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This article was downloaded by permission of the author from www.RethinkingFaith.com, where other articles on similar themes are available.

COULD IT BE THE TRUTH IS BELOW THE BELT?

A SPECULATIVE APPEAL FOR COMPASSION

Recent efforts to make inclusive language standard English have touched even the Bible—producing an outcry among a segment of Christians known as complementarians (people who believe men are to be leaders, and women followers). Since the Bible is a translation of ancient languages, this is not the first time its English versions have needed updating. If inclusive language can clarify that a biblical statement is intended not just for men, but for women too, why all the resistance?

Perhaps the picture in the complementarians' minds is a horrific one -- a scene much like the one that took place in A.D. 33, when Christ, the Word of God, stood before the multitudes, and Pilate asked what to do with him. Only this time, the Word stands in written form, "inscripturated," and the mob is a society run amok that betrays the Word of Truth with shouts of, "Inclusify! Inclusify!"

"What do you mean," asks Pompous Publisher, who presumes to hold the fate of the Word in her hands, "Shall I inclusify your King?"

"We have no Sovereign but that which is politically correct," comes the reply of the masses, steeped in feminist culture.

Perhaps the outcome they fear is not mere crucifixion -- this they would gladly endure -- but castration, not only for God and his Word, but for themselves. Masculinity, not accuracy, is at stake, and with it the possibility of being emasculated.

Perhaps they envision somewhere in heaven an altar, beneath which are the testicles of all the saintly pronouns, crying out, "How long, how long, O Lord, before you avenge us that were cast out?"

We may laugh at this, or find it grotesque, but the tremendous value these men* place on their masculinity, and their conspicuous fear of losing it, seems to govern all they say and do on this subject of gender in language.

How else could these otherwise scholarly men make the kinds of logical errors they do? Could it be they are, in the end, "gender addicts" beyond reasoning with? This is the only rational explanation I can find, personally, for the completely irrational manner in which they've arrived at so many of their conclusions. If women reasoned the way these men do, wouldn't we be hearing sexist slurs without end?

Now let's shift our satellite antenna slightly to bring into focus another historic motif. This one is not the age of the apostles but the Dark Ages, just before the dawn of the Reformation.

Inquisitors sweep the intellectual landscape scanning for heretics to smoke out, try and torture. Just to prove that a heretic should be burned, they dig up the bones of radicals like Wycliffe, who dared translate the Scriptures into the common tongue. They call reformers like Luther before a Diet of Worms to insist they recant their blasphemous efforts at reform. How dare anyone challenge the established teachings of the holy fathers? How dare they question the infallibility of the men who make up councils, who write up canons and creeds, who broadcast daily on Christian radio stations, and who reign on the throne of their beloved peter?

This too is an emotional motif. But this one is our scenario, our psycho-drama, if you will. In this metaphor the gender defenders are not the victims but the inquisitors. They form alliances and hold councils on "biblical" manhood and womanhood, to write up creeds and canons that condemn any teaching that challenges their mannish assumptions and their doctrines of men. Change offends them because it threatens them and so they threaten us.

They gather scholars and professors to increase their credibility, but they subject their scholarship to the service of a biased and antiquated ideology. In doing so they lose the capacity to hear the reasoned pleas of the reformers. As Luther put it, rather than submitting to reason, reason is their whore. Rationalizing, they use her however they will to serve their own purposes. But in the end they will have much to pay.

Which satellite transmission is correct? Which paradigm best fits the facts? As a subscriber to the second narrative I can only suggest that if either one is true then we need to extend sympathy to our poor brothers who are trapped in the tyranny of hierarchic thinking -- and we especially need to pray for our sisters under their domination.

In a hierarchy, it's not just lonely at the top; it's lonely everywhere. We were created to have equals, partners who would, and with whom we could, share all of life's pleasures and pains without dominating or being dominated. Indeed, sisters and brothers, we should weep for these men, their wives, and their children. Unless we see what's really going on inside their hearts and minds, they will always seem to us like inquisitors and enemies, and bad bullies to be punished or ignored.

We need to see them instead as what they are. They do not know how to relate to women as equals, nor do they care to -- their ideology will not allow it, let alone their egos. Perhaps deep down they fear that if they try to do this, they will be found inferior, and not be equals at all. Perhaps they fear they will not only lose their sense of being in control, and their sense of status, but they will surely be crushed -- or worse, castrated and sent away.

Perhaps life is already too lonely for the hierarchic gender-addict ever to consider this. And so their defensiveness and closed mentality may be nothing more than a crossing of their legs to guard themselves from what they perceive to be the ultimate pain.

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* I realize there are female complementarians too. But since they prefer to be addressed in the generic masculine, i.e. as men, I defer to them in this essay.