Jimmy Carter, personal autonomy, and defending progressive faith

In the current media age, articles and videos go “viral” almost instantly. I got a good glimpse of that phenomenon a week or so ago, when friends and students emailed me or “Facebooked” me with links to Jimmy Carter’s brief op-ed, Losing my Religion for Equality. No other modern president has talked about faith more, or made it clear that his Christianity is central to his worldview, than has Carter. A lifelong member of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the USA, Carter has watched with sadness as the church he has known all of his adult life has moved further and further to the right. (It’s a long story, but the conservative coup d’etat within the SBC began right around the time of Carter’s own presidency; moderates were forced out of seminary positions and the denomination’s traditional tolerance for divergent views –a tolerance for which the Baptists were once rightly famed and praised — began to disappear.)

In any case, the article, which ran first in Australia’s The Age newspaper, is a powerful and simple indictment of the way in which traditional religion is so often used to oppress women. This is, Carter suggests, not only tragic, but it is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the teachings of the great religions. The former president writes:

The carefully selected verses found in the Holy Scriptures to justify the superiority of men owe more to time and place – and the determination of male leaders to hold onto their influence – than eternal truths.

Those of us who hold deep spiritual convictions and strong egalitarian values are often accused of cherry-picking quotes from our holy books in order to construct an argument that God really intended radical equality between men and women. But as Carter suggests, it’s the conservatives who are perhaps even guiltier of this, particularly around issues of gender justice. (My favorite example, of course, is the steadfast refusal of many evangelicals to acknowledge the overwhelming textual evidence that Ephesians 5:21 is the controlling purpose for Ephesians 5:22; Paul’s intent is clearly mutual rather than unilateral wifely submission.) It is not we progressives who have let the values of a secular world distort our faith.

But here’s my favorite part of the 39th president’s brief missive. Carter writes:

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

Too often, “autonomy” and “control over the body” are seen as ideals of the secular Enlightenment, in opposition to the so-called spiritual virtue of allowing one’s body to be a vessel for others to fill. Christian women are offered the example of Mary, mother of Jesus, who is traditionally depicted as willingly — even blindly — submitting to God. Mary does submit to God, as all Christians are called to do. But what she doesn’t do is submit to any man. According to Luke, when Gabriel, God’s angel, comes to tell her that she is to carry a child, Mary is already engaged to Joseph. When the young virgin learns she will carry Jesus, the Son of the Most High, she doesn’t say, “Um, let me check with my fiance first to make sure this is okay with him.” She doesn’t ask for Joseph’s permission because she doesn’t need it. Her body is hers, and she offers it freely to God. That’s autonomy in action.

My life is defined by my faith, as Jimmy Carter’s is by his. As his example shows, faith and feminism do not need to exist in uneasy tension; it does not require cognitive dissonance or Jesuitical gymnastics to reconcile principles of individual liberty and women’s body integrity with a devout commitment to the Creator. We progressive believers need to do as Jimmy Carter has done, and speak more forcefully about the ways in which our faith informs our politics, particularly the politics of the body, of sexuality, and of personal autonomy.

More on Christian feminism here and here.