Women are still devalued and debased; condemned to second class citizenship as not one woman in the huge Catholic and Orthodox movements has been admitted to priestly leadership. In Islam any woman who shows a modicum of interest in anything from voting to driving a car or in limiting the number of children she shall carry, is quickly stoned to death. The Southern Baptist Convention of some fifty thousand American congregations automatically cast out each of the sixty odd churches that recently defied the Convention's order against ordaining women preachers. The Missouri Synod Lutheran councils have only recently decided that under some circumstances women can vote on congregational issues. In contrast, we are pleased that our own denomination is now ordaining as many women as men. In fact, the United Methodists have become a refuge for the best and brightest young women from the reactionary groups. We gain their best and brightest, for we will ordain and hire them and set them out doing God's work. Even some of our bishops are women which drives many reactionary clergymen wild when they must work with them on community issues.
Thus, as it always happens, the nature of Christ's revelation of love for women as well as men has been distorted and debased by a narcissistic male aristocracy within the church and through each secular society. From the very beginning of the Christian era, men with religious and political power immediately began shaping the church and its theology to meet their own needs. When the rich estate owners needed farm workers to plow the fields and harvest the crops, the church soon agreed and began teaching that human sexuality was legitimate only if we paid the piper with a new child to work the aristocracy's estates. When slave trading and owning was a common abuse of black humans, the clergy of Dixie fell right into line with the slave traders and owners. There was hardly a single group within Colonial America that didn't profit from the slave trade so, of course, expedient preachers in fundamentalist churches had to bless and justify the wretched business. The reactionary church still blesses every war that secular rulers begin and always send their young men to kill other young men and to die horrible deaths to profit the society. For sixty years the church -- Catholic, Orthodox and Fundamental Protestant, taught that the Cold War was a struggle between God and Satan. Of course, it was really a desperate struggle between two great financial, political and industrial systems for dominance around the world. Every intelligent person sees that now -- but the reactionary church for reasons of its own soon turned the Cold War into a great spiritual crusade being fought by God's holy people. Actually, both Roberta and Jard have trouble seeing Chase Bank and Wells-Fargo -- or General Motors and Standard Oil as great spiritual entities doing God's work for humankind!
We both are covenant Christians but never Victorian prudes for whom any departure from radical assumptions is an adequate reason for punishment -- preferably a public flogging -- from self-righteous and reactionary pulpits across the land. We, ourselves have had rollicking sex lives for half a century and recommend it most highly. We don't care -- let the hypocritical and primitive blue noses call us a dirty old couple for enjoying our love, we have an even lower opinion of their sexual neuroticism. Of course we wouldn't have titled our book about marriage LOVERS FOR LIFE had we not believed that God's ideal for each couple is a permanent union that matures from youth through all of life and on to the elderly years with even deeper love. We believe that sexual love and our reproductive capacity are spiritual gifts that are best shared with one very special person within a life-long commitment. We understand and accept that for many reasons marriages fail and both men and women move on, doing the best they can to settle into a new relationship that offers them the love and satisfaction each person deserves. It is total lunacy for any neurotic bully within the church to teach that a pair of kids must remain lonely, loveless and celibate for the next fifty years because they made an unfortunate marriage when twenty or twenty-two years of age. God has never limited us to one roll of the dice at love that is blessed by the church -- and even if we mature along the way, must live a loveless life forever after. That truly is psychopathy disguised as spirituality regardless of how well concealed by a Medieval sexist theology.
We all long to hear that our sexual disorders are not really disorders, that the simple yearning to be righteous makes it so. That would quickly eliminate the struggle to mature spiritually from our lives. But to do that would mean that our souls were not to be taken seriously -- that the revelation of Christ doesn't lead to better lives. The church cannot accept this -- not even in the name of compassion for those who are in error. No good is served when we abandon the old Truths about the role of conception in lovemaking, of love bringing about the creation of new life to glorify God.
To which we add that we cannot see that a woman who brings twelve to fourteen children, into an often hungry world before she dies during her last childbirth, is glorifying God. His rationalization expressed the theologian's sexist views lingering from the Medieval Era. To which Jard adds:
No good is served if we internalize Medieval psychopathy in 21st century theology and demand that couples obey a clutch of sexually frustrated men who pretend God lets them make the rules governing our sexuality without ever playing the game! Great family disasters are formed when theologians insist that women are little if anything more than brood mares to their men and the church.
Actually, the Catholic Church's position about celibacy for the clergy is enforced only among European, North American and Asian priests. The point is often moot across the southern hemisphere, because the vast majority of Latin American and African priests are either married with families or in permanent relationships with mistresses and the children they conceive together. Both the Pope and the Curia have lost that battle and they pragmatically tolerate it. They must, for their entire program would collapse should they enforce the rules -- the priests would leave their parishes to care for their families. Somehow we cannot see the sexually reactionary portion of the church changing much of anything without a revolution by religious women who demand equality in which they are truly valued as first class persons. Women cannot force the reactionary primitives to ordain them -- in every reactionary religious group the old boys control the machinery, but more than ninety-six percent of English speaking Catholic couples of child bearing age use contraception to space their pregnancies. The intelligent and educated women of the West -- through Europe, America, Canada and Australasia have opted out of producing floods of ragged kids they can neither feed nor educate, to work in the fields for the nobles and to fight the aristocracy's wars. They have sense enough to know that playing Vatican Roulette condemns themselves to perpetual baby making and poverty rather than enjoying satisfying lives of their own. That is, assuming one hasn't been abandoned by a macho husband who has run away to San Francisco to find himself, after giving her six children in seven years to support without any earning skills.
The worst of the lot fear and hate women, resent them and detest their own sexual needs that make them vulnerable to any woman they love. They are trying very hard to block women from breaking free of their restrictions, just as their fathers and grandfathers in the religions tried desperately to block the use of contraception, the right of women to vote, to work outside the home and in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia to learn to read and write and to drive an automobile and to choose her own husband. Orthodox Catholic, fundamental Protestant, orthodox Jew and reactionary Muslim men are especially determined to keep women in a subservient relationship with God and his especially blessed rulers -- they themselves. Of course, they lay all the blame for their wicked pettiness toward women on God -- whom they insist tells them he wants women barefoot and pregnant, subservient and meek and always available sexually to they, themselves.
Authors: Jard & Roberta DeVille; published psychology books, seminars & psychological assessment instruments. NICE GUYS FINISH FIRST was a best seller. He & Roberta wrote 'LOVERS FOR LIFE' and other courses/books together. She's been a wonderful teacher in Minneapolis for many years. He's considered by many to be America's foremost leadership scholar.
Visit http://www.fulfillmentforum.com for Free E-Book Courses and E-Biz Tools.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
