Although there may be a growing moderate Islam women’s movement, the numbers are infinitesimal. The Islamic families these converted Christians marry into are highly likely to be intensely patriarchal, in ways that they’ve never even imagined.

Perhaps another reason why more Muslim men marry Christian women than the other way around is that Islam forbids Muslim women from marrying Christian men. See James Arlandson’s article The Truth about Muslim-Christian Marriages, and if you want to get even more alarmed, read his article, Women Are Inferior to Men in the Quran. Anyone who is familiar with the freedom (especially between the genders) that Christ offers, should not give it up for this type of religiously mandated bondage.

And it still amazes me why any Christian complementarian would want to be anywhere even near this Muslim ballpark.

How is it that this situation has developed? Now that women are no longer barred from higher education, their numbers have been climbing rapidly and men have not kept up. “From the early grades on up,” says U.S. News, “girls tend to be better students. By the time college admissions come into the picture, many watchers of the ‘boy gap’ agree, it’s too late for the lads to catch up on their own. Indeed, beginning in those formative K-12 years, girls watch less television, spend less time playing sports, and are far less likely to find themselves in detention. They are more likely to participate in drama, art, and music classes — extracurriculars that are catnip for admissions officers. Across the board, girls study more, score better, and are less likely to be placed in special education classes.” More of them graduate from high school and more of them go on for advanced degrees.

Most of the colleges who are having to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the men are the second and third tier highly desired private schools just under the first-ranked schools like Harvard, Duke and Rice. Still, there are apparently enough college slots available for qualified applicants, but those who get the most prestigious colleges often get the most prestigious and influential positions. One could think of this educational selection process as one of the many ways that we punish women for their successes.

College graduates on the whole, however, make more money than non-college graduates. They are also more likely to have managerial and other leadership positions then mere high school graduates, so it is clear that the workplace in the modern world will for the forseeable future have an increasing number of work situations where the boss is female and the little worker bees are male. And it will be seen, by most Americans at least, not only as perfectly normal but as a very good thing. And people who try to maintain philosophical or religious social and intellectual frameworks that force people into nonsensical corrals that do not mesh with God-given gifts and formal training will increasingly be seen as anachronistic and evil. And why would any church want to piss off that growing number of female leaders, money makers, and intellectuals in their communities who are quietly doing the work that God gave them the talent to do?

Mostly these days, those women simply stay away from such corrals, and highly trained and/or capable women who don’t are seen as either stupid or duped. Pastors who will happily take their money but keep them out of the board room will also increasingly be shunned. What will happen to all these corralin’ cowboys when they become the minority? I don’t know, but it isn’t going to be pretty.

The local church gathered around to comfort as well, just as they had been working with the family for months comforting and encouraging and guiding. Normally when something like this happens, I figure the pastor hadn’t checked with wise people of the opposite sex to seek counsel. In this case, however, he had gotten advice from spiritually mature members of both sexes, but had proceeded anyway. Why, I’m not sure. Youthful recklessness, perhaps, or maybe emotional or spiritual obtuseness. More likely, though, it was a desire to make a highly positive spiritual progress report about church successes before all the many out-of-town guests who were present.

Pastors, seek godly counsel and then pay attention. It’s so easy to crush a young spirit when you so strongly want to see spiritual bravery.

Democratizing the Bible led eventually to some democratizing of the church, which made it possible for democracy to come to civil politics. Hierarchies (gatherings of power), though, resist efforts to circumvent their strength and constantly regrow or gather power in related areas or in new forms. Democracy is the only effective answer to power grabbers, and gives the common man/woman hope for their own freedom — freedom from the arbitrary and capricious controls of the elites who think they know better than anyone else.

Patriarchy in the church is another limit on individual freedom that must go. All believers are priests who do not need intermediaries (or husbands) to pray, to seek God’s will, or to find their Christian way in the world. I predict that the blogosphere will swarm this topic, too, eventually, and that the evil of it will become as plain to Christians as is the subject of racism.

Head scarves are common in public on Muslim women in Turkey but are banned from government offices and universities to protect the secular nature of the state. Ms Cig has also criticized the Turkish prime minister’s wife for wearing the head scarf, which excludes her from attending state functions.

Having been raised in a small Protestant sect that taught that worshipping Christian women should wear head coverings in church services as a sign of submission to men and their total muteness before God, I’ve come to see the head scarf or Sunday-go-to-meetin’ hat as an out-of-place and out-of-date cultural symbol that causes more harm that it does good. Even if it is a positive thing to take a profane cultural icon and to Christianize it, or Muslimize it, religions need to do a better job of shedding symbols and religious activities when the effects of those iconic behaviors become negative within new cultural contexts.

Or scorn-producing, as the case may be. The trial is likely to be just another in a long list of such trials mentioned by the European Union as they continue to consider Turkey for membership, which Turkey very much wants. Why, the reasoning would go, would the submission and subjection of women even be considered, let alone seen as a good, worth fighting in court about?

The more hierarchicalists get out of their religious spheres’ squabbling and into the public eye, the more such scorn they will run into. There are no upsides to this issue for women, and the upsides for men are dubious at best.

The pastor, however, apparently believes that women can fulfill any job whatsoever they put their mind and hands to — just not in the church. CNN, however, relates that the mayor and the city council may have been disturbed by this schizophrenic viewpoint since the city manager who runs the day-to-day operations of the city is a woman and also the fact that the pastor sits on the city council. Clearly, this story illustrates once again how patrarchialists drag God needlessly through the mud — a God who gives women teaching gifts and then restricts them from using them in promoting his own kingdom (at least the male half of it). Boy, does God come across as dumb.

We also attended a Kenyan Church, and I was struck by the Christians’ all-out, full-throated singing, like I was in the middle of a choir’s quadraphonic sound. An awful lot of Kenyans don’t have much, but the Christians show forth their faith vibrantly. And thanks to the 22 Christian women from America, Australia and Canada who joined the team; without them the five men, of which I was one, would not have made an adequate force to accomplish what a medical team needs to accomplish.

Dad is gone now and my wife and I are taking care of Mom in an independent living situation. It’s sad the things she can’t do because she can’t figure out how to approach the problem of fixing something. Dad used to say she was the world’s worst mechanic. Is this role-segregation to the extreme?

Wait a minute. Mom always took care of the family’s finances from budgets to check writing to investments. She’s still handling all that just fine. Maybe she just doesn’t have the particular skill of fixing things, and, well, Dad was so good at that. Is this an example of each couple’s gifts being given room to flourish? And boy, can she bake! Or is it the ol’ 1950’s role machine gone amuck?

She does, however, get strongly Christian couples in her office, but they tend to be egalitarian in their determining of roles and responsibilities. In many couples, the issues stem from the woman feeling overwhelmed by chores related to the home and a need to shift that stress. She has found most husbands to be highly receptive to those needs, even though different couples certainly end up with different amounts of responsibilities per spouse. So, even though their teachings may say that the man is the head of the household, he is responsive to his wife and willing to alter his behaviors to assist her.

In couples where hierarchical marriages not based on religion occur, Dr. Brandt does find a higher rate of dissatisfaction and subsequent divorce. However, having hierarchical religious teachings appears to either allow women to reconcile their emotions or to keep them from reaching out for help as that would be contrary to their beliefs.

Dr. Brandt has a rapidly growing practice and feels her success is due to her newly developed approach to therapy. She gives three reasons for her success: 1) She works well with men. Men want to fix things and don’t want to ramble all around the place about feelings. She helps them discover what new behaviors will have positive reactions in the marriage, and the men are excited about taking an active role in figuring it out. Women are startled, surprised, and happy at their husbands’ responses to the therapy and problems get fixed quickly. 2) The average number of sessions that couples attend is about five. She deals only with the practical complaints as presented, unless there is a disagreement between the two about the moral framework from which they operate. Once the goals of the sessions are reached, they are done. 3) Medical doctors and insurance professionals hold her in high regard. When marriages get fixed quickly, the individuals’ health improves and the cost is less to the insurance company. She’s fixing marriages, not superegos and ids.

Dr. Brandt sees many categories or elements entering into the mix of what makes marriages work. She’s not into changing morality or moral frameworks unless that is necessary for the couple to get along, and even that change would have to be couple-initiated. Couples, or individual members of a couple, can say they believe something — say, a theological precept about marriage — but they may not in reality operate that way. So how important a certain idea or belief or model is to a person definitely affects the way they interact in a marriage.

There is a limited amount of research out on the effects of the new egalitarian and complementarian doctines on marriages, but more research is needed because it takes awhile for the teachings to filter down into the pews and get implemented in marriage relationships. My mother-in-law reports that in her complementarian church that the men get so much hammering on loving their wives and taking charge in their families that she feels sorry for them. There have been complaints that Christian couples in complementarian churches act more like egalitarians. We need to know, on an ongoing basis, what effect these new teachings, both egalitarian AND complementarian, are having on Christians. This is important because what marriage and family research does continue to show is that unless both parties of a couple feel they are having an adequate imput into the marriage, that marriage will not be happy and eventually is likely to head into serious trouble.

What a shame, then, that we have whole denominations, specific religious institutions, and sets of moral teachings, that try to cram everybody into the same personality, spiritual gift and talent boxes based on what is considered within a particular culture a gender “norm.” It’s these wonderful differences that make us at our core really us. Beware those forces in your surroundings that try to make you less than what God made you. Beware where you go to church.