Disposable women
What does it even mean to be a Godly woman? (Part 5)
In June of 2023, the documentary “Shiny Happy People” released. I watched it, and shared my thoughts about it on Instagram in what became my most-viewed post of all time. That post springboarded a whole series of posts on #jessicaquinnandpatriarchy that I later summarized at the beginning of this series on discovering what it truly means to be a Godly woman.
Though wisps of it were already percolating in my brain, watching “Shiny Happy People” and then processing it through writing ended up being the beginning of my recent journey to get to the bottom of all the ways patriarchy has affected me. As the cliche tells us, the fish doesn’t know he’s wet, and if you have believed something for a very long time, and heard it from many others, you can’t always accurately parse its truth. So, like I approach any problem, I started reading.
My reading lists from the last several years have had very distinct smashing-the-patriarchy vibes, which often made me laugh. Me of twenty-five years ago would be utterly appalled as then I was reading everything I could find on my favorite “Ladies Against Feminism” site. I’ve come a long way since then… In the last year or two, books like Nice Churchy Patriarchy: Reclaiming Women’s Humanity from Evangelicalism by Liz Cooledge Jenkins, A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans, and Jesus Feminist: An Invitation to Revisit the Bible’s View of Women by Sarah Bessey have poked and prodded at ideas that I had blindly believed for so long that they had become a part of me. And honestly, sometimes when that part of me was exposed, I wept (especially if Sarah Bessey was writing!). She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking Up by Sheila Gregoire and others showed me that many of the harmful ideas I had, began way before I started intentionally consuming so much conservative Christian patriarchal content. It was seemingly innocent articles from Focus on the Family’s Brio magazine reminding me to make sure that I dressed modestly so that I didn’t cause guys around me “to stumble”, or that pushed this idea that I needed to give and give and give of myself with no thought of how it affected me.
Along with books directly speaking to the subject of patriarchy, I started reading different memoirs from those have walked away from the ideology to different degrees. The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife by Shannon Harris (ex-wife of Joshua Harris of I Kissed Dating Good-bye fame), Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear by Jinger Duggar Vuolo, Counting the Cost by Jill Duggar (Dillard), and Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy by Cait West. Though I don’t always agree with the conclusions that these different women reached (good thing it’s not on me to judge their actions!), I was filled with so much sadness at all these women and so many like them lost thanks to the whims of toxic men.
One of my most recent reads along those lines was A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings. This is what I shared about it on GoodReads (find me there, I’d love to talk books!):
“Wow. Especially as someone who has also experienced abuse at the hands of ‘Christian’ patriarchy (though mine was nowhere near as extreme as Tia's), this was hard to read. But even so, it's SUCH a needed book. Tia experienced the whole gamut of ‘Christian’ patriarchy, from Southern Baptists to IBLP to Vision Forum to Doug Wilson, showing that, no matter the iteration, any belief system that views women as less-than will inevitably end in abuse. I hope so much that Tia's words and story will open the eyes of anyone who thinks these conservative patriarchal belief systems aren't that bad. Her story is one of thousands, and I'm so thankful for her courage in sharing it.”
Reading Tia’s story was fascinating when seeing the similarities as she moved through all these different variations of “Christian” patriarchy. It didn’t matter the specifics, the disguised-in-spiritual-jargon conclusion was always the same: women are disposable. Some variants required the woman to look pretty and put together while continually pouring herself out without concern for her humanity, others were fine with the abase-yourself-into-the-sidelines approach. Regardless, the idea of a woman as a person with her own needs, thoughts, and ideas was repeatedly shot down. Many Scriptures were taken out of context to try to support this idea, but if you take a step back and look at how Jesus actually treated women, it would quickly become apparent that these ideas were not of Him.
Just take any story of Jesus interacting with a woman: Mary Magdalene, the woman who bled for years, Martha, the woman caught in adultery, the woman at the well…it goes on and on. As is evidenced from the list, in many cases, the texts don’t often even name many of these women, but in every instance Jesus sees each woman for who she is. Her specific needs and individual hurts and unique struggles were evident to Him, and He responded to her out of that knowledge. Never, in any of the stories with Jesus interacting a woman, do we ever get the sense that Jesus viewed any woman as disposable, even though that would be the prevalent cultural mindset of His time.
Yet, in “Christian” patriarchy, as more and more stories come out, we’re seeing that the dominant approach is to view women as expendable. They’re not viewed as unique and valued individuals whose feelings and thoughts, ideas and experiences, matter just as much as a man’s, even and especially as much as the patriarchal head. This mindset means that patriarchy breeds narcissism, and I’ve read about and personally seen that play out over and over again. But as we’ve seen, that’s not of Jesus. That’s 100% of man, and a result of his sin. And the fact that a similar approach of viewing women as disposable happens in other instances not associated with “Christian” patriarchy confirms this: the Taliban, polygamist Mormonism, the playboy with regularly rotating arm-candy. All throughout history, there have been untold iterations of men dominating over women and treating them as less-than. And no matter how many times we’re told that it’s because that’s how God set it up, Jesus shows us that’s just not true. He shows us that God views women as just as valuable as men, in all her very different glory. He created both male and female in His own image, and both are very good. What more do we need to know?
“Aware of this, Jesus said to them, ‘Why are you bothering this woman? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. When she poured this perfume on my body, she did it to prepare me for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.’” (Matthew 26:10-13)
“What does it even mean to be a Godly woman?” series
Part One: I don’t know anymore