Loralee May

What Do a Coward's Bullet and the Complementarian Ideology Have in Common?

This morning, good decent people around the world are reeling in shock over the cowardly act of a religious and militant extremist member who walked onto a schoolbus and shot a 14 year old little girl in the head, because she dared to speak out for girls rights to education. Many are praying, some are protesting, others simply shaking their heads in sadness and unbelief at the profound barbarism of this act.

As horrific as it is, what makes Malala's attempted assasination so shocking is that this 14 year old was actually on the Taliban's hitlist. She was shot because of what she believed in and dared to speak out about - that girls are entitled to an education and a future of their own choosing without limitations imposed on them by a cruel and misogynistic religious extremist group. Malala wants to become a doctor.

As I found my thoughts and prayers going to this bright and courageous young woman repeatedly throughout the day, I also found myself thinking about something I had just read on-line. It was a position paper featuring the content of the keynote address for the 2012 EFCA Theology Conference, the topic was: "Understanding the Complementarian Position: Considering Implications and Exploring Practices in the Home and the Local Church" The address was given by Don Carson, currently at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Bob Yarbrough, now at Covenant Seminary in St. Louis, before some 265 attendees.

As I went about the busyness of my day, both these events kept coming to my mind, like a pesky mosquito looking for his next meal. I would pray for Malala and then simply dismiss my thoughts on the Complementarian Position paper as I focused on the work I had to get done. It wasn't until much later that evening, when the pesky mosquito linking these two scenarios was still buzzing about, that I finally sat down to try and sort through it. That's when I realized why I was unconsciously linking these two seemingly disparate events together; they shared a great deal in common.

The barbaric coward who shot Malala was created by a religious ideology which teaches that the oppression of women is mandated by God. The literal translation for "Taliban" is "religious students." This Frankenstein was created not in a science fiction laboratory, but in a mosque filled with religious devotees who supposedly want to please God. The history books are filled with atrocities of mindblowing proportions carried out in the name of obeying God. From the religious crusades, to the burning of Joan of Arc, to the Salem Witch Trials (for some reason, women seem to often be the target of religious based cruelty and oppression).

While in the Western World, we are protected from the barbaric atrocities of religious ideologies which would justify the oppression of women by means of physical abuse and torture, we are not protected from religious ideologies which advocate the oppression of women as being mandated by God. In the United States, these heinous ideologies are slickly wrapped in packages designed to conceal their true intent, words like "complementarian", phrases like "equally valued, equally loved" are connected to an ideology which would tell women that God does not allow them to teach or preach or lead under the shadow of the church steeple. Anyone who dares to disagree with this ideology is dismissed as simply not wanting to obey God.
The reasons for justifying this oppressively misogynistic interpretation of Scripture are many, some of them based on an attempt at scholarly exegesis of Scripture and others on blatantly misogynistic and oppressive personal bias. For example, in defending the complementarian position from a sociological perspective, Robert Yarborough had this to say: (Ladies, just a warning, fasten your seatbelts, these are direct quotes from the EFCA position paper)

"To ordain women is ultimately to alienate many if not most unchurched men…To put the matter bluntly: in many marriages, wives try to control or at least change their husbands, and men refuse to be bossed."

"...numerous social indicators in the West point to disastrous results for large numbers of women and children since the 1960s when social mores began an aggressive departure from biblical teaching in areas like sexuality, divorce, and abortion, and as women’s ordination became more acceptable with the rise of feminism. Since that time, in the U.S. at least, rates of female poverty, female imprisonment and recidivism, child neglect or endangerment, sex crimes (particularly against children), internet pornography, and sexually-transmitted diseases have increased dramatically. "

I don't know where to begin. Just the simple fact that this barbaric level of reasoning is being put forth by a seminary professor at a theological conference is mindblowing. Really Professor Yarborough?! "men refuse to be bossed?!"  Are you truly inferring that internet pornography and sex crimes against children and STDs are directly attributable to women being allowed to teach and preach the gospel?! Perhaps, you are not familiar with the well known statistics:

*Men perpetrate the majority of violent acts against women (DeLahunta 1997).

*22 million women in the United States have been raped in their lifetime. 63.84% of women who reported being raped, physically assaulted, and/or stalked since age 18 were victimized by a current or former husband, cohabiting partner, boyfriend, or date. (National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey 2010)

*Somewhere in America a woman is battered, usually by her intimate partner, every 15 seconds. (UN Study On The Status of Women, Year 2000)

*Thirty percent of women watch Internet porn, according to a new study. The number is higher for men - 70 percent - in research conducted at the University of Sydney's Graduate Program in Sexual Health, reports Australia's Courier-Mail.

And as for crimes against children, the sexual trafficking of women and children is now the second largest criminal industry in the world and it is an industry run and financed by men.

But facts aside, Professor Yarborough is teaching and preaching that one of the primary factors for these atrocities is the ordination of women who want to serve God with their gifts of teaching and leading. There is the bullet. Instead of a gun, the weapon (method of delivery) is the EFCA (Evangelical Free Church of America).

While there is no comparison between an ideological debate and the suffering and agony of Malala, fighting for her life in a Pakistani hospital, we kid ourselves if we fail to recognize that the spirit behind both is an extremist belief that God mandates the oppression of women, whether it's a courageous 14 year old Pakistani girl wanting to become a doctor, or a 14 year old American girl who wants to serve others as an ordained member of the clergy.