Joyce Mansour

…Il n’a pas de gestes
Seulement ma peau
Et les fourmis qui grouillent entre mes jambes oncteuses
Portent des masques du silence en travaillent….

…There are no deeds
Only my skin
And the ants that crawl between my unctuous legs
Carry masks of silence while laboring….

— from the poem “Il n’a pas de mots” by Joyce Mansour, trans. Emilie Moorehouse, Poetry, June 2023, p. 244

Joyce Mansour (1928-1986) — so I learn from Marwa Helal’s introduction to the selection of Mansour’s poetry in the June issue of Poetry magazine — was born in London to a family of Egyptian and Jewish descent. She grew up in Cairo, where she spoke one or two contemporary Arabic dialects, and learned to read classical Arabic. She spoke Egyptian and Syriac, and read classical Arabic. After she married Samir Mansour, a Franco-Egyptian, she began writing poetry in French. She was exiled from Egypt in the 1950s, during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser. She then lived in France, where she became associated with the Surrealists.

Helal warns us against simplistic interpretations of Mansour’s poems: “While some might try to categorize her work under the umbrella of Feminism™ [sic], Mansour was writing beyond the body and this world…. Par of colonization’s cruel work upon all of us is that it repurposes the work of poets like Mansour for its own ends and meaning. Kind of like how American English conveniently erases important etymologies, essentially whitewashing its own linguistic heritage. But language and meaning existed before colonizing languages like French and English….”

…Je suis l’argent
L’argent qui fait l’argent sans savoir pourquoi….

…I am money
Money that makes money without knowing why….

— from the poem “Je suis la nuit” by Joyce Mansour, trans. Emilie Moorehouse, Poetry, June 2023, p. 248

A final comment by Helal on Mansour: “I think what’s important to consider as you engage with Mansour’s work is to remember she isn’t some radical exception — a woman having escaped or defied gender and its imposed or cultural norms — but a woman who made a place to be her full self in these poems…. I want to avoid ascribing or imposing any kind of Eurocentric reading or categorization of Mansour’s work because, though she lived in France, she held so many cultures and lineages in her….”

More on Mansour: an essay about her by translator Emilie Moorehouse.

Reading list: Search

Bev loaned me the book Search: A Novel (Penguin, 2022), by Michelle Huneven. Search is the story of a ministerial search committee in a Unitarian Universalist congregation in southern California during their year-long process to find someone to replace their retiring minister. Michelle Huneven actually served on a ministerial search committee, and the book is a fictionalized account of her experiences. Bev, who loaned me the book, is a long-time lay leader who has lived through six different ministerial searches in the past quarter century. She told me that I really need to read this book. So I did.

(Spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal key elements of the book’s plot. Continue at your own risk.)

Photo of the book lying on a wood tabletop.
Continue reading “Reading list: Search”

Toxic masculinity

Actor Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock during the Oscar awards ceremony. Now we learn that he was asked to leave but refused. I’ve been asking myself some questions about this incident….

— Why didn’t security remove Will Smith? Had he slapped a woman, of course he would have been hustled out of there. But a man hitting another man is somehow considered normal.

— Why a slap, and not a punch? Because a man defends his honor by slapping the other man. It’s a challenge to a subsequent duel. This continues to be a behavioral norm for men in Euro-American culture.

— If Chris Rock’s joke was aimed at Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith’s wife, why didn’t she slap him? Because this really wasn’t about Will Smith defending Jada Pinkett Smith. It was really about Will Smith defending his own honor.

— Why didn’t Will Smith stop to think about the example he was setting for all the teens and young men who idolize him (and he had plenty of time to think on that walk up to the stage)? Because he was passing along what he learned from previous generations of American men: Defend your honor with violence.

This incident is a classic example of toxic masculinity. The norms of toxic masculinity are deeply ingrained in our social structure. Men are trained from birth to defend our honor. We are socialized from birth to use violence.

I’d like to think that I would never do what Will Smith did. But if I’m honest with myself, in the right circumstances, I might. Yes, I’m a pacifist. I’m a feminist. I’ve taken on a non-standard gender role by working in the helping professions. But any American man could do what Will Smith did, given the right circumstances. Yes, even me. Even you….

Of course Will Smith should be held accountable for his bad behavior. But those of us who are men might also want to think about what this incident says about all of us. We men still have work to do to change what it means to be a man. Let’s use this incident to remind ourselves how important that work is.

Update: In response to a thoughtful email — (1) I’m not trying to excuse Chris Rock’s insensitive joke. (2) Most men do not consider it acceptable to slap another man. (3) One of the horrible things about toxic masculinity is that it damages all men (to say nothing of other genders).

The UUA really needs to do this

Within the past couple of hours, Religion News Service has posted an article titled “Reform movement publishes extensive report on sexual misconduct in its youth programs.” The Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) commissioned an outside law firm to investigate sexual misconduct in their movement’s youth programs and summer camps over the past half century. Then URJ published the report in its entirety, with no redactions whatsoever, on their website.

I’m impressed that URJ has both commissioned this investigation, and that they’re being completely open and transparent about the results. Really impressed. Really, really impressed. Mind you, this investigation didn’t extend to individual congregations; that would have been a much more difficult task. Nevertheless, by commissioning this investigation, the URJ has set the standard for individual congregations.

It’s time for the Unitarian Universalist Association to commission a similar investigation into our denominational youth ministries. I was very active in denominational youth activities in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and I heard enough stories back then to make me think that an investigation would turn up more sexual misconduct than anyone would feel comfortable with.

If the UUA were to commission a law firm to carry out this kind of investigation, what should we look for? We should look for exactly what the URJ looked for: sexual misconduct by adults (anyone over age 18) against minors (anyone under age 18); sexual misconduct between minors; and sexual misconduct between adults at youth activities. As I look back 50 years to 1972, at a minimum the following programs should be investigated: “ConCon,” the former continental youth conference; district youth conferences; and any other programs or summer camps run by Liberal Religious Youth (LRY) or its successor Young Religious Unitarian Universalists (YRUU).

The UUA doesn’t have a great track record of investigating and publicly admitting the sexual misconduct that’s happened in our denomination. This is a grand opportunity for us to do the right thing. I hope our denominational leaders will follow the shining lead of the Reform Jews.

One feminist’s view of non-binary gender

I became aware of feminism as a teenager, back in the 1970s. After some initial resistance, feminism wound up appealing to me not only because it held out the hope of equality for women, but also because it challenged existing gender norms and gender roles. I’ve never been comfortable with the stereotypical gender norms for men in the United States. I’m not the strong silent type. I’ve always liked working with children. I kinda like doing housework (except cooking, I’m bad at cooking). I didn’t know the term “toxic masculinity” back then, but I knew what toxic masculinity was, I knew it was hurting me, and I wanted to change it.

But we mostly remained stuck with the old gender norms throughout the 1980s, and the 1990s, and the 2000s. In 2002, I took a battery of psychological tests as part of my preparation for ministry. On one of those tests, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), I scored well out of the normal range on gender identity. Worried that I had some kind of pathology, I asked the psychologist who administered the test what that score meant. Oh, the psychologist said, don’t worry about that, men going into ministry often test out of the normal range on that scale. I found the psychologist’s reply even more disturbing than the thought that I might have a pathology — because the psychologist’s reply meant that men trained to be empathetic, caring, and group-oriented were considered pathological by society.

So when non-binary gender finally emerged as a viable option, I felt we were taking a step in the right direction. Biological females who happened to be assertive and articulate and willing to talk over men didn’t have to get pushed into a gender role that required them to be deferential and self-deprecating. Biological males who happened to be caring and empathetic didn’t have to get pushed into a gender role that required them to be strong, silent, and unemotional. Non-binary gender gave the promise of allowing a wide range of gender expression, far beyond these two examples.

Non-binary gender is a step in the right direction. It has opened a tiny and fragile space between male and female gender roles. But across the U.S., only a small percentage of people now consider themselves non-binary gender. For most people in the U.S., the old gender norms remain intact. I feel hopeful about that fragile open space where non-binary gender exists. But I’m discouraged that the old gender norms still wall in that tiny open space. I’m discouraged that non-binary gender has to be a matter of individual choice for just a few people, rather than a change in the way society understands gender. I’m discouraged at the thought that as a man, I’d still probably test as pathological on the MMPI. And I’m especially discouraged that non-binary gender people face wide social discrimination.

When non-binary people are discriminated against in much the same way the women are discriminated against, it seems to me that we’re still stuck with toxic masculinity running the show. We have taken a step in the right direction, but from my feminist perspective, it’s only a baby step; I wish we could grow up, and take adult-sized steps.

A history of UU clergy sexual misconduct

Loré Stevens won the Unitarian Universalist History and Heritage Society’s History Research Prize for Future Leaders this year. The title of her paper was “‘Strong at the Broken Places’: A History of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashville, 1992-2019.” Some of my readers will remember that during the time from 1992 to 2019, instances of clergy misconduct were uncovered at the Nashville UU congregation.

Now Deborah Pope-Lance has gotten permission to host this paper on her Web site, here — you’ll have to scroll down past some other papers and essays on clergy sexual misconduct to find the link.

Highly recommended reading for anyone who wants to know more about the history of U.S. Unitarian Universalism in the past 25 years, or for anyone interested in the recent history of feminism in religion. If you think Unitarian Universalism has made lots of progress in becoming a feminist movement, you’ll be depressed by this paper. On the other hand, if you’re one of those who (like me) has been incredibly frustrated at how little attention has been paid to the intertwined issues of sexism, patriarchy, and clergy misconduct with Unitarian Universalism, you’ll be relieved to read this exposé of the abuse of power by male clergy and how influential and powerful people within Unitarian Universalism have covered it up.

I’d even say I was delighted to read this paper, not because I’m delighted by clergy misconduct, but because I’m delighted that this subject is finally getting the attention it deserves from historians and others. Thank you, Loré Stevens. Thank you, UUHHS. Thank you, Deborah Pope-Lance for hosting this paper online.

Feminist theology overview

Below is the text of an online talk I gave on feminist theology this evening. The best part of the talk was the discussion afterwards; unfortunately I can’t reproduce that here.

I’d like to begin with the predictive power of feminist theory. Back in the year 2000, feminist theorist and public intellectual bell hooks wrote a slim volume titled Feminism Is for Everybody. In one of the essays in that book, hooks describes what men can become in the absence of feminism:

“Patriarchal masculinity encourages encourages men to be pathologically narcissistic, infantile, and psychologically dependent on the privileges (however relative) that they receive simply for having been born male. Many men feel that their lives are being threatened if these privileges are taken away, as they have structured no meaningful core identity.”

These two sentences, written twenty years ago, accurately describe several contemporary politicians, including Donald Trump, our current president of the United States. Trump is an extreme example of what happens to a man who is firmly rooted in patriarchal masculinity. Unfortunately, he’s not the only American male this description fits. I’ll go further and say that, due to a decades-long decline in feminism, most white American men — including myself — fit this description to a greater or lesser degree. We white men in America all tend to think we are the most important people in the room, even when we claim to to be enlightened feminists; this means we are all narcissistic to some degree, and infantile insofar as we are psychologically dependent on our male privilege. (Parenthetical note about the reality of male privilege: one of the most interesting things that I have learned from the greater willingness of transgendered persons to be open about their gender identity is hearing what it’s like for people who transition from female to male in their college years: they report that suddenly they have male privilege; suddenly women and other men defer to them; suddenly their opinion becomes more important just be virtue of being male.)

Seeing all these narcissistic, infantile, dependent men should be a wake-up call to all of us, and especially to us as Unitarian Universalists. We already knew that patriarchal masculinity damages girls and women girls through sexual violence and sexual harassment, through repressing their natural abilities. But patriarchal masculinity is also warping boys and men, and it’s creating increasing numbers of toxic monsters like Donald Trump.

We need feminism more than ever before. In particular, we Unitarian Universalists need to develop a feminist theology that offers a positive vision of hope for our future. For this is one of the things that Unitarian Universalism can do best in our society: offer a positive vision.

At the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto (UUCPA), we say that our mission is to transform ourselves, each other, and the world. A positive feminist vision can help all genders, including men, transform themselves into whole and psychologically healthy human beings. A positive feminist vision can help us keep men and boys from being warped by patriarchal masculinity, and help all other genders from suffering damage at the hands of patriarchal masculinity. A positive feminist vision can help us envision a world where humans do not try to dominate other humans, and where humanity does not try to dominate the non-human world.

With this in mind, this adult religious education class is going to be a whirl-wind tour of feminist theology. I’m going to touch on four feminist theorists that have influenced the way Unitarian Universalists have thought about women and about feminism. And in the end, I hope I will have outlined something of a feminist vision of hope.

I’ll start with Mary Daly, because her 1973 book Beyond God the Father had a huge impact on U.S. feminists, including Unitarian Universalists. Beyond God the Father pointed out how religion did not need to be founded on a vision of a male god; we did not need to reinforce patriarchal masculinity through the belief structures and institutions of organized religion. In this book Daly wrote: “Exclusively masculine symbolism for God, for the notion of divine ‘incarnation’ in human nature, and for the human relationship to God reinforce sexual hierarchy. Tremendous damage is done….” [p. 4] Unitarian Universalist paid attention, and within ten years we, like many of the more liberal religious groups in the U.S., began including women’s voices and images in religion by, for example, issuing collections of hymns that replaced the old masculine religious imagery with gender-neutral imagery. By 1985, the Unitarian Universalist Association had revised its statement of principles and purposes with the express intent of removing sexist references.

However, Unitarian Unviersalists did not, for the most part, follow Daly as she became increasingly radical in her feminism. Unitarian Universalists aimed for equality between men and women. But in 1978, in her book Gyn/Ecology, Daly criticized equality under what she calls “tokenism.” According to Daly, tokenism “is commonly guised as Equal Rights, and [it] yields token victories….” Daly went on to assert that tokenism, or equal rights, whatever you want to call it, serves to deflect what she calls “gynergy,” which might be loosely defined as female power unbounded by patriarchy.

The effect of tokenism and equal rights, said Daly, is that:

“…female power, galvanized under deceptive slogans of sisterhood, is swallowed by The Fraternity. This method of vampirizing the Female Self saps women by giving illusions of partial success while at the same time making Success appear to be a far-distant, extremely difficult to obtain ‘elusive objective.’ When the oppressed are worn out in the game of chasing the elusive shadow of Success, some ‘successes’ are permitted to occur — ‘victories’ which can easily be withdrawn when the victim’s energies have been restored. Subsequently, women are lured into repeating efforts to regain the hard-won apparent gains.”

While this statement still may appear radical to us Unitarian Universalists today, I believe Daly gave an accurate prophesy of what actually happened in Unitarian Universalism. We Unitarian Universalists went down the path of equal rights: we worked hard to make sure of women’s equality in ministry; we worked hard to provide non-gendered references in our hymnal and other worship resources, in the name of equality; we worked hard to provide equality in lay leaders, both at the level of local congregations, and at the denominational level. And what was the result?

Today, a bit more than half our Unitarian Universalist ministers are women; yet male ministers are still more likely to have the high-paying positions at high-profile congregations. Furthermore, religious educators — who do what is traditionally considered “women’s work” and nine-tenths of whom are women — are mostly part-time and poorly paid employees whose jobs are the first to be cut in economic hard times. (Parenthetical note: two northern California congregations have cut their religious educator position entirely in the past twelve months rather than reduce the hours or salary of the minister position, thus revealing that “men’s work” is more valuable to us than “women’s work.”) So even though women serve equally as unitarian Universalist ministers, “women’s work,” taking care of children, is still devalued. Overall, success for women as religious professionals remains exactly what Daly said it would be: a “far-distant, extremely difficult to obtain ‘elusive objective’,” in spite of some hard-fought successes.

It is depressing to see this play out in Unitarian Universalism. In 1985, Daly wrote: “Despite the many and solid gains of recent years, the battering of women’s psyches in this period of backlash has dis-couraged many from the process of understanding phallocracy and imagining ways of breaking out. Indeed women are terrorized into amnesia and made afraid to know the full implications of patriarchal power.” Too bad Unitarian Universalism didn’t follow Mary Daly’s lead; as it is, we still don’t have an adequate feminist vision of hope for the future.

Unfortunately, I even see this dynamic at play in our own congregation. While girls at UUCPA have a great role model in Amy Morgenstern as the religious head of the congregation; while they can see me, a man, getting great satisfaction from doing women’s work; — nevertheless the congregation is still run on the “Great Man” model of leadership, with a powerful Board president (who happens to be a woman), and a powerful senior minister (who does however make every effort to distribute power widely). This is to say: we still rely on a patriarchal model of leadership and management at UUCPA; perhaps it could not be otherwise, for here we are in Silicon Valley, surrounded by the virulent sexism of the tech industry; and like it or not, we are affected by our surrounding culture. At UUCPA, we are perhaps less patriarchal than the surrounding culture, but we are very far from the positive vision outlined by Daly, of women freed to be themselves, freed of male domination.

Domination becomes an important concept in feminist, and to explore it a little further I’ll turn now to Rosemary Radford Reuther. Reuther is a feminist theologian who is connected to eco-feminism, which I addressed in the last class. So I won’t spend as much time on her as I did on Daly. But I would like to read you this passage from Reuther’s book “Sexism and God-talk,” where she talks about the roots of domination:

“In her well-known article ‘Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?’ Sherry Ortner postulates a universal devaluation of the hierarchy of culture (the sphere of human control) over nature (spontaneous processes that humans don’t originate or control but are dependent on). Women are symbolized as ‘closer to nature’ than men and thus fall in an intermediate position between culture as the male sphere and uncontrolled nature. This is due both to woman’s physiological role in the biological processes that reproduce the species rather than in processes that enhance her as an individual and to the ability of male collective power to extend women’s physiological role into social roles confined to child nurture and domestic labor. Female physiological processes are viewed as dangerous and polluting to higher (male) culture. Her social roles are regarded as inferior to those of males, falling lower on the nature-culture hierarchy.” [p. 62]

Reuther wrote this in 1983, and we might argue with her based on today’s more careful distinction between gender identity, biological sex, and gender roles. Nevertheless, it’s clear that patriarchy exists; and Reuther is making a larger point here:

“Ultimately we have to ask why nature itself comes to be seen as devalued and inferior to the human. We cannot criticize the hierarchy of male over female without ultimately criticizing and overcoming the hierarchy of humans over nature.” [p. 62]

In this passage, Reuther is leading us to the conclusion that environmental destruction is caused by patriarchy. It’s a hierarchy, where humans are more highly valued than the non-human realm, and then in the human realm men are more highly valued than women. We can, by the way, extend this argument further: non-white humans have been symbolized as somehow closer to nature than white humans — black people are supposed to be better dancers and athletes, indigenous peoples of the Americas are seen to be more attuned to nature, and so on — and thus non-white people are seen as falling lower on the culture hierarchy than white men.

Since we explored ecofeminism in the last class, I’m not going to go any further into this topic, except to say that I continue to believe that ecofeminism, with its critique of domination, offers a powerful vision of hope for the future.

Domination is related to another topic in feminist thinking, understanding violence against women. And this brings us to Rebecca Parker, a liberal Christian who was for many years the president of Starr King School for the Ministry, a Unitarian Universalist theological school. In a book she wrote with Rita Nakashima Brock titled “Proverbs of Ashes,” Rebecca Parker wrote:

“A woman’s religious home can be a place where she is endangered rather than nurtured, put at risk rather than initiated into freedom and life…. women need to construct alternative religious ideas that allow for women’s lives to be resurrected from the scourges of violence and abuse.” [p. 19]

Parker writes from a liberal Christian perspective, and she specifically targets Christian ideals of sacrifice. Many Christian women find justification for tolerating abuse in the Christian story: that Jesus died for our sins, that the Christian God was sacrificed on the cross to redeem all humanity. If Jesus could make the ultimate sacrifice, then surely a human woman could follow Jesus’s example, and put her life at risk by enduring abuse from her husband, a clergyman, a man in her church.

Now then, non-Christian Unitarian Universalists, you shouldn’t feel smug when you hear this. True, Unitarian Universalists — both those of us who are Christian and those of us who are not — have for the most part rejected the idea that Jesus gave his life to redeem all humanity. However, all too often I have seen Unitarian Universalism women abused by men, and not finding the resources to resist such abuse in Unitarian Universalism.

I am particularly bothered by the male Unitarian Universalist ministers who prey on women. In my home church, the man who was minister when I was a child had sexual intercourse with quite a few women in the congregation. I don’t want to demonize him, for he did many things right: he spoke out against the Vietnam War when it wasn’t popular to do so; he advocated tirelessly for better programs and ministries for children. But at the same time he was a sexual predator, and the congregation tolerated his behavior for too many years before finally ousting him.

And UUCPA is a congregation where many women were not able to feel safe from the mid-1970s through 1999. Bill Jacobson was the minister of UUCPA during this time, and it’s pretty clear that he was a sexual predator who had sexual intercourse with women in the congregation, possibly including teenagers. Now some might want to excuse Jacobson, arguing that in those years we didn’t know as much as we do now about the negative effects that happen when a minister, someone with institutional power, has sex with someone in the congregation. I’m willing to excuse single male ministers who married a woman in their congregation — behavior we now know to be unacceptable, but which was considered acceptable for many years — but I am not willing to excuse a male minister who had sexual contact with multiple women in his congregation; there never was any acceptable justification for such behavior; those male ministers were sexual predators because they could get away with it, not because it was considered right or proper behavior.

Indeed, it was only a few years ago that the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association changed its code of ethics to specifically prohibit having sex with congregants. And the code of ethics went further than that: if one minister believed another minister was engaging in behavior against the code of ethics, the first minister was supposed to confront the misbehaving minister before doing anything else. I was a member of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association in those days, and I ignored that last requirement. There were male ministers who were known to us to prey on female religious educators, and I was one of several ministers who told women who were new religious educators to stay away from those male ministers; confronting those men would have been an exercise in futility, since they were part of the Old Boys Network, and we religious educators were relatively powerless; confronting them might cost us our jobs; yet we wanted to be sure vulnerable women were warned.

(As an aside, one of those sexual predators is still an active Unitarian Universalist minister and is revered in the denomination; everyone once in a while, someone will tell me how wonderful he is, and I still stay silent. He has more power and money than I do, and I don’t want to be sued by him for slander nor bad-mouthed by him to important denominational officials. I tell you this as an example of the extent to which patriarchy still rules in Unitarian Universalism.)

I will say that UUCPA is doing better than the denomination as a whole in protecting women in our congregation from sexual harassment, including sexual predation, unwanted touch, unwanted contact, and so on. At UUCPA, we have a pretty good behavioral covenant. Men at UUCPA mostly behave pretty well — or at least, we behave better than the wider culture — and for the most part, when UUCPA men are told to back off, we back off. For the most part.

But let’s face it, in a society governed by patriarchal masculinity, I may well be unaware of instances of misbehavior by men in the congregation (and if you’re a woman who has experienced sexual harassment at UUCPA, I hope you will feel able to tell Amy, me, or a member of the Committee on Ministry about it). And I readily admit we UUCPA men are still pretty bad about dominating conversations, talking over women, not hearing women’s concerns or women’s voices. We still have work to do.

Nevertheless, Rebecca Parker offers us a vision of hope for the future, and I recommend the book Proverbs of Ashes to you. Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock offer powerful stories of how women have faced up to sexual violence. They also offer an important message for those of us who haven’t experienced sexual violence, but who are trying to help and understand those who have. Brock and Parker say: Be quiet and listen. I think this is especially powerful, because under patriarchy we’re either supposed to fix problems, or defend ourselves and pretend the problem doesn’t exist. Of course, if a woman tells me that she is currently experiencing sexual harassment or sexual violence or domestic violence, I’m going to ask her if I can help extricate her from that situation. But more important is to listen without turning away; to listen in order to try to understand.

This is an important part of a feminist vision for the future: listen to those who have experienced violence. And in this moment when the wider culture is suddenly aware of the daily violence experienced by people of color, this is an important thing to remember. Yes, we all need to work together to change policing policies so we prevent further violence. But those of us who have not experienced this kind of violence also have to listen to people of color who have experienced; to listen without turning away from the anger and rage. I would go further and say this is ultimately a religious task: to still our own needs, and listen to those who have been harmed by violence. And this is an essential step towards ending, or at least greatly reducing violence.

I have time for a brief look at one more feminist theologian, the neo-Pagan writer Starhawk. Here is Starhawk’s vision for her feminist neo-Pagan theology, taken from her 1987 book Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery:

“We are never apart from the power of the mysteries. Every breath we take encompasses the circle of birth, death, and rebirth. The forces that push the blood cells through our veins are the same forces that spun the universe out of the primal ball of fire. We do not know what those forces are. We can invoke them, but we cannot control them…. Yet somehow we human beings … have managed to create a culture in which the power of the mysteries has been denied and power itself has been redefined as power-over, as domination and control… We are not particularly happy in this condition. We do not enjoy being the targets of nuclear warheads or developing cancer from our polluted environment. We do not enjoy starving, or wasting our lives in meaningless work, nor are we eager to be raped, abused, tortured, or bossed around. Whether the bosses enjoy their role is not the issue. The question is, how are the rest of us controlled? Or, even more to the point, How do we break control and set ourselves free?” [p. 6]

Starhawk has been a big influence within Unitarian Universalism partly because she offers a powerful vision of a feminine divinity, but perhaps more importantly because of her insistence that religious ritual is essential for social justice work, and also because she offers practices and exercises to reveal the working of power and authority in groups. Indeed, her book Truth or Dare is almost a recipe book for how to do groups based on feminist power analysis. I use her tools and exercises all the time in small groups that I’m a part of.

In particular, she takes the distinction between power-over and power-with — a distinction that, to the best of my knowledge, was first articulated by theologina Bernard Loomer, who was affiliated with both the Presbyterians and the Unitarian Universalists — Starhawk takes the somewhat lofty concepts of power-over and power-with and translates them into practical things you can implement in your small group. Here’s how she defines these two types of power in Truth or Dare:

“Power-over is decision-making power, control. In a hierarchy, it flows from the top down. In an egalitarian group, it remains broadly based. Decisions are made by the people most affected by them, and/or those who will carry them out. Power-with is influence. Whose voice is listened to? Whose ideas are most likely to be adopted?” [p. 268]

Starhawk also considers a third type of power, power-from-within, and explores how that type of power can be used to resist domination and control. And although Truth or Dare is a little dated now, it’s still an excellent resource for building non-patriarchal leadership in small religious groups.

So I’ve almost concluded my whirlwind tour of feminist theology. I’ve left a lot out of this whirlwind tour. I wish I had had time to talk about Sharon Welch, a theologian and ethicist who is both a humanist and a feminist. I wish I had had more time to talk about the feminist thinking of black women theologians, and Latina women theologians, and so on. I wish I had had time to dive into Queer theology, and talk about non-binary gender definitions in theological thinking. I wish I knew enough myself to talk about some of these things!

But I don’t have time. So I’ll end with a final vision of hope from the feminist bell hooks, again from her book “Feminism Is for Everybody,” published back in 2000:

“We are told again and again by patriarchal mass media, by sexist leaders, that feminism is dead, that it no longer has meaning. In actuality, females and males [editorial addition: and all other genders] of all ages, everywhere, continue to grapple with the issue of gender equality, continue to seek roles for themselves that will liberate rather than restrict and confine; and they continue to turn to feminism for answers. Visionary feminism offers us hope for the future….” [p. 117]

Classical gender equality

The Daffodil Project aims to “champion gender equality in classical music.” In a blog post, Elizabeth de Brito writes:

“Mozart and Beethoven together make up just over one third of all classical performances…. Add the next 4 most played composers — Bach, Brahms, Schubert, Tchaikovsky — and they make up 78% of classical performances. Over 400 years and hundreds of amazing composers, but nearly 80% of all performances are of just 6 white male composers that all died over a century ago?!”

De Brito produces an online gender-balanced classical music program which in its first year had “409 composers including 204 female composers, 155 living composers, and 40 BAME composers/composers of colour.” The most played composer? — Florence Price.

And De Brito has hit on one of the main reasons why I don’t bother going to hear classical music concerts much any more — I’m so bored by hearing the same composers over and over again. I like “classical” music just fine, but I don’t want to hear Beethoven and Mozart again and again, I want to hear living composers, women composers, non-white composers….

Which brings me to Unitarian Universalist services that use mostly classical music: what would happen if half the music in our worship services was composed by women? or if we programmed more composers of African descent? and how about a Mexican composer? Life would be a lot more interesting.

What’s killing Sunday school

A follow up to this post.

If Sunday school is going to die, what’s going to kill it? Let’s look at four social and economic factors that are leading to declines in U.S. Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools — and when I talk about decline, I’m talking about decline in enrollment, decline in attendance (which differs from enrollment), decline in interest among children and teens, and decline in interest among adults.

(1) The biggest single demographic factor affecting Sunday school enrollment has to be increasing diversity in the U.S. population. The majority of Unitarian Universalist congregations remain racially and ethnically segregated. That segregation may result from one or more of several causes: (a) Many Unitarian Universalist congregations are located in racially homogenous municipalities, typically upper middle class white towns that have the political power to keep people of color out. (b) Power structures in many Unitarian Universalist congregations are dominated by older white people who remain uncomfortable with the increasing racial diversity of the world around them, and enforce the whiteness of their congregations through a variety of means, including so-called microaggressions, blindness towards their congregation’s biases, talk about how “those people” wouldn’t want to be Unitarian Universalists because they’re all Catholics, or all Buddhists, or what have you; and still other means beyond these. (c) The way Unitarian Universalist congregations tend to imagine diversity primarily in terms of a white congregation adding a few black members, thus ignoring the stunning racial, linguistic, and ethnic diversity of much of the country, including the incredible diversity of people who are lumped together as “Hispanic” and “Asian,” and also including the way that some racial or ethnic groups get obscured by overly broad categorizations (such as Lusophones who are lumped in with Hispanics, or the treatment of “blacks” as a monolithic ethnic group).

For many people, our workplaces, schools, and community groups all have some racial and ethnic diversity. Thus, a parent who walks into a Unitarian Universalist congregation that is overwhelmingly white — and this includes a white parent — is going to feel that this is a strange place, and maybe a place they don’t want their children to be part of.

How can we address this demographic factor? Continue reading “What’s killing Sunday school”

The Year in Review: Unitarian Universalism

What a wild ride we Unitarian Universalists had in 2017.

The wildest part of the year happened last spring, when Peter Morales, the first Latino president of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), resigned from office, with only a few months left in his term. The events that led up to his resignation were somewhat bizarre. Two of the finalists for a senior staff position at the UUA were both members of the UUA Board, which should make us wonder just how incestuous UUA hiring is (I mean, seriously, can’t you find viable candidates outside your volunteer board? — don’t you know how bad that looks?). Then when the white male gets hired in preference to the Latina woman, social media erupts in accusations of “Racism!”

Shouting “Racism!” was not a bad response, but hardly anyone mentioned the sexism involved. Now it’s not sexism every time the man gets hired over the woman. Nor is it always sexism when the man who gets hired is an ordained minister and the woman is a layperson (for while anyone who has done feminist power analysis knows that sexism often hides behind choosing the person with the most professional credentials, on the other hand sometimes the person with more professional credentials is in fact more qualified). And it’s not always sexism when the woman has a background in “women’s work” (which was true in this case; the woman in this case is a religious educator, and works with children, in a profession that is underpaid compared to parish ministry). But it most definitely was sexism when Peter Morales said in an interview that he could not hire religious educators for senior staff positions because they were not capable of that kind of high level work.

I was astonished at the rage I felt after reading that Peter Morales thought I was incapable of working for him in a high level staff position, simply because I am a religious educator, someone who does “women’s work,” in a profession where more than 90% of my colleagues are women, many of whom are poorly-paid part-time workers. Had I been British, I would have given Peter Morales the two-finger salute; but since I’m a New Englander, that would be cultural misappropriation, so instead I looked in his general direction with withering scorn. Continue reading “The Year in Review: Unitarian Universalism”