Episodes

In this second episode in our six part series about the Nativity, Rev. Deborah Duguid-May and Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe discuss what it means to be gendered and how gender is a part of the Gospel birth narratives.

---

Transcript

DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

DDM [00:39] Welcome. So in our episode today, Elizabeth and I are going to continue this Christmas series looking at how Luke and Matthew deal in the birth narratives with the issue of gender. And I don’t know about you, Elizabeth, but I’m excited for this podcast. Now, I think it’s important for us to just, in the very beginning, remember that gender is about how we socially and culturally construct these ideas of what role a person is suited to based on their biological sex. So, it’s these social and cultural constructed ideas of what behavior is appropriate and how biological sex should or shouldn’t be expressed outwardly.

DDM [01:27] Now, because gender is so shaped by our society and culture, we have to remember that, of course, in the biblical narratives, we’re dealing with a specific culture and time period very different from our own. Just as we today are having to navigate gender in our own cultures and generation. Elizabeth, would you say that’s a fair summary so we understand what we mean when we’re talking about gender?

MET [01:53] Yeah, I want to be very clear and just because this is something I’m particularly interested in.

DDM [02:00] Right.

MET [02:00] When we talk about gender and sex, we’re talking about two different things.

DDM [02:05] Biological sex. Yes.

MET [02:07] That’s very important for people to understand. Gender is your outward expression of who you are and how you see yourself fitting into society and the role you want to take, whereas sex is the physical.

DDM [02:23] Biologically, physically, how you were born male, female, intersex.

MET [02:27] Right, and I’ll talk about this in just a few minutes; that’s something we need to start with very clearly.

DDM [02:33] Right, right. Because I wanted to be clear when we’re speaking about these Christmas narratives and gender, what we mean by that.

MET [02:43] Yeah, and that’s exactly where you need to start.

DDM [02:44] Okay, beautiful, beautiful. So Luke’s gospel does something very interesting with gender, because although we find some traditional gender roles and behavior in Luke’s gospel, like a woman giving birth. There are many other ways in which we see Luke presenting some pretty radical concepts that would have really challenged the gender norms of the time. Now in Luke’s gospel women are really at the center, unlike most patriarchal texts, which the Bible of course is, where we have the stories of men, the telling of what they have said and done and how it shaped society and history. In Luke, we have the woman and what they are saying and doing and how that is shaping history and their culture, being right at the heart of the Gospel.

DDM [03:34] And so women’s lives that were traditionally lived in the private spaces of the home and their conversations and relationships that were kept generally between women privately are now central and placed centrally in this public story. And I think that in itself is very unusual. This shifting of women’s lives from the private to the public as central characters really is not normative in patriarchal cultures or storytelling.

DDM [04:10] And then we have Mary, as we looked at in our last episode, not passive, certainly not meek and mild as our culture projects onto her to maintain maybe our own gender norms. But instead, in Luke’s gospel, Mary is active, making choices and decisions without consulting men. The angels approach her directly. She questions and engages in discussion with them before agreeing, and consenting to bear this child.

DDM [04:41] And then utters those revolutionary prophetic words of the Magnificat which we looked at again in one of our previous episodes. This is far from the meek, mild and passive woman that so often has been portrayed of Mary. This is a woman with the strength to make radical choices on her own, prepared to deal with the consequences of those decisions. This is a lot more like, in some ways, Eve in the Garden of Eden.

DDM [05:12] This is a young woman who engages angels and questions them. And this is a strong prophetic woman who makes pronouncements on wealth, power, and politics. And so in Luke’s gospel, this is a real challenge to how women are supposed to act and be in the world at that time. Because Mary is a theological thinker, but she’s also a social prophet.

DDM [05:39] And then we have in Luke’s gospel, the narrative where Mary travels on her own again to visit Elizabeth. Elizabeth is much older than Mary, so Luke in some ways provides us with a model of both a young and an older woman. Elizabeth is wise, very in tune with the spirit, and immediately recognizes in Mary the change, but also prophetically sees the role Mary is going to play in history. And so she utters these words that have become central for any of us who pray the rosary.

DDM [06:15] I don’t know, Elizabeth, if you pray the rosary.

MET [06:17] I don’t pray the rosary.

DDM [06:18] You don’t? Okay.

MET [06:19] And some of that is just because growing up Baptist, we didn’t have I don’t know if you know this, Baptists don’t have set prayers. We don’t have memorized prayers or anything like that. It’s just being a non-liturgical denomination.

MET [06:33] Until I started going to a Lutheran church, I never had a prayer that was memorized except for the Our Father.

DDM [06:41] Okay. Interesting. Interesting.

DDM [06:44] Okay. So myself, I love the rosary. And this is one of the most, in some ways, the rosary, central and beloved forms of prayer globally. And it is Elizabeth who utters these words that now we all say 2,000 years later, Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

DDM [07:02] Blessed art thou amongst women, blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God. And so this is the gift of Elizabeth to us, the clarity to see instantly who Mary is. Not simply a young family relative, but chosen by God to bring the one who will change our world forever.

DDM [07:26] And so Elizabeth says, why am I so favored that the mother of my Lord should come to me? Elizabeth can see that the child Mary carries will be the Lord and Savior and this is interesting well before Peter or any of the other male disciples make these statements it is a woman while Jesus is still in the womb who sees this and makes this declaration and so Luke is showing the wisdom and the prophetic insight of woman again challenging the norms of wisdom being the prerogative of men. And it’s interesting as well that in Luke’s Gospel, Mary and Elizabeth’s faith are held up in contrast to Zachariah, who is the high priest at the time, but who ends up being struck dumb because of his doubt.

DDM [08:16] Now, this contrast would not have been missed by readers at the time. And then Luke gives to us the account of Anna, again a prophet, again a woman who was not under the control of a husband for most of her life as she was widowed very young, a woman who was a mystic, lived in the temple with a deep spirituality, and she is the one who approaches the holy family in the temple when they come to present Jesus, and she immediately declares that this is the child all have been waiting for who would redeem Jerusalem.

DDM [08:52] So again in Luke’s gospel it’s that voice of prophecy the voice of wisdom and insight well before any declaration by a male disciples of Jesus as being Lord and Messiah. And so Luke shows us how the first declarations of who Jesus is come not from the male disciples many decades later but actually from women. Because for Luke, women are not just wives and mothers, but Luke shows divine favor and divine action taking place through women. Luke shows us women filled with courage, wisdom, filled with the Holy Spirit, and proclaiming salvation and prophetic social change.

DDM [09:34] And so in some ways, I feel like Luke’s gospel doesn’t just liberate women from gender norms and roles, but actually celebrates these aspects of women.

MET [09:44] So it’s interesting that you end with that point because I’m going to talk about kind of the femininity of Luke. Last episode, I opened by mentioning that Luke is often called the women’s gospel. And I’m going to let Deborah cover the biblical texts as she started out doing, but I think that thinking about it as the women’s gospel, it’s a really interesting place to start.

MET [10:13] When you think about the nativity story or stories as we see them specifically in Matthew and Luke, we get, as we talked about last time, two very different perspectives. And one of those differences is seeing the story from Joseph’s eyes versus Mary and Elizabeth and Anna, et cetera.

MET [10:33] And we can think about this as a gendered tale. We can think about it as telling the story from the mother’s eyes, or the father’s eyes, or however you want to parse it. But in one gospel, you have the stories of the women in Jesus’s life, and in one story, you have the primary man.

MET [10:53] Okay, first off, consider that these are parental stories to begin with. These stories start out human and accessible, and regardless of whether it is a story of a king or a pauper, this story begins with a mother and a father. This is a family story, but the story is kind of gendered. And I want to talk about what that means because a lot of people don’t know.

MET [11:16] To say something is gendered doesn’t mean it is boy or girl or male or female. It’s kind of like saying it is coded male or female, like there is something about it that makes us think male or female. Generally, this is nonsense. There is nothing actually male or female or masculine or feminine about the vast majority of things, but we have assigned that value or trait to them.

MET [11:49] That’s what it means to be gendered. So, for example, think of household chores. Are there some household chores that are mom chores or dad chores? Does it just kind of happen or make sense that the man mows the yard or takes out the trash while the woman does the dishes and vacuums.

MET [12:15] Now, this is all assuming a certain amount of heteronormativity, of course, but my guess is that many of you know exactly what I’m talking about. This is what it means to be gendered. Women are perfectly capable of mowing, and men can do dishes with the best of them. But in many households, those are separated in kind of sex-specific ways.

MET [12:38] They are gendered. Lots of things are gendered for no good reason. Do you think of Legos as a boy’s toy? Newsflash, that’s dumb.

MET [12:51] It’s a brick. There’s nothing male about it. But for many people, it is gendered. It has to be pink and flowery before the brick is acceptable for girls.

MET [13:03] Do you think of kitchen sets as girls’ toys? Also dumb, the vast majority of successful chefs in the world are men. In fact, it is a notoriously sexist industry, and you are much more likely to make it in the cooking world if you are a man. But domestic cooking?

MET [13:23] That’s girl stuff. So it is two different things to make the claim that these two narratives are about a mother and father, and that these two stories are gendered. But In some ways, both of those claims kind of ring true. Luke’s gospel tells us a story of poverty, tenderness, acceptance, grace, and the humble nature of a new family.

MET [13:52] It’s a feminine story. Am I saying a woman told the story? No, I’m saying it’s a gendered story. Luke’s gospel tells us a story about the spiritual and physical hardships of a new family.

MET [14:07] Luke shares the songs and relationships of women who lift and support each other. It’s a story about family and relationships and connection. It is ultimately a story about humility and tenderness. It is in every way a feminine account of the nativity.

MET [14:24] Compare that to Matthew. Matthew is a story of kings and politics. Matthew tells the story of Joseph’s visions and his decisions of how to respond to his betrothed, about whether he should keep her or not. This is a story about Joseph’s decisions, and it’s a story about intrigue and action.

MET [14:46] In Matthew’s account, there are foreign rulers traveling across known lands involved in cloak and dagger type affairs, right? Sneaking in and out of the country. The narrative is about managing power and money as the Magi bring gifts, and Joseph probably had to keep all of that from Herod. And it’s a bloody story.

MET [15:05] There’s a massacre of the innocents. So there is gore and heartbreak, whereas in Luke there’s love and peace. So you can see how Matthew’s account isn’t just a completely different narrative, it is coded differently. Matthew’s story is a masculine story.

MET [15:21] It’s a story of powerful men doing important things. Where Luke is genteel and simple, Matthew is political and full of intrigue. Matthew is the Ian Fleming version, whereas Luke is Jodi Picoult.

DDM [15:35] I like that.

MET [15:36] Right. That’s what it means to say something is gendered, and my claim is that Matthew and Luke tell very gendered versions of the nativity story.

DDM [15:45] Absolutely. And yes, Matthew is a very different portrayal than Luke, centering Joseph. And yet it’s interesting that in Matthew’s gospel, the angel doesn’t approach Joseph directly as they do Mary in Luke’s gospel. The angel instead in Matthew’s gospel always appears in a dream.

DDM [16:05] So this isn’t that direct communication of a woman with an angel, but instead a vision during sleep. I think it’s an interesting difference. Joseph also does not question the angel. There’s no engagement there.

DDM [16:21] He simply wakes, considers the dream, and then acts in obedience. You might say in some ways that Matthew is a far more passive account between Joseph and the angel than Luke’s version of Mary and the angel. In Matthew’s gospel, no woman speaks. But what we do have, interestingly, is the contrast, I think, of masculinities. One is the masculinity of Joseph and the wise men.

DDM [16:49] These men are open to their dreams. They take their dreams seriously enough to go into exile, travel to a foreign land and allow their lives and plans to be completely turned upside down. In these masculinities, they obey the wisdom revealed in their dreams and then they use that wisdom to protect. Joseph protects Mary and protects the Christ child, doing whatever it will take.

DDM [17:17] These wise men, after another dream, do exactly the same. They use their wisdom to protect the Holy Family and don’t go back to King Herod. But Herod in Matthew’s Gospel is the contrasting form of masculinity. This is a man who uses his knowledge of the coming birth of the Christ child to deceive, to lie, to pretend, and ultimately to kill, murder, and destroy.

DDM [17:45] And so I think it’s interesting that Matthew does seem to show us these contrasts of masculinities and how men engage and use their power. On one hand, we see male knowledge and power being used to protect, and on the other hand, male knowledge and power being used to kill. Again in Matthew’s Gospel we see the difference between the power of male humility versus male pride. Herod uses his power to try to hold on to his role, onto his power.

DDM [18:20] He will not allow any challenge to his role as air quote, “King of the Jews.” This is, I think, the male use of power to protect their pride, their position, and their ego. However, Matthew’s gospel also shows us another way for men to be, where power is being used to protect and no attempt is being made to protect ego, status or reputation. So Joseph willingly takes Mary to be his wife even after it emerges that she’s pregnant and not with his child.

DDM [18:56] That would have been pretty unheard of in those days. Male pride would have been deeply damaged, reputations would have been scarred and the woman could easily have been stoned for bringing such dishonor and shame. Matthew’s gospel shows us instead a man protecting her reputation, protecting the child that is not biologically his and putting aside his own ego and pride. So too with the wise men who we must remember are kings and rulers in their own right from foreign lands.

DDM [19:30] They come to find this tiny baby and they use their power not to feel threatened but instead to bow the knee and worship. Kings choosing to bow down before a foreign child. Again, that is revolutionary in its own right. That male power will bend the knee to a child born into poverty.

DDM [19:53] And so I think we must remember that Matthew’s gospel is in many ways just as revolutionary as Luke’s.

MET [20:03] One of my advisors in grad school used to tell me over and over again that an analysis doesn’t mean much if you don’t answer the so what question. Why does this matter? What is the point of all that you have said? And it’s an interesting thought experiment to talk about gender and Nativity, obviously, and even more for me to make bold claims about how the birth of Jesus is gendered in different tellings.

MET [20:32] But ultimately, we have to ask, what does any of this actually mean? We’re talking about all this gender and revolutionary, what is the point? So first, let’s get the big question out of the way. Was this on purpose?

MET [20:50] And I’m almost certain it was not in many ways. When I am teaching my students to analyze a speech or an article or something, I’ll give them a theory or methodology and I’ll say, look for this effect or method or whatever we’re looking for. And inevitably there’s some too cool for school kid who says, do you actually think they did this on purpose? And they are generally shocked when I say, oh no, of course not.

MET [21:18] I do not for a minute, think that Barack Obama sat down to write a speech and thought, I will use an appeal to logos at this exact point, any more than I think Luke sat down and said, I will write a gendered narrative. But I argue that they did.

DDM [21:36] Yeah.

MET [21:36] That’s what they wrote. Because this is not about authorial intent, it is about authorial effect. So let me explain what I mean. We have been doing things like storytelling, writing, singing, public speaking, all of this for thousands upon thousands of years.

MET [21:55] The rhetorical rules for that didn’t exist for most of those years. We’ve been doing this much longer than we’ve been doing any kind of analysis. But that’s actually what I’m saying. The rules didn’t pre-exist before the communication.

MET [22:11] The rules describe what had already been established as effective. When we say effective speakers, writers, whatever, do X, it is not some random proclamation. It is because we have observed for thousands upon thousands of years that this thing, this X, is an effective tool of speakers, writers, and storytellers. So we’ve made a generalization, and we are now passing that on to people who are learning.

MET [22:43] This happens. That’s what you’re learning in things like speech or composition classes. We know from experience that this is effective. These are not arbitrary rules or observations noted after so long. This is what people do. So did Luke and Matthew set out to write gendered stories? Did they think, I’m going to write a masculine tale about the Nativity?

MET [23:08] No, of course not. But that’s not the question. The question is, what is the effect? Because Matthew and Luke did, so now what?

MET [23:16] And the effect is somewhat startling, because the whole of the Gospels tell us that Jesus’ beginnings cannot be relegated to one thing or another.

DDM [23:28] Mm, understood just in one way or the other.

MET [23:31] That’s right. Jesus’ story starts in both a masculine and feminine way. Luke and Matthew give us both insights into Jesus’ life that show us he will be a Messiah that will embody all parts of us. He will be a king, he will challenge powerful men and operate in the world of politics and the establishment, but he will also be a comforter for the outcasts.

MET [23:56] He will welcome in those who need shelter. Matthew and Luke give us a picture of a Messiah who is not just masculine or feminine, but embodies a whole person. The Jesus of the whole gospel is neither effeminate nor toxically masculine. He is a whole balanced and healthy person.

MET [24:18] He reaches people across the binary where they are at. The story of gender in the gospel is spelled out very early and pretty clearly. Jesus’ story is both masculine and feminine, soft and strong. The gospel doesn’t just provide a story of the perspective of the parents.

MET [24:38] It provides us with a picture of a whole and loving God.

DDM [24:44] Love that, and it’s almost like for us to come to our full humanity, there has to be that integration of the masculine and feminine within each one of us, that anima animus, you know? I think also what fascinates me for me in both of these Gospels is how both Luke’s Gospel and Matthew’s are in their own unique, very different ways, both so liberatory, but also revolutionary. You know, Luke’s Gospel is completely turning on its head the traditional gender roles of women. Women are seen to be public transformers of history.

DDM [25:20] Active, prophetic, wise, challenging not just political and social powers, but even questioning angels. You know, we sing in Luke’s gospel that women are theologians and prophets. And in Matthew’s gospel, we see men trusting the intuition of their dreams, being prepared to travel and move and turn their worlds upside down, being prepared even to disobey kings and political rulers in order to protect a woman and her child. In Matthew’s Gospel we see the liberatory power.

DDM [25:52] I think of a man who will use their knowledge and power to protect and not to harm. To protect against the powers that will harm and destroy so that women and children can become who God has called them to be. In some ways that’s almost as though Luke and Matthew’s gospel belong together, as you say, because they reveal both this masculinity and femininity beyond gender norms and how both men and women can use their power in wisdom, in ways that protect, in ways that save, in ways that transform our world.

DDM [26:27] I honestly think that these texts are still radical even for our day to day and have so much to teach us as human beings.

MET [26:40] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast at priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org slash donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church.

MET [27:05] Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [27:09] Music by Audionautix.com

In this first of six episodes about the Nativity, Rev. Deborah Duguid-May and Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe explore the birth of Christ through the lens of class and material wealth.

---

Transcript

DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010\. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

MET [00:38] Luke, the Gospel of Luke, is sometimes called the Women’s Gospel, and I’m going to talk more about that in the future, but I note it now because the Gospel of Luke tells a slightly different story than the others. Luke wants you to know from the very beginning that Jesus is on the side of the outcasts and the marginalized. Matthew, not so much. And I’m going to be talking about Matthew and Luke because, believe it or not, those are the places where the birth stories, what we think of as the nativity stories, that’s where they take place.

MET [01:15] Mark doesn’t have a nativity story in the way that we think of it, which is kind of weird because a lot of people think Mark was the first or Q gospel document, and Matthew and Luke are kind of based on that. And the beginning of John is just kind of a fever dream. Well, read John. So it’s notable that Matthew and Luke’s version of the birth story differ so radically.

MET [01:47] This is where a little bit of comm theory comes in handy, and my undergrads may have groan, but my good friend Kenneth Burke actually has some important insights here. Now, I have talked about Kenneth Burke before, and I am sure you don’t remember, but I’m not going to give you a full rundown again because I don’t think it’s necessary that you get a complete treatment of methodology and theory, but I want to highlight a few things. Burke says that we are storytelling creatures. We live and speak in drama.

MET [02:20] Our lives are organized into stories because we organize them that way. So in a situation like this, it is very obvious that someone, supposedly two guys named Matthew and Luke, had a story to tell. What Burke posits is that you can tell something about somebody’s motivations by analyzing the way they tell a story. People might be telling basically the same story, but depending on what they highlight or de-emphasize, it tells you something about that storyteller’s goals and motivations.

MET [02:56] This isn’t rocket science, right? If I tell you the story of my day, and I talk a lot about how my classes went and what a great time I had teaching, and how great a conversation I had in my rhet theory class or whatever class, then you know that what I valued, at least for that day, is my work as a teacher. That was the best part of my day.

MET [03:17] If I don’t even mention class, however, and I told you about the research that I did and how that was going, and then I tell you about how great my projects are, then you know then I want you to appreciate me as an academic and researcher. If I tell you how great my meetings went and how well I was able to delegate something and make some tough decisions and how proud I am of my organizational skills, you know I want you to appreciate me as an administrator. Now, by the way, that last one will never happen. And of course, I am just as likely to tell you what a great day I had with my family, or how proud I am of my kid, or the amazing time I had with Carl.

MET [04:02] These are all possibility because I do, in fact, do more than work. If I habitually focus on one of these things repeatedly, then I’m telling you something about myself. If I am using these dramatic narratives to tell you something, it is generally what I think is valuable. So let’s consider Luke.

MET [04:21] What does Luke want you to know? Luke wants you to know that, yes, Jesus would be of the family of David, but for Luke, there’s not a lot of prestige that comes with that. Joseph had to take his fiancee, who was pregnant, back to the bustling burg of Bethlehem. I say that sarcastically.

MET [04:42] One of the things about the prophecies concerning Jesus’ beginnings is that he was supposed to come from very humble start. The Bible tells us that the Messiah would come from a few places. He would be from the city of David, he would be a Nazarene, and he would come out of Egypt. In a wild and twisty set of turns of events, Jesus manages all of this, but it is all because of his family’s poverty.

MET [05:09] Jesus moves around a lot because he is a poor kid in a family that finds itself on the wrong end of politics quite a bit. And then there’s the birth itself. They get to Bethlehem and they can’t find a room, so they end up basically in a cave with animals, and they have to put the baby in a feeding trough. Ladies and gentlemen, it smelled in there.

MET [05:31] And Silent Night must be the worst description of a nativity event ever. There was a newborn, barn animals, a terrified new mother and father, And they had what, straw to keep them comfortable? I guarantee you this was anything but silent. And then who showed up to genuflect?

MET [05:53] Shepherds. They had been out in the fields for who knows how long. They were dirty, unclean in the literal and religious sense, and they probably took up more space than was at all comfortable. They probably didn’t have gifts to bring.

MET [06:08] They were poor, outcast men. They didn’t have any way to comfort the new parents. They just showed up. Hey, the most terrifying thing ever just happened.

MET [06:18] An angel showed up and told us to come here. And then there was this huge noise that filled the sky. And so I guess we’re here now. Is your kid like going to save all humanity?

MET [06:26] How is that comforting? How is that something a new mother and father want to hear? But Luke is sending a message. This child signals a new way.

MET [06:38] The lowly will be exalted. The outcasts are welcome. The poor will be brought into God’s presence and the unholy places will be made holy. Luke’s gospel is in some ways a gospel of class revolution.

MET [06:54] The Jesus of Luke’s gospel begins to liberate the poor and the outcasts before he can even talk. Luke’s story of Jesus is one where the presence of God is found with those who society has pushed to the margins. Luke’s Jesus is a class warrior. Luke’s telling of the birth foreshadows Jesus’s ministry.

MET [07:19] Just as Jesus would spend his life attending to the poor and the unclean, at his birth, the poor and the unclean attend to him.

DDM [07:29] Mm, that’s powerful.

MET [07:30] Jesus’ birth is, according to Luke, unwashed and frightening. Angels spend a lot of time telling people not to be afraid in the Bible, right? Carl and I always laugh about angels showing up in the Bible because the first thing they say is, fear not, which makes us think angels must have been pretty terrifying. In a lot of ways, that is the story of Jesus’ life.

MET [07:55] He surrounds himself with those that society has pushed aside. Some because of what they did, like tax collectors, and some because of their conditions, like lepers and blind people. Regardless, he embraces those that his community would just as soon push to the margins. And because of that, he is frightening.

MET [08:18] He is a very scary figure to the religious hierarchy and to the state, because the more he welcomes the poor, the more he challenges the powerful.

DDM [08:29] Well, Elizabeth has pretty much given you a fabulous theology of Luke’s birth narratives. When I first read them, I phoned her and I said, so what do you want me to say? So I’m going to add a few things that might be interesting. First of all, we’ve got to remember that Luke is not one of the 12 disciples.

DDM [08:51] We often forget that. We say Matthew, Mark, Luke and John so frequently we assume they were all disciples. But in fact, Luke did not follow Jesus during Jesus’ lifetime. It’s thought that actually after Jesus’ death and resurrection, Luke was then converted through Paul’s ministry.

DDM [09:10] So what Luke does is he goes about after his conversion collecting these eyewitness accounts from early Christians to provide what he calls an orderly account from primary resources. So we can already see in this gospel that Luke is the scholar. This is someone whose mind wants clear order, he values primary research, he truly is the doctor scholar. But what is so interesting about Luke’s gospel is that he is also the voice of the outsider, because he wasn’t Jewish, he was a Gentile.

DDM [09:48] Luke was not a fisherman, but he was a wealthy doctor, and his audience, those he associated with, were primarily wealthy Gentiles. And so it is believed that Luke is writing this gospel to wealthy or socially elevated people, Gentiles, who were converting to Christianity outside of Palestine, to provide for them this verified account of the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. So the question then is, if Luke is wealthy, His friends and readers are wealthy. Why then does he go to such lengths to emphasize God’s identification with the poor?

DDM [10:33] And that is what I want to speak about for a little bit, because although Luke is writing with the voice of an outsider, he and his readers are not people who are living on the margins, but they’re privileged converts living in the Roman Empire. And Luke wants these Gentile converts to understand with no doubt, firstly, that God enters the world not in power or wealth, but through poor and marginal communities. So Luke is helping his readers understand, don’t look for divine power among the powerful, the wealthy, the upper class. but among the poor.

DDM [11:15] And so God comes to a poor family who we’re told can’t even afford the prescribed lamb at the temple and instead offers two common pigeons. The inn is full because it has no space for those who are poor. The Song of Mary, as we looked at in our episode on Mary, Luke includes as a revolutionary hymn. Mary’s not just praising God in general, but expressing a vision of social justice and divine reversal, where the existing class order is overturned.

DDM [11:48] The powerful will be brought down from their thrones, the rich sent away empty, but the hungry filled and the poor lifted up. As Elizabeth said, the shepherds were unclean, considered to be untrustworthy. And yet God reveals the truth of God’s birth, not to the elite, but to those considered untrustworthy and outcast. Luke is reminding again his readers that the kingdom of God is for those that we shun and exclude.

DDM [12:22] What is also interesting in Luke’s gospel is there’s no mention of the wise men, who are wealthy, powerful men, but instead Luke focuses entirely on ordinary people. And, as Elizabeth alluded to, Luke traces Jesus’ genealogy not back to King David, but to Adam, reminding the Gentile readers that Jesus is a savior not just for Jewish nationalists, but for all people. So what Luke is doing is saying to his readers, is this who you want to follow and give your life to? Because if you do, you will have to rethink your social values and your wealth.

DDM [13:07] Luke is saying, understand that salvation relates directly to how you both include those who are poor or marginal, but also how you work for their liberation. Salvation for Luke has very little to do with personal forgiveness or spiritual experience that simply becomes another way of self-growth, but rather about a God in Jesus who is overturning social hierarchies and bringing divine justice. And so through the gospel of Luke, it’s wealthy, powerful, privileged Gentiles who are being challenged that if they are to follow Jesus, they are going to have to live differently. Now Luke is not saying that God condemns them for their wealth and power, but that God does hold them directly responsible for what they do with their power and privilege.

DDM [14:00] To follow Jesus means that they will have to actively side with the poor and the marginalized. Now let’s be honest, this was so radical in those days, as in the Roman Empire, it was the cult of the warrior, the strong man. Power was celebrated. The elite were considered divinely favored, even called Lord.

DDM [14:22] And the poor were invisible, or just a nuisance. Luke confronts all of this reminding the new gentile converts that the first will be lost and the poor will be exalted and the king of salvation will be a man who is stripped naked and crucified by state power. Luke is directly challenging not just the gentile converts but the Roman imperial order itself saying that the church’s core is to practice not just generosity but justice. To form inclusive communities where those that are looked down on in the world will be the ones through whom God reveals God’s self.

DDM [15:02] The gospel of Luke, you might say, for those of us who are Gentile converts and come from one of the most wealthy and powerful nations in the world, this is our gospel. This is the message to us. And it’s as hard for us to hear this gospel as it was for the early converts, because Luke wants us to be a lot more like Mary and Jesus and less like Caesar of the empire.

MET [15:29] So this actually helps me transition right into what I wanted to say about Matthew. I talked about Luke, but Matthew has a different take, which, Matthew is a story of kings and intrigue. In Matthew, we also start with a genealogy. Matthew reminds us that Jesus comes from a long line of Jewish ancestry. Interestingly, there are a few people you wouldn’t expect, including a few women, even some of ill repute, but we will talk more about that in the future.

MET [16:09] This birth story is a lot more about Joseph. An angel appeared to Joseph to tell him how to deal with Mary. Matthew feels it is important for us to know that Mary was a virgin until Jesus was born. This is partly to tell us what a stand-up guy Joseph was, and very much to remind us about a prophecy.

MET [16:29] But there’s no mention of shepherds. The birth takes place in Bethlehem again, but the importance of that this time around is political. Herod is king in this area. Now we’ll talk about empire in a few weeks, but for now, let’s just talk about royalty.

MET [16:49] Matthew wants you to know that Jesus’s birth was kingly. Jesus’s nativity story is a royal story. When Jesus is born, magi come from the east and ask Herod where they can find the babe. Magi has been translated a number of ways.

MET [17:09] Wise men, astrologers, astronomers, but these were rich, kingly, smart men who followed the stars. It would not be weird to think of them as wizards from a court from a foreign land. And they traveled, probably with a caravan, to come see this baby. And I want you to think about that.

MET [17:28] These were not Jewish men. They just saw signs and said, hey, this kid is a big deal. Let’s find him. So they came, they asked the king where to find him, probably because they assumed that if such a significant birth happened, the king would know about it.

MET [17:45] And when they found the child, they gave the family incredibly expensive gifts. The kind of gifts you give someone royal. Matthew is telling you a story that is kind of the opposite of Luke’s, but he’s not telling you that Jesus won’t help the ostracized. He’s telling you that Jesus is not like us.

MET [18:06] He is the King of Kings. Jesus may come from a humble background, but those who are wise will recognize him as the royal figure he is. It also solidifies Christ’s story as a political one. Whereas Luke paints Christ as a character that will liberate the oppressed, Matthew establishes Christ as a figure that will operate in political realms and will be equal with kings and wise leaders throughout his life.

DDM [18:35] Absolutely. And I think what’s fascinating for me is why the difference. And I think it has to do with who your readers are. If Luke is primarily concerned with helping wealthy, powerful Gentiles understand how radical Jesus’ teaching and life is, and where God is to be found, and helping them deal with their own responsibility of power and privilege, Matthew instead is writing for the Jewish community, a community that has been

DDM [19:05] occupied by an outside military power, a community that is looked down on as uneducated, primitive. And so to them, Matthew reminds them of their own political legitimacy. Matthew reminds them that you have a royal line established by God. You’re not simply uneducated primitive people, but you are heirs of the royal line of David.

DDM [19:31] And so this is about a reminding the oppressed of who they are. That they have history that they cannot allow the oppressor to eradicate. And so Matthew clearly shows that this little child, although born in poverty under occupation, Matthew’s saying never forget he is royalty in the line of David. He is our Jewish legitimate king, even if Rome does not recognize this.

DDM [19:59] And so Matthew is reminding the oppressed Jewish community that even though you may find your royal line living in poverty, Royal power is not about status, but about divine purpose. In some ways, you might almost say, Elizabeth, that I think that Matthew is a monarchical account. You know, it reminds me growing up in our family with the story of our Scottish kings living in exile and poverty, but they always knew who they were. And people knew, even under the occupation from England, who their true king was.

DDM [20:36] And so in this gospel, we see this world of political power, the Magi, the three kings coming to worship. Again, this is reminding the Jewish people, Rome may not recognize your power and your own royal line of kings, but outside nations do. This is almost like the United Nations saying, we recognize you, Palestine, as a state, even if Israel won’t. It’s reminding the Jewish people that other people see them, see their legitimacy as a nation in their own right.

DDM [21:08] It reminds people under occupation that the oppressor’s view of them is simply that. But others can sometimes see them for who they are. And so again, Matthew is reminding the Jewish readers that no matter how powerful Herod may seem, this powerless child is in fact the true leader of their people. And then it’s interesting because it’s in Matthew we have this awful story of the genocide of the innocents, where Herod orders all the male children in Bethlehem under a certain age to be slaughtered.

DDM [21:48] Now Matthew is reminding the community that no matter how horrendous the violence, no matter how you may suffer under the occupiers or under your own political leadership like Herod that has sided with the occupiers because remember Herod himself was a Jewish person. It is reminding them that God is working always on the side of the oppressed. And so Matthew pulls no punches in showing and reminding his audience how the current powers are cruel, unjust, and truly barbaric. And that power that is rooted in fear and violence will always be illegitimate in the eyes of God.

DDM [22:30] And then in Matthew’s gospel, we see how royal and political legitimate leadership must go into exile, just as many of our nations have experienced. And so this true king begins his life in exile and displacement and under the threat already as a child of execution. But the birth narrative in Matthew is reminding the Jewish people that the Messiah will always return to his people. And so even though his own life is still under threat, this holy royal family returns to a small rural village, almost attempting to live under the radar.

DDM [23:08] We also see in Matthew this constant quoting of Old Testament prophecies, reminding them that none of this is by chance, that everything is divinely ordained. So Matthew’s gospel, like Luke’s, is a message of liberation, salvation from oppression and from occupation. It’s reminding them who they truly are, not in the eyes of Rome, but in the eyes of God. It’s reminding them of their history, their kings, and that God is working in them and through them.

DDM [23:40] And Matthew is reminding them that they are not passive victims. but are actually part of God’s divine kingdom that is rising from this new child, this line of King David. And so from both of our Gospels today, we are reminded that the message of God differs depending on who you are. What we need to know to find salvation or in contemporary language wholeness if we are privileged and have power differs from what we need to hear if we are under occupation and oppression.

DDM [24:15] The gospel is not a one-size-fits-all but it’s a specific word of freedom and liberation to a specific group or people. So the question that leaves us as readers is who are we? In what group do we find ourselves in? And what is the challenge we need to hear for us to find wholeness, integrity, and justice?

MET [24:41] All of this may seem like a different way to talk about the nativity narrative, but it’s actually a really important lens through which to view Christ’s ministry. Jesus came to be a savior for all people, certainly. But we are missing a big part of the gospel if we don’t acknowledge, as Deborah has pointed out many times before, that God has a special place in his heart for the poor. The stories in Matthew and Luke show us that Jesus is going to spend his life doing two things, humbling the rich and exalting the meek and impoverished.

MET [25:18] Because the Magi were kings or sorcerers or royal courtiers from a foreign land, And their whole role in this story was to bring gifts and praise a baby. The royal figures in the story were forced to work for it. They traveled untold distances and went through political back channels and paid who knows how much money just for the chances to see this baby. The rich have one job, and that is to be humble, to pay up and give gifts.

MET [25:53] The poor, however, have a different set of requirements. The poor will have glory revealed to them as the shepherds saw the angels. The poor don’t have to bring gifts. They can show up as they are.

MET [26:06] The poor only have to be there. The poor are there to bless and be blessed. Jesus doesn’t require them to give up their wealth. He’s just glad they are there.

MET [26:16] Now, I’d love to get all theoretical on you. I would be delighted to throw some Marxist theory at you and talk about class consciousness or hegemony or any number of other concepts that I think are applicable, but maybe a bit heady. But instead of that, I’m going to remind you of a story. There is a parable in Luke about a woman who has 10 coins and she loses one.

MET [26:42] So she lights the lamps and sweeps the whole house until she finds it. The meaning of this parable is that God will search for all of his lost children. But the reason this parable makes sense to Jesus’ listeners is because they all know what it means to lose a coin. Losing a coin was a big deal.

MET [27:02] For the woman in this parable, losing a coin meant losing 10% of her wealth. Losing a coin was a terrifying prospect. Yes, she had nine more, which was a lot. But the idea of losing a coin to a general Jewish audience under the boot of Rome was a sobering thought.

MET [27:21] Jesus’ audience knew the value of money. There’s a reason that tax collectors were so reviled. When these stories were shared later, after Jesus’ life, people would have noticed the disparity in the birth narratives, the lowly and the exalted. The Nativity story isn’t just a sweet story of shepherds and kings.

MET [27:46] It’s foreshadowing. Jesus is going to welcome the poor and demand much from the wealthy. But they are, in the end, all holy in his presence.

DDM [27:57] You know, what’s interesting, Elizabeth, is Mark and John, they do have a theological take on the birth narratives, not as obvious as the two we’ve dealt with today. But they will deal with two aspects, which is interesting, love and sacrifice.

MET [28:16] Thank you for listening to The Priest and The Prof. find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [28:45] Music by Audionautix.com

Rev. Deborah Duguid-May and Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe discuss the ways in which scripture has been used to oppress women. They focus on so-called “clobber texts,” which are specific verses and stories in the Bible that have been used as justification.

---

Transcript

DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

DDM [00:39] Welcome. So one of the things you may have noticed as Elizabeth and I have approached the many subjects we’ve looked at over the last year now is how scripture can be read and interpreted in many different ways. Depending on who we are, we see different things in the scriptures. Depending on what we’re going through or facing, we see different things, which is why we can read the same passage over and over again and see things that we haven’t seen in the past. I think that for me, Elizabeth, is what makes literature and scripture so beautiful, dynamic, and what makes it a living text.

DDM [01:16] But that is also why, equally, people can interpret the scriptures in ways that are not life-giving, but in ways that actually end up oppressing and harming others. When this happens scripture is being used as a weapon against others and in a way that leads to less life and less joy for others. This is when scripture becomes an instrument of death. And this is why we have some passages in the scriptures that are actually called clobber texts because it’s when we begin to use sacred scripture or any form of literature for that matter in a way weaponized against another person or group of people.

DDM [02:00] Now the reality is this can happen in all faiths, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity. But it’s not only in religion that this happens, it can happen with any foundational text. For myself, I’ve watched how in the USA we can see the Constitution being read in ways that bring life or in ways that bring destruction and death. I think for myself it’s the nature of words and how they’re used and misused.

DDM [02:28] So in this episode Elizabeth and I want to look at how scripture has been misused in the past and present to oppress women and how we might look at some of these texts which have been called clobber texts in ways that do not become weaponized against us as women. Because religion, and for women in particular, scripture, has often been a two-edged sword. It can be a source of deep inspiration, connection with God, liberation, but it can also be a site of dehumanization and limiting for many of us that just doesn’t sit well.

DDM [03:06] So if we look at some specific texts in scripture, it really begins with the first book in Genesis. The fact that Eve is created second has often been used to imply that she was made to be second to Adam, inferior in some way. Yet we forget that in creation, if God begins with life like water, earth, and then moves into sea creatures and birds, then animals, then humans, and lastly ends with the creation of a woman, if we are to interpret this passage through a hierarchical lens, which I personally don’t think we should, then woman is in fact the pinnacle and final form of creation.

MET [03:51] And I definitely think we should interpret it that way. I’m kidding.

DDM [03:53] I like that.

MET [03:56] Carl is looking at me like, maybe not.

DDM [04:01] Yeah, I don’t think it’s a healthy way of translating those texts, but we have traditionally used a hierarchical form of interpreting them. Secondly, woman is created from a man’s rib, which has been in the past interpreted as subordination to men. And yet the reality is in the text, she’s not created from the feet or from the head, but the side. implying equality.

DDM [04:26] What these patriarchal interpretations don’t tell you is that Eve is created to be a helper, which again is often interpreted as domestic help, but in fact the word for helper used in the text is the same word used for the Holy Spirit who is our helper. The helper in this particular biblical word implies that the helper is the one who is stronger, wiser, and the one whose guidance is needed. And this is the term actually in Scripture used for the role of woman. Did you know that?

MET [05:03] I did not.

DDM [05:03] I know. We looked in our episode on Eve, on the ways in which her choices have been interpreted. But again, on how that is not the only way of reading that story.

DDM [05:16] Because as we looked in our episode on Eve, it is through her that humanity’s eyes become opened and we gain knowledge of good and evil, that we see humanity seeking to be like God in whose image they are made, and it is through Eve that humankind moves in some ways from childhood into adulthood with free choice and knowing moral consequence. The next place we hit clobber text is in the Old Testament with a book called Leviticus. And in Leviticus, they have a long section on what is called the purity laws.

DDM [05:58] These have to do with the cultural and religious laws that deal with the categories of what is clean or unclean. And so menstruation, bodily fluids, sex, childbirth, were seen as polluting or unclean. These left women during those periods being termed unclean and women were therefore excluded from worship and religious space. And that is why in some traditions, women who are menstruating are not even encouraged to come to church.

DDM [06:33] I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Elizabeth, in many parts of the world, or not to read or enter the sanctuary. And in some of the other traditions in our world today, women will move out of the main section of the home and not cook or touch any cooking vessel so as not to contaminate the home. I stayed once with a woman professor and she was living outside of the home when I was visiting her because it was during her period.

MET [07:02] Oh my gosh.

DDM [07:03] You know, seeing our bodies even in a transitory way as being unclean and contaminating, I think it’s deeply affected and limited women for centuries. And I often wonder if this still finds expression today in women’s propensity to cut themselves and the various forms of eating disorders women experience in relationship to their bodies and sexuality that has left women often with an irrational sense of shame around their bodies and seeing sexuality as being sinful or dirty. I mean, if you think about it, we even use the term dirty magazines, when in reality there is nothing dirty about our bodies or sexuality.

DDM [07:48] But these patriarchal ways of thinking have clung onto us even up until today. What is again overlooked in these passages is I think how the text actually applies purity laws to both women and men. Men are equally considered unclean when there is a male emission and they are considered ritually unclean although only until that evening. But their bodies and fluids were not seen in the same way as with women’s as a source of shame, which is an interesting distinction.

DDM [08:24] But male sexuality and the purity laws was highly regulated in terms of incest, bestiality, sex with other men and some forms of adultery under these purity laws, and often with more severe legal consequence. In all honesty, a truthful reading of Levitical purity laws revealed that these laws were designed to hold the whole community accountable around issues of health and sexuality. However, very quickly in the tradition, these were interpreted in ways that focused on controlling women’s bodies and largely ignoring many of the male requirements. Also, I think it is so important to be clear that being unclean in Leviticus does not necessarily mean sinful.

DDM [09:14] We’re talking here about ritual status, not morality and ethics. And then in the New Testament, we have the Pauline passages that deal primarily with two issues, authority and submission in relationship to women. In 1 Corinthians 14, Paul commands women to be silent in the church. And in 1 Timothy 2, Paul says, “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man.”

DDM [09:45] What is not seen in traditional interpretations of these passages is that in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul has just been congratulating women on their faith, their prayers, and their prophesying in the church. Paul also, in other chapters, highly affirms leaders of the early house churches, like Phoebe, who was a deacon, and Priscilla, who was a co-worker in ministry with Paul, teaching and leading house churches. Paul also speaks of Junia as being outstanding amongst the apostles. And so we see clearly that women were functioning in the early church as leaders of the house churches, they were leading worship, they were deacons, they were teaching, and even apostles with a far larger oversight responsibility as being those who would have traveled to other house churches and regions.

DDM [10:39] So clearly in the scriptures women were not silent. They had authority over men and they were partners and leaders in the early church. And Paul himself affirmed in numerous passages their ministry and gave thanks publicly in his letters for their ministry.

DDM [10:59] And then we have the passage that has been used in very damaging ways over women regarding marriage. Where in Ephesians 5, Paul commands wives to submit to their husband, and speaks of the husband as being head of the home as Christ is the head of the church. And this is a, I think, a belief that is still very pernicious in our society even up until today. But this is a fascinating passage because the word used for husbands being the head of the home, as Christ is the head of the church, is the Greek word kephale, which actually means a literal, physical head, or it could be used metaphorically to refer to the head or the source, for instance, of a river.

DDM [11:51] So we know that Paul was not speaking literally that a husband is the physical head of a wife. So that would imply that we need to interpret this word metaphorically, which would mean that just as man was the source of woman, i.e. it was from Adam’s rib that Eve was created, so Christ is the source of the church because the church was created from the life and the body of Christ.

DDM [12:16] So kafale is far better translated as that from which something flows or from where it has its source than the translation of head referring to authority. And regarding submission, well, everybody leaves out the verse just before this passage, which starts the whole passage off by saying, submit to one another out of reverence for God. So we’re talking here about a mutual submission to one another. And the word submission itself that’s used in this text refers to, in some ways, a yielding or a deferring to another person out of love.

DDM [12:57] It is not about power and blind obedience, but of course, in traditional interpretations, all of that is quite conveniently skipped over.

MET [13:08] Right. The long-lasting impact of these things is hard to overstate. I think you all know I grew up under the direct influence of these verses.

MET [13:23] I went to churches where women were not allowed to preach, be deacons, or hold ministry positions, unless it was to work with children.

DDM [13:34] Elizabeth, how would that have been then interpreted with, for instance, those that were named as deacons like Phoebe in the scriptures?

MET [13:43] We didn’t talk about it.

DDM [13:44] Oh, okay.

MET [13:46] Honestly, I didn’t know until I was in college that there were women…

DDM [13:51] deacons and apostles.

MET [13:52] Yeah. Just left out.

DDM [13:56] Interesting. Okay. I was just wondering.

MET [13:59] Yeah. In many of the churches that I went to, women were not even allowed to pray in front of the congregation. It was kind of confusing to me because it was very obvious that it was women who made the church run. So many of the volunteers and leaders and teachers and people who worked on the projects of the churches were women, but they were denied any recognition at the church.

DDM [14:27] Elizabeth, it’s interesting. In South Africa, there was a saying in the church that men may think they’re the head, but women are the neck and the spine.

MET [14:37] Right. So, for a while, I didn’t really notice that necessarily because to be honest, my mom was one of the ones making the gears turn. My mom was always at the center of things. The churches we were at depended on our family to operate, so my mom got a lot of attention and had a lot of friends.

MET [14:57] And when I was in high school, the church we were at finally said, look, you do so many volunteer hours here and you do so much work for the church. We think we should start paying you. And my mom worked for churches for decades after that.

MET [15:13] But, when my mom got that job, her title was associate to the minister of music, because they didn’t want anyone thinking she was anything like a minister. They wouldn’t even call her assistant minister.

MET [15:27] There was no way they were going to let a woman have anything like a minister title outside of children’s ministers. So she had to be associate to. I think that was when it really hit home that there would never be a place for me or anyone like me at the churches I had been raised. They just didn’t like women who lead, and I am and always have been somebody who fits into that category. But, these ideas don’t stop at the church door.

MET [15:57] The demands that women submit to husbands stretch across religions, and though it is particularly stalwart in the fundamentalist sects of the Abrahamic religions, it has bled into the very fabric of Western society, as you noted. America likes to see itself as a great defender of the rights of women worldwide, but it is safe to say that women here in America have their own battles to fight. For example, women are not guaranteed equal rights in the Constitution. There have been, since the 60s, numerous attempts to pass an equal rights amendment, but that has been stymied over and over again by conservatives.

DDM [16:42] That shocked me when I first heard that when I came here.

MET [16:45] The argument is that women don’t need to be guaranteed equal rights because citizens are granted equal rights, and that covers it. But that is laughably disingenuous because the argument is made by people who are just really happy that women are making 80 cents on the dollar instead of 50 cents. Because we as a country have acknowledged time and time again that the law does not recognize the rights of different groups of people because they did not merit the full rewards or citizenship. So we chose to redress that in the court system and the law.

MET [17:21] The results are things like the Voting Rights Act and Americans with Disabilities Act. We have acknowledged numerous times we have to acknowledge equal rights for different people. Pair this with the fact that conservative justice Antonin Scalia once straight up said that because women were not guaranteed rights in the Constitution, He didn’t have to acknowledge any of their rights, and a pretty clear pattern emerges. This is a longstanding and intentional effort to deny women equality in the law in America.

MET [17:57] Until the 70s and 80s, women couldn’t have bank accounts, couldn’t have credit cards, couldn’t have certain jobs. There were actual efforts to keep women out of the places where power and money transactions take place and make sure women were never able to ground themselves. There were actual laws put in place to make sure women would never be able to be independent or support themselves beyond their husbands or fathers.

MET [18:26] Some women found ways, of course, but the system was designed to keep women dependent, submissive, if you will. An example of this, of course, is Roe v. Wade. Many of our American listeners will recognize that name.

MET [18:43] But if not, it is the Supreme Court case from the 70s that codified abortion rights into the law. It was overturned in 2022, and that’s a part of the story too. But what is interesting about Roe is in many ways it’s not specifically a case about women’s choices. Yes, it is a case that gave women the ability to choose whether to end a pregnancy early in its development, but that’s not actually what the case was decided on.

MET [19:15] The case was actually decided on the merits of privacy. Roe v. Wade argued that people, in this case women, have a right to make private medical decisions between themselves and their doctors. That just happens to include the right to abortion.

MET [19:33] Privacy was the sticking point. The government, according to SCOTUS, had no business being involved in medical decisions. What is really interesting in terms of this episode is that a right to privacy for medical patients was a more compelling argument than a right for a woman to make her own decisions about her body.

DDM [19:54] Very interesting.

MET [19:56] What I need you to understand about that is that the right to privacy is nowhere in the Constitution. It’s kind of been interpreted from a few other rights, like the fact that you have a right against unreasonable search and seizures, and the fact that you don’t have to quarter soldiers in your home. But that right to privacy that is literally nowhere in the Constitution was a more compelling legal argument than actual bodily autonomy for women. So submission has been written into the law from the beginning.

DDM [20:28] Fascinating. And of course that form of submission is not a yielding or a deferring out of love and there is no mutuality in these arguments. They’re simply about power, control and of course restricting the freedom and rights of women. And I think this is for me where Jesus always comes in, because Jesus clearly says that it is for freedom that Christ has set you free.

DDM [20:54] And this freedom is not for men only, but for men, women, eunuchs who fell somewhere in the middle of that binary. The freedom is for all, free persons and slaves, Jew and Gentile, for every culture, race and gender on earth. But we’ve not actually loved freedom, I think, as much as we like to proclaim in the USA. Our laws and cultures have been a history of restricting freedom from those that we fear.

DDM [21:24] But in Jesus we see the conscious undoing of all of these. Jesus touches the bleeding woman, not caring about ritual purity or impurity. But equally Jesus touches the lepers, those who were men and unclean from the disease. Male and female ritual uncleanness is directly challenged by Jesus who touches and allows himself to be touched because for Jesus it’s always about compassion, justice and dignity for all.

DDM [21:57] Jesus clearly had male and female disciples and Mary is affirmed for sitting at Jesus’ feet which was the posture of a disciple before their rabbi. Women were the financial supporters of Jesus’ ministry, but women were also the financial supporters of the early church, overturning the assumption that men should be the providers of finance. Jesus first appears to a woman, Mary Magdalene, and sends her out as the first witness to the resurrection, which is the earliest role of an apostle.

DDM [22:33] And so by the choice of Jesus, she actually becomes the first apostle. So it’s not surprising that those who called for Jesus’ death were not the political leaders of Rome, but actually the religious leaders of Judaism.

MET [22:50] One of the things we have talked about before on this podcast is how Jesus eschews the politics of this world. He did not come to be enshrined by our state, he came to be above it. At the same time, we cannot understand Jesus if we don’t understand him as a political figure. He defied political powers, he died a political death, on the one hand, Christ is above our politics, on the other hand, he is a particularly political figure.

MET [23:21] So, when Deborah talks about how Jesus is trying to undo this patriarchy, I want to think about that in terms of what I talked about just a few minutes ago. Our politics is particularly sexist. Our politics is affected by our history, Jesus tried to undo that part of our history. So, why do we ignore what Jesus tried to do?

MET [23:51] And I want to answer that, and I want that answer to be complicated, but it is not. The passages Deborah mentioned before and the interpretations we have stayed with for generations maintain power. And I wish it were something that I could take a few minutes to explicate and uncover for you, but it really is as simple as that. Taking these verses and making them about subjugating women turns some people into property.

MET [24:23] And turning some people into property means other people are property owners. When these verses are put into the light of submission of women, men, specifically husbands and fathers, don’t have relationships with women. They benefit from the different kinds of labor women do, be that domestic labor or even the labor of reproduction. Women become housekeepers and hatcheries.

MET [24:49] In that way, women have a certain kind of value. But it is not as a person, it is as a thing. And if a woman is a thing, she can be traded, used, and discarded. But she does not have to be treated with any modicum of humanity. In such ways, power is maintained. Jesus is inconvenient to such an interpretation. So we just ignore him.

DDM [25:11] Precisely. And I think that is what is most concerning to me, is we’re seeing the re-rising of patriarchal religion under particularly the Christian right, and the stress on men being providers, women and children being homemakers, giving birth and producing children for men. And I think we really are witnessing a very dangerous return of patriarchal family values and gender stereotypes that in some ways are being romanticized now by the notion of the traditional wife.

DDM [25:50] Many women, tired of the demands of now being equally in the workplace and yet still having to carry the bulk of the housework and the child raising, are burning out. And the traditional roles start to begin to feel appealing. Someone to provide for me, someone to take on all the stress of the outside world. But it’s a bargain with the devil that our grandmothers and mothers knew the price of. And so we need to be very careful not to sell the birthright of freedom given to us by God and paid for with the blood of our own grandmothers and mothers.

MET [26:30] Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prophet. find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the cost of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [27:00] Music by Audionautix.com

Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Producer Carl Thorpe discuss the Trump administration’s so-called Religious Liberty Commission and how it is actually a means to prop up a specific type of Christianity at the expense of other interpretations and faith traditions.

---

Transcript

DDM – Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET – And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM – This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

MET – Hello and welcome. Producer Carl Thorpe is joining me today.

MET – On May 1, 2025, Donald Trump established the Religious Liberty Commission. This sounds auspicious – who doesn’t like a little religious liberty? But, as is historically the case, religious liberty is a bit of a misnomer. Consider what religious liberty means as we talk about it historically. We often talk about how the Pilgrims or the first European settlers were coming here for religious freedom. But that’s not exactly right. Yes, they were fleeing religious persecution, but they weren’t coming here to set up a place where people could worship freely. They set up little villages and towns where THEIR religion was the only religion and they could oppress anyone who didn’t follow their rules. And they came with violence on their minds. You might not remember, but in our Christian Nationalism episode I quoted from a sermon or two about how the whole goal of Protestantism in America was to wipe out Indigenous people. Religious liberty and freedom in America started as an exclusive and violent thing, and it’s important to keep that in mind as we think about how it is being “protected” today.

MET – So when we talk about religious liberty we have to be honest about what we mean. Certainly, there were some early Americans who believed all faiths should be treated equally. But one only has to look at early state constitutions to see that most colonial and Founding Americans saw Christianity as the faith that should most be protected by the state. Religious liberty and freedom meant freedom to be a particular kind of Christian. But at the same time, Christianity was written out of the Constitution. There was a concerted effort to keep God and king separate – and I think it’s interesting to note that there were political reasons for that.

MET – Trump’s Commission, then, may be the most historically in-line approach to religious liberty of many Presidents in a while. The Religious Liberty Commission has one goal: to fight any anti-Christian bias. It is not a commission designed to fight for the liberties of people of faith; it is a commission designed to advance Christianity, and Christiantiy means something specific to this administration. For example, Trump has already signaled his willingness to go to war with denominations like the ELCA and the Episcopalians. He has threatened, and even affected, their financial and legal situations and how they can relate to their members and the people they help. Trump is not looking to protect Christians; he is looking to protect those who support him in the name of religion.

CRT – If you remember, Trump, his team, and all of MAGA lost their collective minds when a Christian, Episcopal Bishop, Mariann Budde, exercising her religious freedom by calling on Trump to show compassion and empathy for trans children. They called for her to be fired or worse. She got death threats. Let’s not even get into their responses to Pope Francis and now Pope Leo.

CRT – But even before the current Trump administration, progressive religious speech and activity has routinely been targeted as illegal. In Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Christ Episcopal Church and Mission First Church run aid programs for the large population of people living in poverty in their small town. They provide hot meals, groceries, toiletries, and mental health counseling. The town, however, declared that they were in violation of zoning ordinances because as a church, they were only supposed to be conducting worship and activities normally associated with worship. In July of 2022, they issued a zoning ordinance violation to the churches. The churches responded by saying that serving the needy in their community is worship. It is an expression of their religion. After appealing to the town board and explaining that worship is more than showing up on Sunday mornings, the zoning violation was dismissed. However, both churches continue to receive threats of fines and other consequences of running various aid programs.

CRT – Just this year, A separate Christ Episcopal Church in Tom’s River, New Jersery also faced zoning problems when they attempted to convert part of their property into a shelter for unhoused people. After they submitted their proposal for a zoning variance, citing their deeply held religious beliefs as a primary factor for wanting to provide housing, the mayor of the town announced that he intended to force the church to sell their buildings and property to the town so he could raze the church and convert the land into a public park. Failing that, he would seize it through eminent domain. The church, their diocese, and the National church prepared for a lenghty legal battle to protect the church from the town, however the mayor’s preffered town council candidates lost their primary fights, and his majority on the town council will be eliminated come the November elections. Faced with this, the mayor backed down on his plan to take the property. However, the request for the zoning variance was denied. The church ended up deciding not to fight the town on the zoning ordinance, as they feared the legal fight necessary could put their congregation at risk.

CRT – In 2018, Scott Warren was arrested for allegedly harboring undocumented immigrants. He was part of an organization called “No More Deaths,” a non-profit organization that works to prevent deaths by migrants crossing the deserts of the Mexico-US borderlands. To that end, they hike into the wilderness and leave supplies, food, and water for immigrants to find. Warren was arrested after he found two undocumented immigrants in a barn that his group used as a base of operations. He gave them food and water and allowed them to stay for 3 days. Eventually, he and the migrants were arrested. Warren was facing felonies that could amount to twenty years in prison. Warren and his lawyers relied on Arizona’s Religious Freedom Restoriation Act. in an attempt to get the charges dismissed. He testified that he had deep religious convictions that compelled him to assist anyone who was in need. However, this did not work and his case went to trial. After a mistrial due to a hung jury, he was eventually found not guilty by a different jury. He did end up charged and found guilty of one misdemeanor for driving on a restricted road on his way to leave supplies for migrants in a nature preserve. That act also resulted in him being charged with a misdemeanor for “littering,” however the judge dismissed that as humanitarian aid with a nod to the state RFRA in his decision, as well.

CRT – There are even cases making their way through the system that take a religious freedom angle towards female reproductive health. For example, Kentucky’s intermediate court has allowed a suit to proceed involving a Jewish woman who was going through IVF to attempt to get pregnant. Her claim is that her religious belief requires that she procreate if possible and that Kentucky’s abortion ban post Dobbs is unclear as to how it applies to IVF.

CRT – In December of 2024, Indiana’s Supreme Court left in place a lower court’s injunction in favor of Hoosier Jews for Choice, a group of women who claimed that their deeply held religious beliefs would require them to get an abortion in certain cases that the law does not allow. One plaintiff claimed that a baby’s life begins when it takes its first breath, and until that time their beliefs required protecting the well-being, both physically and mentally, of the pregnant person. They also argued that their religious beliefs would require them to abort a pregnancy if testing indicated significant fetal abnormalities that would cause the baby pain or other suffering. Another argued that all people have bodily autonomy and that if a pregnancy or birth of a child would infringe on her full humanity or dignity that it would be necessary to abort. Other plaintiffs argued that they were compelled to reproduce due to their faith, but the bar on abortions that their beliefs would require in circumstances were banned, so they could not get pregnant.. Eventually, an injunction was placed on the law, but only for the specific plaintiffs in this case.

MET – There’s this story in the Bible that I return to often because I think it has a lot to tell us about power. You probably know it – the Pharisees try to trick Jesus and ask Him if people should pay taxes and Jesus asks who is on a coin. The Pharisess say, “Ceasar,” and Jesus says, “Render unto Ceaser that which is Ceasers.” Now, one of the most important lessons of this is that we know a thing belongs to someone if their image is on it. And we know we are made in God’s image; we belong to God. But ANOTHER important message here is that some things belong to Ceasar, and some things belong to God. The king (or the state) has claim to some things, and the heavenly kingdom has claim to the most important stuff.

MET – This message is getting really lost right now. There is also the story of Christ’s temptation in the desert. Satan tempts him to be the ruler of all the world, or at least of all he can see. Satan says he will make Christ a King – a mighty ruler of humanity’s world. If Jesus will just bow to Satan. And Jesus tells Satan a definitive no. It’s interesting – The gospel of Matthew tells a story of a future King in the Nativity scene, but Jesus spends so much of his life rejecting kingship. Christ wants no part of the institutionalized politics of our world. He says that is a temptation of Satan we should keep far from him.

Look, this isn’t me talking – Christ makes it very clear he wants no part of our state. He is not here to take part in our institutions of politics or government. So why do we keep trying to enshrine Him there? But at the same time, I am not telling you we that have to scrub all mention of religion from the public. It’s silly to think that we should never acknowledge the Christian roots of our society. Just as we have Greek roots. That’s the history of the West. If you want to understand Shakespeare, for example, you should probably know the Bible and Greek and Roman mythology pretty well. Protecting all faiths doesn’t mean removing Christianity from the public. It means not privileging it.

CRT – One of the areas that religious freedom and infringement of religion into the state often comes up is public schools. I worked at two different public schools. The first was an elementary school where I was a paraprofessional. I saw Christian teachers who pushed the envelope as far as how much they could get away with as far as proselytizing to co-workers and even students. One year, they decided to put pictures of Christmas trees on each other’s doors. This was supposed to be a fun little game. If a tree showed up on your door, you were then supposed to make one for someone else. These trees were supposed to be decorated by the teachers themselves, but I know for a fact that at least one teacher had her students all make one. Many of the trees had overt Christian symbolizm on them. Eventually, a tree showed up on my door. Rather than continue the “game,” I decided to cover my door with images from other religious traditions that had a celebration, feastdays, etc in the winter months. When I got around to putting up an Islamic symbol, the teacher across the hall who was part of starting the Christmas Tree thing complained to the principal that my Islamic picture was offensive to her because of her religious beliefs and that her fiance was in the military. The principal told her that if Christian symbols are displayed on the wall, then other religious symbols had to be allowed. I was able to continue my ever growing display of religious symbols from around the world and varying traditions. The principal’s stance was that decisions on holiday decorations had to be content neutral. If any were allowed, all had to be allowed.

CRT – After getting my preliminary certification, I moved to a middle school in a different district to teach language arts. The novels we read from the district approved list were full of religious allusions, imagery, and symbolism. I was always careful to talk about these objectively and in a fact based manner. I noted, however, that many of the other teachers had strict policies that nothing religious could even be talked about. I don’t know how you teach excerpts from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe without talking about Christianity. You have to talk about religion when you talk about Gary Paulson’s Nightjohn, which is about an escaped slave who returns to the plantation to teach others to read as a means of liberation. I guess you could skip most of the second chapter where the narrator tells us that they weren’t allowed to pray and weren’t supposed to know anything about God. But I can’t really see how you get around talking about one of the major events of the book, and that is when Nightjohn has his toes cut off in punishment for teaching Sarny to read, and her saying “John he down for three nights” before he is back teaching her again. Eventually, Nightjohn announces that he has to leave them for a time, however he promises that he will return to them soon.Sarny doesn’t believe he will even make it out, and if he does, he won’t come back, but unlike the apostles, however, Sarny is witness to her messiah’s return from the North.

CRT – The book ends with an afterword called Words

“Late he come walking.

Late in the night when they in the white house are all asleep and we be asleep and nobody can know nothing, late when the moon is down and the stars are hiding in clouds, late when it isn’t the day before and it don’t seem like ever the new day will come—that late he come walking.

In the night he come walking. Late in the night and when he walks he leaves the tracks that we find in the soft dirt down by where the drive meets the road, in the soft warm dirt in the sun we see his tracks with the middle toe missing on the left foot and the middle toe missing on the right and we know.

We know.

It be Nightjohn.

Late he come walking and nobody else knows, nobody from the big house or the other big houses know but we do.

We know.

Late he come walking and it be Nightjohn and he bringing us the way to know.”

CRT – I don’t think it would be crazy to compare that to Mark 7:30-37, the King James Version:

“Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.

Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away.

But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.

Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.

For the Son of Man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch.

Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning:

Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.

And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.”

CRT – In Nightjohn, Sarny and the other slaves are the ones awake and waiting and watching for their Savior.

CRT – Outside of literature, how can you even teach about MLK without talking about him being a minister, without talking about how his famous speeches were sermons. You cannot hear him say “No, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream” without talking about Amos 5:24 which says “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

CRT – These two schools show you the two extremes: one in which the teachers felt free and compelled to try and spread their Christianity and push it upon students and co-workers, and one where they were so afraid of being accused of that, that I don’t understand how they were able to teach.

MET – So that is so important to understand about how we think about religion and religious liberty and religious freedom in the public and how we see and understand that. And it is such a confusing, concept. So many people think they understand it, but most people do not. And some of that is because there are shifting narratives about how we understand this. That is because, quite frankly, we have understood it differently at different points in time. That is because the political narrative has changed, the legal narrative has changed, and I want to give you an overview of that.

MET – For example, in 1992 a somewhat moderate (by today’s standards, anyway) Court decided in Lee v. Weisman that a school could not coerce students to pray. Specifically, that mean there should not be prayer at things like graduations celebrations, commencements – all of those school sponsored events where students are supposed to be. The thing is, some of those are not technically required. So, for example, if you go to a baccalaureate celebration or event, you may not be required to be there, but it could be sort of the expected progress of your senior year. But, if there is a prayer, it is as if the government is forcing you to take part. And in 1992 we as a country decided that was unacceptable.

MET – In 2005, in McCreary v ACLU, there was a similar decision in which the Court decided that displaying the Ten Commandments in school houses and court houses violated the establishment clause and advanced religion. The state could not, according to this decision, propagate one religion over another by posting that religions’s dogma in official state spaces.

MET – Please note – this has been challenged over and over again and in the last 2-3 years has pretty much been forgotten as a number of red states in the South have passed laws requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in classrooms.

MET – There has been a dramatic shift in national attitudes about religion and the state – but that’s not exactly true. There has been a dramatic shift in how a small group of voters and those in power think of religion and the state. It behooves us to consider why. And I think it comes back to the story of Jesus in the wilderness. The Bible is very clear that it is a corrupt and sinful temptation to combine the role of Christ with the powers of the state – Christ rebuffs Satan in the wilderness without any hesitation. But what we have in America today is a religion that embraced that temptation

MET – We see the shift in cases like Carson v. Makin, in which a family sued the state to get tuition assistance to go to a religious school. The state of Maine offered tuition assistance to go to non-sectarian private schools with the aim of all Maine children receiving a free or as close to a free education as possible. However, those who chose a religious education did not receive that help because the state did not want to support religious education because of the establishment cause. A Maine family sued and won, so now it is possible for states to support religious education.

MET – The long-term impacts of this have not panned out, yet. For example, Trump’s Commission is supposed to work against anti-Christian bias. So what happens when someone wants money for non-Christian education? Will they have support? Do they get money? The jury seems to be out on this.

MET – Another notable case is Kennedy v. Bremerton. In this case a football coach was insistent that his religion required him to pray at the 50 yard line at every game. It is important to note that he was given the opportunity to pray at any number of other locations where it could be a bit more private, but he insisted that his religion required that it be public, specifically at the 50 yard line. He insists he didn’t require anyone to join him. But all of the players, sometimes from both teams, joined. The Court decided this was not like other football cases (Santa Fe v. Doe) from decades before, which decided there should be no prayer at football games, and that it was different from Lee v. Weisman (because it wasn’t school sponsored), so this prayer was fine. This is a wild decision – think about the incidents Carl talked about earlier – people claimed taking care of immigrants or the homeless was a matter of practicing their religion – and the judicial system was incredulous. But apparently praying at the 50 yard line is a pillar of the faith. The Court has clearly made some jumps in its reasoning. And has swung around to supporting state sponsored religion.

MET – But as Christians, I think we need to be very careful about what state sponsored religion says about our religion. If we believe we need the state to support Christianity then we have acknowledged that the state is more powerful than Christ. The whole point of the resurrection is that Christ cannot be contained. Christ was executed by the state; it was a political death. But he literally conquered that. That’s like, the whole thing. The state tried to kill him, and you actually could not keep him down.

MET – So what are we saying when we tilt the scales in favor of Christianity? Do we no longer believe in Christ’s divinity? Do we no longer believe in Christ’s resurrection? There ARE places where Christians are persecuted. But being driven underground is not the same as being bothered. And this Commission is basically saying, if I, as a Christian, am bothered by other people, it means Christ needs the power of the state because my faith is not strong enough to sustain me.

MET – This goes right back to our Christian Nationalism episode. A state that wishes to enshrine a faith isn’t doing it because it believe in the faith – it is doing it to co-opt that faith and institutionalize that power. And the people who encourage that to happen are gleefully handing over the responsibilities, import, and power of their faith to the state.

MET – That’s not religious liberty; that’s acquiescence.

Rev. Deborah Duguid-May and Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe critique the harmful practice of pitting women against each other, as exemplified by the historical contrast between Eve (sin, death, fall from paradise) and Mary (grace, salvation, reclaiming paradise). They argue for a re-examination of Eve’s story, highlighting her agency, pursuit of knowledge, and moral responsibility as positive attributes rather than sins.

---

Transcript

DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

DDM [00:38] Welcome! So today we thought given that we’ve done an episode on Mary, it only makes sense to look at Eve. And the reason being is in tradition, Mary and Eve have often been held up as a contrast. Now, let’s be honest, Elizabeth, contrasting women against each other, that’s already hugely problematic. In fact, I think this is one of the outcomes of patriarchy.

DDM [01:04] As women, we’re taught to compete with one another, to hold up other women as examples of what not to do or what not to be. And really, I’m not okay with this. And I find this whole compete and contrast of women very unhelpful. I know I’ve hated it when it happened to me in my life.

DDM [01:22] And I hate it equally when I see it being done to other women. And so I’m hoping we can find a way today to look at Mary and Eve in ways outside of this patriarchal contrast, while also highlighting the danger of this contrast. In the patriarchal narrative, sin enters through Eve, but grace enters through Mary. Death enters through Eve, salvation through Mary.

DDM [01:54] The fall from paradise happens because of the choice of Eve, but the choice of Mary leads to the reclaiming of the heavenly paradise. Very neat and tidy theology, isn’t it, right? Black and white. But of course life, and I believe the sacred, is never black and white, never neat and tidy, as Elizabeth and I will unpack today.

MET [02:19] Before I jump into a lot of content, I do want to make a comment about the way Deborah has started talking about contrasting women and comparing them, and even setting up this situation where, “Oh, you know you’re not like other girls, or this woman does this, etc., etc.” And I think it’s really interesting to think about the Mary episode we just did and we talked about the cult of motherhood, and that’s precisely what we were talking about. “Oh, I’m a better mother than you, because of X, Y, and Z. Which of course, women don’t say out loud, but that’s 100% what that cult of motherhood is, right? The “I want to compare myself to other mothers.” So that’s really what we’re talking about at a fundamental level, this tendency to pit women against each other. So I think it’s really interesting that you started with that. Okay, so now I want to jump into some commentary about Eve specifically. So we know I grew up Baptist.

MET [03:27] Baptists don’t really have a concept of original sin, the way some denominations do. And for a lot of people in churches, Eve is this kind of originator of that concept. We don’t think of we, Baptists, as I once was, we don’t think of people being born into a life of sin that way. People are born largely innocent, and then we make bad choices.

MET [03:57] I think I’ve talked about things like the age of accountability before. And that is where you are born largely innocent, and then you get to an age where you are then accountable. And after that point, it’s complicated. But there’s also… Baptists do adult baptism, so there is a point where you get to a point in your life where you say, “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” So it’s not like you have this original sin, that you are automatically condemned in some way, but you grow up to say, I accept Jesus Christ, and at that point, okay, so all of that is to say We are not born with this concept of damnation so much as we choose our sins. And that’s actually kind of important to the Eve story.

MET [04:50] Eve chose to disobey. She and Adam were created without flaw, but Eve, being so wily and deceitful, chose the wrong path. But it’s not that we’re all immediately damned because of her. We’re damned because we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

MET [05:12] I don’t know if you remember me talking about the Roman road in an episode.

DDM [05:16] I do. I have dreams about it.

MET [05:17] So Eve’s problem is that she is inappropriately willful. Now that is 100% woven into the Baptist narrative. Women are supposed to be submissive, and we can totally see what happens when they are not, right?

MET [05:36] Women can’t be trusted. Women will choose the wrong path. I remember when I was a kid, maybe late elementary school, early middle school, and a friend’s parent was complaining to mine about their kid’s Sunday school teacher. And I need to clarify. We weren’t even from the same church. This was a friend’s parent at another church complaining to mine about a Sunday school teacher, and it speaks volumes about our community that it was totally normal for parents to just stand around and casually discuss their kids Sunday school teachers, like they with their math teacher or their English teacher. That’s just how ingrained in the community this was. So this mom was mad about how the Sunday school teacher was teaching the creation story.

MET [06:26] And the teacher in question kind of skimmed over the serpent and Eve story and gave a rosier view of it than this mom would have liked. Because the Sunday school teacher didn’t want to tell the kids as young as this mom’s kid about sin in a really harsh way. And the teacher didn’t want these kids to think of God as judgmental or vengeful. And my friend’s mom was having none of it.

MET [06:52] If there is no sin, then why did Jesus die? This is what she demanded of my father. And my father just kind of shook his head and didn’t say anything because he recognized that he did not want to get involved in this furor.

MET [07:04] But this is indicative of a very particular theology that I and my friends grew up with. Eve didn’t imbue all of us with sin. She was the first to make a sinful choice and thus opened up the way for all of us to make sinful choices afterward.

MET [07:23] She was disobedient and we are following in her footsteps. It is because of this disobedience from Eve down to me that Jesus had to die. Our disobedience to God is so bad and makes us so rotten to the core that God had to sacrifice his child to make up for our disobedience, and that was the only way we could be forgiven. We required atonement, and our sins were so bad that the sacrifice had to be that great.

MET [07:50] It’s kind of a loveless and gruesome theology, right? We’re told God sacrifices Jesus because he loves us that much. I mean, there’s a part of me that’s thinking, if he really loved us that much, why wouldn’t he just forgive us?

DDM [08:05] Yeah, Elizabeth, I mean, that kind of theology, I really don’t even know where to start, sis. It’s pretty horrendous. But I need to say that it is frightening to say that for many, this is how they both see and teach our faith. And it’s very common to find this kind of thinking out there.

DDM [08:24] But let’s just go back to Eve in the beginning of Genesis. First of all, in the Genesis story, God commands Adam not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So that’s really important for us to remember. Adam was commanded not to eat.

DDM [08:41] Eve really only heard of this commandment secondhand through Adam. It was never a commandment given to her by God in all the times that they walked in the garden and spoke. So I think that’s a very interesting distinction there that sometimes we just gloss over or forget about. We’re very quick to blame woman, to blame Eve for this fall from paradise.

DDM [09:05] And as you’re right, this has been used to justify the subordination of woman by naming all woman now as morally weak, easily deceived and spiritually inferior. But what if Eve’s choosing to eat that fruit was, as scripture says, for gaining wisdom? What if Eve was actually simply seeking truth and maybe her choosing to eat of that fruit was in fact the first human act of freedom and of taking moral responsibility? You know, what if Eve was the first to question, to want to understand, and that she chooses to want to know for herself, even if that’s going to come at a cost.

DDM [09:49] It’s interesting as well in the Genesis text that Eve chooses to have her eyes, as Genesis 3 verse 7 says, opened. I think that’s a beautiful phrase. You know, maybe having one’s eyes opened is the beginning of adulthood. Or moving from a child-like way into an adult seeing.

DDM [10:11] Her eyes were literally opened. And so in scripture, Eve is not seen so much as passive. She’s not silent. But in Genesis we actually see that Eve is a full person with integrity in her own being.

DDM [10:25] She speaks, she questions, she acts, she learns. And I think, let’s be honest, that is what it means to be an adult human being. And I sometimes wonder about this, because it’s almost like very often in our cultures, we almost want women to almost be the perpetual child, and we even think about how women are often infantilized. But we might say that without Eve, without our eyes awakening, there was no free will. There was no free will, then there is no freedom to even be able to choose to love. Then there’s no need for grace, compassion, all the qualities that really make humanity, I think, quite incredible.

DDM [11:10] So if Christ grew in Mary’s womb, maybe Eve was the soil out of which the entire story of Jesus will grow. Maybe hers was that fertile soil for moral choice, for questioning, for searching for wisdom, for free will, and ultimately for the capacity to be able to love and receive grace and grow in some ways into full consciousness as adult humanity.

MET [11:40] There is this poem that you reminded me of that I want to read to you, because it relates a lot to what you were talking about. And it is called “The Autobiography of Eve” by Ansel Elkins.

Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake—
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.
 
Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.
 
I leapt
to freedom.

DDM [12:37] Oh my word, that is profound.

MET [12:43] Every time I read it… I just think, man, that image… It just it gets me every time. Okay, that’s an aside.

MET [12:57] When I got to a point that I was actually thinking about Eve and not just using a blank stock figure for her every time I thought of her, and I admit that this happened shockingly recently, I decided I had a real problem with her sin. I think it’s really awful that it was a sin to know the difference between good and evil. Why wouldn’t a person want to know that? Why would a person choose to remain ignorant?

MET [13:28] Okay, I’m about to say some really controversial things here. I can’t imagine being told, and as you know, it’s really Adam who has told these things, but I can’t imagine being told, this tree will grant you knowledge and wisdom. It will be a grave act of disobedience, however, if you eat of it. And I can’t imagine not immediately thinking the guy making the rules was a fascist.

MET [13:54] Honestly, don’t we talk about how keeping people ignorant is how authoritarians remain in power? Like we have literally said that on this podcast, but Genesis gets a pass. And it comes right back to that obedience thing. In some ways, this is kind of a pre-Frankenstein story.

MET [14:15] Someone wants to be God, so they choose to seek knowledge they should not have, and things go terribly awry. The reason that it never seemed to me that Eve’s punishment fit the crime is because nobody ever made it clear to me what the crime was. In the beginning, God knew good and evil. Humans, being innocent, knew nothing of either.

MET [14:38] Eve wanted to understand these things. In short, she wanted to be like God. It wasn’t Eve’s disobedience. It was her ambition.

MET [14:49] And maybe she was taken in by the serpent. Maybe none of that would have happened. She could have been very naive. But she wanted it.

MET [15:00] She desired to know what God knew. In that way, her story is much more similar to Lucifer’s in Milton’s Paradise Lost than this kind of gendered tale of deceitful and wily women, but also somehow dumb and malicious woman. Because in any other telling than what we get in Genesis and church tradition, Eve would have been the hero. And then there’s Adam.

MET [15:26] Oh my gosh, talk about throwing somebody under the bus. Eve says, Hey, babe, have a bite. And Adam says, Thanks, Shug. And when God shows up, Adam immediately throws Eve under the bus.

MET [15:37] And now for the rest of Western history, women are mendacious, manipulative and deceitful. But Eve’s sin, as I said, was less about disobedience and more about ambition. So Adam’s betrayal is even more spineless than it seems. Because Adam isn’t just throwing Eve under the bus.

MET [15:55] Adam is assuring God he would never seek such knowledge, but his ambitious wife convinced him to take a bite. Eve isn’t a seductress. She’s not a manipulator. She’s an explorer, and that is unacceptable. So it’s really weird to me that we’ve been defining gender roles based on this story for generations. Eve is fearless, provocative and displays leadership, which is ultimately why she’s punished. Adam is cowardly and lacks initiative, and he’s punished too. It’s important that most of us never learn anything beyond the narrative that this story is about Eve’s disobedience, because if we looked into it any further, we’d find some uncomfortable lessons about authority and what it means to be a leader.

DDM [16:37] And you know, Elizabeth, you’ll stress on the phrase, “she wanted this knowledge,” and you’re framing in terms of ambition. Theological traditions use the word desire. And it’s interesting because I think there has been this very passive way of seeing Eve.

DDM [16:55] Eve is silent, only hears the commandment of God through her husband. She’s deceived, cursed, used as a warning. But what if we began to see her, instead of being passive, as an active person? She looks, she reflects on what she sees, beautiful fruit.

DDM [17:13] She knows, as you say, knowledge is a good thing. She questions, she challenges the snake. She chooses, and then her eyes are opened. I really can’t help but stress again that she really is the first act of free will in that garden, because she does want to be like God.

DDM [17:33] And I don’t think that that’s a bad thing, because she was created in God’s image. She was made to be like God, and she knows this deeply. She wants to be more like God than she is, and so she eats. But I think there’s also more to this.

DDM [17:51] Eve survives the eating. She moves from childhood into adulthood morally and physically. She goes on to create life after leaving paradise as God created life. She births.

DDM [18:06] Except she does this now all with her eyes open. And she knows that there is good and evil. I think it’s also interesting for us to look at that word know for a bit. Because in biblical Hebrew knowledge was not something we know with our heads, but it was something that we knew in relationship with.

DDM [18:28] It was a deeply intimate way of knowing. And so to know something is the same word that is used for making love in the early part of Genesis. Adam we’re told knew Eve. It was about a knowledge that came from deep experiential intimacy.

DDM [18:47] And I think part of the problem of the story is that we’ve idolized innocence and childlike faith But I think what is more profound is when sacredness is birthed out of struggle, out of deep adult faith that knows it’s okay to question. It’s okay to reclaim our voices. It’s okay to seek knowledge. And even when we are exiled and pushed out of systems, to still know we will survive and we will create new life and we will birth a new world, and ultimately refine salvation and wholeness again in new ways.

DDM [19:21] But certainly, let’s be honest, this is not the way that the patriarchy has interpreted the story, nor, I think, has it been the way that Western empires have interpreted it. The powerful want to read into the story submission, obedience, and divine punishment. But we know from the life of Jesus and Mary that God is not the God of the powerful, but the God of the hungry who will be filled.

DDM [19:57] Again, that desire that the poor will be exalted. So maybe we should really be reading the story of Eve and Genesis through the eyes of God and through the eyes of Jesus and not through the eyes of power.

MET [20:14] That is a really important message for me personally. And I don’t mean to individualize my experience and say, “Oh, you should only think about this through my eyes.” But I do want to tell you a little bit about where I’m coming from. It has been really hard reckoning for me anyway, with the fact that my faith actively works to oppress and harm people.

MET [20:43] That is very sobering for me. And that’s more true or less true depending on the tradition and location. But as a whole, Christianity is an institution steeped in patriarchy and colonialism, and that’s putting it lightly. And if those are our guiding lights, then it is hard to be a force for good in the world.

DDM [21:05] It’s such a demonic subversion of our faith.

MET [21:07] Yes. So I think about how we have used and abused Eve over the centuries and what she would say about the church today sometimes. Would Eve have rocked some important foundations during the #MeToo movement?

MET [21:26] Would Eve have warned us about the scandals in the Catholic or Southern Baptist churches? Would she have known about the abuses of children and women because she has dealt with powerful men? Would Eve have called out the blatant racism against Bishop Curry from his own members of the faith when he spoke at the royal wedding? See, I think she would have done all of these things, because more than any of us, she knew the difference between good and evil.

DDM [21:56] And that’s a blessing. And that is a blessing.

MET [21:59] Yes. Institutions do not always make good choices. Institutions are mired in systems of power and ideology that actively keep some people under a boot and some people in a silk slipper.

MET [22:15] Eve may have been ambitious, and if you think ambitious is a sin, then I guess that’s a mark against her. But in the end, she knew the difference between good and evil. As you say, her eyes were opened. She knew the difference between right and wrong.

MET [22:29] So maybe she’d have had a lot to tell us about if we’d stop thinking of her as the root of the problem and not the start of the story.

DDM [22:37] Absolutely, and don’t we need today more and more men, women, children who know the difference between good and evil? I think also we need to reject that blame narrative whenever we find ourselves slipping into it. Both Eve and Mary are two remarkable women who made choices that shaped our world. Eve acting despite the cost to enable us to grow in knowledge of good and evil, to move from that childhood innocence into adult faith, and that first person to exercise free will.

DDM [23:10] Mary also acting and despite the cost having the courage to birth God as an unmarried woman and to take on the responsibility of in some ways teaching God what it means to be human. You know, these two women really are bookends to the scriptural story of what it means to be human, to grow in knowledge and love, and to have to navigate these choices in ways that may cost us, but also remind us that we are survivors and more resilient than we may have ever known, and that to want to be like God is our birthright.

MET [23:58] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://PriestAndProf.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@PriestAndProf.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church.

MET [24:24] Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [24:28] Music by Audionautix.com

In this episode, Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Rev. Deborah Duguid-May explore the varying manifestations of Mary, Mother of Jesus, and interrogate whether the version the Church has propagated is empowering for women or oppressive.

---

DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

MET [00:38] Hello, today we are talking about Mary, as in Mary, mother of Jesus. Okay, so I’m not going to lie, when Debra recommended months ago, we do an episode on Mary, I groaned so hard, because I figured it would be Debra thrilling about motherhood and spiritualism. And I would just kind of be sitting here throwing in a few comments about Mary versus whore in the Western canon. Okay, the thing is, I am completely uninterested in Mary as a character.

MET [01:15] And I know that is probably blasphemous to some of our listeners. And it may well be blasphemous to Deborah. That’s what we’re talking about today. But let me tell you my experience with Mary.

MET [01:28] The way Mary was always described to me was that she was quintessentially good. That was Mary’s whole shtick. Mary was so good, so holy, so pure. Now, I wasn’t taught that Mary was sinless, just that she was good.

MET [01:49] So good that God chose her out of all of the women in the whole world to be the mother of his child. Honestly, what am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to feel any connection with a character whose defining characteristic is goodness, so beyond the standard of normal human goodness that God says, hey, bear my child. This is not something I get.

MET [02:17] And maybe it’s not something I want to get. That is weird. And it makes Mary not like other people in a way that makes her particularly difficult to empathize with. If we don’t talk about Mary as being so freaking good, we tend to get Mary wrapped up in the cult of motherhood, right?

MET [02:36] Okay, so let me be very clear on something. I love being a mother. I love my kid more than life itself. But I absolutely do not put any stock into what is often called the cult of motherhood.

MET [02:50] I don’t know if you are familiar with that phrase. But the cult of motherhood is this weird narrative that women get sucked into that everything about kids and raising kids and being a mom and pregnancy is great and beautiful. And somehow you are less of a woman if you show any dissatisfaction with any of that. The cult of motherhood leads to things like the mommy wars, where you have women battling tooth and nail to show that they are the most invested in being a mom, and they love motherhood more than anyone.

MET [03:22] And for these women, they appreciate the magic and the mysticism of motherhood all the time.

DDM [03:29] And you know, even if people aren’t aware of that phrase, the cult of motherhood.`

MET [03:35] Right, we know what that is. We feel it, we know it. We’ve been online,

DDM [03:36] We feel it.

MET [03:38] Right? This is patriarchal nonsense. Here’s some reality for you, okay? Pregnancy is awful.

MET [03:47] I absolutely do not buy into that womb goddess or whatever nonsense some women try to sell me because I have been pregnant and I know the score. It is murder on your feet and your back and even your teeth.

MET [04:04] It is profoundly uncomfortable and even dangerous. Your body does weird stuff you absolutely are not prepared for. When I was pregnant, I did not commune with some spirit of creation. I communed with whatever would help me not feel sick, right?

MET [04:18] I mean, I remember, so funny story. I was all proud of the fact, oh, I don’t feel all that sick all the time. And Carl and I were walking through the grocery store and we walked by the olive bar and the smell of sweet pickles had me running through the store. I thought, this is it.

MET [04:35] I am going to lose every part of my body. Oh my gosh. And I had to go on bed rest, which I absolutely did not do well. And I treated Carl terribly when I got hungry.

MET [04:48] When I got hungry, I became a monster of a person. I mean, I will be asking for forgiveness for the rest of my life.

DDM [05:01] For those of you can’t see, he’s nodding. Absolutely.

MET [05:02] And childbirth sucks. It is not beautiful. It is not a mystic experience. It is awful.

MET [05:08] And people die that way.

DDM [05:10] I split. I split.

MET [05:11] Oh my gosh, yes.

MET [05:13] And breastfeeding sucks. It’s hard and it’s painful and half the time it doesn’t work. The first year of your kid’s life is awful. Sleep deprivation is literally a form of torture used by the army.

MET [05:24] But somehow I’m supposed to find it magical when I’m scooping poop every three to four hours? Right, who convinced us of this? I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Now we have convinced women that they are supposed to be in love with this supposedly beautiful spiritual process when any objective observer will tell you that this is ridiculous and we deserve to get paid.

MET [05:47] So the reason I think Mary plays into this is because often Mary gets used as this kind of mother goddess figure or whatever to make us feel better about the fact that we’ve been doing this work for generations and many of us have been doing it without any help or without any credit. So we’ve made it into spiritual work to make ourselves feel better about the fact that nobody is coming to our aid. You know, so we elevate it to something holy because otherwise we would have to acknowledge that it is dirty and it is hard and the patriarchy has made it virtually impossible to do.

MET [06:23] Now, I am very lucky. I have a partner who has been there for me at every turn. My partner has been active and an equal helper in child rearing. And I am well aware of how rare that is.

MET [06:36] And maybe that’s why I never got sucked into that cult of motherhood. I didn’t need anybody to convince me that it was amazing and great and spiritual and perfect because I could be realistic without losing my sense of self. And because I have been honest with myself about motherhood, I have a much better relationship with my kid, I think. I don’t see them as evidence of my martyrdom or my holiness or whatever.

MET [07:00] They are not proof of just how good a mother I am. They’re a fully realized person, irrespective of whether I breastfed long enough or gave them a Pinterest worthy nursery. My kid is amazing. I value them not just for their achievements, which, yeah, make me look good, but because they are kind, empathetic, and a great conversationalist.

MET [07:22] We have an honest relationship, not one designed to make me feel good about being a mom. So when I do something for my kid, it’s because I want to, and I hope it enriches them or their day, not because I am invested in making myself look good in front of other mothers. I have a teenager who really does like to sit and share a cup of coffee with me. And I can’t say that would be the case if I had spent their entire life invested in motherhood instead of them.

MET [07:50] So let me be very clear about this. I love my kid. I love my family. I love, truly love, love, love being a mother.

MET [07:58] But I am honest about what that entails. And because I am honest with the world and my family about what motherhood is, I have a much stronger relationship with my kid and my husband. I think this hits on an episode about Mary because she kind of comes in two manifestations generally, holy virgin or holy mother. And I think both are kind of bogus.

DDM [08:23] All right, so as Elizabeth said in the very beginning, we knew coming into this topic, we would probably be on opposite ends of the subject. But honestly, the irony is, Elizabeth, I actually agree with you a hundred percent and wasn’t expecting to when we first planned this conversation. Totally, totally, sister. Like you, I love my six kids. I love all the foster kids that I raised, but I never defined myself in terms of motherhood,

DDM [08:52] and never was a traditional mother by any classification, which was much to the irritation I often think of my children who used to moan every morning. Why can’t you be like other mothers? Why can’t you pack us a school lunch? Why can’t you do this or that?

DDM [09:08] The reality is I was working multiple jobs and really doing a lot of that traditional stuff I don’t think was my skill set either. You know, motherhood, I agree with you, has been so co-opted by patriarchy that it is often very unhealthy for both women and children in all those ways and more that you were naming. But now this is where we differ. I don’t see Mary being chosen to bring the Christ child into the world because of her, and I’m doing air quotes, goodness.

DDM [09:40] If we in Christianity define sin as alienation or being fragmented from the world, from ourselves, from any sense of sacredness, then to say Mary is without sin, which really only the Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions do, we know Protestant traditions don’t, To say that is to say that God could see in her a woman, and this is how I understand it, who was not fragmented, who somehow had managed to not become alienated from her own sense of self, had somehow not managed to become alienated from her others, or from a true sense of what is sacred. And that in some ways ties in with her holiness, air quotes again, which again is not so much about being good but about the root of the word holiness which comes from wholeness.

DDM [10:32] So Mary had somehow, even though she was probably only about 14 years old, had managed to maintain a sense of wholeness and of integrity in a world that very often made it almost impossible for people to do that. And that’s why I think in some ways for me that she was chosen because of her capacity to hold her own wholeness and not become alienated from her true self despite living in a very patriarchal world. Which is why, ironically, we see her not consulting anyone, even though she was still a young girl, about whether or not to say yes to carrying the Christ child. You know, in all of the Gospel texts we see that Mary asks no one’s permission.

DDM [11:16] She doesn’t go back to her father, she doesn’t go to her mother, she doesn’t go to her fiancé. And that ties in, for me, with what I believe is the biblical meaning of virgin. You know, virgin actually in the Hebraic scriptural sense was not so much about whether a female hymen was intact. Virgin with woman, all these virgin martyrs we have in the tradition, really spoke much more about the sense of autonomous.

DDM [11:46] So to be a virgin was to not be under the control of somebody else, invariably a male figure. So in the Christian tradition where we have all these virgin martyrs, it actually really didn’t have really hardly anything to do with their sex lives, which, let’s be honest, we actually know very little about. And it’s probably better that way when we start to unearth some of the stories. But it’s more to do with the fact that they were no longer under the control of either a father or a husband.

DDM [12:19] So they were seen as independent women functioning outside of the patriarchal system. So I see Mary as, despite being young, this incredibly strong, independent woman who makes her own choices and who has somehow managed to retain a sense of wholeness and yet deep connection, despite living in this world that so often leaves women feeling fractured and powerless.

MET [12:47] So I think it’s super important to think about what words mean. And I’m actually going to refer to the last podcast we released kind of along those lines, Carl and I talked about literature. and I’m going to make a connection to that because what I’m going to be talking about now is Mary as kind of a character and kind of continuing that when we think about what words mean and also stories and narratives, it all gets wound up. So I want to talk about Mary, in terms of the stories that we weave, because as we talked about in the last episode with literature, I think we can’t really separate Mary the biblical character from Mary the stories that we tell about her.

MET [13:45] And I think when you talk about what words mean, that becomes an important part of that. So anyway, like I said, if you listen to the last one, most of you know that I didn’t start my scholarly career in communication or rhetoric. My undergrad and master’s degree are actually in literature. And it’s funny, our pastoral assistant came in earlier and was giving me a hard time, and he was saying, you just really don’t know how to not talk like a professor, do you?

MET [14:13] Well, no, Joe, I do not. So I apologize for my academies. It’s just who I am as a person.

MET [14:21] But that being said, if you know anything, and I mean anything at all, about women in Western literature, You know that they fall into one of two categories, and that is Madonna or whore. That is just what we do with women. For the last thousand years or so, we have basically been categorizing women in literature, movies, poetry, music, whatever, in one of these two categories: “holy and blessed and pure virgin” or “Whore of Babylon.”

MET [14:52] And really, this kind of is ultimately my biggest problem with Mary. Mary isn’t a saint or an intercessor anymore. She is an archetype. And I’ve talked about archetypes before, and I’ve talked about things like public memory before when we talked about Mary Magdalene, and some of this all comes to a head here. The version of Mary that has been at the heart of Christianity for almost 2,000 years has so infiltrated our society that it has defined all women. And that version of Mary, not the version of Mary you’re talking about, but that version of Mary is not empowering. And it is not even holy.

MET [15:37] That version of Mary is pure and submissive and chaste, and some of you may even remember from your intro to Lit Classes what I’m talking about. If you don’t remember this from your intro to Lit Class, I’m guessing it’s because you weren’t paying attention, because I guarantee your TA or Lit Prof talked about this. Women in the Western canon have been defined by these kind of two polar opposites of womanhood for thousands of years, right? The virgin or the woman of ill repute.

MET [16:05] And those were pretty much the only categories for women to fit into. So Mary has never been an intercessor for me. She’s always been a tool of the patriarchy, to be perfectly honest. Ultimately, no matter how you dress her up, this version of Mary that the church sells is designed to keep women obedient.

MET [16:23] And I know, Debra, We want to protest, and we want to tell each other all about the series you did on Mary, and how it’s not the case, and Mary’s great. You know, a month at Trinity doesn’t contradict the bazillion years we’ve been telling this story. And that hurts me. The narrative of Mary as quintessentially good isn’t just bad theology from my background, and we can’t really excuse it that way. It is the way women’s roles have been defined for generations.

MET [16:56] Mary is not the mother of God in Western culture, that’s just a MacGuffin. Mary is a substitute for what men want out of women. I wrote this article years ago about a theory I proposed called a constitutive character. You could say that word constitutive if you wanted to.

MET [17:16] Basically, the idea is that there are figures, either historical or fictional or whatever, there’s a character. And we use that character to define ourselves. So we say who these people are, but when we say that, it’s actually a reflection of ourselves more than it is a definition of that person.

DDM [17:36] Absolutely. I was thinking that about when you were speaking about Mary, you know, it says a lot more about the West than it does about Mary.

MET [17:43] Yes, that’s exactly right. So I use the example of Jesus in this article, right?

MET [17:45] If you look at all the different versions of Jesus being described out there by all of his followers, and there are a lot of “Jesi” out there, right? But that’s not it. It’s that for each group of followers, Jesus is a reflection of them.

MET [18:02] Mary is also a constitutive character, but she is a reflection of the patriarchy. Mary is much less a mother of God than she is the ideal of powerful men. And in my mind, the ideal of powerful men is generally the opposite of what God had in mind. So I just have to assume that whatever we know about Mary has got to be in the wrong.

DDM [18:23] Yeah, no, 100%, 100%. And I agree with you where in so often Mary has become this projection of patriarchy, you know. And in the West, absolutely, there has been this incredibly unhealthy binary dividing woman into whore and virgin. But you know, I think what we’ve got to remember as well is that for the Christian tradition, it really doesn’t begin as a Western tradition, but as a Middle Eastern tradition.

DDM [18:54] And then within Christian theology, there is, of course, the Eastern tradition, there is the African tradition. So, you know, Mary is, in reality, so much more than just the product of the West. There is Mary in so many ways before the West. There’s Mary of the East, there’s Mary of Africa, and not all of these traditions have defined women in such binary ways as the West has, which despite its continual belief that it is the society that defends women’s rights, has not historically been any less dangerous for women, let’s be honest.

DDM [19:31] Um, the reality is I think that for some women Mary has been incredibly empowering, particularly when you can see beyond the patriarchal narrative or not allow her to be defined by that narrative, you know just as a priest I’ve heard countless stories of women From women of how she’s given them the strength as a role model to make hard decisions that went against every cultural norm or expectation Many have seen in Mary that young revolutionary who proclaims at the very beginning of her young adult life that Song of Mary. Which is interesting because the Song of Mary is actually said in our evening offices every day of our lives throughout the Christian world.

DDM [20:20] East, West, Middle Eastern, African. The Song of Mary is right in the heart of the evening prayer. And in the Song of Mary, or what is called sometimes the Magnificat, there are these words God has scattered the proud in their conceit he’s cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly he’s filled the hungry with good things but the rich he has sent away empty And so Mary, throughout history, despite what I think patriarchy and literature and these narratives, maybe even you might even say priestly narratives have done to her, Mary still remains in her own words the one who proclaims unapologetically that God is not on the side

DDM [21:08] of the proud and the mighty, but the ordinary grassroots people. That God will fill the hungry, but the rich will be sent away empty. And Mary names the God who is always on the side of the poor, the marginalized, the outcast, and will judge the powerful who exploit God’s people. And then I have to ask myself this, I mean, where else did Jesus learn this from?

DDM [21:33] Like, hello, you know? I mean, this is in some ways almost what Jesus himself will mirror later on, the same words as his mum. And that’s why I believe for me Mary was chosen. is she saw into the heart of true faith and could be trusted to shape God’s child.

DDM [21:52] But she was never afraid to speak out. And so Jesus goes on to be a person who will not be afraid to speak out. She acts in ways that destabilize the powerful and the mighty. And so Jesus goes on to act in ways that will destabilize the powerful and the mighty.

DDM [22:09] So for many, Mary is the one, biblically, who shows us the courage to stand up against the powerful, to speak out and to stand with those who suffer and are oppressed. And so, you know, I agree with you that in many ways our literature does say less about Mary and more about our Western society and maybe even our obsession with sex and with what women are doing with their bodies, you know. But I want to end with this because for myself there’s another side to Mary and that is the Mary in a way obviously beyond literature but maybe even beyond the scriptural text. You know, there’s the Mary beyond all of our narratives and tradition, beyond archetype.

DDM [22:57] And that’s Mary the woman herself. And, you know, the reason I say this is because some people will know this if I’ve been their parish priest. But when I was 14, I didn’t grow up in the church. I didn’t grow up at all with, I mean, I didn’t even hardly ever go to Sunday school.

DDM [23:15] So I didn’t have the pictures or the images even in my head. We were a pretty secular family by all accounts. And I remember when I was about 14, I was lying in bed at night and this woman came into my room. She had a blue gown and she had white underneath and she had this shining bluey silver star from her forehead and she was fairly dark.

DDM [23:42] She was really a dark woman. And she came in and she sat on my bed and I was speechless, you know, because I was like, and in my little head, I was thinking to myself, is this God? Because I had no idea what God looked like. I didn’t grow up in the Sunday school.

DDM [23:58] And she sat on my bed to the extent that the pillow actually went down. And she spoke words over me that I will never forget. and she came from the time I was 14 probably about three times in the evening and kind of like spoke these words over me. So in my head she became the first image that I ever had of God and I didn’t know that she wasn’t God until when I was about 15, 16 I went with a friend to a Roman Catholic Church and I saw her in a statue they had this

DDM [24:35] dark statue this was in South Africa of Mary And I remember turning to my friend and saying, who is she? I mean, that’s how unchurched I was. I was like, who is she? And my friend said, no, that’s Jesus’ mom, Mary, you know?

DDM [24:49] And I was like, oh my God, I’ve met her. And my friend was like, what do you mean, you know? And so from then I developed this fascination with Mary. Like I wanted to know everything about her.

DDM [24:59] And I got my friend during geography class to teach me the Hail Mary.

DDM [25:03] And I used to recite this during geography class, which shows you I had no real interest in geography, I guess, but subsequently when I was about to be ordained I was very nervous that what does it mean to be ordained as a woman in a tradition that traditionally men have been ordained into and for those of us who believe that it actually becomes the body and blood of Christ at the consecration I kept asking myself if I consecrate will it become the body and blood of Christ or is this just all a joke? And I was in a retreat and we were in this little cloister room we didn’t really leave much and I was really wrestling with this issue and I guess it was about integrity you know is what I’m doing genuine or is it actually just something fake?

DDM [25:52] And Mary came to me again in that room and said, who do you think brought the first body and blood of Christ into this world? It was a woman. And she was like, of course you can do this.

DDM [26:05] She was like, if I could do it, you could do it. And I never asked that question after that moment in time. And subsequently there’s been so many times in my life when I’ve really been at a crossroads or grappling with something and Mary will come to me, shaping me, teaching me, challenging me and reminding me of who I am. So that’s why for myself, Elizabeth, I adore Mary, not because of scriptural text, not because of literature or even how others see her, not because she’s essentially an archetype.

DDM [26:41] I love her because in a way she’s always been there for me. because I trust her, her love and her care for me. And because of my experience in my relationship with her, that’s something that, you know, can’t be taken away. Not patriarchy, not even our scriptural tradition, not what anybody else says.

DDM [27:00] And so I guess for myself, my deepest wish is that people would actually begin to relate to Mary. for who she is as a person in her own right, maybe to begin to speak to her, to allow her to break through all these different layers of historical narrative in a way to allow her to be unchained from the past and maybe to be encountered again in the present.

CRT [27:29] Producer Carl here and I felt like I needed to share a poem. This is by Jay Hume. I’ve been told I was pronouncing his name wrong. This is the poet that I talked about in the literature episode.

CRT [27:42] This is called The Holy Family. Christ had brothers, do you remember? Half-forgotten in gospel song, bit parts with single lines, denied by those desperate for a virgin mother to remain untouched. Perfection is what happens when myth overtakes the reality, when wanting erases the truth already there.

CRT [28:07] Imagine being venerated by those who deny your children. Imagine centuries of men disclaiming the love of your kin. Imagine it said that you never held your husband, never cradled him close, closer, soft curve, hard flesh, whispered promise. Imagine.

CRT [28:28] Acting on love doesn’t make you any less holy. This wanting cannot preclude a person from faith. I think on dark nights Mary pulled Joseph closer, counted their five sons, their daughters, each one miraculous, the oldest God. I think many times they added to holy creation, their Savior sleeping soundly, a baby still and snoring at their feet.

MET [29:00] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church.

MET [29:25] Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [29:29] Music by Audionautix.com

Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Producer Carl Thorpe discuss the connections between literature and faith. They share their love of reading, background in literature, and then discuss some favorite poetry.

---

Transcript

DDM [00:03]: Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May. And

MET: I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

MET: Carl and I are back with you today and we’re here to share with you a bit of our expertise that we don’t often get to delve into anymore. Today we’re talking about literature and the Bible.

MET: Now, there are whole podcasts devoted to this topic, so we don’t plan on trying to be comprehensive – that would be impossible. But we wanted to talk about a few connections and provide some examples. So before we get into anything really analytical or otherwise smarty-pants sounding, I’d like to talk about how this is personal.

MET [1:13]: Carl and I actually both have degrees in English (the number of books we have in our house is obscene). So, obviously we are readers and have a love for stories, the written word, etc. Let me tell you about my love affair with words.

MET: Oddly, it probably began with my dad. I say oddly because when I was young my dad wasn’t around a lot of the time. He was an oil hand and was out on the rigs a lot in my formative years. But when he WAS home, he read to me. I mean, just about every day. I distinctly remember when I was very young that he read all of Winnie the Pooh by Milne and he would go through a few pages every night. It was really important and special to him. I have no idea how old I was at the time, but it was one of the first books I remember. And I’ve pretty much been reading every since.

MET: I think a lot of this comes down to the fact that I have a pretty active imagination. Carl will tell you that if I am sitting quietly it probably means my mind is going about a million miles a minute. There is always something going on in my head. Reading gave me both something to focus on, and a way to exercise my imagination. And I was intent on it.

MET [2:33]: For example, I hated books with pictures in them. I know young kids are always trying to get out of doing real reading by trying to find books with as many pictures as possible, but I sought out the chapter books that eschewed illustrations – because I did not want things sullied by what somebody ELSE thought the story looked like. If I was reading something I was imagining in my head what the people and places looked like. I had their voices pitched in my head. I had given them accents appropriate for their station or location. I had a world based on this narrative. The last thing I wanted was for some other dingbat to come along and try to tell me what things looked like because I ALREADY KNEW. I did not want somebody else’s notions of what a story looked like because I had that taken care of. I was a relatively reserved kid, and bookish, and didn’t like kids books and didn’t want pictures. I think a lot of adults thought I lacked imagination. But the reality was that I was immersed in it.

MET: So I grew up inhaling novels, short stories, whatever. And I got so far ahead of my peers. I groaned at everything we read in school because I thought it lacked substance. So, once again, my dad took things into his own hands.

MET [4:00]: When I was in 6th or 7th grade, my dad realized I was about to give up on my English classes. I loved reading, but school was just awful. So, he gave me something that probably changed my life – a literature textbook. I think it was meant for seniors in high school or freshman in college. It was a very basic collection of British lit covering all eras, so there was really no focus, and an actual expert would have rolled their eyes, but I was entranced. I read it from cover to cover. It had poetry in it like I had never read. It had stories in it like I had never come across. That book, as much as anything else in my life, set the course for my academic career. I just had no idea you could do those things with words. And I had no idea there was such a rich history of story-telling and craft. I probably became a literary scholar with that book.

MET: I learned to read and analyze that way. I learned to understand things through this process. I knew how to make sense of a text well before any of my peers, and by the time I was in high school everyone knew that if you had questions about a literary text, I was the person to ask.

MET [5:18]: In high school I was a stand out in the performing arts and I had a reputation for just GETTING reading and writing. Everyone knew I could act. Everyone knew I could sing. And everyone knew that there was no way I was going to be valedictorian, but the valedictorian came to me for help in English. So, when I was on my way to college, and I mean literally driving there, to move in, I was planning on majoring in theater and minoring in music. Everyone thought I was going to be the next big thing on Broadway. And here is where it’s both a little sad, but also maybe a little serendipitous because it led me to the success I have today – my lack of self-confidence got in the way. I was afraid I wasn’t pretty enough to make it on stage. And I was afraid I would never be a good enough dancer to make it in the chorus. So, I literally gave up on my theater dreams right there in the car, and decided to focus on the other thing I loved – literature. When I got to college, I signed up to major in English. That set me on an intellectual path that eventually got me here

CRT [6:31]: I was a voracious reader as well when I was a kid. Both of my parents and my sister were readers, so there were always books in every room of our homes. I wasn’t as worried about pictures in my books as you were (and I’m sure you won’t discount such magnificent illustrations in children’s books as the scene where Chester tries to drive a steak through Bunnicula’s heart). Like you, I found much of what we read in school to be drivel until I got into AP English classes in high school. I did have the advantage of a parent, my Mom, with two English degrees that regularly engaged with me on the books I was reading. She read the books I read for AP and we discussed literature regularly.

MET: Before we get into a lot of lit, like what you’re talking about, we should explain just how different our literature backgrounds are. I studied lit at a very conservative, very religious school. There was 100% an agenda there. And, to be frank, I did not get a very good literature education. There were a few classes here and there that were standouts – I’ll mention one or two in a bit – but it was not great. I hardly learned anything modern. I didn’t learn ANY theory at all. I mean NONE. Which maybe doesn’t sound like a big deal but I was SO behind when I went to grad school. It’s a miracle I came out in one piece. And what I did learn was just bad or wrong a lot of the time.

MET: I remember a roommate who was also taking a lot of lit classes walking into our house one day after a few English classes and throwing her books on the ground and proclaiming loudly, “Not EVERY character is a Christ figure!!!” My professors forced a Christian interpretation on a lot of things where it was inappropriate.I remember one day in class where a professor had us read a poem by e.e. cummings. I don’t know how much you know about cummings, but he’s a modern guy, and isn’t scared of taking risks. This poem is about sex. I mean, it’s about a car, but it is 100% about sex. And it is graphic. You would either have to not know how to read or live in a bubble with no contact with the outside world to miss the fact that this poem is about sex. And my professor stood in front of an entire class of seniors and acted scandalized because we had suggested it was sexual because, according to him, it was obviously about a man proposing to a woman.

MET [9:14]: Let me tell you something – this is an important lesson about art: all those well-meaning lit and art teachers who told you art can mean anything you want it to were lying to you to make you feel better about not knowing what the heck you were talking about. Art does NOT mean anything you want it to. Art can be interpreted in any number of ways; but that does not mean all interpretations are valid. Sometimes you can be flat-out wrong.If you read 1984 and then tell me it’s about how the government should invest in more surveillance programs you are, in fact, dead wrong. This is a major failing of education. If we were teaching students to understand texts, the world, ANYTHING, which teach you that there are only one or two answers,we’d have jettisoned standardized testing ages ago, and we would have fired all the hippies who wanted everybody to feel good about themselves who went the other way and said, all answers are valid. These are equally nonsensical positions. The world is complex and nuanced. If you want to understand it, you have to think that way, too. Which means there can be a lot of right answers, some will be better than others, and you can always be wrong. The question isn’t, what is the right answer? The question is what does the evidence indicate? Making sure you can’t answer those questions is a way of keeping you unable to challenge power. If you stay docile and unable to analyze a problem you can’t figure your way out of a situation. As long as we aren’t able to think through things, we are not a threat to those with money or political clout. So don’t tell me your humanities classes don’t matter.

MET: Which brings me back to this English professor. And this prof was dead wrong about e.e. Cummings. There was no textual evidence for his claims. I got a lot of that at my school. When I got to grad school I understood literature pretty much by sheer force of will.

CRT [11:29]: Like you, I didn’t head to college expecting to major in English, though I took a bit longer to realize where I needed to be. I started out as a computer engineering major. Unfortunately, engineers really ought to understand things like math and physics and more math. Those were not my strong points. So at the end of my first, abysmal semester at Texas A&M University, I decided to take a bunch of non-engineering core courses, intending to figure out some other major. None of those classes were English classes, as I already had the basic English credits due to AP exams in highschool. But I took two sociology courses, a journalism course, political science, and philosophy. And it was amazing. It was clear that I needed to be working with words, not numbers.

CRT: Nearing the end of that second semester, I was certain that I was going to major in sociology. I went to my advisor to start the process of changing, but at the last minute, I chose English. I honestly can’t remember why. It might have been that at the time I thought teaching might be where I was heading career wise, and it seemed much more likely that I would be able to get a job teaching English than sociology. Maybe it was the voice of my Mom in my head who got two degrees in English. But for whatever reason, I ended up switching over to English.

CRT: Unlike Elizabeth, I was in a program with an extremely diverse faculty that were not bound by the University to teach a certain worldview. As an example of the type of course that I had access to in my program that Elizabeth did not was a undergrad/grad bridge course in feminist theory.

CRT [13:03]: My primary interest in literature was post modern literature. The basic premise of postmodern anything is a profound skepticism and abandonment of grand, overarching narratives made up of capital T truths that can explain the world. Truth, in postmodern literature, is relativistic, and the truths we choose to believe are more often created by power structures rather than objective facts.

CRT: When I was studying literature as an undergrad, I was an outspoken atheist. I saw many connections in the texts that we read with the faith that I had been a part of when I was younger, but it wasn’t personal to me. I assume that meant that I was approaching literature from a very different angle than you were, Elizabeth. How would you say your faith and literature connected in your mind?

MET: The question of how my love of literature and my faith life connects is pretty simple actually – but as I got older and started to think in a more adult fashion about that connection, it took on a more mature pallour. I’ll explain. There are a few things I love about lit – the story, the meaning, and the quality and interplay of the language and text, that kind of thing.

MET [14:18]: When I was young, my family was insistent that I knew the stories of the Bible. To a weird extent. I mean, I didn’t just go to Sunday School, I went to Bible Study, Mission Friends, I read my Bible all the time, and my family gave me Bible stories on tape to listen to. But we didn’t talk about them a lot. I was just kind of left to my own devices to figure out why they were important or what they meant. So I learned really early on that the Bible was full of complex, contradictory, and REALLY wild, supernatural, and dramatic stories. So it wasn’t hard for me to think of the Bible as a book with a lot of good stories in it. And that appealed to me.

MET: Meaning was important. As early as 11 or 12 I learned that texts have many meanings. And because I had figured out that the Bible was a text, I put it together in my head that the Bible could possibly be interpreted in more than one way. And I thought that was FASCINATING. I also realized very quickly that had major implications for the arguments that I did not understand but I knew were going on out there in the religious world. Instead of turning me off, that made me want to know more. I wanted to figure out what this text was, what were its many meanings, and what they meant to people.

MET [15:42] And as for the language – my interest there is probably what should have indicated where my intellectual life was headed as much as anything else. I had heard sermons before on what words means in Greek or Hebrew or whatever and what that meant for the Bible or for the people of the day…and it was almost always in service to a particular ideology, which I didn’t necessarily pick up on, but I DID recognize that this meant language mattered. I realized that there was slippage around these words. I remember someone in my youth group lecturing me on why I should only read the King James Bible because the language is so much more beautiful, and I remember thinking, but not saying, if you are reading the Bible for pretty language as opposed to historical language or contextual language you’re going to get a very different Bible. These were not welcome additions to my Southern Baptist Youth Group retreat share circle conversations. So before I even knew what any of this meant, I had an appreciation of the Bible AS literature. I liked it as a book. I mean, yes, it was holy scripture. But I also just kind of thought it was an interesting read.

MET: When I grew up and learned more, I actually figured out I was way more right than I knew. For example – The Psalms are lovely. But we too often don’t think about what they are. They are songs or poems. If we think about them just as essays or monologues we don’t really get what’s going on. The Psalms aren’t just a guy writing down his thoughts. They are art. The Song of Solomon is pretty much erotica. Right there in the middle of the Bible. And it generally gets skipped because of that. But the Bible includes a whole dirty book. What are we supposed to do with that information in context with the rest of the Bible? There are two creation stories. They don’t match. How are we supposed to read a Bible that literally can’t get its stories straight unless we acknowledge that the operative word is “story?”

MET [17:59]: And then in college I took a life-changing class that made the connection in the opposite direction. I took a class on religion in literature. It was maybe one of my favorite classes ever. I think if the professor and I had ever sat down and talked about policy in any way about any thing we might have been at each other’s throats. But it was a great class.

MET: We read literature with religious themes. We started the class reading very old hymns as poetry, and then read ancient Christian poems, and worked our way up through major writers who had included religion in their writing as a major theme. I was introduced to Flannery O’Connor in that class. That rocked my world. I actually named a dog Flannery. Flannery O’Connor was problematic in about a thousand different ways, but between her novel Wise Blood and her short story Parker’s Back I was pretty sure she had uncovered the mysteries of the Bible Belt. So all my life I saw a connection between literature and religion. Even if I couldn’t articulate it always, it was a part of my thinking.

CRT [19:10]: As I said, I don’t really have a lot to say as far as connections between my faith and my background in literature, but I guess my love of postmodern literature definitely led me to a more universalist view of religion. All roads leading up the same mountain. Stuff like that. Isn’t it more limiting of God to insist that he revealed themself to all people the same way than it is to allow them to appear to people in different ways throughout time and place? I once heard a priest talking about alien life in the cosmos and whether or not Jesus would have visited them. He found that question a bit silly, because in his mind aliens wouldn’t necessarily need a savior, and if they did, God would take the form of them to do it, just as Jesus came in the form of a human.

MET: Well, I’m definitely interested in Jesus’s humanity.

MET: It doesn’t do a lot of good to talk about these things without getting into specifics, so I’m going to talk about some poetry. Now, understand I could talk about this for hours. I am ready right now to tell you about the Dream of the Rood or religious themes in Gawain or if you want to talk about prose I am prepared to have a multi-session discussion on Flannery O’Connor or John Steinbeck. We could make this happen. But, I say as Carl’s eyes get big and he shakes his head at me, I will not do that to any of us. I am actually going to use an example from John Donne and James Weldon Johnson.

MET [20:46]: John Donne wrote poetry during the Elizabethan Age and was what you would call a metaphysical poet. His works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style. He is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, and ironies. These features were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society. Another important theme in Donne’s poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorised.

MET: What Donne is particularly famous for among budding lit scholars outside of all that mumbo jumbo, though, is his strange poetic juxtaposition in his writing. And by that I mean, he is basically known for two things: very spiritual poems about how loving and great God is and how much we need him, and incredibly dirty poems that you would have been embarrassed to read in your intro to lit class.

MET:This is beyond a Song of Solomon situation. Donne’s poems are basically erotica. Which lit students find delightful when compared to his incredibly virtuous and holy works, So I thought we’d take a look at something he did and see if we could locate the spiritual.

MET [22:19]: I’m going to tell you about a weird little poem Donne wrote called “The Flea.”

MET: “The Flea” is, in it’s most straightforward interpretation, a man trying to convince a woman to have pre-marital sex with him. He uses the insignificant flea as a metaphor – if a flea bites him, and then bites, her, then their blood has mingled in that flea’s body. Their bodies are already unified, and it was no sin. So this next step wouldn’t be, either.

MET: The flea, he says, is their marriage bed. He also says it is three lives in one – the woo-er, the woman, and the flea. This is a point where Donne moves the poem from just the physical to the spiritual – three spirits in one is a reference to the Trinity, and comparing their marriage bed (or the flea) to something as holy as the Trinity moves the seduction away from something sinful into something sacrosanct. So, when the woman kills the flea with her nail, Donne (or whoever is dictating the poem) is rebuffed. Killing the flea is a rejection of the seduction – she has killed the supposed “marriage bed,” she knew was not one, but was just his manipulation. So Donne actually gives the woman in this poem a bit more agency, a bit more personality than a lot of women had in things like chivalric literature.

MET; That is a very short synopsis of a complicated poem, but I wanted to highlight a few things:

MET [23:59]: This was the time of Queen Elizabeth. And people my parents and grandparents age love to tell us how in the old days things were so much more wholesome but that is absolutely untrue. This is back in the 1600s and Donne, who was a priest, is talking about how to most effectively seduce a woman into premarital sex. And this was widely read poetry.

MET: There has never been a time when things were more wholesome. We have always been obsessed with sex and drugs. We have always been a people who want to have sex and get intoxicated. We want to feel good and make bad decisions. It is who we are as a species. And anyone who tells you “not in my day” is either lying or has such selective memory that they are not worth arguing with. Don’t believe me? Read Shakespeare. Read Greek mythology. Read literally anything.

MET: The reason I say this is because Donne takes this idea and juxtaposes that with the holy. Throughout Donne’s work he says, “Okay, we’re physically bound andsexually obsessed creatures – how does that connect us to God?” And I can’t think of a more interesting question to explore in art. And one that could span the ages.

MET [25:24]: The other poet I want to tell you about is James Weldon Johnson.He was an American writer and civil rights activist. Johnson was a leader of the NAACP, where he started working in 1917. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novels, and anthologies, collecting both poems and spirituals of Black culture. He wrote the lyrics for “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, which later became known as the Black National Anthem, the music being written by his younger brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson. In 1934, he was the first African American professor to be hired at New York University. Later in life, he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University, a historically Black university. In recognition of his scholarship and impact, New York University established the James Weldon Johnson Professorship in 2020.

MET: Those of you who took American lit courses (and I realize this might be way out of the experience of some of our international listeners) will remember that the Harlem Renaissance was a time of real rejuvenation in Black culture and arts. It wasn’t just that more Black people were involved in the arts, it was that Blackness was being infused into the arts.

MET [26:51]: And that’s why I wanted to talk about Johson’s poem “The Creation.” I first came across this poem at a speech tournament When I was young my dad taught speech at high school for a few years, and when one of his students couldn’t make it, I often got roped in to sub in for a random event here and there as a junior high student. One of the events that is common is poetry recitation – you memorize a poem and recite it dramatically. A young woman that was at a tournament I subbed at recited this poem “The Creation” and I was just blown away. I couldn’t have told you why, but I wrestled with this poem for years after that.

MET: Johnson tells the story of the creation in Genesis. It’s not a wild departure in any way – you know what’s coming next at every turn. But what Johnson does is different in that he tells the story in the tradition of Black story telling. When God looks over his creation, he simply says, “That’s good.” That simple phrase, “That’s good,” hit me like a ton of bricks. My God had always said, “It is good,” or “It is finished,” or something so weird in syntax or strangely phrased that it was supposed to sound churchy, I guess, but in this poem God simply says, “That’s good.” And the idea of a God who can just look at something and say, “Yeah. Pretty good,” filled me with such joy and hope that I didn’t know what to do with it. This was a God who got me.

MET: And the God of Johnson’s poem was so relatable. Johnson’s poem starts out with God sitting there and saying, “I’m lonely – I’ll make me a world.” I get that. That was me as a kid. We were all lonely children who made up worlds for ourselves. We understand this God’s motivation. And when God makes a man, the imagery Johnson uses isn’t a thunderous creator, but that of a mammy leaning over a child. This is a tender God. A God that cares for his creation. Johnson’s poem isn’t amazing because of it’s creative content – the story in Genesis isn’t new.It is amazing because it tells the story in a new but faithful voice

CRT [29:25]: I want to talk about a contemporary poet named Jay Hulme. H-U-L-M-E. And I’m going to ask Elizabeth to read these poems and then I’ll talk about them. I want to start with a poem that goes along with the poem Elizabeth was just talking about.

MET:

God as a Carpenter; hands shot through with nails

In that moment, perhaps,
He remembered the things
He’d created,
	In thirty years
Of hammer striking wood.
And in His pain He thought
Of all Creation
	As good enough;
Still good.

CRT: Jay Hulme is a transgender man who found God just before the Covid-19 pandemic began, having been an atheist since birth. Much of his poetry since 2020 has been about his journey as a queer Christian in a changing, often hostile world. Like his imagining of God on the cross in the poem Elizabeth just read, Hulme looks at the world as something that is still good, even as his very identity makes people revile him.

CRT: Many of his poems have direct analogues in the Bible. For example, in Matthew and Mark, we find the story of the woman who was hemorrhaging who touched the hem of Jesus’ cloak in the faith that she would be healed. Jesus notices and tells her that her faith has healed her. Hulme writes his version as this:

MET:

Jesus at the Gay Bar

He's here in the midst of it —
right at the centre of the dance floor,
robes hitched up to His knees
to make it easy to spin.

At some point in the evening
a boy will touch the hem of His robe
and beg to be healed, beg to be
anything other than this;

and He will reach His arms out,
sweat-damp, and weary from dance.
He'll cup the boy's face in His hand
and say,

my beautiful child
there is nothing in this heart of yours
that ever needs to be healed.

CRT [31:39]: This is, perhaps, the first time one has encountered the idea of Jesus being at a gay bar. For many Christians, that is the last place they would expect to find him. And if he is there, for many believers, he would be there to drive the people out like he did in the temple with the money changers, but no, here he is dancing. Like the woman in the Bible, a boy touches the hem of his robe in hopes of being healed.. To be something other than “this.” In the Bible, Jesus tells the woman that her faith has healed her, but people at that time would have seen the fact that she even touched him as a huge transgression of Jewish purity laws. She was likely suffering from years of menstrual bleeding, and purity laws dictated that she not touch anyone, least of all an unrelated man. She was unclean. Jesus doesn’t chastise her for that. He doesn’t even forgive her for touching him, which the law says would have made him unclean as well. Similarly, Jesus doesn’t chastise the boy for touching him, but here we see a change. Jesus tells the boy that there is nothing in him that needs to be healed. Jesus tells him that he is already whole, and Jesus sees no need to “forgive” the boy for anything. Hulme once again references the Bible in his poem “Like Thomas”

MET:

Like Thomas

I have been building myself
out of scraps of shattered dreams;
God hands me flour and water,
says: I know what it's like.

The surgeons say I have only to
count backwards from ten
and when I wake I will be reborn.

And reborn I touch
my own body for the first time;
incredulous at the miracle
right before my eyes.

CRT: Here, Hulme touches the scars on his own body from gender affirming surgery as proof of his own rebirth or resurrection, just as Thomas touched the scars on Jesus’ body.

CRT [33:44]: In addition to Hulme’s grappling with faith and identity in his poetry post conversion, Hulme’s earlier work is at times in conversation with faith, though it very often is unpleasant From “Broadmead”

MET:

They told me I was Satan
Those side street preachers
With gospel grin

CRT: From “I Am a Man” when talking about leaving home after coming out

MET:

Pitchforks raised to chase
away the man I have become
I left them, on a hurricane Tuesday
When the weather broke against me
Like the wrath of a God
Others told me existed.

CRT: I wonder how one is able to even imagine a loving God when your identity is supposedly an abomination and the cause of your own family denying you. In Hulme’s case, I think it is because of his command of words and language that he was able to find a place on the margins for himself and others like him in Biblical narratives that are supposed to be settled, capital T truths.

MET [34:53]: Okay – I have loved getting to talk about some things near and dear to me – literature is never far from my heart. And I have loved getting to do that with Carl. We hope we have given you something to think about and maybe inspired you to do a bit of reading. Rev. Deborah will be back soon, and we have some good things planned. Carl and I have loved experimenting with you over the summer. It’s good to know we can try a variety of approaches.

MET: Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prophet. find us at our website, priestandprof.org.

MET: If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast at priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org slash donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM: Music by Audionautix.com

In this mini episode, Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe discusses the nature of public vs private communication and how those differences relate to the faith.

---

DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.

MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.

DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.

MET [00:39] Hello!

Rev. Deborah is still on sabbatical, and our producer actually has shingles, so things are going to be a bit shorter than usual, as it’s just me and Carl is not up to a whole lot.

But there was something I wanted to chat with you about before Rev. Deborah came back, because it might shine some light on some things we’ll do in the fall and winter.

I actually want to talk to you about the public vs. the private.

So, if a student wants to sign up to major in my program at school, they have to choose a concentration. This used to be broken up into interpersonal/organizational, and public/mediated. These words generally mean nothing to undergrads. They very likely mean nothing to you. So, let me explain.

Think of these as levels of audience. There is the first level, which is interpersonal. That’s person-to-person. That’s what you do with your spouse or your buddy or your priest. After that, things are kind of categorized by size of audience. There’s organizational – which is how an organization communicates within itself or to an outside receiver. There’s public communication, which is largely what I do – a person speaking to a crowd. Which has a lot of crossover with mediated communication, which is when the communication is just that – a matter of new media. Depending on what quote-un-quote level of audience you are speaking to, you communicate differently, and you study that communication differently.

Okay, I didn’t really tell you anything that was brilliantly insightful, there. But, I start there to remind you that there is a difference between certain kinds of communication – there is public communication and private communication. You may know this from your job – you make a public memo or flyer for everyone to see; you send a private email or memo to one team member about their particular work. Once again – this is not rocket science.

But I was thinking about how this relates to the faith. Matthew 6:5-6 says, “And when you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they [a]will be seen bythe people. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 6 But as for you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.” But if you go to a liturgical church you know very well that public and communal prayer is integral to a church service. Is Episcopal prayer non pleasing to God because it is done out loud? That seems dubious.

And actually, this takes me back to our very first episode. When I introduced myself to you I told you how I was raised in a very individualized faith. And that’s actually a bit of a paradox, you know? On the one hand, it was very self-centered, individually focused, and without a lot thought for the community. At the same time, there was a lot of emphasis on the public nature of the faith. So it was all about YOUR relationship to God, but kind of how you related to him in public. And that’s a little weird. You would think if it was about an interpersonal relationship, it would be a bit more private. But Episcopalians do the reverse, and I don’t know if we can call ourselves any better. We have this beautiful communal faith – our focus is on the body of the church, both as a physical representation of Christ and a collective community. We pray together, we worship together, we sing together, and we commune together. And yet our faith is very private. You don’t see a lot of Episcopalians telling their friends about how the church has changed their lives for the better. Episcopalians aren’t good at telling people, “I see God in you.” Episcopalians have 100% bought the narrative that it is inappropriate and uncomfortable to talk about religion. They have to be reminded that, yeah, Jesus told us not to pray on street corners, but he also told us, “19 [a]Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to [b]follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you [c]always, to the end of the age.”

Wow, it’s almost like God doesn’t expect our relationship to Him to be one-dimensional.

One of the things that seems to be really hard for some people to wrap their heads around is that God is multi-faceted. God is multitudinous. And, he expects maturity and complexity from us. We are, as Paul observed, not to be content with milk, but should move on to the meat of our relationship.

What I mean by that is that God expects us to understand a bit of context. He tells us, no, I don’t want you to stand on the street corners and pray. That’s what hypocrites do. But that is absolutely different from saying he does not want us to proclaim. God asks us to consider our circumstances. A public street corner with an audience that doesn’t really want to hear you in a show that doesn’t do anybody but you any good is not sharing the gospel. A one-on-one conversation between you and your friend who wants to know how you’re handling things is a very different situation. And this is the difference between a public faith and a private faith. A person who preaches on street corners or college campuses or prays over food loudly in restaurants to make sure the waiter can hear them is the hypocrite praying on the street. They may be doing things in public, but there is no faith to it. A moment with a friend in which you share how God is a part of your life may seem private, but in that moment you are sharing in a very communal thing.

I’m asking you to think about this as we move into the fall and winter because there’s a lot going on in the world right now that asks us to re-imagine our faith in terms of its relation to the public or the private. Who can talk to about what at work? What religions get public funding? Who prays where? What faiths have power over and access to schools? How much influence will religion have over judicial review?

All of these are questions about how the public intersects with religion. It would behoove us all to have some idea of how we situate ourselves in terms of those things as well.

MET [08:03] Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prophet. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.

DDM [08:30] Music by Audionautix.com