IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHENTIC SELF:

THE RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTION OF EVANGELICAL WOMENS FAITH

EXPERIENCE

by

Gay M. Ramsey
B. A., Westmont College, 1991
M. A., California State University, Northridge, 1998

A Dissertation
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Speech Communication

in the Graduate School
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
May 2007

UMI Number: 3264794

Copyright 2007
by
Ramsey, Gay M.
All rights reserved.

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DISSERTATION APPROVAL

IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHENTIC SELF:

THE RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTION OF EVANGELICAL WOMENS FAITH
EXPERIENCE

By
Gay M. Ramsey

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
In the field of Speech Communication

Approved by:
Lenore Langsdorf, Chair
Suzanne Daughton
Johnathan Gray
Elyse Pineau
Kathy Hytten

Graduate School
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
March 2, 2007

AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF

GAY RAMSEY for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in SPEECH COMMUNICATION,
presented on MARCH 2, 2007, at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
TITLE: IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHENTIC SELF: THE RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTION
OF EVANGELICAL WOMENS FAITH EXPERIENCE
MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Lenore Langsdorf
This dissertation proposes a rhetorical way of reading daily life by bringing together
research from rhetorical theory and criticism, feminist theory and practice, and feminist
theology. It works with the way daily life surfaces, discloses, reveals, and potentially
transforms the rhetorical discourses that give life order and meaning. I begin with the
assumption that feminist theorists, critics, and activists articulate the relationship between
mundane living and institutional (i.e., policies and/or attitudes) critique in three overarching
conversations or desires. I define these conversations as desire for public voice
without sacrificing potential for individual and collective wholeness, desire for change
without reinforcing the status quo, and desire for space to breathe without giving up the
project of reform. Rhetorical criticism situated in relation to these desires draws upon
Susan Zaeskes notion of identity in relationship, in which individual meanings are
typically constituted in relation to collective--and therefore political--subjectivites; the self is
always a self-in-relation. Evangelical women articulate the necessity of this identity in
relationship posited against nostalgic desire to retreat to an imagined past where masculine
and feminine gender norms are fixed, secure, and therefore safe. What fuels desire for this
nostalgic retreat from the present are perceptions of violence pervading our cultural context
and anxieties that pervade the messiness of daily living. In the process of this retreat, the
critical agency found in the ambiguities of mundane life may be lost or subsumed. Thus,

evangelical feminists and women pastors employ rhetorical strategies to narratively reorient
to notions of identity, community, and the value of the present, local, and lived context.
Kenneth Burkes concepts of metabiology, orientation, and recalcitrance developed in
Permanence and Change and Bryan Crables argument for their salience add new dimensions
to feminist rhetorical criticism. I develop Burkes concepts in relation to the everyday as
well as feminist theological concerns. Burkes concepts provide resources for thinking about
the rhetorical force of an identity in relationship set against the alluring potential of
memory as it operates within what Margaret Bendroth calls an evangelical masculine
persona. In the Evangelical Feminist Movement, men and women contrast their biblical
interpretations against this evangelical masculine persona by liberalizing adherence to
Scriptural authority while struggling to move outside confining logics in relation to church
practice. Through my interviews with women pastors I discover subtle and nuanced
reorientations toward the self and therefore unearth innovative ways to address notions of
community, ministry, and social change. The dissertation concludes with reflection on the
way notions of transcendence and immanence are given meaning in daily life through women
pastors experience of God, suggesting that the coalitional identities characteristic of third
wave and post-feminist politics emerge from contingencies of lived experience.

ii

DEDICATION

For my dad who passed away before he could see

the completion of my dissertation and Ph.D.
I know he is pleased.
I love you, Dad.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project is the result of collaboration among many intellectuals: academic
scholars, pastors, students, and everyday rhetorical critics. Lenore Langsdorfs support and
vision helped this dissertation to come together. She loved the idea of taking on a project
that looked at the intersections of feminist theology, spirituality, and rhetoric.
I am in her debt for her high expectations of tightly woven arguments among these subjects.
My dissertation committee, Suzanne Daughton, Elyse Pineau, Johnathan Gray, and Kathy
Hytten also provided support through a stimulating academic atmosphere that never divorced
academic goals from the realities of ones daily life.
I would also like to thank not only the women pastors I interviewed but the many
women of faith I came into contact with over the years who modeled perseverance,
tenderness, and courage in the face of great challenges. These women continue to teach me
how to live my faith, acknowledge the messiness of meaning in my present context, and
continually engage a God that is radically concerned about humans and social
transformation. I would like to thank these women for the tears and the prayers as well as the
sincerity with which they approach their faith, their calling, their communities and world, and
their God.
I also thank my friends who supported, encouraged, and engaged my dissertation
process. Doreen Franson and Charissa Jones read and responded to drafts of my dissertation,
always engaged in what this project might bring into being. My husband and armchair
academic Stuart Bammert encouraged the completion of this project and loves to talk about
it. He is simply a great person and friend.

iv

Finally, I want to thank my family, especially my sister, Karyn, brother-in-law, Erik,

nephew, Jakob, and brother, Jim, for their constant support, playfulness, and strength. My
mom, JoEllen, and dad, Howard, gave me a place to rest and to work for the first two years
of my dissertation, my mom transcribing interviews and my dad providing enriching
conversation. This project would not exist if it werent for their help and love.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER

PAGE

ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................................................ I
DEDICATION .................................................................................................................................................III
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................................ IV
CHAPTERS
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION - THE RHETORICAL CONTOURS OF
DAILY LIFE..1
CHAPTER TWO: KENNETH BURKE AND THE TERRAIN OF THE SUBJECT
IN EVERYDAY LIFE. 41
CHAPTER THREE: RHETORIC OF MEMORY AND THE EVANGELICAL
MASCULINE PERSONA... 70
CHAPTER FOUR: EVANGELICAL FEMINISM AND THE DEBATE OVER
MORAL AUTHORITY...95
CHAPTER FIVE: NARRATING THE CHURCH: WOMEN PASTORS
CHALLENGE NOSTALGIC DESIRE..... 160
CHAPTER SIX: EPILOGUE EXISTING IN TENSION: NARRATIVE, FEMINISM,
AND RHETORICAL AGENCY... 216
WORKS CITED 242
APPENDICIES
APPENDIX A........................................................................................................... 257
APPENDIX B: VERBAL SCRIPT .......................................................................... 260
APPENDIX C: BACKGROUND INFORMATION................................................ 261
APPENDIX D: INFORMED CONSENT FORM .................................................... 262
VITA.. 263

vi

1
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION - THE RHETORICAL CONTOURS OF
DAILY LIFE
What about when you make available people to come up for prayer? You
know if they have prayer concerns during communion you can sit with
somebody. I pointed out that to not have a woman available for that is
potentially harmful in a church setting; to ask women to share with men
their prayer concerns, there are just some concerns that open a woman up
to harm. He said, Oh! That makes perfect sense. Oh never even thought
about it, thats great! So this time I said, Have you looked into that?
He said, Well, you know, there are just so many people that have to be
arranged to be present on Sunday morning, to have one more person that
we have to fill to have somebody present is just too much. Thats when I
realized, I just wanted to cry, I and I, I didnt even understand. I had this
huge internal reaction, just HUGE and I wanted to cry; I was so scared of
the rage that I felt in that moment, but I really tried to choke it back. But I
felt like I heard that not just from my context and in my setting, but I felt
like I heard it as every woman has ever heard those same words.
(Interview with CJ)
She is the woman whose identity feels the pull of two dramatic forces: she
is continuously undone and remade, disarticulated and redeployed; she is
radically relational yet centered and directed. (Jones 61)
Then Jesus said . . . If you continue in my word, you are truly my
disciples; and you will know the truth and the truth will make you free.
(Study Bible, John 8: 32)

Over the past few years Ive conducted interviews with Christian women pastors
representing diverse denominations. I asked questions about their understanding of their
faith, why they pursued a career in ministry, and how they experience God, Christ, and
Holy Spirit. Some of the questions I asked were generated around concepts of
community, ministry, and social justice. Other questions centered on expressions of faith
from the pulpit and how these expressions impacted their audiences. I let their themes in
our interview guide our dialogue and each time discovered new things about my own
faith and about Gods amazing interest in human beings and human relationships. The

2
question that usually started my interviews was a request for a story: What brought you
to your position as pastor? Answers to this question have both been intriguing and
diverse, emerging in talk like calling, purpose, and hope. For these women,
pursuit of the pastorate unfolded over time and was typically marked by resistance to
hierarchical, systemic, and in some cases, male authoritarian denial of ones gifts,
passions, and desires. Some women pastors noted their gifts at an early age and have
simply engaged the struggle to educate and exercise them. Other pastors trod carefully
into ministry and ordination, not sure of their path and not sure that their role as pastor
would be worth a foreseen struggle and fight.
Interestingly, this expressed ambivalence seemed to open up critical possibilities
for these pastors unsure of their road to ordination. One of my interviewees said that her
calling began by not pursuing a pastoral career. She first pursued a degree in Spiritual
Nurturing, a one year degree designed to develop spiritual insight and understanding as
well as counseling skills, and over time realized her gifts, talents, and passions coalesced
into something more. At the same time, she began to take more risks in relation to her
local church community, asking her pastor to make more space for women in leadership
in her church. Her requests seemed minor at the time, such as having the option to pray
with a woman after the church service, yet in the face of denial and resistance to her
requests she started to discover a growing dissatisfaction toward the devaluing of women
in her faith community. Her discovery was subtle, sparked simply by her male head
pastor declining her request to include women as prayer counselors. Thats when I
realized, I just wanted to cry, I and I, I didnt even understand. I had this huge internal
reaction, just HUGE and I wanted to cry; I was so scared of the rage that I felt in that

3
moment, but I really tried to choke it back (CJ). The expressed reason for her pastors
denial was based on a value of expediency; it was simply too much effort for him to
coordinate communicating to womens spiritual needs.
The notion of expediency in CJs pastors response highlights several themes in
relation to gender, womens worth, and faith community responsibility. To subsume the
individual worth and value of womens lives within an expression of faith seems to
undermine its rhetorical efficacy, both in the faith community and beyond. Additionally,
the role of pastor is supposedly that of shepherd: one, who teaches, guides, counsels, and
encourages people under his/her care to know God, glorify God, and serve God in the
larger community. Thus, I argue that to not make an effort to care for the diversity of
womens and mens lives in ones congregation is to exercise omniscience, usurp Gods
power and authority, and promote a tyrannical ethos among community.
Over the past couple of years I participated in the life of an evangelical Christian
church shepherded by a woman. She is a phenomenal preacher and gifted pastor who
recently moved on to pursue doctoral studies in New Testament and homiletics. But her
legacy at this church remains. We continue to define ourselves as culturally relevant,
but not to the extent that we lose sight of our mission to live as Christ in the world. We
do not seek to make ourselves feel better about being more open and tolerant than many
other conservative Christian churches, but are consistently aware of our tendencies to
form a cocoon against the world, become indifferent in the midst of our prosperity, or
spend too much effort on self improvement rather than pay attention to local needs.
With all these efforts to engage and guard against the world, our Church occupies
tenuous space, but this is precisely what makes the church such an exciting place to both

4
understand the formation of distinct cultural discourses and means to transformation
within its social infrastructure. I have been a part of churches that refuse to engage the
mutable space of their communal relations, and have seen two split because of that
refusal. I have also been a part of churches that offer space for critical dialogue about life
and death and the choices we make in between. Thus, I am convinced that the church is
one of the last civil institutions in the United States that defends the public against
demagoguery. At the same time, the church may spiral in on itself, deluded by antiquated
beliefs that have no relevance to contemporary culture or mundane existence, which
ultimately is like a vase that when dropped shatters into millions of pieces: empty and
lifeless. This may be a reason why many people resist the rhetoric of the contemporary
Christian church, saturated with political interests and conservative ideologies. I, too,
resist this rhetoric, and would become bitter against Christianity if not for the
relationships with people of faith who have shown me a God bigger than these failings.
My journey in the Christian faith is marked by the sexism I concurrently experienced,
which used belief in God as a weapon to demand particular performances of gender and
sex roles. One of my students at California State University, Northridge, for example,
told me of an experience with a pastor/priest who told her the date rape she experienced
was her fault, due to her dress and actions. Indeed, violence comes in many forms. Yet,
I have also encountered a God for whom violence is never the last word. This is not a
God who states, Trials are sent to test your faith, or your suffering will only make you
stronger, or things will work out if you just believe in me enough. I said goodbye to
that God a long time ago. But many still live in this faith orientation.

5
Feminist activists, and more recently, feminist theologians have been articulating
a reversal of sorts. Carla L. Peterson frames her analysis of African American women
speakers and writers in the nineteenth century as women who appropriated many
different cultural discourses ranging from a reliance on Africanisms to the adoption of
standard literary conventions in order to become producers rather than mere consumers of
literary expression (22). This shift from consumption to production is emblematic of
much feminist practice over the last two centuries. It is particularly salient to note how
interconnected the Christian tradition is with feminist social reform, especially during the
nineteenth century. One has only to look at the rhetoric of Sojourner Truth, Lucretia
Coffin Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to see very diverse approaches to feminist
reform and yet common rhetorical links to God and Jesus as the author of such change.
Currently, this advocacy may be found in the work of feminist theologians such as
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Delores Williams, and Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, as well
as the early work of Mary Dalys call to radical feminist living. Biblical feminists,
defined by their efforts to value womens lives within contemporary Christian thought
and practice, focus their energy on deconstructing and reconstructing interpretations of
scripture traditionally utilized to sanction womens subordination in relation to men as
well as within church hierarchies. As Serene Jones argues through her description of
feminist debates over womens nature (i.e., essentialism versus constructivism), Christian
theology must take into account the complexity of womens oppression as it unfolds
through lived experience in order to imagine possibilities for liberation (Feminist 22-48).
This is apparent in third world feminist theology where the precedent for moral and
spiritual change is physical survival. Julia Esquivel, a theologian who works with the

6
ecumenical movement of churches in Guatemala, claims that true peace in Christ must be
linked to social justice in the immediate community. Pervasive in her writing is the
theme of redemption from forces that violate the dignity of all human beings, and
specifically, the Guatemalan people. She is not afraid to denounce the brutality of the
Guatemalan military (sustained by capitalistic forces in the developed world) that rapes,
tortures, and murders thousands of indigenous people. Her activism ultimately forced her
into exile in 1980 where she continues her advocacy for human rights. The reality of
violence in the lives of Guatemalans is similar to that of many womens experience in
Central America, South Africa, and the Middle East (Eck and Jain 15). For this reason,
Esquivel claims, The real face of God is one of suffering, of a God who suffers when he
hears the cry of the oppressed (24).
Comparatively, some womens voices are subtly yet consistently silenced through
faith communities requiring complicity with distinct social performances. Carolyn
Heggen notes, for example, how some pastors counsel women to stay in abusive marital
relationships in order to adhere to Christian doctrine and belief. For example, a woman
who suffered from years of emotional and physical abuse told her pastor that she was
going to take her children and leave her husband. Her pastor asked her if her husband
had been sexually unfaithful to her and she responded that he had not. Her pastor then
responded that there were no biblical grounds for splitting up a home (Heggen 26)
except adultery. This woman feared rejection from her faith community, so she stayed
within the violent marriage until she learned some years later that her husband had also
been sexually abusing their two daughters (26).

7
Many people dont recognize how traditional biblical interpretations as well as
social and cultural norms are internalized and thus govern the way one sees self and
other. Bell hooks notes the cancer of internalized racism, white supremacy, and other
forms of oppression that not only conditions how the dominant treat the dominated, but
teaches those dominated to be complicit with their condition in society (Killing Rage 3150). One has only to look at the recent surge of pedophile cases against Catholic clergy to
note how perverse power structures may subsume divergent voices within an overall
spiritual ethos. However, to radically reject antiquated church structures and start over
with a feminist precedent, or valorize the reality of womens lived experience doesnt
exhaust the critical resources available to those attempting to create substantive social
change. The task is to hold lived experience and systemic critique in tension. Jones
notes a neglect of this tension in feminist theory: What has also happened to feminist
theory as it has wandered down this path [toward academic isolation] over the past
twenty years is that it has increasingly distanced itself from the communities that initially
inspired its eschatological yearningsits originary normative movement
(Companionable 298). Jones continues to say that feminist theorists could learn a lot
from feminist theologians whose project of critique is typically tied to the communities
that shape and nurture their spiritual lives. Ursula King echoes this charge by stating that
for as long as the religious dimension of womens subordination and worldwide
oppression is not fully made clear, challenged and transformed, it is impossible to
achieve the goals of feminism and create a new social order (317). However, I must
note that this task is easier in the Protestant and Evangelical Christian tradition in contrast
to the Catholic tradition. Some feminists took up the project of critique of misogyny

8
within the Catholic faith orientation, such as Mary Daly in her text, The Church and the
Second Sex. She now seeks different ways to create change for women through
rhetorical spaces outside androcentric realities. It is much easier to engage in critique of
the Protestant Christian tradition due to its reliance on authority through Scripture rather
than church hierarchies or traditions. In my dissertation, it should be clear that even
though I incorporate feminist theologians from the Catholic tradition, I am working from
a Protestant framework and my critique occurs within the context of the Evangelical
Christian faith tradition. Thus, the notion of understanding the practicality of theory and
the way everyday life surfaces, reveals, discloses, and suppresses possibilities for
transformation is the substance of my dissertation. I want to know what possibilities
exist in the lived moment for critique of oppression and imagining means for redemption.
Why is it important to turn to the lived moment, to map it out, to understand it, and to use
it as a frame for social criticism? The answer I will explore in this project is how the
everyday, and its rhetorical contours, is an integral link in both womens desire to change
faith structures as well as rhetorical critics ability to see how criticism can engage the
messiness and mutability of human existence.

Rhetorical Contours
Susan Zaeske, in a 2002 award winning piece of rhetorical criticism in Quarterly
Journal of Speech, makes a provocative argument through her analysis of womens
antislavery petitions. Instead of looking at the persuasive dimensions of the petitions in
particular she chooses to focus on the effects of these petitions on the reformulation of
the political subjectivity of the rhetors themselves (148). Zaeske thus spends time
looking at how the act of signing petitions allows white women to slowly create a new

9
sense of self that is increasingly independent of their husbands choices and wishes. She
concludes that the lived moment involves discursive practices that facilitate not only
development of an isolated individual identity but also identity in relationship or
collective subjectivities (149). In short, there is simultaneous inclusion and exclusion
working in the lived moment, and the way women negotiate these rules and their
meanings sets up an interesting orientation to rhetorical critique. Indeed, Zaeskes
reading of womens signatures on antislavery petitions suggests that the lived moment
has rich rhetorical resources for understanding the way people both make sense of their
everyday lives as well as how their mundane decisions reveal a process that expands the
scope of rhetorical praxis.
Olga Davis makes a similar argument in her article In the Kitchen: Transforming
the Academy Through Safe Spaces of Resistance. Similar to many feminist authors
noting the transformative potential of embodied experience and the growing attention to
the rhetoric of physical space (cf. Code 1995; Mountford 2003), Davis acknowledges
how ones sociocultural location reveals intersections of oppressions (e.g., race, class,
gender, sexual orientation) and the means to transform them. She speaks from the
cultural location of an African American woman and more broadly the concept of
womanism, to analyze the cultural space of the slave kitchen and suggest how struggles
for liberation are born out of the lived moment. Within the American system of slavery,
Davis argues that black women were typically relegated to kitchen spaces, sites of
domesticity and silence (366). These spaces thus became sites where power and
significance were negotiated. Often white women would use the means of food and its
preparation to further subjugate slaves, exercising what little power they were given in

10
the household. Plantation mistresses supervised enslaved women and exhibited
domination over them within the kitchen (367). However, the kitchen also became a site
of resistance where black women responded with subversive kitchen strategies to
circumvent the atrocities of slavery. For example, they would grind and mix pieces of
glass into food, or poison food and set fire to the houses of their masters (367). The
kitchen was thus a space where complexities of oppression and creative acts of resistance
existed in tension. Davis reveals this tension by looking at slave narratives and slave
history revealing how their Southern cookery subtly redefined and transformed their
place of inferiority (368).
Daviss most provocative argument lies in the notion that the mundane unearths
nuanced means for both addressing and transforming rigid normative constructs.
However, through their creative, yet nurturing work in the kitchen, black women created
spaces of resistance beyond the kitchen; they transformed these images, redefined their
humanity, and transcended oppressive locations. The cultural space of the kitchen
catapulted them beyond inferiority and enabled self-actualization (369). The trajectory
of this argument, for Davis, is a desire to transform the Academy as a space of possibility
for women of color. Consequently, I believe Davis tapped into a more fundamental
process that contributes to rhetorical critics overall desire for social change and expands
the scope of rhetorical criticism praxis; this process received some attention with debate
over critical voice in the spring 1993 Western Journal of Communication (cf. Wood and
Cox 1993; Farrell 1993; Condit 1993) as well as debates surrounding the materiality of
rhetoric within the overarching critical rhetorical project (cf. McKerrow 1989, 1993; Ono
and Sloop 1992; Cloud 1994). My hope is to continue these discussions by pulling

11
together a methodology incorporating some different pieces of theory, critique, and
practice from feminist and rhetorical orientations in order to conceive what rhetorical
criticism might look like as an organic, day-to-day practice.
One rhetorical theorist and critic who initially broached this task changing the
scope and function of rhetorical criticism in relationship to Western rationalism in the
early eighties is Walter Fisher, who argues that a narrative in comparison to a rational
world paradigm (one that dominates traditional Western epistemology) is more amenable
to human life and community. In Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The
Case of Public Moral Argument, Fisher contrasts the concept of rhetoric within Western
rationality in relation to the rhetorical dimensions of narrative. He builds this contrast on
several key components of rhetoric and the argument that humans are essentially
storytellers (6). His argument suggests that life is a creative process that unfolds over
time, in relation, and through symbolic interaction. Kenneth Burke makes a similar
argument through the lens of poetry, by naming the ethos of its expression and reception
as an art of living (PC 66). Compared to a rational world paradigm where formal
argument dominates the communication of trained thinkers and deliberators, narrative is
the material of the mundane and the means for ordinary people to make sense of their
daily life. For this reason, Fisher argues that narrative creates and orders lived experience
as well as provides the means to interpret it, move through it, and change it. Symbolic
interaction in daily life is therefore never neutral, but laced with meaning that influences
human choice and action:
The idea of human beings as storytellers indicates the generic form of all
symbolic composition; it holds that symbols are created and

12
communicated ultimately as stories meant to give order to human
experience and to induce others to dwell in them to establish ways of
living in common, in communities in which there is sanction for the story
that constitutes ones life. (Narration 6)
Stories mediate human experience. In fact ones story is never abstracted from
other stories; there is a materiality to the process of identification through storytelling that
cannot be subsumed in symbolic constructs. CJs anger, for example, in response to her
pastors dismissal of womens concerns in her church was a physical manifestation of the
violation of a normative construct. This construct was her implicit belief in the value of
her and other womens lives in relation to their faith perspectives: I felt like I heard that
not just from my context and in my setting, but I felt like I heard it as every woman has
ever heard those same words. Fisher argues that these material grounds for making
judgments about stories place everyday thinkers at the center of critical practice. With
daily life at the center of critical practice, Fisher invites all humans into what has
traditionally been reserved for trained academics: social and rhetorical criticism.
Additionally, Fisher argues that knowledge and rationality in the narrative
paradigm, what he calls good reasons (Narration 7-8), are constituted through the
process of identification in human interaction. The way in which people connect to each
other through communication, which Fisher argues is through stories, is the fulcrum upon
which understanding, becoming, and political action are situated. Instead of perceiving
knowledge as a priori material in reasoned debate, something to be discovered beneath
the surface of human experience, or elements exposed through dialectical processes,
everyday life exposes knowledge as a product of human judgment. Fisher argues that

13
these judgments are made through two criteria: narrative probability and narrative
fidelity. Narrative probability has to do with the internal coherence of a story and the
ways in which an audience pieces together, in fact orders, reality. Narrative fidelity
works with audience experiences and the consistency of storytelling elements with their
histories, memories, and relationships. These two modes of judgment condition how
information is interpreted. Criticism through narrative is therefore not a disengaged
activity; the critic is an integral element in the creation of knowledge as well as how that
knowledge acts upon human existence.
Davis brings together the concept of narrative among several other important
elements to frame the context for her analysis: she speaks from her own location as a
woman of color and a feminist rhetorical critic, she pans out to larger discussions of
womanism and black feminist rhetorical criticism, and she invokes the power of lived
experience as a space to explore rhetorical acts and reveal rhetorical realities. In this
vein, I want to situate my exploration of the rhetoric of narrative in relation to evangelical
womens faith experiences because it both speaks from the context where I and many
women of faith have acutely experienced oppression as well as possibilities for liberation.
Additionally, these desires for freedom are inextricably intertwined with contemporary
feminist politics. No matter what part of feminist/womens history one studies there are
what I call three desires woven into several ongoing conversations amongst theorists,
activists, and critics. First, there is desire for public voice without sacrificing potential
for individual and collective wholeness. Second, there is desire for change without
reinforcing the status quo, and finally there is an overarching desire for space to breathe
without giving up the project of reform. Within these conversations I continue to cycle

14
back to the potential of narrative; its centrifugal force suggests new ways to imagine
intersections among feminist rhetorical practice, emerging subjectivities, and social
change. Thus, I now turn to these conversations to provide some context for my
project and to engage an overarching goal in my seeking of what Bonnie J. Dow and
Celeste M. Condit term gender justice (The State 449); a goal that takes into
account the ways that gender always already intersects with race, ethnicity, sexuality, and
class. Gender justice may include but can also go beyond the seeking of equality
between men and women, to include understanding of the concept of gender itself as
politically constructed (449).

Desire for Voice

Over the last few years I developed and taught a course titled The Rhetoric of
American Feminism. This course inevitably challenges what my students and I
understand about the complexity of the womens movement as well as general, yet
diffuse notions of feminism. Indeed, it is always amazing to get into the second wave
of the womens movement--what many call womens liberation-- with our text,
Sisterhood is Powerful, as we witness passionate and diverse approaches to change. We
finish both volumes of Karlyn Kohrs Campbells organized and thorough Man Cannot
Speak for Her, and plunge into what seems to be the disarray of the second wave.
Narratives of women from the second wave of the womens movement is where we begin
to question the notion of having an effective public voice without giving up individual
concerns. Campbell notes the problem with this private/public bifurcation in the
womens liberation movement (i.e., second wave) emerging in the mid 1960s and

15
climaxing in the early 1980s. In her article Rhetoric of Womens Liberation: An
Oxymoron Campbell argues that because feminist activism demanded complete
renunciation of traditional female roles (primarily for white women) change was
absolute; systemic change inevitably included individual change. The radical feminism
of the 1960s thus threatened the institutions of marriage and the family and norms
governing child-rearing and male-female roles. To meet them would require major, even
revolutionary, social change (77). What is particularly provocative about Campbells
article is her attention to the rhetoric of moral conflict . . . [and] a price in anxiety (75,
77) that feminist advocacy produced.
Feminist advocacy unearths tensions woven deep into the fabric of our
society and provokes an unusually intense and profound rhetoric of moral
conflict. The sex role requirements for women contradict the dominant
values of American cultureself-reliance, achievement, and
independence. . . . In fact, insofar as the role of rhetor entails qualities of
self-reliance, self-confidence, and independence, its very assumption is a
violation of the female role. Consequently, feminist rhetoric is
substantively unique by definition, because no matter how traditional its
argumentation, how justificatory its form, how discursive its method, or
how scholarly its style, it attacks the entire psychosocial reality, the most
fundamental values, of the cultural context in which it occurs. (75)
For this reason, feminist rhetorical critics struggle with how to occupy lived tensions
between the personal and the collective--the personal is political--; the project of

16
critique in this context is literally in between with a consistent amount of debate on
how to not reduce the world to self or other.
This tension between the personal and the political is what makes womens
liberation provocative and at the same time frustrating. Advocates, such as Phyllis
Schlafly and her anti-ERA campaign, and more recently Caitlin Flanagan and her book
To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife, are able to construct a
straw figure argument about what women want (e.g., access to jobs, equal opportunity,
and egalitarian roles in the home), and dismiss it. For example, one of the fears Phyllis
Schlaflys successful anti-ERA campaign built on was the argument that opportunities for
women outside the home would simultaneously encourage them to forfeit their security
that a traditional home and family provide. In Schlaflys words: ERA supporters are
antichildren, antimen, and antifamily. She elaborates on the connection between the
ERA and un-American ideals: Women libbers are promoting free sex instead of the
slavery of marriage. . . . They are promoting abortions instead of families. (qtd. in
Foss 144). Anyone who spends time studying the womens movement can pick out the
either/or logic in Schlaflys persuasion, but the point is her rhetoric works because it is
easily consumed. Unfortunately, proponents of the ERA could not make their case
palatable enough to achieve ratification. Yet it is precisely this face of feminism that
dominates public consciousness, and is the reason why Bonnie J. Dow in a recent review
of new books on the second wave suggests that feminist rhetorical critique must
include mass medias collusion with cultural means of production and consumption. I
believe that fully understanding the movements [second wave] influence on U.S. popular
consciousness requires attention to its interpretation by mass media, specifically

17
broadcast media, thus highlighting a central difference between the cultural milieus of the
first and second waves (90).
One of the books Dow reviewed by Patricia Bradley, titled Mass Media and the
Shaping of American Feminism, concludes that the most successful changes [in relation
to womens causes] were those that coincided with medias profit motive and desire for
new audiences, while women reporters as much as male reporters found an appropriate
zone of comfort in a reform agenda (Reading 103). Where the media placed their
cameras seemed to have a substantial impact on feminist reform. Whether the leadership
prowess of Gloria Steinem or the radical tactics of groups such as WITCH (Womens
International Terrorist Conspiracy From Hell) mass media seemed to be more set on
selling feminism than revealing its complex and diverse politics of reform. This is an
important conundrum to navigate within feminism because it reveals tendencies toward
reductionism, what Amber Kinser argues in her article Negotiating Spaces For/Through
Third-Wave Feminism as necessary gain instead of sufficient gain, encouraging us to
move beyond the battle prematurely, based on the faulty assumption that it has already
been won (143). How do women give voice to the complexity of their everyday lives
when so much of feminist reform revolves around representations reproduced to make
feminism palatable to the public?
Third wave feminists take up the same issue of representation versus real world
complexities by shifting the terrain of argument to mass media and popular culture, using
their own bodies, stories, and lives to counter stereotypes and gender essentialism.
Helene A. Shugart, Catherine Egley Waggoner, and D. Lynn OBrien Hallstein in their

18
article, Mediating Third-Wave Feminism: Appropriation as Postmodern Media Practice
argue that:
Certain tenets of third-wave feminism are appropriated, commodified,
reinscribed, and sold back to audiences via a postmodern aesthetic of
strategic juxtaposition in such a way that those feminist sensibilities are
not only defused but ultimately rendered consonant with the dominant
paradigm that they appear to resistthus, the ultimate function of these
mass-mediated representations of third-wave feminism is hegemonic.
(196)
These authors work with the music of Alanis Morisette, the modeling image of Kate
Moss, and the television show Ally McBeal. One of their overarching conclusions is that
even though these popular culture personaes resist what is understood to be traditional
models of womanhood, their resistance is always juxtaposed to male desirealbeit in
different and somewhat complex waysthus reinforcing gendered dichotomies rather
than undermining them. An example is Alanis Morisettes 1995 CD Jagged Little Pill,
which defined a new kind of feminist expression with an angry, in-your-face assertive
attitude (198). Right Through You defines Morisettes ability to capture third wave
womens desire to expose male prerogative and abuses of women through intimate
relationships. She sings, You took me for a joke/You took me for a child/You took a
long hard look at my ass/And then played golf for a while (qtd. in Shugart, Waggoner,
and Hallstein 199). Morisette later revels in her independence from and confidence
without this man: You didnt think Id show up with my army/And this ammunition on
my back (199). Set against male desire, Shugart, Waggoner, and Hallstein argue that the

19
aesthetic code of juxtaposition paints Morisette as dangerous and sinister, unpredictable
and imbued with violencethe distinction between assertive challenge on political
grounds and personalized obsessive threat is collapsed (200). The problem for third
wave feminists trying to find a political voice for their postmodern contradictions,
multiplicity of identities, erotic and angry in-your-face style is to find rhetorical space
for their expression in mediated spaces predisposed to simplify them. Similar to the
second wave, third wave feminists strategically respond to this problematic by turning to
their personal embodied experiences; they raise their own consciousness regarding their
complicity with male dominated systems and relationships as well as look for themes of
unity amidst diversity. By accounting for the vernacular in relation to dominant
discourses through personal story, what Kent Ono and John Sloop argue is important for
any critical scholarship (The Critique), feminists appropriate discourses designed to
objectify them, creating new space to articulate alternate identities and knowledges.
Lenore Langsdorf builds on this reorientation toward knowledge by arguing for
performative dimensions of rhetorical reasoning and what John Shotter calls knowledge
from within (qtd. in Langsdorf, Performative Dimensions 6). Langsdorf works with
this notion of knowledge in two separate articles, utilizing Calvin Schrags concepts of
rhetoric to enlarge the theoretical scope of the speaking subject. In The Performative
Site of Rhetorical Reasoning she argues that there is a third dimension to the praxial,
propositional, and poetic functions of knowledge (6). In addition to knowing how
(praxis) and knowing that (propositional), there is a poetic dimension to knowledge that
emerges from within situations, is embodied, and is engendered through the process of
interaction and the performance of daily life (7). For example, there is a qualitative

20
difference between knowing that ice cream is cold, smooth, and sweet and the sense of
these concepts on the tongue as the melted dessert slides back toward the tonsils and
down the throat. Langdorf argues that this latter sensation is the kind of knowledge that
persists in daily life; coming to know how to behow to craft ones own being as a
unique conjunction of attitudes, beliefs, and actions from within ones performances is
not a knowledge that can be formulated into propositions for another (7). The type of
knowledge that emerges in everyday life cannot be entirely captured in logical
formulations or speech acts. However, what escapes the totalization of language use is
theoretically rich for conceiving alternative ways of being; this is what makes
Langsdorfs development of Schrags space of subjectivity so intriguing and salient to the
rhetorical critical enterprise.
In Defense of Poiesis: The Performance of Self in Communicative Praxis
articulates an argument by Langsdorf that builds on Schrags claim that communicative
praxis, an amalgam of discourse and action, is about something, by someone, and for
someone (Communicative viii). Langsdorf contends that there is a rhetorical dimension
to the performance of self through communicative interaction and this dimension is
defined by the crafting or making of self in the production of communication for another
(1). Typically, she argues, this crafting of self is overshadowed by a focus on production
of communication (i.e., praxis), but affords interesting insight as to the possibilities for
human renewal and transformation. To return to my interview with CJ and her
interaction with her pastor about providing women counselors after the Sunday morning
church service, it is evident that her pastors denial of her request reorients CJ toward her
understanding of Christian faith and its expression.

21
CJ: [T]here is enough to coordinate on a Sunday morning without
inventing a new position, I understand that, and it is logical. I thought:
logic has hit women over the head century after century, age after age,
generation after generation; it really is the same excuse over and over
again and it might be perfectly reasonable, but always leaves women in
the margins.
GR: In other words its not worth the effort.
CJ: Absolutely, absolutely. I think thats the part that broke my heart is to
be told essentially its not worth the pain or the trouble [and] it would be
pain, it would be trouble [. . .]. And I just got in my car and cried and cried
and cried and just felt like Id entered the grieving work for every woman
who has ever had to hear that question. It was so strange, I felt so sad and
so angry and so frightened by those emotions and yet there was a weird
kind of kinship in that moment. I really did feel myself standing beside so
many women.
Something about how CJ understands herself conflicts with her pastors perception and
thus causes a breach, reorienting her understanding toward church, faith, and the Holy.
Rather than give up and assume that women are not to serve in positions of authority in
the church, CJ imagines more about her own sense of worth as well as the worth of all
women in relation to the Divine. Consequently, this interaction produces knowledge
about CJs self that could not be found or actualized through disengaged critique of
scripture or even hearing about other womens spiritual struggles. Langsdorf argues that
through the performance of communicative praxis an emergent self performs in ways

22
that actualize some, but not all, possibilities for becoming (In Defense 3). I argue that
this excess of possibilities is a rhetorical apparatus that not only provides individuals with
new resources to reflect and critique on forms of oppression and possibilities for freedom,
but also proposes an alternative cultural politics on which to build social order.
Amber Kinser argues that third wave feminists tend to base their activism on
mainstream mediated versions of feminism, which produces a false and/or a weak
feminism (142). False feminism assumes a narrow worldview, such as Naomi Wolfs
dichotomy between power and victimhood in her book Fire with Fire: The New Female
Power and How it Will Change the Twenty-First Century. Wolf reduces feminism to
personal transformation, to use Hogelands (2001) terms, suggesting that true feminism is
about the power one feels inside and is unrelated to the difficult work of dismantling the
power of patriarchal systems (Kinser 143). Natalie Fixmer and Julia T. Wood echo this
sentiment by stating that third wave feminists, while appropriately responding to the
contingent subjectivities, decentralized modes of resisting power, and locally situated
practices (243) characteristic of their postmodern surroundings, are historically
uninformed (245), not accounting for the collective polysemic, radical, and multicultural
precedent of first and second wave feminist advocacy. Third wavers err in reducing the
second wave of feminism to the early phases of one-branch mainstream. In equating
second wave feminism with the embryonic stage of one of many branches to second
wave feminism, third wavers ignore radical feminism, from which third wave goals and
politics seem to descend quite directly (245-246). They caution third wave feminists to
not neglect or even diminish the shoulders of feminists upon which they stand; the result
being a weak version of feminism, which gives the illusion of change, but ultimately
sacrifices substantive reform at the feet of the status quo. Fixmer and Woods critique
seems to suggest that feminists shift their attention from defining who they are to how
they position themselves toward projects of reform.
As human beings make sense of the lived moment, making choices about what to
do and say in relation to perceived purposes, Burke argues that human interaction (i.e.,
drama) dialectically unfolds through interlocutors orientations. Based on the felt
needs of the moment, whether to encourage change or reinforce the status quo, speech
and action derive particular products from others as well as from within the self. These
products stem from notions of the good or ought. Burke argues that the axiological
dimensions of the rhetorical moment are understood not only through the effects
symbolic choices produce, but through how these choices are ordered in response to the

23
felt needs of the concrete situation. The concrete situation evokes possibilities for actors
to order their realities in the best way, which strains toward a perceivable future while
incorporating sensibilities of the past. Orientation is thus a bundle of judgments as to
how things were, how they are, and how they may be (Permanence 14). Choices are
made surrounding actors perceptions of the ought and therefore may not be the best
way to live, but may reinforce a status quo that is oppressive in nature. The concept of
orientation thus alludes to possibilities for experiencing God in new ways.
Burkes concept of orientation is important in illuminating not only what people
know in one particular moment, but also, what eludes symbolic representation. A
symbolic orientation toward the world both reveals and protects what is knowable. There
are always hidden elements in communicative interaction simply because of the notion of
choice. And some might argue that these choices are all we have to understand and
interpret; therefore discovering what lies beneath the surface is moot. One can trace this
argument back to Gorgiass (5th century B.C.E) sophistic rhetoric and the belief that what
is knowable is subsumed within language and the performance of it. Nietzsche is also a
believer in the creative art of language, its illusory grasp on reality, and how it effaces as
it discloses meaning (On Truth and Lying 248-49). Many feminist theologians build
on this understanding as they challenge and deconstruct Scriptures that delimit womens
relationship to the Divine. Contemporary evangelical debates over the role of women in
Protestant churches, for example, rally around the authority of scripture and its
interpretation in relation to congregational needs. Complimentarians, who believe that
women and men have complimentary but distinct roles in the Christian Church, argue
that men should occupy roles of leadership and women serve those men in order to

24
preserve the notion of priesthood (Grenz and Kjesbo 180). Complimentarians argue
that Christian tradition and androcentric interpretations of Scripture presuppose belief
that men are Gods chosen leaders. They emphasize that the Old Testament reveals and
the New Testament affirms countless stories of God choosing men to lead people out of
slavery and into freedom and abundance. For complimentarians, history is the precedent
for what is known and what is practiced.
Egalitarians, in contrast, believe that men and women should share all gifts and
roles in the Church equally. They argue that gender is not the prerequisite for Gods
choice of leaders in the Old and New Testaments. The nexus of egalitarian arguments is
the scripture found in Galatians 3:28, There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free,
male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (The Holy Bible). This belief in
equality among persons, regardless of gender, race, or social class, is the reason
egalitarians claim that the priesthood should be responsive to particular cultural needs
and predispositions. The contemporary cultural milieu may make different demands on
believers and thus open the door for women to be ordained into ministry. Scriptural
meaning is therefore contested and indeterminate. Burkes notion of orientation and the
saliency of rhetorical choices cultivate new sensibilities about what is known, what is
hidden, and what is pragmatic for women of faith.
An audience may be predisposed toward a particular orientation and not see its
negative influences. Borrowing a term from Veblen, Burke calls this blindness trained
incapacity (Permanence 7). This notion is crucial in understanding the ways in which
representations of reality and the beliefs that condition their acceptance are reinforced.
For example, feminist activists appear to be making great strides toward womens

25
equality in American society, but how does this equality mitigate values of expediency
that effect, for example, CJs pastors choice to dismiss womens needs in his church
congregation? There is still an apparent disparity between gains made for women in all
their diversity and the subtle ways oppression is experienced in daily life. Burkes
concept of orientation thus takes on salience as it suggests that an audience is predisposed
toward distinct worldviews; these orientations are also sustained by the workings of
belief in them. Women have to believe they are subordinate to men in order for the
hegemonic force of patriarchy to function.

Desire for Change

Defining feminism today illuminates another ongoing conversation within
feminism surrounding the notion of difference; how do feminists achieve social change
without recycling oppressive myths, traditions, and social constructs? How is unity
within diversity achieved? Barbara Bieseckers critique of attempts to write women into
the history of rhetoric, namely, the work of Karlyn Kohrs Campbell (Coming to Terms)
is precisely a response to these kinds of questions. Biesecker notes that even though
Campbells work is exemplary for forging new paths for women in the rhetorical
tradition, it does not deconstruct the systemic constraints that keep both women and their
work subordinated to male-centered academic norms. Campbells inclusive work on
women in the history of public address (e.g., Man Cannot Speak for Her, Vols. I, II), and
challenging rhetorical critical paradigms using feminine style as a trope for critique (e.g.,
Gender and Genre) is notable. However, Biesecker argues that bringing women into the
history of rhetoric tokenizes their accomplishments without affirming the diversity of
their lived experience, including the way women negotiate oppression and domination as
well as imagine possibilities for subversion and change.
For this reason, Biesecker uses Foucauldian and Derridean theory to critique the
standards that reinforce cultural supremacy within the Western rhetorical tradition. Her
pivotal insights have to do with reconstitution of subjectivities through discourse and in
relation to lived moments. She argues from Derridas insight: that the subject that is
always centered is nonetheless outstripped by a temporality and a spacing that always
already exceeds it (Coming 154, emphasis in original). This insight eventually leads
to Bieseckers claim that there is something that happens in the breaches of daily life that
lead to possibilities for transgression and transformation of entrenched ways of thinking
and being. For example, when CJ was told women counselors would not be provided in
her church service she experienced anger, even rage, toward her pastor. Hurt and rage
functioned both to disrupt CJs understanding of faith expression, and to move her toward
new understanding of the way this expression denied women a sense of value and worth

26
in relation to a spiritual community and notions of the Divine. Biesecker concludes that
subjects use rhetorical tools within a lived moment to craft alternative subjectivities that
can fight forces of oppression and domination.
Feminist desire for change without reproducing the status quo is thus achieved
and expressed, I argue, through Kenneth Burkes concept of recalcitrance. Burkes notion
of recalcitrance--developed in one of his early books, Permanence and Change-embraces both what is created through human interaction as well as what possibilities lie
beyond the rhetorical constitution of reality. Within every situation there is a particular
amount of resistance to human understanding and action. One might believe the Bible as
it describes a God of love and one who is inherently concerned with human welfare (e.g.,
I John 4:16), however, in times of emotional suffering (e.g., loss of a loved one, divorce)
there seems to be quite a bit of resistance to the truism that God is love. For this
reason, Burke argues that the interplay between human symbolic realities and human
material conditions proposes a dialectic of meaning that transcends literal interpretation.
There is always more than what we can symbolically describe, explain, and understand.
What we do know is constantly refigured and transformed in each new situation; this is
the nature of rhetoric. This evocative character of symbol use leads Burke to define
rhetoric as rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly
realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of
inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols (A Rhetoric of
Motives 43). Human symbol use and the notion of recalcitrance are therefore central in
making evident particular notions of spiritual immanence, the felt sense of the Divine, as
well as ideal notions of what is good, right, or true.
To elaborate on this understanding of recalcitrance, I turn to a concept offered by
Langsdorf about the performative dimension of rhetorical reasoning. Langsdorf notes
that crafting knowledge in the moment is engendered by a temporary stasis: an

27
intersection/convergence of vectors (factors and forces within experiential flux) that
resists objectificationand so frustrates efforts at (re)presentation as a what or that
while enabling dialogue about its processual being (The Performative 3, emphasis in
original). Temporary stasis takes on significance in relation to womens faith
experiences because this concept suggests that a critical tension exists between discursive
representation and evocative experience. Katherine Henry, in her dissertation on what
she calls rhetorics of exposure, notes how womens subjectivities are a terrain of
struggle between ones performance in relationship to others and the hiddenness of the
self that effaces symbolic grasp. Using Simone DeBeauvoirs existentialist feminist
theory, Henry argues that women as subjects (and I would argue as critics) hold in
tension both revelation and deep mystery. Beauvoir writes that there is its belly
outside, it has no more inwardness. The inner nature of living things is more
impenetrable; the feminine belly is the symbol of immanence, of depth; it gives up its
secrets in part, as when pleasure is revealed in the expression of a womans face; but it
also holds them back (qtd. in Henry 10).
Play between secret depths and public self-disclosure is what makes womens
subjectivity such an interesting site to explore the relationship of critic to criticism. As
the critic begins to embrace particular interpretations of performed meanings, so many
other options are left unsaid, unknown. For this reason, Burke writes that reality always
involves a process of selection, reflection, and deflection (Grammar 59). Interpretation
of social life can never be more than a glimpse of reality. Thus, the subject as critic is
always situated paradoxically toward criticism. Consequently, I think about the critic in
relation to criticism as Henry writes about feminine subjectivity: [I]t is figured as
transparent and integral, and yet always suspect, always open to the charge of
fraudulence. Second, it is figured as invisible and private, deep and inward, and yet it is
always under an external gaze, its immanence produced for and ratified by the
experience of an audience (10-11). A rhetorical criticism amenable to everyday life, and
to womens experience and expression of the Divine, must embrace the tension between
immanence and transcendence, disclosure and protection, representation and effacement,
which is acutely performed in mundane living.

28
Interestingly, in contexts that often evade critical scholarship and intellectual
activity, there is burgeoning potential for political activism and social transformation. I
witness my own and others critical work in mundane contexts as we negotiate our
symbolic worlds to attain measures of freedom, success, and peace. Candace West and
Sarah Fenstermaker affirm that lived interaction is the place where inequalities, and
possibilities to change them, surface. They state that the process of rendering something
accountable is both interactional and institutional in character: it is a feature of social
relationships, and its idiom derives from the institutional arena in which those
relationships come to life (21). A specific interaction illustrates this point. Patricia
Williams, a Black female law professor, wanted to do some shopping for her mother for
Christmas and so approached a store in New Yorks Soho at one oclock in the afternoon:
I pressed my round brown face to the window and my finger to the buzzer,
seeking admittance. A narrow-eyed white teenager, wearing running
shoes and feasting on bubble gum glared out, evaluating me for signs that
would pit me against the limits of his social understanding. After about
five minutes, he mouthed were closed, and blew pink rubber at me. It
was two Sundays before Christmas, at one oclock in the afternoon; there
were several white people in the store who appeared to be shopping for
their mothers. (qtd. in West and Fenstermaker 31, emphasis in original)
Intersections of race, class, and gender dont simply function as abstract principles within
systemic structures, but in mundane situations that seek to confine and control
possibilities for freedom. Even as the microphysics of power is separated from
macrophysical logics in this context, it is important to remember that these two

29
dimensions of power always live in tension. To eliminate this tension is to remove its
critical force. A rhetorical way of reading everyday life has critical power in the way
local situated and embodied perspectives cut against moral principles and idealistic
sensibilities of the good life. If the everyday functions to subvert totalizing logics and
hegemonic cultural forces, then that which both gives in to the external gaze of the
audience and what remains hidden from it must be equally emphasized in critical
practice. This is the potential of rhetorical criticism engendered by daily life; this is the
politics of its practice.
Desire for Space to Breathe
Consequently, this tension between speaker and audience, revealing, disclosing,
and effacing hidden truths, sums up a third theme in feminist theory and practice: desire
for space to breathe without giving up the project of reform. Luce Irigaray articulates
this desire through the metaphor of an envelope, which is a containing space for women
apart from male desire, yet is not removed from the world. Irigarays notion of an
envelope is a radically relational feminist politics. In Serene Jones words:
She provocatively depicts woman as needing to be enveloped in a
structure of identity that enables autonomy and thereby contests the
fragmenting relationality that Western discourse has imposed on her. As
she poetically describes it, woman needs to adorn herself in garments
of her own desires rather than wear the clothes of mens desires. (Feminist
43)

30
Lisa Flores echoes feminist desire for space to breathe without giving up the project of
reform as she describes the need for a homeland in the rhetoric of Chicana feminists.
Many Chicana feminists are caught between worlds,
Without a land of their own, the Chicana feminist, as evidenced by Ty
Diana Rebolledo, must find a space in between; [W]e have grown up and
survived along the edges, along the borders of so many languages, worlds,
cultures and social systems that we constantly fix and focus on the spaces
in between. . . . Expressing a similar sentiment is Anzaldua who sees the
border feminist as constantly negotiating space between worlds
(Borderlands 20). By her limitation to the border, the Chicana feminist
encounters numerous boundaries that constrain her identity and action.
Her stance as a feminist means her acceptance within her culture is
decreased, and her identity as a Chicana leads to limited acceptance within
the feminist movement. Such multiple allegiances to many groups
without complete acceptance by any results in a diminished sense of
community. (Flores 144)
Flores notes how Chicana feminists craft a homeland by first establishing a space for selfacceptance through the written word, story, and tradition. There is simultaneous tearing
down of the objectified other, a role and a performance cast by the dominant culture,
which may even be internalized, and creating a new cultural identity that builds on local
and traditional discourses. Once Chicana feminists craft a space to breathe, they then
turn to others to establish solidarity within community. These relationships that bring a
network of support become the grounds for the third piece of the homeland: actively

31
reaching out to change society; in Floress terms: building bridges (151). Irigarays
envelope for Chicana feminists is thus the building of genuine relationships that then
form the basis for their social activism. This perspective echoes in the work of Black
feminists, such as Patricia Hill Collins, and Asian American feminists, such as Trinh T.
Min-ha, and consequently is the reason many women of color resist the way the
mainstream womens movement defines feminist theory and practice. Maria C. Lugones
and Elizabeth V. Spelman argue that the legacy of white, heterosexual, middle-to-upper
class imperialist and ethnocentric theory and practice precludes white women from
working with women of color to achieve feminist goals. In their words,
Out of obligation you should stay out of our way, respect us and our
distance, and forego the use of whatever power you have over us--for
example, the power to use your language in our meetings, the power to
overwhelm us with your education, the power to intrude in our
communities in order to research us and to record the supposed dying of
our cultures, the power to ingrain in us a sense that we are members of
dying cultures and are doomed to assimilate, the power to keep us in a
defensive posture with respect to our own cultures. (506)
Despite the heterogeneity of race, class, sexual orientation, age, etc. of womens
activism within the waves of the American womens movement, the whiteness of the
movement seems to subsume divergent histories and voices. This is the reason many
women of color seek definitions of gender justice apart from popular conceptions (e.g.,
womanism for Black women). Consequently, the third wave of the womens
movement in America explicitly sought after multiplicity of identities as a defining

32
feature of their activism, as Rebecca Walker urges other young women in a 1995 Ms.
Magazine article to face and embrace the contradictions and complexities in our
feminist lives (qtd. in Kinser 131). Amber Kinser argues that while third wave feminist
multiplicity is one of its strongest features, everything cannot be feminism. My point is
not one about silencing others, but one about negotiating space in ways that help clarify
which utterances belong fighting other battles outside of, perhaps alongside, feminism
(145). How do women locate a space to breathe, honoring individual diversity, without
giving up collaborative efforts toward change? Lugones and Spelman suggest that unity
and diversity may be held in tension through friendships, shifting the terrain of debate
from getting along to working side-by-side toward common objectives. So the motive
of friendship remains as both the only appropriate and understandable motive for
white/Anglo feminists engaging in the tasks as described above [working with women of
color feminists] (Lugones and Spelman 506).
Burkes notion of metabiology works with this relationship between the
individual and the collective and is an important concept in understanding humans as
symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animals (Language 16). At its root,
metabiology is inclusive of the human body in all its concreteness and relatedness to
symbolic contexts. In short, for Burke, the body demystifies the mind. He develops this
claim through Marxist philosophy, arguing that I locate the individual [. . .] in the
human body, the original economic plant, distinct from all others owing to the divisive
centrality of each bodys particular nervous system (Methodological 404). However,
Burke moves away from Marxs materialism as encased in economic conditions to a
standpoint that conceives the body in relation to symbolic worlds. In short, Burke wants

33
to lay emphasis both upon the realm of the symbolic and upon the conditions of
embodiment that shape the symbolic (Crable 307). The interplay of mind and body is
central to Burkes rhetorical theory, which imagines a pivotal role for the human subject
in relation to discursive realities as constituted and disseminated.
For example, most women work out notions of redemption in response to
individual experiences of oppression. Mary Dalys groundbreaking feminist theological
work, The Church and the Second Sex, emerged from her witness of Vatican II in Rome
and her despair at seeing the nuns who participated in this council accept their limited
role in the Church as well as their subordinated position in relation to Christ and God.
Dalys subsequent writings on feminist philosophy and feminist theology challenged
these forms of oppression. One of her arguments regarding what she calls Catholic
androcentrism is against the belief that feminine and masculine nature is immutable and
this gender essentialism is based in an immutable image of God. The Catholic hierarchy
could oppose changes in gender roles and relations based on the understanding that if
God is changeless, then the human will must both discover and conform to this right
order. [. . .] The typical conservative theologians who have opposed change in the
Catholic Churchs position on birth control have this frame of reference (qtd. in
MacHaffie 214). This static view of reality forecloses divine revelation that can
transform lives. Clearly, Dalys embodied relationship to oppression conditions her
critique of it. Her analysis of Catholic misogyny also reveals how subjects and their
subject-matter might beon the basis of current experience and recognition of
possibilities for being otherwise (Langsdorf, The Performative 3, emphasis in
original). Rhetorical criticism emerging in the day-to-day acknowledges the fact that the

34
body matters in rhetorical interaction, both in the creation of self and reality.
Additionally, body as standpoint, as root of human existence (Crable 308), operates
dialectically with human symbolic worlds. There is reciprocity between human
embodiment and symbolicity that must be recognized for their critical potential to
demystify conditions of domination sentiently felt in the everyday.
Serene Jones develops this body-symbol dialectic in her argument to reorient
women to the story of Jesus Christ. She begins by outlining feminist theoretical debates
over womens nature and hence, political positions, varying from essentialism to
constructivism. Essentialism espouses a foundational essence to womens nature and
identity, whereas constructivism, in its extreme position, sees gender as a performance;
womens identity is a kind of site, terrain, territory, or space through which
cultural constructs move, often settle, and are frequently contested and changed
(Feminist 36-37). Jones ultimately finds both essentialism and constructivism
unsatisfactory, because essentialism limits womens becoming and constructivism refuses
to posit any universal basis for womens identities. As a compromise (that is not
reductive or trivializing), Jones argues for what she calls strategic essentialism that
measures theory by its practical effect in womens lives. In order for feminist theory to
be truly liberating, Jones argues, the strategic essentialist must be able to make normative
judgments about what is emancipatory. This means that to an extent womens nature can
be described deterministically even as her nature is viewed in light of its constructedness.
To describe this tension, Jones uses the Womens Liberation Movement in the 1960s and
the sexual ethics that free love espoused. She argues that this movement encouraged
women to express their natural sex drive (language of essentialism) and throw off

35
repressive expressions of sexuality (Feminist 47). At the same time, this essential
sexuality made it permissible for men to claim access to womens bodies. What had
once passed as a feminist liberating essential came to seem instead a constructed
oppression (Feminist 47). In light of womens lived experience both essentialism and
constructivism play an integral role.
Strategic essentialism also offers an interesting lens on womens experience in
relation to Christian theology and faith practices. Moreover, in relation to both the
essence and construction of womens oppression, Christian theology is challenged in the
way it rhetorically orders womens faith experience. Jones works with Christian
doctrines of justification and sanctification to make this point. Using Martin Luthers
doctrine of justification and John Calvins doctrine of sanctification, Jones maps a new
means for Protestant and Reformed theology in relation to womens lives. She begins her
argument by stating that Christian identity is a product of an ongoing interpretive
engagement with Scripture, tradition, and present-day experience, [as] it also seeks to
identify the truth of the matter about God and humanity (Feminist 51). With this
precedent, Jones claims that Christian expression is grounded in several truths: all people
are loved by God, our bodies are part of Gods good creation, we are all fundamentally
determined by our relationship with God and neighbor, and thus, violence, slavery or
oppression in any form contradicts Gods will for humanity in creation and cuts against
our basic human orientation (51).
Martin Luthers description of the doctrine of justification still has a hold on
traditional Protestant understanding. Sixteenth century Reformation brought about
significant changes in Christian theology and especially the way God comes alive to

36
persons as the creator and redeemer of their lives (Jones, Feminist 56). Luthers most
significant doctrinal contribution was justification in contradistinction to a papal
emphasis on a bifurcation between Gods holiness and humanitys sinfulness. Merging
obedience to the law of God and recognition that human attempts to obedience always
fail engenders an ethos of grace and the substance of Luthers notion of justification. In
Jones description, Luthers doctrine of justification unfolds through a courtroom drama
where God looks down on the guilty sinner who has no way to earn or even argue toward
acquittal. In light of the weight of this sin, God pardons the sinner from all wrongdoing;
God grants grace that could not be earned.
Years later John Calvin builds on Luthers doctrine of justification and argues for
a way to live out redemption. Calvins doctrine of sanctification articulates a process of
living life empowered by the Holy Spirit for service to neighbor and faithful obedience
to God (Jones, Feminist 57). Sanctification is about ongoing internal transformation.
The process of sanctification is begun through mortification, (58) as the sinner comes
into acute contact with her/his sin and chooses to turn away from it. Through
vivification (58) the sinner is reborn into a life with Christ where renewal continually
unfolds in ones concrete context. Calvins doctrine of sanctification is literally about the
remaking of human life. Notably, the church plays a pivotal role in how this remaking
unfolds, is communicated, and is performed: The church is like a mother who tenderly
cares for her children, the community of believers; she teaches and disciplines them as
they advance in their ability to follow the Law (58).
For this reason, many feminist theologians critique Christian thought and practice
that delimit and constrain the way women experience freedom in relationship to Christ.

37
Jones argues that women cannot face their own undoing through the doctrine of
justification before they experience wholeness, a piecing together of disparate fragments
that constitute their identities. This is why she claims that sanctification should
rhetorically precede justification in the telling of redemption through Christ. Many
women have only known themselves as subjects constituted through relationship to men
and others: she is in her relationship, to a fault (62). To ask women to again give up
themselves in relation to God (i.e., justification) without first expressing care for
womens physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wholeness (i.e., sanctification), is the
nexus of feminist theological concerns. By changing the order of the two doctrines, the
feminist theologian affirms, in concert with the strategic feminist theorist, that for women
the normative moment is politically and pragmatically crucial (Feminist 63). Jones
concludes her argument by again noting her belief in a God who does not desire to break
women of what little confidence they have, but to build them up, to empower and liberate
women and men from bondage. I concur with her belief in a God who intimately cares
for humans. For this reason, I argue that a rhetorical way of reading everyday life
provides tools to critique the forces that bind humans to oppressive states of existence.
Celeste Condit also notes this emphasis in her article The Critic as Empath:
Moving Away from Totalizing Theory. She does not denounce the exemplary work of
rhetoricians that questions elite logics, hegemonic discourses, and oppressive social
conditions, but she does problematize the institutionalization, and hence, totalization, of
critical and ideological turns in rhetorical theory. These turns, she argues, started as new
critical awareness of ways in which oppression was constructed and reinforced in social
life, but lost their political authenticity as dialogues and publication pressures produced

38
theory for theorys sake (178, 180). She claims that rhetoricians have become insular to
the extent that theory and practice fail to make substantive change in peoples lived
realities. Condit returns to the way the rhetorical critic orients toward criticism and
suggests that when rhetorical theory ceases to impact the material world, then it is time
to move back to experience (182).
In order to fulfill this call, Condit argues for an empathic criticism as an
alternative to what she calls universalist criticism that distances critics from artifacts, and
from partisan criticism that sides the critic with a nebulous oppressee against an
oppressor (184). Empathic criticism begins by listening to diverse voices represented
in the discourses studied. The critic then reconstructs his/her analysis of these voices in
such a way that the needs of the communities represented are privileged. Finally, the
empathic critic recognizes power differentials that keep people located within a particular
social class and at the same time recommends options to critique and change oppressive
conditions. Apparently, the empathic critic must be good at, in Clifford Geertzs terms,
thick descriptions that locate people within their lived contexts, the issues they wrestle
with on a daily basis, and offer ways to critique and understand the lived realities that
emerge from these local communities and relationships.
Condits recommendation for an empathic criticism notes the importance of
seeing and feeling the world from a rhetorical perspective. However, rather than turn to
everyday life as a site for mapping out these perspectives Condit makes it clear that
rhetoric is inextricably linked with social and public concerns. A rhetorical culture is a
conscious, externally projected, public phenomenon, not a lived experience of daily life
(188). This is where my project diverges from, even as it builds on, Condits claims.

39
While listening, reconstructing, and offering possibilities for change, ultimately, the
rhetorical critics capacity to materially change peoples lives is limited to the confines of
academia, publications, conference presentations, and pedagogies. If every individual
could use rhetorical criticism as a tool to understand and critique daily life, an operation I
argue happens whether we name it rhetorical or not, then the critical reflexiveness of
rhetorical theory may gain social and material efficacy that may never be foreclosed by
institutionalization.

Preview of Chapters
In Chapter Two I build on these feminist conversations through an in depth
analysis of Kenneth Burkes metabiological rhetorical criticism (outlined by Crable,
1998), and synthesize these concepts as well as his theories of subjectivity through his
later works. In Chapter Three I begin with the assumption that the rhetoric of memory,
and Greg Dickinsons 1997 explication of it, outlines some of the contours of an
evangelical masculine persona. Margaret Bendroth and Roxanne Mountford, among
others, detail the masculinization of American Protestantism at the turn of the nineteenth
century. I am curious about how this masculine persona might be operating subtly
through the rhetoric of memory and thus frame biblical feminist critiques of Scripture
emerging in the 1970s. Chapter Four thus takes a rhetorical critical look at the
Evangelical Feminist Movement, to see how their divergent orientations toward
Scripture, church practices, and social transformation add insight to the workings of
memory in evangelicalism. In Chapter Five I follow these contours of memory by

40
looking at nostalgic desire and the way women pastors rhetoric transforms it through
attention to mundane workings of community and notions of the church. Finally, in
Chapter Six, the Epilogue, I bring together some final thoughts on the workings of
memory in relation to identity and the narrative development of womens political
subjectivities. I detail the salience of a rhetorical way of reading daily life, especially in
light of feminist desires and concerns.

41
CHAPTER TWO: KENNETH BURKE AND THE TERRAIN OF THE SUBJECT
IN EVERYDAY LIFE
[I]nstead of considering it our task to dispose of any ambiguity by
merely disclosing the fact that it is an ambiguity, we rather consider it our
task to study and clarify the resources of ambiguity. For in the course of
this work, we shall deal with many kinds of transformationand it is in
the areas of ambiguity that transformation takes place; [. . .]. [W]e must
take A back into the ground of its existence, the logical substance that is
its causal ancestor, and on to a point where it is consubstantial with non-A;
then we may return, this time emerging with non-A instead. (Burke, A
Grammar of Motives xix, emphasis in original)
The question is: How can we escape from the prison this language
constitutes? And it is a prison, this father language, this sexist language,
this language that excludes women. (Soelle, The Strength of the Weak
101)

I recently attended a conference titled Narrative: The Theological Implication of

Story. At one of the plenary sessions, Stanley Hauerwas, a theologian who teaches at
Duke University, presented a paper titled The Narrative Turn Thirty Years Later. In
his presentation he argues that the Christian Church is responsible for claiming and
communicating not only the truth of Gods creative purpose to the world, but also the
redemption offered through Jesus Christ. However, he also claims that the Christian
Church no longer has its critical teeth. The modern stress on the sovereign self and the
desire to make Christianity intelligible within modernity forces evangelicals into a
conundrum where they seemingly have to choose between an orthodox retreat into
fundamentalism, where the world is absorbed within a particular religious omniscience,
or pander the Christian message to the values of cultural consumerism, where God is
made amenable to human needs and desires. Hauerwas claims that in this context the
Church is forced to choose a story when they have no story. He suggests that Christians
reclaim the power of Gods story told through the Church and then narrated to the world

42
through the accounts of creation and the gospel (i.e., life, death, and resurrection) of Jesus
Christ. This requires, however, that Christians cling to authority not grounded in
individual or collective action, but in cooperation with an a priori purpose of Gods
creation and redemption of the world. In other words, those who believe in Christ as
savior of the world ascribe authority to that which is beyond the self without diminishing
the integrity of the self and community to make that meaning known to the world.
Rhetoric is, in effect, incarnational.
How do evangelicals make this argument effectively in a culture saturated with an
understanding of Christianity as religious fundamentalism? How do Christians find a
story when their stories have lost social efficacy? Hauerwas calls evangelicals to reclaim
Gods purpose communicated through creation, Jesus Christ, and fellowship of the Holy
Spirit. Reclamation of these truths, however, requires attention to the philosophical
underpinnings of how the Church narrates the world to the world (The Narrative
Turn). To recover, renew, and reclaim Gods message of redemption to the world,
evangelicals must be in tune with the way this message rhetorically unfolds in relation to
self and society. Thus, as Hauerwas argues, story mediates Gods action in the world as
it coordinates orientations toward that action and the telos implicit within it. He uses the
metaphor of a symphony conductor to describe this coordination. Within the disparate
musical elements of a symphony a conductor shapes sounds, timing, and rhythm to move
an audience and encourage understanding. Each conductor claims a particular style of
leadership, without which the message loses its meaning. The symphony conductor
cannot lead without the cooperation of the musical gifts of those playing instruments; a
rapport plays out between leader and follower and music made through that relationship.

43
To diminish the authority of the conductor or stifle the power of choice in the musicians
suffocates the music and ultimately the lives of those listening. Authority and choice
must exist in relation if the story is to maintain its rhetorical force in creating change and
conditions for the possibility of transformation. How is this relation found in
contemporary American evangelicalism?
The long history of a tenuous relationship between women and evangelicalism in
America is where I see this relation between authority and choices unfold. Margaret
Bendroth argues in The Search for Womens Role in American Evangelicalism, 19301980 that for many years evangelical women occupied ambivalent roles in church
practices. After the Civil War women formed separate organizations from churches for
evangelism, social welfare, and moral reform (124). Pragmatically, these groups were
important because they promoted the overall financial prosperity of different
denominations, defining and legitimizing their social place. Questions about theology
were thus subsumed in the need to support the existence of these organizations.
However, their existence confined womens spiritual gifts and talents to the outside of
church polity. Separate associations were therefore a necessary means for women to
pursue their special feminine calling in evangelism and relief work (124-25). A sense of
calling and a spirit of reform defined womens church work to the extent that when
their organizations were appropriated by the ecclesiastical mainstream in the 1920s their
mission and purpose diminished. Their struggles to then define their role and place
within Protestant denominations consequently mirrored general confusion within modern
evangelicalism over women and mens roles. Growing confusion over womens roles
simultaneously fostered a narrowing of possibilities and thus a necessary psychological

44
and rhetorical adjustment to spiritual identity and religious activism. This confusion
continued through the 1920s and on into the 1950s, where womens roles in evangelical
churches were somewhat indistinguishable from secular society. With the resurgence of
fundamentalism after World War I, womens bodies and appearances were pathologized
to the extent that traditional hierarchies placing men in authority over women preserved
and maintained the evangelical social order. Bendroth notes this pathology in a Christian
writers comments: A Christian woman may be absolutely fundamental in her doctrine,
yet defeat the power of the Word by the modernism of her appearance (128).
Subsuming the appearance of women within an overall Christian ethos is one among
many themes emblematic of the way women learned to live in American evangelicalism.
History demonstrates that when conservative Protestants retreat from social and moral
renewal womens place becomes more constricting: if womens role is highly
specialized or overly diffuse their interests become increasingly irrelevant, and the more
women uncritically appropriate secular values without simultaneously providing
theological evidence for them, their challenges to church thought and practice diminish in
scope and force.
Bendroth continues to argue that conservative approaches to womens role,
including the backlash in the 1980s and on into the twenty-first century, follows on the
heels of secular feminism and increasing dissolution of traditional family structures.
Comparatively, evangelical feminists proposed a new ethic of personhood which they
believe is fundamentally biblical: instead of arbitrary roles, they emphasized the
humanity of women and Gods desire that all persons be able to develop themselves to
their fullest potential (133). Even though evangelical feminists attempt to reconcile a

45
contradiction between the philosophy and goals of feminism and the fundamental tenets
of the Christian faith, cultural influence determines their biblical hermeneutics and
church practice, rather than vice versa (134).

Biblical feminists therefore struggle to

communicate the authority of Gods message of redemption through creation and Christ
to all people while basing the exigence of their public voice on cultural precedent. Here
lies both problem and potential. In one respect, debates over womens role in Protestant
churches are circumscribed and circular because there is no clear consensus on the
subject (134). Yet this lack of consensus discloses a narrative reorientation toward the
authority of God and human agency through the will or power of choice. Questions
over womens role thus turn toward the making of choices in relation to particular
religious and social norms. How are these choices made? What factors are central in this
deliberation process? What possibilities open up in womens crafting of their faith
identities?
The contested space of womens role in evangelicalism alludes to the contested
notion of publicity itself. Katherine Henry, in her dissertation Rhetorics of Exposure:
Women in Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century America, writes provocatively on this
notion of publicity, separation of public and private spheres in the nineteenth century, and
the figuring of womens selves in what she calls rhetorics of exposure. Using the
theory of French feminist Simone DeBeauvoir she claims three dimensions to the female
subject: she is transparent and integral, and yet always suspect, always open to the
charge of fraudulence (10), she is invisible and deep and yet her immanence is
produced and ratified by the experience of an audience (11), and she exists in tension
between inside and outside, immanence and transcendence. The paradox of the female

46
subject is what makes the figuring of womens role in public spaces, such as the
institution of the Christian Church, so fascinating. Henry claims that through the notion
of domesticity or the cult of true womanhood as a political stance, women (e.g., white
women) were postured toward public, rational dialogue in negative ways. However, she
argues that if we begin to understand publicity as contested, the focus of our inquiry
shifts from the means by which women were excluded from public life to the frames
within which they reconciled their femininity with their public speech (19).
This process of reconciliation probably wouldnt be so profound if it did not
articulate underlying deep desires that ground all feminist theory and practice: desire for
worth, value, and wholeness. Consequently, womens desire for wholeness and the
systematic denial of it over the centuries cultivated strategies for finding self-worth
within discourses and structures of domination. Essentially, this is the ethos of feminism,
which materializes in different forms according to the exigencies of the concrete context.
In the 1960s liberal feminism gained social force through the work of Betty Friedan in
The Feminine Mystique, the National Organization of Women, and the Equal Rights
Amendment. Inability to tolerate white, middle- to upper-class notions of woman
within this type of feminism brought other organizations and feminisms to the social
surface, such as womanist and Black feminism with the activism of Angela Davis and
writing of bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins. It seems that womens desire for worth
articulates universal yearnings; the consistent denial of womens self-actualization
encourages the crafting of rhetorics that invigorate their search for wholeness. For this
reason, we can turn to the figuring of womens voices in evangelicalism, especially those
voices that collaborate with secular feminist desires, to reveal strategies that renew the

47
social efficacy of American evangelicalism as well as imagine theology and discourses of
faith as cultural politics.
This task, however, cannot be accomplished without bringing the full scope of
womens daily lives into view. As Serene Jones casts feminist theoretical debates into
two main camps: essentialists and constructivists, and then argues for collaboration
between these perspectives (strategic essentialism) she notes how womens desire for
wholeness is rhetorically created and effaced. Essentialism has its roots in Greek
philosophy that characterizes men and womens natures in terms of innate essences.
Human identity is thereby categorized in naturalistic and deterministic forms. Because
sexual difference was (and still is, it seems) the key means of differentiation between
men and women, maintaining social order occurred through sexual proclivities. Thus
women as more emotional, that is engaged with their passions, were biologically and
dispositionally disadvantaged in a society that privileged the capacities of rational
thought; men, encouraged socially to engage their faculties of rational thought, acquired
social and relational power over the unstable nature of womens bodies.
Comparatively, constructivists claim that sex, gender, and woman are neither
natural facts nor essential/universal features of personhood but are effects of the dynamic
play of culture and convention (Jones, Feminist 32). Constructivists understandably go
back into the space where womens selves are decimated and seek to restore and renew
womens worth by giving life to their material and embodied lives. Sex and gender are
thus lived, where the self is a kind of site, terrain, territory, or space through
which cultural constructs move, often settle, and are frequently contested and changed
(36). The trouble with feminist constructivism does not rest in its theoretical

48
sophistication, for many feminist constructivists (e.g., third wave feminists) even argue to
use localized thick description (39) to divulge subtle details that influence womens
lives in concrete contexts and cultural practices, but in its effacement of virtue or the way
moral truth guides political action.
Jones argues that because Greek philosophers developed belief in natural or
innate human essences in coordination with concepts of virtue and attainment of certain
unalterable truths, the desire for substantive change and human wholeness for women
requires theory and critique that embraces these different dimensions. This is the essence
of her argument in Companionable Wisdoms: What Insights Might Feminist Theorists
Gather From Feminist Theologians? It is also the reason she turns to the notion of
strategic essentialism, where feminist theory is measured in pragmatic ways and
strategic decisions about what universals might work in a given context and which
might fail (Feminist 44) are utilized. By appropriating Western philosophical logics of
gender identities in lived contexts, notions of desire or virtue cannot be pathologized,
rather, the way women are undone and remade in the immediate situation exposes what is
tenable and what is superficial. But we must remember that the female subject is
understood in tension between that which is produced for an external audience and deep
hidden mysteries. To remove women from the language and culture that constrains their
being adopts a view from nowhere, but by stepping into a cultural space shaped by an
alternative set of normative views (45) women increase their critical capacity as well as
contextual possibilities for transformation.
The move to language, culture, and everyday logics that contributes to womens
disenfranchisement is not monolithic in form. Katherine Henry argues through the notion

49
of public and private spheres of nineteenth-century life in America that exposure of
private selves in public domains preserved for rational debate prompted imaginative
identification while disavowing critical disengagement (14). In the process of this
identification, however, a sympathetic ideal replaced a critical one, predisposing an
audience for consumption (14-17). She uses the work of Jurgen Habermas in The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Ann Douglas in The Feminization of
American Culture to make her case. Habermas and Douglas claim that nineteenthcentury public bourgeois culture shifted from a space of critical debate to a display of
public prestige. Habermas calls this new space representative publicness and Douglas
calls it sentimentalism (qtd. in Henry 15). Representative publicness is a staged
display (15) where the private, personally oriented self brings a different kind of
authority or ethos to an audience. Supposedly, this display is an unearthing of the private
life, which is prized according to its ability to evoke identification, breach normative
sensibilities, and invite learning. The power of this presentation is found in the way it
exploits weakness, as Douglas puts it, as the basis for a power-play (320) (Henry
16).
The trouble with representative publicness and sentimentalism rests in the
way the audience is crafted into passive spectators in response to it. Knowledge is
illusory through this type of interaction because the audience is postured to privilege a
tone of intimacy manufactured through its presentation (16). Verisimilitude displaces
real connection. Dorothee Soelle, a German feminist theologian, critiques male-centered
language and images in her faith tradition for precisely this reason. I feel that the
silencing of the feminine side of the soul and the subordination of everything that smacks

50
of womanhood, the condescension that is so often in play whenever someone is described
as feminineI feel that this kind of domination and arrogance is most destructive for
those who practice it (83). Soelle demands that womens lives be treated as worthy of
experiencing God. But this requires attention to places of neutrality in ones faith
expression and understanding. Sentimentalism is not so daunting if an audience is
aware of the potential of it to manipulate, as in the case of advertisements or comic
parody. Without this awareness the audience is vulnerable to exploitation. Habermas
argues that this manipulation occurs as an audience is physically drawn toward the
personal, which hollows out the province of interiority (qtd. in Henry 17) of the self
and predisposes it to consumption rather than critical deliberation.
Henry claims that what is at stake is the critical disposition of the public (16)
and I argue that in the context of womens search for wholeness in relation to the Divine
what is at stake is the critical disposition of the Christian faith. For this reason, inclusive
language or feminist hermeneutics of suspicion in relation to biblical scriptures is not
enough. It seems that much of the oppression women experience is understood in their
mundane, lived realities. And their devaluing is complex in its materiality. Jones notes
in her discussion of oppression and its Christian theological counterpart, sin, that
womens selves play out in relation to internal and external constraints. As she works to
deconstruct the notion of sin from a Christian reformed perspective (i.e., Calvinist
theology), Jones argues that women need to take responsibility for their sin in order to
experience grace offered in response to it. Using the feminist theory of Luce Irigaray,
Jones translates her concept of envelope, a postmodern notion that women are
dispersed into fragments in relation to the needs and desires of others, into an

51
understanding of the process of sin in womens lives. Jones compares Calvins totally
corrupted sinner to Irigarays figure of the unenveloped woman, where Calvins
autonomous individual corrupted by sin is displaced by Irigarays dissolving woman,
dissolved into projects, plans, and desires of others and thus without a skin to define the
integrity of personhood (Feminist 121). Cases of sexual violence, where women are
dominated and violated so totally that their sense of self is lost within these experiences,
are examples of this loss of self within distorted power relations. Within this perspective,
Gods grace in response to this understanding of sin is to pull together womens lost
selves, teaching us how to narrate ourselves into being. Admittedly, sin is not merely
external. Jones claims that sin moves from the inside out as well, and taking
responsibility for it is crucial for womens empowerment. She builds on Calvins
account of guilt that defines intersecting oppressions as part of the human condition. In
other words, no one can escape from sin, for it is a nexus of oppressive social relations
(Feminist 123). This moves Jones to an argument for the transformation of these social
relations rather than their denial or effacement. Building boundaries for disparate and
fragmented selves in dialectical connection to localized experiences of oppression is a
trope for understanding womens experience of sin and grace in Christ. Faith thus
becomes a means of rhetorical exploration into the structure and workings of womens
lived realities. As Graham Ward notes in his introduction to Jones article
Companionable Wisdoms: she provides an explicit examination of the way in which
theological discourse is always rhetorical practice, an exercise of power on behalf of a
specific community (295). Divulging the rhetorical underpinnings of womens
subjectivities in relation to faith traditions and practices illuminates subtle ways in which

52
oppression is reinforced through daily life. Kenneth Burkes philosophy of rhetoric is
amenable to this cause. He arguably includes the ethos of feminism in his search for
wholeness through language and literature with an overarching concern for discourses of
faith and the way notions of the transcendent order immanent being and becoming.
The intellectual climate surrounding the effects of the Great Depression, World
War I, and eventually, World War II, Vietnam, and the protests of the 1960s engendered
Burkes philosophy of rhetoric. Although Burke started as a literary critic his immediate
social context set the precedent for his style of criticism. From his merger between
literature and critical social theory evolved what I call a rhetorical way of reading daily
life. Burke imagines every human being as a critic. In one of his first books, Counter
Statement, through his later works such as The Rhetoric of Religion, Burke works with
symbolism, and more precisely symbolic action, to propose means for a better life.
Along the way Burke encounters pivotal players in Western philosophical discourse,
debates over intellectual territory between philosophy and rhetoric, and tendencies within
these groups to disengage from active social change. For example, in an address to the
American Writers Congress on April 26, 1935, Burke argues that to make social change
possible writers need to work with symbols that dont just enlist readers sympathies, but
also their ambitions (qtd. in Simons and Melia 279). He speaks to a radical left audience
that believes in their role to shape contemporary social conditions. However, when
Burke argues that the term worker does not appropriate current American values and
attitudes, which is why he suggests using the people instead, his audience recoils.
They seem to miss Burkes point, as Frank Lentricchia argues later in his analysis of
Burkes speech, that the purpose of such rhetoric is to create a new social center aligned

53
with the working class by its intellectualsa critical mass galvanized into active
sympathy for the oppressed and antipathy towards our oppressive institutions (qtd. in
Simons and Melia 292-293). What is also important in this interaction is the way Burke
symbolically reorders desire by taking it out of a language that disciplines it and using its
cathartic impulses.
Similar to many postructuralist feminists, Burke notes how desire for wholeness
can be conditioned within a language and logic of domination. Essentially, this is
Habermass and Douglass argument about representative publicness that predisposes
an audience to belief and consumption rather than knowledge and critical sensibility.
Burke strategically works to demystify the logical underpinnings of language by both
exploiting the ambiguities of what is present in the lived moment and imagining other
identifications and interpretations in response to it. To again note his argument
surrounding the linguistic shift from worker to the people, Burke suggests that to
rhetorically craft conditions for the possibility of change new symbolic means are
necessary. He argues that symbols embody ideals, but the ideal of the worker is
counter-intuitive to American ambitions. The people, however, is closer to American
folkways than in the corresponding term, the masses, both in spontaneous popular
usage and as stimulated by our political demagogues (qtd. in Simons and Melia 269270). Burke brings symbolic meaning close to the ground where people walk, live, and
breathe.
Additionally, when Burke looks at symbolic meaning he sees socialization
processes that interpret and order the world. He does this to attend to the ways in which
the rhetorical constitution of realities emaciates individual and hence social life. Frank

54
Lentricchia argues that Burkes advocacy for the symbolic shift to the people in his
1935 address exposes:
The discipline of desire in the working class, to move it within a
normalizing and self-perpetuating structure of desire promoted by an
economic system that knows how to protect itself and, in this way, to
move desire away from realizing one of its disruptive implications: the
structural transformation of society and its socialist redefinition. (qtd. in
Simons and Melia 288)
At the heart of Burkes concepts and theories is a desire for the structural transformation
of society. To do this he must move within languages of domination, discovering how
they operate, and culling resources for change. There are three overarching concepts
within Burkes philosophy that orient the critic toward this transformation: metabiology,
orientation, and recalcitrance. As espoused in one of his first books, Permanence and
Change, and unfolding over the course of his later works, the trajectory of Burkes
philosophy for a better life is sophisticated, complex, and entirely centered around
human possibility.
Bryan Crable explains Burkes concept of metabiology within an overarching
understanding of Burkes notion of ideology. Crable crafts an elaborate argument
advocating a novel view of ideology as it is bound up in Burkes concepts formulating a
metabiological rhetorical criticism (304). Traditional concepts of ideology follow
Marxist conceptions, where beliefs, values, and attitudes operate within economic
relations. Crable notes an earlier version of Permanence and Change where Burke
vehemently denounces bourgeois privilege. Their very morality is involved in their

55
privileges; their means and purposes are adjusted to them; their concepts of the good
life are grounded in them; their fabulous possessions are their tools and shelter; their
incapacity is their training (qtd. in Crable 306). Burke finds a kindred spirit in Marx,
however, his theory of ideology disavows false consciousness; he moves ideology out
of the realm of reason and rationality located in concepts of the mind as it is separate
from the body as well as Hegelian philosophy that reinforces belief in Kants
transcendental subject. Instead, Burke conceives ideology based in the metaphor of a
norm where human symbolicity determines dialectic relationships between thought,
action, and material reality. As Crable states: This third position can be best described
as a metabiological rhetorical criticism, a criticism that gains its normative force from
the dialectical interplay of human symbolicity and the nonsymbolic (304).
Dialectic movement among symbolic and nonsymbolic worlds is what frames
Burkes concept of metabiology. In short, Burke postures criticism from the standpoint
of a critics embodied reality that neither totalizes nor effaces lived biases. This posture
is found in the dialectic fluidity of meaning within the permanence or unification of a
particular symbol. Symbolic meaning both positions interlocutors toward each other and
the situation temporally ordering understanding and constituting action. Crable uses the
example of the U.S. Constitution to explain narrative (i.e., temporal) and logical
grounds of social order (305). When the Constitution acts as evidence in a case for,
say, freedom of speech, as in advocacy against censorship, interpretation of this
centuries-old document determines distinct conclusions. Literal interpretation of the
Constitution is impossible because its authors and its original context no longer exist.
Thus, to use this document as evidence in judicial decisions involves symbolic acts. As

56
Bygrave concludes, Burke reminds us in this way that our actions and specifically
symbolic actions can be shown to rest on grounds which are themselves discovered to
be acts (Crable 305). In this case, interpretation of the Constitution alludes to what is
possible as it unfolds historically and in hierarchical relation to the meaning present in the
lived context. A postmodern ethos is therefore noted in Burkes struggle for meaning
through history; there also appears to be a decentering of the autonomous subject as
shifting interpretations order individual and collective action.
Consequently, Burkes metabiology returns to the site of the body as the
location for struggle over meaning and action. Similar to feminist theorists and
theologians, the body becomes a terrain where cultural discourses are interrogated. Yet
the body is not a pure site. Interrogation dialectically unfolds between what Burke
terms symbolic action and motion. Motion includes animal-like drives that are sentiently
known. For example, human motion might be expressed in sexual proclivities. Human
sexual desire is also socialized in distinct ways, what Burke would call symbolic action,
where sexual acts are the result of social expectations that presuppose particular choices.
As Crable notes, Our habits of embodiment thus form the basis for the habits of our
social interaction and social life (308). Metabiology involves a reorientation toward the
body as a locus of interaction between the symbolic ordering of our histories, traditions,
and cultures and the unclaimed terrain of the present lived context. Rather than seeing
the body as the culmination of cultural discourses it becomes a standpoint, a point of
reference in understanding and critiquing known and unknown realities.
Burke advocates metabiology in place of metaphysics in order to counter
technical rationalizations of modernity. He is disenchanted with science and religion as

57
two metaphors shaping attitudes toward history and the universe (Permanence 261).
Whereas science and magic fail to embrace the mutability of lived experience, for they
can only explain it, religion defers this experience to the power and immutability of a
transcendent deity. Neither science nor religion, then, can solve problems induced by a
growing mechanistic and technological society. For Burke, the corrective cannot simply
recover Being [cf. Heidegger, Letter] via a return to preSocratic mythos [for it] in
effect abandons the struggle, surrenders the field to instrumental reason (Crusius, The
Question 4). Instead, Burke turns to a philosophy of poetry, which emphasizes human
identification and inducement of passions. Thus, the criterion for knowledge, rather than
being grounded in formal logics, is displaced by the practical needs of the moment that
link understanding, move emotions, and evoke an authority mediating author, message,
and audience. The corrective of the scientific rationalization would seem necessarily to
be a rationale of artnot however, a performers art, not a specialists art for some to
produce and many to observe, but an art in its widest aspects, an art of living
(Permanence 66, emphasis in original).
It is important to note how Burkes turn to embodiment reorients interlocutors
toward purpose and the power of choice. What is lived is what defines purpose. This
claim counters scientific method, as Burke relates, which presupposes universal truths
can be extracted through careful analysis (170-171). Metabiology assumes that truth
unravels in relation to the local lived context as bodies interact through symbolic worlds.
Simone De Beauvoirs feminine subject problematizes the uniformity of this
embodiment. [W]oman has a double and deceptive visage: she is all that man desires
and all that he does not attain. [. . .] Being all, she is never quite this which she should be;

58
she is everlasting deception, the very deception of that existence which is never
successfully attained nor fully reconciled within the totality of existence (197-98).
Consequently, this tension between disclosure and depth of the female subject is what
leads Henry to claim that women are forced into a virgin/whore binary in religious
archetypes. Woman is either pure mother, as in Mary mother of God, or beset with evil
and this evil is expressed in possibilities of unrestrained sexuality. Yet by returning to
this false bifurcation of womens spiritual selves and refusing to be controlled by its
entailments, women can infuse life into antiquated images, restore a lived relation
between hiddenness and revelation, and thereby implode the power of these images. One
of the women pastors I interviewed recovers a sense of spiritual agency as she struggles
over the meaning of being pregnant and a pastor, and what this might communicate from
the pulpit:
[B]ut sometimes people look at pastors and say: Oh, theres the model.
They all look different and theres no perfect, theres no right model. And
so if I were pregnant that would give, that would open up a whole new
door for people to say: Oh, look at that, thats part of how God works
too! And I started to actually anticipate, if that were to happen some
time, that it actually would be [. . .] theres a struggle, but theres quite a
gift in it that could be there, not only for me, but for this congregation, to
be involved in that somehow. (Interview with RS)
At first glance, for RS, it doesnt seem that pregnancy and pastoral care are
commensurate; there is disconnect, a rupture of what fits, what seems natural, what seems
true. However, as RS continues to entertain the seemingly unfitting reality of these

59
images she makes and remakes her identity as Christian woman pastor. She is a
consistent negotiation between what is believed to be possible and her rhetorical
reordering of those possibilities as she lives into them. Awareness of her pregnancy, both
in her life and the life of her congregation, turns a critical eye toward the logical
underpinnings of Christian doctrine and the effects of this logic on women and mens
lives. By advocating metabiology instead of metaphysics, Burke reinvigorates the power
of choice through the standpoint of bodily involvement in the creation of symbolic
realities. As Barbara Biesecker argues, it is embodiment that fuels Burkes notion of
meaning-formation, dialectic, and rhetoric:
The human being is not, as most readers of Burke would have it, first and
foremost a symbol-using animal. The human being is, rather, first and
foremost a dialectical animal, because dialectic is a term that I believe
signifies for Burke the process of the production of the human being, a
movement that effects verbal or symbolic action but is not limited to these
particular determinations. (Biesecker, Addressing 28-29, emphasis in
original)
As Barbara Biesecker fleshes out her argument on Burkes dialectic, she contends
that the concepts of action and motion formulate a centrifugal force within his theory of
dramatism. The monolithic notion of symbol use and misuse is therefore effaced in her
turn to dialectic as a process of production of the human being. In other words, symbol
use emanates from lived interaction and also orders it as it reveals possibilities for new
ways of becoming. This requires a subtle shift in focus. Elements of dramatistic analysis
(the pentad: scene, act, agent, agency, and purpose) reveal an embodied orientation

60
toward the lived moment; symbolic action as structure is revealed through the subject in
contrast to the situation. Whereas the pentad is typically used as a rhetorical critical lens
for analysis of distinct artifacts, Biesecker suggests that the pentad is a way for humans to
order reality. For example, Dorothee Soelle, a feminist theologian and leader of the
German peace movement, works with the term obedience in Christianity, which she
suggests is counter-intuitive to the liberation theological principles she adheres to. In
terms of Christian doctrine obedience defines the heart of the believer in relation to an
immutable God. However, in the context of post World War II she claims that the notion
of obedience fuels the barbaric ethos of fascism, Nazism, and technocracy (111). Her
point is that obedience to a faith tradition can order human reality to the extent that
devotion subsumes choice. To then use male-centered God language, such as God the
father, without seeing how this term reinforces an authoritarian religion leads to that
infantile clinging to consolation which we can observe in the sentimentality of religious
art and the history of devotionalism (110). In this instance, dialectic is found in the
subject in relation to structure rather than vice versa. For this reason, Biesecker proposes
that Burke argues that language is an object of inquiry (Biesecker, Addressing 31) into
the way humans identify with meaning and thus order reality accordingly.
The symbolic ordering of reality unfolds through Burkes notion of orientation.
For Burke, orientation is essentially about relationship. He thus uses relationships as a
trope for understanding symbolic linkages, or piety, which is the sense of what
properly goes with what (Permanence 74). In the process of meaning-formation past
experiences influence present choices as the future determines the telos of those choices.
There is no such thing as neutral meaning. Robert Wuthnow, author of numerous books

61
including After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s, describes contemporary
American spirituality as a move away from dwelling to seeking. No longer content
to allow organized religion to determine and order familial and social existence, many
Americans seek a faith that meets their individual needs and desires. Wuthnow claims
that the seeker mentality emerged in the 1960s as a response to a realization that things
were not so easily controlled (13). However, the 1980s brought about desire to return to
a safer and quieter past, where the contingencies of life are quieted by memories of
traditional values, abundant living, and peaceful social relations. Faith in American
society is defined by the past as well as the needs of the present and is thus bound up in
symbolic orientations: a bundle of judgments as to how things were, how they are, and
how they may be (Permanence 14).
With this notion of orientation comes a tremendous amount of freedom. The
trick, however, is to note how orientations guide human judgment. To return to
Wuthnows dweller and seeker argument, it is possible to claim, as he does, that the
1980s--most notably in the ethos of President Ronald Reagan--capitalized on American
desire to return to a quieter and safer past. Yet this past is a perception. And perceptions
are rhetorical creations responding to human needs in a lived moment. Desires to infuse
life back into the American spirit and restore a sense of national security prompted
Reagans election while obfuscating his denial of human liberties (e.g., refusal to support
civil rights and womens public policy initiatives) (13). Apparently, symbolic
orientations subsume other possibilities. Understanding Burkes notion of orientation
requires awareness of the many interpretations actualized in any one situation.

62
This is why Burke argues that symbols select, reflect, and deflect meaning (A
Grammar 59). How an individual selects meaning also represents the choices available to
create meaning. As Burke relates, [I]n a statement as to how the world is, we have
implicit judgments not only as to how the world may become but also as to what means
we should employ to make it so (Permanence 14). Working with Veblens notion of
trained incapacity Burke illustrates his concept of orientation and the ordering of
judgments. Simply put, trained incapacity has to do with implicit belief in a monolithic
interpretation of a situation. When a dog hears a bell and then eats meat, as in Pavlovs
experiment, every time that bell is rung the dog salivates in expectation of that meat.
However, if a bell is rung and then the dog is hurt in some way, what was once
considered capacity is now incapacity. Burke argues that trained incapacity, when
transferred to social relations, becomes an error in interpretation (15). White fear of
power usurpation by Blacks in the pre-Civil Rights Movement South absorbed an
orientation that presupposed intimidation by lynching as the adequate solution of their
problem (15). Violence can result in the way language orders reality and undermines
other possible interpretations. Creating meaning is therefore as important as
understanding the meaning selected. Additionally, what is made available to the subject
in the creation of meaning adds another dimension to Burkes concepts of orientation and
of motive. Burke claims, for if we know why people do as they do, we feel that we
know what to expect of them and of ourselves, and we shape our decisions and judgments
and policies to take such expectancies into account (Permanence 18). In short, motive
has to do with the future. However, an interesting twist in the concept of motive is both

63
Burkes belief in language as the substance of it and how this substance collectively
(albeit verbally and nonverbally) shapes the subject.
To begin with the former claim, motives are schemas of intelligibility, where we
reflect on meaning presented in a particular moment and ascribe intent to it. Ascribing
intent is an attempt to externalize our own point of view on the conduct in question
(Crable 309). Apparently, motive is implicit in socialization processes. For example,
when I heard my pastor refer to God as both he and she one Sunday morning, I felt
anxious and nervous. After so much time spent researching critical feminist theory and
practice in relation to religion, I wondered how to make sense of my bodily resistance to
this inclusive God language. Making sense of my reaction and the assigning of motive is
precisely how I employ the verbalizations of [my] group [. . .] [t]o discover in [myself]
the motives accepted by [my] group (Permanence 20-21). Using knowledge from my
past, which is rhetorically and symbolically mediated, I make sense of the present with
expectations of how the future will come to be. Thus, language is the least common
denominator in the way humans are motivated to act. Our minds, as linguistic products,
are composed of concepts (verbally molded) which select certain relationships as
meaningful. These relationships are not realities, they are interpretations of reality
hence different frameworks of interpretation will lead to different conclusions as to what
reality is (35, emphasis in original).
Burke does not argue that all reality is therefore socially constructed, for he
believes, as evident in prior claims about metabiology, that there is a material reality to
human existence that cannot be symbolically effaced. He does claim, however, that the
way motives demonstrate prior symbolic linkages demarcates how the co-constitution of

64
reality in the past shapes the present action of the subject. An inherent collaboration
between the individual and the collective exists in symbolic action. Biesecker argues that
in fact the social is organized through symbolic production ( Addressing 51). She
bases her claims on Burkes action/motion differential as the substance of the subject
coming into history or being. Another way to look at her claims is to turn to Burkes
concept of identification, which is a natural corrective to human division. He elaborates
on identification in A Rhetoric of Motives by initially claiming that because humans are
divided, they seek identification or connection. This division is the material reality of
human existence; in essence, there is no way to expiate human bodily separation (at least
long term) except symbolically. How people symbolically connect to each other to
correct their natural state of division and subsequently form purpose and meaning is the
substance of Burkes notion of identification. Identification is essentially mysterious. To
bring together difference and continuity in the realm of the symbolic, and then to argue
for this interplay as an organizing principle of the social, makes Burkes notion of
rhetoric provocative. How Hitler was able to unify and motivate Germans under a
common scapegoat, the Jew, was, according to Burke, an interweaving of Christian
principles in a time of conflict among our vices (Philosophy 192). Hitler projected
onto the Jew economic strife, moral licentiousness, and social misery. In Mein Kampf,
Hitler claims: Therefore, I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty
Creator: By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lords work (84). In the
rhetorical vision of a God who loves people and desires peace, Hitler organized the
eradication of social strife through a common enemy. With the materialization of this
enemy in the daily life of Germans, identification with Hitlers rhetoric subsumed logics

65
of love for Jewish people. Identification is a powerful process of human collaboration
towards desired ends; fundamentally, this concept articulates the way the self is always
socially crafted and the social is a lens into the individual soul.
Interestingly, the very fact that the self is socially created simultaneously
illuminates the constitutive nature of that creation. Lenore Langsdorf, using the theory of
Calvin Schrag, describes the crafting of self in the rhetorical moment as poiesis. In
contrast to the classical notion of praxis, which is the production of meaning for an
audience, Langsdorf argues that something happens in this production that is more
performative in nature. She claims that a new self is able to come into being in the
process of production. The subjectivity that comes into being in the space of
communicative praxis is the extrinsic, or transcendent, result of poiesis (In Defense
1). One of her examples is an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting where the literal telling of
ones story creates new symbolic realities that the self can live into: engaging in specific
new performances (e.g., participating in meetings; conversations with their sponsors,
disrupting entrenched daily schedules with periods for meditation) enabled them to reconfigure their situations with alternative meanings that arose from those innovative
performances (2). This process of changing the self as one communicates relates to
Burkes concept of recalcitrance and the final piece of his metabiological rhetorical
criticism.
Recalcitrance, according to Burke, is resistance felt through the process of
communication. In a way, recalcitrance is the felt sense of Burkes belief that we select,
reflect, and deflect meaning. There is no way symbols can totally embrace all the
meaning present in a lived moment. Excess is a reality in communication. W. Lance

66
Bennett argues that this understanding is what forms the logic of narrative. Through the
example of storytelling in criminal trials, Bennett claims that idealistic visions of reality
collide with the materiality of the lived moment. As stories are told about what
happened, who was involved, and what actions took place, narrative visions grow, as the
situation demands different symbolic expressions. If an accomplice in a robbery case, for
example, who drove robbers away from a crime, acted under coercion, then liability is
diminished. However, if this driver is understood to be loyal to those committing the
crime, then culpability can be assigned. Truth and fact are thus part of the symbolic
ordering of the moment and, Bennett claims, are also the reason that the false may appear
true and the true false. This means that in some instances perfectly true accounts will be
disbelieved due to improper symbolization or structurally inadequate presentations.
Conversely, false accounts may be believed due to the skillful juxtaposition of internally
consistent symbols (16-17). Burke would claim that the recalcitrance of these narrative
presentations is what orders interests and is therefore inescapably ethical (Permanence
257). In short, the fact that meaning changes over time in response to lived interaction
reveals the primacy of identification and the integral position of the subject in social life.
Consequently, Burkes concept of recalcitrance also demonstrates that symbolic
realities are always partial, incomplete, and mutable. Such a position does not involve
us in subjectivism or solipsism (Permanence 256). This is the comfort one can also take
from the notion of recalcitrance: mystery is inevitable and in fact conditions social
relations. In addition, recalcitrance is conceptually rich because its theoretical force
derives from everyday life and the critical disposition of the subject. Recalcitrance
names what cannot be named in the lived context. I may have a particular view of a

67
person in my mind, but when I meet and interact with her or him the materialization of
our interaction forces its way into my abstract reality. Daily life shapes that which is
resistant to symbolic conceptualization. Interpretations--always being partial and
therefore limited--require the subject in the communicative moment to work for
understanding or induce action. This is what a speaker attempts to do in the persuasion
of an audience toward particular ends. However, as Burke argues, something happens in
the process of speaking that reorients both speaker and audience toward self, other, and
mystery. It is the seemingly unfitting reality of the lived moment that evokes new
strategies for coping with human error; these strategies then turn and open up possibilities
for new ways of being and becoming. In essence, the subject creatively develops a
critical disposition for negotiating and ordering the ambiguities of daily life. This is what
it means to live. Burke argues that this living is rhetorical.
While Burkes notion of recalcitrance postures the subject as critic in daily life, it
is important to also note that this posturing does not result in radical perspectivism
(Crable 313). Rather, through the process of interaction and the consequent adjusting of
orientations, interlocutors co-constitute normative judgments. In other words, levels of
agreement or disagreement substantiate conclusions thus positing a normative foundation
for future interactions. This normative foundation also evokes transcendent qualities.
While human materiality cannot be effaced in the concept of recalcitrance, what is
lived gives way to that which is possible, creating and influencing future action. Burke
makes this point poignantly in The Rhetoric of Religion in his first analogy: The terms
for the supernatural, themselves derived by analogy from the empirical realm, can now be
borrowed back, and reappliedin analogy atop analogyto the empirical realm (37).

68
The allegorical figuring of the word in relation to the ineffable (15) postures the
everyday subject as critic, that is, as one capable of sophisticated negotiation of meaning
to make sense of the world and find value for ones place within it.
When read as an ideology, as in Crables argument, metabiological rhetorical
criticism functions narratively. This is not a paradigmatic framework for a specific type
of analysis or critical reflection. Indeed, I argue, Burkes concepts inform what already
takes place in lived experience. Metabiology, orientation, and recalcitrance are simply
concepts that help to read the rhetorical elements of daily life. These concepts also
refigure the everyday subject as critic. This means that every human being has the
capacity to deconstruct forces of oppression as well as construct strategies for coping
with the struggles of life. To return to evangelical womens desire for voice in Christian
thought and practice, their strategies for coping with neither total inclusion nor exclusion
within church thought and practice reveal an untapped critical agency. As Stanley
Hauerwas recently reminded evangelical scholars, if the authority of the Christian
message has lost social efficacy due to modern and postmodern conditions, new ways to
narratively orient toward biblical authority must be culled. I believe that if we look at the
way evangelical women experience and express their faith, because their role in the
church is still tenuous, strategies for reinvigorating theology as a critical social discourse
will be available.
Additionally, Burkes concepts for a metabiological rhetorical criticism infuse life
into the everyday subject as critic and simultaneously invigorate the critical disposition of
the public. Admittedly, notions of the public and private are contested, and it is not
my desire to defend any particular perspective. I do want to argue that Burkes notion of

69
a better life cannot be achieved in a postmodern age without engaging the language and
logics of domination: this is the task of the rhetorical critic. This being said it naturally
follows that the rhetorical critic is thus aligned with ethical responsibility to not only
specify the workings of social relations, but also disclose that which keeps people in
bondage. Ultimately, I believe Burkes concepts give rhetorical critics license to pay
closer attention to their biases and how they are read into critical dialogue with others. By
doing this rhetoricians can collaborate in the development and practice of what Crable
claims is a rhetorical criticism that is also a critical theory of society (317).

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CHAPTER THREE: RHETORIC OF MEMORY AND THE EVANGELICAL
MASCULINE PERSONA
Times of rapid change or insecurity encourage a tremendous desire for the
past. (Dickinson 1)
These transactions emerge out of a complex dynamic between past and
present, individual and collective, public and private, recall and forgetting,
power and powerlessness, history and myth, trauma and nostalgia,
conscious and unconscious fears or desires. Always mediated, cultural
memory is the product of fragmentary personal and collective experiences
articulated through technologies and media that shape even as they
transmit memory. Acts of memory are thus acts of performance,
representation, and interpretation. (Hirsch and Smith 5)

Roxanne Mountford recently completed a study of the way Protestant women

pastors occupy the rhetorical space of their church pulpits. She describes the physical
space of these pulpits as both a location that carries connotations of masculine authority
as well as rhetorical possibilities to disrupt and reshape this authority. In order to
understand what women pastors take on when they step into these gendered spaces,
Mountford spends time defining what she calls the manly art of preaching (40). She
deduces through her analysis of preaching manuals that as a cult of manhood gave way
to a more virile muscular Christianity of the late nineteenth century, these preaching
manuals reflect a national anxiety over the status of white men as well as institutional
anxiety within mainline Protestant denominations over the declining status of the
minister (41). Gail Bederman makes the same claim more generally in her book
Manliness and Civilization, as she discusses a confluence of cultural forces challenging
traditional masculinity at the turn of the nineteenth century. These challenges from
women, workers, and the changing economy not only affected mens sense of identity
and authority, they even affected mens view of the male body (14). Mountford argues

71
that this supposed crisis of masculinity is what shifted attention in homileticspreaching
theory and practicefrom persuasion of ones congregation to recasting the character
of the preacher into a true man. She notes this shift with solemnity:
While it is tempting to view the treatises of these preacher-scholars as
quaint relics of the Victorian era, they are part of a larger trend in
American culture of investing in national manhood, with the character
traits attributed to leader-heroes (primarily white, but increasingly
extended to heterosexual men of other races) modeled after the ideal man
of the late Victorian period. Character training for men and boys is still a
national calling for Boy Scout leaders, Promise Keepers, and Pop Warner
coaches. (42)
Mountford quotes Dana Nelsons National Manhood and her assessment that American
investment in masculinity culminates in expectations surrounding the office of president.
The president [. . .] embodies democracy as a paradigm of national manhoods
unhealthy desires for unity, wholeness, and self-sameness. [. . .] That is, we hold onto
this deeply strange cultural commitment to white male heroes because of a desire for their
imagined qualities (Mountford 43, emphasis in original). Mountford also argues that
implicit acceptance of white, male, heterosexual authority persists in Protestant culture
(42). I argue that an evangelical masculine persona operates subtly through cultural and
collective memory, ordering the way people participate in communities of faith as well as
how they diverge from them.
In recent years, the concept of memory as a cultural location or site has taken
on salience. Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith note the importance of cultural memory

72
in feminist studies as they introduce the concept for a symposium in the first 2002
edition, volume twenty-eight of the journal Signs. Hirsch and Smith argue that the notion
of cultural memory has always been important for feminists, since their project is
inherently one of reclamation of histories, bodies, experiences, and narratives.
Admittedly, bringing the past into the present or silenced voices into being is only one
aspect of the heterogeneity of memory. Greg Dickinson argues in Memories for Sale:
Nostalgia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena that memories place both
landscapes and individuals within a stabilizing and authenticating past (1), helping
people to feel safe and secure in a seemingly chaotic world.
Made tenuous by postmodern consumer culture, contemporary identities
are performances that utilize the resources of memory; these performances
occur in and are structured by landscapes of consumption. These
performative identities, while structured, are not determined. Rather,
memoryencoded, invoked and materialized in urban landscapesserves
as a grammar or set of resources and structures, with which, through
rhetorical turns, individuals invent rhetorical performances of themselves.
(2)
Two elements are important to highlight here: memory is implicitly relational--both
individual and communal--in that it involves individual performances of identity for
others, and memory places (2) are stabilizing sites where people are more likely to
consume. These aspects of memory are particularly important considering our rapidly
changing times, and what Pierre Nora defines as cultural memory loss. There are lieux
de memoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de memoire, real

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environments of memory (Nora 7, emphasis in original). These sites of memory are
increasingly fragmented by our technological and information saturated societies, in
which Michael McGee reminds us that self, other, and world are but fragmented
discourses, texts, and contexts grafted together through myth, tradition, story, and
experience (Text, Context). Attempts to create meaning, purpose, and even a sense of
history are thus a grasping at fragments that make up these memory sites; the need to do
so increases as the world appears more violent and chaotic.
Both memory and consumption are located in the places of everyday
behaviors; places that at once utilize the unifying forces of memory while
encoding the fragmenting and atomizing forces of consumption. These
places call on complex, intertextual relationships to trigger the resources
of memory, foster consumption and provide places for the bodily
enactment of identity. Thus, memories and memory places are not just
comforting responses to the fragmentation of postmodern consumer
culture, they are an integral part of contemporary performances of identity.
(Dickinson 5)
This notion of memory is particularly provocative in relation to communities that
maintain strict gender and racial hierarchies, privileging some and oppressing others. For
example, Margaret Bendroth, somewhat baffled at what brings women to Christian
fundamentalism (a religious sect that does not allow women to preach, teach, or lead in
faith communities), and, consequently, what keeps them there, suggests:
Women, like men, found in the fundamentalist movement a clear, though
perhaps narrow, call to Christian vocation and a language of cultural

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critique that simplified the daunting range of choices in a secular lifestyle.
Women perhaps especially appreciated the movements high standards for
family life, still the primary area of concern for most mid-twentiethcentury women. Fundamentalist churches upheld womens role in the
family and, even more important, provided a forum for like-minded
women to air common fears and hopes for their children. In short,
womens stake in the success of the fundamentalist movement was at least
as strong as the ambitions that drove its masculine leadership.
(Fundamentalism 11)
It seems that women are drawn to Christian fundamentalism due to its simultaneous
ability to order realities while allowing for complex performances of individuality.
Dickinson, noting the power of gardens in Renaissance Rome to trigger memories, states:
These memories served the rhetorical purpose of creating and maintaining individuals
sense of themselves within a larger cultural network (3). Though the world may be
ordered through these collective memory sites, in the case of Christian fundamentalism, I
believe the price to be intractably high. Many evangelical feminists would agree, and
have fought the hegemonic influence of evangelical masculinity for at least two centuries.
Biblical feminist (also known as evangelical feminist) concerns evoke desire to be
deemed worthy, considered whole, and fully accepted as women in relation to God,
Christ, and Holy Spirit. Their interpretation of biblical scriptures, their investigation of
feminine images of the Divine such as Sophia, the wisdom of God, and their challenge to
church traditions emerge from a refusal to believe that there is any divine mandate for
womens subordination. As one biblical feminist poetically explains, I am a Christian

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feminist because the organized church has carelessly thrust women into a soul-bending,
spirit-crushing, ungodly mold that makes it nigh impossible to dream the dreams and see
the visions that God has for us all (Potter xvii). In the process of this demand for value,
biblical feminists narratively reorient to Gods individual and social materialization in the
world. This reorientation produces interesting resources for understanding how to
critique oppression as it is lived and experienced as well as ways to imagine renewal
through paradigms of faith.
A recent US News & World Report explains how women of diverse faith
orientations challenge traditional interpretation and expression of spiritual truths. The
report follows on the heels of the popularity of Dan Browns The Da Vinci Code, where
history surrounding Jesuss life and relations are called into question. Scholars cited in
the article conclude that culture guides interpretations of Scripture, faith and its practice.
Women who question faith traditions excluding them from full participation or denying
them ways to move into healing and wholeness thus seem justified in their critiques. The
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries produced diverse female and male scholars
concerned for the way gender norms limit Gods message of redemption through Christ
to humankind. One of the most prominent scholars to challenge womens role in the
Church is Mary Daly. In her groundbreaking text The Church and the Second Sex, Daly
claims that androcentric interpretations and traditions long sustain distorted relationships
between men and women within the Christian faith. For example, belief in Gods
immutability, the notion that God is unchanging, all-powerful, and just, permits
oppressive conditions to exist (182), for who would contest ones concrete
circumstances in the face of this God? This effect upon attitudes is reinforced by certain

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ideas of divine providence as a fixed plan being copied out in history. With such a frame
of reference, there is temptation to glorify the status quo, to assume the social conditions
peculiar to any given time and place are right simply because they exist(182). Daly
counters this Christian doctrine with a feminist sensibility toward discernment of human
constructions of the Divine and androcentric interpretations utilized to preserve cultural
order. Though Daly eventually gave up her project of reconciliation with male religious
authority, many biblical feminists continue along her imaginative road. Biblical
feminists privilege the normative moment as lived, pragmatic, and political, thereby
unlocking hidden workings of faith that situate the subject between competing discourses
of cultural practice and notions of the Divine.
Who is the biblical feminist? She is a woman who doesnt believe the stories she
is told about her subordination. She challenges the coherence of stories that exclude,
deny, and colonize her independent whole being. She expresses desire to be like Christ:
independent of male-centered rule and role. She refuses to remain victimized by history
and thus reworks traditional stories of male domination in subversive ways. She
challenges stories that domesticate faith, diminish Christ, and the power of his
transforming work in the Church. She is worthy of being known and being pursued by
God. Her expression of faith pours out of antiquated boundaries built to constrict and
confine. She adds depth to the pragmatics of living like Christ and by so doing imagines
the subject as integral in the process of coming to knowledge of Christ. She hopes for
community and understands that community must be critical of that which excludes, so
the stranger in the midst is important. Good and just societies require a narrative,
therefore, that helps them know the truth about existence and fight the constant

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temptation to self-deception (Hauerwas, A Story-Formed Community 178). It is
precisely this juncture between an individuals story and larger cultural networks of
meaning that cultural memory operates, and as many feminists working with the notion
of memory and nostalgia suggest, can better highlight difference and particularity of
context, eschewing the generalizing and homogenizing tendencies of identity politics
(Hirsch and Smith 7).
Margaret Bendroth illuminates in her book, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to
the Present, how an evangelical masculine persona developed over two centuries in
response to declining church authority and the growing complexities of modernity. There
are two movements in particular that helped to cultivate this persona: biblical inerrancy
and dispensationalism. I will turn to each of these movements and the workings of
memory in relation to them, but first it is important to understand some of the roots of
evangelicalism in America.
Leonard Sweet notes difficulties in tracking the beginning of evangelicalism in
America because of its diversity, normative status in cultural politics, and capacity to
permutate into the contemporary social milieu. Sweet begins by comparing evangelical
origins and their revivalist and Puritan roots (3). American Puritans believed they were
called to the new world by God and thus cherished reorientations toward New
Testament faith and its living. However, Sydney Ahlstrom claims that for Puritans the
problem of assurance became existentially central. When neither professions of faith, nor
attendance on the ordinances, nor outward evidences of sanctified living could assuage
concern, only an inward experience of Gods redeeming grace would suffice (272). This
need for assurance may have been a reaction to ecclesiastical corruption in England.

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Nevertheless, Puritan focus on an individual conversion experience set the tone over the
next four centuries for evangelical unity surrounding the doctrine of justification.
Justification unfolds through a theological narrative, beginning with human realization of
sin (i.e., total depravity and doomed to death), God as the only way to rid humans of
this sin, confession from the sinner that Christ is the means for this redemption, and
Gods justification of the sinner through the blood of Christ. Ahlstrom also suggests
that Puritan belief in individual responsibility for faith and its practice as well as their
efforts to bring economic order under the care of an overarching moral order cultivated in
what Max Weber calls a Puritan ethic, where individual choice carries economic and
religious connotations (273). Evidently intersections among religious belief and social
mores are where one can find the evangelical. Additionally, Puritan and Pietist need for
order through salvation became congruent with the growth of American democracy and a
liberal individualist identity.
Individualism is an important dimension of American evangelicalism and
consequently fuels the unifying rhetorical force of its doctrine of justification. The first
and second Great Awakenings--two centuries (1700-1900 A.D.) of religious revivals that
encouraged personal experience with and social activism in relation to God while also
eschewing anti-intellectual sentiment--cultivated this spirit of individualism through the
proliferation of desire for spiritual experience of God. Charles Finney, notable for his
preaching and fashioning of Arminianism during the second Great Awakening, believed
that humans played a central role in the conversion experience. Finney believed that the
right use of constituted means could ensure conversions. In this line, he instituted
pragmatic new measuressuch as praying for individuals by name, all-night prayer

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meetings, and the anxious seat, where those on the verge of salvation could receive
special prayer and exhortationto manipulate human sensibilities (Cochran 24).
Catherine Brekus notes that the revivals of the nineteenth century even opened the door
for female preaching; consequently, the presence of large numbers of white and black
women in the pulpit seems to offer evidence of the democratization of American
Christianity (11). Belief in human power to persuade God and visibly transform human
circumstances fueled two great evangelical revivals that George Marsden, professor of
History at Calvin College, calls the religious counterpart of democracy and free
enterprise (135). The basic component of individualism in the doctrine of justification is
the power to choose God instead of the self (or other means) as liberator and adjudicator
of justice and freedom. It is interesting to note how fiercely evangelicals and theologians
debate this notion of choice and free will. For Calvinists, who inherited John Calvins
Reformed doctrines of sin, justification, and sanctification, humans have no role turning
to God for forgiveness, mercy, and redemption through Christ; all effort made is God
initiated and purposed. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Arminian view, which
advocates both the recognition of sin and the move to repentance as human choice and
voluntary action. The tension between these two poles of human action shaped prorevivalist and anti-revivalist intellectual sentiment, the grounds of adherence to biblical
authority, and eventually, fundamentalist-modernist debates over connections between
secular and sacred theory and praxis. Pro-revivalists favored interconnectedness between
thought and emotion in the salvation experience and the living out of faith (Cochran 22).
They privileged an emotional experience of Christ versus intellectualized understanding
of Christian truths and ritualistic enactment of this understanding (e.g., liturgy, hymns).

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Anti-revivalists favored a faith experience more abstracted from the sentient realm and
thus resistant to the emotional excesses of revivalism (23). For the anti-revivalist,
Christian tradition justified biblical truth. Ecclesiology, in the sense of administering the
sacraments and preaching Christian truth, provided a rational basis (i.e., Enlightenment
principles, such as objectivity and value-neutrality) for the legitimacy of the Christian
experience. Rationality thus ordered the emotional experience of the Divine rather than
vice versa.
The anti-revivalist stance characterized the work of scholars at Princeton
Seminary who provided a tightly reasoned doctrine of biblical inspiration, the view that
the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God (Cochran 25). Trustworthiness and
infallibility of the Bible thus became reasoned means for understanding certain ways in
which God acts in human life. However, part of the rhetorical force of memory is the
way complex realities are abstracted from their lived contexts. Conservative evangelical
hermeneutics seem to overcompensate for the emotional tendencies of revivalism by
subsuming a local, specific, and complex rendering of the subject within efforts to
preserve the verifiability and reliability of Scripture. Epitomizing this approach to
biblical interpretation is J. Gresham Machen and the works of his contemporaries at
Princeton Seminary. He elevated and enlisted human reason to discount liberal
tendencies within evangelicalism. Machen left Princeton in 1929 to form his own
seminary, Western Theological, based on his orthodox belief in biblical inerrancy and a
separatist outlook. Enlightenment philosophy pervaded academic and political culture of
this time, provoking theologians to justify descriptive and normative dimensions of
biblical truths. Princeton theologians diverged from the orthodoxy of Enlightenment by

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relying on the philosophy of Scottish realism (i.e., Common Sense Philosophy) and
Baconian empiricism, thus understanding human moral senses as being as important as
the physical senses. Yet they still assumed the autonomy of the subject in relation to the
natural or physical world: even though sense perception was fallible they believed these
imperfections could be transcended through heavy emphasis on human capacity to
reason. Thus defenders of inerrancy used inductive logicestablishing elaborate
arguments for the entire reliability of every biblical statementas a means of proving
their a priori belief (Cochran 26).
Dependence on rationality as the criterion for biblical interpretation consequently
characterizes the nexus of antifeminism within early fundamentalism. Bendroth notes
how fundamentalist defense of the Bibleof which the biblical inerrancy movement
including Machen and other Princeton theologians were a partemerged over suffrage
questions of womens role and womens rights in the late nineteenth century
(Fundamentalism 34). The same group attacked abolitionists along with womens rights
advocates because they did not believe that slaves or women could act as responsible
citizens of society. Thus, it is easy to see the implications of biblical hermeneutics
conflating moral order with cultural order. Safety underpinned status quo arguments
regarding Gods authority and scriptural truth. Charles Hodge, a Princeton theologian at
the time of Machen, for example, argued in 1860 that in this country we believe that the
general good requires us to deprive the whole female sex of the right to self-government
because they are incompetent to the proper discharge of the duties of citizenship (qtd.
in Bendroth 35). Hodge argued that men have a natural predisposition for rationality,
while women are peripheral to this pursuit. The linking of science, logic, and objectivity

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with masculinity, in contrast to the supposedly feminine characteristics of emotion,
beauty, and relationality, separated men and women into different social spheres: the
public sphere and its cultivation of citizenry became commensurate with masculinity.
Fundamentalist theology reflects these distinctions. Ahlstrom states of the rigid doctrine
of biblical inspiration which insisted on the verbal inerrancy of the Bible and the unity of
the Old and New Testaments (283):
During the ensuing century it would lead an organized resistance to the
advance of modern religious ideas, including evolutionary theories and
many types of historical study, in seminaries and churches as well as in
public schools and universities. Its rapid growth and continued vitality as
a movement is no doubt a function of the comfort it brought to many
people who were disturbed by the growing worldliness of American
society and the increasing strength of liberalism. (283)
Moreover, if particular biblical interpretations functioned to guard against the supposed
decline of secular society, their meanings and the faith performances they evoked could
become storehouses of identity, culture, and community. There is, then, a complex set
of relations among memory, space, identity, and rhetoric, wherein stylistic, often
architectural, devices elicit memory to argue for and secure personal identity (Dickinson
4). Bendroth notes that the persistence of the evangelical masculine persona is due in
large part to an overarching desire for stability and security against a changing world as
well as to guard against the feminization of the Christian faith. In the increasingly
militant ethos of the 1920s [. . .] masculine imagery took on a more combative edge and a
new purpose. For one thing, the tactic prodded liberals at a vulnerable point: their own

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worry that modernism might become a thin, effeminate faith, devoid of honest emotion or
strong conviction (Bendroth 64).
Distribution of fundamentalistholding to the fundamentals of the Christian
faiththeory and practice occurred in the late nineteenth century partly in response to
modernization and liberalization of social values as well as the decline of male authority
in society. The closing of the frontier, the rise of pacifism, and declining opportunities
for the self-made man in the urban business world made the quest for authentic manhood
elusive and difficult (Bendroth 17). As reorientations toward masculinity unfolded
during this time of ambiguity over gender roles, Protestant churches garnered social
power by appealing to the supposed disenfranchised male. However, women dominated
in leadership and congregational numbers through their work with foreign missions and
domestic social reform such as temperance. To reinvigorate the appeal of Christian faith
to men without losing the social prominence of Christianity largely instituted by women,
a precarious balance of masculine control and female subordination would have to be
arranged. Fundamentalists created this balance through a Christian persona characterized
by masculine ideals of faith performance and regulated through feminine maintenance
and support.
Masculine connections to fundamentalism were particularly effective in contexts
where the Christian message was believed to be domesticated and therefore impotent
against perceived social chaos. The language and logic of masculinity (e.g., control,
decisiveness, aggression) shielded Christians from the ambiguities of modernity. One
Congregational minister described this message: If men are to be as loyal to their
church as they are to their college, he wrote, they must be given a chance to fight for

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her, their hunger for truth must be fed with facts, and their fellowship must be based upon
their service in and their devotion to a common cause (qtd. in Bendroth 19).
Fundamentalist orientations toward the Christian faith thus articulated some sort of
catharsis for men riddled with the ambivalence of a changing social climate and religious
emasculation. From this context fundamentalists embraced a muscular, aggressive, and
fearless stance against apostasy, understanding their iconoclastic faith orientation as
pivotal in bringing people to Christ as well as remaining true to the gospel. The doctrine
of justification by faith consequently adopted a masculine ethos that still characterizes
fundamentalist doctrine today. Mountford notes that themes of manliness and morality
(47) not only emerge in preaching manuals of the twentieth century, but also endure in
groups such as the Boy Scouts and the Promise Keepers. It seems that a strong, moral,
and virile Christianity no longer required the space of the pulpit, but may be evoked
through distinct gendered performances.
They [manlyclergy] were to be spiritual leaders of their flock very much
in the mold of Bill McCartneys Promise Keepers: men of vigorous
physical and moral health who compelled those in their charge to become
better Christians, men who, as Beecher argued, did not even need the
masculine space of the pulpit; since they were so vigorous, morally fit, and
authoritative. (47, emphasis in original)
Dwight L. Moody and his itinerant preaching and evangelism are emblematic of
this masculine ethos. Moody started in the Young Mens Christian Association bringing
evangelical Christianity to the battlefields during the Civil War. After the Civil War
Moodys preaching style, formidable, yet personal (Bendroth 20), attracted men and

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women alike through his tough but sensitive appeals to faith. As one admiring
biographer put it, the great evangelist stood boldly, manfully, and squarely against the
masculine retreat from religion (21). At the same time he affirmed womens central role
in his ministry as preachers and evangelists. Part of his ministry troupe was a Womens
Evangelistic Committee that coordinated ministry by and for women. He also supported
womens education when he enlisted Emma Dryer to coordinate programs for women at
what would become Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. However, the work and role of
women was subordinated to Moodys overarching goal of winning souls. He believed
this winning occurred through masculine connotations of the conversion experience:
acknowledgement of ones total depravity (i.e., Calvins notion of sin) without God,
making a firm decision for Christ, and aggressively pursuing holiness by putting off the
ways of the world in search of power through Christ. The holiness teachings adopted by
fundamentalists denied the Wesleyan understanding that sanctification could rid believers
entirely of sin; from their more Calvinist perspective, they taught that victory over sin
demanded constant vigilance and unquestioning trust in the power of Gods grace
(Bendroth 22). According to religious historians, by 1925 and the Scopes Trial--William
Jennings Bryans dogmatic portrayal of Christianity and debate over teaching evolution
versus creation theory in schools--the first wave of fundamentalism ended. Yet this end
did not change the reality that male authority and female subordination had become
firmly entrenched within evangelicalism.
From the 1930s on into the turbulent social climate of the 1960s male authority
within fundamentalism remained hegemonic. Bendroth claims that this hegemonic
stance is in large part due to the premillennial dispensational stance of fundamentalist

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theology that positions the Christian in the future, where faith is lived in response to the
potential of a better and different world in contrast to the one experienced in the present.
Premillennialism is a theory about the end times, stressing the downward trend of
human history (Bendroth 41). This theory still materializes in the faith and practice of
culture today. For example, there is almost a cult following of Timothy Lehaye and Jerry
B. Jenkins Left Behind book series fictionalizing the narratives of Revelation in modern
context. These books are built on belief in Jesus Christs second coming to rapture his
church--which they note happens before the tribulation--the rise of the Anti-Christ, the
suffering and tribulation that occurs on earth before Jesus establishes his thousand year
reign, and last battle with Satan before he is cast into the Lake of Fire. Additionally,
dispensationalism denotes a created order where specific dispensations unfold in
human history:
The Scofield Reference Bible, an annotated dispensationalist version of
Scripture edited by C.I. Scofield, listed seven edicts of the Adamic
dispensation: (1) a curse on the deceiving serpent, (2) the promise of
Christ as the future redeemer of humanity, (3) a curse on the earth, (4)
inevitable sorrow, (5) burdensome labor, (6) physical death, (7) a
changed state of the woman to include multiplied conception,
motherhood linked with sorrow, and male headship, made necessary by
the entrance of sin, which is disorder. (Bendroth 45)
In short, God established an order to human life at creation that was distorted
through the Fall, in time and in relation; to participate in the redemption of that original
order, faith must unfold in distinct ways. Dispensational premillenialism embedded the

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principle of masculine leadership and feminine subordination in salvation history itself
and, perhaps more important uplifted order as the highest principle of Christian life and
thought (41). For the fundamentalist, security and order are found in a changing world
through the promise of the coming of Christ, a powerful rationale for evangelism (42),
thus requiring obedience through the enactment of specific faith performances.
Consequently, the dispensationalist premillenial stance allows Christians to watch the
demise of culture from a distance; if joy is actualized in the future then there is no reason
to confront the oppressive logics of the present. Memory thus involves images of a
perfect future and gains rhetorical force through the decontextualization of these images
from the lived moment. Premillenialism offered an antidote to despairif Christ was
coming soon all was not lost (42). Even though the dispensational premillennialist
arguments allowed women to perform as evangelists and leaders--due to belief that in the
last days there would be an outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all humans so that many
come to faith in Christ--constraints against women within fundamentalism seemed to
tighten.
Bendroth argues that this tightening occurred through lived tensions between
dispensational appeals to Gods ordering of the Christian life and the growing cacophony
of voices and views in secular culture. Fundamentalist order was found through belief
in the imminence of end times, bringing biblical interpretation and social patterns into its
overarching rubric. Thus, evangelicals imposed right order on biblical scholarship.
Despite the activism of women within fundamentalism as evangelists and social
reformers in the early 1900s there was still a designated role for women traced back to
the Fall and to an extent redeemable in Christ, but not given total transformation until the

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Second Coming. George C. Needhams wife, Elizabeth [a popular dispensationalist
author and teacher], thus held that women would never lose the theological stigma of
Eves transgression, a moral disability, whose humiliation will abide even upon the last
woman to the end of the age (Bendroth 45). If women were to be a part of the
evangelical faith they had to buy into their own subordination. Even though Galatians
3:28 espouses the full equality of men and womenfor there is neither male nor female
[. . .], for all are one in Christ JesusGods created order, according to fundamentalists,
classified women as second-class citizens. Sexual equality in Christ, in Elizabeth
Needhams words, does not obliterate the restriction of sex binding in womankind
(qtd. in Bendroth 46). Bendroth notes that Elizabeth argued that in the last line of the
verse, that all are one in Christ Jesus, indicated the future masculinity of Gods creation.
It explains why throughout the New Testament . . . believers of both sexes are always
addressed as SONS OF GOD (qtd. in Bendroth 46).
Why would women be complicit with an evangelical masculine persona?
Dickinson cites Robert Bellahs Habits of the Heart and claims that many live both
inside and outside of memory and most are continually negotiating new relations between
memory and individualism, self-identity and group-identity (5). In other words, the
construction and performance of identity in any particular community of memory (5) is
mutable. Part of their appeal is the fact that one may create the self anew in each
encounter of these memory places. One may choose to perform in a particular way in
one moment and express this differently in the next. Fundamentalism provided hope for
a better life through Christ, so women were able to sacrifice their present happiness in
deference to this hope. Needham affirms this attitude: The earth is a leprous house. [. .

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.] May we keep ourselves unspotted from its contagion; living in wholesome loathing,
and awaiting in eager hope the summons of the Royal High Priest (qtd. in Bendroth 43).
It seems for women the evangelical masculine persona cultivated romantic visions of
freedom and wholeness. Dickinson argues that nostalgia functions to make the present
look better than the originals (12) and does so to compensate for a sense of
emptiness and loss. Working with Frederic Jamesons notion of postmodern culture,
Dickinson argues that nostalgia is a dialectical response that attempts to overcome,
consciously or unconsciously, the emptiness left by the postmodern loss of the past. [. . .]
loss of communities of memory, loss of the extended nuclear family and loss of concrete
relations (12). In feminist terms, a glass ceiling grew out of fundamentalist belief in a
divine a priori order that stood culturally neutral and spiritually pure in opposition to the
saturation of modernism in society; and persists today in relation to postmodern
connotations of loss and emptiness. The sanctioning force of biblical interpretation
conflated Gods truth with gender hierarchies, and thus normalized male authority over
women. As Mountford reveals in her study of women pastors preaching in masculine
spaces, when one witnesses elements of the evangelical masculine persona, typically a
particular gender essentialism regarding male leadership and female submission follows.
When critical forays in biblical interpretation are made amidst post-World War II
fundamentalist-modernist debates and the rise of neo-evangelicalism, women are
somewhat liberated from their subordinate roles. Neo-evangelicals began to open up
dialogue between traditional fundamentals of the faith and contemporary culture,
which paved the way for women to take up currents in modern thought, namely, liberal
feminism and rhetorics of sexual equality. New evangelicals such as Daniel Fuller, son

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of radio-evangelist and Fuller Seminary founder Charles Fuller (Cochran 29),
challenged strict biblical inerrantist views such as biblical chronologies, and believed this
critique did not diminish the expression of Gods authority through Scripture. Yet when
Letha Dawson Scanzoni, a founder of the evangelical feminist movement, noted
incongruities between womens roles in Christian service in a 1966 article Womans
Place: Silence or Service, there was an amazing backlash among neo-evangelicals
(Bendroth 121). Scanzoni simply observed inconsistencies between Christian norms
such as restrictions against her teaching a Sunday school class made up of men and
women, but allowing her to lead evangelistic service for an all-male group of
penitentiary inmates (qtd. in Bendroth 121). Response to her article ranged from overt
condemnation from a Texas pastor: A perfect example of why a woman is admonished
to be silent in the church, to mild acceptance from a New England Baptist pastor:
women are filling a gap in many areas of the ministry today where there ought to be
men (qtd. in Bendroth 121). This pastor goes on to say, however, that Scanzonis article
would be appropriately titled: Womens Place: Silence in Service (121). Apparent
discord among evangelicals despite growing acceptance of contemporary intellectual
trends reveals an overdetermined masculine persona characterizing Christian faith
performance. However, neo-evangelicals continue to distinguish their theology and
hermeneutics from orthodox fundamentalists, which provides women with a window of
opportunity to challenge and change the way they move and live in Christian
denominations. Interestingly, feminism gained social prominence only a few years
earlier, changing the way the broader social landscape viewed women.

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The inception of the feminist movement coincided with abolitionism in the
nineteenth century along with social reform movements extending into the early
twentieth century. After the passing of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which
guaranteed voting rights to women, battling for womens rights became more diffuse, but
did not end. The 1960s brought new waves of feminist activism, as women challenged
restrictive roles as mother and wife, women of color challenged multiple forms of
oppression including race and gender, and activists such as Kate Millett attacked the
sexual politics of American consumer economy. With the institutionalization of the
National Organization for Women (NOW), the publication of Ms. magazine beginning in
1972, and the 1972 Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court ruling that state antiabortion laws violated womens right to privacy (Cochran 33), a critical feminist voice
gained precedence. This may be the reason biblical feminists were seen as forsaking
their belief in Gods authority in light of their supposed seduction into contemporary
feminist activism. Nevertheless, biblical feminists collaborated with the work of young
evangelicals in adopting higher criticism (interpretation of texts as literature and therefore
as fallible) thus liberalizing strict inerrantist views of the Bible. The theologians goal,
then, was to uncover Gods eternal principles and apply them to everyday life, not to find
the most authentic and objective texts. Evangelical scholars used higher-criticism to
reveal historical information that added to the context in which the text was written
(Cochran 32). Tensions between growing cultural and social unrest with the status quo
and young evangelical willingness to engage this critical voice opened the door for
biblical feminist activism.

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David Wells argues that in the 1960s desire for biblical truth was replaced by a
thin transconfessionalism where faith was produced for consumption rather than indebted
to particular doctrines or faith claims. In other words, what it meant to be evangelical
was also part of what it meant to be the social status quo: theological ideas, rather than
being rejected, simply los[t] their power to shape evangelical life (399). Wells argues,
in Richard Neibuhrs language, that Christ and culture became indistinguishable from
each other. Whereas evangelicals maintained a strong cognitive center in tension with a
secular social climate prior to the 1960s, a sudden shift to the cultural center for
evangelicals diminished the rhetorical force of their confession as understood and
expressed counter-to-culture. Evangelicalsno longer being outsiderstried to more
intricately define their position in culture, their political engagement with it, and their
calling to faith. Evangelicals like Dan Fuller, Bernard Ramm, and Edward J. Carnell
welcome the congruence between culture and Christian doctrine through their
progressive approaches to biblical interpretation. Comparatively, orthodox
fundamentalists--characterized in popular culture, for example, by the Reverend Jerry
Falwell--hold to literal interpretations of Scripture, by working to institutionalize social
and behavioral norms in relation to Christian principles in order to preserve their
confession of faith. Yet it is the fragmentation of options available to evangelicals that
defines the rhetorical contours of the masculine persona and its operation through
personal and collective memories. Thus the structure that memory provides is not
complete; it is like a grammar, a set of possibilities out of which each individual, through
a set of rhetorical turns and maneuvers, makes her or his own identity (Dickinson 19).

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Admittedly, the evangelical masculine persona operates in subtle ways in
contemporary society. It seems to constantly be situated against the supposed decline of
society. Indeed, the Promise Keepers--an evangelical mens movement emerging in the
1990s--came into being as a result of a perceived loss of masculine leadership in the
family and in society (Clatterbaugh 179). Gary Smalley and John Trent, both marriage
and family counselors, authors, and speakers at Promise Keepers rallies, state:
If masculine independence lends the cornerstone of health to a marriage,
then the steadiness of credibility and credentialsand the appropriate selfconfidence results, is the capstone. . . . A healthy self-confidence will in
turn transfer over to your wife and help her feel a similar self-confidence.
In turn, it also gives her the security to allow her husband to lead the
family. (qtd. in Clatterbaugh 177)
There is no subtlety to the professed male privilege of Promise Keepers rhetoric.
However, I wonder how this privilege endures covertly in the contours of evangelical
collective memory. Moreover, if men and women orient to each other through an
evangelical masculine persona in the communal memory places of churchand this
persona is something people consume similar to the coffee and pastries in a nostalgic
Old Town cafwhat are the implications for church, family, individual, and society?
Much of what Mountford reveals in her discussion of the manly art of preaching is
congruent with my discussion of memory and the evangelical masculine persona: male
dominance operates when the preacher, theologian, or teacher assumes some sort of
cultural distance from the message. Therefore, with an understanding that cultural
memory gains rhetorical force through desire for a stabilizing past or future, aesthetic

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distance between teacher and message, and belief in the possibility to continually recreate
the self in communal memory sites, I turn to the rhetoric of the evangelical feminist
movement. Evangelical feminists attempt to narratively reconstruct the collective
memory site of evangelicalism, and in the process reveal the porous and thin boundaries
of the evangelical masculine persona while creating new space for women and men to
flourish.

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CHAPTER FOUR: EVANGELICAL FEMINISM AND THE DEBATE OVER
MORAL AUTHORITY
By its very structure, evangelicalism finds itself both affirming and
denying culture, stressing both its continuity with and discontinuity from
the world. It expresses its guardianship over creation and affirms its own
expulsion from the course of life in a fallen world. It is disenchanted with
society, and yet it is fiercely committed to preserving society from that
moral dissolution which is the inevitable consequence of being fallen. It
recognizes the intrinsic value of human life, but it recoils from the
perversion of nature it finds in each person. (Wells 92)
It is clear that the woman question has no solution outside of a renewed
attention to the social dimensions of the Christian faith, for only then can
the static concept of womens role be discarded in place of a more fluid,
open-ended emphasis on Christian calling [sic]. The question of womens
place thus remains an important part of the churchs ongoing task of
incorporating diversity into a larger unity. At present it is still waiting for
an answer. (Bendroth 134)
The truthfulness of a tradition is tested in its ability to form people who
are ready to put the tradition into question, or at least to recognize when it
is being put into question by a rival tradition. (Hauerwas, A StoryFormed Community 174)

Introduction
The year is 1975 as 350 women gather in Washington D.C. to launch an
Evangelical Womens Caucus (EWC) through support of the ERA (Equal Rights
Amendment), ordination of women, and the belief that the Bible, when interpreted
correctly, teaches the equality of women and men (Cochran 2). Women evangelicals
found themselves at a unique juncture at this meeting. Finally, cultural precedent existed
to voice womens experience and understanding of the Christian faith. There had to be
such relief and excitement for these women beginning to live into a sense of calling
through the interconnection of their spiritual identities and social roles. Indeed, as Pam
Cochran argues in her dissertation, Evangelical Boundaries and the Threat of Biblical

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Feminism, 1973-present: A Theological and Institutional History, evangelical feminists
helped change the nature and scope of traditional biblical authority (283). She claims
that evangelical feminists shifted the doctrine of biblical authority from inerrancy to
inspiration, proposed new methods of interpreting the Bible, cultivated what is called a
therapeutic ethos in American religion, and confronted conservative stances on distinct
issues of social living (283). However, in the midst of these paradigmatic shifts within
American evangelicalism lie deeper struggles for meaning over Gods purpose expressed
through human connection.
Serene Jones, Associate Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School, claims
that to study theology one must adopt a critical posture toward the character of God and
the understanding of self in relation to God. In her book, Feminist Theory and Christian
Theology, Jones demonstrates how feminist theory, which engages the lived
particularities of womens lives, enables remapping of traditional Christian doctrines
surrounding faith, sin, and church. She begins with discussion of feminist theory and
debates over gender essentialism and constructivism, concluding that somewhere in the
midst exists a fulcrum sensitive to womens material existence and critical deconstruction
of oppressive cultural and social structures. She calls this fulcrum strategic essentialism.
For this vantage point, the universal and normative dimensions of gender are always on
the move even as they are naturally considered in the concrete moment. The question
that takes on salience at this point is: Where does this critique lead the subject? or
How is the subject situated within theological discourse? In response, Jones claims:
all persons are loved by God; our bodies are part of Gods good creation; we are all
fundamentally determined by our relationship with God and neighbor; and violence,

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slavery, and injustice (oppression in any form) fundamentally contradict Gods will for
humanity in creation and cut against our basic human orientation (Feminist Theory 51).
For Jones, Christian theology orients the feminist subject and keeps her and him open to
the process of transformation as it unfolds through contours of faith. Jones critiques
contemporary feminist theory in its tendencies toward theoretical abstraction, that is,
removed from the complexities of womens material lives. She emphasizes, through
drawing upon her own, her students, and her colleagues experiences, the complexity of
oppression as it is lived in everyday life, necessitating a type of feminist critique
amenable to these experiences. This, in turn, situates her claims squarely in the realm of
rhetoric, where context, choice, audience, and discourse adopt weight and force in
determining how oppression is understood, interpreted, ordered, and critiqued. When she
turns to her Christian faith to imagine liberation as it emerges from daily life she again
utilizes rhetorical principles and in the process taps into a critical agency that locates the
feminist subject among competing discourses of faith and cultural practice. She claims
that because feminist theologians explore oppression as sin and liberation as
sanctifying grace with a commitment to reform of their local faith communities, they
expose diverse resources for change of faith orientations rooted in everyday life--which
reorders concepts of community, cultural politics, and social activism.
Through biblical feminist rhetorical reordering of Christian doctrines subtle
nuances regarding the pragmatic, political, and performative character of rhetoric in daily
life surface. Kenneth Burke points similarly to the way rhetoric might be understood
through the mundane life of the critic. He alludes to these subtleties in his theories, most
notably in his theory of dramatism (cf. Language as Symbolic Action; A Grammar of

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Motives). However, practical investigation in the life of the everyday critic (cf. Walter
Fishers untrained thinker, 1984) is needed if we are to see their potential for individual
and social change. Avoiding war is precisely what Kenneth Burke sought in the
development of his literary, social, and rhetorical philosophy. A product of the Great
Depression and World War I, Burkes praxis emerges from his own interactions with
modernity and his disenchantment with scientific, religious, and magical interpretations
of reality, what he calls rationalizations (Permanence 59). These rationalizations are
predisposed to describe, manipulate, and transcend respectively that which is lived.
Burke therefore argues for a corrective that is both human-centered and poetic in
character. The corrective of the scientific rationalization would seem necessarily to be a
rationale of artnot however, a performers art, not a specialists art for some to produce
and many to observe, but an art in its widest aspects, an art of living (66, emphasis in
original). As the rest of Permanence and Change unfolds, the reader is privy to a new
understanding of criticism as well as what it means to be a critic. There is a particular
integrity involved in Burkes notion of criticism: the critic cannot transcend what is lived,
but neither can he/she be reduced to it. Rather material life is transformed through the
symbolic. And this requires that the critic pay attention to his/her limitations, biases,
orientations, and orderings of reality within any particular moment. For what is
rhetorically available to the critic through language, image, symbol, ritual, is that which
is mutable and thus open to change. Early biblical feminist hermeneutics suggests this
openness to possibility. Competing orientations toward Scripture and its interpretation
demarcate how possibility for change is perceived and conceived.

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I believe biblical feminists utilize Burkes theoryalbeit unknowinglyas
everyday rhetorical critics where surprising insight and knowledge of human relationship
and social patterns are found by simply desiring change in ones concrete context and
working to make this change happen. In the process they challenge the way an
evangelical masculine persona subtly operates through collective memory sites--both in
traditional interpretations of Scripture and the cultural practices those interpretations
evoke--and in their reclamation of Scriptural meanings through their own storied lives
carve out new space to perform identities. Additionally, looking at the history and social
context of biblical feminism and analyzing the constraints on the narration of salvation in
womens lives discloses new insight about the way rhetoric functions in everyday life and
enhances understanding of Burkes philosophy of rhetoric as well as what shape rhetoric
might take when conceived as lived praxis.

Historical and Critical Frame

A reinvigorated human agency cultivated by the 1960s secular feminist
movement in America defined biblical feminist challenges to womens role in church,
family, and society. Initially defining their movement was support for the Equal Rights
Amendment and liberal feminist advocacy for equality in rule and role. Before their first
meeting in Washington D.C. a small group of women and men drafted several
affirmations including: all persons, male and female, being created in the image of God
(Galatians 3:28), a call for mutual submission between men and women, and equality in
family roles, business employment, education, and church positions. These affirmations
eventually coalesced into what was called the Chicago Declaration: We acknowledge
that we have encouraged men to prideful domination and women to irresponsible

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passivity. So we call men and women to mutual submission and active discipleship
(qtd. in Cochran 42). This affirmation circulated among evangelicals gathering
endorsement and providing an audience for an initial meeting of up to thirty men and
women in 1974. Among these women were Letha Scanzoni, Nancy Hardesty, Virginia
Mollenkott, and Cheryl Forbes, an editorial assistant at Christianity Today. By the time
the Evangelicals for Social Action conference rolled around in 1975, three hundred and
fifty women were in attendance and the book All Were Meant to Be: A Biblical
Approach to Womens Liberation, by Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty, publicized
many evangelical womens perspectives and concerns.
All Were Meant to Be played a pivotal role in the early evangelical feminist
movement as a consciousness-raising tool. This book received acclaim among
evangelicals for the way it addressed issues of gender in relation to Christian thought and
practice. Scanzoni and Hardesty relied upon historical-cultural criticism to help place
traditional passages of Scripture that limited womens role in church, family, and society
in context. Cochran concludes that this contextual biblical hermeneutic helped Scanzoni
and Hardesty create new precedent for gender roles and relations. For a text to be
situationally limited meant that its teachings were not intended to be normative
commands for all people at all times, but were provisional principles given to a specific
church to deal with a particular situation (Cochran 44). Scanzoni and Hardestys
provisional versus normative principles are notable in their interpretation of the creation
story, where Adam is made from the dust of the ground and Eve is made from Adams rib
(Genesis 1, 2). They refute the notion that Eve is Adams whole or androgynous other
half and affirm that she is his equal, taken from his side, as well as his beloved, taken

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from his heart (26). Additionally, they reorient toward the notion of helper in the
Genesis scripture that states Eves creation as Adams helpmate, by extending the
meaning of helper to superordinate rather than subordinate (26). They glean this
meaning from the many uses of helper in the Bible referring to Gods help for those in
time of need, such as Psalm 121:1,2: From whence does my help come from? My help
comes from the Lord. Hardesty and Scanzoni continue to problematize womens
subordinate status to men as they challenge Pauls (whose writings are traditionally used
to justify male-female hierarchy) demarcation of womens subjugation to men by noting
the discontinuity of his claims. For example, in his letter to the Galatians Paul states that
there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, slave nor free, for all are one in
Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28). Yet in First Corinthians 11:3-10 Paul commands women to
pray and prophesy with their heads covered: A man ought not to cover his head, since he
is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. For man did not come
from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for
man. Hardesty and Scanzoni thoroughly temper traditional interpretations of Scripture
by noting discontinuities in its meaning and reliability. They demonstrate how
conservative orthodox positions on the role of women are value-laden rather than
objective, and so promote an epistemic skepticism that lays the groundwork for their
feminist activism.
After the first meeting in 1975 the evangelical feminist movement gained
momentum over the next ten years, publishing and organizing nationally with local
chapters. One of their publications, although separate from the Evangelical Womens
Caucus (EWC), was a theological journal titled Daughters of Sarah (DOS), which by

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1978 had twelve hundred subscribers. Their format included biblical interpretations,
book reviews, poetry, and biographies of women in ministry called foremothers
(Cochran 61). DOS came to life in 1974 through a group of women from Northpark
Theological Seminary discussing the role of women in the church. On the cover of their
first issue was this statement:
We are Christians; we are also feminists. Some say we cannot be both,
but Christianity and feminism for us are inseparable. DAUGHTERS OF
SARAH is our attempt to share our discoveries, our struggles and our
growth as Christian women. We are committed to Scripture and we seek
to find in it meaning for our lives. We are rooted in a historical tradition
of women who have served God in innumerable ways and we seek
guidance from their example. We are convinced that Christianity is
relevant to all areas of womens lives today. We seek ways to act out our
faith. (qtd. in Cochran 62)
These commitments helped to define and map out evangelical womens concerns
regarding their faith as well as desires for opportunities to express it in socially
meaningful ways. Even though DOS initially started with a budget of thirty dollars and
charged one dollar per issue as they assumed they would have exhausted their discussion
of womens issues in one year, they continued to publish as a result of the two hundred
initial subscribers with two-year subscriptions. Looking at a poll of their readership
Cochran claims that most subscribers were white middle-class professional women with a
minimum of an undergraduate education (62-63). The journal culminated in its final
edition in 1996. For two decades DOS utilized womens experiences of faith as the

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fulcrum for their social critique and activism. Sue Horner, one of the editorial board
members of DOS, writes: May the following herstories inspire others to continue to put
womens experiences in the center and to remember that conversion to Christian
feminism is both personal and social (233). Centering womens experience in
evangelical feminist biblical interpretation and social critique cultivated space for
womens diverse perspectives in the early phases of the movement, but ultimately led to
irreconcilable differences and the split of the caucus in 1986.
Valerie Saiving, in her 1960 groundbreaking article on feminist theology and
gender identity, claims that women of faith value their femininity; they do not wish to
discard their sexual identity but rather gather it up into a higher unity. They want, in
other words, to be both women and full human beings (108). Jones notes the need for
this fullness in womens material lives through Luce Irigarays concept of an envelope
in relation to Christian Reformed doctrines of sanctification and justification. Irigaray
demonstrates in Speculum of the Other Woman how women are defined according to
masculine desire, having no identity of their own apart from the men they were
constructed to define (qtd. in Jones 42). This leads Irigaray to conclude in An Ethics of
Sexual Difference that women need a containing space or envelope that structures
identity, drawing together a coherent self without removing the self from the world or the
relations that make up ones existence. The purpose of womans envelopment is not
simply to enclose her in her own desires but to give her sufficient definition to meet and
be met by others in a play of wonder (Jones 43). Irigaray also suggests through her
enveloped womanher means of becoming herself apart from mens desiresthat God
authors the space of her becoming (qtd. in Jones 43) where the tools to understand and

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critique ones oppression are theologically conceived and practiced in communities of
faith.
Wholeness does not come about, however, by simply bringing womens voices
into male-centered public forums. For this reason, perhaps, competing theological
agendas emerged in the EWC drawn along the lines of womens experience in relation to
Gods revealed truth and authority in Scripture. At the second EWC conference in 1978,
Roberta Hestenes outlined two competing theological paradigms in an article titled
Scripture and the Ministry of Women within the Christian Community. She claims that
within the traditionalist paradigm there may be inward change according to spiritual
transformation, but the social order remains intact. Comparatively, the egalitarian
paradigm proposes that a new church order is commensurate with inward change.
Resurrection power is a present possibility (Ephesians 1: 19-20) [. . .]. We in the
Church may rightly look to the liberating power of the gospel to be present here and now
in all areas of human life (qtd. in Cochran 78). There is social and spiritual congruence
within the egalitarian framework. These paradigms in early biblical feminist theology,
such as the work of Donald W. Dayton, Lucille Sider Dayton, and Nancy Hardesty, claim
a Wesleyan Methodist tradition, for which the inward witness of the Holy Spirit creates
possibilities for cultural change, giving them the best way to remain faithful to all of
Scripture and the central thrust of the gospel (Cochran 82).
Evangelical feminists institutionally split when they could not reconcile
differences over emerging social issues in relation to Christian faith and practice, such as
homosexuality, abortion, and feminist activism. However, their unity of voice in the
early stages of the movement whittled away at a masculine persona that characterized the

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evangelical experience. This persona developed in the early part of the twentieth century
in response to the supposed feminization of Protestantism, but as Gail Bederman notes,
the masculinization of religion was catalyzed by an overarching economic shift from
individualistic entrepreneurship to corporate order. In short, the feminized
Protestantism which informed an individualistic, producer-oriented middle-class had
been rendered obsolete by the development of a corporate, consumer-oriented order
(The Women 437). For Bederman, the desire of the Men and Religion Forward
Movement of 1911 and 1912 to find 3,000,000 men missing from American church life
(432), for example, was more about casting a strong and powerful persona in the face of a
new economic order as well as a changing social climate. Reinvesting in masculine
connotations of the Christian faith experience thus seemed to be less about the
feminization of faith and more about constructing a united front against the perceived
social chaos of modernity. However, coupled with the biblical inerrancy movement-determining both the meanings of Scripture and the conditions for the verifiability of this
meaning--the evangelical masculine persona took root in theory as well as practice;
today, it seems to provide an explanatory and normative power to order the lives of
everyday Christians against the threats of postmodernity. The salient point, here, is the
way an evangelical masculine persona functions through collective memory places
(Dickinson 2) to bring comfort, tradition, and a sense of home to those weary from a
world that appears to be increasingly violent, fragmented, and lonely.
Greg Dickinson argues that the insecurity and anxiety of contemporary
postmodern society encourage[s] a tremendous desire for the past (1). Thus, he states
that memory rhetorically functions to stabilize identities and provide a sense of order in

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changing times. Maurice Halbwachs concurs with this function of memory, defining two
types: one made of habits and turned toward action, and another which involves a
certain disinterest in present life (47). In the case of the latter, a fantasy reality
(Bormann) takes over to transport one to a safealbeit rhetorically constructedpast or
future.
Contemporary urban experience combined with the growth of consumer
culture makes the maintenance of stable, coherent identities difficult.
Memory offers consumers the possibility of coherent identities firmly
situated within a warmly remembered past. However, these sites of
memory are themselves fragmented, making the apparent coherence
illusory and opening the possibilities for a wide range of identities. Old
Pasadena brings together both the fragmenting claims of consumption and
the reunifying voice of memory, creating a rhetorically meaningful
memory place. (Dickinson 2)
The evangelical masculine persona also offers a reunifying voice of memory for those
who feel contemporary culture has abandoned values such as, safety, strength,
community, and home as well as the cultural performances these values engender.
Indeed people adopt the Christian faith orientation because it has endured through time.
Maurice Halbwachs notes that the historical and cultural tradition of Christianity is what
nurtures its diverse denominational orientations. To them [believers in God], there is an
essential difference between religion and other customs. The latter, in effect, are valued
only in passing as a means of organizing temporal society more or less successfully,
whereas religion has its roots in the far removed past and is transformed only in

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appearance (100). Memory is an important part of the practice of Christian faith, and
functions to link people to a larger religious community and purpose. What happens
when distinct cultural practices become fixed as a way to preserve theological
understanding?
The evangelical feminist movement was built around this particular problematic:
evangelical feminists attempted to address social inequities between men and women
characterized by roles, distribution of power, and biblical hermeneutics. Christian
women wanted access to roles that enabled them to use their gifts, expand their influence,
and circumvent confining and demeaning familial and social norms. Virginia
Mollenkott, a central player in the evangelical feminist movement, claimed that their
advocacy included equalization of financial opportunities through education;
employment; and tax, pension, and Social Security reform. Women also wanted control
over their lives and labor (qtd. in Cochran 57). A persistent theme for evangelical
feminists is the notion of agency. They believe that if women and men are freely able to
exercise their gifts and shape their present circumstances then they will share
responsibility for the life of the Church and the Christian message will be heard and more
faithfully practiced. Moreover, evangelical women believe that God created them with
worth independent of men, which is at the root of their activism. To make this claim
biblical feminists spend a lot of time and energy separating womens nature from
womens role in the church and the family. The conflation of role and nature may have
become firmly entrenched with the resurgence of fundamentalism in the 1950s;
nevertheless, biblical feminists trace their challenges to this logical base. Evangelicals
who take the traditionalist position argue that womens nature is understood within a

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created order outlined in Genesis. This created order sets the precedent for understanding
male-female roles. As a result of subsuming essentialized notions of male and female
natures within an a priori order of human existence, evangelicals are able to keep women
from ordination as well as from exploring their capacities beyond traditional gender roles.
Thus, social relations sustain their force through belief in a divinely created and
sanctioned order that cannot be changed through human means, merely obeyed. To
question this order is to question God.
This is why biblical feminists reinterpret Scriptures traditionally used to justify
womens subordination, and in the process carve out new space for the performance of
self-in-relation. To counter the way an evangelical masculine persona subtly functions
through collective memory, space, and identity (Dickinson 2), biblical feminists must
not only reinterpret Scripture in relation to womens lived experience, but also critique
tendencies to remove processes of interpretation from lived contexts. This point is
critical for feminist theologians, such as Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, who claims that a
critical feminist hermeneutics of suspicion puts womens lives at the center of the
interpretive process. I seek to work out a process and method for a feminist political
reading that can empower women who, for whatever reasons, are still affected by the
Bible to read against the grain of its patriarchal rhetoric (But She Said 7). For Jones,
Christian theology offers a normative vision for a redeemed humanity that looks ahead
to a model of identity yet to be realized and not back to models of personhood that
remain rooted in an essentialized nostalgia for the natural and the given (Feminist
Theory 54). She calls this normative vision eschatological (i.e., theology surrounding life
after death) essentialism. It incorporates debates over womens nature in relation to

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Christian claims about an already/not-yet future (54), and thus carves out rhetorical
space to identify complexities of existence in relation to patterns of hope.
Phyllis Tribles germinal work in biblical feminist interpretation of the Old
Testament maps out one dimension of this rhetorical space. Trible uses higher criticism
(the interpretation of scripture as literature), which allows other voices to emerge from
traditional interpretations (which she claims are patriarchal). Her approach assumes the
polyvalence of the text, which means there is a hermeneutical centeralbeit, not a fixed,
static centerthat embraces a confluence of meanings. These meanings surface as
readers encounter the text and makes interpretation meaningful or salient. For Trible, the
polyvalence of the text becomes an act of subversion of a patriarchal essentialism that
centers traditional hermeneutical standards. Illustrative of this polyvalence is Tribles
reinterpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden as found in Genesis, Chapters Two
and Three. She first pays attention to her own experience, refusing to believe that the Old
Testament is irrefutably patriarchal and sexist. Notably, by including herself as subjectin-relation to Scripture, she challenges an assumed objectivity and value-neutrality
typical of male-centered hermeneutic practice. Questions she asks are: How come this
story feeds and nourishes my life? How come there is no anger in reading or proclaiming
this story to others? Why do I have a sense of well being in relation to this story despite
its tragic ending? (Eve and Miriam). She concludes that there must be something at
work in the text that redeems it from its oppressive worldview. Encountering Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden, engaging their interaction, and observing choices that
provoke their subsequent fall from grace, are each pieces of Tribles hermeneutics of
suspicion. She acknowledges patriarchal interpretations of this story: Man [was] created

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first and woman [was] last and that is a value judgment; she is his derivative, subordinate,
helper as assistant not equal, seducer of him, cursed, punished by being explicitly
subjected to the rule of her husband (Eve and Miriam). Countering these
interpretations of Adam and Eve, Trible posits other views: Eve was created last and is
therefore best; she is a woman of integrityalert, intelligent, and sensitivewhile Adam
is passive and belly-oriented, and Eve contemplates before eating the apple while
Adam simply eats it. Trible continues to argue that the creation of Eve is congruent with
the advent of sexuality, thus making Eve a pivotal character in the culmination of the
creation story. Also, the translation asa, Hebrew for helper, noting that God is also the
helper of Israel, means fit for or corresponding to, thus tempering connotations of
superiority traditionally assumed in Adams relationship to Eve. One of the most
compelling interpretations is the wisdom of Eve in relation to the serpent, for she not only
restates the meaning of Gods command to not eat of the tree of good and evil, but
interprets it faithfully, understanding her own culpability as well as capacity to make
choices that have particular effects in the world. Trible concludes from these different
interpretations that their plurality counters a narrow patriarchal worldview. Additionally,
by focusing on diverse interpretations of the creation and fall of humankind--a story
traditionally interpreted to advocate gender hierarchy of male rule and female
subordination--Trible challenges its narrative coherence and fidelity by situating the locus
of judgment in the audience. This shift of power from text to audience rearranges
responsibility in the life of the critic. Traditional interpretations of Scripture no longer
stand in neutral territory; humans are accountable for their creation of meaning and their
responses to it.

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In the 1970s when biblical feminism rises to the evangelical surface Martin Marty
claims that evangelicals fiercely contested the intersection of faith and social issues in
debates surrounding biblical inerrancy. Biblical inerrancy advocates the truthfulness and
infallibility of biblical scripture in all subjects upon which it touches (in whole and in
part), whether faith, history, or science (Cochran 26). Struggle with biblical inerrancy
highlights the heterogeneity of evangelical perspectives. However, their diversity rallies
around a central unity: the doctrine of justification by faith. Justification, a Christian
doctrine initially defined by Martin Luther in the sixteenth century, is belief in Gods
divine mercy for humans as sinners, rescuing them from condemnation and death, and
bringing them into new life through Jesus Christ: his incarnation, crucifixion, and
resurrection. Essentially, this divine rescue is what Christians call salvation and
conversion. Human turning from death to life through Christ begins a new order toward
self and other. Without individual willingness to acknowledge ones sinful state and then
confess the need for redemption through Christ, there can be no change and thus no
renewal. Justification is an expression of both the need for transformation and the way
God affects it. The doctrine of justification deals with the question of how God who is
absolutely holy [. . .] and who demands ethical perfection in his creatures, can allow men
[/women] who are guilty of breaking his law into his presence and fellowship
(Schwertley 1-2). Thus, at its roots evangelicalism is about individual and social
transformation; to study this faith identity is to study processes of social change.
Justification is based on the foundational theme of soteriology (Greek for
salvation) fanning out into five intersecting images and ideas based on Christs work
on the cross. The first image is victory, where Christ defeated sin and death through his

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shedding of blood on the cross. The second image is that of a pardon that changed
human legal status. Those who are guilty can be washed clean of their sin and be
justified in the sight of God (McGrath 101). Changed personal relationships define the
third image, where Christs death functions as a reconciling act, restoring relationship
between God and human. Fourth is the image of liberation: captives to oppression and
evil are set free to imagine and enact possibilities for new life. Finally, the idea of
restoration to wholeness completes and continues the process of salvation. Those who
are ill on account of sin can be made whole again through the cross of Christ. Through
his cross and resurrection, Christ is able to bind up our wounds and heal us, restoring us
to wholeness and spiritual health (102). These images of salvation move and shift in
human life to the extent that some discourses surrounding them take precedence while
pressing material needs eclipse others. Evangelical history--and consequently, the
evangelical masculine persona--paints an image of pardon and changed legal status-depicting justification--and subsumes images of sanctification: movement toward healing
and wholeness. However, biblical feminists attempt to breathe life into the doctrine of
sanctification--narratively constructing a whole and interconnected self--to the extent that
their critiques deconstruct masculine dimensions of justification and their colonizing
influence in womens lives.
Additionally, their critical hermeneutics mapped out novel means of narrating
salvation connected to the realities of human existence. Jones explains this perspective
through a rhetorical reordering of the Christian doctrines of sanctification and
justification that, rather than start with interpretation, tradition, or text, begin with
womens concrete, material, lived experience. This reordering challenges distorted

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power relationships between men and women and encourages both to see the way
constructions of faith condition perspectives of the other. Typically, the doctrine of
justification--the self as sinner in need of a gracious God--rhetorically precedes the
doctrine of sanctification (the process of becoming whole in and through Christ). Martin
Luthers notion of justification, Jones argues, expresses how every human is understood
primarily as sinful, an object of Gods burning wrath that may only be extinguished
through sacrifice--the shedding of blood--which God provides through the sacrifice of his
son, Jesus Christ, his incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. In this doctrine, Jones
claims that women--already constructions of male desire, fragmented, dispersed, and in
need of their own skin--are further dismantled and dismissed. Notions of sin being met
by Gods grace simply fail to connect to womens lived experience. Already suffering
from an excess of humility and debilitating lack of self-containment, she is made by
Gods grace to recapitulate the dynamics of her oppression and self-loss. [. . .] This
entrenches rather than challenges the worldly definitions that surround her (63).
Comparatively, John Calvin claims that the process of sanctification rhetorically builds
up and materially transforms the life of the believer in Christ. For Calvin, the idea of
sanctification is built on metaphors of regeneration--an organic process of growth,
process, and developmental change (qtd. in Jones 57):
According to Calvin, this growth toward God is forever incomplete in this
life because of sin, but this incompleteness never eclipses the importance
of the real transformation that occurs in persons who know themselves to
be loved and forgiven in Christ. Thus, in contrast to justification, where
the sinner is made righteous by an external judgment and an imputed,

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alien righteousness, in divine sanctification, God initiates real, internal
transformation. The believers life is materially (not just juridically)
remade. (Jones 57)
Within the doctrine of sanctification the believer is consistently made aware of sin
and the way sin occupies self and society. The means of this awareness is the church
who tenderly cares for her children, the community of believers; she teaches and
disciplines them as they advance in their ability to follow the Law (58). Church as
mother thus plays a pivotal role in defining and nurturing conditions for growth,
transformation and renewal. Jones argues that standing in the space of sanctification,
the one whose identity has been undone and forgiven is now given normative
contours, disciplines, laws, and ethical directives within which to become a concretely
new person in Christ (58). Thus, sanctification speaks more poignantly to womens
lived experience, the need to be nurtured into wholeness, literally enveloped, while
remaining connected to community and society.
The tenor of many biblical feminist interpretations of Scripture plays with sacred
images, and poetic expression confirms their need to hear first from God through the
language of sanctification, followed closely by justification. For example, encountering
the theme of abuse in the lives of Christian women illustrates how many women are torn
apart by the belief that their subordination is divinely sanctioned. Lonni Collins Pratt
reveals in her article, The Lost Coin, that her ex-husband, an evangelist and pastor,
beat me regularly for fourteen years (130). She claims that much spiritual advice she
and other battered women receive was similar:

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I was hospitalized after a severe beating. I couldnt sit up or turn my head
because of several well-aimed kicks to my neck, so the minister had to
lean over my bed when he said softly, All things work together for your
good. This is the cross God has called you to bear. Think of how glorious
it will be when you see your husband conforming to what God wants for
him. It will happen if you just continue to love him. Hes Gods man and
the devil is after him, but we arent going to let old slew-foot have him,
are we? (Pratt 131)
For Jones, in the context of womens lives sanctification affirms womens experience of
oppression without trivializing or dismissing it. In fact, she calls for critique of the
complexity of oppression as it functions in womens daily lives by holding up a
normative ideal: With sanctification at the beginning, the first word to meet the woman
who enters the doctrine of the Christian life is one that constructs her, giving her the
center and the substance she needs to become the subject then judged and graciously
forgiven (63).
What stands in the way of this rhetorical reordering of the Christian faith? Jones
argues that blaming one group of people, concept, or institution is nave and counterproductive. To blame patriarchy, for example, for sins against women reduces the
complexity of oppression as it is lived and experienced. Indeed sin is pervasive and
all-consuming to the extent that where it begins and ends is nebulous and its workings,
subtle and insidious. For this reason, Joness turn to the theological concept of sin allows
her to practically orient to the negative workings of power in womens lives while
crafting views of liberation that emanate from these experiences. She deviates, however,

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from sin as it is linked to the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of original sin. Instead
of linking sin to concepts of the original integrity or pure image of humanity, she
conceives sin as part of her overall narrative reordering of the doctrines of
sanctification and justification. This shift allows Jones to work with language, images,
and meaning concerning womens lived particularities and their need for social justice.
Encountering narratives relating the rhetorical workings of human tragedy, healing, and
liberation orients the subject toward the Divine in such a way that neither trivializes
human experience nor reduces divine expression, but exposes both as vulnerable to
relation and formidable in character.
[A]pproaching sin from the perspective of justification and sanctification means
seeing sin from the eschatological perspective of the woman who knows herself as
sanctified and justified in faith, both now and in the promise of things to come (Jones,
Feminist 96). By making this claim Jones suggests that there is a particular rhetorical
force in the materialization of sin. In other words, sin can be understood relationally and
in terms of its effects on self and others. Rhetoric thus grounds the explanatory power of
sin. Utilizing Calvins organic and contagion metaphors for sin, Jones navigates between
innate and constructed elements of oppression. Sin is organic in that it is not only
inherited through familial ties, social patterns, and individual experience, but also
insidious in the way it spreads like contagion, ubiquitous and tenacious in character.
These metaphors describe the total depravity and corruption of human life (102).
Yet the tension between the natural and the constitutive maps rhetorical space for change
as it is lived, expressed, and understood. No one escapes sin; its effect is complete and
total. Here we meet the Calvin who finds in the human condition nothing but shivering

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nakedness, putrid decay, filth, and incurable disease (102). The depravity of the
human condition might entirely depress except for the juxtaposition of Gods sanctifying
grace. In sanctifying grace, ones life receives new form as one is conformed to Gods
will; one is placed within the structure of the law and the gospel, and this structure gives
ones life shape, edge, and definition (103). Interplay between sin and grace thus
propels the Christian faith: the subject is eternally undone and remade in the practice of
this faith.
What complicates the perpetual motion of sin and grace is the notion of human
agency. Calvin turns from the organic character of sin to the concept of free will or the
extent to which human choice influences divine mandate. With this shift from the
organic to the juridical, his discussion moves from humanity as the site of sin to a
discussion of humanity as the agent of sinhumanity is now assessed not as a place
that sin attacks but as an agent who enacts sin (105). To return to Pratts story about
her husbands violence toward her, clearly there are victims and perpetrators of sin.
However, both Pratt and her husband met with choices in each encounter. Pratt could
make choices to leave her violent situation and her husband could seek rehabilitation;
allowing violence to continue was not their only option. The question that takes on
salience at this point is how to recognize these choices, what to do in response to them,
and how to negotiate systemic constraints that force particular choices upon actors.
Calvin argues that human enactment of sin moves along a continuum toward or away
from righteousness. Humans either completely shy away from right action, thus
allowing sin to continue through indifference, or determine that sin may be easily
eradicated through proper performances of faith, diminishing the effect of sin in human

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life (106). Consider the proper performance the pastor counseling Pratt advocates
while she is in the hospital after a severe beating: This is the cross God has called you to
bear. Think how glorious it will be when you see your husband conforming to what God
wants for him. It will happen if you just continue to love him (Pratt 131). According to
this pastor, freedom is only available to men at the expense of women. For freedom to be
possible, Calvin argues for ways to critically orient to the nature of sin without
trivializing its function or effects. For women living in a male-centered society, this
point is crucial. Credit must be given to the complexity of sin and its entrenchment in
human history to the extent that its eradication is not simply choice between right and
wrong, but willingness to engage processes of renewal. This is why Jones argues that
Calvins view of sin has a definite rhetorical function. Movement toward wholeness
requires consistent deconstruction and construction within patterns of sin and grace.
Kenneth Burke refers to this rhetorical motion in his concept of the comic frame, where
human folly is really a lens into human fallibility. Instead of looking at situations in
terms of what is good or bad, right or wrong, Burkes comic frame shifts to human
mistakenness, allowing multiple meanings and interpretations to surface and thereby
determine judgment. There is a critical openness to the comic frame that accounts for the
shortcomings of humanity with an attitude of hope for the future. Thus it seems that
Burkes rhetorical perspective is amenable to the logical underpinnings of Calvins
doctrine of sin.

Analysis: Five Categories of Oppression

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Compounding the problem of sin and the scope of human agency in relation to it
are patterns of socialization that determine the shape of oppression and liberation. Jones
claims, through a rhetorical reordering of sanctification and justification, that faith
orientations are inextricably intertwined with cultural processes; to change one inevitably
is to change the other. Yet the beauty of what biblical feminists accomplish through their
narrative reorientation to biblical authority is demystification of the evangelical
masculine persona as it operates through collective memory. Traditional interpretations
of Scriptureparticularly those emanating from the biblical inerrancy movement and
their proliferation through different Protestant denominationsoperate, in Dickinsons
terms, as collective memory places (2). These interpretations gain rhetorical force
through their decontextualization and abstraction from their lived, mutable, and synthetic
beginnings. Biblical feminists bring these supposed neutral meanings into the
complexities of their lived experience; they use their stories to expose the implications of
interpretations on their bodies, identities, and relationships. To map out the heterogeneity
of their critiques, I continue with Joness notion of oppression as sin and work with Iris
Youngs development of what she calls five faces of oppression to analyze diverse,
complex, and porous dimensions of social inequities. These intersecting faces are
exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. In
relation to evangelical feminist challenges to male-centered faith orientations, I will look
at each face of oppression in order to see the way these women attempt to rhetorically
reorder the doctrines of sanctification and justification while simultaneously poking holes
in collective memory places, characterized by an evangelical masculine persona. My
sense is that biblical feminist critiques broaden the scope of salvation (i.e., the doctrine of

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soteriology), in experience and understanding. If this is the case, then perhaps biblical
feminists open up different ways to narrate salvation, both in the context of Christian
community and society in general. Moreover, rhetorically opening up possibilities to
move toward healing and wholeness offers productive means for individual and social
change as well as the circumvention of violence, victimization, and strife.

Exploitation
Youngs concept of exploitation has roots in Marxist philosophy. Karl Marx built
his philosophy on several fundamental tenets: social existence determines consciousness,
control of material relations shapes access to and production of power, and economic
power influences ideologies of liberty, equality, and freedom (Tong 40). In short, what
one does determines who one is. For women, the equation of work and self-worth were
more heavily weighted than for men because women, in Marxist thought, were
commodities to own or means of exchange. Women were unable to even enter Marxs
state of alienation in relation to product, self, others, and nature. Exploitation understood
as the transfer of the results of labor from one group to benefit another thus explains male
usurpation of female labor power. Young finds exploitation for women when the
freedom, power, status, and self-realization of men are possible precisely because women
work for them. Gender exploitation has two aspects, transfer of the fruits of material
labor to men and transfer of nurturing and sexual energies to men (50). Evangelical
feminists thus have two central tasks if they would counter exploitation within Christian
circles: to construct womens worth independent of men and then suggest ways this

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construction sets a precedent for innovative ways of being, becoming, and relating. They
accomplish the first task through advocacy for the second.
Belief that work determines worth outlines the central ethos of gender relations in
evangelicalism both in church and family structures. Biblical feminists set out to expose
the ideologies that undergird these structures through their reinterpretation of biblical
narratives, Jesuss relation to women, and Pauls itinerant preaching and evangelism in
relation to the early Christian church. One of the first goals of biblical feminists was to
rhetorically extract womens nature from womens role and to do this they outlined new
perspectives on Gods created order as told through the Genesis scriptures. Paul Jewett,
professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary and an advocate for
evangelical feminism, argues that men and women are created to be in mutual relation
and are distinct creatures of equal worth in relation to God. Man is not just in
fellowship with his neighbor. Rather, according to the Bible, God created Man male and
female (Gen. 1: 27). The primal form of humanity, then, is the fellowship of man and
woman (36, emphasis in original). Fellowship, for Jewett, functions as the central lens
through which one knows, experiences, and understands God. Thus, Gods image (imago
dei) materializes qualitatively in the way men treat women and women treat men. The
male is never the male in the abstract nor the female the female in the abstract. That is
why the Scripture does not say that God created Man male or femalethough in a sense
this is truebut male and female (38). Gendered nature in this context cannot be
stereotyped or idealized because it is always constituted through relation. Woman/man
does not know herself/himself except through the eyes of the other. At the very root of
the created order is mutuality.

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Thus, Jewett counters the logic of gender essentialism and the American value of
individualism through emphasis on relationship. Many biblical feminists follow his lead
in their disruption of a supposed natural order of male dominance and female
subordination. Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty argue at length in their book All
Were Meant to Be that women do not occupy subordinated status in relation to Jesus
Christ, and therefore in the eyes of God women are of equal worth to men. One of their
key arguments about the created order told through the story of Adam and Eve in the
Garden of Eden is God-ordained equality. So God created man in his own image, in the
image of God he created him; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:27). They
trace this original goodness through the story of the fall of humankind and the
institution of original sin, claiming that along with Eves willingness to eat the fruit from
the tree of good and evil, Adam listened to Eve and also ate; thus there is equal, but
different, culpability. The immediate result of sin was a shattering of that perfect
communion the two human beings had known in the garden with God and with each
other. [. . .] E.J. Young puts it poignantly: Sin is secretive and breaks a pure and open
fellowship . . . for sin is essentially divisive. . . . Sin renders men [sic] lonely (Scanzoni
and Hardesty 34). Similar to Jewett, Scanzoni and Hardesty point to the problem of the
created order as disruption of male and female mutuality, communion, or fellowship. A
distorted relationship between men and women exists as a result of the Fall and the work
of redemption through Christ is to restore this relationship. Their argument formulates
the grounds of the egalitarian perspective of gendered nature, for which womens role in
the Christian church is based in belief that equality between men and women is possible
through relationship to Christ. They use a passage from the Bible to ground this

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theological and political claim: There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor
female, for you all are one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28). Equality among men and
women in terms of church and family roles seems to be clear through the redemptive
work of Christ.
One might wonder, then, why there was such great backlash among evangelicals
in the 1970s against this egalitarian precedent. Harold Lindsell, theologian and author of
Battle for the Bible, argues that biblical feminist challenges to scriptural interpretation
diminish biblical authority. At stake here is not the matter of womens liberation. What
is the issue for the evangelical is the fact that some of the most ardent advocates of
egalitarianism in marriage over against hierarchy reach their conclusion by directly and
deliberately denying that the Bible is the infallible rule of faith and practice
(Egalitarianism 46). However, it is precisely the supposed neutral connection between
what the word says and what the word does that keeps the memory of the evangelical
masculine persona intact. Patricia Gundry in Woman Be Free counters this problem
when she claims that equality of essence is congruous with position: the Bible
taught male and female equality in every way: the ground at the foot of the cross is
level (qtd. in Cochran 89). Traditional evangelicals have difficulty seeing Gods truth
as vulnerable to cultural practices; however, one might note that their reactions legitimize
assumed neutralities within their hermeneutics and faith practices. Elizabeth Elliot, a
missionary and popular evangelical author, sees the adoption of feminist politics within
evangelicalism as a loss of power in the Church (12). She begins similarly to Jewett,
Scanzoni, and Hardesty with claims that the creation of Adam and Eve set logical
precedent for a specific gender hierarchy in society. However, she determines that this

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gendered order as it unfolds through history and culture is Gods normative vision for
humanity. She deviates from biblical feminist arguments of male and female fellowship,
to argue that Gods ethos of immutability present in the created order may neither be
circumscribed nor questioned. It is not by leveling and equalization that the life of the
Christian is enriched, but by recognition of and obedience to the order given by the
Creator. To attempt to apply democratic ideals to the kingdom of God, which is clearly
hierarchical, can result only in a loss of power and ultimately destruction (13). For
Elliot, the opacity of Gods intent for human relationship reinforces a gender essentialism
untouchable by human means. Throughout these positions on Gods patterns for male
and female relationships there is an a priori assumption that Gods truth is accessible
through Scripture and tradition. This assumption is what allows some evangelicals to
immediately move to the usurpation of relationship by role. Elliot states, Supreme
authority in both Church and home has been divinely vested in the male as the
representative of Christ, who is the Head of the Church. It is in willing and glad
submission rather than grudging capitulation that the woman in the Church and the wife
in the home find their fulfillment (14).
Biblical feminists do not desire to dismantle Gods truth or authority as it is
revealed through Scripture; rather, they desire to be considered worthy in the eyes of God
and in relation to others, which leads them to analyze Scripture and its lived meaning.
Evangelical feminists vision for equality materializes in an ethic of mutuality, thus
tempering connotations of superiority and domination that make up exploitative
meanings and structures within the Christian faith. Scanzoni and Hardesty in All Were
Meant to Be offer a representative critical hermeneutic in their interpretation of head in

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Ephesians 5:21-33. They work with the Greek word for head, kephale, interpreted not in
terms of rule and authority, but source (30). They establish this interpretation by
looking at Christ as head of all human kind in Colossians 2:9-10: For in Christ all the
fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ,
who is the head over every power and authority. Here Christ is the source of unity and
bodily fullness rather than ruler over subordinates. Similarly, in Ephesians 5:22 when
Paul speaks of the husband as the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church,
his body, of which he is the Savior, Scanzoni and Hardesty claim that an ethic of
mutuality guides the interpretation of this use of head. They find this ethic of mutuality
in verse twenty-one: Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Mutual
submission is what enables overall communal growth, and that is the purpose, according
to Scanzoni and Hardesty, for role distinctions and preservation of individual identities.
The goal of this growth process is that every one of us might be conformed to his
[Jesuss] image, might grow to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (Eph.
4:13) (31). Their hermeneutic advocates an axiological shift from gendered role
relations to human worth as the logical basis for social action. The biblical feminist goal
for equality is thus a means for enlarging the scope of sanctification (the process of
transformation in Christ) as well as tempering male superiority in relation to female
subjugation. Through these arguments, biblical feminists deconstruct the negative effects
of distorted power relations based on traditional gender hierarchies. Alan G. Padgett, a
consulting theologian for Christians for Biblical Equality and professor of Systematic
Theology at Luther Seminary, recently confirmed this consciousness-raising effort, which
remains a central part of the ongoing vision and activism of the evangelical feminist

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movement. Biblical equality is rooted and grounded in our Savior, Christ the Lord, and
in his book. We have seen that biblical equality means human equality of all in the image
of God; equal responsibility for all believers without regard to wealth, class, gender, or
race; and mutual submission to one another in the name of Christ (25).
Another way biblical feminists reconstruct value for women through reordering
traditional gendered roles is by investing their material experience in the substance of
their textual criticism. Mollenkott, for example, an English professor at William
Patterson College, amateur theologian, and leader within the movement, comes from a
strict fundamentalist Christian background. In addition to attending a strict
fundamentalist high school, she attended Bob Jones University, where she learned that
Christianity is commensurate with particular normative behaviors. Mollenkott felt
pressured to marry a man out of duty rather than love, which is the reason she claims she
later divorced him. She grew tired of working, studying, and taking care of home and
family while her husband refused to nurture her spirit or help lighten her load in care and
duty. As she tells her story she notes that healing her emaciated spirit took time, but is
ultimately what guided her activist and academic work (Virginia 153-162). She recalls
her experience at the outset of the movement:
During the conference, Paul Jewett gave me a new lease on life by taking
seriously my exegetical abilities and by saying I had spoken like a
prophet. Only someone who has endured years of put-downs and the
ignoring or mockery of her gifts could possibly appreciate the impact of
such male approval. In contrast, my former husband had frequently
warned me that he could tell God not to listen to my prayers, and God

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would cut me off. (To my knowledge, he still believes that husbands have
that kind of ultimate spiritual predominance over their wives.) (Virginia
160)
Mollenkott leads the Evangelical and Ecumenical Womens Caucus, a group that
split from the original movement now called Christians for Biblical Equality. What
guides her hermeneutics is her refusal to remove her cultural lens from her interpretive
product. Her interpretations are scholarly, as her Ph.D. in English from New York
University suggests: she utilizes literary criticism and the historical-cultural context of
texts to make sense of some of the Bibles most condemning words against women. In
First Timothy 2:11-13, for example, Paul states, A woman should learn in quietness and
full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man; she must
be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it
was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. Mollenkott counters the
pejorative dimensions of passages like these by tempering the authority of Paul through
understanding of his cultural biases. In an interview with John Alexander, editor of The
Other Side, a journal interweaving culture and evangelicalism, Mollenkott claims that
Pauls Jewish heritage was inherently misogynistic, which she claims mitigates the
rhetorical force of his claims.
Now I get to the problem. The intertestamental rabbinic misogyny is the
background against which Paul must be read. Paul was trained by
Gamaliel, one of the most famous rabbis. As a man socialized in a very
chauvinistic society, naturally Paul would believe in the inferiority of
women. What we call natural is always a result of our socialization. [. . .]

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So when Paul asks in I Corinthians 11 whether nature doesnt teach that
women should have long hair and cover their heads when praying, he
clearly is appealing to culture. The Bible itself is telling us how to read it;
its telling us that at times biblical writers fall back on what they have
been socialized to think is natural. (Alexander 26-27)
Clearly, Mollenkotts questioning of the ethos of Paul, whose words historically and
culturally are used to subjugate women, challenges the way one orients to gender, the
Divine, and faith practice. She reveals the relationship between text and audience as
constitutive: ones material existence is the ground for understanding the meaning
engendered between them. In short, Mollenkott situates the text in the messiness of
daily life, and emphasizes the need for interpretation. If humans are to be in relationship
to God, then God must be amenable to change, a principle that makes up the essence of
human existence. By bringing the Divine into the realm of human relations meaning is
opened up as well as possibilities of making different choices.
Then again, making the kinds of arguments that reveal Christian truths as human
construction encounters much resistance. John Alexander confesses in his interview with
Mollenkott that critique of what he always assumed to be normative regarding gender
roles, cultural practice, and scriptural interpretation evokes fear. Here are his words:
So one way to tell if a passage is normative or merely cultural is whether
its context is general and theological or whether it is very specific and
addressed to a particular cultural oddity. But Im not sure thats enough.
Im seriously considering going the direction youre going, and Im
genuinely rather frightened. On the one hand, a good many passages

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bother me, and Id like to just forget about them. But on the other hand,
where is it going to stop? How do I let Scripture keep standing in
judgment on me and my culture? Do I just reject anything that offends my
sense of propriety or rightness? (73)
Alexanders fears represent much evangelical resistance to interpretations of traditional
gender roles; consequently, this fear seems to be the reason an evangelical masculine
persona persists through rhetorical contours of memory, providing comfort, stability, and
hope. However, his fear of a slippery slope toward relativism is circumscribed, according
to Mollenkott, by the narrative coherence of a text. She argues that there must be
continuity among passages of Scripture for universal truth to be present. Paul states that
his mission is to serve Christ and tell others about him, which is why Mollenkott can then
claim that there must be coherence between what Paul and Jesus say and do. Pauls
advocacy for womens silence in the church in I Timothy 2: 11-13 must therefore have
continuity with Jesuss revelation of himself to women throughout his ministry. Womens
silence in Pauls interpretive context does not seem to be universal. Biblical feminists
therefore hermeneutically challenge the transfer of womens power and voice to malecentered confession, advocacy, and leadership by calling for methodological consistency.
Mollenkott states, As I see it, this is one completely healthy thing about the male-female
issue: it can make us into really close readers of the Bible, real students of the Bible
instead of skimmersand that is enormously to the good (75). Admittedly, challenging
the role of women in the church and home is not enough to change the way men see
women and the way women see themselves. To cultivate this new reality biblical

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feminist critiques are needed that fit into the next category of oppression outlined by
Young: marginalization.

Marginalization
Marginalization is perhaps the most dangerous form of oppression. A whole
category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus subjected
to severe material deprivation and even extermination (Young 53). Whereas economic
relations engender exploitation, a somewhat obvious form of oppression, marginalization,
which refers to how people may be kept from access to the conditions that create
possibilities for success, is often more subtle. Marginalization is both a material form of
oppression and ideological as it proliferates into meanings that denote uselessness,
boredom, and lack of self-respect (55). Perhaps the most insidious aspect of
marginalization is the power relations that deem particular forms of human life
productive or useful. Serene Jones states, The ideological rhetoric of suitable work
in our culture hides the economic and political factors that marginalize persons and
makes it appear as if poor, old, or disabled persons and racial and ethnic minorities are
naturally disinclined to conform to social definitions of productive work (Feminist 85).
In the context of evangelical womens experience, a masculine persona demarcates what
it means to be Christian and thus marginalizes anyone unable to perform within it. This
is apparent during the time of Dwight L. Moodys itinerant preaching and evangelism of
the 1870s, when the freedom to study, preach, and teach through missions and
evangelism enabled women to encounter the Divine in novel ways. However, Moodys
overarching goal to win souls ultimately subsumed womens diverse faith experiences.

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Moodys associate D.W. Whittle did not object to women evangelists but was clear in
his distaste for women in authority, an unmistakable sign of failure and
apostasy(Bendroth, Fundamentalism 46). Masculine character defined the evangelical,
growing into and pervading the Christian mindset while remaining invisible, amorphous.
Biblical feminists therefore have to make this masculine persona visible. They do this by
holding in tension its normative dimensions with the structures that occupy everyday life.
First, they determine that there is historical precedent for womens inclusion into what
are traditionally considered male roles in the church. Second, they develop arguments
building up an ethos of mutuality to counter the negative effects of individualism in the
practice of the Christian faith.
Women in the evangelical tradition have not always occupied restrictive roles. In
fact biblical feminists argue that the historical precedent of women as preachers,
prophets, teachers, and evangelists is reason enough to argue for their inclusion in
churches today. Donald W. and Lucille Sider Dayton provide a brief history of women
preachers in their article Women as Preachers: Evangelical Precedents. Notably, at the
outset of suffrage and catalyzed by the abolitionist movement, women moved into
leadership positionsalbeit, not without much resistancein diverse Protestant
traditions. Angelina Grimke, a prominent abolitionist speaker and leader, framed her
anti-slavery arguments by her faith in God. Elizabeth Cady Stanton also pioneered
critique of male-centered doctrine and practice with her Womens Bible, which many
found too impertinent to embrace. Within the evangelical tradition Phoebe Palmer
preached in the Holiness movement and Catharine Booth, founder of the Salvation Army
and advocate for egalitarian ideals within faith communities, was one of Palmers

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primary advocates. Dayton and Dayton note that these women moved into prominence in
the evangelical scene due to the social precedent set by revivalistic thinking during the
time of Finney and the First and Second Great Awakenings (4). Booth, for example,
challenged androcentric ideologies through the example of Anna, a prophetess during the
time of Jesus, that the spirit of prophecy which is the testimony of Jesus, was poured
out on the female as fully as on the male disciple, and His daughters and His
handmaidens prophesied (144). Additionally, women in the nineteenth century found
ways into evangelical leadership through abolitionist critiques of the biblical justification
for slavery. Those who developed in opposition a Bible argument against slavery
discovered that the same questions arose in relation to the woman question (Dayton and
Dayton 5). Anti-Slavery advocates utilized Galatians 3:28there is neither bond nor
free . . . for all are one in Christ Jesusto propose an egalitarian spirit over and
against a subordinationist letter, which eventually paved the way for Antoinette
Browns ordination in the congregationalist church, the first woman to be ordained in
America (5). Despite this rich history and the logical coherence of womens right to
preach, the resurgence of fundamentalism during the twentieth century amidst
modernism, cultural pluralism, and industrial and economic expansion forced many white
women into socially subordinate roles within the church and home. Biblical feminists
had to critique the cultural values sanctioning their inclusion or exclusion in order to
change the insidious effects of marginalization in their lives.
Margaret Bendroth notes that as women became associated with moral
licentiousness during the 1920s, men donned the mantle of defenders of orthodoxy
(Fundamentalism 64). Male-female relations took on an interesting paradoxical character

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at this time. While women seemed to experience new social freedom and security,
Christian men conflated the cause of Christ with what it meant to be a strong, virile man.
Both womens independence and mens authority built on the same reverence for the
liberal individual: rational, objective, financially stable, and personally and socially
fulfilled. While white men and women experienced different types of freedom and
growth during the twentieth century, the liberal individual grew deep axiological roots in
America, pervading social systems and developing hegemonic force. The cultural value
of individualism thus provides nuanced dimensions to Christian memory places, adding
complexity to the way people negotiate personal fulfillment through relationship to God
and other. Consequently, evangelical feminist debates rally around the liberal
individual and divide along egalitarian and what is called complementarian lines, each
employing different strategies to maintain Gods truth without compromising human
agency. An important question at this point is how evangelical feminists orient to faith in
order to affirm or counter the values of the liberal individualist. In other words, how do
evangelical feminists disrupt the function of faith in order to promote connection,
mystery, and potential for transformation?
Egalitarian evangelical feminists promote three central tenets: human equality,
equal responsibility, and mutual submission. These three tenets form the nexus of
biblical feminist ethics, subtly shifting the performance of the Christian faith to a process
of becoming like Christ. Complementarians, those who believe that equality and
interdependence are salient among men and women but privilege function over relation,
argue that gender difference naturally leads to diverse yet complementary roles. The
fundamental difference between complementarians and egalitarians is the interplay of the

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function of the Christian faith and the relationships that make that faith meaningful. For
example, egalitarians contend with the notion of subordination as it connects to
Trinitarian as well as male-female relationships. In short, they argue that womens
subordination is not commensurate with Christs subordination to the Father. Yet
complementarians argue that subordination does not necessitate inferiority. I Corinthians
11:3 states, for example, Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ,
and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. In reference to this
passage, complementarians argue that Christs inferiority to God is a status he willingly
accepts in order to fulfill Gods purpose for humankind. The Sons subservience to the
Father provides the ultimate example that a person may be subordinate in function while
remaining ontologically equal to another (Grenz and Kjesbo 151). Gender differences,
for complementarians, are functional not essential. Egalitarians, however, counter with
the question of how one can speak of a necessary subordination of status without also
implying a necessary inferiority of person. [. . .] The emphasis here is on necessary
(152). Complementarians seem to back themselves into a corner of arguing for the
conflation of spiritual gifts, gender differences, and individual worth when they equate
Christs submission to the Father with womens submission to men. Subordination of
women to men orders Gods creative distribution of spiritual gifts through gender
differences, thus subsuming individual worth in the fulfillment of gender roles.
Comparatively, egalitarians claim that this conflation misunderstands the intent of
Christs example (153). Jesuss example is more about an attitude of humility and selfsacrifice within an ethic of mutuality. Rather than fighting to establish lines of authority
and submission, we are to live in mutual submission to one another (Eph 5:21) (153).

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While complementarians preserve the right of the individual through relational role and
function, egalitarians highlight the erroneous claim that a voluntary, temporal, and
personal subordination provides the basis for the necessary and permanent submission of
one group to another (152). Stanley Grenz and Denise Kjesbo note, by relying on the
church father Origens doctrine of the Trinity, that the Fathers authority depends on the
Sons subordination; there is mutuality even in their ordering of function and role (155).

Powerlessness
Differences among egalitarians and complementarians appear to be matters of
emphases. However, despite the logical soundness of biblical feminist arguments,
practically shifting from an individualistic sociocultural lens to the more communal lens
of mutual submission requires social contexts amenable to these shifts. Evangelical
womens feelings of powerlessness, another category of oppression outlined by Young,
complicate those efforts. Working with a Marxist conception of power, Young defines
powerlessness as lacking control over ones circumstances while persistently being
subject to others demands. For the powerless, there is lack of respectability and
inhibition against making decisions that might enable them to grow into positions of
authority. The powerless are those who lack authority or power even in this mediated
sense [in relation to others], those over whom power is exercised without their exercising
it; the powerless are situated so that they must take orders and rarely have the right to
give them (56). In the context of the evangelical feminist movement, powerlessness has
to do with voice: the silencing of womens experience in relation to the Divine and
their expression of faith in Christian community. Silencing womens voices may happen

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in a myriad of ways: trivialization, patronization, infantilization, or through their
dismissal, invisibility, or lower-class status. These methods rhetorically function to keep
the collective memory of distinct gendered hierarchies in place. Thus, for biblical
feminists, speaking into and out of this silence is necessary and surfaces in obvious ways,
by naming, claiming, and speaking womens experience into public consciousness. To
combat powerlessness, evangelical feminists challenge normative belief in womens
subordinationinternalized oppressionwhile deconstructing the rhetorical spaces of
faith contexts that sustain an ethic of individualism over mutuality.
Similar to secular feminists--when diverse theories about womens oppression
began to surface in mainstream culture--evangelical feminists began to speak themselves
into being. Helene Cixous, a French feminist theorist, noted the importance of women
writing themselves into history, theory, and the mindset of androcentric realities (The
Laugh of the Medusa 1527). Evangelical feminists echo this method of voice by
telling their stories to each other, in journals, and in their organizational advocacy.
Daughters of Sarah is one of the places where women found this voice. Reta Haltman
Finger, one of the editors for this magazine from 1979 to 1994, outlines two of their
theoretical goals: First, no topic was off limits if it related to Christian feminism. [. . .]
Second, we were committed to a range of Christian feminist positions within a particular
theme (The Wisdom x-xi). Perhaps this explains why biblical feminist expression
ranged in this journal from academic critique to poetic expression, as in this poem Water
Rights by Ellen Roberts Young:
Sister, Ive found/ one of our mothers wells./ Come quick before our
brothers/ claim it for their own./ They see it their duty to guard our

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sources,/ decide which to open,/ pour out water for us/ fitting their own
thirsts./ We have a sorry choice:/ to show our mothers gift/ and see it
closed, labeled/ with our fathers name/ or keep it to ourselves,/ unwalled,
a little while./ I choose the latter. To this day/ our willingness to share has
met/ misunderstanding and contempt/ from those who think the
patriarchal/ waters should suffice. (87)
What remains constant in biblical feminist expression is desire to be heard and to own
rhetorical space. Contrary to Mary Dalys claim that this woman-space (cf. Pure Lust;
Gyn/ecology) may only be constructed outside male structures and institutions,
evangelical women pursue reform within their faith communities. As Young argues in
the above poem, it is time to proclaim womens disenfranchisement, but not give up on
institutional structures that bind and limit womens being. Evangelical feminists pursue
reform of their faith communities because they believe that despite what history and
tradition say women have deeper purpose and calling in relation to God. They also
believe that God is the source for expanding womens worth and value. However, this
expansion cannot happen separate from the corporeal; the body politic is where biblical
feminists embrace Gods vision for humanity. Daughters of Sarah thus was one
magazine among many during the 1980s and 90s that supported womens concerns by
challenging that which delimited and stifled faith expression.
Voice for evangelical feminists is not simply narrating womens experiences,
but challenging the structures that demoralize womens being while making them
partners in their own victimization. One way biblical feminists engage this critique is
through the male-centered language and imagery of the Bible. Mollenkott in her book

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The Divine Feminine narrates diverse feminine imagery in relation to God. God is
described as a nursing mother in Isaiah 49:15: Does a woman forget her baby at the
breast,/ or fail to cherish the son [or daughter] of her womb? Yet even if these forget, I
will never forget you (qtd. in Mollenkott, The Divine 20). God is also midwife, mother
bear, female homemaker, and female beloved. However, these images do not
quantitatively compare to the masculine imagery of the Bible, which is why Mollenkott
argues that feminine imagery diversifies the character of God through human perception
rather than shifting thinking to a feminine-divine reality. For Mollenkott, feminine
imagery of God connects human sensibilities with abstract concepts, suggesting that
intersections between lived experience and textual meaning are part of the interpretive
act. In light of the aforementioned verse in Isaiah, Gods formidable care for the people
of Israel is not simply understood in principle, but infused into the practicalities of life-the mother-child relationship, in this case--where transcendent notions of love are
tangible and sentient. Feminine language not only runs counter to male-centered
constructions of the Divine, but also opens up possibilities for women and men to enter
into relationship with God in new ways. Mollenkott thus encourages connections
between body and spirit through feminine imagery, fostering an ethic of mutuality
through Scriptural interpretation.
Another dimension to feminine language and imagery for the Divine is the way
metaphors for God encourage what Burke calls recalcitrance: the understanding that
words never entirely embrace the moment, the person, or the interaction (Permanence
256-57). The word never directly relates to the thing it represents and thus there is
always an excess of meaning. When Mimi Haddad notes the reference to God as

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midwife in Psalm 22:9, Yet you brought me out of the womb; you made me trust in you
[. . .], as a biblical feminist she claims an excess of meaning in relation to God that
creates space for women to be and become.
However, when people hear only male metaphors for God, or masculine
language in the church, or Bible translations that always render Greek
words such as anthropos as men, they are led to ask whether there is
something fundamentally wrong with being female, or whether God is
not a respecter of persons. A mishandling of language not only furthers
an unbiblical subordination of women; it blurs the character of God.
(Haddad, www.cbeinternational.org)
Language is an important tool for biblical feminists in the opening up of meaning in
relation to the Divine, for it can craft space to exercise voice and counter androcentric
realities in faith contexts.
Feminine language for the Divine is also reconstructive. Elizabeth Johnson,
author of She Who Is, a book about feminist theological discourse and notions of the
Trinity, proposes that It [feminist theology] attempts new articulations of the norms and
methods of theology itself and newly envisions Christian symbols and practices that
would do justice to the full humanity of women as a key to a new whole (30). Linda
Coleman demonstrates this reconstruction through her critique of assumptions underlying
popular conservative Christian phenomena, such as the Total Woman seminar and book
reaching thousands of women, Fascinating Womanhood by Helena Andelin, Larry
Christiansons The Christian Family, Judith Miless The Feminine Principle, and books
by Tim and/or Beverly LaHaye pervasive in Christian book stores (210). Coleman

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argues that the appeal of these books and seminars rest within cultural values of
expediency and efficiency within an overarching goal of peaceful relations. These
Christian living materials make a conflict-free and peaceful life a test of success (212).
Rather than engage the nature of life as complex, mutable, and often rife with suffering,
these Christian forums reduce problems to rules to follow and principles to apply.
Coleman, who has her Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of California at Berkeley,
challenges these reductive tendencies. She notes that the Bible is full of stories about
struggle and wrestling with God, for example, Job, the prophet Jeremiah, Esther, and the
Psalmist. Desire for peace is a logical reaffirmation of a gendered order that is
efficacious; traditional gender roles are nostalgically revived with belief in Gods
sanctioning of them simply because male domination and female subordination works.
Coleman does note that these advocates for Christian living promote womens worth as
equal to men even though they simultaneously prescribe different roles. The statement
women are to be submissive, but not doormats (213) is emblematic of this claim.
However, the difference between role and worth is semantic doubletalk for Coleman.
The teaching of male leadership and female submission subtly but effectively erodes the
true equality of worth which men and women have before God and should have in the
church. That is why so many women struggle with a poor self-concept (213).
Analyzing the logical grounds upon which much popular Christian literature is based
encourages understanding of the intersection of faith and culture.

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Cultural Imperialism
Biblical feminists hermeneutically cultivate critical space that is simultaneously
deconstructive and constructive. As they occupy this space they must engage the tension
of a fourth category of oppression: cultural imperialism. To experience cultural
imperialism means to experience how the dominant meanings of a society render the
particular perspective of ones own group invisible at the same time as they stereotype
ones group and mark it out as the Other (Young 58-59). The notion of cultural
imperialism comes from the effects of dominant countries colonizing less developed
countries. Colonization occurs through an introduction of language and lifestyle changes
that are advocated as bringing underdeveloped countries up-to-speed in terms of
industry, economics, and government. Cultural imperialism is thus crucial to dominant
societies visions for global community. Evangelicals participated in these imperialist
impulses through missions, where women found distinct freedoms to minister and utilize
their gifts and talents in distant countries with supposedly less fortunate people. The
freedom evangelical women experienced outside America cultivated dissatisfaction with
their subordination when they returned. Helen Barrett Montgomery, a Baptist lay leader,
speaker, writer, and activist in the early part of the twentieth century, spent her life
advocating for the needs of women in the church at home and abroad. At the time
missions boards did not want to spend money to send women abroad nor did they think
the cause of women and children in these distant countries as important as that of men.
Montgomery affirms womens particular needs and roles in order to continue her
advocacy for reform. There is a feminine viewpoint which, to be sure, is only partial,
but it is different. Certain methods are tried out, certain experiments made that would not

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appeal to me, but do to [some] women. Cannot we cooperate all the better in joint
undertakings, for having the separate work which each does better alone? (138).
Though her claims affirmed the imperialist mindset within Christianity during this time,
Montgomerys exploration of missions funding reveals a privileging of male over female
experience of and contribution to Christian faith communities. The modern educated
woman has ideas not only on the way to collect money but on the way to spend it, and the
purposes for which it should be spent (136). Incongruity between what is lived and
what is confessed makes up the nexus of biblical feminist critiques of cultural
imperialism.
In Virginia Hearns compilation of fifteen stories of evangelical women, Our
Struggle to Serve, there seems to be repetition of a single question: If there is freedom in
Christ, then why am I still in bondage to men? This question emerges in stories about
male-female roles in family and home, church communities, and professional
relationships. Clearly, these women sense that male-centered faith orientations colonize
their lived potential, their self-perceptions, and their daily interactions. Judith Ann Craig
Piper, a woman who grew up in a family used to pioneering life in Wyoming and equal
distribution of work for survival, reflects on the choices that led her to seminary.
Growing up in the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition and under the care of a woman pastor as
well as other women ministers Piper never questioned womens capacity or right to
lead in Christian communities. Piper served in the Army Nurse Corps and dreamed of
being the first woman chaplain in the military. Although she enjoyed her time as a nurse
in Vietnam, after she married she began to feel pressure from others to perform her

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femininity in particular ways. She recalls this pressure at a time when her health
deteriorated:
It was at that period of my life that I was most hurt by the philosophy of
Christian womanhood characterized today by the Total Woman mentality.
I was in a struggle for myself and my children and my husbands career. I
was waging a battle as a wife and mother and being made to feel like a
total failure because I couldnt keep up a middle-class personal
appearance and houseand because my mind was so rattled I couldnt
come off with the niceties of conversation. (70)
It seems, for Piper, that her faith took a critical turn when her contemporary gender
expectations ruptured her freedom of expression as a woman in family and in church.
Yet her experiences cultivated resources for knowing God and practicing faith not
sanctioned by the mainstream. Pipers critical frame grew in humility and openness to
God and others. Used to being ignored academically and professionally in seminary,
Piper recalls, I assumed that one woman was referring to my colleague when she told a
group that We have a near-minister in our midst and I was totally unprepared for her
grimace and the surly tone of her final comment, and its a she! (71). The way biblical
feminists counter the cultural imperialism of male-centered faith patterns and practices is
through attention paid to their own stories, noting the fissures and ruptures between
experience and confession.
In the late 1980s evangelical feminists took the momentum of their advocacy for
equality to new levels. Countering the cultural norm of heterosexuality, Scanzoni and
Mollenkott published Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? in 1978. Their text suggests

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ways for evangelical communities to be more inclusive of the homosexual lifestyle. They
made diverse arguments for biblical justification of homosexual relationships, giving
greater weight to the authority of reason and experience (Cochran 128). Although their
book focused on biblical exegesis of particular passages, their belief that homosexual
drives are biologically determined guides their hermeneutical process. For example, in
Genesis eighteen and nineteen the story of Sodom and Gomorrah tells a tale of three
visitors to Abraham proclaiming that the Lord will destroy these cities because The
outcry [. . .] is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they
have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me (Genesis 18:20, 21). The three
visitors (as the Lord) reach Sodom and Gomorrah and stay with Lot (Abrahams brother)
who offers them a place to rest and eat. While they rested all the men of the town
gathered at Lots house demanding that the visitors be given over to them for sexual
relations. Despite Lots attempts to dissuade them they did not relinquish their desire for
the men. Understanding that there was no one righteous in this town and after Lots
family was told of the coming destruction, the Lord rained down burning sulfur on
Sodom and Gomorrahfrom the Lord out of the heavens (Genesis 19:24). Most
evangelicals understand the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah as the sin of sodomy (Cochran
131); and the context that provoked the destruction of Sodom, even given Abrahams
pleas to the Lord to spare the town if there were but ten righteous, reinforces assumptions
that sodomy was the cause. However, Scanzoni and Mollenkott argue that their sin
was inhospitality, comparing Jesuss instructions to disciples to shake the dust off their
feet if they are not received well in a town; I say to you, it will be more tolerable in that
day for Sodom, than for that city (Luke 10:12). Even a cursory glance at their

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interpretation reveals a significant reduction of the integrity and grace of God, for his
power seems maleficent. Admittedly, it is difficult to find any reason God would destroy
a people with burning sulfur, but inhospitality characterizes God as pedantic and
somewhat deranged; the penalty does not match the crime. Critics of Scanzonis and
Mollenkotts exegesis thus seem warranted in their claim that the sin of Sodom and
Gomorrah must be sexual to necessitate Gods wrath. Don Williams, a professor at
Fuller Seminary and critic of their text, claims that they practiced polemical apologetics
carrying out biased exegesis, selective data and fallacious conclusions (qtd. in Cochran
132). However, Scanzoni and Mollenkott are commended for bringing new light on
Christian perspectives of homosexuality. Then again, Williams concludes that Gods
affirmation of human dignity, not necessarily the institution of marriage, subsequently
affirms proper sexual relationships. He argues that the sin of Sodom was abuse of
power, exercised through the threat of a violent sexual attack and an attempt to live
outside Gods established order. [. . .] A proper, pastoral approach to homosexuality,
therefore, called for repentance, restoration, and renewed obedience on the part of
homosexual Christians (qtd. in Cochran 135).
Scanzoni and Mollenkotts avowal of homosexual relationships as the expression
of mature love between adults in a committed, permanent relationship (qtd. in Cochran
138) signifies a desire to motivate womens process of sanctification. The woman
created in this space of this doctrine is the embodied agent struggling to become the ever
shifting essential woman of the future (Jones, Feminist 64). They turn to scientific
evidence to prove that the homosexual orientation is involuntary and irreversible (qtd.
in Cochran 140). Their citation of scientific and sociological research allows them to

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suggest that sexual orientations and expressions fall along a continuum, and that the most
extreme performances, both innate and learned, are difficult to change. As a result, they
conclude that homosexuality, a variant of human sexuality rather than sexual deviance,
adds to the complex matrix of gender identity. A person may have homosexual feelings
but never act on them, resulting in psychic tensions continually reproduced through
inconsistencies between institutional and social norms and individual personalities.
Scanzoni and Mollenkott cite Kinsey Institute research that one-third of adult males and
one-tenth of adult females had homosexual feelings before becoming practicing
heterosexuals: After such transitory adolescent experimentation, many of these people
go on to lead quite conventional heterosexual lives that include getting married and
having children. It should be clear by now why we speak of the homosexual issue as
complex (86).
Clearly, biblical feminist resistance to male-centered imperialism of their
gendered identities requires a willingness to engage the interweaving of faith and culture
through the mundane activities of everyday life. Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, biblical
feminist and professor of psychology at Eastern College, arrives at similar conclusions to
Scanzoni and Mollenkott with regard to homosexuality; however, she argues that
irrespective of innate or learned sexual orientations, people are responsible for how they
act in relation to their desires. Rather than fixing sexual orientation within human
biology, Van Leeuwen argues that orientations function within language and its
acquisition, and thus are always mutable and open to interpretation. She also concludes
that people predisposed to homosexual desires should be represented truthfully and
treated as whole persons without diminishing the problematic issue of sexuality in

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general. To do this, tension between individual identity and communal responsibility
should make up a theological ethics of sexuality. She quotes Lewis Smedes in Sex for
Christians:
Sexuality as part of Gods image [. . .] is the human drive toward intimate
communion. More than a mere physical itch that needs scratching, it
urges us to experience the other, to trust the other, and to be trusted by the
other, to enter the others life by entering the vital embrace of his or her
body. (Gender 213)
What Van Leeuwen highlights in terms of sexual responsibility is weight placed on social
accountability both in relation to the Christian faith and sexual desire, thereby mitigating
the imperialistic force of androcentrism.
Yet this ethic of care might also become imperialistic if understood as helping the
other move toward the normative cultural center. This may be the case with churches or
Christian groups trying to help homosexuals return to heterosexual lifestyles. Women of
color also note this problem of helping, which keeps power relations intact: dominant
groups merely shift their attention from oppression to liberation. This is the reason Maria
Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman in Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory,
Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for The Womans Voice argue that the only
collaboration among white/Anglo women and women of color is through friendship:
So the motive of friendship remains as both the only appropriate and
understandable motive for white/Anglo feminists engaging in the task
described above [seeking liberation for all women]. If you enter the task
of friendship with us, then you will be moved to attain the appropriate

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reciprocity of care for your and our wellbeing as whole beings, you will
have a stake in us and in our world, you will be moved to satisfy the need
for reciprocity of understanding that will enable you to follow us in our
experiences as we are able to follow you in yours. (506)
Inequitable power distribution among evangelical feminists is the reason AfricanAmerican women refused to join the movement. Delores Williams, author, professor,
and womanist theologian, claims that white feminists were exclusive and imperialistic
for giving visibility solely to white, middle-class feminist women (qtd. in Cochran 57).
Williamss perspective voices a deeper problematic within the evangelical feminist
movement: oppression is complex and heterogeneous in character; if the movement pays
attention to one aspect of oppression other aspects are subordinated and at worst
subsumed. The lack of racial diversity in the early EWC is an example of this fact and
led African-American women to eschew the womens task force at the second meeting of
Evangelicals for Social Action to attend the African-American caucus. Division along
race lines within the evangelical feminist movement were thus firmly in place early in its
design. These would eventually make their hermeneutical stance problematic and their
politics vulnerable to backlash.

Violence
The final category of oppression offered by Young, violence, helps us to look at
biblical feminist critiques of the notion of control and relations among biblical authority,
sexual desire, and human agency. Young contends that violence doesnt merely exist as
an imminent physical threat in womens lives, but is systemic, which is to say that social

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contexts create the possibility for violence to exist. Serene Jones states that feminists
focus on three dimensions of violence within the individual unconscious, in the
dynamics of group configurations, or in the masochistic economy of exchange produced
by relations of domination and subordination (Feminist 91). Biblical feminists address
all three of these areas of violence in diverse ways and attempt to critique their external
and internal effects. To do this they must critique the comforting and enabling structures
(Dickinson 17) supporting the nostalgic rhetoric of particular faith orientations and the
cultural performances they engender. Before examining these three dimensions to
violence it is important to note that both men and women are perpetrators and victims.
Violence is pervasive. At its root, violence begins with more concern for the self over the
other. This is the reason some women hurt other women, even in their collaboration for
freedom. Lugones and Spelman, as noted above, voice how this hurt functions between
white/Anglo and Latina and African-American feminists through the guise of help.
White women may change their approach to women of color, from subordination to
empowerment, but they (we) are still the ones holding the power and are thus still
complicit with racist ideologies. Violence must be confronted as both product and
process of social systems and behaviors.
Feminist theorists denaturalize violence against women by exposing the
mechanisms through which it is socially constructed (Jones, Feminist 90). One of the
most insidious mechanisms is its internalization: one is so used to diminishing and
trivializing self-worth that violence exists and functions as a worldview or daily mode of
operation. This is one reason French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva suggests that the
symbolic order that sustains this orientation toward violence must be disordered.

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Kristeva makes her claims through a psychoanalytic framework, claiming that the social
desire to brutalize and efface womens bodies is tied to a social unconscious that secures
its masculine identity by wounding or destroying the metaphoric body of the
mother/feminine (qtd. in Jones 90). Rosemary Radford Ruether concurs with this claim
in Sexism and God-Talk by tracing the denigration of womens bodies in the JudeoChristian tradition through goddess mythology and Puritan burning of witches in
America in the 1600-1700s. As symbol of the body, sexuality, and maternity, woman
represents the evil lower nature (80). This belief remains constant throughout Western
Christian church history, in which constraints imposed on womens bodies are at times
more overt, such as the witch burning, but also exist in covert form. Ann Burlein, in her
article, Countermemory on the Right: The Case of Focus on the Family, notes how
James Dobson, leader of Focus on the Family, demonizes the radical rhetoric of the
womens liberation movement by casting it in opposition to family values. In one of his
public storytelling radio broadcasts called, Being Saved from the Sixties, he
interviewed an employee who claimed she was sexually abused in the youth movement in
the 1960s (209-10); Dobson stated that her experience was proof that social movements
were bad for women (210). He goes on to offer a nostalgic creation of the traditional
family, with male-female hierarchies firmly in place, as an alternative to feminist
liberation that evidently brings only insecurity and degradation. Burlein argues that, for
Dobson, the traditional family operates as a counter memory and a safe place against
troubling and uncertain times. By exploiting the gaps among identity, memory, and
desire, nostalgic invocations of the traditional Bible-based family construct people
against themselves, pitting the way we are against the way we wish we were (208).

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Thus, if biblical feminists are to critique covert forms of violence they must look not only
at Christian doctrine and its material effects in their lives, but also work with the notion
of desire to escape suffering and live in a more stable and secure world. In 1992
Daughters of Sarah presented a dialogue on suffering in which women confronted the
doctrine of atonement, where the shedding of Christs blood on the cross leads to human
redemption.
Biblical feminists claim that this understanding of Christs suffering on the cross
legitimizes womens and other disenfranchised peoples oppression as the natural path to
redemption. Violence and obedience to God, in this case, are conflated. Joanne Carlson
Brown, minister and professor in Seattle, Washington, works with three views of
atonement to discern ways abuse is sanctioned through Christian practice. The first view
is that suffering is a gift. God works through suffering and pain, as he did with Jesus on
the cross, so humans should see it as a path to new life. Brown suggests that this view of
atonement diminishes the tragic nature of violence on human worth and dignity by
deferring its effects to the future. Second, Christs death is looked at as a penalty paid for
human disobedience, thus suffering is sanctioned as an experience that frees others
(Divine 145). One abused in this context might see love and violation as
commensurate, in that the victim suffers to liberate others. Third, Abelards moral
influence theory suggests that suffering exists due to depraved human nature. The
reason women might experience date rape, for example, is due to their moral
licentiousness that is a natural outgrowth of their wayward lives. Brown concludes from
her analysis that the doctrine of atonement functions only to perpetuate violence and
therefore must be eradicated from Christian thought and practice. For Brown, there

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seems to be no way around the meanings surrounding Jesuss actual death on the cross
without their leading toward human victimization. Weaver Santaniello, another
contributor to this dialogue on atonement (148), contends with Brown that Jesuss
suffering on the cross can be viewed as descriptive rather than prescriptive, and thus
circumvents the need to extricate the atonement from Christian faith structures. The
cross is central to Christianity inasmuch as it is a historical fact which is an essential part
of the Christian religion. It is a fact in the sense that it requires theological reflection by
the community to go beyond the fact of death in an attempt to create new life (148).
Shelley Wiley, pastor and Ph.D. in theology from Northwestern University, claims that
Christians need the doctrine of atonement because Christs death is an essential part of
the path to redemption. However, she also believes that abuses perpetuated by Christian
churches, which seem to be at the heart of Browns critique, should be brought to the
surface, addressed, and challenged. Personally, I dont so much disagree with Browns
article as I think we dont have adequate foundations in place to receive such statements.
I think the insight that makes the connection between glorification of suffering through
the cross and abuses in our society is absolutely crucial (151).
Wileys argument that contemporary church doctrine and praxis is not amenable
to social problems indicates a reason why churches dont know how to address overt
problems of abuse within their own faith communities. With domestic abuse, assault,
harassment, sex-related murders, and other crimes perpetrated by men against women on
the rise, it is no wonder that Jones claims, violence against women is a structural feature
of everyday life in the United States (Feminist 89-90). Biblical feminists address these
forms of abuse through the telling of their stories, their advocacy for reform, and their

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networks of support through non-profit organizations. However, it seems that one of the
most salient contexts for critique of abuse exists between pastor and congregation.
Carolyn Heggen relates countless stories of women counseled by their pastors to remain
in abusive relationships with their husbands due to fundamental belief that God intends
that men dominate and women submit (16). When one woman told her pastor about her
husbands abusive behavior, her pastor responded: No matter what hes doing to you, he
is still your spiritual head. Respect those behaviors that you can respect and pray for
those that you cant respect. But remember, no matter what, you owe it to him and to
God to live in submission to your husband. Youll never be happy until you submit to
him (17). Here, duty to God is synonymous with duty to husband. In fact, the words
owe and happy indicate a product-oriented faith; one works toward the nebulous goal
of happiness by purposefully following gender rules and roles. Consequently, this pastor
points to a consistent theme in Christian faith orientations: the creation of meaning in
faith contexts--typically achieved through preaching and interpretation of Scripture--is
somehow distanced from its material effects in the world. The task for biblical feminists
addressing Christianity and its perpetuation of abuse is to reconnect the reconstruction of
meaning and its materialization in peoples everyday lives. This requires a hermeneutic
amenable to the messy, synthetic, and ambiguous nature of daily living.
Evangelical feminists turn to this messiness by looking at systemic constructs that
provide the conditions for violence to exist. Catharine MacKinnon, U.S. legal theorist,
argues that pornography and sexual harassment continue to exist in America because
power relations in which women are depicted as submissive objects that men desire to
dominate [. . .] runs so deep in our public conscious and social institutions that [. . .] it is

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impossible for heterosexual interactions to escape it; in this constructed script, sexual
pleasure becomes synonymous with mens raping women (qtd. in Jones, Feminist 9091). Contemporary evangelical feminist Linda Smith claims this power relation is what
perpetuates global sexual slave trafficking and its growing problem in America. Smith,
former Washington state Republican Representative turned anti-sex slavery advocate,
argues that faith and political action are not incommensurate. In fact, much of the human
rights activism over the last decade stemmed from coalitions built among feminists,
politicians, and diverse religious groups, such as evangelicals, Jews, Catholics, and
Buddhists who worked together to pass the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act,
monitoring religious persecution around the world (Shapiro 27). What evangelical
feminists bring to critiques of systemic violence is a fundamental belief that God desires
better human relationships. Allen Hertzke, director of religious studies at the University
of Oklahoma, states that sex trafficking is not the way children of God were meant to
live (27). Evangelical feminism actually forms an ethical base to both question what
constitutes quality of life and to build coalitions across cultural lines to put conditions for
that life in place.
However, systemic critique of violence must include critical reflection upon the
assumptions that form concepts of liberation, freedom, and social transformation. Ann
Burlein notes how James Dobson was able to marginalize the radical feminist agenda
emerging from the womens liberation movement by contrasting their agenda to more
reasonable protest (212). Dobson does not overtly exclude difference so much as he
disciplines it by reinscribing difference within a new frontier: not along the line of

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feminists versus traditional women, but along the line of assimilable feminists versus
militant feminists (212-13). In 1989, Dobson stated:
Congressmen and state legislators were quick to grasp this opportunity [to
establish laws improving gender equality] to impress 50% of the voters,
and they rapidly translated many feminist ideas into law. Heady with
success and encouraged by an enthusiastic press the real agenda of radical
feminists came into focus. They wanted the whole pie! (qtd. in Burlein
212).
The product of this new frontier of difference was simultaneously diminishing
misogyny as it was subtly reinscribed through traditional family values and suggesting
that feminist goals were for the time being, achieved. Clearly, freedom for some is not
freedom for all.
However, womanist theologians within evangelicalism provide a hermeneutics of
suspicion of white evangelical womens assumptions regarding race, class, gender, and
sexual orientation. Jacquelyn Grant, for example, problematizes the Christian concept of
servanthood. She notes that Christians are called to serve one another in love, but-practically manifested--this provides logical justification for class distinctions present in
the status quo. It is interesting, however, that these terms are customarily used to
relegate certain victimized peoplesthose on the underside of historyto the lower rung
of society (200). She explains how white women moved out of servant roles after 1920
and the passing of the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution, while Black female
servants increased, such that by 1920 forty percent of all domestic servants were Black
women (205). Despite supposed gains from suffrage and the first wave of feminism,

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white women still experienced social powerlessness, but through the privatization of the
home maintained power in this sphere. Blacks were being lynched and imprisoned on
the one hand, and privatized on the other. Essentially, they were still substantially
controlled (206). For Grant, the notion of faithful Christian servanthood fails to capture
the immediate needs of white and black women of faith. She calls for an end to the
camouflage of some womens experience as normative and universal, a typical critique of
biblical feminism for its uncritical assumption that white middle-class women define
every womans concerns. We must begin to eliminate the obstacles of sisterhoodthe
hate, the distrust, the suspicion, the inferiority/superiority complex (209). Ultimately,
these obstacles rest within theological language as it orders faith and its practice. For this
reason, Grant calls for the eradication of servant language and for putting in its place
Christian discipleship as a politics of empowerment. Christian discipleship, for Grant, is
a paradigm that employs four methods of critique: suspicion of Christian language that
reaffirms oppressive realities rather than attempting to eliminate the oppressive reality
itself, seeking liberation and justice rather than peace and reconciliation, resisting the
tendency to relegate some people to lower rungs of society, and working to value all
people. Grants challenge is simple: if Christians are serious about their commitment to
Christ, then they will work to mend broken human relationships. Her methods are
critically reflexive in the way they question the taken-for-granted patterns of thinking and
being that make up the normative Christian Church.

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Conclusion
Grants problematizing of the notion of servanthood alludes to an overarching
theme in my analysis of evangelical feminist theory and practice; the substance of their
critique is engendered by and ultimately returns to that which is lived, felt, and
experienced. This emphasis saliently brings actors back to the present, juxtaposing
nostalgic longings for safety and security in, for example, Dobsons traditional family,
with the complexities of womens mundane lives. The rhetorical contours of memory
thus provide a nice lens into the way an antiquated masculine persona occupies biblical
hermeneutics and prescribes particular gendered performances. Two of the key ways an
evangelical masculine persona functions through memory are through the objectification
of Scriptural interpretation and its disconnection with human interaction. Biblical
feminists piece together the mutability of their existence with biblical meanings in an
effort to reveal the constructed nature of Gods character and work in the world. In the
process, they craft complex narratives disclosing human imperfections that are capable of
simultaneously wrestling with a God bigger than human aspirations. Their narratives
also suggest that postmodernism, in terms of fragmentation of meaning, multiplicities of
identity, and turbulent social times, may actually caution against simplification of self,
desire, or faith. Dickinson argues, Through their varied forms, places of memory trigger
intertextual relations that motivate, stabilize, secure, and provide the resources for
identity (21).
At the outset of the movement women converged at the Evangelicals for Social
Action conference under the auspices of opportunity to voice their desires for equality.
Even though they faced difficult times as a movement in the late 1980s and subsequently

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split into two distinct organizations, their different social agendas within the evangelical
tradition function to politicize the needs of women that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Linda Smiths anti-sex trafficking advocacy, her positive work with the government
under the current administration, and her coalition building across religious and cultural
lines demonstrates this function. Thus, despite what looks like a narrow focus on
Christian womens experience, the fact that biblical feminists begin by listening to
diverse needs of women suggests that they are able to see how the heterogeneity of
womens experience lives in tension with faith orientations and their consequent practice.
These connections predispose biblical feminists to understand processes of sanctification,
that is, using the critical tools of the lived moment to trace out new patterns of thinking
about God, self, and others.
However, getting to this critical posture requires a fundamental shift in the
cultural values that underpin contemporary Christian doctrine. Burkes concept of
metabiology is useful, and perhaps crucial. Metabiology, Bryan Crable explains,
describes a dialectical reciprocity between embodiment and social action, one whereby
these two aspects are interrelated and whereby each ultimately is not reducible to the
other (Crable 299). What makes biblical feminist critiques socially effective is their
rootedness in concern for the local, specific, and embodied subject. Yet how to include
this subject, without diminishing the authority of Scripture in meaning, logic, or tradition,
is a persistent problematic for evangelical women. Evangelical feminists attempt to
move away from essentialized views of gender and sexuality in order to affirm their
right to occupy all types of ministerial roles in the Church as well as advocate the
legitimacy of alternate lifestyles. In the process, according to Pam Cochran, their

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hermeneutics and the conservative backlash they encountered shifted the doctrine of
biblical inerrancy to biblical inspiration. Such a change suggests a subtle move away
from the authority of Scripture based on its truthfulness to the selective appropriation of
Scripture based on individual needs and interests (294). However, as I will demonstrate
in the next chapter, perhaps the way evangelical women live their faith paints a more
complex picture of Scriptural meaning in relation to personal and collective identities.
The women pastors I interviewed continue to challenge oppressive gender hierarchies
through the stabilizing memory of an evangelical masculine persona. Their challenges
take shape through their concepts of church, community, calling, and ministry.

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CHAPTER FIVE: NARRATING THE CHURCH: WOMEN PASTORS
CHALLENGE NOSTALGIC DESIRE

If she is to be able to contain, to envelop, she must have her own envelope.
Not only her clothing and ornaments of seduction, but her skin. (Irigaray,
An Ethics 35)

Introduction
Bill McKibben, in a recent article in Harpers, The Christian Paradox: How a
Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong, argues that American Christian faith has become too
individualistic. America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the
developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior (32). He argues that many
Christian churches profess a prosperity gospel, where faith is about getting and
maintaining what one wants out of life, but he wonders at the inherent contradiction
between this gospel and the radical message of Christ. Responding to the mega
churches rising up in contemporary AmericaJoel Osteen, one of the most influential
pastors in America, and his church recently leased a 16,000 seating capacity sports arena
in Houston for their services (34)McKibben claims,
In fact, most of what gets preached in these palaces isnt loony at all. It is
disturbingly conventional. The pastors focus relentlessly on you and your
individual needs. Their goal is to service consumersnot communities
but individuals: seekers is the term of art, people who feel the need for
some spirituality in their (or their childrens) lives but who arent tightly
bound to any particular denomination or school of thought. The result is
often a kind of soft-focus, comfortable, suburban faith. (33)

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McKibben notes that the potency of what Jesus said and did is what Christianity should
be about: radical orientation to the good of the other/Other. Jesuss teaching to love
your neighbor, McKibben argues, is where one begins not where one ends up when all is
acquired, full and content. Especially since Jesus, in all his teachings, made it very clear
who the neighbor you were supposed to love was: the poor person, the sick person, the
naked person, the hungry person. [. . .] A call for nothing less than a radical, voluntary,
and effective reordering of power relationships, based on the principle of love (35).
What is at stake? McKibben argues for critical engagement with social trends, issues,
and messages and the very conditions that make democracy possible.
Since the days of Constantine, emperors and rich men have sought to coopt the teachings of Jesus. As in so many areas of our increasingly
market-tested lives, the co-optersthe TV men, the politicians, the
Christian interest groupshave found a way to make each of us
complicit in that travesty too. They have invited us to subvert the church
of Jesus even as we celebrate it. With their help we have made golden
calves of ourselvesbecome a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. It
works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come. When
Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only love of self, they will
remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back for more of
the same. (37)
McKibben raises a crucial issue in contemporary society where divergent views seem to
be repressed, while groups that reproduce the norm (such as Osteens 16,000 member
church in Houston) continue to grow. It seems McKibben echoes a similar claim to Greg

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Dickinson in his discussion of memory: Contemporary urban experience combined with
the growth of consumer culture makes the maintenance of stable coherent identities
difficult. Memory offers to consumers the possibility of coherent identities firmly situated
within a warmly remembered past (Dickinson 1-2). Ann Burlein argues this point in
relation to James Dobsons Focus on the Family with a mailing list of 3.5 million and a
budget of over 100 million: Dobson generates this tremendous appeal by casting the
conservative politics of Bible-based family values as a countermemory to modern life
(208). The success of groups like Focus on the Family lies within their capacity to
diminish fears surrounding the seemingly violent, conflict-laden, and turbulent times we
live in, while creating a world that coherently orders the narrative fragments of daily life.
By exploiting the gaps among identity, memory, and desire, nostalgic invocations of the
traditional Bible-based family construct people against themselves, pitting the way we are
against the way we wish we were (208).
While the appeal of memory is the way it orders and stabilizes the chaos of the
present, memory places (Dickinson 2) may also colonize individuals lives within an
overarching cultural agenda, ultimately limiting and confining self and community. One
of the implications of this colonization is suppression of dissent and tempering the critical
disposition of the audience, necessary to guard against manipulation and demagoguery.
Borlein states the problem this way:
Moreover, the Right has launched its bid for hegemony, not by stubbornly
insisting on speaking only its own language, but by reworking and
appropriating precisely those cultural memories, discourses, and images
that the Left thinks of as its own property: memories of protest and

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popular resistance associated with the 1960s. Engaging in elaborate acts
of memory that take effect as substitutions, displacements, disguised
conquests, and systematic reversals, the Right represents an authoritarian
politics of Bible-based family values as a form of democratic populism.
(217)
The same contradictions of daily life that drive many people to conservative Christian
communities are the resources women pastors use to articulate new versions of the self
within larger cultural networks. Though memory may be utilized to reinforce cultural
hegemony it also contains transformative potential. Dickinson argues that memory
operates as a grammar or set of resources and structures, with which, through rhetorical
turns, individuals invent rhetorical performances of themselves (2). I argue that women
pastors use this grammar to encourage their faith communities to reorient toward the
messiness of daily life, and in the process create space for novel expressions of self and
community. Within this critical frame--grammar--I investigate evangelical women
pastors understanding of faith and its practice as a means to understand the workings of
nostalgic desire and the rhetorical crafting of a viable feminist posture and politics of
change.

Historical and Critical Frame

I interviewed twenty women pastors from various evangelical denominations in
Southern Illinois and Seattle, Washington. Out of the twenty interviews, due to technical
difficulties, I was only able to transcribe twelve of these interviews. However, the
purpose of my interviews was not to represent women in diverse evangelical

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denominations, but to shed light on the way women reorient to God in light of their
calling to Protestant church roles traditionally defined male, namely pastor. I
interviewed eight Presbyterian USA pastors, one who started an ecumenical church, two
pastors of Community churches, one Bible church pastor, two Disciples of Christ pastors,
two United Church of Christ pastors, one United Methodist but ordained Baptist pastor,
one Methodist pastor serving in an ecumenical church, and one Southern Baptist male
pastor sympathetic to the seven women pastors in his community, as well as one Catholic
nun also sympathetic to the changing climate of faith in her Southern Illinois community.
One of the two ecumenical pastors I interviewed in the Seattle area started a church for
homeless women, and the other continues that work today. Finally, I interviewed an
Assemblies of God pastor after I completed my data gathering for this project. Thus, I
did not record my interview with her, but our conversation informs my understanding of
women pastors perspectives and struggles. My data gathering process was truly a
fascinating and enlightening project as I met and interviewed women over the course of
two years, participated in a church led by one of these pastors, and developed
relationships with others, including one friend who recently became a candidate in the
ordination process of the Presbyterian USA church. What unfolds in my analysis of these
interviews is a rhetorical reorientation toward faith in God as it is lived without
diminishing the integrity of Scripture or the reality that life in Christ is always in process.
Rosemary Radford Ruether, a noted feminist theologian, remarked in the early
1990s that women within Christian churches were moving in greater numbers into
positions of authority that were traditionally only occupied by men. Additionally,
women as students and clergy [have] begun to make an impact on the substance of the

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Christian faith, the way it is symbolized, organized, and understood (279). Within many
evangelical denominations the number of women in pastoral roles continues to grow. For
the Presbyterian Church USA, by 2000, women were one in seven pastors and copastors; four in ten associate pastors; and six in ten of all other active ministers
(www.pcusa.org). However, other denominations retreat to more conservative stances on
women in the church. Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, a nondenominational church recently listed among the top fifty most influential churches in the
nation (www.thechurchreport.com), boasts of their postmodern and culturally relevant
take on the Christian faith through principles like beauty. Yet, in one of his 2002
sermon series on women, he works through Scripture in Genesis in relation to Adam and
Eves sins leading to the fall and subsequent curses, and has this to say about women,
womens roles, and culture.
It was also promised by God that Eve and all her daughters throughout
history would struggle with contentment in their role of submission to
their husbands and instead desire to reign over and master men as sin did
Cain (Genesis 3:16b cf. 4:7). In our present day this promised conflict is
called feminism. This gender war is fought under the guise of equality
which in truth is little more than womens coveting the domain God has
assigned to men and being discontent with Gods high calling on the home
which they disdain. (www.themarshillchurch.org)
There is an apparent blindness still present in contemporary Christian theology and
church practice regarding womens roles in church, home, family, and society. In Mark
Driscolls case this blindness seems to be a lack of understanding in relation to

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feminisms diversity and complexity. More troubling, however, is the fact that Driscoll
has a substantial followingmore than 4,000 people attend his church every week
which adds to my curiosity about his influence. What are people looking for when they
go to church? Why are people wooed by an overt socially conservative stance with
regard to womens role and male-female relations? In relation to these questions, I
briefly turn to Luce Irigarays notion of an envelope and Kenneth Burkes
metabiological rhetorical criticism (Crable, 1998) to examine the rhetorical contours of
possible responses. Then I will look at how women pastors confront nostalgic desire for
order, stability, and even a sense of home as they narrate their faith experiences; my
sense is that through women pastors challenges to nostalgic longings resources for
individual and social change emerge.
Irigarays concept of an envelope comes from her work An Ethics of Sexual
Difference, where she argues that women need a containing space separate but not cut off
from male desire. Women throughout Western culture were products of male desire, and
one may notice the way women still cater to it, whether through body image in popular
culture or womens roles in diverse social institutions. For this reason, Irigaray believed
that if women were to ever learn to love themselves (and consequently love others better
as a result) they must come to an awareness of self outside of male desire. Serene Jones
puts it well when she speaks of Irigaray:
As she poetically describes it, woman needs to adorn herself in
garments of her own desires rather than wear the clothes of mens desires.
She needs to become herself. Irigaray also suggests that God plays a role

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in this adornment, as the one who authors the space of her becoming.
(Jones, Feminist Theory 43)
In addition to this containing space for womens own becoming, Irigaray argues that this
envelope has openness to the world, which allows access to difference (An Ethics 69).
In other words, a healthy female subject must not allow the process of learning to love
self become closure, a state of seduction or bondage. For Irigaray, the notion of an
envelope describes a female subject-in-relation, constantly moving toward wholeness.
This means that outside forces influence how a woman perceives herself, but not
determine who she is in the process of becoming.
Wonder goes beyond that which is or is not suitable for us. The other
never suits us simply. We would in some way have reduced the other to
ourselves if he or she suited us completely. An excess resists: the others
existence and becoming as a place that permits union and/through
resistance to assimilation or reduction to sameness. (74)
The very nature of communication presupposes an openness to change and possibilities
for wholeness.
Serene Jones takes Irigarays notion of an envelope as a space for womens
flourishing with an imaginative and hopeful openness for a more just future and develops
a feminist posture she calls strategic essentialism. Strategic essentialism borrows from
debates between gender essentialism and gender constructivism. In Joness words:
When a strategic essentialist asks the question: Is there an essential
character to womens identity or is it a product of culture? she does so
from a distinctive angle. The issue of practice comes to the fore. The

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strategic essentialist is a pragmatist or functionalist, because she uses
practical effect as the measure of theory. Instead of relying on rigid
principles (either constructivist or essentialist), she asks: Will their view of
womens nature advance the struggle of womens empowerment? She
also makes calculated, strategic decisions about which universals or
essentials might work in a given context and which might fail. The almost
militaristic emphasis on strategy highlights the fact that she is not a
disinterested observer of other persons practices and theories. She is a
politically engaged analyst studying the practical effect of views of
womens nature so as to craft ones that are emancipatory and life-giving.
(Feminist Theory 44-45)
The feminist strategic essentialist is one with an awareness of possibilities for change that
exist in the lived moment. This posture holds the value of life in steady view; there are
always relational and social implications to ones choices. Kenneth Burkes
metabiological rhetorical criticism, as Bryan Crable outlines through the concepts of
metabiology, orientation, and recalcitrance, collaborates with that of the feminist strategic
essentialist. Metabiology is a concept Burke utilizes to describe the importance of social
critique emerging from the body, that is, from ones lived interactions. The body, for
Burke, is where one must begin analysis if critical reflection is to have substantial impact.
Even though critique spirals away from the body through research, analysis, and the
writing process, Burkes concerns are practical, hoping to circumvent the social
conditions that lead to violence, and ultimately, war (cf. Rueckert, 1982). In Burkes
view, theory should never stray too far from the lived moment.

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Orientation and motivation describe Burkes focus on language and meaning as it
mutates through communication processes. Roxanne Mountfords interview with Pat,
one of the pastors discussed in her book The Gendered Pulpit, reveals how meaning
changed for the congregation when Pat came down from the tall pulpit raised above
them. Pat claims, It allows me first of all to get out from behind the pulpit. And Ive
gotten a number of comments--this has been an interesting sort of experience. And
people say they like that because they dont feel like Im dictating from on high. But,
Im one of them [. . .] (Mountford 80). The fluctuation of meaning as Pat negotiates
space around the pulpit allows the congregation to call into question authority and power
associated with pulpit. In terms of feminist strategic essentialism, it destabilizes the
sex-gendered subject by dissolving its seemingly natural moorings and exposing the
dangerous politics hidden in it (Jones, Feminist Theory 59).
Finally, one of Burkes most provocative concepts is the notion of recalcitrance,
suggesting that the meaning of any given moment never is fully known. The very nature
of language does not allow the situation to be fully embraced. There is always something
left over, hidden, and invisible. Perhaps this is why Irigaray warns against an envelope
that becomes too insular and so does not allow natural processes of communication to
take place: an excess resists (An Ethics 74). For Jones and the feminist strategic
essentialist, there is renewed attention paid to local thick descriptions where there is a
celebration of the indeterminate, of differences, of the messiness of womens identities
that surfaces when the legislative powers of normality and order flee the scene (Feminist
Theory 59). Recalcitrance assures the rhetorical critic that he/she is only seeing a partial
view of the story, a view navigated through author-text identification, so all must be

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made aware of the insight and blindness of any particular analysis. The possibility of
being mistaken is thus germane to Burkes rhetorical criticism. If there is only one
interpretation of reality then the natural result is violence and death. One sees this tragic
drama play out in womens lives everyday as they starve their bodies to attain ideal
shapes and the attraction of many. Burke inspires one to ask: What if there are more
possibilities for living? Perhaps there is another way. As Burke imagines an art of
living (Permanence 66), he confesses that living comfortably in oppressive conditions is
appealing. And in this staggering disproportion between man and no-man [sic], there is
no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their
cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss (272).
One of the ways people huddle together at the edge of an abyss is through cultural
memory and the desire to retreat to an imagined past. Greg Dickinson argues that
instability and perceived chaos encourage a tremendous desire for the past (1).
Increasingly, scholars are working with the concept of memory both as it helps to recover
the past--bringing voice to hidden or neglected histories--and the notion that memories
stabilize uncertain times characterized by postmodern urban landscapes. The memories
place both the landscapes and individuals within a stabilizing and authenticating past.
Often memories are utilized in these sites to create intriguing spaces for consumption
(1). Ann Burlein, among other scholars, thus note the powerful force of memory to
reinvigorate conservative agendas through a retreat to more peaceful, ordered, and simple
times. Janice Doane and Devon Hodges argue that nostalgic longings for less turbulent
times actually fueled the American anti-feminist backlash in the 1980s (3). Nostalgia:
nostos: the return home. Nostalgia permeates American politics and mass culture. [. . .]

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As feminists, we argue that nostalgic writers construct their visions of a golden past to
authenticate womens traditional place and to challenge the outspoken feminist criticisms
of it (3). As more women enter into the masculine space of pastor--in Mountfords
study, the actual space of the pulpit--how does nostalgic desire both limit and provide
narrative potential for individual and social transformation? Metabiological rhetorical
criticism, hand-in-hand with feminist strategic essentialism, guides us through the
rhetorical terrain of nostalgic desire in relation to women pastors faith experiences. The
themes I discovered through our interviews surrounded notions of community and the
function of the church. What follows are three themes outlining how women pastors
enter into community: calling, their narrative concepts of community, and their
description of ministry or how the church reaches out to the world.

Analysis
Calling
One of the first questions I asked women pastors in our interviews was, How did
you come to this position? Tell me a little about your journey to the position of pastor.
These women loved telling their story, each markedly different. From the very beginning
of my interviews I noticed that they used the term calling when they talked about their
process of ordination as well as coming to their current position of pastor. As each
woman talked about her decision to become a pastor she articulated different kinds of
struggles. Some struggles were profound. One pastor was forced to get extra seminary
education after she completed her Master of Divinity at one school in order to persuade
her board for her ordination. I was allowed to be ordained in this class, but they, even

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though I had my MDiv, they made me go back to Calvin Seminary and finish another
sem., do some more work there. [. . .] And the spring of that year they tried to rescind
their decision (ER). They ordained her that year, however, and she became the fourth
woman within the Christian Reformed tradition and the first woman west of Michigan
within her faith tradition to be ordained. Her struggle was lengthy--her education and
ordination process took twelve years--and included many debates with church boards,
district and regional, about her qualification for the role of pastor. I asked her why she
persevered, and she answered:
The call was so clear. And I have my whole life been so grateful for that
because otherwise I would have quit so long ago. [. . .] my decision was
whether to remain in the denomination; it was never to abandon the idea
of being a minister. (ER)
The struggles that women pastors go through seem to involve their identities: who they
are in relation to God, what their purpose is in the world, and what strategies to employ
when determining whether and how to continue the process. And that is exactly how one
of the ecumenical pastors defined calling: I mean its about timing and about need
presenting itself. And Gods drawing me, which I believe actually manifests itself as that
desire. So it wasnt a voice. It was a process (PS).
The decision to pursue the vocation of pastor was not easy for many of the
women. One pastor moved into a position titled Pastor to Women because, in her
terms, our church was ready to add a woman to staff and they had a director of womens
ministries prior to my coming on, but it had been like ten years (MK). But her case is
the exception, not the rule. RN pursued ordination because she had grown up in a church

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that encouraged her pastoral care gifts and gave her plenty of opportunity to lead,
encourage, and inspire. Her ministry experiences as well as her love of theology took her
to seminary at Regent College in Canada. However, seminary offered her a very
different experience. She tells a story of a colleague who found out about her pursuit of
ordination and at the time borrowed her computer.
And um, Ill never forget he comes knocking on my door, this ashen white
face and says: I cant borrow your computer anymore. And I thought,
okay thats fine, and I found out later that he told a friend that for me to
become a pastor was like becoming a whore. I am not kidding, that was
his language. [. . .] I was accused of seeking professors attentions and um,
I kind of blocked it, but it was just this sense that I was too needy for male
attention; I was too friendly. When I look back on whom that came from
was also a needy man as well, but that shut me down, it really shut me
down. I went through a period where I didnt wear any makeup, I wore
my hair back, and I wore plain clothes. But I withdrew, I withdrew, I
withdrew. (RN)
RNs seminary experience located her calling in her gendered body. Indeed her pursuit
of God could not be abstracted from her body. In response to these attacks she moved
toward a more androgynous performance of self--one might even argue masculine
performance--in order to reconcile apparent tensions between her body and her vocation.
She notes now that she looks on those struggles as seemingly innocuous, but these forms
of oppression were the beginning of her pursuit of a deeper relationship with God and in

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the process a more holistic sense of self. The option to just believe in God was not left
open to her.
In fact, RN talks about questioning God in the midst of these challenges. She
asks God:
If for some reason you are a God who doesnt want women to do this, to
have these gifts, then you have to show me. [. . .] You have to show me,
you have to help me, and Im willing to still believe in you [. . .], but you
have got to show me why because it makes no sense to me. (RN)
Every time she would get to this point she felt Gods voice,
No, this is good. Keep walking through this. And as Id read Scripture
and as I would look at the different perspectives on the Scripture the
perspective that God is for women and has been for women since the
beginning is the only message that came through to me. (RN)
An interesting interplay of meaning moved RN back-and-forth between her experience,
her studies, and interaction with God. Meaning was not understood as a disembodied
interpretation of the text, but inclusive of her identity struggle as she sorted through ways
to reconcile her gifts, her goals, her experience, and theology. In Burkes terms, this
interplay of meaning became the sub-stance (A Grammar 22-24) or that which stands
under and supports her sense of self, making possible her continuance toward her divinity
degree. Dickinson makes this point another way when he claims that memory sites are
themselves fragmented, making the apparent coherence illusory and opening the
possibilities for a wide range of identities (2). However, what is missing from this
formula is the reunifying voice of memory (2) casting a God of love and acceptance in

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relation to RN. Instead, the characterological coherence (Fisher, Narration 316) of God
is taken up in RNs desire to reconcile her belief in a God who is for her in the midst of
violence against her own body. Through her mundane account of sexism at Regent she
opens her audience to a process in which her subjectivity is at play, and who she is
begins to unfold as a confluence of experiences, meanings, and textual interpretations.
The subject is always a subject-in-relation.
Consequently, this subject-in-relation, or in Burkes terms, identification, builds
on past interactions to the extent that each new interaction pulls on the past while creating
possibilities for the future. Any particular rhetorical moment thus is a mixture of
orientations ordered through present motives and needs. Ordering the present through
past interactions becomes evident in the way pastors claim that their perseverance in
times of struggle builds on previous questioning of faith and its meaning. LL remembers
coming home with her family after church one Sunday when the pastor preached on real
faith, and her mom literally wept because she was not sure she had the right kind of
faith.
So I got my Bible in the book of Romans, at age twelve, not understanding
it, and it just so happened that night I opened my Bible to Romans 10,
verses 9 and 10, which says if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is
Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, then
you are saved, or you will be saved. And I thought this is what I believed
my whole life. Were saved. This is what mom believes. I remember
going into her room and actually saying to her: Mom, you dont have
anything to worry about, this is what you believe. And that was the

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moment when it occurred to me that, yes, I was really one of Gods
children. I didnt have to worry about that. (LL)
As LL describes her struggle to respond to what she claims was Gods direct call on
her life to become a pastor--there was always this nagging sense that God was calling
me to something more, I was being pulled--she builds on her professed assurance that
she is Gods child. Her questioning of faith and call become the very substance upon
which she perseveres in her role as pastor. In light of this critical questioning, Crusius
adds to Burkes insight:
It [rhetoric] stands under, supports, makes possible not only the
persuasiveness of its betters but also all human made order itself. For, in
Burkes vastly expanded sense, as identification, rhetoric designates the
very process by which human societies are created, maintained,
transformed, destroyed, and recreated. (121)
Thus, the critical process of coming to a sense of self-as-pastor, when analyzed through
Burkes conceptual lens, is a sharpening, if you will, or a honing of self-in-relation.
Womens choice to occupy supposed masculine space chafes and chips away at
determinedly natural gender norms to expose their malleability and begin processes of
transformation. Often their struggles are lengthy and involve body, mind, and soul,
which is what renders forms of cultural hegemony within nostalgia suspect.
Women chip away at more than social norms in their process of becoming
Christian pastors. They expose an internal makeover as well, where rhetorics of social
change are simultaneously a process of recreating self. Lenore Langsdorf uses the
concept of poiesis to analyze how the self is remade in the process of interacting with

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others. She uses the example of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings where members tell
and retell their stories to others, simultaneously reconstructing self in each new narration.
Literally, possibilities for becoming new creatures exist within the realm of rhetorical
interaction. It is through this interaction that often one might see something about the
self never before known. This happened to CJ as she began to pursue a seminary degree
and potential career of pastor. She thought she would do an internship with her current
pastor and sought out his counsel.
So I met with the pastor, we had a conversation. I suggested some ways
that womens voices could be better integrated with the church, and he
was very curious. And he said, those are some great practical
suggestions, I dont see why those things would be hard to put in place at
all. (CJ)
After a week of excitement at this news CJ met with him again to discover that he did not
follow up on any of his suggestions, and in fact wanted to delay their internship six
months. When she asked him about having women up front to lead liturgical prayer he
dismissed her request in this way:
So he said to me, well, its really important that we um, the elders are in
such a weak spot right now. They are new. Theyve only been in place
nine months. I really want to affirm their authority, so I want an elder to
read in this part of the service. If an elder is not available I want a deacon
to read, and if a deacon is not available then I want any other leader
which could be a woman, any other leader. So I said what other leaders
are there? And what are they? He said, oh, well community group leader,

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then he caught himself because he realized we dont have any women
community group leaders. Nobody knows why, they dont know why the
women stopped leading. They are not quite sure. But the Sunday school
teachers and the nursery leaders, and I just . . .yeah, great, thats good,
thats really good. So that felt like a kick in the stomach. (CJ)
CJs belief of womens inclusion in her faith community began to melt away as she
dialogued with her pastor. All of a sudden what came into view for CJ was a clash
between belief and performance: so that felt like a kick in the stomach. At the end of
their conversation she recognized that this pastor was going to do nothing to encourage
womens wholeness in their faith community. He even stated that to include women up
front to pray with other women would be too much work: Well, you know, there are just
so many people that have to be arranged to be present on a Sunday morning, to have one
more person that we have to fill a time slot to have somebody present is just too much.
The value of expediency in CJs narrative exposes what she thought to be right and
true about her faith as mere fabrications, illusory.
Katherine Henry writes provocatively of the notion of rhetorics of exposure in
her 1997 dissertation. Noting traditional separation of public and private spheres in
American nineteenth century white bourgeois culture, she theorizes about the notion of
exposure in public speeches and lectures and a supposed rhetoric of protection in the
private sphere. Working with Ralph Waldo Emerson among others and the notion of
integrity as a private or public virtue, that is, a virtue created in the mind of an audience,
Henry claims:

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First, it moves from the inside out, firmly grounding its truth in the depths
of the private self and defining itself from within. But the final standard
of this private truth, paradoxically, is its public acceptability; the passage
ends up on the outside looking in. Repeatedly in Emerson the external
gaze turns up when it is least expected: it is there that we find ourselves
considering the public face of our secretest presentiment, and it is there
when our discussion of Emersons integrity as a public speaker turns
unavoidably to the experience of his audience. (7-8)
Consequently, this exposure is where we find CJ, on the outside of her faith looking in at
what she assumed to be true, what she assumed to be acceptable. Her access to freedom
is severely limited by a pastor who does not believe in womens inclusion in the church.
Mary Dalys vehemence toward the Catholic Church in her book The Church and the
Second Sex reveals the pervasiveness of sexism within the Christian tradition. In
response to the claim that God is, of course, masculine, Daly states:
What can masculine mean if predicated on a Being in which there is no
sex? [. . .] In any case, the subtle conditioning effected by the widespread
opinion that God is masculine, whatever that may mean, is unlikely to
engender much self-esteem in women, or much esteem for women. (qtd. in
MacHaffie 212)
Daly takes issue with the belief that what God deems acceptable is congruent with the
status quo, but how does one convince those in power to share it? CJs kick in the
stomach was the realization that there is no space for her voice, her expression of faith,
or her choices.

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Interestingly, as this external performance of faith unravels, she simultaneously
begins to come to new awareness of self and sees a space for Irigarays envelope of
female desire to come into view. In the same moment she is undone and remade.
And I just got in my car and cried and cried and cried, I felt like I entered
the grieving work for every woman whos ever had to hear that question
[Am I asking too much?]. Its just . . .it was so strange. I felt so sad, and
so angry and so frightened by those emotions. And yet there was a weird
kind of kinship in that moment. It just, I really did feel myself standing
beside so many women. So somewhere in the midst of that, I went, Why
is he so important to you? Why, why does this matter? So I sat with that
and I thought what if it matters because its connected to calling? What if
thats part of your passion? And youre being asked to wrestle with this,
not just because its an interesting intellectual dilemma or an interesting
question for the church, but because it cuts to the core of how youve been
made? (CJ)
CJs calling to the role of pastor becomes a space where she can work out female desire
for power, for hope, and for freedom. Her interaction with her pastor evokes an
antithetical movement (Henry 7), where she moves from the inside out and ends up on
the outside looking in. According to Henry, this antithesis or persistent contradiction is
actually a creative tension (8), and CJs performance of faith is simultaneously an expose
of its fabrications. Once she realized that women in the practice of her church were
somewhat estranged the constructedness of her Christian faith surfaced. At the same

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time her proposed kinship with many women before her alludes to a supposed interiority
of faith; a faith not yet known or realized.
Although the goal of exposure is to break apart privacy, to evacuate
interiority, to peel away the dry husk and reveal the secrets beneath, the
appeal of the expose is in the belief that there are still secrets yet to be
revealed. (Henry 8)
Even as faith comes to the surface it may then again be appropriated into public
performance for the external gaze of an audience. Clearly, the subject is made and
remade through creative tension between hidden depths and performances for the
pleasure of others. The rhetorical efficacy of this making of the subject exists in the
present lived moment in contrast to nostalgic deferral of fulfillment to the past or the
future. In David Carrs words: I am the subject of a life-story which is constantly being
told and retold in the process of being lived (17). Thus, call, for CJ, sets in motion a
paradox of becoming that resists the hegemonic tendencies of memory sites, opens up
space for the expression of female desire, and suggests new routes for movement toward
wholeness.

Community
Ambiguity is particularly germane to female subjectivity and defines the critical
power within it. CJs discovery of kinship with women leans on the synthetic character
of the female subject, always poised to change. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex
notes this mutability: she stands before man not as a subject but as an object
paradoxically endued with subjectivity; she stakes herself simultaneously as self and as

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other (691). Because woman lives in between her own inner depths and that which is
performed for the gaze of another, she accesses, according to de Beauvoir, both
immanence and transcendence, both the poetic and the real (690). Feminine metaphysics
entails a deep inwardness that opens out into infinity, a sense of the spiritual, of
otherworldliness, and yet one that is within reach incarnate and tangible (Henry 9).
Additionally, as woman exposes herself to the gaze of masculine desire she
simultaneously retracts from this gaze, hidden and invisible. De Beauvoir claims that the
feminine belly symbolizes deep immanence: it gives up its secrets in part, as when
pleasure is revealed in the expression of a womans face; but it also holds them back
(qtd. in Henry 10). This incongruity between revealing and hiding counters traditional
masculine notions of public performance as supposedly revealing all that is to be known
to an audience traditionally predisposed to belief rather than disbelief. RS notes this
contrast in her struggle over whether or not to preach using feminine imagery:
Maybe its easier for some, a man that feels very confident of this and is
able to do this and women, you do it and you think . . . oh great shes
trying to . . . push her agenda. But the last sermon I preached, I got
assigned the annunciation and I really talked about Mary being the Godbearer. And talked about how were all called to be God bearers in this
world. And challenged people to say: what is God forming and fashioning
in you? Whats being birthed and reborn in you? I felt really comfortable
using those images, where [. . .] and it felt very true to who I was, where in
the past I think I might of, I might of strayed from them or been more
afraid, but realizing that voice is very important. And Im not quite even

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sure what Im bringing, but Ive had a lot of people say: this has been
missing. (RS)
What RS brings to the pulpit is a realization that the truth is not fully known. There is
always an excess of meaning in each moment, which reinforces the idea that what one
believes is only part of a bigger story. Consequently, this meaning is co-constituted
between speaker and audience. Belief that logics and structures are right or true
depends on an audience predisposed to belief. As RS uses feminine imagery in her
sermon, recalcitrance surfaces, which may be accompanied by doubts, suggestions of
fraud, [and] manipulative tactics (Henry 10). Thus, the audience plays a vital role in
determining the strength of meaning or the viability of an orientation. By disrupting what
is thought to be true or certain, RS encourages her audience to critically engage the
meaning of Scripture with their own lives, fostering what Serene Jones calls bounded
openness (Feminist 152): Communities need both normative principles to bind them
and a healthy suspicion of norms so as to be open to self-critique and change (152).
Paradox seems to breed contrasts, contradictions, and comparisons. This is the
ideal position of the subject, for Burke a predisposition to believe in ones own
mistakenness rather than suppose ones understanding is grafted into essential nature,
determined and binding.
The audience, from its vantage point, sees the operation of errors that the
characters of the play cannot see; thus seeing from two angles at once, it is
chastened by dramatic irony; it is admonished to remember that when
intelligence means wisdom [. . .] it requires fear, the sense of limits, as an
important ingredient. (Attitudes 41-42)

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The purpose of community might thus be defined as what reminds one of a sense of
limitation, of never quite accessing the whole picture. Consequently, accepting ones
partial view of reality resists the homogenizing tendencies of memory. The appearance
of unification is what fuels the stabilizing power of memory sites. Its [Old Pasadenas]
traditionalism can cover fears about new relations, the loss of traditional communities
and the dissolution of the nuclear family (Dickinson 15). In the process of providing
stable realities, memory naturalizes the complexities of daily life in monolithic
representations. Countering these homogenizing tendencies requires education; learning
how to navigate the diversity of mundane existence. Each pastor notes the importance of
community, however, each provides different perspectives on what community looks
like, both in its ideal and real form. For example, two women defined their calling to
the pastorate as something affirmed through community. One pastor described it simply:
a calling is primarily something that comes through community (CR). Her particular
call emerged as she practiced her spiritual gifts and her church community affirmed
them.
Through the camping, through some camping experiences with Young
Life where adults were involved, some of the Presbyterian lay people from
our congregation began saying things to me like, You should be a
minister. Translation was, You should be a pastor who has a pulpit on
Sunday morning. I knew thats what they meant, I usually tease them by
saying, I thought I was in ministry. (CR)
Another pastor spoke of the affirmation of her preaching gifts as what encouraged her to
pursue ordination. Indeed, she was my pastor for two years and I have yet to hear

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comparable preaching. When she was a Fuller seminary student at their extension in
Seattle, she won a ten thousand dollar preaching competition: her competitors were
seminary students at places like Duke, Princeton, and Harvard. When I asked her how
she came to the position of pastor she responded: But then the other piece of it was
that it was important for me in terms of ordination, to have a community confirmation;
that the way I handle Scripture and the way I interact with people, that my character
could be trusted (LW).
Church communities are somewhat unique in civil society. They exist as
organizations, specifically in the Protestant tradition, that rally around statements of faith
whereas other organizations order themselves around mission, purpose, and goals. This
is not to say that Christian churches disavow these characteristics, but they diverge in the
belief that how they organize impacts the faith that will lead them to a new world. In
short, churches answer Gods call to Christians to remember who God is and
communicate to others the gospel of Christ. Marjorie Suchocki describes the function of
the church in this way:
Each Christian generation expresses anew the assurance that God is for us.
The immediate catalyst for these expressions may well be the profound
conviction that God is a force for love, trust, and hope in a world of
diverse cultural communities. The conviction carries with it a drive for
expression and the expression itself becomes a call to the ever-new
creation of communities of love, trust, and hope. God is for us! Therefore,
we speak, creating a tradition that is continuously appropriated and

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transformed within our cultural diversities, so that we might live as a
complex community called the church. (1)
Some of the troubles Protestants face result from an unwillingness to acknowledge
diversity in the creation of communities of love, trust, and hope. An example is Jerry
Falwells comment, post 9-11, that feminists and the ACLU, among others, were
responsible for Gods wrath that took shape in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center. This would be a boundedness (Jones, Feminist 152) that suffocates. But Jones
notes that bounded openness is tenuous and a difficult path to follow; there must be
enough unity to identify as community, but the unity must not become uniformity. As one
pastor puts it: We now believe that you can have unity without uniformity (KG). CR
echoes this problem of some Christian organizations becoming too insular, shutting down
critique, so that individuals must work hard to encourage openness to difference. She
talks of the systemic racism and sexism existing in her work for a national ministry to
junior high and high school youth, and how weary she became of trying to personally
subvert it:
But no matter whether it was somebody who was really open or somebody
who was really resistant it was the same battle to educate someone to
understand the fact that things are different, the cultures are different,
because if youre White in America you do not have to be bi-cultural. [. .
.] And Christians if anything are the worst about it, because the
presumption is as the word has come into my culture not even knowing
that its not the Scripture and the Spirit that are transforming my culture,
but my culture is swallowing up the message, and only to a certain degree

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responding to it, and that most of the responses even if theyre legitimate
biblical responses are only a possible response, they are not the way to
respond; this is not the kind of worship to have; this is not the kind of
language; this is not the kind of way to do hospitality, this is not the kind
of way to raise your kids. Nevertheless, White Christians carry that same
sense only they theologize it so that it becomes, so that things that they
have no idea are their culture become, you know the patent of spirituality
to them and are therefore more resistant to any kind of open change. (CR)
Admittedly, CR notes that every religious organization struggles with community life
issues. She notes that many individuals may be open and well meaning in their personal
acceptance of others, but systemic problems predispose individuals to act in oppressive
ways. Dickinson notes how western imperialism persists within communal memory sites
where cultural privilege and longings for security converge. Importantly, this
imperialism encodes a desire for older stable relationships, based on traditional power
differentials, in this case [Banana Republic], the difference between the colonizer and the
colonized. The stability is purchased at the price of remembered oppression (17). What
complicates this issue is the notion of whiteness and supposed good intentions.
Thomas Nakayama and Richard Krizek argue in their article, Whiteness: A Strategic
Rhetoric, that whiteness denotes privileged cultural space and deploys distinct strategies
for its maintenance. One of the strategies is the presumption that white is normaland
consequently, capable of fading into the background--whereas people of color are marked
(i.e., located) by their race. White, as a subject position, is otherwise unmarked,
which feels more appropriate and occupies a more universal discursive space. [. . .]

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Whiteness is only marked in reverse. This is a characteristic of domination (299). The
chameleon-like nature of whiteness allows its location to recede from view, making
critique of its power difficult and wearing. CR mentions that during her time working
with the national youth ministry she grew tired of addressing peoples apparent blindness
to problems stemming from white and male privilege. But at a certain point, ministry is
hard enough, the kind of things that are presented in peoples lives in brokenness,
violence, addictions, family disorders, ministry is just flat tough enough without bucking
racism and sexism in the system (CR). Yet she remarks that this type of critique is the
true meaning of being an evangelical. I caution young women and people of color
before they enter most evangelical institutions about what it would cost. You have to
fight your own as well as fight the devil, the world, the flesh (CR).
Understanding the ways in which culture influences biblical interpretation is a
priority in CRs notion of community; maximum critical consciousness is important if
religious messages are to remain viable to the secular world. If a faith community
shuts itself off from the outside world its message not only loses social efficacyno
identificationbut also may potentially harm those within it. As Kathleen Norris soberly
muses regarding the Heavens Gate Cult deaths in 1998 (a group of about twenty people
overdosed on drugs and suffocated themselves to meet up with an alien ship supposedly
following the Hale Bop comet): Unlike the Benedictines, they really are trying to escape
the world and cant afford to be contaminated by outsiders, those less enlightened than
themselves, who are not true believers (Amazing 263). Outlandish as this event may
seem, Norris reminds her readers that community is difficult and hospitality is a process:
it takes time for people to figure out how best to incarnate it (265).

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Yet the call to love others is central to the churchs critical capacity to resist
abuses of power through demand for distinct faith performances. Church is other
people, a worshipping community (268). There is something made possible through
church for social outcasts, for remembering tradition and family, and for renewal and
hope in a better future. Jones notes how feminists agree, despite the difficulty of
community, on the destination: communities in which women flourish (Feminist 152).
How do women pastors find these spaces of flourishing?
Jones analyzes two different perspectives of community as well as feminist
responses to them. These perspectives include liberal contract theory and communitarian
theory. Liberal contract theory is based in liberal philosophy, which, in short, argues for
an essential structure of personhood that analytically precedes a social self, has a
proclivity toward self-determination and self-creation (Feminist 136), promotes its own
self-interests, and rationally understands how to pursue these interests. Jones claims that
liberal theory is what one commonly finds in most Western concepts and practices of
community. In fact, much of American feminist history is based in liberal theory. One
aim of the first wave of the feminist movement was built around arguments for womens
capacity to act like men: to be rational, objective, and supporters of freedom and
democracy. Notions of equality--notably, those that underpin the Equal Rights
Amendment and abortion debates--rally around these ideals of selfhood and society.
Liberal theory at its best encourages society to be responsible in protecting the rights of
the individual; this is the contract.
However, LW suggests that in the process of protecting rights our society has
become too individualistic, and we see residue of this in the way the Christian church

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handles relational issues. For example, I provided LW and a few other pastors with a
hypothetical situation. Lets say a couple comes to you for counsel, seeking a divorce,
and you know that Scripture states clearly that Jesus does not approve of divorce. What
kinds of things come into play in this kind of situation? Here is LWs response:
I think the community comes into play in a huge way that we havent dealt
with in the West cause were so individualistic. So, for example Ive had
folks whove come to me who are looking to get divorced, and if there
hasnt already been some conversation in the whole community about
marriage and divorce and covenant and redemption and all this, it would
be, I think, oppressive as a pastor to make them the test case for the entire
thing. [. . .] Most of us as communities dont have the guts to actually deal
with the violence thats going on behind closed doors.[. . .] If what were
going for is the redemption of persons, then the whole community has to
talk about that [this notion of redemption]; yes we get people out of those
situations [abusive] and we intervene. And yes, the whole community
gets, not in a, ah invasion of privacy way, but in a way where weve talked
enough about how marriage is for the redemption of persons and world
and city that we actually know how to interact with those stories.
Calvin depicts the ones invited and embraced into the church as dim witted,Burke
offers a less pejorative term: mistaken (Attitudes 41)prone to distraction and to
wander (Jones, Feminist Theory 166). Thus, for Calvin, members of Christian
community require the church to also teach, to remind people of Gods character,
purpose, and care. LW suggests that critical engagement with Scripture and its meaning

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is required for healthy community. If the goal is redemption, then how community
members uphold the integrity of individual life in relation to society comes into play.
However, LW also sees a bigger picture of community interaction. There is an
overarching responsibility of the faith community to inhabit the stories of the church, the
stories of Scripture. This happens by discerning, as Jones claims, the church as the
community that imitates and performs the story (Feminist 157).
While there is a mimetic function of the church to imitate and follow the stories of
Scripture, aligning the actions, emotions, attitudes, and beliefs of its members with the
multivalent patterns of action, emotion, attitude, and belief that structure the narrative
(157), imitation is not enough. Imitation alone is the reason many churches grow stale in
their faith orientations, by taking something meant to be mutable and lived and turning it
into antiquated rituals and practices maintained for the preservation of cultural power.
Returning to CRs diatribe against White Christianity, thinking they have the faith, one
can see the way monolithic faith norms do more harm than good, giving way to
oppressive systemic structures. And very often the churched in that generation are lost
to the church because they have to either choose between going to a place that affirms
their culture or they dont get to worship in their own language; or going to a place where
everybody is White and they have to do the same bicultural thing they have to do all
week (CR). For this reason, Dickinson suggests that communities of memory operate
as liminal spaces existing between notions of community and individualism, where
consumers negotiate the relation between past and present, between the structure of
memory and the freedom of consumption (6).

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Dickinson articulates this tension in his work with Robert Bellahs (et al.) book
Habits of the Heart:
At the same time, many of those most thoroughly embedded in
communities of memory struggled against the limiting functions that
tradition can play. In short, Habits of the Heart suggests that many live
both inside and outside of memory and most are continually negotiating
new relations between memory and individualism, self-identity and group
identity. [. . .] Thus, while there are individuals comfortably embedded
within tradition, many are ambivalent about their traditions and their
relations to the profound diversity of contemporary urban life. (Dickinson
5)
With regard to the church: The image of performance clarifies the way the church
inhabits Scripture (Jones, Feminist 157, emphasis in original). Improvisational
performance connotes a drama, where members are actors in a play, dependent on a script
written prior to their entrance. God is the author defining notions of creation, sin, grace,
and redemption. However, the subject positions of the actors are mutable, capable of
taking on the life of Scripture in concrete and yet indeterminate ways. Subjects of
Christian community do not merely imitate supposed meaning of Scripture, but speak and
listen to the story of Gods liberating history with us and the eschatological promise held
therein (Jones, Feminist 156).
JK works with this notion of performance in her church community, the Church
of Mary Magdalene, which is made up entirely of homeless women. These homeless
women inhabit Scripture through corporate preaching:

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I worked with the homeless women, especially in worship setting. We had
a, I had a conversation. I invited the whole church to preach with me. [. .
.] to increase their self-esteem. They have been preached at all their life as
just sinners, but in my church they were the preachers. And I will bring a
theme and my own sermon, but then instead I say it, I help them to say it.
[. . .] I can help them say it, but I let them say it. Bible study same way,
you know, like Sarahs barrenness, and Hannahs barrenness in the Old
Testament. I will bring that theme. What barrenness means [for
example]. And they can relate to that. Barrenness is nothingness,
barrenness is, you know, degrading, barrenness is guilt. Barrenness, you
know, in those days people couldnt have a baby then you as a woman no
good. In our country too. So no goodness, nothingness, these homeless
women relate to what the barrenness means. And then what the
conception means: production, you know, so that way instead of me
saying it they can say it. So they feel: we are garbage outside, but here we
are SOMEBODY, you know, were important, we are the preachers. (JK)
Sermon making at JKs church works to exploit power structures that have in the past
been oppressive. In fact, JK goes on to say that the women who come to her church have
nothing left; some are literally desolate socially, economically, and physically; to expect
rapid change or to assume a traditional posture as pastor might only discourage healing.
Whereas liberal theorists believe in the rights of the individual and his/her
protection in their vision of society, communitarians affirm the value of community as a
starting point for imagining freedom and rights.

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[C]ommunitarians thus look to our neighborhoods, our churches, our
ethnic traditions, and our extended family networks to find a whole clutch
of values and views of self that form our view of community and our sense
of a good society. (145)
For feminists who critique liberal orientations toward community through claims that
feminine space is undervalued or invisible or difference is not considered in terms of
culture, language, and power, [and how it] affects the character of our communal
interactions (141), communitarian approaches to self and society offer an alternative
approach. Communitarians appreciate local thick descriptions of community as they
listen to the stories of community members; stories told in their diversity and fecundity.
Like liberal theorists, communitarians affirm that the challenge for political theory in
such a pluralistic context is to devise ways for diversity to flourish while also establishing
rules to manage effectively our larger corporate lives together (146).
One of the main critiques feminists have of communitarian approaches to
community is simply that community values always trump individual values. In other
words, the individual must sacrifice for the good of the whole. At the heart of their
critique is the claim that communitarianism, as a whole, fails to account for the role that
gendered relations of power play in the formation of communal values and practices
(Jones, Feminist 149). Even though JK helps the women of her church to recognize the
value of their voices and their stories, literally shifting the grounds of community from
universal reasoning (liberal theory) to particularized reflections, simply voicing
perspectives does not change society. Feminists worry that communitarians respond to
liberal society with an uncritical call to revalue the private realm (150):

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Communitarians often offer an overly simplistic and highly romanticized account of
community life. They conceive communities as harmonious groups of persons bonded
by common values specific to themselves (150). JK answers these concerns by
addressing the specificity of each womans life who enters her doors. She assumes that
individual change somehow affects larger social and systemic problems.
They call you all the names under the sun, but I dont, I didnt take it
personally. After their anger die down I sit in the corner and talk to them,
You know, if you, if this ministry asks my life, yes, you know, I am ready
to give my life, but I cannot take abuse. You know what abuse means? I
know what abuse means. Thats the last thing we can do to each other.
And they apologize. They say we so used to use those words, bad words,
were doing it. And so gradually they change. [. . .] You wouldnt believe
what impact this church is doing for the poor people. A lot of them stop
drinking, or drug and move on to better life, but we dont get those
reports, see? [. . .] And my idea was if I bring the positive side of
Christianity and real image of Jesus who accepted and worked with the
women and respected women and all that aspect, then women begin to feel
good about themselves; and when you feel good about yourself, you stop
doing negative stuff. (JK)
JK defends community values through a revaluation of the individual self. Her approach
to community is not simply telling ones story, but re-visioning the nature of community
and church in light of individual wholeness. Both individual and society are held in

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tension, and it is this tension that becomes the critical posture for understanding Scripture
and connecting with the Divine.
Jones returns to reformed theology to understand concepts of community; she
works with three themes in her book Feminist Theory from this perspective: womans
nature, oppression, and community. She uses Martin Luthers concept of justification in
relation to concepts of the church as well as John Calvins notions of sanctification and
the church. I shall work with her discussion of Luthers concept of the justified church
after considering women pastors concepts of community and church as a sanctifying
space. Jones uses two metaphors in Calvins doctrine of the church: Gods
accommodation and church as mother (166). Gods accommodation is literally God
inviting people into a space where humanity flourishes, where Gods creatures live
adorned in faith, hope, and love (166). Thus, the church is designed by God to be a
place where anyone may find comfort and nurture. Additionally, the metaphor of
church as mother describes relations between church and believers. In the womb of
the Christian community, we are pulled together and refashioned in a manner that
contradicts the chaos of sin and gives us new patterns of living in Christs life (167).
Church as sanctifying space is endemic to JKs dialogue with the homeless women
above. She will not tolerate abusive language because her community needs to be a
space where women may imagine new ways of being. In PSs work as the current pastor
of the Church of Mary MagdaleneJK started the church, but recently retiredshe
reiterates the need for the church to be a space that nurtures women and provides
different ways to inhabit stories of life with Christ. We talked about the way she

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constructs this space and encountered the idea of homeless womens belief that their
bodies are created in the image of God, and are thus deserving of honor.
I think partly that happens through preaching. I tell a lot over and over
again the biblical stories of Jesuss healing women, honoring women,
which isnt specifically about creating in the image of God, but it, it acts
out who we believe God is. So thats one pole. Heres the other pole.
One of the things we do in this church is every woman who comes here
gets a new bra and panties four times a year. And its explicitly about;
you deserve to have something new and nice to put on, underneath where
nobody could see, even if youre wearing everything else out of donations.
This is a way of honoring your body. Thats a JK thing, thats lingerie
theology. (PS)
PS reiterates the importance of a church that does not merely imitate the story of
redemption in Christ, but finds a way to inhabit the story. To allow members to
participate in Scriptural interpretation through tangible life experience changes the way
faith is understood and practiced. Women in this congregation are empowered through
their ability to create meaning through sermon making, engendered through integration of
their life experiences and intellectual capacities. In sum, they inhabit stories of the
church by conforming to norms that bind and hold together self while exposing this self
to possibilities for change.
Calvins church that is both Gods accommodation and mother must build on an
active and critical dialogue between leadership and constituency. In other words, conflict
in community is good and productive. The possibility for community to be lulled into

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comfort within their normative binding (e.g., rules, programs) threatens the activist stance
of the church; this is the tendency of nostalgic desire to decontextualize the present and
consequently, the rhetorical efficacy of the lived moment. Martin Luthers concept of
church evokes a very different picture of community. In his view, Grace disarticulates
[exposes] the sins of the community, and Gods judgment ruptures its boundaries,
exposing the arrogance of its false adornments and undoing its many pretensions (Jones,
Feminist 171). At the same time, Luther articulates Gods forgiveness in the midst of his
wrath. Thus the church takes on an ethos of humility: consistently aware of its sin while
predisposed to grace and the chance to start fresh. This is a community of implicated
resisters who know that Gods love is finally victorious. The God of this people is
perhaps best described as a forgiving God because of her act of justifying forgiveness in
the midst of sin (171). The church that emerges from Calvin and Luthers
characterizations is one that is both mother and magistrate; one that nurtures people into
wholeness while holding them accountable for their misdeeds. Out of these two
economies of divine grace (an economy of adornment and an economy of forgiveness)
emerge two different pictures of the same church: the church marked by its boundedness,
on the one hand, and by its openness, on the other (171). Pastors are accountable to
members of their churches for what they teach, and members are accountable to each
other and their leadership who do not allow the bounded openness of the church to
flourish. Kathleen Norris tells the story of a woman pastor occupying this tension:
One Lutheran pastor I know was sent to a church that had kicked out its
two previous pastors, one after eleven months, the other after just nine
months. On her first Sunday, she announced to the congregation, I wont

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let you do that to me. She saw her ministry as helping the congregation
to contend with the conflicts that had existed within their church for years
and that would be likely to remain long after she had gone. She stayed for
eight years. (Amazing 269)
Addressing issues that keep communities of faith encumbered in destructive patterns
seems part of the responsibility of church leadership. LW concurs with this view:
But weve so psychologized vulnerability that we tell ourselves if we
have some place that I can come and just be gut level honest about who I
am thats the end of the story. And um, vulnerability is, especially the
vulnerability of Christ is a lot broader than that, because evil is real. So
simply a psychological vulnerability gets very nave about the reality of
evil. Um cause theres this idea that vulnerability in and of itself is
redemptive. And the reality is, according to the story of Christ,
vulnerability in and of itself takes us to a cross, and then the cross is
redemptive. [. . .] And its through receiving of Christ into the vulnerable
place that ends up being redemptive. But vulnerability in and of itself, I
think, can actually be pretty damaging. (LW)
The damage LW alludes to is one that Katherine Henry discusses in detail in terms of
Jurgen Habermass and Ann Douglass notions of representative publicness (Henry
15):
Here is a staged display of the private self, a self-conscious performance
designed to elicit an audiences attention, celebration, and caressing.
What Habermas describes as an aura of personally represented authority,

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Douglas describes as the innermost sanctums of personality: both
expressions convey an image of an awed beholder, overcome by a sense of
the supernatural (Habermas 195). (Henry 15)
Similar to LWs concerns with vulnerability for vulnerabilitys sake, Henry notes in her
discussion of the epistemology of exposure that the staged display of the private self
opens the audience up to manipulation. When the private is accepted as something
valuable and worthy of public attention there is a sense of the supernatural, in which
weakness becomes strength and inferiority becomes superiority. As Douglas puts it,
sentimentalism prepares the audience for the role of consumer (189); as Habermas puts
it, mass culture channels social forces . . . into the conjugal familys inner space,
thereby transmorgrif[ying the public sphere] into a sphere of culture consumption
(Henry 16). The result infuses public dialogue with advertising functions (16), and
puts at risk the critical capacity of the community. Thus while a critical public sphere
operates to check the power of the state representative publicness is inherently
conservative, operating to reinforce the status quo, constructing not citizens, but
consumers (Henry 17). I hear many stories of Christians sharing their faith with
others without considering their audience; of telling the story of Jesus simply to tell it
without considering the repercussions. Faith is bought and sold in these circumstances; it
is something one consumes and then markets to others. If ones stories are to be
redemptive, in LWs perspective, there must be critical interaction with them, using grace
in Christ as the criterion for judgment. Comparatively, when stories, sermons, or claims
are told, the audience must be encouraged to participate, as in the case of JK and PSs
Church of Mary Magdalene. Taking the unchanging, apolitical, ahistorical, sphere of

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private life into politics and history (Henry 17) is part of their process of transformation;
coming to voice is necessary in order to imagine change.

Ministry
Stanley Hauerwas notes that the objective of the Christian church is not to make
the world safe, but to use the stories of Scripture--and their promises of present and
future fulfillmentto navigate a dangerous world. Yet he laments that the former is
typical of community:
Absorption into most societies is training in self-deception as we conspire
with one another to keep death at bay. Ironically, the more our societies
confirm this self-deception, the more dangerous our life becomes. We
lose the skill of recognizing what danger is and where it lies. Deception
becomes the breeding ground for injustice, since the necessity to hide the
dangers of our world make it impossible to confront those aspects of our
social order that impose unequal burdens on others. Our conspiracy for
safety forces us to see our neighbor as a stranger. (Story-Formed
Community 178)
How do women pastors negotiate desire for safety, fueling nostalgic longings, while
calling their faith communities to remain true to the stories of Scripture?
One pastor of a Disciples of Christ church in Southern Illinois invites members to
collaborate in their ministry to each other:
In this church mutuality is played out in the relationship that I have with
my elders. I have twelve elders. And I tell them all the time that I am not

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here to do ministry for them, I am to do ministry with them. And I invite
them if they ever would like to preach, to fill the pulpit, to preach, we do
the table, the communion table together. I invite them if they would ever
like to baptize someone; they are welcome to do that. I invite them to do
the pastoral care of the congregation. Thats not my invitation, thats our
denominations understanding of the ministry of the laity. And the
clergys responsibility is to equip the laity for ministry, not do the ministry
for the laity. (KG)
Similar to JKs approach to ministry of homeless women, KG asks her leadership group
to take responsibility for their faith. Instead of being content observers, they must
embody belief through the enactment of rituals and making these rituals meaningful to
others. At the heart of Burkes notion of recalcitrance is the subversion of social patterns
taken for granted to be true and correct. When the embodied subject enters into a
space to make meaning, there is always an excess that cannot be contained. By
encouraging one to practice faith in the concrete moment, the lived context becomes a
natural corrective to subjectivism or solipsism. It does not imply that the universe is
merely the product of our interpretations. For the interpretations themselves must be
altered as the universe displays various orders of recalcitrance to them (Crable 311).
Literally, having to make sense of what one believes opens up the believer to processes of
transformation and growth; the body and diverse relationships are the conditions that
make growth possible.
Including people in the process of creating faith and its meaning is a gesture
toward empowerment. I have discussed several injustices associated with

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powerlessness: inhibition in the development of ones capacities, lack of decision-making
power in ones working life, and exposure to disrespectful treatment because of the status
one occupies (Young 58). KGs faith tradition argues that growth in ones faith is
participation in it. Were supposed to love God with all of our minds, bodies, and souls,
so the heavy emphasis on the mind is a personal thing for me. We have a healthy
ministry here, that is made possible through a lay person, a non-clergy person who is, has
taken the training to be a parish nurse. [. . .] So were taking care of the body too (KG).
However, JK realizes that reordering power relationships must also work in a top-down
fashion beginning in seminaries, in the way ministry is taught:
Seminary education must be able to undo the damage done to men. A lot
of men come from the church of tradition and families that discriminate
against women. And in the family, in many families it happens, but still, a
lot of families, you know, carry that traditional woman role and image. So
here Christian education in the seminary, they should bring out right
theology, you know right theology, especially to male pastors to undo
their tradition knowledge or insight they gained from their families or
churches. And then it has to come out to women also, women students,
who need to change their value system too. Women abused so long and
they accept the value of the abuser as their own value system. So they
need to undo that also. (JK)
Reordering power relationships must happen with men and women, JK notes, to undo the
damage that has been done to both. Men are taught authority through distorted
relationships with women, and women are taught to accept the role of victim as natural

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and determined. JK calls for a radical reorientation toward male-female relationships as a
way to cull the exploitive and abusive relations that make up the core of many
evangelical churches.
CR claims that this distortion also insidiously affects race relations in the church.
There is a wonderful book out now, which is tremendously helpful in the
conversation [about race] called Divided by Faith. The thing that is so
unique about it, two things unique about it, one is that it provides a model
for talking about racism without someone feeling personally affronted.
The other is it describes why White evangelicals dont get it. [. . .] Why
therefore they end being farther down the road away from the
understanding of what it means to be a person of color in the U.S. than
someone who is moderate religiously on the Left or someone who is not
religious at all. Thats why they say its divided by faith; it is actually our
faith that divides us. The evangelical precepts primarily are based on
individual responsibility, everything is individual responsibility, therefore
systemic things do not exist and theyre not our responsibility so if I look
at my own heart and Im not racist then I have no responsibility. Well, in
the evangelical framework thats true. So I should feel no responsibility
historically that racism [sic], so I dont have to be responsible to the fact
that I have inherited a position of privilege; cause what did I do? I didnt
make that happen. I am not responsible for that.
CR goes on to say that the way to counter this lack of responsibility is to understand
the corporate power of sin. We do not only sin against ourselves, but as a church we are

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culpable for perpetuating social evils. The way that we treat, and it is always the way
we treat, its not like how hard you are when you pass a homeless person, its the way we
treat, we are judged corporately for the way we behave (CR). Here is an example of
Luthers justifying church. Luthers drama bequeaths to us a rather amazing account of
how an entire community, a collective people and not just a single person, is similarly
undone by divine judgment and remade by divine grace (Jones, Feminist 162). Within
the doctrine of sin is thus a radical turn to the other, in CRs view, in which how one
handles social issues is a marker of the viability of the faith of a community. Conversely,
according to Dickinson, memory places function to reaffirm holistic senses of
individual and communal identities. Calling people within a community to look to the
good of others fragments seamless identity performances within particular landscapes of
consumption, adding complexity to the performance of self in daily life. God calls the
church to be more, to be socially accountable. Ministry thus takes on communal values.
If the church is to undo distorted relationships among men and women, and among
different races, then there must be a move away from an individualistic faith and a
reorientation to corporate responsibility.
How do pastors suggest making this transition? RN believes that change in the
church must be aided by the Holy Spirit and modeled through church leadership:
The difficult part is that we dont change people the Holy Spirit transforms
people. I think it has to be modeled from the pulpit. I think it has to be
talked about from the pulpit and modeled. And in a way it has to be done
not as agendas, it has to be done as a lifestyle as a . . . So much of what
Jesus did with the disciples, this is a kind of tangent, but someone was just

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recently wrestling with this whole question of Why werent any of the
twelve [disciples] women? And it just seems so obvious to me that what,
none of those twelve, there were other women around, but none of those
twelve could be women, that was way too much for those men, that wasnt
the culture. They walked with Jesus and they watched him talk to women,
they watched him talk about women, they watched him heal women, they
watched him bring women in, he had Mary Magdalene tell them he had
risen. So you go from that of Jesus modeling that to the early church
where in the book of Acts it seems like the men and the women are there;
there is this new partnership that you didnt see in the gospels, something
happened. And I think that is what were called to as pastors; were called
to model it and talk about it and bring people along and it will happen.
(RN)
Change, for RN, happens through a return to the body, what one lives, and how one
teaches others through practice; social change must be embodied. The meaning of faith is
constantly being tested in how these women live their lives and model leadership to
others. What is understandable as faith to women pastors is that which moves
dialectically between embodiment and symbolic action (Crable 308); and the effect of
this reciprocity is cultivation of a critical awareness that keeps one in tune with the
surreptitious, insidious, and often subtle ways that ideology is mistaken as the truth. CR
echoes the notion of an embodied ministry in the leadership of her church:
So one of the things [about] my being mentored by people of color, one of
the practical applications is that I understand power and I understand how

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power works, and I can see it coming, and particularly in relation to issues
of race and ethnicity. Where the power is and whose voice is heard and
how its expressed is something I watch for. Now our, my ministry gift, I
have a Barnabas type gift, I come alongside people and help enable their
gifts, thats what I love to do. (CR)
In the attention women pastors pay to how faith is lived, faith shifts from dependence on
Scriptural authority to habits of embodiment (Crable 308). Movement between textual
interpretation and embodied meaning produces a lived hermeneutic capable of critiquing
tradition, texts, and interactions. In short, there are countless resources available to the
everyday critic if he/she knows where to look.
By helping people connect faith and its practice, women pastors help to reorient
people to Scripture so that new meanings become available. CJ encourages these
connections by bringing womens voices into mainstream dialogue in the church. When I
asked about her vision for ministry this was her response:
I see part of it as recovering the female voice as found in Scripture, or
barely found in Scripture. I think theres so much that hasnt been done
there. So that when I did a recent sermon, I did it in first person from
Eves perspective, because so much of the work on those passages has
been done from a male theological perspective, a white male
understanding of those things. So just to give a voice, part of it isnt even
my voice, its an attempt to recover a voice. So I would see that as part of
my role as a pastor is to begin to uncover some of the voices or recover
some of those voices and make them known. And make them known in

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such a way that is both a challenge to culture as it plays out, but is also an
invitation to something else. So its not satisfied with pure critique, but is
critique mixed with invitation. (CJ)
CJ attempts to recover womens voices by bringing the notion of change back into
corporate focus. Marginalization is perhaps the most dangerous form of oppression. A
whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus
potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination (Young 53).
If one of the sins of the church is the slow alienation and estrangement of women from
God, from themselves, and ultimately from others in the community, then part of the path
to wholeness is recognition of this oppression. CJ brings this oppression into the public
forum of her church by suggesting womens diverse subjectivities and thereby
encouraging new ways of relating. An example of communicating these diverse subject
positions occurs in LLs sermon (LL and ER are co-pastors of a Seattle Community
church).
And I have an adopted daughter and I talked about the thrill of her coming
into our home and how I felt and I talked about taking, when I first saw
her, when the social worker brought her in, the first thing I did is I smelled
her. And I said this sounds so weird, but I had to smell her hair, because
there is an instinct when you have a child, without even thinking about it,
you sniff them to see if theyre like you. And I said, she smelled like she
belonged to me. And then I used that; that was part of my sermon. I
talked about how we smell to God like his own children, you know, we are
his own children. I used that image and afterwards a man came up to me

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and he said: You really caught me with that one, he said, I started to get
teary, you know. And so I hear the responses and I know ER does too.
And so I think what we do for men is we enable them to get in touch with
their feelings because thats a side of us we share. I think what we do for
women is we give them a role model and a voice in a way that theyve
never had it before. (LL)
Change is subtle; change is a slow turning to the taken for granted things of everyday life.
LLs focus on smell brings vividness to Scriptural meaning as well as evocativeness to
the way God sees her/his children. The turn to the audiences olfactory senses functions
to redirect traditional hermeneutical understanding through the body. As meaning sifts
through tangible experience it becomes more acute, more present; I started to get teary.
In the process of this interaction there is simultaneously revaluation of experiences
typically gendered femalewe enable them [men] to get in touch with their feelings
exposing the supposed natural moorings of gender essentialist traits, and once again
setting difference in motion. This exposure simultaneously ruptures the sedimentation
process of nostalgic desire. These constantly changing, socially constructed forces are
the workings of memory, for the sedimentation of past actions, past proscriptions and
past sanctions compose the cultural resources people utilize in the performances of
themselves. Identity, in this formulation, is the creative performance of memory
(Dickinson 5). By making an audience more aware of their interaction with the stories of
Scripture and encouraging them to engage in critique of itin Walter Fishers terms
narrative fidelity (Narration 10)particular religious orientations are not allowed to
be reified. Bringing an embodied understanding of faith into the pulpit redefines the way

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self and God connect and subsequently, the way self and other connect. Possibilities
open up to recreate communal relations.
However, some people may be dismissive of womens voices and the need to
address their disenfranchisement in the church. I heard one of the men in my Women in
Ministry class at Mars Hill Graduate Schoola seminary in Seattle, Washington-- say
that addressing womens oppression is not as important as evangelism; as spreading the
gospel to those who dont know Christ. Clearly, for this man, there is a hierarchical
relationship between social justice and the message of Christ. But I dont see how the
church can alienate its own people and then turn and supposedly offer a message of
grace, hope, and redemption to others. The message takes on a whole new meaning in
this case: Hey, come along and join our oppressive and violent group. We have the key
to redemption. The message is incongruous, and yet many seemingly are unaware of
this fact. But perhaps more is being done to debunk myths about marginalized peoples in
the church than I realize. SF, the one male pastor I interviewed, told me a story about a
couple of women who had an impact on his faith. Here he recalls one interaction:
And then I met this good, down-home Baptist woman who was almost old
enough to be my mother, at least an aunt. She was just one of these solid,
good as gold people, not a heretic, not a liberal, not a bra-burning feminist
or anything. She was just a woman who felt called of God to be a pastor.
When I met her, when I was able to kind of put a face on the idea of
women in the pastorate, it really threw me for a loop. I began to think, her
name was Carolyn Collins, I began to think, well, Im not sure I could say
that Carolyn shouldnt be a pastor. It kind of particularized it for me; kind

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of put flesh to the idea. And then I began to hear that, well, maybe some
of what Paul said about, I do not suffer women to speak in the church or
usurp authority over men. I began to hear people say, well maybe that
had to do with the culture of his time. Maybe Paul was speaking out of
the patriarchal culture and perhaps that wasnt what he intended for all
time, that maybe it would have been better in Pauls time that women not
be pastors, because it would have been so controversial, the Christian
church would have never gotten off the ground. (SF)
For SF, it was through interaction with women that change occurred and possibilities for
new interpretations emerged. He witnessed a different model of woman pastor from
the stereotype. Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman argue that the only way to change
a White imperialist gaze of the other is not to represent the other through voice, but
to build relationships, in effect, friendships:
Out of obligation you should stay out of our way, respect us and our
distance, and forego the use of whatever power you have over usfor
example, the power to use your language in our meetings, the power to
overwhelm us with your education, the power to intrude in our
communities in order to research us and to record the supposed dying of
our cultures, the power to ingrain in us a sense that we are members of
dying cultures and are doomed to assimilate, the power to keep us in a
defensive posture with respect to our own cultures. So the motive of
friendship remains as both the only appropriate and understandable motive
for white/Anglo feminists engaging in the task as described above. (506)

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The goals of interaction in this case are to listen, care, and engage without judgment.
Friendship requires openness to difference. Lugones and Spelman elaborate on their
meaning of friendship: If you enter the task out of friendship with us, then you will be
moved to attain the appropriate reciprocity of care for you and our wellbeing as whole
beings, you will have a stake in us and in our world, you will be moved to satisfy the
need for reciprocity of understanding that will enable you to follow us in our experiences
as we are able to follow you in yours (506). Hauwerwas concurs with this notion of
friendship when he states:
Such a community depends on the ability to trust in the gifts each brings to
the groups shared existence. They must in a certain sense be out of
control, often dependent on luck to help them over their difficulties.
Luck can be a very misleading term; more properly, it is fate put to good
use by the imaginative skills acquired through a truthful tradition. (Story
Formed Community 185)
Mutuality is fostered through friendship and thus, for many women pastors, is the ideal
critical posture for ministry.

Conclusion
The contours of womens faith experiences coalesce into a rhetorical way of
reading everyday life that is both engendered by the mundane and critically reflexive of
it. This perspective thus becomes an interesting way to define a viable feminist politics
in contemporary American society. One of my colleagues made the argument a few
years ago that we cannot do away with the political position and term feminist until

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violence against women is no longer an issue. I agree with her position that feminism
today seems to be more about reorienting men and women to relationship with each
other, and this is inclusive across mutable boundaries of race, class, sexual orientation,
age, religion, etc. In this context, Irigarays envelope of female desire that is space for
her becoming and flourishing not disconnected from the world, but in relation to it, seems
to be a viable feminist ideal. The way many pastors imagine the health of their church
communities through individual wholeness suggests the rhetorical efficacy of Irigarays
metaphor.
Additionally, Kenneth Burkes concepts of metabiology, orientation, and
recalcitrance, when situated in mundane experience, speak to the power of rhetoric in
the everyday to formulate a critical posture predisposed to care and change. This takes
on salience in light of the power of nostalgic desire to encourage people to escape current
problems in order to occupy more stable and securealbeit imaginarypasts. Bill
McKibben argues that Christians are more concerned about their own needs than the
needs of others. The narrative construction of memory thus arguably defines the
rhetorical force of Christian communities and their surge in membership. Perhaps what
many church communities offer is a return to the past where family values are honored,
the home provides nurture and comfort, basic needs are met, and there is a sense of
care among neighbors. Repercussions for living in this imagined past are reinforcement
of antiquated oppressive structures, both systemic and attitudinal; resulting, for example,
in gender hierarchies that naturalize male dominance and female subordination. RNs
colleague in seminary likening her to a whore or CJs pastor dismissing meeting the

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needs of women in his church because it was simply too much work are examples of the
insidious operation of oppressive attitudes.
However, when feminist theories are submerged in the lived moment, the
presumption of a universal subject, the notion of individual choice, and belief in natural
and determined structures are set at play. Instead of reproducing homogenous theories
and practices disconnected from womens complex experiences of oppression, local
thick descriptions of womens lives reveal subtleties not given to generalizable
principles. Jones believes that the character of the reformed Church is such that these
individual understandings should be heard. Women pastors faith expressions seem to
encourage this hearing. LLs example of talking about God smelling his children to
know they are his own and provoking an emotional connection with one of the men in her
congregation, identifies how embodied understanding functions as critical capacity.
Bringing the audience into meaning production, whether in sermons or otherwise, allows
each individual to move from the inside out and see supposed natural moorings as
constructed and capable of transformation.
But that is not where the story ends. Diversity and unity merge in the
performance of a bigger story of redemption setting people free to attend to the concrete
reality of daily life. In the last chapter, I consider the way the process of identity
formation and performance are a crucial factor in social change. Dickinson states:
Identity is a project, a constant repetition of stylized acts that are not founded on any
secure structure, but instead are enmeshed in constantly changing, socially constructed
forces (5). He argues that these socially constructed forces are the workings of
memory (5), which is why subversion of nostalgic desire becomes an important task for

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the rhetorical critic in the everyday. Additionally, narrative coherence of intersections
among individual and community within memory places may expose the way identity
formation is central to the rhetorical efficacy of social movements. In Susan Zaeskes
words: This process [construction of political subjectivities] involves discursive
practices that facilitate not only development of an isolated individual identity but also
identity in relationship or collective subjectivities (149). To this development of the
political subject I now turn.

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CHAPTER SIX: EPILOGUE EXISTING IN TENSION: NARRATIVE,
FEMINISM, AND RHETORICAL AGENCY

When I asked the women pastors I interviewed about their experience of God, I
found their polysemic and poetic responses intriguing. One woman described her
experience of God as a color as she sought words to define her very personal relationship
with Godindeed, she said it might be hard to keep herself from crying when answering
my question. Here is a pastor who seems to have a really good sense of what the
Christian church should be about, what ministry looks like, what her gifts are, and how
community is a space to hold people accountable to their faith and its practice in the
world, and yet her own experience of God is seemingly mysterious. As I gaze longer at
her words what emerges is an experience of God that resembles an evocative and yet
critical posture toward faith and its practice. To conclude this project I want to look at
another theme from my interviews: women pastors experience of God, to bring together
some final thoughts for a critical rhetorical posture toward social change.
Susan Zaeske argues in her article, Signatures of Citizenship: The Rhetoric of
Womens Antislavery Petitions, that white womens political subjectivities were
developed in the mundane world during the nineteenth century abolitionist movement.
Whereas antebellum women were for the most part politically invisible, Zaeske claims
that their very act of signing petitions fed into a cultural process of developing novel
political consciousness. Consequently, this process of coming to a new awareness of self
also transformed the collective political terrain. The construction of political subjectivity
is a cultural process, related to individuals living experience and the ever-changing
discursive resources available to them (149). For this reason, Zaeske concludes that

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identity formation is a necessary component to the viability of social movements. Karlyn
Kohrs Campbell would concur with this claim in her analysis of the womens suffrage
movement. In the first volume of Man Cannot Speak For Her, she notes that leaders of
womens suffrage did not formally organize until eighteen years after the Seneca Falls
Convention in 1848. Part of the reason was due to the conflict these women witnessed in
the abolitionist movementthe activist roots of many of the women in the suffrage
movementand they did not want to battle similar difficulties (49). They also knew that
it would take time to develop their movements ideology, change the public discourse
surrounding white womens lives, and internally challenge the way women saw
themselves as worthy of particular rights. Conventions were held annually from 18501860 (except 1857) to accomplish these goals. They [conventions] raised morale and
increased commitment to the cause by regularly gathering together like-minded women
and men. They were public forums in which values, norms, and structure emerged,
creating a stable movement ideology and making womans rights part of public
discourse (49-50). Thus identity seems to function as a nexus of social change. Zaeske
puts it this way: The aim of womens discourse is not an attempt to define an isolated
individual ego, but to discover a collective concept of subjectivity which foregrounds the
construction of identity in relationship (Zaeske 162, emphasis in original). The process
is similar for evangelical women pastors and their relationship to Protestantism as well as
their local congregations.
Zaeske uncovers an identity in relationship (162) by looking at the politics of
inclusion and exclusion as well as the counterpublics that result from the latter. She
claims that counterpublics form around the details of their exclusion: The rhetoric of

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counterpublics, then, is directed inward, with an eye toward the discursive construction of
oppositional identities (162). With attention to the way these oppositional identities
develop through the forces that police access to publicity (161), I discovered the way
contemporary women evangelicals narrate their understanding of calling, community,
ministry, and God. However, in contrast to Zaeskes focus on petition signing during the
Jacksonian era with clear cut separations between private and public spheres, the
terrain women pastors negotiate today is the rhetoric of memory and nostalgic desire for
retreat from a seemingly chaotic world.
At the outset of this project, I outlined three feminist desires expressed through
what I believe are ongoing conversations among feminist theorists, critics, and activists:
desire for voice without giving up individual wholeness, desire for change without
reinforcing the status quo, and desire for space to breathe without giving up the project of
reform. In this final chapter I want to explore the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion
based on political subjectivities of women pastors as they each answer one of my last
questions in our interview: How do you experience God? My hope is to pull together
some final thoughts on their negotiation of desires for freedom, what implications result
from following particular orientations in relation to the Divine, and how to take into
account the complexity of existence in the process of critique in daily life. I end this
chapter with a look at possibilities for further research using the rhetorical contours of
lived experience and critical posture toward social change.
Greg Dickinson argues, Both memory and consumption are located in the places
of everyday behaviors; places that at once utilize the unifying force of memory while
encoding the fragmenting and atomizing forces of consumption (5). He continues to

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argue that the complexities of modern day society result in identity loss, which makes
consumers hungry for recovery of this loss through connection and community. The
way people compensate for loss of identity, according to Dickinson, is through nostalgia
(i.e., a return home). Memory thus takes on interesting rhetorical dimensions as it
becomes a grammar or a blue print for how to retrieve a lost self, which is supposedly
authentic and self-actualized. Landscapes of memory draw on memories in an attempt
to authenticate themselves as sites and to authenticate the identities of those who visit
them (1). Dickinsons study argues that actual urban spaces, such as Old Town
Pasadena, California offer people the possibility to physically participate in this retreat to
the past. I made a similar argument in a paper on Martha Stewart Living: consumers are
able to visually retreat to an imagined past where they may perform self in creative and
liberating ways. However, problems result in the process of performing self in relation to
the contours of a particular memory site. There is simultaneous diminishing of critical
orientations toward self and other as well as the complexities of daily life. Ultimately,
although there is a certain amount of freedom in participating in memory places, self
expression and communal integrity are sacrificed on the altar of fantasy realities, which
can only result in reinforcing cultural hegemony. Dickinson notes this problem in the
reinforcement of western imperialism through the purchase of Banana Republic items:
The power encoded is not the bland power of corporate suburban life, but rather the
power of exotic times and places (17). He also notes that while Banana Republic draws
on the nostalgia of traditional manhood, Victorias Secret is its opposite: drawing on
womans privileged position as sexual object (18).

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The rhetorical impact of Victorias Secret lies not only in its nostalgic
invocation of oppressive, traditional gender roles; the stores strength
comes in its relation with Banana Republic. The two support and demand
each other in the building of a repressive past and present. (18)
Just as memory functions to construct new identities, its apparent incoherence in relation
to daily life provides means for its own undoing. The task is to recognize how the
rhetorical terrain of memory functions in any particular context as well as how political
subjectivities operate in relation to these memory sites. Mark Freeman and Jens
Brockmeier, in their analysis of Augustines autobiographical masterpiece, Confessions,
state:
But there is also something unique about the main turning point in
Augustines Confessions, namely, that here, for the first time in history,
the function of memory itself becomes seen as vitally important in the
fashioning of identity. [. . .] Among memorys many marvels, there is
perhaps one that looms largest: Anything and everything that we might
remember, from the simplest ideas to the deepest ethical precepts by
which we lead our lives, have [sic] been in existence prior to their
instantiation in us. The task is to find them. (88)
In a sense, my question to women pastors: How do you experience God? is a
question about the rhetoric of longing to return home. For many Christians, faith
adherence is supported by desire to eventually live in a peaceful worldwhat many refer
to as heavenfree from violence and strife. Additionally, faith adherence is about

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finding meaning and order for life and how it should be lived. When I asked LL how she
experienced God, she replied:
Through worship, through his still small voice in my heart, through other
people, through children, through grandchildren, through my husbands
ministering to me when I, almost a year and a half ago now, I was terribly
ill. Through the people in this church who laid hands on me and prayed
for me.
Her experience of God is literally constituted through relationships with other people. LL
also recollects a time when the force of touch brought healing to her body. Her
understanding of God was mediated through the bodies of others. There is a complex
rendering of meaning as it moves from her embodied understanding of God at work in
her life to theological meaning in her care for the people in her immediate context.
Movement between what is lived and what is understood provides a fuller and more
complex picture of theory in connection to praxis. I experience God all the time in all
kinds of situations. I mean he is very real to me. He is my friend; Jesus is my brother,
my friend, my savior (LL).
While Jesus fits into a social role of brother and friend, and even savior, LLs
description of the salience of faith expression in this next narrative reveals how her
experience of God must negotiate social propriety to prove to an audience her adherence
to doctrinal orthodoxy.
Now this week, I was told, I prayed at a meeting that we had in our church
just a few weeks ago, and I prayed a prayer that was a reformed
ecumenical prayer that refers to God as God only. And I didnt say, in

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Jesuss name, and some elder from one of our more conservative churches
decided that I must have a feminist agenda. This man has never spoken to
meever, but he decided that I must have a feminist agenda that I was
pushing and I probably needed to be disciplined for that. (LL)
Constantly proving ones faith through proper performance of it, while dancing on the
edge of potential exclusion from church and communion with God highlights the
representational nature of faith experience, and why so many women explain their
experience of God in uncharacteristic ways. Collapsing boundaries between self and
other is literally the way many women experience God. This contrast comes into view
through my interview with a male Southern Baptist pastor. When I asked him about his
experience of God he began with nature, through good music, through good literature
and through certain Biblical passages and slowly moved to an experience of God
described as intellectual ascent.
Good preaching, that can challenge the mind and motivate and touch the heart. So I
guess Im saying in a way that even though we say the Bible is the sole authority, there
are a lot of things that are involved in interpreting the Bible, that are, that other people,
the tradition of the church, prayer . . .. (SF)
When I questioned SF about his contrast between the intellectual and emotional presence
of God he affirmed that emotional experiences play a part in faith. I guess when I say
the Scriptures are the sole authority for the faith and practice of a Christian doesnt mean
its the only thing we draw on. But youre making me think of things in ways I havent
thought about them before (SF). SFs experience of God depends upon the readability
of his faith in terms of Scriptural interpretation, tradition, and faith expression. The
Scripture is the barometer. Its what we check everything else against (SF). Experience
must conform to performance, and this performance through tradition is often understood
through masculine constructs.
In her book, The Gendered Pulpit, Roxanne Mountford describes how the physical space
of the church, and specifically the pulpit, are understood through a masculine ethos. This
masculine ethos is synonymous with the ethos of God, where experience of God is kept
distant from human interaction. Mountford explains this distance through a reading of
Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick where Father Mapple ascends his pulpit by ladder used
in mounting a ship from a boat at sea (Mountford 17). The pulpit is literally a fortress
and the preacher is a soldier and sailor, offices associated with traditional masculinity
and the absence of women (18). Mountford contrasts this pulpit with those occupied by
women preachers in the forest, under trees, on the streets, and on makeshift pedestals,
outside the institutional church building. This contrast reveals how the masculine pulpit
imbues meanings of strength and virility; while the feminine pulpit communicates
humble labors and forgiveness contrasted with the ills of institutional authority (18).
What one experiences as the authentic presence of God is therefore mitigated by
orientations toward biblical interpretation and faith performance. Women breach these
orientations by simply taking up this masculine space through their bodies. However, if
women live within traditional evangelical constructs without questioning how their

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feminine nature and bodies are reproduced through male desire, experience of God may
be recast in oppressive ways.
However, the narratives of women pastors reveal a process of bringing depths to the
surface, an unearthing of possibilities. RN describes this process in her own faith journey:
One thing I would say about my faith is in the midst of these struggles, and I dont know
how they will come across or be perceived, but I think one thing I am eternally grateful
for is somehow who God is has never been rocked; it has been expanded. Since I was a
child I have known that God was there. I think there were periods of my younger life
where I thought I couldnt meet Gods approval. But even in that period there still, deep,
deep down, was a sense of being loved. There was a disconnect maybe in me, where I
had to get my heart and mind together in that, and so um, I spent many years wanting to
be the perfect person for God. Then I had the breakthrough: thats the whole point youre
not perfect. I am grateful for that. (RN)
For RN, how she sees herself is how she sees God; faith and identity are interconnected.
Yet her experience of God, as she explains it, simultaneously retracts from view. She is,
in Simone de Beauvoirs words: deep immanence and far off transcendence; she
speaks [. . .] in close accord with the real (qtd. in Henry 9). Thus the female subject,
according to Henry, is paradoxical.
While male subjectivity has an outside and an inside--a public self that can engage in
aggressive debate with other public selves, and an invulnerable private self [. . .]--female
subjectivity exists in the tension between inside and outside, between immanence and
transcendence; in surfaces that represent invisible depths, and secret presentiments that
are revealed in public display. A womans private self, therefore, is unprotected by the
fixed boundary that protects a mans interiority. But that lack of protection, that
vulnerability, is precisely what makes the rhetoric of exposure such an effective public
strategy: it is what pulls the audience beyond the surfaces, and charges the performance
with something larger than itself. (Henry 11)
RNs struggle to find her voice in relation to her faith marks the heart of feminist reform.
As women face exclusion from social institutions, whether directly in terms of access or
indirectly in terms of, for example, sexual harassment, surface and depth, reality and
illusion collaborate to motivate particular courses of action. Feminine identity thus
points to the complexities of existence understood through the lived moment. If the
rhetorical terrain of memory is to reduce complexity in the process of providing stability
and order, then the feminine subjectin all its contradictionsmaps out an important
critical posture toward social change.
Contemporary urban experience combined with the growth of consumer culture
makes the maintenance of stable, coherent identities difficult. Memory offers to
consumers the possibility of coherent identities firmly situated within a warmly
remembered past (Dickinson 1-2). What is tragic of peoples need for memory is the
way security trumps individuality. While memory serves as a resource for creating
selves (Dickinson 2), the normative contours of memory places (2) demand different
degrees of conformity. CR talks about this notion of conformity through her memory of
a traumatic event: her involvement, in the eighties in a church plant that turned into a
cult. A cult in the sense of mind control, not in the sense of doctrine; that was twelve
years ago; since then Ive been recovering pieces of my life. CR thus describes her
experience of God as a process of recovery and renewal:

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I feel like the subjective side of my relationship with God has been the longest to heal
since the cult. The feelings of being able to feel God, any kind of feelings, the feelings of
being able to feel people, satisfaction in work, love; intense, even sexual attraction took a
while to come back. All the affective stuff was pretty closed down. At this place now I
experience God as a color. The color of that is something like this, that comes out of a,
there is more blue in it than that, the colors that are in the Northern islands from the San
Juans up North through British Columbia I assume Alaska is like this too. Where the
trees above the islands, water, rock, tree line, Douglas Fir, and those waters in the
summer when its calm there are colors in there when I have the most sense of being in
Gods presence alone. Its that color. (CR)
Color binds CRs wounds. The intangibility of colorin terms of having a linear
referent; one cannot point to an object and say, this is blueallows CRs experience of
God to be mutable and open to change. Katherine Henry discusses this notion of the
unreadability of character in the final chapter of her dissertation on rhetorics of exposure.
She uses the nature of hysteria as a primarily feminine phenomenon to look at exposure,
representation, and anti-representation. As Henry relates different perspectives on
hysteria she notes that part of its appeal is the way both actors and audience are provided
space to forget the separation between them. Likewise, actors who discuss their craft
often speak of moments of forgettingmoments in which they become their character, in
which their consciousness of stage and performance and audience disappears (202). For
CR, there is power in the unreadability of social performance; depth of character seems to
emanate from an inner private space that has not been made over in the likeness of social
propriety.
Thus it is uncertainty rather than certainty of representationnot knowing rather than
knowingthat creates the illusion of interiority; depth of character, in short, depends not
on the things that are public and conventional, but precisely on the kind of somatic
representations that are termed hysterical. (Henry 202)
At precisely the juncture where experience eludes explanation, certainty gives way to
possibility. ER explains this concept through her experience of God:

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There are times during that walk to the ministry, to ordination, of such
terrible pain that I would literally lie on the floor and cry and cry and cry.
You know truly prostrate before the Lord and cry. And there would
always be the calmness afterwards, after the tears and then almost always
a note in the mail or something or a phone call. How do I experience
God? [. . .] So its kind of like each week [. . .] I need to make it [sermon]
become real to me, so thats how I think I experience God, through
working on my own sermons. (ER)
Diverse scholars on narrative theory and practice argue that everyday stories are the
substance upon which people make sense of their world, and these stories entail distinct
logics and meanings. Kenneth Burke reiterates this point in his concept of identification:
interlocutors come to an interaction with meanings that literally stand under (i.e., substance) their sense of self, orienting them toward the present moment. This is why Burke
argues that there are countless ways of reading any one moment. Rather, we must take
A back into the ground of its existence, the logical substance that is its causal ancestor,
and on to a point where it is consubstantial with non-A; then we may return, this time
emerging with non-A instead (A Grammar xix). CRs experience of God, for example,
reveals truths essential to her understanding and at the same time is a creative process;
discord between expectation and reality carves out space to enact self. The dialectic of
habits of embodiment (Crable 308) in relation to symbolic patterns articulate the
necessity of paying attention to the present lived moment in all its ambiguity, complexity,
and local thick (Geertz) meaning. This is what women pastors accomplish as they
reorient to their own relationships with God.

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With this attention to daily life, knowledge of oppression and its materiality adopt
weight and force as one person may experience a combination of inequities within any
lived moment.
I was born to a mother who was very abuse by my father. And I always use this analogy.
Maybe I was pounding on her womb in her womb. Why are you giving birth to another
woman? You are so abused, you know. You couldnt do anything about it. Why are you
bringing another woman into this world? And quite a while I wasnt proud of being a
girl. Quite a while. And so I said my women movement started in my mothers womb.
And she was a great teacher. She never went to school. Her father was very educated,
highly educated person in Korean culture, but in Korean country in her time no girls
could go to school, but she learned. She was a self-taught person. While her father was
teaching other kids she overhead all this memorizing, you know, reciting and all that and
she taught herself. She was able to read and write. And her lesson for me was, never live
like I did. You dont have to know how to cook, how to sew, how to do cleaning, how to
do anything. Get your education and stand on your feet, and dont accept abuse like I
did. (JK)
For JK, the first pastor of the Church of Mary Magdalene (a church for homeless women
in Seattle, Washington) growing up in an abusive home shaped her political subjectivity.
She understood from her mother that liberation springs from education. As JK later
describes her ministry to homeless women as one that weaves together faith and culture,
it is her understanding of abuse that leads to her understanding of what church and
ministry mean. Homeless women wander in from the streets to the sanctuary of JKs
church, living multiple oppressions that inform their perspectives of the Divine. So no
goodness, nothingness, these homeless women relate to what barrenness means (JK).
Without the complex texture of oppression as it materializes in womens experience
possibilities for change become moot.
Desire for womens flourishing is the reason Serene Jones looks at intersecting
categories of oppression in relation to womens lived experience. She utilizes Iris
Youngs discussion of the five faces of oppression: exploitation, marginalization,
powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. In Chapter Three, I discussed these
categories of oppression in relation to the way evangelical feminists narrate the
intricacies of injustice. Many of the leaders, speakers, and writers of the movement came
to voice by learning how to articulate their oppression in relation to traditional biblical
hermeneutics. One of the repercussions of their calling out oppression was the way it
eventually became part of a larger narrative describing the second wave of the feminist
movement as radical and anti-institutional. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell notes the way the
rhetoric of the womens liberation movement bifurcated womens causes by positing
feminist reform against traditional gender roles. Admittedly, defining the complexity of
oppression in womens lives must take into account the way cultural hegemony functions
to pit women against each other and even subsume their voices within dominant
narratives that dismiss the salience of lived experience.
In her 1996 article, Dominant and Muted Discourses in Popular Representations
of Feminism, Julia Wood argues that feminist theorists still struggle for a praxis that
works in womens daily lives. She states that if feminists ignore dominant cultural

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narratives that colonize lives, logic, and public policy, they will trivialize their insight,
being dismissed as dogmatic rather than socially efficacious. Wood argues for feminist
theorists to let their theory enter life. I believe that feminism must emerge and never
leave womens local and lived experience and must build a viable political voice from an
embodied and mundane posture. Wood examines three books in her essay: Christina
Hoff Sommerss Who Stole Feminism? (1994), Katie Roiphes The Morning After: Sex,
Fear, and Feminism (1993), and Naomi Wolfs Fire with Fire: The New Female Power
and How to Use It (1993) (171). Because these three books draw on and participate in
popular cultural narratives, they provide an opening to inspect larger trends that shape
discursive practices and the identities and options made visible and invisible by the
discourses that circulate at any moment in the life of a culture (182). In her review of
these books, Wood claims that a substantive feminist position must address four
interrelated premises that coalesce into a dominant cultural narrative:
1. The United States is a homogenous culture (melting pot) in which
individuals are never limited by, nor treated differently because of,
gender, race, and class.
2. Individuals are autonomous agents who have, and should embrace,
personal responsibility for their choices, as well as for solving any
problems they have.
3. Traditional patterns of social interaction and views of knowledge are
correct. The alternatives to traditional practices are wrong.
4. Because feminism does not endorse premises 1-3, it is a polemical
movement rather than a form of social, critical, scholarly, and political

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praxis; by extension, feminists are unintellectual extremist ideologues.
(173)
Woods discussion of Roiphes, Sommerss, and Wolfs texts may not seem relevant to
the huge body of feminist theory and criticism written over the last two centuries. In other
words, their perspectives are easily countered. However, as I consider a feminist politics
that is able to move between everyday life and larger social patterns, these works and
Woods critique take on salience. Woods muted discourses articulates well what
happens to feminist identities in relation to nostalgic desires. Through her keen
exploration of feminist theory and practice, she develops a rubric that helps me identify
cultural blindspots existing in memory places.
Seemingly simplistic and archaic is the metaphor of America as a melting pot.
Yet Wood notes how firmly entrenched the white, middle-to-upper class, heterosexual
norm is in feminist thought. This perspective is obviously not overt, but covert, resting in
an uncritical perspective of self as author in relation to text, subject, and audience.
Roiphe, Sommers, and Wolf, all of whom still have powerful voices in feminist circles,
come from elite institutions and have successful professional lives. Alternatives to this
homogenous perspective, according to Wood, are offered by many other feminist writers
and thinkers who analyze intersections among race, class, and gender. Although
feminists adopt different positions regarding how much to deal with diversities among
women, virtually all current feminist thinkers are mindful of the dangers of essentialist
views of women as an undifferentiated group (Wood 174). However, engaging the
universal subject seems much trickier than being mindful of diverse perspectives.
Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek argue in Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric that

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cultural studies scholars use spatial metaphors such as boundaries, centers, margins, and
borderlands (291) to understand and locate the invisibile and transitory white subject.
It is important that we acknowledge that the radicality of conservatism of
essentialism depends, to a significant degree, on who is utilizing it, how it
is deployed, and where its effects are concentrated. By viewing
whiteness as a rhetorical construction, we avoid searching for any
essential nature to whiteness. (293)
Countering the tendencies toward homogeneity of the privileged authors perspective
does require mindfulness of diverse positionalities, but also a search for that which is
invisible or that which eludes analysis yet exerts influence over everyday life
(Nakayama and Krizek 293). Thus, interpretive variations take on salience in rhetorical
criticism in order to work with the itinerant nature of meaning in everyday life.
When I spoke with the pastor from the Assemblies of God denomination I was amazed at
her story of struggle to gain credibility as a pastor. She spoke of a group of women
pastors who meet to support each other, including a growing number of African
American women pastors. Many of these women are called to churches populated by
women or people of color. According to my interviewee, the Assemblies of God board
places African American women pastors in roles that will not be a threat to the white,
masculine structures that traditionally define the leadership of this denomination. Teresa
E. Snorton discusses this problem through an African American perspective on pastoral
care. She argues that it is
essential to recognize and acknowledge the imbalance of power that exists in such
relationships [white and non-white], not only on the therapeutic level, but also on the
cultural, social, and political levels. The helper can begin to equalize the division of
power by becoming knowledgeable about [. . .] the world of women of color. (Snorton
59)
One of the ways to accomplish this task is to listen to women pastors of color to discover
the way whiteness functions in relation to the evangelical faith tradition. Many of the
white women pastors I interviewed desire to see past their own assumptions in terms of
the way they interact with their local communities and in the way they understand the

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Divine. What women of color offer all people of faith is a position of critique that is
always postured toward change. Bell hooks continually reminds her audiences that the
woman of color does not have the luxury of abstraction from her body as it is lived, as it
is marked as other, and as it is used and abused for the purpose of domination and
control. In a sense, the body of the woman of color brings an attitude of vulnerability to
the rhetorical process. Katherine Henry, in her discussion of feminist reform, notes how
important vulnerability is in shaping public action.
A vulnerable public self translates into vulnerable public institutions
public institutions that, because they have failed in their claim to protect
their citizens, are in need of radical reform. Losing the cloak of
invulnerability is comparable to challenging the benign mask behind
which everyday oppression operates: both cloak and mask are false
surfaces that hide an underlying violence; both images beg for exposure,
and exposurein both casesis the impetus for reform. (Henry 219)
Germane to this discussion of feminist tendencies to neglect the universal subject
is a persistent debate between gender essentialists and gender constructivists. Popular
belief suggests that if differences between men and women are eradicated there will be a
slippery slope toward androgyny, relativism, and chaotic gender relations. This is a
highly reductive conflation of feminist arguments, but seems to articulate well the second
premise of Woods muted discourses that individuals are autonomous agents: those
who do not recognize their autonomy employ a victim mentality (175). I find it
amazing how well this notion of personal responsibility, individuality, and choice is
written into public policy and social activism. An example is Sommerss and Roiphes

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stance on sexual discrimination and violence. Wood notes their consequent belief that
women are not in the middle of a social epidemic. Roiphe and Sommers reject the claim
that women are commonly victimized [. . .], claiming that sexual discrimination and
violence are not widespread: If I were standing in the middle of an [a rape] epidemic,
crisis, asks Roiphe, wouldnt I know it? (175). Wolf echoes this sentiment by stating
that women who assume a victim mentality impede their own progress toward selfknowledge and empowerment as well as perpetuate a male chauvinism predisposed to
limit their access to equality (175). In their assessment, date rape might be construed as
the responsibility of the woman, because of the clothes she wears, the way she provokes
sexual desire through flirtatious activities, and isolating herself somewhere with a man.
Alternative discourses not engaged by Wolf, Roiphe, and Sommers argue that ideologies
normalize violence between intimates (West, 1995) and sexual harassment (Bingham,
1997; Clair, 1993; Strine, 1992) (175). Assuming that freedom may be accessed
through different choices presupposes a particular level of autonomy that many women
do not have, or are not aware that they have, and cannot access through easy or overt
means. Consequently, when some particular patterns of sexual relations are acceptable it
is difficult to see the violence in operation: it may be subtle, even diffuse and therefore
invisible.
Wood claims that autonomy is also problematic because autonomy is not equally
encouraged and rewarded in the sexes (176). Women who are self-reliant, independent,
and intelligent risk reprimand for stepping outside normative gender roles. Karlyn Kohrs
Campbell claims in her article on Hating Hillary that vehemence toward Hillary
Rodham Clinton is largely due to her unemotional, objective, and intelligent public

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advocacy. She is literally hated because she does not perform to audience expectations
by appropriating strategies associated with womensuch as domestic metaphors,
emotional appeals to motherhood, and the likeand avoiding such macho strategies as
tough language, confrontation or direct refutation, and any appearance of debating ones
opponents (The Discursive Performance 5). Hillarys appeals for health care reform,
according to Campbell, are simply not told with enough affective appeal. Campbell
concludes from her analysis that when women step outside traditional feminine public
roles they risk hostility from diverse constituencies.
This is also the reason Wood claims that women and men as groups are not
equally encouraged to develop autonomy. The material, social, and symbolic
circumstances typical of womens and mens lives differ in ways that promote distinctive
identities, perspectives, priorities, and modes of interacting (Haraway, 1988; Harding,
1991; Wood, 1992; Wood & Cox, 1993) (176). One of my friends in Seattle is moving
through the process of ordination in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. I asked her to speak
to my Womens Rights class to help us understand ways in which women in religious
contexts struggle against institutional, theological, and personal structures and patterns.
What my students found most provocative was her personal struggle for confidence in
her professional calling of pastor. She articulated her decision to become a pastor
through many little moments, such as speaking up in a graduate theology class and her
right as a woman to do so, or her reflection on the possibility that she may not marry if
she pursues ordination, for what man would want to marry a female pastor? She mused:
should she shut down desire? Because the evangelical pastoral role traditionally has not
been open to women, the decision to enter into masculine space seems to be

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contentious, requiring much courage. For my friend, even if women choose to pursue
roles traditionally characterized male they will most likely engage diverse struggles in
the process of mapping uncharted terrain. Roxanne Mountford in her book, The
Gendered Pulpit, concurs with this reality as she interviews three women Protestant
pastors, noting their unique struggles as they work within rhetorical space traditionally
gendered as male. The ways these three women disrupt expectations from the pulpit
reorders and reorients congregants perspectives of faith, self, and Divine. Consequently,
plenty of courage is required to leave what is comfortable, even if the situation is
oppressive, and search for nebulous notions of freedom.
Many women pastors go through such a long response to hearing, answering, and
fulfilling Gods call on their lives that they understand how God works through time,
space, and lived experience. This awareness allows them to see the mutable nature of
faith and the way Scriptural interpretation perpetuates particular kinds of cultural
practices. As many women described their perseverance through the process of
ordination, I realized they were rarely afforded the luxury to simply pursue their
vocation. Rather, many pastors were subjected to communal, social, and personal
scrutiny as gender performance disavowed professional ethos. However, this process
works like fire bringing to the surface dross of the Christian faith; one is able to skim off
what binds and constrains and then look in a new direction, able to start fresh. Women
pastors occupy a unique space in which to define and expose sins of sociality as well as
turn people to spaces of redemption.
PS, the current pastor to homeless women at the Church of Mary Magdalene,
describes this process through her experience of God:

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I look out the window in the morning and see this beautiful world. I
experience God that way. Thats the other thing I was raised to do is give
thanks. That goes way back to the Sunday school part. I sit down with
my daughter at breakfast and marvel at seeing somebodys life unfold and
grow, so I experience God that way. And here, its just, watching them
care for each other. Its such a powerful proof of the power of the spirit,
you know? There are sometimes very rapid miracles happening here.
Most of them are pretty slow, but I see people growing all the time. (PS)
PS articulates beautifully the long protracted process of change. This process is not
disconnected from daily life. A critical rhetorical posture toward change is emergent.
Katherine Henry notes how feminist reform calls us to look beyond the public and male
experiences of trauma to the private, secret experiences that women encounter [. . .] as
long as we understand privacy as something from which we turn our eyes and avert our
attention, we contribute to the oppression of women (216).
This turning or reorientation, though slow and subtle, is tenacious. LW describes
how her respect for Scripture emanates from her moms interaction with the Bible and
LWs witness of this interaction growing up.
She reads her Bible every morning. Shell quote Scripture. Shes a little
hammering over the head with Scripture at times. And she misquotes it. [.
. .] There was a period in her life that was just so dark, the thing that kept
her alive, literally, was Scripture; and the trustworthiness that the Lutheran
church taught about Scripture. So thats part of where the respect came in
my taking so long to get ordained was, and I think this is true with most

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people who are honestly fundamental [in terms of fundamentalist
religious orientation; religious right] and not just abusively fundamental,
that at the most fundamental level she got put back together by the Bible.
And if that were taken away theres still something there that would fall
apart. And so you understand that about my Mom and you just let it lie
and you just let it lie and realize OKAY, this is, we all have our places that
we could, uh, well, were just fragile. That we could just lose it at any
point and something about Scripture shored her up there and still holds her
together there. (LW)
When meaning is forced to move its way through experience it takes on the contours of
life; some things are held onto and others discarded. LW was my pastor for two years,
and continues to be a great friend. I witnessed her love for Scripture and the way Church
performs Scripturegrace, hope, redemption, justice, and mercynot merely imitates it.
There is congruity between these stories and the living of faith; what one believes and
what one practices are therefore interconnected. At the same time, women pastors
articulate a vision of the Christian church that call people to something larger than
themselves.
A third thread in the centrist narrative is that conventional patterns of social
relations and traditional structures of knowledge are beyond dispute (Wood 176). Wood
notes that many scholars, such as Allan Bloom in his Closing of the American Mind,
believe there are natural and innate differences between men and women; in other words,
biology is destiny (Wood 176). Bloom asserts that men are selfish and must remain
so in order to fulfill their biological destiny of maintaining machismohis word (176-

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77). The trouble with this argument is that it still seems to have cultural power, notably
in the recent claim by Larry Summers (former President of Harvard) that women may not
excel in the math and science disciplines due to their innate differences from men. He
later apologized and retracted his comment, but highlighted prevalent belief (and debate)
that traditional epistemological perspectives are right and true. As Wood notes,
when Sommers and Roiphe suggest that rape and sexual harassment are part of nature
mens proclivities to sexual aggressionthere is an obvious conflation of what is
biologically normal with what is culturally normal. Wood cites several of Roiphes
claims on sexual harassment: Once sexual harassment includes someone glancing down
your shirt, the meaning of the phrase has been stretched beyond recognition; Unwanted
sexual attention is part of nature (qtd. in Wood 177). There is seeming distrust of
personal experience in this context, echoing Walter Fishers contrast between the rational
world paradigm and the narrative world paradigm. The narrative world allows the
untrained thinker to be the expert, whereas the rational world requires participants to
know the rules of engagement and be trained for battle. From the narrative paradigm
view, the experts are storytellers and the audience is not a group of observers but are
active participants in the meaning-formation of the stories (Narration 13). Lorraine
Code concurs with this view in her development of an epistemology of everyday life
(xi) to counter the ethical and philosophical rigidity of traditional western epistemic
structures. She argues that womens narratives, because they occupy cultural locations
caught between inclusion and exclusion, offer valuable resources for transforming
epistemic realties and the ethical orientations within them. One of her essays explores

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the nature of gossip and its capacity to cull truths from the lived moment even as it is
dismissed as a valuable means to get at truth.
Gossip is located, situated discourse, subtly informative, yet never stable
nor fixed. For these reasons, above all, it has a peculiar appeal to
feminists working both in epistemology and in moral-political theory to
contest injustices and oppressions; to work toward creating humanly
adequate social orders. (153)
Why is there still so much distrust of personal experience, especially within
feminist circles? Wood states how interesting it is to read Roiphe, Sommers, and Wolf
lament the excessive use of personal stories, while each author assumes her personal
location and experiences authorize her not only to speak about women in general, but
perhaps more importantly, to discount the experiences of women in other locations
(178). Additionally, their analysis, such as Wolfs of Take Back the Night Marches,
flatten out the complexity of womens experience of violence, which may range from
being unpleasant to life threatening (179). Is it possible that Wolfs own capacity to
speak out renders her unaware that powerful structural forces suppress some womens
voices? (Wood 178).
To combat the supposed normalcy of traditional forms of social interaction and
belief that traditional structures of knowledge are correct, Wood argues that we have to
pay close attention to the language of sexual violence as well as the relevance of
individual stories. Language is often used to conceal brutality rather than reveal it, as in
the shift from battering women and battering men to domestic violence (179).
Also, the way the media characterizes abuse as spousal conflict or family problems,

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even using the language of love: he loved her too much, she was the victim of love,
love went too far (Wood 179), diminishes the reality of violence in womens daily
lives. To change these patterns of violence, Wood argues that we must not only pay
attention to the use and meaning of language, but men cannot continue to naturally be
viewed as sexual aggressors, with implications for womens identity as victim.
Comparatively, women as victims of violence should not be discursively downplayed or
disguised; both the reality of oppression and possibility for transformation need
acknowledgement in any given context.
RS narrates the power of the everyday in her own experience of God.
Maybe all of us at some point are experiencing God in the grand, right?
Thats what you write when you first meet Christ and all those things.
And Ive finally come to this place of looking and being watchful and as
mindful as I can. I can, and sometimes it goes unnoticed and sometimes it
comes up as a surprise of Gods presence. [. . .] In the small ways that God
is caring for me. In the little, the little gifts of the day, cause I, you know,
I think sometimes Im very quick to say: where, where was God in that?
Or where was God in this? And then I start to think, well, what I believe
about God is that God never leaves my side. [. . .] So in my daily
experience, I think I started to learn . . . being very specific in telling God
what I need, because I think so much of my approach is: well, tell me
how it should be or what can I do for you? Rather than saying, asking for
one little thing each day, whether its, Lord, today, I need peace, however
you bring that, and trusting that will come forth in my day. (RS)

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RS reveals how her experience of God slowly moved from public expectation for how
God might be experienced to small, subtle, and intimate experiences of Gods care. In
order to understand her experience of God, she asks herself rhetorically, Where did I
feel most integrated, most alive in the ways God, you know, would, would want me to
be? Where did I feel energy? Where did I feel like my gifts were being utilized? Or that
Christ was near? As she moves through her day, answers come to these questions as she
is aware of Gods presence woven through relations and actions. What RSs experience
of God demonstrates is a lived tension between the normative social structures that
determine what is right and true, and the way the messiness of life appropriates these
structures. One may allow dominant cultural narratives to colonize lived experience, or
one may work against these structures, even leaving organized religion altogether and
searching for alternative paths to the Divine. However, the power of social change is
caught up in the notion of reform; in the context of women pastors lives reform means
working within discourses of domination. Feminist reform thus entails a reorientation
toward the mundane and the politics of social change latent within it.
Finally, Wood argues--as a natural extension of her discussion of the three
previous premises--that it is easy to dismiss feminism as a polemic movement, not an
intellectual, political, and philosophical praxis; [. . .] feminists are irrational ideologues
(180). Woods main contention with the three authors reviewed is their position as
feminists: claiming an insider view, while defining their objections to feminism by
highlighting some feminist theory and neglecting others, most notably, pieces germane to
feminist concerns. In repressing prominent feminist discourses, Roiphe, Wolf, and
Sommers each reinforce the widely held misconception that critical reflection and debate
do not exist among feminists (181). This oversight might be ignored if dominant
cultural debate credited feminism with more intellectual capability. Wood suggests
asking some different questions about womens lives, such as:
(3) In preference to, or in tension with, attention to womens responsibility
for control over their sexual activities, might it not be worthwhile to
examine the character and bases of what research indicates is many mens
sense of entitlement to sexual liberties?

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(4) Instead of blaming women for a lack of agency, would it be useful to
identify and seek to remedy social and discursive practices that diminish
many womens voices?
(5) To augment analysis of particular excesses of feminism, might
examination of other libratory movements divulge ways in which excesses
sometimes foment important, more modest changes? (182)
Lilian Calles Barger, founder of the Damaris Project, offers a contemporary look
at Christian feminists efforts to merge faith and culture in womens lives. The Damaris
Project is a national non-profit organization based in Dallas, Texas, and is one of the few
nationwide working to merge feminist theory and practice, spirituality, and daily life.
This organization works with thousands of women across America, many wounded by
the traditional church, encouraging reengagement with Jesus, the Bible, and church
community. Here is a description of their mission from their website:
We are committed to increasing our understanding of how God works in the world, and
to valuing women's contributions to that world. We believe that women are seeking
spiritual values not only in the wake of unprecedented legal and social freedoms in the
West, but also as a response to the global plight of women.
We seek to live an embodied faith that impacts the daily lives of women and
communities. We facilitate this by creating places of dialogue on college campuses and in
the community through forums, small groups, and a variety of other programs. The think
tank portion of our work encourages increased understanding in the areas of spirituality,
women's studies, and popular culture. (www.damarisproject.org)
When I learned of this organization I became intrigued with the way it merged spirituality
and culture, honoring womens voices from all walks of life. I spoke with one of the
leaders of the organization who sent me some texts, including the readings for their
academic salons. The readings for these salons are a collection of works by authors such
as Alice Walker, Dorothy Sayers, and Simone de Beauvoir. The power of these readings,
I assume, is how they emerge in the lived moment as they connect the diversity of
womens lived experiences.
At a recent lecture at Seattle University bell hooks spoke on the Black female
body. She described the problem of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist,

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patriarchy as it influences the way we study and understand the Black female body
through history, culture, and politics. She also noted the way the Black female body is
subtly dismissed and erased in contemporary popular culture. One student stood up to
ask hooks the question, What do we do in light of this knowledge? Hooks answer was
particularly provocative to me. She first identified the problem of being stuck. With
all of the advancements in our thinking, research, and analysis, why as a culture are we
still stuck, caught between feminist rhetorics of radicalism and conservatism with no
place in between to exist. Her solution was long, protracted, individual and small group
change. To illustrate this style of activism, hooks told a story of a man with whom she
built a relationship: she defined him as white, working class, heterosexual, and red
neck. This description contrasted with her identity as a Black, female, middle-class,
critical cultural scholar. One of her discussions with this man surrounded the issue of his
homosexual son. Hooks recalls that their discussion was particularly productive in the
way they were able to articulate the arbitrary boundaries of sex, the fluidity of gender
norms, and possibilities for change. Beyond our assumptions regarding cultural identity
are possibilities for change, but these possibilities are latent within the context of
friendship, trust, and narratives emerging from lived experience. These are the politics of
becoming unstuck. Additionally, the context for connection between feminist theory
and praxis is friendship. For Lugones and Spelman, friendship provides a window of
hope for reconciliation. But the viability of reconciliation must be through an attitude of
collaboration, as the critical finger turns in on itself and asks the one pointing to do some
reflection, and more importantly, to listen.

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Websites:
www.thechurchreport.org
www.damarisproject.org

APPENDICIES

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APPENDIX A
Tentative Interview Schedule
1. Tell me about how you came to acquire your position at this church.
2. Why did you choose to become a pastor?
a. How do you define calling?
b. Did you encounter obstacles from others as your pursued your goals?
c. How do you understand your role as a spiritual leader for your church?
3. What is your perspective on Christianity?
a. How do you define Christian?
b. What does being a Christian mean to you?
c. How did you become a Christian?
4. How do you experience God?
a. Describe your journey in relationship to God, highlighting key points on
that journey.
b. What does it mean for you to know God?
5. Do you believe there are Christian practices that take away or diminish this
experience? How do you compensate for these constraints in your own leadership
within the church?
6. How do you understand prayer? How do you experience Gods presence?
a. How does God communicate with you? How does God reveal
himself/herself to you?
b. How does God manifest his/her presence in your church congregation?

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7. How do you understand Jesus Christ and the doctrine surrounding his birth, death,
and resurrection?
a. Describe your understanding of Jesuss incarnation, crucifixion, and
resurrection.
b. How important is this doctrine in your churchs understanding of Christ?
8. What is the role of your church in relation to God?
a. What is the role of your church within the community?
b. How do you define ministry?
c. How important is it for people in your congregation to be involved in
ministry?
9. How do you understand community?
a. What are the most important relationship characteristics within your
church community? Why?
b. What kinds of relationships encourage understanding of God or Jesus
Christ?
10. What do you think Gods perspective is on pain and suffering within the Christian
life?
a. How has suffering played a role in your understanding of God?
b. Do you think suffering is necessary in the Christian faith? Why?
11. What is the role of the Bible in your understanding of God?
a. Define your perspective on the Bible as the authority of God.
b. How do you use (or not use) the Bible in your leadership within your
church?

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12. How do you understand sin? (Probably will lead to questions about Gods grace,
justice, and mercy, and how each is defined.)
a. What do you believe is Gods perspective on sin?
b. How does sin play a role in your understanding of God?
13. What is your notion of an ideal Christian?
a. How do you try to measure up to this ideal?
b. Do you measure up to this ideal?

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APPENDIX B: VERBAL SCRIPT
The purpose of my research is to understand how Christian women leaders understand
and experience their faith in God. My hope is to discover ways in which women
negotiate traditional Christian orthodoxy in terms of Christian doctrine and institutional
practices. Our interview process should be thought of as a conversation. I hope that
responses to my questions will unfold through dialogue, however, I will focus on
encouraging your answers and perspectives. Please feel free at any time to stop the
interview or refuse to answer questions if you feel uncomfortable. Additionally, please
feel free to ask me questions for clarification or to understand my rationale for asking
these questions.

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APPENDIX C: BACKGROUND INFORMATION
1. How long have you been a Christian?
2. What is your religious affiliation?
3. How long have you been a part of this religious denomination?
4. How long have you been a pastor in your church?
5. How old were you when you became a Christian?
6. Where did you receive your religious/spiritual training (if formal)?
7. How long have you lives in the Seattle, Washington/Carbondale, Illinois area?

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APPENDIX D: INFORMED CONSENT FORM
The purpose of this study is to better understand how Christian women, as leaders within
their own churches, understand and experience their faith in God and the Gospel of Jesus
Christ. You have been asked to participate in this study because you are a leader in a
church that professes and practices the Christian faith. Christian may stand for a belief in
Jesus Christ as the Son of God and acceptance of him as Savior. You will be asked to
respond to some interview questions regarding your understanding and expression of
your faith in Christ.
Your participation in this research is strictly voluntary, and all reasonable steps will be
taken in order to protect your identity. Your name will not be connected to your
responses in any way. Your participation in this research project will take approximately
one hour and if more time is needed we can schedule a time to meet to finish our
interview.
The interview will be conducted much like a conversation. Although there are various
themes that will be covered by the interviewer, your own responses may spark new
themes during the interview. You may ask questions at any time during the interview
process. The interviewer will audio tape the interview, and after the interview the tape
will be transcribed such that the transcript will contain no reference to your name or any
other identifying features which can link you to the data. Once the transcript is made, the
audio tape will be destroyed.
You may refuse to answer any question at any time during the interview. You may
withdraw from the study at any time. Your participation in this research project is
entirely voluntary. No payment is being offered to study participants.
If you have questions or concerns regarding this study, please direct these concerns to
Gay Ramsey at 425.788.2328. You may also contact Dr. Lenore Langsdorf, Department
of Speech Communication, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale 618.453.2291.
This project has been reviewed and approved by the SIUC Human Subjects Committee.
Questions concerning your rights as a participant in this research may be addressed to the
Committee Chairperson, Office of Research and Development and Administration,
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901-4709. Phone: 618.453.4533.
I have read the material above, and any questions I asked have been answered to my
satisfaction. By continuing, I have agreed to participate in this activity, realizing that I
may withdraw without prejudice at any time.

__________________________________
Signature

_________________________
Date

263
VITA
Graduate School
Southern Illinois University
Gay Michelle Bammert

Date of Birth: March 10, 1969

7704 23rd Avenue NW, Seattle, Washington 98117

Westmont College
Bachelor of Arts, Communication Studies, May 1991
California State University, Northridge
Master of Arts, Speech Communication, June 1998

Special Honors and Awards:

Thomas Pace Award for excellence in teaching undergraduate Communication
Studies, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
Richard Aronstam Scholarship for Forensics (Debate), California State
University, Northridge.
Dissertation Title:
In Search of an Authentic Self: The Rhetorical Constitution of Christian Faith in
Womens Experience.
Major Professor: Lenore Langsdorf
Conference Presentations:
Angelina Grimke and Catharine Beecher: The Rhetorical Constitution of
Christian Faith and Social Transformation. National Communication Association
Convention, Chicago, Illinois, 2004.
A Comparative Analysis of Dell Hymes Ways of Speaking and Gerry
Philipsens Theory of Speech Codes. National Communication Association
Convention, Seattle, Washington, 2000.
Martha Stewart Living: The Rhetorical Force of Memory. National
Communication Association Convention, Seattle, Washington, 2000.
Narratives and Service Learning in the Communication Classroom. Central
States Communication Association Convention, Detroit, Michigan, 2000.

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Oral Response to Timothy Crusius and his book Kenneth Burke and the
Conversation After Philosophy, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, 2000.
Computers in the Classroom: Tool or Terror? Western Speech Communication
Association Convention, Denver, Colorado, 1998.