The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This has been a difficult book to bring forth, and I have many skilled midwives to thank.

First, my gal pals: Hayley McCullough, Cassie Meadows, Jessica Rolfe, Merissa Zielinksi, and Erika Barber. Your prayers and encouragement buoyed me up through many moments of fear and self-doubt.

To my soul-friend Lindsay Tsohantaridis especially, who read through the rough cut, and whose friendship is one of my great consolations.

To all who have shared their stories, speaking honestly about gender dysphoria and transition, especially Daisy Chadra, Laura Reynolds, and Adelynn Campbell, who entrusted their stories to me, a sacred thing. And to one particular woman, who prefers anonymity, who showed me how best to support the dignity of intersex people like herself.

To those who helped me think through my own thoughts, saying yes to a stranger asking for a Zoom chat: Angela Franks, Erika Bachiochi, Stephen Adubato, Isaiah Jones, and Benjamin Boyce.

To Artur Rosman, editor of Church Life Journal, who graciously gave me permission to pillage some words from my Church Life essays and weave them into this book.

To Corynne Staresinic, founder of The Catholic Woman, who helped me envision what Catholic feminism could look like.

To Mark Brumley, for taking a chance on me, and to Suzanne Lewis, Thomas Jacobi, and Abigail Tardiff, all good shepherds throughout the editing process.

To Michael and our children, who, more than anything, reveal to me daily the depth of divine love and the sacramental beauty of the body.

Abigail Favale

October 15, 2021

Feast of Saint Teresa of Ávila

Heretic

In the spring of 2015, I was teaching a course on gender theory at a Christian university. This was a course I’d taught for years, but never in quite the same way. Gender theory was ever morphing, as were my students, and I was pivoting constantly, trying to keep up with the latest jargon and trends. This time was different. I was in the midst of two dramatic upheavals in my personal life: the birth of my second child, which happened in the middle of the semester, and a tumultuous conversion to Catholicism, which was upending everything I thought I knew. I found myself both giving birth and being born—my body turned inside out to bring forth a daughter; my soul turned inside out to make room for Christ. Each of these births, like every birth, was an engulfing paradox of beauty and agony.

My physical labors tend to go quickly. Spiritual labor, not so much. I began that semester as a half-brewed convert: technically Catholic, but not yet inwardly Catholic. I was in a strange and dizzying in-between. When I joined the Church in 2014, I assumed I would become a cafeteria Catholic, lugging my cherished progressive beliefs into the Church and taking shelter under the canopy of conscience. Then something terrible happened. My conscience started to rebel. The progressive beliefs I was carrying began to feel less like personal belongings and more like baggage: burdensome and out of place.

The world I’d inhabited comfortably as a feminist academic started to make less sense. I was like Plato’s unhappy cave dweller, stumbling out of the murk into blinding daylight for the first time. The shadows on the stone walls behind me, once so clear and disturbingly real, now seemed cartoonish and oversized. Yet moving beyond the cave was terrifying; my eyes had not adjusted to a world lit up by the sun, so I lingered in the entrance for a while, stranded in the half-light.

Teaching gender theory in that state was bewildering, to put it mildly. While discussing essays I’d taught a dozen times, I was suddenly plagued by unbidden questions, noticing gaps and inconsistencies that had never troubled me before. Over the semester, it became increasingly clear to me—in little epiphanies of horror—that I’d been living in a cave for over a decade, mistaking it for reality. In pursuing my love for women’s literature and my abiding interest in women’s experiences, I had entered a field of study that came prepackaged with its own totalizing worldview, a worldview I gradually absorbed. I’d become an ideologue without realizing it.

I remember one particular class session, when my students and I were wrangling with an essay by Judith Butler, a prominent gender theorist. In the essay, Butler rolls out her concept of gender performativity: gender as something we do, rather than something we are. (I’ll discuss Butler in more detail in chapter 3.) Like most critical theorists, Butler writes in all but impenetrable prose; nonetheless, my students readily embraced her idea of gender as a performance. What they didn’t fully recognize is that Butler asserts gender is only a performance, that women don’t really exist, and that any truth claim is ultimately an exercise of power. These ideas, which might not have been so appealing to my students, remained well hidden below the surface, obscured under opaque jargon. My students skimmed along the topsoil, grasping a few blooms here and there, but they never got a good look at the root. Only now catching my first real glimpse, I wasn’t much help to them.

I left class that day feeling defeated and unsure why. I’d taught this text to undergraduates before, many times, with an untroubled conscience. In fact, I’d often felt good about exposing my students to heady and trendy theories about gender. When they voiced newfound uncertainty and confusion, as they usually did at the end of the course, I’d feel satisfied, as if my central task as a gender studies professor was to disrupt and unsettle their tidy and simplistic views, to expose them to irresolvable complexity. Now that work of disorientation, without any effort at reorientation, began to unsettle me. My conscience, after giving me reassuring high-fives for the past decade, was now clearing her throat in the backroom of my mind and asking: So, is any of this true?

In this state of unease, I sought the advice of an older professor I respected. I rushed to his office straight from home, my hair still wet from a recent shower. I was newly back from maternity leave, always five minutes behind and sweating profusely, trying to cram all I could into the three-hour windows between breastfeeding sessions. I showed up with a Diet Coke in hand, thinking I would be having a nice, casual chat with a colleague. Within five minutes I was in full-blown confession mode, disclosing the indictments of my conscience not to a priest, but to a gray-bearded Quaker with a Gandalf vibe. I feel like I’ve been giving my students poison to drink, I said. For so many years, I’d been careless, careless with their minds and, most disturbingly, their souls.

The professor listened quietly to me, as was his way. He tends to speak few words, but those words are usually wise and rarely what you want to hear. He could have coddled me, told me I’d done what I thought was right at the time, that I was being too hard on myself. Instead, he said, in an Appalachian drawl, You know that verse in Matthew? The one that says if anyone causes the little ones to stumble, it would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and be drowned in the sea? I’ve always thought it would be a good idea for us professors to have that tattooed on our arms.

That’s what I was feeling: the damn millstone. In truth, it had been around my neck for years, but at least now I was feeling the weight of it. That much was a comfort.

I left his office with a little more clarity about what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to keep teaching gender theory as a set of value-neutral ideas, without giving any attention to the worldview operating in the background. I didn’t want my endgame to be confusion. I understood what not to do, but was less sure about what to do.

If gender theory was, at root, an ideological discipline, had I simply wasted my education? Was there nothing good here, nothing salvageable? I did not know how to integrate these theories with my newfound Catholic identity—or whether I should even try. I had to keep climbing out of the cave, that much I knew, but was there nothing of value I could bring with me? I was experiencing a profound worldview dissonance, as if I’d been floating happily along on what I’d thought was a sturdy raft, only to discover I was straddling two separate logs that were drifting apart.

I suspect there are many women today who find themselves in a similar place: caught between worldviews, suspended between Christianity and the latest feminist trends, wondering how, if at all, those perspectives connect and overlap. Some feel this tension deeply, unsure how to reconcile the two. Others don’t feel it at all, instead concluding that Christianity and feminism are so compatible they amount to roughly the same thing: to follow Jesus is to be a feminist. Then there are those who adopt feminism so wholeheartedly it becomes a religion, and any lingering Christian commitments gradually become vestigial or disappear altogether.

In my strange and meandering journey of faith, I’ve been all of those women.

Evangelical Feminist

I started college in the fall of 2001. The planes hit the Twin Towers two weeks into my first semester. The world was in turmoil, but all that was miles away; I was safely on the West Coast, preoccupied with the upheaval in my own small world. Leaving home felt like a prison break. I was eager to pursue the college promise of self-discovery—and to find a boyfriend as quickly as possible. At the time, I held typical Evangelical views about women; I toed the party line on things like male headship and female submission, at least if asked. Encouraged as I’d been from a young age to dream about my future husband, I kept a list of desired traits in the back of my journal. At the top of the list? A leader in the home and in the world. Ever a creature of contraries, I also kept a list of all the boys I’d kissed, a number that ramped up into double digits the summer before college.

Despite my obligatory nod toward male authority, I didn’t have a good track record of embodying the submissive feminine ideal. I often found myself in male-dominated spaces, like the boys’ soccer team in high school and the philosophy classroom in college, and I’d manage to hold my own. I was ambitious and competitive, feisty when needed. I didn’t fit the feminine mold (too much body hair, for one thing) and my awareness of this fact heightened during that first year of college. Debates about women’s roles, which had seemed far off to me as a teenager, now gained urgency. Marriage, family life, career: these were no longer just future fantasies but looming prospects. The question of my identity and purpose as a woman became pressing.

I entered college assuming, as I’d been taught, that feminism was a harmful ideology at odds with Christianity. Not that anyone in my Evangelical church or small Mormon hometown ever really mentioned feminism. The most I heard was Rush Limbaugh occasionally railing against Feminazis on the car radio. I thought of feminists as shrill, liberal women with short hair and pantsuits. It didn’t take long for this caricature to fall by the wayside. Within nine short months of entering college, I was writing a term paper entitled God Is a Feminist and emailing it to my no-doubt scandalized parents.

What sparked this sudden shift? Reading the Bible. As a cradle Evangelical I’d done plenty of Bible reading, but only in typical piecemeal fashion: a memory verse here, a chapter or passage there. In college, however, I was required to read a whole biblical book in one stretch, and I discovered some strange, murky corners in the Bible I thought I knew. I was caught off guard by verses about women covering their heads and keeping silent during church, or even more perplexing: women as the image and glory of man, and men as the image and glory of God.¹ That one sent me spinning. Are men closer to God than women are? Despite growing up in a nesting doll of religious conservatism—an Evangelical bubble inside a Mormon bubble—I had never been so directly confronted with what seemed to be a hierarchy of value between women and men, and from the Word of God, no less.

I instinctively recoiled from the idea that women have less value in the eyes of God. But I wanted to be able to reconcile my belief in men and women’s equal dignity with the authoritative words of Scripture. My professor didn’t have a satisfactory interpretation, and neither did my classmates. Feeling lost, I took myself to the library, searching for answers. Wandering those aisles, I made a discovery that would reorient the trajectory of my intellectual life: feminist biblical interpretation.

This discovery sparked what you might call my own first wave as a feminist: Evangelical feminism. For the next two years or so, I focused my energy on interpreting Scripture in a way that affirmed an egalitarian perspective on men and women. I found a golden hermeneutical key in a snippet from Galatians 3:28—there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. I used that key to unlock the puzzling verses that had troubled me. Meanwhile, my broader religious views remained more or less Evangelical. I still relied on Scripture as the ultimate authority, with the caveat that it must be interpreted correctly; I had faith in Christian revelation and Christ’s salvific work. I saw no tension between feminism and Christianity, as I understood them, and I busied myself with the work of convincing others of their compatibility.

My second wave of feminism began when I was a junior. There was a new professor on campus who was a vocal feminist, and I took her class on women in the Bible. When we got to those pesky Pauline passages in the New Testament, I sat back and waited to be taught what I already knew: Paul is not sexist; we just have to read him correctly.

To my surprise, the professor pivoted to make another argument entirely: Paul is indeed sexist, but we can just ignore those bits of Scripture, because they were corrupted by the patriarchal culture of the time. My first reaction to this was frustration; I knew my classmates, who were skeptical about feminism, would retreat from any perspective that played fast and loose with the Bible, and I’d been hoping to win some feminist converts.

Despite my initial vexation, the class gradually began to reshape my view of Scripture. By the end of the term, I had wholeheartedly adopted the professor’s way of thinking and reading. The Bible was no longer the Word of God, something trustworthy and deeply true; I saw it as a man-made artifact and an instrument of women’s oppression. For the first time, I began to feel a tension, even a chasm, between Christianity and feminism. I was decidedly on the feminist side, glaring suspiciously across at Scripture and tradition.

The following semester, I went to Oxford to study medieval women writers. I spent four months immersed in the works of Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Christine de Pizan—all deeply Christian writers and faithful daughters of the Church. Strangely, I did not see these women as representative of tradition; I saw them as rogue players, whose voices had been suppressed. I found a handy little sourcebook of anti-woman material in the writings of various Church Fathers that I took as representative of Christian tradition as a whole. Without reading any of the primary sources in their entirety, I contented myself with these excerpts, plucked from their full context, to blacklist Augustine, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, et al. and support my presumption that Christian tradition is anti-woman.

I quickly acquired a reductive and bifurcated understanding of Church history. I saw the women writers I had newly discovered as marginalized figures, even though Hildegard wielded enormous influence in her day and has since been declared a saint and doctor of the Church. My grasp of tradition was hopelessly impoverished, but I was unaware of this. I had been raised in a corner of Christianity that was more or less ahistorical, one that viewed our local church as a seamless extension of the earliest Christians in the New Testament. The intervening centuries, the gradual working out of creeds, canon, and doctrine—all of this was skipped over entirely. I was not even self-consciously Protestant, unaware that Evangelicalism is itself a tradition, the newest kid on a longstanding block. I knew the Bible well, but I was unaware of its interpretative heritage. I naively assumed that my familiarity with Scripture made me an expert on Christianity writ large, and I wasted no time in hastily constructing a flimsy scarecrow version of it, one I could easily tear down.

Looking back, I can see clearly that both of my first feminist phases were characterized by enthusiastic cherry-picking. As an egalitarian feminist, I selected the verses that appeared to affirm that perspective, like Galatians 3:28, and used those verses to reinterpret the ones that seemed at odds with egalitarianism. As a critical feminist, I homed in on the passages that were flagrantly sexist and used those to confirm my conclusion that the Bible, and thus Christianity as a whole, was fundamentally patriarchal and in dire need of feminist reform. Instead of wading into the tension created by these apparent conflicts within Scripture, I made a classic move: resolving the tension by doing away with it altogether.

I caught a glimpse of a third way in Oxford—one that avoided the well-worn paths of misogynist hierarchy on the one hand and egalitarian sameness on the other. I wrote my term paper that semester on Hildegard’s cosmology, focusing specifically on her understanding of man and woman in the created order. Differences between men and women have too often been used to justify a strict hierarchy of value and roles between the sexes. In the effort to reject this, feminist thought has typically regarded sexual difference itself with hostility and has downplayed difference in order to affirm equal dignity. Hildegard’s mystical theology, conveyed through rich images rather than abstract propositions, conveys an understanding of difference that is harmonious and balanced, rather than hierarchical. I was able to recognize that her vision of complementarity was unlike the complementarity I’d been taught in Evangelical circles, and I also perceived that she was out of step with modern feminism, which is suspicious of the very concept of complementarity.

Somehow, Hildegard managed to balance equal dignity with meaningful difference, in a way I’d not yet encountered. I wish I’d followed that thread; perhaps it would have pulled me into the Christian cosmos earlier. Instead, I let it go and lost myself in the labyrinth of postmodern feminism for the next ten years.

Revisionist Feminist

This was the beginning of a new wave for me: revisionist feminism. I graduated from college and went to graduate school in Scotland to study women’s writing and gender theory. By then, I was increasingly interested in French poststructuralist feminism. I was drawn to philosophers like Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, who were doing strange and unsettling things with language. Reading their works was like entering a dream world, ducking just under the surface of conscious thought into a realm where words, images, and metaphors swirled around in dizzying eddies, creating pictures that moved and shimmered and dissolved. As an undergraduate philosophy major, I had grown tired of the desiccated language of analytic philosophy that seemed hopelessly removed from embodied experience. These French feminists