each one bit of a whole system of thought subscribed to by the person making them. And often, human beings being what they are, inconsistencies and even outright contradictions can exist within a person's system of thought. These inconsistencies and contradictions often come from unexamined assumptions and prejudices within the person who is writing or speaking. The cognitive dissonance thus created is often assuaged by some small cheat, such as an unacknowledged change in the definitions of the words being used. For instance, Thomas Jefferson's idea that all people are equal is one tenet of his thought. The idea that certain kinds of humans aren't really people is another tenet of the same man's thought: the one that justified both slaveholding and the ongoing rape of certain of his female slaves. Both ideas have to be taken into account in order to make proper sense of Jefferson. The fact that equality depends on how "people" are defined is a weakness in his system of thought that needs to be recognized. In fact, it's a weakness that he either introduced or allowed, in order to justify his personal behavior to himself.

We can't ignore Jefferson's weakness relating to who gets defined as fully human, if we want to avoid falling into similar traps in our own thinking.

Roger Olson's reasoning on the subject is as follows:

If we were to discount the value of every theologian whose life was in some way scandalous our library shelves would be much less burdened down. And perhaps our theological thinking poorer. And I didn’t even mention all the German theologians and biblical scholars who supported National Socialism! 

Having said all that, I have to add this. If those German theologians allowed their pro-Nazi sympathies to infect their writings we would all, I suspect, decline to use them in our courses. So, to the extent that a theologian allowed his infidelities, racial prejudices, wrong political views, to affect his scholarship, I believe we must inevitably either 1) discard his scholarship, or 2) use it but highlight those areas where the scandalous parts of his life affected it. 

However, to the extent that the theologian’s scandalous actions did not affect his theology (or biblical scholarship) I see no reason to make much of them. They should probably be mentioned in a biography but there’s no need to reject his whole theology because of them.

Olson's writing here, I think, reveals his tendency to think in just the sort of binaries I have asserted we should try to avoid-- that either a theologian's theology has been affected by his personal life, or it hasn't; and that it's possible for it not to have been. And where it has been so affected, if it's not too pervasive it's possible to cut away those places like a bit of mold on a piece of cheese, leaving the rest good and usable. However, if the taint of the theologian's personal life is too pervasive, the entire theology must be discarded.

But I'm afraid we humans really don't work that way. We are all a mixture of bad and good acting and thinking. Our thinking does affect the way we act, and the way we act does affect our thinking-- and this is particularly true of the kind of people whose words, spoken or written, are wise enough to have been remembered down through the years. Wise people don't usually leave their actions unjustified by their thinking, because they are thinkers and they can't function that way.

Therefore, it's important to take a theologian's private life into account when reading his or her writings, and note where cognitive dissonance may have been compensated for by changes in definitions and other such things. 

If Tillich abused young women at Union Theological Seminary, then his attitude towards women certainly affected what he wrote (or didn't write) about Eve. The key is to keep that in mind when reading his Systematic Theology and other works.

What I'd Like to See from Hollywood

This week I came across an interesting article, We're Losing All Our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome.  The author, Tasha Robinson, names this Hollywood phenomenon after the female character "Trinity" in The Matrix:

[T]he Strong Female Character With Nothing To Do [like Valka in DreamWorks’ How To Train Your Dragon 2] is becoming more and more common. The Lego Movie is the year’s other most egregious and frustrating example. It introduces its female lead, Elizabeth Banks’ Wyldstyle, as a beautiful, super-powered, super-smart, ultra-confident heroine who’s appalled by how dumb and hapless protagonist Emmet is. Then the rest of the movie laughs at her and marginalizes her as she turns into a sullen, disapproving nag and a wet blanket. .  . Her only post-introduction story purpose is to be rescued, repeatedly, and to eventually confer the cool-girl approval that seals Emmet’s transformation from loser to winner. . . This is Trinity Syndrome à la The Matrix: the hugely capable woman who never once becomes as independent, significant, and exciting as she is in her introductory scene. 

From there, of course, I had to read the link to an August 2013 New Statesman Article called "I Hate Strong Female Characters" by Sophia McDougall, which defines "strong female characters" and identifies the real problem with their ubiquitous appearance in modern Hollywood films:

They're still love interests, still the one girl in a team of five boys, and they’re all kind of the same. They march on screen, punch someone to show how they don’t take no shit, throw around a couple of one-liners or forcibly kiss someone because getting consent is for wimps, and then with ladylike discretion they back out of the narrative’s way. . . What do I want instead of a Strong Female Character? I want a male:female character ratio of 1:1 instead of 3:1 on our screens. I want a wealth of complex female protagonists who can be either strong or weak or both or neither, because they are more than strength or weakness.

All of this got me to thinking.  There is a lot more of this kind of thing going on in Hollywood films than just strong female characters, with or without Trinity syndrome.  And by "this kind of thing" I mean unoriginal, uninventive, follow-what-everyone-else-is-doing plots, characterizations and inter-relationships that I'm getting a little tired of.  I would say it's all about the tyranny of "what will sell," but I think it's even worse than that. It's the tyranny of "what we have seen sell already, and we're afraid to risk trying anything different."

So here's my list of what I wish Hollywood would try.  Maybe they'd lose some money on some of these efforts, but the fact is that lots of films lose money anyway despite sticking with "what we have seen sell already."  Part of what sells really is inventiveness, and I know Hollywood knows that.  So maybe it would be more worthwhile to take bigger risks, than to keep churning out the same sort of thing over and over.

A few disclaimers before I start:

A.  I know there are exceptions.  I know there have been one or two examples of some of these kinds of movies that actually have been made, some of which have done very well with moviegoers. But they've been very rare.

B. I know I'm not a professional or an expert, and maybe it's a little presumptuous of me to tell Hollywood moguls how to do their jobs.  But I have been a member of the moviegoing public all my life, and thus one of their target audience in the various demographics I have belonged to over the years, right?  So maybe my opinion does count for something. . .

C.  I am a white, middle-class, heterosexual, cisgender, Christian married person with kids.  I understand that I'm privileged in many ways, and that a great many more Hollywood movies are made with people like me and my family as the target audience than many people could ever hope to expect.  But that's part of why I do want to see some of the things on this list-- because I don't think only the privileged should have movies made that aim to please them, and the very fact that so many of them are aimed at people like me seems to be contributing to their sameness.

So with all that said, here's my list.

I'd Like to See a Movie About:

1.  A smart, adventurous young man who is black, and his best friend and sidekick, who is white.

2.  A group of kids having an adventure, in which the leader and her best friend are girls and there's one, and only one, boy in the group who is pretty much just along for the ride.  Bonus points if the girls are black, Hispanic or Asian and the boy is white.

3.  A woman over 35 who is not portrayed as someone's mother, but who gets to be in love with a male character her own age.  Bonus points if she's got some extra pounds on her.  Extra bonus points if she's the main character.

4.  An "ugly" female character in a movie on the theme of beauty, who is not actually a gorgeous woman wearing thick glasses.  Bonus points if the film doesn't end with her taking off the glasses, letting down her hair and putting on some makeup to show the audience that she's a real woman after all.

5.  A senior woman who is not portraying someone's grandmother.  Or Miss Marple.

6.  A senior, man or woman, who is the main character in a movie that is not about being old.  Bonus points if he or she is a person of color in a movie that's not about prejudice.

7.  A superhero movie where the main super-protagonist is female, and of color.  Bonus points if she's the leader of a group of superheroes.

8. Any nerdy character who doesn't have to stop being nerdy by the end of the film, either by getting the "cool" makeover or by winning the "cool" date.

9.  An Asian character (in an American-made film) who is not super-smart and super-good at school, but has other traits that render him or her a fully developed character.  Bonus points if he or she is the main protagonist and leader.

10.  A female character who is not, and does not end up, in a relationship.

11. A retelling of a myth or fairy tale that does not come from the Western European tradition.

12.  Gay, lesbian and/or transgender character(s) in a movie that is not about being gay, lesbian or transgender.

13. Person(s) with disabilities in a movie that is not about overcoming disabilities.

14.  Last but definitely not least, an Elfquest movie.  That is, a movie based on a comic book series that isn't about superheroes and which is written and drawn by a woman.

So there's my list. Would anyone like to add anything of their own?

Let's Talk About Sexual Entitlement

It started when I was only five years old. A neighbor boy, about a year older than me, with a couple of his friends, persuaded me to take off my clothes for them. My older sister was shocked and put a stop to it-- but it was the first lesson of many. The second lesson was on my first-grade playground, where I was caught by two third-grade boys and dragged to the notorious schoolyard kisser, where despite my struggles I endured being kissed by the boy while his friends laughed and jeered.

By second grade my female classmates and I had learned to consistently wear shorts under our skirts. Boys liked to run by and flip the skirts up, or crawl under the monkey bars and look up as we swung overhead. In fifth grade, the year I got plump before thinning down again in junior high, I became known as "fatso" and "bubble-butt."  My name seemed to have been forgotten, replaced by jokes about what I looked like.

It was the early 1970s, and all these things joined together to teach me that what mattered most about me, as a girl, was my body: how it looked, whether that was pleasing to boys or not, and how it could be turned into a source of fun and mockery. And when I started to develop breasts? Well, all I will say is that this didn't improve things.

In junior high, one day when I had to leave class before the bell rang (I don't remember why) a boy chased me through the empty halls, down the stairs of the school and across the parking lot, trying to touch my chest. But even worse, somehow, was the feeling of worthlessness because other boys wanted nothing to do with me, being too smart and not pretty or cute enough. A girl's worth was measured by whether a boy wanted to be her boyfriend, and I didn't measure up. I'm sure I'm not the only girl who invented a boyfriend who lived in another town, just to get a little respect as a girl whom a boy had claimed.

This continued throughout high school. Girls who were small and sweet, who acted childlike and not too smart so that boys could feel important and protective-- these were the valued ones. Not being one of these, I began to learn to find my value in other ways: through the speech team, through grades, and through my new-found faith.

One of the main draws of the spiritually abusive religious group I joined in college was that, whatever their faults, they required the guys and girls to treat one another as sisters and brothers. Girls were given opportunities to have a real voice in the church, too, though we couldn't aspire to anything greater than to someday be a pastor's wife. As sisters, though, we really were viewed as real people, not just as bodies that existed primarily for the enjoyment of men.

There was, in fact, actually a good reason at that time to be fearful of "the world" around me-- the university campus had developed a reputation for the ease and frequency with which rapes occurred. The campus was even referred to as "the candy store" because women were so vulnerable as they crossed the grounds and the surrounding streets. Those of us girls who lived outside the church's boarding house were requested to call the house for a brotherly escort any time we needed to walk after dusk.

The memory will always stay with me of the evening I hurried home just after sunset, having misjudged the hour, terrified of being noticed by anyone. At the sound of pounding footsteps approaching down the sidewalk behind me, I froze in panic. "It's all right! You're all right!" said the jogger as he passed me, leaving me weak with relief. Not all men were rapists. But we had no way of knowing who was and who wasn't.

I know I'm one of the lucky ones. Except for the occasional grab, I've never been physically assaulted by a man. But that doesn't mean I've escaped the pervasive sexual entitlement in our culture.

When I finished college I went to work at first for a woman boss, and that was lovely. But her company failed, and I found a job for a small technology-development company where all the bosses were male. I had to get used to comments being made about my legs, my figure, and my singleness. I was propositioned by the CEO, who was over 70 years old and apparently liked a little side action when his wife wasn't around.

But I was fortunate. None of them did anything more than talk, and the CEO didn't try to force the issue when I told him I was only interested in guys my own age. In fact, they were afraid I might report this to someone or get a lawyer. It was the mid 1980s, and "sexual harassment" was new terminology that had only recently been coined.

Not until I arrived at work with an engagement ring on my finger did the harassment stop. But this was not because they had decided to respect me. They only respected the fact that a man had now staked a claim to me.

I left that job for the paralegal position I have held ever since. The lawyers I have worked for have been men, with one brief exception-- but I have always been respected there as a person, not just as a female body that belongs to another male. As I have grown older, instances of disrespect and harassment elsewhere have also pretty much ceased. But the attitude that female bodies exist for the use and enjoyment of men has not died. Far from it.

When a young man in Isla Vista recently went on a killing spree because women refused to have sex with him, it touched a nerve on the Internet, resulting in the Twitter page #YesAllWomen.  Women everywhere added their voices to say that though not all men participate in this attitude, pretty much all women, young and old, have experienced it in one way or another in their lives.  It isn't just a problem from our society's more sexist past -- it's still going on now.

Today I was dismayed to learn that only a week after Isla Vista and #YesAllWomen, a new story of male entitlement is circulating, and in this case (presumably because he hasn't killed anyone or made an over-the-top video expressing terrible misogyny) this 17-year-old is being praised for dumping his girlfriend when she cheated on him-- apparently because he was clever in the way he did it, exclusively using Internet memes.  But if you really take an objective look at what happened, it isn't funny.  It's the same, "I own you, so I can punish you when you misbehave" attitude that women should not still be encountering.  A guy is certainly justified in breaking up with a girl who cheats on him, if they had promised each other an exclusive relationship.  But threatening to "do bad things to you" and to "murder your family," aren't funny even if meant in jest.  And the follow-up picture, which is supposed to be a joke, is nothing more than a gang-rape suggestion/threat.

I'm not laughing.

As blogger Sarah Over the Moon says:

Many people in our society respect women and, if asked, would tell you that women do not deserved to be threatened with violence. They don’t deserve to be shot down in the streets of Isla Vista, and they don’t deserve to receive a text from a young man threatening to murder their whole family. “Of course they don’t! Women are our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters! We would never want such a thing to happen to them,” a benevolent man might say. 

But that same exact benevolent man is likely to change his mind quickly as soon as a woman steps outside of a “proper” role for women to fill. As soon as a woman stops acting like an innocent, romanticized mother, sister, or daughter, and starts acting like a “bitch,”or a “slut,” or a cheater, the hostile sexism begins to fly. There is research backing this up. . .

This is why CNN and Buzzfeed can mourn a tragic shooting one week, and interview a “Twitter hero” who threatens women with violence the next. .  

I’d like to think society is improving in its views toward women. I’d like to think the success of #YesAllWomen shows that men are starting to learn and listen. But then Kane Zipperman goes viral, and I put my fists back up.  

We’ve still got a lot more fighting to do.

A May 29th ThinkProgress article examines several studies that show how the media, and male readers, still frequently categorize women as adjuncts for the benefit of men, rather than as full people in with their own goals, rights and needs.  It concludes:

There are serious consequences to this pervasive cultural attitude about women as objects of men’s desires. When men believe that they are entitled to sex, they often respond violently when women deny it from them. . . 

These attitudes have been so deeply embedded in our culture, young women believe that forfeiting their consent is a normal aspect of gender relations, according to a recent study. “Objectification, sexual harassment, and abuse appear to be part of the fabric of young women’s lives,” the study’s authors noted.

Unfortunately, Christian churches, including the one I fled to for refuge from male sexual entitlement, often also participate in the objectification of women and the commodification of their bodies through Purity Culture and its insistence on women dressing modestly for fear of "causing their brothers to stumble".  But if we can leave all that aside, the idea that unless a man and a woman have both consented to become romantically involved, they should treat one another as brothers and sisters, is a pretty good thing. There's a reason why Jesus and the apostles used "brothers and sisters" as their main terminology for referring to Christians in community.  As Michael Kruse of the Kruse Kronicle puts it:

Remember that in the obsessively status oriented Greco-Roman world, the sibling relationship was the most egalitarian of all relationships. Harmony and solidarity was expected among brothers. If folks followed Jesus instruction of sibling relatedness, then status questions would evaporate. In verses 8-12, Jesus rejects all status seeking preoccupations and reiterates his upside down paradigm where the way you get to the top is by going to the very bottom. This is just one way in which the fictive family metaphor regulates the life of the community.

Kids growing up in the same family do usually imbibe the idea that their siblings are fellow human beings and not objects or adjuncts.  Sharing, respect, and asking first before you take, are all part of being good sisters and brothers.  So can't we do better at teaching these basic principles not just in our churches, but in society as a whole?

We're all still in many ways imbibing the message that women's bodies exist for the use and possession of men.  We're still imparting it to our young people, in the church and out of it.  We're still unquestioning of it on TV and movies and magazine covers.  We're still proof-texting it from our Bibles-- but this is not what the Bible as a whole teaches.

We've got to break this cycle, for everyone's sake.  I would love someday to have my grandchildren struggle to grasp the concept of sexual entitlement in a unit of their high school history classes.  I would love to have respect and consent simply be an integral part of their world.

It's not impossible.  Let's see if, by the grace of God, we can make it true.

Christian Cliches: "Don't Cause Your Brother to Stumble"

This is the beginning of a series on various catchwords and cliches that Christians (particularly evangelical ones) are fond of using.  Like most oversimplifications, however, they usually give an inaccurate or one-sided view of the particular issue they purport to be about-- and often, they are based on misunderstandings of the Bible text(s) they are taken from.

"Don't cause your brother to stumble," is the first one I'm going to focus on.  This comes from Romans 14:21, "All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble," and 1 Corinthians 10:31-33, "So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it for the glory of God.  Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God, even as I try to please everybody in every way.  For I am not seeking my own good, but the good of many, that they might be saved."*  The greater context of both these verses is whether Christians should eat meat that has been offered to idols-- which is not so much a problem nowadays, so the real issue is how this teaching should be applied today.

Twenty years ago, the way I usually heard this cliche used was in terms of drinking alcohol. Christians shouldn't drink, the idea went, because some people are problem drinkers or alcoholics, so in order to keep them from stumbling, we just shouldn't imbibe at all (even, for some reason, if there was no one in our group who actually had a drinking problem).   Of course, this was in reality a very American-evangelical notion (rooted in the Temperance Movement of the late 19th/early 20th century), because people in Europe, Christian or not, have always had a much more casual and non-uptight relationship with alcohol.  And American evangelicals have gradually loosened their attitudes in this area in recent years, too, so that you hardly ever hear "Don't cause your brother to stumble" used in this context.

Today, the way the cliche is most often used is not to discuss anything we imbibe or partake of, but to advise women to dress modestly, so as not to tempt Christian men to lust after them.

The Her-Meneutics article How "Modest is Hottest" is Hurting Christian Women puts the idea in a nutshell:

The Christian rhetoric of modesty, rather than offering believers an alternative to the sexual objectification of women, often continues the objectification, just in a different form. . .Too much skin is seen as a distraction that garners inappropriate attention, causes our brothers to stumble, and overshadows our character. Consequently, the female body is perceived as both a temptation and a distraction to the Christian community. . . (Emphasis added)

Another Her-Meneutics article, A Dad's Perspective: Why I Tell My Daughters to Dress Modestly, shows the reasoning behind applying these verses to women's dress:

Paul reminds us that, as all of Scripture does, that in all that we do, we have an obligation not only to ourselves but to others as well. This message has obvious intersection with modesty. Our bodies are not sinful or problematic—they are created by God and are beautiful things. Still, for many people, the bodies of others are tempting and cause them to think about that person in an objectified, sexualized light. This is surely more the fault of the one doing the lusting than anyone else. . . [but] we're presented with a quandary—bodies are beautiful, and yet they often cause us to think and act in sinful ways, so what do we do? . . We do whatever we can to prevent other beloved brothers or sisters from being stumbled. (Emphasis added)

To be fair, this article attempts to balance the message to women by enjoining men also to dress modestly.  But the fact remains that the primary message of the article is to women, and even though it is declared to be "more the fault of the one doing the lusting than anyone else," responsibility is also placed on the ones being lusted after to "prevent" someone from "being stumbled" (whatever that means)-- because if someone is thinking about someone in an "objectified, sexualized light," it's because they have been "caused" to do so. 

But is that idea of "cause" in the original texts?  And is it really appropriate to apply these texts about foods and eating, to women's bodies and what they wear? 

In 1 Corinthians 10:32, the word translated "do not cause anyone to stumble," is actually a single descriptive word, transliterated as "aproskopos."  The King James Version (KJV) renders this, "Give none offence."  It means "having nothing that anyone could strike [their foot] against."  The word in Romans 14:21 has the same root: it is the verb "proskopto," meaning "to strike against; to stumble." It is coupled in the original text with the verb "skandalizo," meaning "to put a stumbling block or impediment in the way."  The KJV renders it, "whereby thy brother stumbleth or is offended."

The noun forms of these words are found in Romans 14:13: ". . . make up your mind not to put any stumbling block ("proskomma") or obstacle ("skandalon") in your brother's way."  Interestingly, a "skandalon" was literally the word for a trap or a snare.  These two words, with the added word "stone," are used of Jesus as a "stumbling stone" for non-believers in Romans 9:32-33.

What is missing from these texts is any actual word for "cause."  Clearly a person who puts an obstacle in someone's way that they might stumble over is responsible for putting it there-- but said person has not actually "caused" the other person to fall.  To blame Jesus because people stumble over Him is contrary to the most foundational beliefs of Christianity.

Words mean things.  The word "cause," particularly in our modern, linear way of thinking, is part of a chain of cause-and-effect that once started, cannot be stopped without another cause intervening that makes the process stop.  The KJV does not use the word "cause" in any of these texts, nor do most of the older translations.  The newer ones, like the NIV, the ESV, and NLT, all add the word.  The result is, I think, that in a way not considered by the original audience nor by readers of these texts in earlier English translations, modern readers find themselves holding other people responsible for their own stumbling.  "You made me do it!" is an attitude that women in particular find themselves confronted with, whenever they wear something that a man finds attractive or arousing.

What does it feel like when a young woman first truly experiences the male gaze?  When she understands that no matter what her intentions, many men are going to view her body as a tempting object?  That if they're Christian men and they feel attraction or arousal, they'll believe that means they have stumbled-- and if they have stumbled, it's because she caused them to?

Blogger Samantha at Defeating the Dragons illustrates this poignantly in her story:

It was Easter morning, and it was the first time I had owned a new dress– a pretty dress– in years. I felt elegant, delicate, a crocus pushing up through the snow. The chiffon skirt fluttered below my knees, and the light, cool fabric felt wonderful against my skin in hot, humid Florida. I walked into church that morning feeling like I was finally taking my first steps out of girlhood, and I felt pretty.

 After church was over, the pastor’s son confronted me in the dirt parking lot.

“Sam… Sam, I need to talk to you.”

I turned to face him, the pit of my stomach clenching. Somehow… I could feel what was coming. It was stamped all over his face, in the way he hung his head, in how he fiddled with the comb he always carried in his pocket.

“Sam… I, I really just don’t understand. The skirt you’re wearing– it,” he couldn’t look me in the eye as his voice broke.

“It caused me to stumble.”

I didn’t really hear anything after that– it was like he was far, far away, his voice coming to me from a distance and his face was frozen and warped. I caught snatches of “why would you do this to me? to yourself?” and the glow that had been inside of me all morning… it broke.

The second we arrived home from church, I dashed into my bedroom. In a frenzy driven by shame, by humiliation, by fear, I tore off that dress– the dress I had put on that morning, the dress that had made me feel that for once I could be pretty– and threw it into the dark corner of my closet and slammed the door shut. I crumpled to my bedroom floor, staring at those shut doors, and cried. (Emphasis in original)

That's how it feels.  Thank you, Samantha; a story is worth a thousand pictures.

But the passages in Romans and 1 Corinthians are actually talking about something you do that tempts someone else (who can't do it in good conscience) to do it too.   Being a woman, by contrast, is something you are.  And it's a fact that (especially if you're young or have female parts which are more rounded) no matter how you dress, someone somewhere is going to find it a stumbling block.

So how were these texts most likely to have been understood by the original readers?  Why was it that eating meat sacrificed to idols was considered to be putting a stumbling block in another's way?

First, it's important to remember that whereas modern Western culture is largely based on an underlying foundation of Christianity (going to church, at least at Christmas and Easter, is thought normative, as are these holidays themselves), Christians in ancient Rome and Corinth lived in a much different world, where the feast days and the center of worship were around entirely different gods. As  PBS's Frontline website puts it:

We have to remember that religion in the ancient world is very much a part of public life. They had no idea of a separation of religion and state. Indeed quite the opposite. Religion was one of the most important features of the maintenance of the state. One offered sacrifices on certain days as a part of the celebration of the founding of the state. One offered sacrifices on the birthday of the emperor. Cities very often mounted these enormous celebrations to celebrate the emperors and all the populace would have been expected to come and join in and for most people you wanted to join in. After all, this would have been a public celebration. A great festival....

To a newly-converted Christian in that culture, thinking of the Emperor and the Greco-Roman pantheon as real dieties for worship, was natural-- and learning not to think of them that way was hard.    That's why Paul says a few chapters earlier in 1 Corinthians, "We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and there is no God but one. . . But not everyone knows this.  Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled." (1 Cor. 8:4-7)

Older Christians, then, as brothers and sisters of the newly converted ones, would be bound by the expectations of kinship to aid their younger siblings.  The Kruse Kronicle's in-depth study of the "Household of God" as a major theme of the Bible, describes the ancient concept of brotherhood as understood in Paul's day:

The only familial relationship that seems to have been relatively free of contractual and utilitarian concerns was between siblings and in particular brothers (and indeed this was true of cultures throughout the Ancient Near East.) Brothers were assumed to be of one mind and in complete accord. (Emphasis added)

Another article in the same series shows how the concept of family (and particularly brotherhood) was applied to Christians, in order that they would see one another as fellow-members of a spiritual family:

The fictive family is Paul’s primary metaphor for instilling unity among believers and uniting them in common mission. . . Paul’s use of the metaphor seems to be used most frequently in his letters to the Corinthians, then Romans. .  . . 

Paul goes on in 1 Corinthians 8:9-11 to talk about how more mature Christians (whose consciences permit them to eat meat sacrificed to idols) are to act towards younger believers as older brothers: 

Be careful, however, that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this knowledge eating in an idol's temple, won't he be emboldened to eat what has been sacrificed to idols? So this weak brother, for whom Christ died, is destroyed by your knowledge. (Emphasis added)

Since brothers were to be in complete accord, seeing an older brother eating in an idol's temple would be a signal to a younger brother that he should do the same-- and, since he has not fully left behind him the emotions connected to his former worship of other gods, he would thus be ensnared into violating his own conscience.  

The mores of ancient Near-Eastern hospitality would also play a part in this ensnarement.  It was common in the culture for families to eat together of foods which were first offered to gods during religious observances.  A newly-converted Christian invited into a home where this was what was for dinner, would be conflicted in how to respond. This Santa Clara University article explains:

Just as the host is gracious, the guest is also obliged to be gracious. Whether an invitation to break bread is accepted or rejected is fraught with social implications. . . [W]hen it comes to basic humanity, no food is unworthy and all offers to share are equal. Rejecting an invitation to eat may imply an unwillingness to acknowledge the host as basically equal or valued as a human being.

In many cases the situation of being offered meat sacrificed to idols would have occurred in just such a host-guest situation.  The younger Christian guest would be trapped between the desire to not offend his host and refuse to eat, and his own belief that eating would in some sense mean a return to his former idol worship. Older Christians were being cautioned not to put their younger brothers and sisters in this type of a bind.  This was different from claiming that they were causing their younger brothers to sin-- the passages don't do that.  But Christians were enjoined not to put traps, snares or stumbling blocks in one another's way.

Conversely, when the New Testament actually talks about lust, it doesn't use the language of stumbling blocks at all (and it talks about lust far less often than it talks about food offered to idols). The principal place is Jesus' words in Matthew 5:27-28:  "You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.'  But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." 

Again the NIV obscures the sense of Jesus words by turning "looks at a woman to lust" into "looks at a woman lustfully."  "Lustfully" is an adverb describing the way a person looks at something.  The original Greek uses a verb meaning "to lust" plus a preposition that according to BibleHub's Greek lexicon has to do with "moving toward a goal or destination."  Intent is a clear connotation of this particular form of "to," as is also used in Matthew 6:1: "Be careful not to do your acts of righteousness before men, to ("pros") be seen by them."  A better rendering into our English to contain this sense would be "in order to."

Lust is not simple attraction or even arousal, which are natural and often involuntary responses of our bodies, which God created to be sexual.  Lust isn't something you feel, it's something you do.  Lust is when you look at someone you're attracted to in terms of gratifying yourself sexually with them.  It's not about physical attraction, it's about self-gratification.  It's about looking at a person not as a person, but as an object of self-satisfaction.

Because of this, the solution to lust cannot be any external thing another person does or doesn't do. The solution is to change our attitude about the other person.  And in general, it's about men changing their attitudes about women.  She isn't causing you to stumble into lust.  Lust is something you're choosing to do with your feelings of attraction.  And if you're feeling attracted but not choosing to look at her in terms of your own gratification, you're not lusting at all.

Romans 14:21 and 1 Corinthians 10:32 are very problematic to try to apply to women's clothing choices.  She's not putting you in a bind by doing something that you feel compelled by ties of brotherhood or hospitality to do too, and that if you did it, would violate your conscience.  She's simply wearing clothes on her body-- which God created and called good.

The Her-meneutics article "How Modest is Hottest Hurts Christian Women" (linked to above) affirms:

[T]he church needs to overhaul its theology of the female body. . . Women's bodies are not inherently distracting or tempting. On the contrary, women's bodies glorify God. . . He created the female body, and it is good.

So -- if one of the words for "stumbling block" actually refers to a trap or snare, what does that mean for women who find that no matter what they do, no matter how they dress, they can be blamed for "causing their brothers to stumble"?  Doesn't this put a woman in a bind?  Doesn't it tempt her to look at herself in terms of being an object for sexual gratification, thus denigrating the image of God in her?

Christian brothers-- please stop putting this stumbling block in your sisters' way.


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*All Bible quotes are from the New International Version, 1984, as this is on the whole the version most familiar to evangelicals. 

Christianity and the "Male Gaze"

Be modest.

Be beautiful.

"Don't cause a man to stumble."

"Don't let yourself go."

These are some of the central messages evangelical Christian women continuously receive from our churches.  Similar messages come simultaneously from secular society:  Be sexy.  Be attractive. Female empowerment includes sexual empowerment, which means "you respect your needs, realize your desires, and accept the sexual aspect of yourself. Break away from the stereotypes that society enforces on women, on how to behave, the Do's and Don'ts which most of the time subdue the spirit and confidence of a person."  And this sounds like-- and can be-- good advice.*  Except that too often women's response to this advice still seems to be not actually focused on the woman as herself, but on how men see her.

And it's not hard to understand why.  To an extent rarely, if ever, experienced by men, a woman's identity, status and social approval are a function of how she looks.  This is why female leaders and politicians' clothing and hairstyles are often the subject of media discussion, while male leaders and politicians are almost never subjected to such scrutiny.  This is why women on magazine covers are usually in some state of undress, while men most often appear fully clothed.  This is what sociologists call "the male gaze."

As this academic paper describes it:

Though this may not necessarily be common knowledge, we can all buy the argument that a woman’s place in society’s stratification is defined by the outward manifestation of her person, and that person is identified first and foremost by her gender. . .women, in the majority of societies around the world, live lives of spectacle. . . females seldom find themselves in the role of spectator, or in the case of film, in the role of control. Women form the spectacle. They are the objects while males are generally the subjects. (Emphasis added.)

The "Landscapes of Capital" website created by sociology professors defines "male gaze" as follows:

When you look at an object, you are seeing more than just the thing itself: you are seeing the relation between the thing and yourself. Some objects are made to be looked upon. . . .The painting of female beauty offer[s] up the pleasure of her appearance for the male spectator-owner's gaze. But the spectator-owner's gaze sees not merely the object of the gaze, but sees the relationship between the object and the self. . .WOMEN ARE MADE TO APPEAR AS OBJECTS OF DESIRE based on their status as OBJECTS OF VISION. . . The male gaze is so pervasive in advertising that it is assumed or taken-for-granted. Females are shown offering up their femininity FOR THE PLEASURE OF AN ABSENT MALE SPECTATOR. "Men act and women appear"[.] . . .  Oddly, the female viewer also looks at the exterior of women as an "object of vision." She surveys their appearance as she does her own, through the eyes of a man. 

(Emphasis in original.)

The idea that women's primary status is as "objects of [male] vision" is so long-standing, so internalized and deep-rooted that we are hardly aware of it.  But it's there, and it affects the way both men and women-- Christian and non-Christian alike-- view themselves and one another.

The blog A Woman's Freedom in Christ recently posted a clip of a video in which actor Dustin Hoffman discusses how he had been used to thinking of women, during the creation of his 1982 movie "Tootsie."  He says he had an epiphany that changed his attitudes about women when he was told that though he could appear believably as a woman in the film, the makeup artists could not make him beautiful.  Mr. Hoffman actually tears up as he recalls how it came to him that he had spent his life up to that point considering a woman's physical beauty as the single criterion for whether or not he would even try to meet her or get to know her:

"I think I'm an interesting woman, when I look at myself on screen, and I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character, because she doesn't fulfill physically the demands that we're brought up to think women have to have in order for us to ask them out. . .  There's too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life, because I have been brainwashed." 

Hoffman is talking about the male gaze here-- and he expresses it in terms of brainwashing.  He literally was unaware of the way this viewpoint had affected his behavior his whole life, until viewing himself as a woman showed him how narrow and limiting to actual women it really was.

The question, then, is whether the male gaze is somehow part of Christianity?  While it's true that the human writers (all those we are sure about, anyway) of both Old and New Testaments were male and wrote from a male-centered perspective, there is no indication in the Bible that the "male gaze" is God-ordained or divinely sanctioned.  God's recorded interactions with humans, though accommodating such human perspectives, repeatedly ask humans to lift their gaze and try to understand God's perspective.  "'My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,'" declares the Lord.  'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.'"  Isaiah 55:8-9.

Proverbs 31, the famous passage on finding a good wife, says, "Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing, but a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised." (v. 30.)  1 Peter 3:3-4 says to women, "Your beauty should not come from outward adornment. . . rather, it should be that of your inner self."  Paul advises Timothy that women should adorn themselves "as is proper for women professing godliness, with good works."  (1 Tim. 2:10) It's interesting how Christians, instead of focusing on Paul's desire that women seek to be known for actions rather than appearance, focus so strongly on the verses immediately prior to verse 10, which do speak in terms of women's outward appearance.  This ends up turning the whole passage into a proof text for "modesty" in dress-- when the passage, read as a whole, is really a refutation of that outward focus.

In fact, both the 1 Peter verses and the 1 Timothy verses, written in a time when males and females alike covered their bodies in swathes of robes, really aren't about "modesty" in terms avoiding sexual display, but about not showing off one's wealth through elaborate hairstyles ("see, I have a maid to do my hair!"), gold jewelry or expensive clothing.  Churches were largely comprised of poor people and slaves (see 1 Cor. 1:26), so it was important not to flaunt markers of high social status or to show partiality to the same (see James 2:1-9).

Christian teachings about women's personal appearance, therefore, should be centered on changing this focus on outward appearance to a focus on the heart and actions.

However, it's very difficult for us as Christians to shake the longstanding cultural/social male-gaze focus on women in terms of their appearance, both historically and now.

Christians in earlier centuries took to heart much more than we do today, the New Testament's words on displays of expensive ornamentation.  But often the very absence of ornamentation became part of women's pride of appearance, as shown in George Eliot's classic novel Adam Bede, in the attitude of respectable farm-wife Mrs. Poyser:

"The most conspicuous article in her attire was an ample checkered linen apron, which almost covered her skirt; and nothing could be plainer or less noticeable than her cap and gown, for there was no weakness of which she was less tolerant than feminine vanity, and the preference of ornament to utility."

By contrast in the same novel, Bessey Cranage, the blacksmith's daughter, is held to be "the object of peculiar compassion [being set apart as an object of pity for moral weakness], because her hair. . . exposed to view an ornament of which she was much prouder than of her red cheeks-- namely, a pair of large round ear-rings with false garnets in them, ornaments condemned . . . by her own cousin. . . ."

Thus the point of Paul's and Peter's words was lost-- for rather than focusing on a woman's inner self, the focus of those more austere times was still on women's outward appearance, simply reversed to glorify outward plainness of dress rather than outward glamour. 

Today, Christians are adept at holding, at one and the same time, attitudes that women should be outwardly beautiful/sexy and modest/sexually concealed. The shaming of Christian women for supposedly not staying attractive for their husbands, is a prime example of the former (while by contrast, Christian men remain nearly exempt from any teaching that they should try to remain attractive to their wives).  And as to the latter, it's hard not to notice current summertime focus in Christian blogs on women's swimsuits and "modesty."  As the Word of a Woman blog humorously but pithily points out:

Summer is upon us kiddos and you know what that has meant (at least in my Facebook feed)? A plethora of articles from my well meaning Christian friends that tell me what I can and cannot wear at the beach or even in my own swimming pool if I am going to claim to be a proper Christian lady. Bikinis are taboo my friends and not just for me but also for my 10 year old daughter if I don’t want her to grow up to be some sort of floozie. . . Where is the line between too sexy and just sexy enough? Because the same folks who tell me there are rules about me wearing a bikini also tell me there are rules about not “letting myself go” and making sure I am still sexy enough for my husband. Sigh. It is exhausting.

The same blog also showcases the current Christian trend in which women ask men what they think of women's clothing choices, and men rate everything from sleeves to shoes in terms of whether it might "cause them to stumble."  Amusingly, the blogger points out that even a "Modest is Hottest" T-shirt is immodest by some of these standards.  We Christians appear to be skilled at not only perpetuating the male gaze, but elevating and catering to it.

But all this focus on women's physical appearance-- whether too sexy as a cause for men to stumble, or not sexy enough as a cause for them to stray-- unfairly places the burden on women for the actions and attitudes of men.  As Rachel Held Evans' book A Year of Biblical Womanhood states, "While young love is certainly celebrated in the Bible . . . nowhere does it teach that outer beauty reflects inner beauty.  The Bible consistently describes beauty as fleeting." Evans points out that Proverbs 5:15-19 advises men to choose to remain satisfied with their wives through the natural aging process. As she puts it, "Both husbands and wives bear the sweet responsibility of seeking beauty in the other at all stages of life.  No one gets off the hook because the other is wearing sweatpants or going bald or carrying a child or battling cancer.  Any pastor who claims the Bible says otherwise is lying.  End of story."

Jesus Himself placed the responsibility for lust squarely on the person doing the lusting (Matthew 5:28), and said nothing whatsoever about women's personal appearance, in that context or any other.  Jesus always related to women in terms of their personhood, not their appearance. As Evans points out in the same section of her book, "The gospel writers never rated the hotness of Jesus' female disciples."

In the midst of a male-centric culture, Jesus and His apostles sought to turn off what we now call the male gaze, encouraging men and women both to see themselves through God's eyes, in terms of a kingdom-of-God focus on the inner self rather than outward appearance, and on actions rather than looks. 

So what business do we have, as Christians, catering to the male gaze?  I suggest we stop worrying so much about what women are wearing and whether they've lost or gained weight, and just let our sisters be who they are and dress according to their own consciences and preferences.

Sound like a plan?



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*Even the most conservative Christian women can be sexually empowered when they develop their own principles informed by their own understanding of the faith and of themselves, rather than what they're told by religious traditions and leaders that they have to be and do.

Sanctified Sexism

When asked whether reading a Bible commentary written by a woman would be placing a man under the teaching authority of a woman, the well-known evangelical preacher John Piper responded as follows:

It might be. Uh. He may feel it that way. And if he does, he probably’s not gonna read it. He shouldn’t read it. . . [But] It doesn’t have to be experienced that way I don’t think. And here, here’s my reasoning. 

The point of Paul in I Timothy 2:12 where he says. . . I don’t permit a woman to teach or have authority over men. That’s a key text. I Timothy 2:12. I don’t permit her to teach or have authority. And those two things together, I think, constitute the eldership office. Teaching and authority. . .

What is the dynamic between how men flourish and women flourish as God designed them to flourish when an act of authority is being exerted on a man from a woman.

And so I distinguish between personal, direct exercises of authority that involve manhood and womanhood.

Because it’s personal. She’s right there. She’s woman. I’m man. And I’m being directly, uh, pressed on by this woman in an authoritative way. Should she be doing that? Should I be experiencing that? And my answer’s, No; I think that’s contrary to the way God made us.  So that the, the personal directness of it is removed. And the man doesn’t feel himself, and she wouldn’t feel herself, in any way compromised by his reading that book and learning from that book. Because I’m not having a direct, authoritative confrontation. She’s not lookin’ at me, and, and confronting me, and authoritatively directing me, as woman. There’s this, there’s this interposition of this phenomenon called “book” and “writing” that puts her out of my sight, and, in a sense, takes away the dimension of her female personhood.

Whereas if she were standing right in front of me, and teaching me, as my shepherd, week in and week out, I couldn’t make that separation. She’s woman. And I am man. (Transcript of portion of John Piper podcast provided by Bible Literature Translation.)

Notice that though John Piper uses the text of 1 Timothy 2:12 to support his view that a man can learn from a woman through a book, his actual point is that he would "feel" himself "compromised" if she came into his office and spoke to him in person-- presumably even if she quoted exactly, in person, the same words he just read in the commentary.  The fact is that as far as I can see, the text of 1 Timothy 2:12 really doesn't distinguish between a woman being physically present, or just reading what she wrote in a book.  The traditional reading is more about (as he himself admits above) whether she's an  "elder."  But that really doesn't seem to be what Rev. Piper is talking about.

As long as he doesn't have to notice she's a woman, Piper says, he has no problem receiving teaching from a woman who would be considered enough of an authority on the Bible to have her commentary published.  Apparently it isn't authoritative teaching by a woman that's the problem.  It's authoritative teaching by a woman in front of him, in the same room.  And this is a problem even, it seems, if she holds no "eldership office" anywhere in any church, but is instead a doctor of theology. 

So is this really about Dr. Piper's interpretation of 1 Timothy 2:12?  Or is it more about Dr. Piper's feelings about how women should act towards men? 

John Piper considers himself a "complementarian." Theopedia.com gives us this definition of "complementarianism":

Complementarianism is the theological view that although men and women are created equal in their being and personhood, they are created to complement each other via different roles and responsibilities as manifested in marriage, family life, religious leadership, and elsewhere. . .Complementarianism holds that God has created men and women equal in their essential dignity and human personhood, but different and complementary in function with male headship in the home and in the Church.  

Complementarianism, holding that women are equal to men in their ontological being, thus sets itself apart from the more traditional view held both by Christians and the whole of society from the beginning of recorded history until at least the beginning of the 20th century-- the view that women were simply inferior to men.  As the Encyclopedia of Women and Gender, Vol. 1 states: 

"Early philosophical speculation emphasized the inequality of the sexes on all dimensions of social importance. . . [I]n later centuries female inferiority was viewed as a function of divine fiat, physiological instability, or defects in the brain.  Though the rationale for this belief changed over time, its substance remained the same: females in every respect, were viewed as lesser beings."

This belief was certainly not confined to the church, as Charles Darwin and his fellow evolutionists unabashedly declared that women were evolutionarily inferior to men.  But it is this traditional attitude that women are inferior that forms the basis of what is called "sexism," just as the belief that certain races are inferior is the basis of "racism."  

Here is one of Dictionary.com's definitions of sexism:

"discrimination or devaluation based on a person's sex, as in restricted job opportunities; especially, such discrimination directed against women." [Emphasis added]

The online Social Science Dictionary simply says:

Beliefs which hold one sex superior to the other thereby justifying sexual inequalities. [Emphasis added]

A complementarian, therefore, should eschew sexism by principle.  Since complementarianism purports to base itself on Scripture alone for its view of the essential equality but functional differences between men and women, it seems reasonable to expect that those church leaders who publicly define and defend complementarianism in and for the church in general, would reject sexism, insisting that nothing but Scripture should define how men think of and act towards women.

Unfortunately, it's not always that simple.  

Human nature being what it is, most of us hold attitudes and ways of thinking which we have imbibed since we were children: attitudes that come from existing in our bodies in the societies and among the cultural mores in which we live.  Complementarians sometimes say that egalitarians, in rejecting "biblical" male-female roles and "male headship," are capitulating to "modern, feminist culture."  But the roots of sexism in American life lie far deeper and more entrenched than we may realize, and feminism (which has only existed for about 100 years) is really still the new kid on the block.  And complementarianism, of course, is itself informed by feminism when it re-examines the traditional Christian view and disagrees that the Bible supports the notion that women were created inferior.

So when the most public faces of complementarian Christianity in America today speak of men, women and male-female relations, Christians (complementarian and egalitarian alike) should be willing to confront them when the things they say, and the attitudes they reveal, show not so much a complementarian viewpoint as a sort of sanctified sexism-- a reflection of a deeply entrenched societal devaluation of women, a culturally imbibed societal expectation of favoritism towards men as the superior sex.

To do him justice, John Piper says this in the same podcast:

So, I think the point of that text is not to say that you can never learn anything from a woman. That’s just not true. It’s not true biblically, and it’s not true experientially, because the reason for saying that I don’t permit a woman to teach or have authority over men here is not because she’s incompetent. It’s not because she can’t have thoughts. In fact, the women in your church, and the woman in, the woman you are married to, have many thoughts that you would do well to know. [laughs] And to know, and learn, and to learn from. And so the issue there is not that she doesn’t have thoughts that you wouldn’t benefit from. Or that she can’t, uh, teach you anything.

The, the issue is one of how does manhood and womanhood work. 

Piper obviously believes that he believes men and women are equal.  He doesn't think he can't learn from a woman, or that women are incompetent to teach men.  But he can't seem to get past his discomfort in having a certain kind of experience of women-- an experience that gives him a feeling of being "directly pressed upon by a woman in an authoritative way."  Remembering that according to the complementarian injunction that a woman is excluded only from being a church elder, and not from being a theologian who comments on the Bible-- this is not about what she's teaching or where she's teaching or how she's teaching.  It's whether he has to directly experience a woman being an authority on a subject in his presence. 

It looks like sexism to me.  Sexism that's sanctified by its ostensible complementarianism, so that it slips under the radar as just part of complementarian doctrine.  But what Piper's words are really communicating, whether he intends it or not, is that he doesn't want women to get uppity in his face.  He doesn't want to feel, in the presence of a woman, that she might have more knowledge than him on a particular Bible text.  It makes him feel uncomfortable about his manhood.  

Is this, at its heart, about what Scripture says?  Or is it about how a man (raised in the 1950s and 60s when men expected to be deferred to by women) feels when a woman is not deferring to him? 

The same sort of thing happens in the most recent Pat Robertson controversy being picked up in the media:  the one where Pat Robinson (who became a married adult during the Father-Knows-Best 1950s) counsels a woman whose husband has been cheating on her that "men will be men":

"Here's the secret," the famous evangelical said. "Stop talking the cheating. He cheated on you, well, he's a man."

The wife needs to focus on the reasons she married her spouse, he continued.

"Does he provide a home for you to live in," Robertson said. 'Does he provide food for you to eat? Does he provide clothes for you to wear? Is he nice to the children... Is he handsome?". . .

"Recognize also, like it or not, males have a tendency to wander a little bit," Robertson said. "What you want to do is make a home so wonderful that he doesn't want to wander. . . ."

In another appearance back in January of this year, Robertson told a woman,

We need to cultivate romance, darling! ... You always have to keep that spark of love alive. It just isn't something to just lie there, 'Well, I'm married to him so he's got to take me slatternly looking.' You've got to fix yourself up, look pretty.

This certainly has a lot in common with traditional social attitudes towards male adultery, as illustrated in a Los Angeles Times article from 1987:

In a Parliamentary debate in 1857, the Lord Chancellor said that "A wife might without any loss of caste condone an act of adultery . . . but a husband could not condone a similar act on the part of the wife . . . as the adultery might be the means of palming spurious offspring on her husband." Englishmen could get a divorce for any evidence of adultery, while Englishwomen had to prove that the adultery was incestuous or otherwise unnatural.

Unflattering as it is towards men to say they shouldn't be required (or expected) to control their sexual urges, this mindset is part of traditional permissiveness towards male sexual behavior, while female behavior has traditionally been tightly controlled.  Though it may seem on its face to treat men as the inferior sex, what this attitude is actually rooted in is a devaluing of the woman to her sexual/reproductive functions as primary to her nature, while men are treated more as whole persons.  Not being expected to control himself is part of historically male autonomy, while being kept under rigid social control is part of historically female subordination.  So also is being told, in essence, to just be grateful for a roof over your head (which frankly, in this era when women usually contribute almost equally to the household rent, mortgage, grocery bills and clothing purchases, simply sounds ludicrous).

But what does this have to do with the Bible?  Where does the Bible say a man shouldn't be expected to control himself, or that it's a wife's job to stay pretty so that her husband won't stray?  On the contrary-- throughout the Book of Proverbs it's the man who is warned to not to be enticed by adulterous women, not the wife told to keep him from getting enticed! In fact, Proverbs tells men to choose to see the woman they married as beautiful, no matter how old the couple has become: 

May your fountain be blessed,
and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.
A loving doe, a graceful deer—
may her breasts satisfy you always,
may you ever be intoxicated with her love.
Why, my son, be intoxicated with another man’s wife?
Why embrace the bosom of a wayward woman?

Prov. 5:18-20, emphasis added.

There is no onus laid upon women anywhere in the Bible to stay forever youthful in appearance, or to take responsibility for keeping their husbands from adultery.  Women are instead told not to focus on beauty, but on "the hidden person of the heart."  (1 Peter 3:4).  And far from being expected to just be grateful for being provided for by a man, Proverbs 31 shows that Old Testament women (wealthy ones, at least) had their own incomes, businesses and land ownership!

So-- are Robertson's words complementarian (focused on Scripture as teaching male-female equality along with difference in role)?  Or are they just sanctified sexism? 

It looks like the latter to me. 

So here's my respectful request and challenge to complementarians:  Please, no more sanctifying of sexism.  If an attitude that one of your public spokesmen (however well-intentioned) is perpetuating about women has nothing to do with what you believe the Bible teaches, then please, speak up about it!  Egalitarians and complementarians might be able to find some common ground here-- an area where we can work together for the uplifting and honoring of all our sisters in Christ. 

Just because a preacher is well-known doesn't mean he can't make mistakes, or that his mistakes shouldn't be addressed-- or that he shouldn't be encouraged to retract them just as publicly as the mistake itself was public.

Perpetuating the notion that the heart of Christianity is sexist-- devaluing to women and treating them as inferior-- isn't doing any of us any good.  

Are you with me?