Women Deacons? Who Cares? or, Christianity's Original Sin

Julian Guthrie’s book The Grace of Everyday Saints describes a San Francisco Catholic congregation forced from their historic building by esoteric church bureaucracy. Angry, heartbroken congregants organized themselves to resist the closure. They met in a Russian Orthodox Church’s basement, made alliances with (and sought forgiveness from) gay rights organizations, and became fixtures in SanFran’s busy activist community. Forced from their church, they arguably became more Christian than ever.

I couldn’t help remembering Guthrie’s description of St. Brigid’s congregants when news broke this week, that Pope Francis would commence a commission to study admitting women into the Roman Catholic deaconate. Not that he’d start ordaining women; that he’d ruminate letting them become deacons. Sure, that will mean occasional women’s voices from the Catholic pulpit, and something’s more than nothing. Many Catholics are celebrating this hypothetical future possible slight change.

But this makes me wonder: is the church itself the heart of the problem? Generations after women began to vote, hold office, start businesses, and own property, Christianity’s largest church might consider letting them preach, part-time, unpaid. This joins a litany of opportunities Christianity had to oppose systemic oppression, and failed. Sadly, this private Christian must conclude, while Christianity teems with potential for individual gravitas, Church itself embodies the problem.

Whenever anybody cites Christianity’s history of bad decisions, somebody else posits a counter-argument. Yes, the church supported wars, often unjust wars, from the Crusades to Vietnam, but Christians from Tertullian to Dr. King opposed wars. Yes, the church justified first slavery, then segregation, but abolitionists, Civil Rights activists, and modern dissidents have drawn inspiration from their faith. Christianity has straddled both sides of most debates from ancient to modern times.

Notice, however: while the church, a bureaucratic institution, repeatedly supports movements that draw lines between individuals and peoples, the opposition comes from individuals and parachurch organizations. Reformers cite individuals, like William Wilberforce and Daniel Berrigan. The status quo has organizations, and whenever it cites individuals, it’s generally organizational leaders, like popes and bishops. All power, even religious power, tends to support oppression and division, while vibrant individuals oppose them.

Historically, Christianity appealed to early Romans because it offered powerful personal dignity. Women flocked to Christianity because it gave their lives meaning beyond their ability to bear children (see the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla). Men, like Martin of Tours, converted partly because it gave them purpose beyond military service. In both cases, these actions were powerfully counter-cultural, elevating human worth above its utility to reigning secular powers.

But institutional churches, like bureaucracies everywhere, are primarily self-serving. They exist to preserve themselves, and thus not only resist to social movement, they often mimic the secular authorities they were instituted to oppose. When women, Blacks, the poor, or whomever, lack secular power, they mostly lack religious power too. This bolsters my belief, that when church and state become entwined, it isn’t the state that’s changed by the interaction.

This isn’t a uniquely Catholic problem. Lutherans today extol Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s martyrdom before Hitler’s machine, but turn mumble-mouthed when reminded that German Lutheranism allied itself with Hitler, letting him reorganize their structure. The largest Black denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was founded because early Wesleyan Methodists refused to ordain, and in some congregations even commune, Blacks. As for the Anglican Communion, I commend to your attention Prince Charles.

Reverend Jim Wallis has called racism America's Original Sin, a term not original to him. But we might say Christianity’s Original Sin is its tendency to draw lines between people. With its longstanding institutional desire to be liked, and to get along with secular authorities, Christianity has embraced a willingness to separate women from men, Black from white, poor from rich, foreign from native-born nationalist.

Sadly, it’s impossible to create divisions between groups without establishing a dominance hierarchy. Just as “Separate But Equal” in American law created second-class access to public resources, saying women have different, but equally important, contributions to the Body of Christ inevitably pushes women into inferior standing. Of course, no individual can do everything. But precluding anybody from any position by gender creates intractable second-tier standing.

Private Christians have a long history resisting injustice. The Church, sadly, has a long history of perpetuating injustice, even in many cases creating or expanding it. Saying change comes eventually, and urging oppressed groups to remain patient, isn’t good enough. Injustice is happening now, and the Church is justifying it. Commissioning a study is a sop. Christians must challenge their church to uphold Christianity’s standards.

The Great Scottish Oil Wars

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part Eight
Bill Forsyth (writer/director), Local Hero

Houston businessman “Mac” MacIntyre (Peter Riegert) has everything early-Eighties yuppie affluence brings: a penthouse condominium, sleek car, frosted-glass office in a prestigious high-rise. His company, Knox Oil, taps him to conduct a sensitive negotiation to acquire strategic land in Scotland, mostly because his name sounds Scottish. More comfortable with machines, Mac demurs, but has no choice. He arrives to find a pristine fishing village largely untouched since World War II.

Audiences too young to remember the 1980s might not understand how important North Sea oil really was. Alongside a strike in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, several Scottish oil strikes, beginning in 1978, helped break the second OPEC oil embargo, overturning that decade’s economic malaise. Getting valuable British-controlled petroleum to landside refineries became a global security imperative. Texas oilmen like T. Boone Pickens became global folk heroes.

Mac meets his local liaison, Danny Oldsen (Peter Capaldi, in one of his earliest roles), a slick-suited Glaswegian who’s as uncomfortable in rural Ferness, Scotland, as Mac. Neither likes face-to-face negotiations; both prefer phone negotiations and teleconferencing, then becoming the big thing. But they gamely soldier on, meeting Gordon Urquhart (Denis Lawson, Star Wars), the village’s publican, innkeeper, accountant, and general business professional. Did we mention it’s a small town?

On its surface, this movie appears a typical fish-out-of-water comedy. Mac and Oldsen, thoroughly modern technocratic professionals, must negotiate with an entire community where most residents share one public phone. Mac commands more money than Ferness has ever seen, and wields it with brazen abandon. But the humor of their interactions conceals deep inner violence, because Knox Oil intends to raze the village, replacing it altogether with a refinery.

Not only will this end generations of village history, as area marine biologist Marina reveals, any pipeline into Ferness will devastate wildlife. Thus Knox promises to destroy not only the village, but also any chance of future on-site rebuilding. The villagers, surprisingly, don’t mind: immune to myths of rural simplicity, they want out, and oil money offers their ticket into modernity. Though they feign indifference, hoping to increase the offer.

Peter Capaldi (left) and Peter Riegert in Local Hero

But to Mac’s surprise, as he adjusts to village rhythms, he no longer shares their desire for modernity. Mac and the villagers each have what the other wants. Though the villagers envy Mac’s car, condo, and money, he finds them empty—especially has he falls in love with Gordon’s wife Stella (Jennifer Black). He covets their face-to-face interaction, humane pace, and physical purity, the very qualities the villagers would escape.

Negotiations stall as one villager doesn’t want to leave. Due to intricacies of late-medieval land law, local beachcomber Ben apparently owns most of the beach Knox needs for its refinery. As villagers form feuding camps over their future, Mac sees the community he loves slipping away. We, however, see a deeper rift made explicit. Modernity is very lonely, and cripples its staunchest devotees, but the alternative is very arduous and uninviting.

We also see the violence people do their most sacred beliefs because they cannot see themselves clearly. Victor, captain of a Soviet fishing trawler that often moors off Ferness, has stashed his secret offshore accounts with Gordon, turning the perks of Communist standing into capitalist wealth. Gordon seems ready to sell everything, including the business that gives him community standing, knowing nothing awaits him after he closes the sale.

And Mac himself loves Stella so deeply, he’s willing to trade his entire career for her, but he never speaks with her. That embodies everything wrong with himself. Money has shrivelled his humanity so completely that, when exposed to rural simplicity for mere days, he’d chuck everything, not knowing what he’s committing to. He could lose it all, and eventually does, without ever really understanding what he hopes to gain.

Though critically acclaimed, with a rare 100% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.com, this movie has never had much market traction. It went almost unnoticed upon release, and has had cult viewership at best. Much better received was its soundtrack, the first composed by Mark Knopfler. It employs the moody, synth-driven textures he’d later expand in The Princess Bride, and which others would appropriate, usually with less success, for years to come.

Someone once said, comedy works best when it tells the truth. That’s what this movie does. Stuffing absurd characters into an entirely too plausible situation, it reflects its insights back onto its audience, because it’s finally about us. Reality makes us choose between wealth and simplicity, between tradition and modernity. It’s funny because it’s painfully accurate.

Death in a Lifeless Place

Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

The receding tide at the Loney, a desolate stretch of beach along Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, England, reveals the gruesome remains of a murdered child. A nameless London recluse recognizes the place, and the body, from his boyhood, when his aggressively devout Catholic mother made annual pilgrimages to a nearby holy well. Our narrator, Smith, has buried his secrets for forty years, but knows everything will spill now. So he has to control the narrative.

Andrew Michael Hurley’s first novel, published in Britain in 2014 and making its global debut, comes with a laudatory cover blurb from Stephen King. No wonder, since it’s essentially a Stephen King novel: superficially a horror thriller, it actually encompasses the consequences when childhood traumas rear their ugly heads in adulthood. It also addresses misplaced beliefs and human inability to comprehend the world objectively, common King themes. It’s a King novel with a Limey accent.

Throughout his life, Smith has been his older brother’s caretaker. The brother’s named Andrew (coincidence? I think not), but everyone calls him Hanny. Mute and perpetually childlike, Hanny communicates in sign language only Smith comprehends. Hanny’s parents, Mummer and Farther, along with several fellow London parishioners, make an annual pilgrimage to the Loney, hoping holy well water will make Hanny whole. This despite the evidence it hasn’t yet, which has pushed Smith into nihilistic malaise.

Though presented as a thriller, this book is principally a family drama about religion. Our narrator struggles—or, more accurately, fails to struggle—to reconcile his mother’s deeply held beliefs with the evidence that life is a meaningless mechanism. But it also encompasses families’ difficulty communicating the most significant topics. Mummer and Farther, Smith, Father Bernard, and the parishioners share their concern for Hanny. They just talk past one another translating that concern into action.

Every year, the parishioners visit the Loney’s holy well on Easter Monday, force-feeding Hanny supposedly sacred water that consistently makes him gag. They occupy the same late-Victorian rental property, visit the same pre-Reformation church, pray the same prayers. The persistent ritual gives their lives shape; for them, ritual comes first. But Smith notices the ritual produces no measurable results. Early on, he seems ambivalent about belief and practice, though this eventually lapses into outright unbelief.

Andrew Michael Hurley

However, from page one, we know something the characters cannot know in the midst of events: Hanny really gets healed. He becomes voiced and sociable; eventually he becomes a married Anglican priest in a prestigious London parish. While Mummer and Farther hope Hanny’s voice gets restored, we wonder how, and by whom. Mummer, whose faith lapses into abusive fanaticism, hopes God will intervene. We wonder who comes wearing God’s face. Her future is our past.

While the urbanized, middle-class parishioners occupy their rental cottage, praying, locals notice and resent their presence. Taking the visitors’ presence as an affront, they find ways to insinuate their way into the house, extracting information from the parishioners while disclosing little themselves. Very Straw Dogs. Like many places in Northern England, pre-Christian traditions survive in Lancashire, dressed in sacramental drag. As sweaty local rituals encircle the clean, pious Londoners, we brace ourselves for the confrontation.

There, ultimately, is where this novel flails. If Hurley stuck with his strongest components, the brutal collision between faith and evidence, he’d have a powerful novel. Smith describes his parents’ willful blindness in excruciating detail, though later chapters imply Smith has his own blinders he’s worn so long, he’s forgotten they’re there. These parts really sing. However, he foreshadows his supernatural thriller elements so long, they’re an ultimate let-down, especially since they mainly happen offstage.

Hurley writes best not about the demonic, but about how humans conjure their fears into reality. He throws characters onto their own devices and lets them struggle. Both faith and unbelief appear as human attempts to impose meaning on the universe, which both prove equally unsatisfying. People struggle to communicate, understand, see, but are circumscribed by the evidence of their senses. Either way, we must make the Nietzschean journey through nihilism to find our meaning.

This novel has enough, in its struggles between faith and senses, to energize deep, inquisitive readers. Smith’s attempts to understand his family, couched within his failure to understand himself, make for deep reading. But audiences seeking the big, final Stephen King-ish conflagration will find his distant supernatural elements ultimately unsatisfying. Read this novel for its quiet, internal struggle, not its apocalyptic showdown. Because the former more than makes up for the lack of the latter.

A Plague of Visible Women

Holly Miranda

I couldn’t help realizing my MP3 player seemed to have more women’s voices coming out of it than other music players at work. Officially, we’re not supposed to have radios, MP3 players, streaming audio, or other music on the jobsite, but unofficially, more people have them than don’t. Like me, many people have loaded music onto their phones, or play audio streamed through their data networks. And almost none seemed to play women at all.

By contrast, my belt-loop speaker keeps belting out female vocalists: soloists like ZZ Ward, Holly Miranda, or Meg Myers, or bands with singing front-women, like Wolf Alice, Lucius, or Florence + the Machine. In a workplace soundscape dominated by growly macho posturing, I seemed to have an inordinate number of women’s voices surrounding me. It sure felt like my sound was unusually woman-dominated. So like any intellectually curious explorer, I sat down and counted my vocalists.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered barely a third of my songs had female vocalists. I tried changing my counting methods: counting groups with both male and female vocalists, like Grouplove or Of Monsters & Men, as women, men, both, or neither, while excluding instrumental tracks with no vocalist whatsoever. But no matter what rubber-numbers trick I played on myself, the conclusion remained inescapable. My playlist seems woman-dominated, where actually, female vocalists still play second fiddle.

Meg Myers

That’s harsh reality for a man who considers himself progressive-minded and egalitarian on women’s issues. I could make facile excuses, noting that most radios in my male-dominated workplace don’t play any women whatsoever, or that my playlist is more fair-minded than others’. But that’s cheap excuse-making, and I know it. Women make up half the human population and, as anybody who’s attended open mic nights knows, way more than half of today’s aspiring young artists.

My area has two “classic rock” radio stations. One occasionally plays artists like Pat Benatar and Heart, but the other doesn’t play women at all. I know they once played Janis Joplin, but she’s vanished. A stroll through classic Billboard charts reveals women have always been influential in rock music. Powerful, popular women, from Peggy March and Petula Clark to Suzi Quattro and Patti Smith, have virtually disappeared. They’ve written women out of rock history.

I recall the discovery that many of historic America’s best-selling books have practically evaporated. Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, one of the 19th Century’s best-selling novels, is vanishingly difficult to find anymore, and others have completely slipped my mind. Though women have always been the greatest producers and consumers of fiction, only male-written books get termed “literature” and deemed worthy of study in schools. Women’s books are termed “chick lit” and generally die with their authors.

One could continue indefinitely. Painter Lee Krasner’s legacy lives almost completely in her husband Jackson Pollock’s shadow. Novelist Jonathan Franzen, famous outside his fiction for egocentric ramblings and curt dismissal of other authors, gets multiple accolades for individual novels, while equally acclaimed female novelists like Sue Monk Kidd and Barbara Kingsolver must work like assembly lines just to break even. Even athletes like Hope Solo and Danica Patrick do cheesecake photos to pay the bills.

ZZ Ward

We’re not talking fringe figures here. These are among the public world’s most accomplished women, yet they vanish behind men who, though undoubtedly good, aren’t better than the women. Even when the women are inarguably better (Abby Wambach, not Landon Donovan, is America’s highest-scoring soccer player), their accomplishments are considered second-string. Even I, apparently, lose track of women. Despite occasional “Well, Actually” mansplaining, nobody’s ever offered a justification for this disparity that I can digest.

I thought my playlist was female-dominated because sometimes, two or three songs with female singers would play consecutively. That’s better than most other workers’ playlists, since unless it’s Top 40 or Kurrent Kountry, they probably play no female singers. But one-third isn’t a preponderance of women; it merely reflects that, at some important level, I still consider female vocalists exceptional. Which means that I still regard male vocalists, and maybe other artists too, as “normal.”

Unfortunately, I have no ready alternative for the situation. If a man who considers himself allied to women’s issues still makes this mistake, there’s no near-term remedy for the men I work with, who use racist, sexist, and nationalist slurs in common conversation. There’s little chance the situation will change in the larger culture any time soon. However, the more aware we become of this imbalance, the more likely we make a healthy future remedy.

Manhattan Fraudster Squad

Camille Perri, The Assistants

It starts stupidly enough: Tina Fontana, executive assistant to Manhattan's biggest media mogul, accidentally double-bills her boss's airline tickets to the company expense accounts. The resulting check is a rounding error for the unsubtly named Titan Corporation, but large enough to write off Tina's student debt. She considers the resulting fraud a one-time incident... until an accounting aide catches it. To buy silence, Tina launches a relatively ambitious embezzlement ring.

Somewhere around page 120, I began sketching notes for a diss review of Camille Perri's debut novel. It's not bad, really, just self-consciously topical and vague in language, and I prepared to teasingly upbraid Perri's reliance on stock characters and safe, market-tested situations. But I kept reading, and somewhere after the one-third mark, her tone changes. The story remains anodyne and remarkably low-friction, but becomes distinctly more readable and engaging.

Seems Emily, the gorgeous but insecure (and possibly alcoholic—her vaunted beauty won't withstand that wine intake) accounting gnome, also has insurmountable college debt. Tina starts double-billing nickel-and-dime expenses, which Emily quietly buries. The perfect crime, until a mid-level auditor skims the books. The ladies soon find themselves underwriting everyone else's lingering debt, straddling the line between The Devil Wears Prada and The Bling Ring.

Meanwhile, Kevin, a handsome rising star in Titan's legal department, begins courting Tina. Their unlikely romance flourishes, though her self-recriminations about the embezzlement, which dance perilously close to whining, keep her from truly committing. She misleads him about her extracurricular activities. That's how, in a "loose lips sink ships" moment, he accidentally makes an online journalist think she's about to save America from student debt. Then the floodgates really open.

Tina, Perri's first-person narrator, makes snap decisions about other characters, which we're supposed to consider binding. She judges other women by wardrobe, hair, and cup size. She wonders why Kevin chooses her, since she repeatedly reminds everyone how flat-chested and androgynous she is. This latter never gets resolved, because he's the only male given any depth in this female-centric ensemble, besides her boss Robert, who speaks in folksy gnomic Texas-isms.

Camille Perri

Plus, Tina's guilty conscience gets pretty annoying. Long after she should've developed thick skin from all the fraud she's committed, she remains as skittish as a middle-schooler caught pinching from Mommy's pocketbook. Don Corleone she ain't. This timidity results in philosophical asides about as deep as Pretty Little Liars soliloquies. Does Perri think childlike self-doubt makes her protagonist more human? Because I kept hoping Tina would act like a grown-up.

But after the slow, chugging introduction, a change occurs. As increasing numbers of glamorous, well-put-together female assistants begin approaching Tina for relief from their student debt, she realizes her "imposter syndrome" is entirely in her head. Everyone around her who doesn't have assistants, is probably yoked into debts that keep them scared, desperate, and compliant. Manhattan splendor absolutely requires peons too burdened to rebel against their subjugation.

That's where Perri develops an actual thesis. Early on, Tina describes her penny-ante Robin Hood scheme as "an Oxygen network original series waiting to happen," and I yawningly agreed. But once Tina discovers virtually everyone shares her feelings of fiscal despair, her dominant trait shifts from despair to action. Realizing her problems are normal, that everyone around her also suffers in silence, motivates her to get off the pot.

Not that she stops acting relentlessly nice. Even once the story develops actual cojones (a word this story loves and overuses), Tina remains committed to us liking her. She mostly flinches from confrontation, unless she already controls the table, so little is actually risked. The story mostly centers on discussions around kitchen tables and trendy Midtown taverns. These conversations remain polite and idea-driven; disagreements primarily involve allocating the loot.

Joseph Stiglitz notes many young college graduates have high aspirations, but accept lucrative, meaningless jobs to subsidize their debts. I have an MA and work construction; I sympathize. But dreams postponed become dreams abandoned. This novel does best when addressing these issues. A little Cagney and Lacey proceduralism could've driven Tina past kitchen-sink drama, into the themes that clearly excite Perri.

Perri's press biography states she wrote this book's first draft while working as an executive assistant. Therefore we can attribute this story to Perri's wish fulfillment, and Tina's self-flagellation to Perri's own imposter syndrome. That lends this novel a certain authenticity, and probably bolsters the understated humor. If only Perri set Tina free to risk without being the authorial proxy, this novel might've transitioned from merely good to great.