The Complementarian Imagination: Race, Gender, Exclusion, and Dominion
My new article published in the Priscilla Papers
I’m thrilled to have a new article published in Priscilla Papers, the peer-reviewed academic publication from CBE International. You can read the complete article free! Wondering what it’s all about? Here are the first few paragraphs:
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Shakespeare illuminates our lived experience with this profound metaphor, inviting us to question the stages we stand upon, the stories we live within, and the characters we perform. While “the Bible is a script that is waiting to be performed,” the present social order has a script of its own, casting us onto a rival stage to perform a rival drama.
Jarena Lee offers a poignant example of this dynamic. In her 1836 autobiography, she defends her calling to preach the gospel, “as unseemly as it may appear now-a-days for a woman to preach.” While Lee is thoroughly convinced her character should preach within the biblical drama, she knows this act is unseemly on the world’s stage. Catherine Mumford Booth perceives the same in her 1859 Female Ministry: “The first and most common objection urged against the public exercises of women, is that they are unnatural and unfeminine.” The public ministry of a woman is assumed to be out-of-character—unseemly, unnatural, and unfeminine. On the world’s stage, an actress must not stand in the actor’s pulpit.
In 1988, white evangelicals in the United States coined the term “complementarian” to describe a contemporary ideology derivative of the ancient social performance of male authority and female submission. To understand the roles we perform, I will turn to Willie James Jennings and J. Kameron Carter, whose poignant works on race illuminate the unseen imagination energizing both racial and gendered social order and hierarchies.
Jennings, in The Christian Imagination, powerfully argues “that Christianity in the Western world lives and moves within a diseased social imagination,” and, therefore, “people’s social performances of the Christian life [are] collectively anemic.” Rather than accepting Christ’s invitation into a narrative of radical joining within the covenant family of God, Western Christianity often performs division and dominion, thereby perpetuating the present evil age. How else can we explain a Church that was instrumental in the trafficking and enslavement of millions of Africans made in the image of God? Jesus said, “a good tree cannot bear bad fruit” (Matt 7:18 NRSVue), and we can be sure that the toxic fruit of slavery and White supremacy throughout church history has been possible only because the tree has grown within the soil of toxic imagination.
What Jennings calls the “diseased social imagination,” Carter calls “modern racial reasoning.” Carter reminds us that a renewed mind rejects the logic of separation and domination to inhabit a new world: “To enter into Christ’s flesh through the Holy Spirit’s Pentecostal overshadowing is to exit the gendered economy and protocols of modern racial reasoning” (italics mine). The stage on which we play is thoroughly racialized: White players and Black players must perform the social dynamics of race in this drama, while modern racial reasoning upholds a “gendered economy.” The tendrils of division and domination touch both race and gender, energizing both subtle and extremist expressions of racism and misogyny alike. Furthermore, I argue that racializing logic depends on an ancient gendered imagination sprouting from the post-fall garden of Genesis 3:16. Because men came to imagine separating from and taking authority over the gendered Other, they could also imagine the possibility of enslaving the racial Other.
I contend that complementarianism, which casts women and men into roles of submission and authority, is an ideology built upon the same diseased social imagination that allowed colonists to cast Europeans and Africans into the roles of White and Black…
Continue reading for free:
https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/the-complementarian-imagination-race-gender-exclusion/
Division and domination: fruit of the toxic kingdom and in opposition to the Christ’s Kingdom.
Well written. Good reasoning. Now how do we convince them?