Capitol Siege: The Price of Christian Patriarchy
When a surge of insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, the most disturbing images weren’t the Confederate Flags waving on the Senate floor, the man wearing the “Camp Auschwitz” shirt, or even the hangman’s gallows erected outside the building, it was the countless signs, slogans, and cheers of Christian fundamentalists who seem to have been at the very heart of this violent rebellion. The mob carried “Jesus Saves” and “God, Guns, and Guts” flags, while one man waved the flag of Israel above a sign begging passersby to say yes to Jesus. “‘Shout if you love Jesus!’ someone yelled, and the crowd cheered. ‘Shout if you love Trump!’ The crowd cheered louder.”
So as evangelical pastors and denominational leaders finally muster the courage to voice their concern over this attempted coup, we must resist the temptation to be surprised. This day has been in the making for decades. Fueled by white rage, a culture-warrior mentality, and the idolatry of militant masculinity, evangelicals joined fascists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis lashing out at a nation they no longer control. One could argue President Trump ran an entire campaign on male fragility and Christian nationalism, presenting himself as the savior of both. “Evangelical support for Trump was no aberration, nor was it merely a pragmatic choice,” writes historian Kristin Du Mez in her book Jesus and John Wayne. “It was, rather, the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad.” It seems the 81% weren’t holding their noses in voting for Trump after all. They like him. They identify with him. He is the modern manifestation of a Wild at Heart man whose pseudo-masculine, domineering persona is the very incarnation of the “biblical masculinity” they’ve been waiting for. And all of it has its roots in patriarchy.
In simple terms, patriarchy is institutionalized male dominance. It’s a social construct whereby men rule and women submit. Based on perceived theological and biological distinctions, patriarchal societies support the unequal distribution of power between the sexes, i.e., masculinity is privileged at the expense of femininity. And to some, it’s all mandated by the Bible. Verses like “Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord” (Eph. 5:22-23) or “Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man” (1 Tim. 2:11) have been used as weapons to keep women in their place in both the home and in Church for hundreds of years. Christians at different stages of spiritual development have interpreted these texts in disparate ways for centuries. As the late Rachel Held Evans wrote in her book Inspired, it is the lens through which we read the Bible that is more important than what is printed in our current Bibles:
If you are looking for verses with which to oppress women, you will find them. If you are looking for verses with which to liberate or honor women, you will find them...This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not “what does it say?” but “what am I looking for?” I suspect Jesus knew this when he said, “ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened.” If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.
The question then becomes: What do we do with these problematic texts and how do we faithfully approach the painful reality that patriarchy seems to be supported in the Bible?
Want to learn more about patriarchy in the Church? Check out our podcast episode, “Unholy Trinity: Patriarchy”!
First, Jesus trumps the Bible. We do not worship the Bible, we follow Jesus. And in this case, when we read verses that appear to support patriarchy, we must remember Jesus didn’t and doesn’t. In addition, Jesus engaged the scripture of his day creatively and selectively. “He consistently ignored or even denied exclusionary, punitive, and triumphalistic texts in his own inspired Hebrew Bible in favor of passages that emphasized inclusion, mercy, and honestly”, writes Father Richard Rohr. So when we read something in scripture that doesn’t look like the ‘Word’ made flesh, Jesus wins, not the text. Second, the Bible wasn’t written to us, but it was definitely written for us. It’s not an encyclopedia that simply spits out facts and beliefs, it is a story—two stories really, that of ancient Israel and the early Church and their understanding of God.
Third, the Bible is multi-vocal, meaning whether you like it or not, it often disagrees with itself. The various writers, redactors, and editors all bring their own perspectives and agendas to the text. So even very essential things like salvation, the role of works vs. faith or free will vs. predestination, and the place of women in society don’t align in perfect harmony. Even something as foundational as human slavery was debated at some point as being ordained by Scripture. (Check out our discussion of the apostle Paul’s patriarchal texts here.) As author Christian Smith writes in his book The Bible Made Impossible, “Appealing to the same scriptural texts, Christians remain deeply divided on most issues, often with intense fervor and sometimes hostility toward one another.”
Fourth, we must approach Scripture from its historical and cultural context. As scholar John Dominic Crossan so aptly put it, “It is wise to remember that, when we are reading letters never intended for us, any problems of understanding are ours and not theirs. When we read Scripture, we are reading someone else’s mail.” When we pick up a letter written by Paul to a particular church community in the first century, we would be absolute fools to assume he was speaking universally to us. Therefore we should approach the text with great caution and humility, asking which commands are universal and essential, and which are more culturally conditioned and can therefore be set aside. Before you react, remember that we all do this already anyway. How many of us still follow the Levitical command not to touch a dead animal (all hunters are out) or to stone our children when they disobey? We read these texts and automatically realize they weren’t written to us and can therefore be set aside, so why don’t we do that when it comes to texts that subjugate women?
So, if fundamentalist Christians are going to use the Bible to subjugate women and to promote a militant version of masculinity, we owe it to the Church and the world to change the conversation. In the beginning, God created Adam and Eve as equals. Period. Genesis 1 declares, “God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female.” Here at the very beginning of the biblical text we get a glimpse of the totality of God, balanced eternally with divine masculine and divine feminine attributes. In his book The God We Never Knew, theologian Marcus Borg candidly wonders, “How can women be made in the image of God if God cannot be imagined in female form?” Adam even declares Eve to be “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” In his widely read biblical commentary, theologian Matthew Henry writes, “The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him.” Instead of highlighting their differences, a spiritually mature reading of scripture points to what male and female have in common. They are identical in origin, united in purpose, and mutual in relationship. Hierarchy, patriarchy, and the dualistic separation of gender roles was never God’s design.
The gender ideals of patriarchal evangelicalism that have led Christians to support, mirror, and idolize overtly obscene, violent, misogynistic men must end. The toxic expressions of masculinity that exert dominance, spawn violence, and subjugate women aren’t “biblical masculinity,” they are anti-Christ. Instead of modeling our paradigm of masculinity and gender roles on Donald Trump or John Wayne, what if we modeled it after Jesus, who was courageous enough to cry, mature enough to mourn, strong enough to serve, and brave enough to bring about His kingdom by taking on suffering instead of inflicting it? Seeing a strong man desperately pursue power isn’t astonishing, it’s cliche. “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints,” C.S. Lewis observed. On January 6, we watched patriarchy and militant masculinity invade our nation’s consciousness with little resistance, and it would be foolish to assume those pathologies are limited to the pursuits of a corrupt politician. They run like a through-line, connecting and creating systems, structures, and societies that are not only unsustainable, but unnatural, and therefore must be undone.
Amen.
For a deeper dive into the pathology of patriarchy, check out our Holy Heretics podcast.
