Off Track: Confessions of a Feminist Christian

I was a young evangelical Christian in 1968 when feminism hit me like a train I had been waiting for. When I raised questions, people told me that feminism conflicted with the Bible.

When I married, my male relatives said I wasn’t really married if I didn’t take my husband’s name.

When I finished grad school at UC Berkeley and got my first job teaching English at Cal State San Bernardino, my father asked, “Why don’t you do something worthwhile–like be an engineer?”

When I became pregnant with my first child, my aunt told someone that I wasn’t fit to be a mother.

When I had my second child, I took time off from working outside the home. I knew I couldn’t juggle both with a husband whose own job commitments prevented him from sharing childcare 50/50.

When I had a third pregnancy, unplanned, I decided to keep the baby but edit a prochoice book with the personal stories of Christian women who had chosen to end a pregnancy. I wanted to persuade other evangelical Christians to support legal access to abortion.

It was not a good idea to start a baby and a book at the same time, but Abortion–My Choice, God’s Grace was published in 1994.

One thing I knew for sure as my third child arrived: I couldn’t stay home with three kids five years old and under. I went back to teaching and hired an older woman to take care of the baby while my husband and I were at work. Our oldest was in kindergarten, and our two-year-old was in preschool.

I managed to get better jobs and then finally to earn tenure at a Catholic women’s college in Los Angeles in 1998–but the next year I learned that my two oldest daughters were “cutting.”

Later that year the US Conference of Catholic Bishops decided to enforce restrictions on any professors of religion and theology at Catholic colleges and universities who did not toe the line on the Church’s teachings against birth control, against abortion, against women becoming priests, against priests marrying, etc.

At that point, I had to re-evaluate all my choices on how to live my faith and my feminism. To find out how I changed course, read my memoir, Off Track: Confessions of a Feminist Christian.

Photo above is Letha Dawson Scanzoni with me in 2019. Her 1974 book launched the evangelical feminist movement–All We’re Meant to Be: A Biblical Approach to Women’s Liberation.

Life is a mountain, not a beach.

You know you’re evangelical when…

My writing group liked my 36-page chapter called “Born-Again in Bakersfield” but they said there are too many Bible quotes in it.  Too much preachiness…

In one sentence, I list three parables that I have always liked: “We heard about the prodigal son, the widow looking for her lost coin, the seeds that fell on rocky ground and didn’t sprout.”

“We get the reference to the prodigal son,” said two of my writer friends, “but you should explain what the second two are–or not mention them.”

I am amazed that they have never heard these two parables.  They are such a part of my outlook on life–God as female seeking her lost one, and God as sower who casts seed that never sprouts, seed that sprouts and dies, and seed that sprouts and grows well.  How can anyone live without these powerful metaphors?

I don’t want to delete most of my Bible quotes and references….  I love the Bible.

Furthermore, this book is a portrait of who I was, who I am, and how I got from one to the other.  It’s a portrait of an evangelical, for Christ’s sake, so it’s going to be preachy.

Their critique points to a fundamental problem, however: who is my audience?  Should I make it less preachy to reach secular readers?  Or is it aimed mainly at Christian readers, who know these references to Jesus’s parables?  But why preach to the already-converted?

I’ve got to figure this out…

 

To be or not to be… an evangelical.

I identify as an evangelical, but it got a lot harder in 2003 when the US bombed Baghdad and evangelicals were supporting President George W. Bush on that bombing.

A month or two later, I read a newspaper article about American evangelicals trying to convert people in Baghdad. We bomb their city and then tell them about Jesus?

Then when Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 but won in the Electoral College, it became even harder to be out as an evangelical.

But at least I’m not alone. There are a lot of evangelicals who were totally dismayed that an admitted abuser of women moved into the White House.

In April 2018, sixty evangelicals met in Wheaton, Illinois, to discuss how to be people of fa in a world where the labels “right-wing” and “Trump supporter” have become associated with the word evangelical. “World evangelical leaders confer at Wheaton” reported the Wheaton Record. The meeting was called the Wheaton Consultation on Evangelicalism.

“Several Christian leaders walk out after evangelical meeting turns to Trump-bashing” was the headline of an article on CBN News.

The Washington Post even took an interest, publishing “I was an evangelical magazine editor, but now I can’t defend my evangelical community” by Katelyn Beaty as an opinion piece in the Acts of Faith series.

All the while, I’m writing a memoir on being an evangelical and a feminist. Do I need to reject what has been my identity for a long time?

Actually, ever since my pro-choice book in 1994, some evangelicals have decided I’m not really one of them. Never mind that Christianity Today magazine and other leading voices in 1973 accepted legal access to abortion as an improvement over back-alley or self-induced terminations. And never mind that I’m still a born-again Christian.

Postscript in 2019:

I was encouraged when Christianity Today came out in opposition to Trump on December 19, 2019, with an editorial “Trump Should Be Removed from Office.” I even re-subscribed.

I had worked for CT back in 1970 and 1971 as a summer intern and even been offered a permanent job, but I chose to return to graduate school instead. I continued writing some occasional reports for CT as a free lancer, and I continued subscribing–until one year when the issue of women preaching led to a CT cover depicting a woman in the pulpit as if she were at sea with a storm raging around her.

There are several reasons why I continue to call myself an evangelical, but my friendship with Virginia Ramey Mollenkott has been one of them.

“You don’t have to accept their version of what an evangelical is,” she said. “It’s a good word, and we don’t want to let them own it.”

Trout Lake from the trail to Lake Hope