'We never really meant women were evil, just ... different': oh please.

This was a rant I wrote in response to the Church of England’s decision not to ordain women as bishops:

Unfortunately what has happened is a typical Anglican paper-over-the-cracks exercise that has got stuck at the fudge stage. I love the Church of England for its fudginess as a rule, but really this is going a bit far.

Someone triumphantly remarked that you can’t find any Bible quotations to support women priests.  Silly.  Quotations will only ever give you one snapshot (that’s why arguing using them never gets anyone anywhere).  What you need is to get a sense of the wholeness that the dialectic is tending towards (sounds a bit vague I know, but ...) I mean, all right, Jesus didn’t care for convention, didn’t he? He positively wanted to turn things upside down, exalt the humble, send the rich empty away ... If you asked him ‘now, these people on whom you have breathed, and sent them to preach to all nations and lay on hands and forgive people’s sins, what sort of people do these have to be? I suppose they have to be men, to start off with ...’ I think he might just have laughed incredulously and said ‘you still don’t get it, do you?’

You notice in the Gospels that almost every time he’s actually having a conversation with someone and responding to what that person is saying, as opposed to lecturing them, it’s a woman. The only times he seems to change his mind are when he’s confronted by a woman – his mother at the marriage at Cana, the Syro-Phoenician woman who comes out with the line about dogs and crumbs, and arguably Martha at the raising of Lazarus. No way did he regard women as spiritually incapable.

Now of course anti-women-priests types will say ‘no of course women aren’t spiritually incapable, there’s just this one thing that is special to men – Jesus was a man, God is a Father, there must be some essential way in which a male priest can represent him while a female cannot.'  Unfortunately, then, their only logical position is that males are made 'in the image of God' in some fuller way than females - not what Genesis says. 'God made man in His own image, male and female he created them.' Now you can perfectly well believe in a God who would create a two-tier human race - Muslims do, and I don't suppose the idea comes very hard to Calvinists as they actually believe he created some to be damned, which is a lot more extreme! But it doesn't sound like the Christian God to me. Would the God who supposedly inspired his mother to say 'He has put down the mighty from their seat and has exalted the humble and meek' then go on to say to her whole sex, 'No, I didn't mean you lot, you can stay where you are'?  If the Incarnation is to have no knock-on effects for women, how does it make sense? Women are fobbed off with Mary: 'okay, one of you carried God in her womb, one of you is higher than the seraphim, but be content with that, the rest of you can shut up, stay out of the sanctuary and go on making the coffee'. Huh?

Anyway, they can't have it both ways. Either they should come clean and admit that they think women are something midway between true human and animal, or they should admit that women, too, can be representatives of God on earth.  This ‘equal, but with different roles’ stuff is a lame negotiating position adopted much too late to be in any way convincing.  No one can explain, if priesthood is special to men, what exactly is spiritually special to women.  Motherhood?  But male Christians have always been pretty condescending about that, at best, unless it’s virgin birth. Fatherhood is reckoned much more spiritually valid.  Mysticism?  Ah, but you have to be sceptical about these hysterical women.  Asceticism?  Now male asceticism can be dignified, but female asceticism is much too much like a mere morbid exaggeration of what women are all too prone to do anyway – placate or disarm the stronger sex by masochism: look how little space I can take up! Look how few demands I make! Look what a VICTIM I am (and as for that nasty sex, I never liked it much anyway ...).  Male-priesthood defenders may try and turn the argument around by saying, well, being a priest is all about service and sacrifice and that’s why men have to do it, women do it in their everyday lives already. Well, then, if the Christian thing is to balance out gender roles, shouldn’t women get some real authority somewhere to make up for their sacrificial excess? Preferential role as teachers and preachers, maybe?  Never saw it happening ... a lot of this stuff is just bare- faced opportunism.

To argue for equality in the priesthood is not 'modern political correctness' (and in any case, where did the dogma of equality come from if not from Christianity? You won't find it in any culture that hasn't been Christian). It's simply Bible logic. Nor does it matter that the Church has been doing things differently for 2,000 years. For one thing, the idea of the spiritual equality of women has always been around, bobbing up at awkward moments. It's time for it to stay up. For another, has not the Church spent more than half its history holding out for the absolute necessity of some things that Anglicans now consider positively harmful, e.g. a celibate clergy?  Didn’t it take most of two thousand years to decide that slavery was unacceptable in any circumstances?  Hey, the Church is a work in progress. It was never guaranteed to get everything right all the time. Most of the time it just got on with it, with far less agonising about eternal destiny versus passing fads than now.

But it can’t be said either side comes out of this argument well – it gets so polarised – the shrill, moral-high-ground-grabbing, manipulative misrepresentations of the pro-lobby or the elephantine scriptural literalism and thinly veiled misogyny of the more vocal antis (and they’ve finally learned how to do the politicking too, by the looks of things).

Funny thing is, the church is in effect probably already largely run by women – the indispensable tea-makers and flower-rota-fixers, the mumsy organising matriarchy that runs rings round the poor old parish priests. My nightmare would be that the opening of the priesthood to women would result in all those types actually getting into the saddle and taking over the whole show officially as well as unofficially! (After all, being a priest is such a nice job for a married woman, a touchy-feely, second-income, people-person kind of job...) The men, of course, would find it unbearable and desert in droves, then we’d have the first ever all-female, truly matriarchal Church. Ready for that, everyone? The cliqueiness, the gossip, the backstabbing, the non-speakers, the victim points, the conflict avoidance, the covert bullying ... My hope is that getting real, recognised responsibility on merit, rather than having to get it by stealth and as part of a competition for male attention, will eventually flush out all this sludge and women will stop behaving this way, but it’s a slow process, much slower than the men going into a sulk and refusing to do any job that NASTY GURLS are allowed to do ...

And my daughter added:

‘God is (in my opinion) a genderless spirit who was described as male by the patriarchs who first wrote about him, and Jesus wasn’t a woman because he was realistic – he struck a blow for the humble and meek by being born a normal carpenter’s son instead of a prince or whatever, but he knew he needed to be an able-bodied, mobile and basically respectable person if he was to have the freedom to get around spreading his message. In a male-dominated society, that meant being male. A female Jesus probably wouldn’t have got very far. Also: fifty-fifty chance. Maybe he just *happened* to be male.