War Stories (2)

Chapter 3 in Julie Ingersoll’s book Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles is called “Conflict in the Lives of Individual Women.” Even women, she says here, who have been groomed and carefully nurtured to be put on the faculty of conservative educational institutions come to believe that’s it’s only an act to show the world that they don’t discriminate. Why? There’s always a “but.” “They keep saying that ‘of course you are valuable, but….’ Of course women are equal to men, but, women can do this in the church, but, women can contribute this, but.”

Women often get caught in the middle when interviewing for faculty positions at Christian higher education institutions. The administration and faculty want to hire them, but the board may fight it. In some places they are recipients of coordinated challenges by male students who don’t feel like they should be taught religion by a female. On average it took women in one of these institutions two years longer to achieve promotions than men; 76 percent of the men made promotions the first time they requested it and 76 percent of the women failed. “Collegiality” is a very dangerous evaluation criteria to have on campuses because of its subjectivity and has been found to be an important factor in the differences between men and women making promotions and tenure in Christian universities. In 1999 the American Association of University Professors stated its opposition to this criteria because it “threatened diversity, academic freedom and legitimate dissent.”

Even in denominations that say they are friendly to the idea of women pastors don’t hire many. Pastoral couples are great to many church boards because they think they can get two for the price of one. Even if they do both get salaries, the wives are often sidelined into roles that have little real decision making power or institutional respect. Church members call her “a pastor”; they call him “the pastor.”

One woman worked as a youth pastor for a well-known parachurch ministry. At one of their camps where she was supposed to be “coworker boss,” her male coworker sabotaged every leadership situation that should have been shared. For example, “he would just go alone to all the camp directors and supervisors and make all these decisions and then he would come out and tell everybody about them without even telling me — and I would go out to make an announcement to the kids and he would cut me off or correct me or challenge what I was saying. He wanted to be in charge. That was clear.” But she knew if she made an issue of his behavior, which she tried to do, it just looked like she was being petty and “unChristian.” Her take: “It was this conservative evangelical spiritual guilt I was living with. If we weren’t getting along I mustn’t be being a good enough Christian. I just needed to pray, or I needed to pray for forgiveness.”

Ingersoll saw this sort of self-doubt everywhere. “I found it in nearly all of the conflicts I examined,” she wrote. “It is exacerbated by the subtle but broad-based undermining of women’s self-confidence. Women’s essential nature is thought to be dependent, designed for supportive rather than leadership roles, and in need of masculine leadership and guidance. With such socialization, women, more than men, look to others to validate their interpretations of situations and their own understandings of their talents and callings.”

In Bible school, people ask the guy what he thinks God has called him to, but don’t ask his fiancée who “had sacrificed a lot to leave [her] country and family to pursue the ministry.” Women report direct, public challenges even after they have been hired as pastors. Men are made “area leaders” and the women are made “staff women.” Organizational leaders often do not hold male staff accountable when they push women around and sabotage their leadership efforts, even in organizations that have mission statements that supposedly support women in leadership. Sometimes a woman is not consulted, even when the issues under consideration are the woman’s responsibility.

Next: women college students in evangelical contexts.