Continuing in Julie Ingersoll’s book, Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles, the author relates the plight of female students at many evangelical seminaries and colleges (interviews conducted between 1993 and 1995 at seven schools in different parts of the U.S.). Gals outnumber guys at evangelical colleges. Some families prefer to send their sons to more prestigious secular universities to raise their career prospects, but send their daughters to a Christian school, which is thought of as more “safe.” Many of these schools have a pervasive hostility to feminism, and women students report “feeling steered away from careers and toward marriage…, sometimes blatant and intentional, sometimes more subtle.” Young men are supported and mentored when studying for the ministry; young women get little support from the larger community. They are also told that they ask too many questions.

Women students feel devalued when male students make relentless jokes about them, showing disrespect, but they are devastated when the criticism and disrespect comes from faculty. There’s an assumption that women will never be serious scholars, that “objectification of women’s bodies and devaluation of women’s minds was ‘natural’ and indeed partially desirable to women,” making them suspect when they dare to “venture out of the prescribed expectations.” All the women interviewed did share stories of support and affirmation, but they also all agreed that they “desperately needed more mentors.”

Despite many of the female students being sent to Christian schools to preserve their innocence, the interviews turned up stories of sexual violation and date rape at each of the institutions visited. They also feel pressure to not report the incidences; hushing up is rampant and little is done to perpetrators. Ingersoll tries to emphasize the especially damaging effects these incidences and the shoddy treatment of them have on these young women: “These are college-age women who have been raised with a tremendous emphais on modesty. They dress very conservatively and take their sexual purity extremely seriously. Many of them are virgins, and almost all of them would claim to be. Having their sexuality deprivatized in these ways is particularly humiliating for them. Because purity is so essential to being ‘Christian,’ unwanted sexual attention undermines not only their sense of self but also their sense of their relationship with God.”

By far the most problems, however, could be put into the category of gender harassment and intimidation, most of which are quite mild, but their power to “undermine the self-confience of the victims is magnified by the context.” Sexual harassment in these locations and these situations are clearly more about power than about sex.

Watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the latest Harry Potter movie just out, made me think about awkward teenage interaction between the sexes. As Potter devotees know, each book (and movie) is another sequential year in the life of Hogwarts, and in particular the lives of friends Harry, Ron, and Hermione. They are now old enough to be noticing the opposite sex, which brings tensions of its own.

Of particular interest to me was Ron’s struggle to get up the nerve to ask someone for a date. How can a guy talk to a gal about something personal, he wonders, when they all go around in packs? Of course, his best female friend, Hermione, is an unnoticed exception to that “rule.” Although Hermione interracts with other females quite naturally, she seems to prefer the company of her best friends Harry and Ron, both males. I’m attracted to the Hermione character and of all the characters in the movie/book, my wife most strongly identifies with her. She’s independent and smart. What a great combination of talent for any gender.

I’ve always loved middles. Golden means. The place away from extremes. I describe myself as a moderate, both politically and theologically. So I’m attracted to the rare attempts at finding a logical, maybe even warm, middle in between patrarchialism and egalitarianism. The well-known Christian psychologist and best-selling author Dr. Larry Crabb is one who explores that territory by trying to set up a comfort zone where the two sides can meet and be civil.

In his book Men & Women: Enjoying the Difference, Dr. Crabb does that by playing up the complementarian concepts of masculinity and femininity (or the extremely uncomfortable “hood” words), but also de-emphasizing roles. Traditionalists (his word), according to him, emphasize that it’s “not right to guard against the abuse of authority by eliminating it,” and egalitarians look “for ways to honor our equality as redeemed image bearers.” The tradionalist’s gender roles may “encourage a moralistic obedience that hides self-centered purposes behind good behavior, and the egalitarian’s mutual freedom may “foster an unhealthy interest in developing and freeing oneself, thereby strenthening self-centeredness” when the real problem in life is just that: self-centeredness. I think Dr. Crabb is probably right when he tries to emphasize that both of these groups do not “adequately highlight the central problem of self-centeredness…. Fitting into roles can provoke self-serving conformity, and affirming equal value can encourage self-serving assertiveness.”

Being a marriage counselor, Dr. Crabb discusses this issue within the context of marriage. But to him, putting an emphasis on a partnership of equals leaves him “strangely unwarmed” since he sees his wife as not only equal in value, but also “enjoyably different.” He agrees with J. I. Packer when he says that certain Biblical passages continue to convince him that “the man-woman relationship is intrinsically non-reversible.” However, he would prefer to “think more about richly relating to one another than pinning down an exact definition of sexuality that we must express in our behavior.”

Crabb’s counsel is not to define masculinity and femininity and try hard to measure up to it, nor to try to fit into whatever role seems to best fit that definition; neither is his counsel to figure out who we are as people with our own sets of interests, talents, and resources, working to more fully express them and removing obstacles that get in the way. Rather, his counsel is “to look hard at your spouse, to identify his or her hurts and wounds and frustrations, and then to do whatever is within your power to help. The obstacles [we] need to remove are those that interfere with [our] progress toward other-centeredness, not with self-expression.”

That makes a lot of sense to me. However, Crabb then goes on define the undefinable. Masculinity, he suggests, is “the satisfying awareness of the substance God has placed within a man’s being that can make an unique contribution to God’s purpose in this world, and will be deeply valued by others, especially his wife, as a reliable source of wise, sensitive, compassionate, and decisive involvement.” And femininity, he suggests, is “the secure awareness of the substance God has placed within a woman’s being that enables her to confidently and warmly invite others into relationship with God and with herself, knowing that there is something in each relationship to be wonderfully enjoyed.”

What? Women don’t want to make unique contributions to God’s purposes in the world? Tell that to the female theologian or the female doctor. Men don’t want to invite others into relationships? Tell that to the ever growing moose lodges and hunting clubs — or male-led churches for that matter. Maybe the former has more to do with A and B type personalities and the latter more to do with introvert and extrovert ways of interacting with others. Neither are gender specific.

Crabb basically sees masculinity as “moving toward others,” and “entering,” while femininity involves warmly inviting others in. Therefore personal sexuality mirrors physical sexuality. This to me, while at first attractive, really doesn’t express to me all of life. It leaves me strangely unwarmed.

A wonderful opinion piece appeared in the Chicago Tribune on September 6, 1998, shortly after the Southern Baptists reimbraced a patriarchal social order. The Northwestern University law professor wrote the following.

“Though I yield to no person in my commitment to the accepted tenets of gender equality, I actually took some satisfaction in the Baptists’ pronouncement since it implicitly repealed their controversial 1996 resolution to preach conversion to the Jews. What, after all, is more likely to drive Jewish females away from evangelists than raising ’submissiveness’ to a religious requirement.

“I do know a thing or two about Jewish women (including the one to whom I have been happily married for 20 years). And while she is extraordinarily gracious in many situations, you can be absolutely assured that ’submission’ is entirely absent from her behavioral repertoire…. My good, asertive, outspoken, forceful Jewish wife will simply never be fodder for conversion to a creed that expects her to be submissive, graciously or otherwise. There is no submission in our family and not much ’servant leadership’ either. What we have instead, in a tradition dating back to our matriarchs, is debate, disagreement, dialogue and then more debate. I always thought that approach made our marriage happier, stronger, and certainly more interesting. Now it has the added benefit of making us immune to proselytization.” — Steven Lubet.

And thanks to Alan Johnson who quotes this letter in his Priscilla Papers article (Fall, 2003), “A Christian Understanding of Submission.”

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.

The vast majority of what is published concerning Christian disagreements about gender, at least in academic writing, are logical explications in various spheres of study, such as theology, sociology, history, etc. An awful lot of this writing is rather dry and difficult to wade through, although bits of examples and stories about the affects of sexism on women and men occasionally salt the writing. I’ve been amazed, in fact, at how little of published personal experiences I’ve come across. I’m probably looking in the wrong places, but a wonderful academic exception is the following book: Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles by Julie Ingersoll, published by New York University Press, c2003.

In June 2000, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to restrict women from serving as pastors. Ingersoll spends a full chapter discussing the precedent changes at Southern Seminary, where Diana Garland, dean of the Carver School of Social Work, was fired over the same gender issue as it became a new criterian for hiring around February 1995. Shortly thereafter, in June 1995, Ingersoll conducted interviews with the major players at the seminary. Keeping the denomination pure and away from slippery slopes used to be done by the issue of Biblical inerrancy, but the conservatives (the good guys) were convinced that moderates (bad guys) were slipping through denominational leadership cracks, so a new issue was uncovered as a new litmus test: gender and church leadership.

Ingersoll has this to say about the costs of “purity”: “Southern Seminary has been willing to pay a very high price to secure agreement on gender-related social issues. While specific reports vary, in 1996, the year following this controversy, the seminary lost approximately one-third of its faculty and one-half of its student body. The Carver School of Social Work was the only school of its kind (i.e., a school of social work attached to a seminary). The air of pain and grief that hung over the campus was as heavy as the summer humidity. Several people spoke of having moved to Louisville in the previous few years to teach at Southern, only to face uprooting their families again because they anticipated leaving or being forced to leave…. Several [people] spoke to me only on the condition of anonymity. An atmosphere of intimidation and secrecy pervaded the campus…. People talked in hushed tones when referring to the controversial issues at hand…. Student[s] had been given a directive to refrain from talking about ‘internal matters….’ Students referred to [it] as the ‘gag rule.’”

More on this book later.

Not as many people know Frank Schaeffer as knew his father, Francis, the early Christian Right apologist, but he’s apparently well enough known in evangelical circles to get hate mail from them. I’ve been quite taken with two of his novels, Portofino, and Zermatt. They, along with Saving Grandma, are the ongoing saga of Calvin Becker, a young teen coming of age in a very strict fundamentalist/evangelical family. These books are humorous, and depending on your point of view, either hilarious or realistically painful — or more likely, both — especially to anyone raised in similar religious circumstances.

Calvin, his two sisters, and parents love each other, sometimes hate each other, and live on the edge of sanity. Although these characters may be exaggerated a bit, what they say and how they think ring true, but with a mother like his, I think I’d have learned to lie up a streak as well. We see the raw underbelly of an excessively religious family, and it is this that intrigues me the most and is why I mention it here. How does a family handle various grades of insanity, especially when it’s all painted in religious terms? When does faith become fantasy, or delusions or even schizophrenia? Or just outright sugar-coated meanness?

What is it that happens in family interractions behind closed doors? When family members are by themselves? How do the differences between the sexes express themselves when interracting with specific personality types? Just how do men and women negotiate what they want? Egalitarians rightly emphasize that all natural talents and spiritual gifts have been distributed between the sexes, but what’s the problem with admitting that they are not distributed equally? Even if that creates the problem that groups of people then tend to create required roles based on those unequally distributed talents and gifts, that’s still no excuse for not admitting the reality when it stares you in the face.

In Zermatt Calvin’s Dad tells him after his mother gets all hyper about his supposed episode of masturbation: “Boys don’t call their penis a ‘Little Thing.’ Boys don’t call their balls a ‘Precious Seed Sack.’ Women talk like that and they giggle when they have their period and call it ‘falling off the roof.’ It’s as if it’s all some cute secret…. Well, son, we men aren’t cute! Got it? Don’t be cute!” I have to say it was a great relief when Dad steps up to the plate to assert himself after pages of excessive and irrational religious talk by two of the three female characters, but I’m sure plenty of female readers would have the same reaction.

I think it’s wise to have a sense of forgiving humor about people’s weaknesses and a sense of humility about the certainty of our religious beliefs. We need the same senses concerning our views about gender. As Schaeffer says, believing in paradox and mystery is not a bad place to be.

Fifteen years ago, Deborah Tannen wrote a bestseller about miscommunication between the sexes called, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. Four years earlier than that she had published That’s Not What I Meant: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Your Relations with Others, which also showed how people subconsciously miscommunicate, whether between the sexes or not. One thing that interested me in those books was the topic of manipulation.

Feeling manipulated by someone else can easily happen for a variety of reasons. For example, if one person prefers to communicate more indirectly than another person, both can come out of a conversation feeling manipulated. Bette tells Billie that she’ll be in Billie’s town on business on Tuesday and Billie reacts positively, saying, “Great! I’ll keep Tuesday evening free so we can have dinner.” Bette, who’d already made plans for that evening, feels things are not going her way and instinctively starts to mentally adjust her plans to accomodate the new development. She didn’t tell Billie no because she had been expecting a much more indirect response like “Would you like to get together?” Then she could have expressed her suggested time and place, kept open-ended, but the response was too direct and too forceful; contradicting a statement that had been put that strongly would have been rude. Since it wasn’t arrived at together (and indirectly), her friend obviously wanted this particular thing very badly. Billie, however, was only showing her enthusiam and had no intention of bullying Bette. Bette feels manipulated into the new situation. Billie could feel manipulated and hurt, too, if she learned that Bette felt miffed and really didn’t want to spend the evening with her when she could have so easily have told her no.

Tannen describes an office situation where Morton works for a director, Roberta. Staff meetings involve listening to everyone’s point of view, debating all the pros and cons of each proposal, but somehow, in Morton’s view, the group, mostly women, winds up deciding (by concensus!) what Roberta all along thought best. Morton feels manipulated and that his time has been wasted. The women love Roberta’s rule by consensus. The one man hates it. My thought: Roberta probably hates the term “boss.”

Do women fear success? Tannen says the research says they do, because a woman saying she’s better than other women, or by behavior even appearing better, is absolutely verboten. Women are supposed to stress their similarities and connections, so what they’re really fearing is rejection by their peers. Girls learn from an early age that displaying superiority will not get them what they want: peer affiliation. Displaying superiority will get boys what they want the most, however: higher status.

So here’s the question. How do women become successful — by manipulation? Perhaps another (more positive) way of saying the same thing is — by indirect means that retains peer affiliation?

I recommend “Commander in Chief” on ABC TV Tuesday nights. Mackenzie Allen, the USA vice president, played by Geena Davis, becomes the first woman president of the United States by being sworn in upon the death of the president, against the president’s wishes and the leaders of his party. They’d prefer someone “more appropriate,” in other words, someone not a woman. That rankles her and she takes on the challenge.

There’s plenty of fodder here for lots of drama, and watching a bold leader like President Allen should provide thrills for many seasons, let alone the opportunity to explore the issues of female leadership on the world stage for a country which has come to believe that having a woman president is just about inevitable someday soon. Mackenzie’s husband has always been politically involved and he chafes at the whole “first gentleman” thing. Then there are the kids, high school twins, and a six-year-old, who all have their own issues and possibilities for political embarrassment.

Let’s all set aside an hour on Tuesday nights to watch a woman academic navigate Washington minefields and balance family responsibilities.

There are still a few men of a certain age in this universe who ooze chauvinism out of every pore of their bodies. They fling sexist remarks around like cigarette ash litter and pat female bums as if they owned them. Half of them don’t even know they’re doing anything amiss, and the other half do it to get a rise out of someone. And way more than half of both of those groups do these things to intimidate, perhaps subconsciously, perhaps not.

The workplaces these men can be found in seem to be isolated and traditionally male. Women have been making inroads into these bastions, and so gender attitudes have been changing in many fields. The problem in the workplace, as I see it, no longer lies mainly with blue or white collar workers, craftsmen or even the crassest of sports figures, but with those who work above the glass ceiling, those who are used to ruling their little fiefdoms: business owners, CEOs, doctors, pastors.

Laws, fortunately, have been changing. These men do get warnings, but unfortunately, many of them don’t get it until they’re sued. And yes, even churches are being sued for sexist practices.