A Guardian column written by V (formerly Eve Ensler) has been circulating among friends. Her criticism of our nation’s patriarchy, which she calls “psychopatriarchy,” struck a chord.
Recognizing the horror and anguish that women (as well as men) in my life are carrying, I found myself in tears and my own anger followed. V names the “backlash against the progress we have made on all fronts,” describing a culture speeding toward the cruelest expressions of male power — in politics, in wealth and in women’s bodies. What she describes is present in our churches as well.
Jon Singletary
This fall, I am facilitating a book group with men using Heather Matthews’ Confronting Sexism in the Church, sponsored by Baptist Women in Ministry. Early on, Matthews writes a sentence that invited sincere reflection in our group: “We are all sexists.”
She does not mean every man is a villain. She means those of us formed in patriarchal churches and cultures have taken in its assumptions, often without knowing it, and have benefited from them, often without asking. She writes to give voice to women’s experiences and also to call men to acknowledge how we have kept this system going and profited from it, and then to use whatever power we hold to join the work women have been doing for generations.
What should men do with a column like V’s and a book like Matthews’? Our usual reflexes are to explain, defend or move quickly to solutions. We may quibble with her language. Some will rush to show we are among the good ones. I want to suggest a different first step, one our tradition knows well and we must learn to practice: Lament.
Lament as truth-telling
Lament is not despair. It is faithful protest, addressed to God. “How long, O Lord?” the psalmist cries. Lament refuses to look away, and it refuses to hurry to comfort. It tells the truth about the world and then dares to bring that truth before God.
“Lament is not despair. It is faithful protest.”
Scripture also gives us a harder kind of lament, the confession of a people’s sin. Nehemiah and Daniel pray this way. They do not lament what those people have done. They pray, “We have sinned.” They place themselves inside the failure of their community, even when they did not author all of it.
That is the lament men need now. Not grief on behalf of women, as though we stand apart as sympathetic witnesses, but grief that names our part. It means grief for the women in our churches who experience violence as we look away. Grief when women were told their calling was misheard. Grief for the insults, doubts and questions female pastors experience regularly. Grief for the gifts lost as women walk away. And grief for what patriarchy has done to men — the deformation of our own souls by entitlement we did not choose and did not refuse.
Anger that is not the end
Grief is not the only thing V’s column stirs in me. I am angry. Contemplative practice has taught me not to push that anger away but to notice it, name it and ask what it is teaching me.
V’s focus is largely political, but she acknowledges it doesn’t stop (or start) there; we know our churches perpetuate and benefit from the same practices of patriarchy. And so I am angry when I hear our churches teach that women bear the image of God fully and equally, while denying women opportunities to lead. When women are told they are supported in ministry while repeatedly facing the microaggressions of remarks their male counterparts never have to hear. When women experience violence and abuse and are dismissed or even blamed, literally adding insult to injury.
“What V sees in our public life did not arise apart from the church.”
Matthews argues that much of the church doubled down on male authority and aligned itself with political power to protect it, and that this pursuit of power is tied to the abuse that has come to light in congregation after congregation. What V sees in our public life did not arise apart from the church. Too often it was baptized there with the faulty reference to Scripture as the justification. Their arguments spark an anger in me, and I am mindful that this is a response women often feel daily.
Men must feel this anger, and yet it cannot be where men stop. Unexamined, it becomes one more performance of male intensity. Placed within lament, it can become something else: Energy for repentance and for repair.
What lament makes possible
V writes, “Our feelings, our pain, our empathy, our rage, our love, our refusal to turn away will be our salvation.”
She is not writing to the church, per se, but the call for salvation resonates. Empathy is healing work, and lament is not the end of men’s work; this is where the work begins.
Grief that has been honestly expressed makes room for things that defensiveness never could. It makes room for listening to women without explaining their experience back to them, for friendships across genders that break down stereotypes, and for sharing power, or giving it up, in the places where we hold it. It makes room for advocating, in our own congregations, for women to preach, lead and be paid fairly, and for teaching our sons and the young men around us that strength and domination are not the same thing.
These are small, concrete steps. Matthews insists that change often comes this way, through steady, incremental faithfulness more than grand gestures. Small steps can feel inadequate against the scale of what V describes. But the alternative is paralysis, and paralysis is just another way of leaving the work to women.
I am trying to let myself grieve and to let my anger be honest. I also am trying to resist the temptation to make this about my feelings. Then I want to get up, along with the men in my group and, I hope, men reading this, and do the work that belongs to us.
How long, O Lord? Perhaps as long as it takes men to stop asking women to carry this alone.
Jon Singletary holds the Diana R. Garland Endowed Chair of Child and Family Studies at Baylor University, where he teaches and previously served as dean.