John Allen had some interesting commentary last Friday on lay ecclesial ministry and the feminization of the Church.
GET THE STORY.
He describes the basic phenomenon of increased lay ministry well (for good or ill), and much of what he has to say is quite insightful.
I’d like to write a longer commentary on what he has to say than I can at the moment (perhaps I can revisit the subject another time), but I’d call attention to at least a few points, briefly:
Allen notes (correctly) that in both the Catholic Church and in Protestant churches (even those that allow women ministers), the top level of leadership consists of men, but the level below this is largely women. That’s to be expected for several reasons:
a) Women are–in all cultures and times–more religious than men, meaning that they’re more likely to sign up/volunteer/whatever. However,
b) Men are not biologically equipped to bear and nurse children the way women are, which makes them the natural primary caregivers for children, which takes women out of the work/volunteer pool for a considerable length of time (at least until the children don’t require constant supervision). In humans, bearing and raising young requires an intense personal investment (compared to some species, where the young are on their own from the moment they’re hatched), which means–and this is especially true historically–that if a human family has to make a choice about who is the primary caregiver for the children and who is the primary breadwinner, the choices that most families will make, and have made historically, are obvious. This has an impact on human psychology, specifically:
c) Women are on average more psychologically oriented toward caregiving within the family and men are more psychologically oriented toward interacting with the outside world, which means things like pursuing a career (income for the family), fighting wars (protecting the family), and pursuing leadership (securing a place for the family in the broader social situation). Men have an innate leadership instinct that is stronger–on
average–than the same instinct is in women.
Because of factors (b) and (c), men disproportionately form the leadership of almost every institution: the family, the state, the business world, and the religious world. Men have a stronger drive to achieve in these areas, and because of their biological inability to bear and nurse children, they aren’t taking time off to do those activities and can devote themselves more fully to their careers.
You might even expect men to be even more dominant in the religious world than they are except for factor (a): Women are more religious than men, which ensures them a prominent place in religious institutions.
What I have said thus far, of course, is based on the law of averages.
It’s not true of every individual. Some women are more driven to lead
than some men and some men are more nurturing than some women in the
same way that some women are taller than some men and some men live
longer than some women (greater height being a male thing on average
and greater longevity being a female thing on average). Similarly, some men are more religious than some women. It’s all averages.
So the pattern that we actually see is to be expected: Men outnumber women in the top leadership roles in religious institutions, but women outnumber men in the next layer down.
In the Catholic Church, this reality has been reflected from the very beginning: Christ appointed apostles (leaders) who were all men, but we then read about there being a group of women (not men!) who ministered to their needs in turn.
Based on this defining, founding experience, the Church recognizes that the priesthood is something that can be held only by men, but it allows for a prominent place for women religious (think: priests and nuns).
In contemporary Protestant churches there have been some that have allowed women ministers, but the same pattern holds: Senior ministers are disproportionately male, while other church workers (including junior pastors) have a higher female representation, and sometimes are disproportionately female.
That’s just the way the human species is. This pattern is straight out of human biology and psychology. It’s part of our species’ reproductive strategy. It’s how God designed us.
But there can be fluctuations in how this gender dynamic plays out. Different religious bodies may have a more masculine or a more feminine orientation, and it’s not hard to see how some churches have become so oriented toward one gender–by tilting toward a masculine spirituality or a feminine spirituality–that the environment becomes uncongenial to the other sex.
At one time there was much more of a stress on masculine spirituality in the Catholic Church than there is now. That’s why we still speak of the Church militant as its earthly embodiment. But today the situation is changed, and it raises questions about how congenial an environment the Church is today for men.
Allen writes:
[S]ome recent writers have voiced concern that Christianity actually alienates men. David Murrow’s Why Men Hate Going to Church (Nelson Books, 2004) and Leon J. Podles’ The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity (Spence, 1999), illustrate the point. Murrow is a Presbyterian and Podles a Catholic, but both have noticed something similar about their respective denominations.
As Podles put it succinctly, "Women go to church, men go to football games."
Podles believes that Western Christianity has been feminizing itself for the better part of 1,000 years, beginning with medieval imagery about the church as the "Bride of Christ," which he associates with St. Bernard of Clairvaux and exhortations to "fall in love" with Jesus. While that kind of imagery has a powerful impact on women, Podles wrote, it’s off-putting for men. Podles argued that Christian men have sublimated their religious instincts into sports, soldiering, fraternal organizations, and even fascism. When they do engage in religious activity, he wrote, it’s more likely to be in a more masculine para-church organization such as the Knights of Columbus (note the martial imagery) or Promise-Keepers.
Even reviewers who didn’t buy Podles’ historical arguments generally conceded that he was onto something in terms of Christian sociology.
On a less theoretical note, Murrow, a media and advertising specialist, said he looked around after attending weekly church services for almost 30 years, and drew what to him seemed an obvious conclusion: "It’s not too hard to discern the target audience of the modern church," he wrote. "It’s a middle-aged to elderly woman."
This was never anyone’s intention, Murrow said, but it’s the inevitable result of the fact that these women have two things every church needs: time and money. In that light, he said, it’s no surprise that "church culture has subtly evolved to meet women’s needs." Murrow agreed with Podles that "contemporary churches are heavily tilted toward feminine themes in the preaching, the music and the sentiments expressed in worship."
"If our definition of a ‘good Christian’ is someone who’s nurturing, tender, gentle, receptive and guilt-driven, it’s going to be a lot easier to find women who will sign up," Murrow wrote.
I don’t agree with everything Allen says in the piece. In particular, I have some qualifications that I’d make in his final section regarding salaries and gender, but the dominance of feminine spirituality today in the Catholic Church is a concern to me. As a former Evangelical, I have an experience of what it’s like to be in a church that has a more masculine spirituality, and the Catholic Church’s early zeal to evangelize was driven by a masculine impulse ("Convert those heathen!"). I have a concern that the Catholic Church today is in danger of–and, indeed, has already become–too oriented towards a feminine mode of spirituality.
Both modes are essential for the Church to function optimally, just as both a man and a woman are essential for a family to function optimally.
It’s how God designed us.
After all, in the beginning there was Adam and Eve. It was "not good" that man should be alone, and it also is not good that woman should be alone. God meant for mankind to exist with the two sexes working together–bringing both of their viewpoints to the experiences they encounter–and when one viewpoint begins to crowd out the other, it’s not a good thing.
