Anastasia McAteer is a fellow Pasadenan and Fuller Seminary alum whose blog Feminary has long been one of my favorites. From her blog and from Facebook, I learned about the new anthology to which Anastasia has contributed: Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Female and Evangelical, edited by Hannah Faith Notess. For anyone interested in the intersection of feminism and faith, the title alone makes the book indispensable, and I ordered a copy. (It’s cheaper from the publisher than it is on Amazon, where the book is out of stock at the moment. Click the link.)

As Notess writes in her introduction, one of the defining experiences of American evangelicalism is the offering of a “testimony” — the story one tells to those as yet “unsaved” of one’s conversion experience. Even for cradle Christians, evangelicalism generally requires that each believer be born again, even if that rebirth happens at age eight; all must make “a decision for Christ.” Jesus Girls is rich in testimony, but not of the sort taught in Sunday Schools. The nearly two-dozen essays within its pages bear witness to the extraordinarily diverse, yet surprisingly similar ways in which young evangelical women come to grips with their sex and their faith. Though all were raised under the umbrella of evangelicalsm, we have stories from women who grew up in a wide variety of traditions — Free Methodist, Pentecostal, Southern Baptist, Reformed, and, of course, “non-denom”, meaning unaffiliated.

The essays are arranged by theme: Community; Worship; Education: Gender and Sex; Story and Identity. Some of the women who write have left the church, but most are still committed Christians, though their faith has changed since they were little girls. Beyond the themes imposed by the editor, the essays reflect similar experiences, some of which are hardly unique to evangelicalism. The desire to please parents and teachers at any cost, to not be a bad girl and to fit in, is one with which we too often raise our daughters both in and out of the church. But growing up evangelical adds a twist: God is watching, watching all the time, and nothing escapes His gaze. That theme of relationship with God and Jesus appears again and again in the collection, sometimes explicitly and others obliquely, but frequently touching on the difficulty of developing a relationship with the Lord that goes beyond the people-pleasing with which women are invariably inculcated.

For those who have stayed in the faith, the stories in Jesus Girls reflect the ways in which their faith has had to grow in new and unexpected ways. In her “Why Isn’t God Like Eric Clapton”, Andrea Palpant Dilley embraces traditionally masculine imagery, and the tensions it creates to do so as a believer embodied as a woman:

My doubt was my desire, to touch the untouchable, to possess the presence of God…I am at core an Old Testament Christian: prone to Job’s questions, David’s psalmic longing, Cain’s wandering, and Solomon’s love of beauty and dominion. My faith has been more predatory than anything else, a hungry prowl in the dark and a practical, unrefined pursuit — like chasing a ten-foot tiger with a carrot peeler — something larger than life that has to be found with the inadequate tools of mundane life.

The theme of rejecting, reclaiming, and revisioning relationship with God is beautifully explored in Heather Baker Utley’s “The Journey Towards Ordination”. Raised a liberal United Methodist, Utley became an evangelical in college, and flirted with embracing the female submissiveness (the complementarian heresy) so much a part of more conservative churches. In time, however, Utley realized she needed to do more than simply accept the liberalism of her childhood or the traditionalism of her late adolescence; she had to do something new, something adult:

My identity wasn’t supposed to be defined by a gender role or an occupation — it was suppoed to be defined by God. Maybe I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom and use my pastoral gifts elsewhere, but if that was true, I wanted to make those decisions as a function of my own spiritual growth, not as a result of the church giving me a gender-based identity to become submissive and maternal. Gone were the role, the traditions, the “liberal” way I was raised and the “conservative” life I’d adopted. I felt empty without these pieces of my identity, but I was filled with hope. I knew I was going to start over — just God and me — and I was going to rediscover who I was defined only by my relationship with him.

Emphasis mine, and it’s in bold because it encapsulates the theme of the book. So many books about women and the church are written from one of two perspectives: a secular progressive standpoint, deeply suspicious of any attempt to reconcile feminism and faith — or froma rigidly conservative position, eager to push both sexes into narrowly-defined, “God-ordained” complementary roles. Jesus Girls is particularly welcome because it is a book written by women whose Christian faith, for the most part, remains at the center of their lives, but it is a faith that they have defined and redefined for themselves. Some have left the churches of their childhood (Anastasia McAteer grew up Evangelical Free, flirted with collegiate pentecostalism, and is now an Episcopalian), others have stayed in the denominations in which they were raised. But each has wrestled with what it means to be a woman, to be a Christian, to be in relationship not only with God but with God’s frequently exasperating, sometimes lovely, and invariably imperfect people. The stories of that wrestling are the heart of the book.

For progressive secular feminists, Jesus Girls will burst some commonly-held assumptions about evangelical women. For women still in the churches who have not yet found a way to give voice to doubt, this anthology will be a great comfort. For all of us, it is a reminder that faith and feminism can be reconciled — and that reconciliation isn’t just a theory, it’s something that women are living out every damn day. That reconcilation takes many forms, and in the rich variety of stories within this slim book, there are examples and inspiration aplenty.