There’s no doubting that gender continues to occupy a lot of time, space & energy in the church. It regularly raises the emotions and generates a lot of heat and little light. It can also put Christians into camps where the ‘the other side’ can be seen, talked about & treated as a problem or worse ‘the enemy’. In the church this is nothing short of disastrous. So I’ve invited Hannah Mudge to a blog conversation with me about faith and gender.

Click here for part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5

P: Let’s talk gender – I’m really interested to hear your thoughts on this because this is perhaps one of the most fundamental questions which underlies all the other topic. Are there differences between men and women? If so what? What significance, if any, should our biological differences carry? What does it mean to be a man/woman? Is gender a social construct?

It certainly is one of the fundamentals, and it’s also one of the things I see people get most irate about and most confused about. There is a huge problem, for example, with confusing “equality” with “being the same”. You get people arguing against gender equality on this point – they will say that men and women are so different that it is not possible and certainly not right. This, in my opinion, is a misunderstanding – equality and androgyny are not the same thing!

P: It seems that we have a common starting point in that we agree that men and women are equal but different. The devil is in the detail it seems. So what we need to work towards are common understandings of what it means to be equal and what it means to be different and how as genders we complement each other. I hear much more from egalitarians on the ‘equal’ bit but not nearly enough on the ‘different’ bit. The opposite being the case from the complementarian side!

I don’t dispute that men and women are different – in some ways – and that this was obviously intended when we were created. We can see this in Genesis; it is clear that God created men and women as distinct but in a way that was supposed to fit together and complement, or complete, each other. However, I don’t believe that Genesis implies hierarchy or authority as part of this. I don’t believe that the “difference” here includes ideas about gender essentialism or stereotypes, which have often been incorporated into Christian teaching and labelled as “Biblical”. These ideas would include teaching that men and women always have certain personality traits because of their gender, or should fulfil certain roles in a relationship because of their gender, and so we get teaching that talks about the way Genesis shows us a picture of a male breadwinner and female homemaker, or a woman’s “inherent softness” and “need to be rescued”. The idea that Genesis 1-3 tells us these things is bizarre. I think you are just as likely to find huge differences in personality and preferred roles between men, and between women.

P: Personally I don’t see Genesis 1-3 in terms of hierarchy or (to a lesser degree) authority but more in terms of responsibility. I’m not saying anything about who is more responsible. Experience suggests it’s probably not the men! What I mean is that the story shows God giving a task to Adam but it’s evident and obvious that man cannot fulfil this task alone. Women being described as a helper, first says to me that as a man I need help. I am not self-sufficient, I can’t do it alone. I think that applies in family life and it applies in church life and it applies more or less everywhere. To fill the earth in the best possible sense with the knowledge of God takes men and women working together. However I’m not yet persuaded that the responsibilities given to men and women are the same. I’m not yet persuaded that the role of father and mother is simply the same as ‘parent’ or ‘husband’ is exactly the same as ‘wife’.

I believe that many of these ideas have come from cultural assumptions we hold about the roles of men and women and that they mean we must fulfill certain stereotypes. I’ve seen Christian writing on the subject that talks of the need to reinforce this in children through what toys they play with, their behaviour, and what they see their parents do around the house. In no way has this got anything to do with the Bible and I find that quite concerning because these are things that are really imposed upon people and come through in books about marriage, about dating, about child rearing…

When it comes to “what it means to be a man or woman” this is something I did a bit of exploration of last year. I asked my Christian friends on Twitter what the words “womanhood” and “femininity” meant to them – and the answers were interesting. They were also all very different, with the exception that quite a few women saw the concept of “femininity” as a stick to beat them with for not fitting inside a neat little box of characteristics and behaviour. You can read my blog post about this discussion here. However you’ll often see conservative women talk about how the concept of femininity is so important to them and how much they want to glorify it. It means so many different things to different people. A friend posted about this on her blog and one commenter replied that to her, motherhood was the signifier of womanhood. This managed to upset quite a few people, as you can imagine.

What it means to be a woman or a man is something that has really been subject to distortions of culture and unhelpful stereotypes. This is why you’ll often hear feminists say that “patriarchy hurts men too”. I think there are more differences between men and women than people think, but that it is clear that we are not “the same”.

P: I read your discussion on womanhood and femininity – what struck me is that no one really has any idea what it is. So it’s no surprise that firstly men are going to get it wrong if there is no ‘right’ but also that my egalitarian friends would do the wider church a great service by do more work in this area. If men and women are equal but different but there’s no idea what that ‘different’ is or means (is it simply physical? I know plenty of women egalitarian or otherwise who would hesitate to stop there). Most of the books I have come across put all their effort into arguing about what the equal bit means, have you read any good books in this area?

Totally agree! I know a lot of people who think the difference is purely physical (but then you also get into the murky and at present extremely controversial waters of transgender issues) and other who would say it goes further than that (which I also believe) but like me, would hesitate to actually specify *how* because often, “differences” are described by Christians as being in terms of man = provider, woman = homemaker, man = logical, woman = emotional, man = leader, woman = helper – and we don’t necessarily feel that is true. I’d agree that most books put all their effort into discussing equality. I own and have read Elaine Storkey’s Created or Constructed? The Great Gender Debate, which does deal with the concept of difference in detail. Storkey concludes that:

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