Liz Cooledge Jenkins on 'Nice Churchy Patriarchy'

Liz Cooledge Jenkins joins Hannah and Will for a conversation about her new book 'Nice Churchy Patriarchy', unpacking all the subtle but damaging ways patriarchy can operate in 'nice' Christian spaces and inviting us to imagine and participate in more equitable and just ways of creating faith communities.

Connect with Liz's work here: https://lizcooledgejenkins.com/

About 'Nice Churchy Patriarchy': https://lizcooledgejenkins.com/nice-churchy-patriarchy/

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Transcript

  Hey friends, my name's Will.

 And my name's Hannah. And you're listening to the Spiritual Misfits Podcast.

 If you've ever found yourself on the fringes of Christian faith, this is a safe space for you. Your questions, doubts, and hopes are all welcome here. 

We're creating conversations, affirmations, meditations, and other resources to support you on your spiritual journey.

And let you know that even if you feel like a misfit, you don't have to feel alone. 

Will:
Liz Coolidge Jenkins, very warm welcome to you to the Spiritual Misfits Podcast.  

Liz:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat with you all. 

Will:
And welcome Hannah. It's been like a few episodes since you've been on. So even though you're always, you're always a presence,  it's great to have you on.  

Liz, you reached out to us a little while ago because you've got a new book in the world called Nice Churchy Patriarchy and a great book that Hannah and I have had a chance to spend a bit of time with, and we're looking forward to chatting to you all about church and gender and patriarchy and both what is, in need of dismantling is also what it might look like to imagine but to begin with, I'd be really interested, I ask everyone to begin with to share a bit of their backstory and when they may have felt like a spiritual misfit.

And in a sense, your story, as you begin to open it up in the book is actually pretty cleanly broken up into the first 18 years of your life and the faith space you were in. And then the decade after that, and the kind of contrasting faith space you're in. So do you want to fill out a bit of that backstory and maybe talk about when you started to feel.

Maybe like a spiritual misfit in terms of those spiritual spaces.  

Liz:
Yeah, totally. It was a pretty clean break. I grew up in a mainline Presbyterian PCUSA, progressive Presbyterian denomination. So that was a, it was a large Presbyterian church that my family went to from before I was born.

So baptized there as an infant of through when I moved away to go to college. And that was a space where I don't really recall any particular instances of gender discrimination. I'm sure there were things going on that I wasn't aware of as a teenager. But to me, things felt really equal. We did have a male senior pastor, but we had other female pastors who preached as often as anybody else did on the weeks when the senior pastor wasn't preaching and there were female elders and nobody really thought twice about any of that. I didn't think twice about any of that and wasn't aware of any debates going on or anything like that.

When I moved away to go to college and had to find a new church, I didn't really have. A very clear concept of what I should be looking for beyond just visiting some churches and seeing what felt right and where people were nice and I felt like I fit in. And so I ended up unwittingly choosing a pretty conservative evangelical church conservative complementarian church, a church where women were not allowed to be elders and not allowed to preach very often.

That was I would say a slow several years long journey of becoming more and more of a misfit there as I began to feel more and more strongly about gender equity and feel more and more strongly that it was really important that women were teaching and preaching and leading and just that free to be ourselves and use our gifts, whatever those gifts might be.

So yeah, I would say that was a slow, misfit kind of journey. I think when I first got involved in the church I didn't really buy into the complementarian ideology, but I also didn't think it was that big a deal. I thought we could agree to disagree and I saw where people were coming from.

And so it took a few years for me to come around to see  That actually is something that's really important. It's not just something that we can agree to disagree about as if it doesn't affect everything. So that's been a bit of my journey. 

Hannah:
I think I really resonated with a lot of what your book talked about because I've followed a similar trajectory to you where things were normalized growing up that I didn't realize were supposed to be abnormal. And it's only been in my adult years that I have gone, that's really messed up and actually that insidious complementarianism is toxic. So I appreciated that your book went after those insidious little parts of patriarchy that aren't there. The overt things that we all know are wrong, but the little bits that really undermine female agency and female voice and we'll talk about this later in the episode, but not just female, but people of any kind of minority which I also appreciate about your book.

But I wanted to ask about  The balance that you find in your book between  going after that nice churchy patriarchy and also  really calling out  the danger of these practices. But first of all, can you define what you mean by nice churchy patriarchy, and then we can unpack that a bit together. 

Liz:
Yeah, totally. In the book, I really wanted to get into, like you said what are those ways that patriarchy takes shape in faith communities. That may not seem egregious when you first are aware of them. Cause there's some really, obviously super damaging things out there in terms of sexual abuse abuse of power and all that.

Purity culture, I think would be another, topic for another day, but things like that, where it's like more clearly like this is not okay. This is really damaging to women and girls. I think I really wanted to tease out yeah, what are some of the things that might seem a little bit less.

obviously awful, and yet that really influence everything that really do undermine women's sense of confidence and sense of agency and power, and that undermine the ability of a whole community to function at its best when it's keeping half of its people from using their gifts. So yeah, Nice Churchy Patriarchy, I think the church that I was involved in for 11 years, starting in college, was full of really nice people, a lot of people that I really like and respect, a lot of men that I really like and respect, and yet, who hold these patriarchal views that end up being really damaging, so the book is a lot of me wrestling with that good people who fought into these systems that are really toxic. 

Hannah:
Yeah, and I think it's that nice in the title that stood out to me, because I think  that was that's the most pronounced way that this sexism  is allowed to yeah, get away with itself. That it's nice. And it's people that were like, Oh, they mean or, actually it's okay because they're being kind to me.

And I think that's why what you're writing about is so important because we don't actually  notice it for what it is. So I appreciated that you systematically went through the different ways that this niceness can be really belittling to women. But I think, you just spoke about these communities of good people.

And on, on page five, you write the faith communities I write about with good communities for me in a lot of ways. And I cherish them. I cherish the people I met there.  Even though I also wish things were different and feel strongly enough about this that I no longer wish to be a part of these kinds of communities. 

And I want to ask about,  because this is something I've wrestled with how do you cherish and what do you cherish about these spaces? And how do you tease out?  The damage or how do you hold the good and the ugly concurrently?  

Liz:
Yeah, I think that's a really good question and a hard one and one that I'm still wrestling with too, for sure.

I think as I look back on that church that I was a part of for so many years, I think about. I think about the ways that I really did grow and flourish I think that there were a lot of opportunities to use some of my gifts and a lot of ways that people encouraged me to do yeah, and I think, when you're when you move to a different state, whether that's for college or work or whatever just building a community of people who care about you and you care about is a really powerful thing.

And I treasure that. I don't take that for granted. So yeah, I think it's been quite a process of kind of teasing out like all the ways that was a good community for me. But then ultimately recognizing that. The ways that patriarchal power structures played out there and patriarchal policies played out there and the ways that the church leaders.

Did not have any intention of changing those policies in the end that became untenable for me and I don't think that I I ended up leaving the church when I moved across the state to go to seminary, but if I had stayed,  yeah, if I had stayed. 

Hannah: 
Do you feel like that grace, that gracious, It's like being able to take the good out of that season and still recognizing the bad, has that been something you've always been able to do or is that a  something you've been able to do with hindsight? Because I think, when I was working through my own  anger with spaces that were also nice and churchy and patriarchal I just felt a lot of rage for a long time and wanted to just throw the entire thing out.

And I think it's only been in recent years I've been able to. hold gratitude for a lot of the things that I've taken whilst also still being honest about the things I really need to leave behind. How have you navigated  that kind of  like recollection of those 

times? 

Liz: 
Yeah, I think I feel something similar to that. And then I also feel the flip side of it where I feel like. It was like the good things about that community were so clear to me for a long time that it felt like the bad things maybe weren't that bad.  Yeah, so I think it's also been a journey of coming to terms with the bad things really were that bad and it was right to leave even if I hadn't moved across the state like it was not right for me to stay there any longer than I did and I don't owe anything to anyone there in terms of staying.

I, yeah, I want to offer kind of friendship to anyone who still wants to be friends, but I don't owe them my agreement. I don't know that my submission to their authority, I don't owe them like my bodily presence in their church or anything like that. So that's one of the things I've had to come to terms with. 

Will:
Yeah, I can  I can relate in part, to looking back at, the. The church that I grew up in, or previous churches I have been in, where my theology has shifted significantly. And I can look back and see a sense of security in the community, things like that. But I wonder how, yeah, I could not be part of communities with certain views anymore.

Having said that, I'm very conscious that as far as a lot of the patriarchy in those communities was expressed. I'm part of the category of people that I think patriarchy is bad for everyone, and I want to say that very outright, but in terms of those power structures, I am the kind of person that those systems I'm a beneficiary by default.

So I'd be interested if you're happy to actually share, because I think it's really important for any listeners who are also white, cisgendered, straight men, who again we lose out in terms of the boxes patriarchy puts us in. But, could you give some of those examples of, it's that gradual awakening, almost, is how you've spoken about to realizing these kind of like toxic things that are in the air that are very normalized, often very polite, often, yet they can get away with it because X is such a caring, compassionate member of the community.

But could you paint some of those examples that actually in a woman's body, as well as in the body of, many people of different diversities within these communities what does it feel like to experience some of those kind of? Microaggressions or experiences of everyday patriarchal assumptions. 

Liz:
Yeah  Oh, there are so many things and so many microaggressions, I think is a good word for it because they can seem like small things, but they do add up and they're not insignificant, even if they're not as. This is a story that didn't make it into the book, but I think sometimes still about a time when I was eating lunch in the church courtyard.

I was on staff at my church at this time working in college ministry and I was eating lunch with two female colleagues one pastor and one ministry director. And I don't remember what we were chatting about, but I remember a male pastor at the church who had been there for a long time and had a lot of authority at the church, stopping by to say hi and saying something like, Oh, I see you ladies are having a serious theological conversation over here.

Ha.  And I think that we weren't. So it was funny, but what if we were like, I think it really rubbed me the wrong way as I thought about it more that assumption that three ministry staff of this person's church would not be having a theological conversation. And would he have said the same thing to three male church staff who were there having lunch?

I can't quite imagine that going over in the same way or. So I think there's, yeah, that's one of the things that comes to mind as a microaggression, just the assumption of the things that women care about or are talking about amongst themselves, the assumptions about what women think about or what is important to women or what women may or may not have thought through deeply or, have something to contribute on. 

So that's one of those things. I also.  Yeah, I think a lot also about how mentoring works in churches and how at that church we were all paired, some of us younger ministry staff were all paired with same sex mentors which, there can be some good reasons for that in terms of trying to  the church from accusations of sexual misconduct or protect people from actual sexual misconduct.

But I think when you go too far in that direction of being so wary of any male female interaction that you're not like Having young women be mentored by male pastors those women miss out on mentoring from people who actually have positions that they might aspire to one day in terms of preaching and teaching and eldering and leading that kind of thing.

So I don't think that anyone like intended to say limit my job prospects at that church by assigning me a female mentor. And yet. Without intentional mentoring from male pastors in the way that a man in my place would have had it was very hard to learn how to navigate church structures and systems and all that.

Those are a couple things I think of.

Will:
I wonder how much that one as well cuts both ways. Like, how often do you hear of a male senior pastor being mentored by a woman? And how different might things been if lots of our, men in ministry were actually experiencing the mentoring of, the other half of the sky type thing where it's like actually you would probably think about a lot of things differently if you had a different voice opening up your mind and perspective. 

Liz:
Totally.  

Hannah:
Yeah, because I guess that's back into the idea of patriarchy doesn't just harm women and other people groups, it's men too. We're all missing out if we keep letting these systems grow and be unchecked. And I think what stood out to me was  You're really going after that benevolent sexism, aren't you, that and I'll just define it for people quickly here.

If they haven't heard that term, it's a form of sexism in which people, especially women, who conform to traditional gender roles are viewed in a positive manner. And I guess what we're talking about here is not just,  Behaviors that are unique to the church, but the church seems particularly gifted at this benevolent, nice patriarchy.

Why do you think  churches are so good at this? And why are we facing it? Such insidious behavior in churches? 

Liz:
 Yeah, that's a good question. Because like you said, it's not just in churches. And I think that part of my journey of becoming so frustrated with all of the misogyny in church was this realization that yes, this is everywhere.

And the church could be better. The church could be,  Doing things differently than the surrounding patriarchal world, instead of being even more entrenched in these systems that aren't serving anybody. So yeah, I think that the people who hold most strongly to patriarchal views have done  a really good job of convincing a lot of people that is the way that Christians must be, that's, That their views are found in the Bible.

And I think a lot of people are very genuinely convinced of that. And I've heard from people who say yeah, like gender equality makes sense to me, but I don't know how to justify it with what I read in scripture. So yeah, I think that people who. People who have a vested interest in keeping things the way that they are, have managed to convince a lot of others and convince them that true Christians only see things one way.

And so I think it's been really eye opening and just really helpful for me to learn over the years that there are so many different ways to be a Christian. There are so many different ways to interpret scripture and there are ways to interpret scripture that are really honoring and uplifting to women.

Yeah, ways that don't, just talk about the passages that seem limiting or that talk about those passages in different ways, more nuanced ways and ways of reading that see all of the women that are leading there.  

Hannah:
Yeah,  I think about that anecdote in your book about you're at a church barbecue.

You sit down at a table and I can't, who, who sits down with you and then asks you to pretty much just justify the rights of women, like I love that story. Do you want to share a little bit about that or something similar in your book?  

Liz:
Yeah there was a friend from the young adults group that I was a part of at church who just randomly out of the blue at a church barbecue brought up the passage in, I believe it's 1 Timothy 2 that says something like I don't permit women to have authority, and that kind of thing, and he just asked me what I thought about that, and I was thinking, Oh man, like I just wanted to enjoy my burger and hang out with friends of church.

I didn't really want to talk about this right now, but it seemed like he was asking in good faith and he was a friend and someone I liked and trusted and respected. And so I made an effort to share some of the things that I learned about that passage and some of the things that. Make its interpretation a little bit less clear than it might seem.

And he listened  and then, and he heard me out. And then at the end he was like I don't know about all that, but I think I just need to take scripture at face value. And that's what it says. I was like, okay I tried.  Yeah. 

Hannah:
And I think what I noticed what was pronounced in that anecdote was you had very good reasoning and then even like the contextual reading of that time.

And actually this word might have been mistranslated and actually what he's saying here is this, and it wasn't even like  they did this person that you didn't name wanted to actually hear your reasoning. What do you think the intention of that question was? Was it just to.  Was it to put you in your place?

Cause it feels like that anecdote was representative of many experiences you had.  Why do you think that experience kept happening to you? 

Liz:
 Yeah, that's a good question. I think that people just felt entitled to bring up those conversations whenever and however they felt like it.

I think a lot of people were interested in the questions but didn't necessarily recognize the impact that the interpretations have, right? If you're a man in these systems and you're mostly just talking about these things with other men, it might be oh, I'd be curious to hear a woman's perspective on that.

Let's ask Liz.  But not really recognizing the just the difficulty of being drawn into those conversations all the time and the drainingness of it, the weariness of it because for them, it might be this intellectual debate. That's interesting. But for me, it's my whole life. It's the opportunities that are available to me.

It's the freedom I have or don't have to use my gifts to serve. It's the, how I'm viewed with respect or not by other people in the church. Like it's, it impacts so much of my existence and I don't feel like there is often a full recognition of that.  

Will:
I do feel like that's very representative of a lot of, what we might call 'Theo bro' culture, where it is this sense of these are all fun ideas and we can find somebody who holds the other end because we love to play the devil's advocate or I do I've witnessed a lot of that.

I've probably participated in some of that.  So often that kind of culture has to be built on a certain degree of removal from lived experience. And that's what perpetuates it as well, is this sense that in a sense, and I don't want to cast aspersions on this particular person at the barbecue, but in a sense you're just a prop.

In helping to reinforce their fun debate, rather than actually a person with a lived experience that, that actually those ideas aren't just ideas they become embodied. 

Hannah:
Yeah, because you talk about how for that is an ideological thing that men can just toy with, whereas for you it was this deep emotional labor because you're living that.

I guess that is a real overt example of sexism, nice sexism where it's, justify why you should have a voice in this space, but then you also talk about going to a more progressive seminary where you are practicing  talking about theological issues, but you talk about the really insidious sexism of bringing up the idea of women should be able to preach and you're like, you could choose any other. 

of a myriad of issues to talk about, but why women? So even just the toying with these ideas that really affect people in this group rather than more abstract ideas. I think you keep talking about how  women are always the ideological punching bag almost.  either overtly 

Or subtly, 

And you keep coming back to that.

So it seems like it's been something you've really contended with throughout your professional and your personal life. Do you still feel like you're coming up against that now in the space you're in? 

Liz:
I think that I've really tried to distance myself from spaces where I feel like my full humanity as a woman is up for debate. So yeah, the church that I'm in now is a progressive Presbyterian community. I went back full circle to the denomination that I grew up in and it's a bit of a different kind of church than I grew up in.

It's a bit more ethnically diverse and socioeconomically diverse and a bit more openly queer affirming as well, which has become very important to me. So yeah, I, I wouldn't say that those things still come up in the same way as they used to. There's definitely forms that patriarchy takes in more progressive communities.

But at least I feel like we're all at this church because we're on the same page that we want to see people of all genders.  And I think a lot of people have come to the church that I go to now because there's a female senior pastor and we appreciate her leadership and the fact that the kids in our community can see her leadership and all that. 

Hannah:
Yeah.  If we go back to, how I was asking about why churches seem to be particularly  rife with nice patriarchy. Do you think that could also be because it is this self fulfilling thing you were talking about? If this ideology means it can confirm itself that this is just what the Bible says, so you can't question it.

Do you, like? Do you think the way that the church is structured means that it's allowed to get away with it more than other spaces? 

Liz:
 Yeah, that's a good question. I think churches often have a little bit less, oversight than other spaces in terms of hiring and firing practices, that kind of thing. 

I also think that sometimes at least churches are set up in ways that just makes it really hard to change whether that's Through the church hierarchy that you'd have to go through and national conventions and all of that, or if it's just at the complementarian church, I was a part of for a long time.

The way that the church was structured was that the elder board had to vote unanimously for anything to change. So that,  that didn't mean that the elders were actually all unanimous about everything. It just meant that if anything needed to change, there was a really high bar for it and elders were appointed for life.

So you're stuck in these systems that are just built to be very conservative in the sense of hard to change.  


Will:
It really does feel like a bit of a chicken and an egg. Is it a community where people want to justify. The convenience and the benefits that they get from the patriarchal norms and so then the Bible and certain elements of history become a very convenient way to reinforce that.

Or is it the other way around where it's like, Oh, I just read this text at face value, then this helps me to establish a community like either way, it feels like that's a really reinforcing cycle that unless it is intentionally broken, it will just continue to loop around in on itself.

And you can understand, I can totally empathize with why somebody would see that and go of course the church is more patriarchal and more sexist than the rest of the society, because they're even listening to this dude, Paul, who says some stuff that really seems very sexist. I think, though, that in a sense, to tap out there, and I don't judge anyone, I understand why people do it.

But to tap out there, there's a laziness because it just means that the conservative interpretation is seen as the default way of interpreting Christian history and Christian scripture. And I think part of what you do really well in the book as well, Liz, is you actually go, again, this is a kind of a rewriting of history where we fail to see that so much of Christian history So much of Christian scripture can actually be seen as a chicken and an egg around liberation.

Do we care about reading the scripture as a liberating thing because we're interested in that already? Or, is it actually I became interested in justice, I became interested in trying to dismantle patriarchy because I read the words of Jesus. And I wonder if you could almost flip it a bit.

Because I feel like it, I just, it really gripes me when The conservative church get to own like the primary or default Christian narrative and what if actually that's a distortion on the fundamental message being one of liberation and anti patriarchy. I think you can make a very strong argument that Jesus and within his context, Paul are actually like making huge grounds for like feminism and humanism and all of that.

But do you want to talk about some of the areas where you started to see? In history and scripture like that. There's actually a way of saying that this is the primary place of liberation.  

Liz:
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I do think that scripture often reflects what we're looking for when we come to it.

And I think Rachel Held Evans said that really well. And I agree. And I do think that there's ways that we can read it and if we're open to being changed by it or open to being shaped by it differently, I think that does happen. And I think it happens especially when we read it together with or if we are in these groups just as ourselves, our full selves.

So together with people who are marginalized or oppressed, whether that's by gender or sexuality or race or something else. So I think that, in all the different ways that there are to read scripture when female theologians, when theologians of color, when women of color theologians. 

reading it and are, saying what they see in it. Those are often interpretations that are really liberating. People who are on the other side of power structures see different things in scripture. And as a whole church, we gotta be listening to that. Otherwise we get these very twisted views that reflect the beliefs of people in power.

But yeah, I think that, like you said, yeah I agree that a case can definitely be made for reading Paul in ways that are more liberating than impressive. I don't know that I would exactly make him into a modern day feminist icon, but I do think that for 

his culture, for his time, yeah, too far, 

too far, there's a limit. 

Has 

his moments, has his moments, but 

I 

do think that like it was really important for me for one thing to realize that, or I think to learn in seminary that those passages were Paul tells wives to submit to their husbands. as well as slaves to submit to their masters. So if we're reading one of those literally and not the other, there's a problem.

But in those passages, they're they're based on Greco Roman household codes that were very common, commonly known at the time. And so people who read those letters would have seen okay, this is what Paul's saying. That's similar to our broader patriarchal culture. And this is what he's saying.

And they would have seen I think it would have been pretty clear to them that Paul was pushing for some changes that made things better for women. He was giving instructions for husbands to actually love their wives and sacrifice for their wives. And that was the counter cultural part.

As opposed to the submission part. So yeah, I think just learning more about the context of all of those things that seem limiting has been huge for me. And I think that looking at the ways that Jesus interacted with women throughout his life has been huge for me too. And looking at the different stories where he interacts with different women even or especially women who break out of the expected gender roles and norms.

That might've been expected of them. I'm thinking of the woman who anoints Jesus with her tears and wipes his feet with her hair at a dinner party full of men debating important theological things as men do. And she just comes with her faith and her realness and her honesty. She probably could have weighed in at that debate, but instead she approaches Jesus in a different way that Jesus really appreciates and affirms.

And there's just so many instances of Jesus affirming women's faith and affirming their agency and affirming their choices to approach him in ways that might not have seemed very ladylike or acceptable. So I think all of those things can be really liberating too.  

It's interesting, like I think the phrase, the plain reading of scripture is just a big fat firthy, which is like Australian slang for, a lie.

One of the things that you, like you have this fascinating little chapter where you actually go through your book collection. And you do some maths and you have some pretty staggering results around how many of the books you amassed over the years. And these are the ones that you hadn't thrown out yet.

Some of them being so overtly sexist that you just got rid of them. But of the leftovers, it's well over 70 percent are just white male dudes. And then you go further to talk about how often when women and women of colour Are writing in theology spaces, they're writing about gender and race, whereas the white dudes just get to write about like salvation and like grace and like all the big stuff.

So in a way, like the plain reading of scripture is just as much about who have we allowed to commentate, who have we allowed to narrate, and what stuff have they been assigned in terms of what they can speak to. . I just think that's so I found that really fascinating and I think if most people did an audit.

on the reading that they have read scripture through. And even if that's what you've heard from the front, that the pastor or the preacher, what does their bookshelf look like? That becomes pretty clear that actually, the interpretive lens here is very dominated by other voices. But that's something that has actively changed for you, and you talked about even doing not reading white people for Lent.

Do you want to talk a little bit more about that and how that started to actually reshape again some of your kind of ways of seeing theologically and again seeing these liberative themes as those other voices become more central in your 

understanding?  Yeah, totally. And I embarked on this journey of really intentionally seeking out female authors, and especially women of color authors, after realizing how skewed my bookshelves were, and how skewed my seminary education had been, even at a seminary that is, in theory, really committed to racial equity and gender equity even at that seminary, and even specifically seeking out justice oriented classes in that seminary, which I very much did where I could.

Yeah the whiteness and maleness of the syllabi by and large was just very striking and very disconcerting. And yeah, when I graduated and had some time to go back and  even try to ask those questions of what voices did we miss. When we weren't hearing from women authors and women of color authors on our syllabi.

Yeah, that's been quite a journey over the last four years since I've graduated. And through that length time of specifically fasting from white authors, as well as just more generally trying to balance things out and just hear as much as possible. Possible from authors of color and women authors I do feel like that's changed everything for me.

I think it informs everything in the book. As I try to figure out what it looks like for me as a white person and a feminist to not fall into white feminist traps of only advocating for my own benefit or benefit of people who look like me and have experiences similar to mine. Yeah, I think that reading more intentionally from women of color authors has changed how I view God and has changed the possibilities that I see for faith.

I think that  there's just so many things that people on the underside of these power structures see that people on top of the power structures don't see. And so there's so many experiences of just yeah, reading and thinking. That totally makes sense, and I did not see it as a white person, I did not see it and I imagine that's similar for men reading women authors as well so I think and even for me there's things that women, even like white women authors say that I hadn't quite thought about in that way, but totally makes sense just because I've been trained to read everything through male eyes and read everything through male theologians eyes.

I think there are ways that women name women's experiences that are really helpful for other women to read and think, yes, that is actually what I would call that. That is actually what I've experienced too and what do we do about it? Yeah, it's been really powerful.  I really 

appreciate that your book doesn't just stick to the white feminist view and is really careful to acknowledge that if it's hard for white, heteronormative, middle class women It's probably much harder for other communities.

And I resonated with when you were talking about a lot of your unraveling at Faith Bible Church was when you started to acknowledge. queer communities and their space in Christianity. That was a really helpful tip of reading widely and not just reading through the lens of male eyes. Are there other ways that the church can  do better in fighting for the rights of all and being more inclusive in not just perpetuating this nice patriarchy? 

Yeah, I think that I think that representation and leadership is huge. I think that,  even for denominations that welcome women to pursue ordination in theory, sometimes there are just a lot of barriers to that in practice. And when you see a denomination that in theory supports women in ministry, but really  Sometimes far less than half of their ministers are female.

That's something that needs to be addressed. So I think, like having as many women preach from the pulpit as possible, even if there's a male pastor, they often have a lot of choices that they're making about whether or not they share the pulpit and with whom and. who they invite as a guest preacher.

And so I think thinking through all those things, thinking through how women are represented in different forms of leadership and just drawing on all the different resources within the Christian tradition that point toward a different way than many of us have been taught. So I think like for me, it's been really.

Healing and life giving to learn more about Christian history and learn about some of the women in all 2000 years of Christian history who have fought for equality and sometimes in some measure achieved it.  And just women who have used their gifts and unconventional ways. And I think just to realize that these battles are not new in the last few years.

They're not new in the last few decades. It's been this push and pull over 2000 years has been. That's been really huge for me. So I think there's a lot that churches can consider just as they consider the resources that they draw on and the theologians they draw on, and even the language that we use to talk about God and whether that's however, unintentionally giving the message that God is an old white man up in the sky.

I think there's a lot we can rethink in terms of metaphors and. Liturgy and the way that we pray and the songs that we sing, all of it.  

Yeah. And the second half of your book really does go through, in some great kind of detail around, yeah, different prayers, different ways of addressing God different ways to approach liturgy in a community.

And there's some great stuff there for those who are wanting to dive a bit further in the book. I guess one question that kind of loops back to almost where we started. Is around, if we were like having a strategic planning meeting to smash the patriarchy or to smash the Christian patriarchy there is this sense in which, yeah  you know like the place of anger. 

And again, I guess within those systems, there's a  that can almost be, there's like this built in fail safe that, oh, if they get angry, then we can say that they're being emotional, which reinforce reinforces this kind of stereotype around people not adhering to their place. But also I guess there is this kind of balancing act around  a constructive anger, an anger that is actually, you have a sentence in the book that's something around I'm all for being kind, but I'm also all for anger. 

And I wonder what does it look like to, for people listening and for each of us as we try to grapple with these very big systems, but also often these very polite systems that may try to coax us into only engaging if we're going to engage really politely, patiently, and gently what does it look like to, and particularly for women to reclaim, you talk about agency and anger, to reclaim agency and anger as very valid tools for advocacy and for, I guess like thinking through how do I actually bring about change?

Do you want to speak to a little bit of that kind of balancing act?  

Yeah, totally. I think that any community that really cares about justice and really wants all of its people to be liberated and seen and heard needs to grapple with the fact that there will be anger from people who are being marginalized within that community.

And I think that people in power in those communities need to learn to hear that anger and people who are experiencing anger, I think, need to figure out ways to express it and if the community is a good one and a healthy one, there's room for that.  it doesn't need to be something that's written off, even though it often is.

So yeah, I think there's a lot of self reflection to be done, both on the part of people who are angry, of how do I express this in ways that, that liberate and heal and are good. And then I think there's a lot of self reflection on the part of people who find themselves Hearing that anger of, realizing that's okay.

It's good. I don't want to be part of a community where people feel like they can't express what they really feel and what they're really experiencing. I want to know so that we can figure out together how to make things better. And I think about the line in Ephesians where the apostle tell, apostle Paul tells people.

To not let the sun set on their anger and I think that's, yeah, there's a fair amount in the book about that. So I'll try to be brief. But I think that's actually a really powerful image, not necessarily. Saying that we shouldn't be angry, but acknowledging that we often are, and especially if we're the victims of oppressive systems we're often angry.

And what does it look like to not let the sun set on that? Not necessarily in a literal sense of never going to bed angry, but in the sense of figuring out what are some good things that we can do with that anger, what are some ways that we can, Use it as fuel to move towards healing and liberation and justice.

So yeah, I think there's a lot there. I think anger can be powerful. I think it doesn't have to be destructive. It doesn't have to be self destructive or destructive of others. But it can be a powerful force for change and to motivate toward change.  

Yeah,  following on from that, I'd like to read a bit from your book, because it bookends. 

Nice churchy patriarchy with this idea of reframing church community. So  let's look at how it's failed us and then let's dream of how we can change it. So on page six, you reference some Rebecca Solnit research. So you say, I didn't know until recently that the classic human fight or flight response to danger is actually a masculine phenomenon. 

I learned from Rebecca Solnitz, A Short History of Silence, that the original flight or flight studies didn't study female rats or female humans. And when researchers did study females, they found that we often gravitate toward other options. We tend and befriend. We gather, support, nurture and build social networks that help us cope with stressful situations.

That's amazing and it feels right, but it doesn't have to be for women only. People of all genders can cooperate in these ways. As we see the stress induced by patriarchal ways of being  the danger it presents to us and our communities. We don't have to freeze and we don't have to become violent. We can gather in supportive communities that heal together, tear down and build together, push together for change, hold one another gently as we do and then towards the end of the book, you write, we are desperate for new ways of being. So even though you acknowledge that you're not always sure what these ways are, I'd love to hear some details of inclusive spaces you may have been part of, or what you dream for the non nice white patriarchal church of the future.



Yeah,  I dream of it not being quite as white dominated, not being quite as patriarchal and if there's niceness. It's because we genuinely want to be kind and express that, not because we feel like we have to hold things inside of what we actually feel or experience. So yeah, I think that there are people working toward this vision all over.

I think it could look tons of different ways in different communities and that's part of it, that it should be specific to each community and shouldn't necessarily be this like cookie cutter. Like white churches have often been just take one and plant it somewhere else and do all the same things and it'll work.

So yeah, I think it takes a lot of thoughtfulness and a lot of just gathering in community to talk through what are we doing, who are we, who do we want to be and really putting into practice everything that, white people like me often like to say about listening to people of color, listening to women of color There's a quote from Ijeoma Oluo that I often go back to in my mind of respecting women of color as thought leaders.

I think that's a really helpful framework just in terms of how we see like who we should be listening to and following. I've seen that in my very imperfect current church community and the ways. That we I think we really try to do those things. And I was really moved and I write about this in the book.

The first time that I saw new elders ordained or commissioned to be in that role. And they were almost all women of color, including a bunch of young women of color. And that was so different from everything that I'd experienced at 11 years in this church. That was very patriarchal and dominated by.

mostly white men.  And it was just so moving to see oh yeah this is actually what leadership looks like. This is what good leadership looks like. The things that we assume about who should be a leader really need to be re examined. So I think I was just really encouraged by that and.

Yeah, I think it's really specific to each community and takes a lot of conversation and prayer and putting our heads together and being willing to maybe develop a thick skin in terms of being called out when things aren't working. Or just an openness to change, openness to being shown things that we didn't see.

So  

yeah. Awesome. Liz, thank you so much for For your words and your work, I want to affirm like one of the things that you did was to leave spaces that weren't the, sometimes there's this real sense of, I have to stay and reform this thing from within, but what I hear and see in your work is just that there is sometimes a time to leave and go somewhere fresh and dream anew. 

So I want to thank you and affirm your decisions along the way to not only leave, but then to be really active around using your voice and your experiences and your words to invite people into a broader imagination. And thanks for doing that with us.  Spiritual Misfits Podcast is brought to you by Meeting Ground, a church for the misfits. 

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