This commentary is by Michael Caldwell of North Wolcott, a member of the international, ecumenical Iona Community. He writes the Radical Center, a syndicated monthly column seeking creative consensus, transcending intractable fractures in cultural and religious discourse.
When I heard about a new round of activism by the pro-choice community, spurred by the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservatism and by the 49th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision on Jan. 27, I poured my consternation about the intractable divide into an essay seeking a consensus ethic about abortion decision-making.
I suggested that the viability of fetal life outside the womb could be one possible criterion for creating a semblance of common ground between poles of obstinate demonization.
I shared the draft with a small group of diverse readers who check my blind spots. A young feminist acquaintance saw my attempt as the feeble ignorance of an aging white male, clueless about the wider issues that create the divide.
“You don’t get it. There are a hundred reasons why the Right won’t accept what you’re saying, and just as many reasons why the Left believes that the government has no role in family decision-making. The alternative to complete individual freedom about matters of pregnancy? An expansion of the Texas theocracy. It’s only when women are given equal rights in all things that there will be an end to this conflict.”
I took several days to recover from the blow of this feedback. I respected this person. Her indictment disturbed me and challenged me. I pulled back with a question for her:
“Then what’s the answer to the growing tension? After almost 50 years, the war is getting worse, not better.”
“Respect women. Period. Repudiate the patriarchal structures which consign women to be ‘the second sex.’ Refute the biblical injunction, ‘wives, be submissive to your husbands.’ The abortion war is a symptom of the wider issue of patriarchal control. Change that, and you’ll have your answer.”
The next morning, I awoke with a vague dream with an image of Jesus with the Samaritan woman at the well. Words were the only remnant: “Pro-choice? Pro-life? Pro-women.” The dream gave me language for my longing to make peace in this war. Be pro-women.
Conservatives, liberals, whatever you are, just be pro-women, which implies pro-family equality. Everything follows from that shift, that equality.
I jumped out of bed, put the coffee on, reflected in my journal on my dream associations. My feminist detractor had invoked Paul’s patriarchal concept of family life. My dream invoked the proto-feminism of Jesus, who, in effect, at every turn, uplifted the status of women.
In the gospel story of the woman at the well in the fourth chapter of John, Jesus’s first unorthodox move was to simply talk with not only a despised Samaritan, but an unknown Samaritan woman, breaking a strict social boundary. His disciples were appalled. But he rebuked them for interfering with his healing work. Meanwhile, she becomes one of the first emissaries of his mission, sharing the power of her encounter with him with her village.
The Right cannot legitimately proof-text the apostle Paul to justify male supremacy. Jesus’s own ministry with women counteracts Paul’s culturally bound sexist discrimination. If you take the Bible seriously, you see the inevitable cultural bias of ancient Holy Scripture, even as you sift it to find the Word of God for the present. And you also see the revolutionarily unorthodox Jesus correcting the patriarchal blindness of his time. Just as he turned over the tables of corrupt Temple practice, he turns over the tables of patriarchal supremacy.
Wise theological and political centrists — and even calm activists on the Left — might approach the Right with a diplomatic invitation to release its anxiety about inevitable social change toward equal rights for women, equal rights for all. No less than the figure of Jesus himself is antidote and alternative to the distorted masculinity of, for example, John Wayne and Donald Trump — characters the Right adores, though they are the literal antithesis of Gospel ethics.
One major reason “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven” (in the Lord’s Prayer) hasn’t come in 2,000 years is that women haven’t been honored as equals to men, as with the implied post-patriarchal counter-culturalism of Jesus.
My young critic and my dream convince me that those who are serious about addressing the abortion divide would do well to promote common-sense viability of equal rights for women and men. With Christian historian Kristen Kobes Du Mez in “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” we have the biblical and ethical springboard to do it, beyond the unnecessary fear of traditionalist thinking.
