Yesterday I described some of the social scene at Shawmut River Baptist Church in James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh, which explains why feminism isn’t very appealing to women in that community. But I still left a big question hanging: why are women so insistent on the inverse of feminism? Why do they insist men should hold the positions of authority in church, family, and nation?

One point becomes clear throughout the book: the official positions of power don’t mean a whole lot. For instance, while the church is technically run by the pastor, his deacons and a board of trustees, all of them male, when Ault asks congregants who the most powerful people in church are, the uniform answer is the pastor, his wife, his parents and his in-laws. Women confine themselves to the domestic and family spheres and leave the institutional, “public” spheres to the men; but the family sphere looms so large in this society that it comes across as a fairly even trade. For those of us looking at things on the large scale, where men make laws, direct armies and control billions of dollars, it seems like giving away the store. But in Shawmut’s small-scale world, things look different.

More provocative, though, is Ault’s analysis of female influence over men. The Baptists have a saying: “The man is the head, the woman’s the neck that turns the head.” Normally that doesn’t seem to me to say much for women’s power, because it still seems to be affirming men as the ones who really matter, and women matter only to the extent that they affect them. But Ault sees female influence as being much broader than this.

Recall how, back in my first post about this book, I described how the community operates by a consensus that seems to belong to no one individual: it’s “how we’ve always done things” or “what everyone knows.” After watching how men and women interact during his years there, Ault concludes that women are the ones who mainly control that consensus, largely by running the gossip network.

The word “gossip” sounds light and trivial to us, but as anyone who’s read the Epistle of James knows, in a tight-knit society it’s deadly serious business. In a word-of-mouth society, it’s how information is conveyed and group opinions formed. Ault says even the pastor is at its mercy:

Once reputation crystallizes, whether true or not, it provides a lens through which all members can legitimately see what that person’s actions obviously are … In the quiet flow of normal conversation unruffled by dissent or controversy, ice crystals of “fact” gradually form, linking up slowly with others in a grid, which, as layer upon layer form, might eventually become solid enough to drive a truck across. Meanwhile, anyone trying to navigate the waters of life at Shawmut River had to beware these ice-formations-in-the-making hidden beneath its surface.

Frank’s preoccupation with gossip was understandable. Rather than the all-powerful commander of his ship, he seemed its frustrated pilot, nervously scanning the seas around him for signs of hidden icebergs whose creation and movement he was unable to control, things that would drive parents from his school or turn his flock against him.

Anyone who’s been on a schoolyard knows that gossip is a heavily female thing (and social-psych studies have confirmed this). And the fact that the women are more likely to be at home with family and neighbors, rather than at impersonal workplaces like men, makes it even more likely that they’ll hear and spread the word. All this isn’t particularly new.

But Ault’s novel (to me) claim is that women succeed in forming public opinion precisely by being invisible. Remember that the consensus opinion becomes a consensus because it isn’t attached to any particular person — it’s just what “everyone knows.” But that means that it can’t come from those in official positions of power:

…to achieve this collective voice, gossip must distance itself from the voice of individual authority and individual accountability. But patriarchal authority, whether in father or in pastor, requires the posture and voice of individual accountability. Furthermore, as heads of households, men are, as individuals, continually vulnerable to questions of honor, forcing them into defensive and aggressive postures and efforts to save face and to be and appear strong….

In the traditional regime of gender, then, women’s place in the family — where families involve broader ties of mutual aid among relatives — and the posture of individual strength and accountability required of men as household heads give women certain advantages in elaborating common belief in ordinary talk. Removed from positions of formal authority, women thereby enjoy certain indirect means to shape an oral tradition through the continual stream of day-to-day moral judgments carried largely in talk. And it is at least partly for this reason, perhaps, that women are seen in settings like Shawmut River to be the principal carriers of morality.

This all sounds manipulative, but Ault doesn’t see the Shawmut women as consciously deceiving him (or other men). They sincerely believe they are simply transmitting what everyone knows, those external, eternal values they all believe in. But by submerging self into the group’s collective unconscious, women achieve a collective power that balances the individual power of men. And on some level women derive their security from this, and they don’t want it to change. (I suspect this dynamic extends well beyond this church or this country. A book I have on India remarks that, “although so many Hindu practices seem to the disadvantage of women, it is women who uphold the customs and caste rules most vigorously. Hindu women also observe their religious obligations much more faithfully than men.”)

Raising the whole specter of female influence over men is, well, uncomfortable. It has historically been used to disbelieve or blame women who claim to have been raped or abused, on the theory that women are really in charge of their men, or if they aren’t perhaps they deserve what comes to them. For that reason, many feminists have dismissed the idea out of hand as a male paranoid fantasy that justifies abuse.

But, given Ault’s comprehensive observations, as well as my own experience, I’m willing to believe him. I just want to qualify it with a few points:

1) Some women are better at this than others. In fact, reading about the whole female scene at Shawmut brought back unhappy memories of my own difficulty fitting into female groups as a kid, usually because I didn’t know “what everyone knows” and felt like there were unspoken signals flying around that I couldn’t follow. For that reason, I generally wound up hanging out with guys who were themselves rejects from male groups. Ault doesn’t deal much with the whole question of gender misfits; in a community as small as Shawmut River, there aren’t many of them. But I suspect that one of the driving forces of feminism is the way urban life lets gender misfits (including homosexuals) congregate in their own groups, and perhaps plot the overthrow of those gender norms they find so oppressive.

2) Even women who have the knack for influencing men need a stable and cohesive society that will socialize men so that they behave in a fairly predictable way. The incident with the braless hippychick, for instance, wouldn’t have happened at Shawmut because the language of clothes is generally agreed upon; you wouldn’t have a woman claiming that her choice of apparel means X when everybody else thinks it means Y (or, as seems more the case, has a lot of different opinions what it means). If women basically know how a man is going to react to an action or word on their part, it becomes a lot easier to have the effect on him they want.

But women in modern society run into colliding and nebulous behavioral norms, so we don’t have that kind of assurance. Another unhappy memory wanders into my head as I think of this. Some time ago I dated a guy who treated me badly (I’ll spare you the details). When I tried to go talk to him his mother intervened, saying, “You know how men are, what are you expecting?” Once again, I ran into an “everybody knows” that I didn’t know, in this case because my “everybody” wasn’t her “everybody.” In the little subculture where this guy and his mother lived, it was basically accepted that men were pigs; but women like his mother felt they were pigs they understood, and therefore could basically manage. And so the son lived up to his mother’s low expectations.

The women at Shawmut River, to their credit, do try to improve their men by bringing them to Christ. But it’s worth noting that they basically swap out their old model of man for an even older one. Relying on time-tested gender roles with predictable rules means men can still be managed. Trying to create a New Man, or letting men figure out for themselves what they want to be, would make men unpredictable and therefore potentially dangerous.

3) Even under ideal circumstances, there’s still an element of randomness to human behavior. Men can do totally unexpected things, and women are, you know, human and fallible. So I don’t think women deserved to get raped or beaten for these failures any more than I think men deserve to get killed in duels for not being swift enough with a pistol.

Whew! Time to take a break. But obviously, all this has larger implications for both politics and religion. More on that to come.

As I mentioned before, James Ault got started in the business of conservative anthropology largely because he was trying to figure out why working-class women resist feminism. By the time he got around to studying the Baptist church in Spirit and Flesh his interest had widened, but the question of women still preoccupies him. Because the women he finds there don’t just accept traditional gender roles as a cross to bear; they are actively attached to them. In fact, one conversion narrative Ault keeps running into is the story of how Jesus saved a marriage, usually by converting the wife who then hauls her somewhat reluctant husband to church and induces him to take on “headship.” As in most churches I’ve been to myself, women outnumber men in Shawmut River’s pews. So why are women so actively supporting a system that seems to only subjugate them?

Ault’s answer is complex. So complex, in fact, that I’m going to need more than one post to explain it. But it’s worth ploughing through, because I think it says a lot about our current cultural dilemmas.

First of all, Ault found that Shawmut River’s society was highly homosocial. The culture is overall highly sociable, with people tending to do things in groups; and generally male groups do one thing and female groups another. He doesn’t say exactly how these groups form, but since people tend to be around the same family and friends they’ve known all their lives, it seems like an extension of the groups formed on the schoolyard. These networks continue even after people marry, because they usually stay in geographic proximity of their childhood groups.

These homosocial networks themselves, Ault points out, remove one of the conditions in which feminism arose. Ault contrasts marriages within this society with the marriages of professionals like himself, which exist largely in social isolation:

At the same time, the unrestrained privacy and greater intimacy of our marriages carried their own peculiar strains, including the social isolation of housewives bearing the relentless responsibilities for child care and housework. These strains fueled our criticisms of traditional gender roles in the family and prompted numerous adaptations to relieve them, including our interest in a wife’s work outside the home as something good in and of itself, our explorations of communal living and our reliance on “support” or “consciousness-raising” groups to help bridge the gap between public and private. A touchstone of the feminist critique of the family in the 1960s and 1970s was that because women were socially isolated in the private sphere of family life, they were removed from the discourses and power structures of public life.

But the role of housewife and mother did not isolate the women of Shawmut River socially. Instead, it bound them in cooperative relations with women relatives — cross-generational groups in which their common identity as women was collectively fashioned. That identity emerged in a world separate from men’s, in which women as well as men appeared as distinctly different creatures, as “fractions with different denominators,” as Jean Strong put it.

The problem with this homosociality was that it made heterosexual relationship rather difficult. Marriages tended to happen suddenly after brief courtships, Ault noticed, and spouses often found it difficult to talk to each other. So when marriages were under stress, they tended to fall back into their homosocial support networks and become even more estranged from each other. (Ault speculates that the community’s vehement opposition to homosexuality, which most people had even before conversion, may spring partly from this temptation to stick with your own sex. A lot of men there could relate to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, from the sound of it.)

So when the Shawmut Baptists heard those passages from the Haustafeln that women like me find so hard to digest, what they first heard was the message of unity. Telling husbands that their wives are “your own flesh,” which sounds almost boringly romantic to me, is actually a revelation in a society where men and women often feel like different species. So while defenders of traditional biblical gender roles often seem to be arguing for the differentness of the sexes, here it is actually a taken-for-granted problem that the Bible helps to overcome.

Ault says several women tell him they used to be “women’s libbers” before their conversions. But in their typically concrete way of thinking they aren’t referring to an abstract position on Women’s Place In Society, but to interpersonal behavior: “Listen to him, do what I want.” Ault notes that “…feminism’s call for women’s greater independence would simply underwrite the traditional bifurcation of men’s and women’s worlds they already lived within.”

The fact that, even after conversion, marriages continue within these larger networks profoundly affects the female experience of submission to the husband, Ault says. At one point, he asks some church members what they would do if someone’s husband made a really bad decision, like spending scarce money on a sportscar instead of replacing a broken washing machine:

Sharon was most circumspect in responding. … She said she would turn the matter over to Frank (the pastor), who was called of God and accountable to him. But she was concerned Frank might advise the woman simply to sit back and wait until her husband “fell flat on his face.”

“‘Fell flat on his face’?” I asked incredulously.

“That would be my question,” Sharon admitted, “unless she went out there an tripped him,” she added, laughing. But others commenting on the situation quite readily imagined concrete ways for her to do just that. Not to have his shirts ready for an important business meeting, Sharon’s stepfather, Tom Morse, suggested, or finish them stiff and wrinkled. Not to stock the house with things he needed or, in claning up, to misplace things he needed were tactics others imagined. Rather than counseling a wife’s submission, members suggested indirect ways to achieve her legitimate interests by working within her traditionally designated domain of household responsibilities. In employing such tactics, she could depend on material and moral support from the women in her family circle and, perhaps, her own husband’s relative distance from those realities.

Ah yes, passive-aggressiveness, that old female standby! But actually, this anecdote also demonstrates to me another reason why it’s important to the fundamentalists to believe they have eternal, unchanging values. Because the wife doesn’t submit to the husband in the sense of going along with all of his whims; rather she holds him, along with herself, to an external standard. So the problem is cast not as man’s interest vs. woman’s interest but as human interest vs. God’s interest.

Such passive non-cooperation is not restricted to wives. Although Frank, like most fundamentalist pastors, theoretically has almost dictatorial control over his church, when he makes an unpopular decision he finds the collection plate comes back a lot lighter. So even though he is rarely challenged directly, he still gets the message.

But why — I found myself wondering — should women have to be so roundabout? Why does this reconciliation of the sexes demand that women submit to men, and not just to Christ or to some general moral standards? That comes along later in the book, and will be the subject of Part 2.

One very important element of the society of Baptists that James Ault studies in Spirit and Flesh is its ethic of reciprocity. Like most Christians, the Shawmut River Baptists see “putting others before self” as essential to Christian life. But what they mean by that distinguishes them from their more liberal brethren.

For one thing, as I said, they live in a highly personal world. So when they think of “others” they aren’t thinking of people in the ghettos of Chicago or the slums of Calcutta but the people they know. Acts of kindness are personal gifts and favors for people whose situations they are familiar with. Large institutions, whether public or private, are seen as the enemy of this kind of giving; one family Ault talks to, for instance, goes to great lengths to avoid putting their mother in a nursing home. (In one curious passage, the pastor ponders whether capitalism is congruent with Christianity; he concludes that small family businesses are fine, but major corporations are “liberal.”)

I think this points out something Doug Muder alluded to in his article that started all this: in contrast to what many liberals believe, institutional safety nets actually enable individualism. Sure, they take out a hunk of your paycheck, but they free you up immeasurably more in time and lifestyle by not making you care for a network of family and friends. From that perspective, the pastor’s seeing corporations as “liberal” makes a weird kind of sense.

Yet every act of personal giving at Shawmut River carries an expectation of repayment. Not in some immediate quantifiable way, but at some point in the future, somehow the scales will balance. The Baptists are fond of sayings like “What goes around comes around.” And whenever people have favors done for them, they feel a sense of obligation, not because the giver demands it but just from that social miasma that permeates everything.

This makes their politics conservative for a couple reasons. Their mistrust of social institutions gives them obvious problems with government aid and welfare schemes. Ault says that this is not because they are heartless, but because in their small world they honestly don’t realize that everybody doesn’t have this web of reciprocal relationships. The pastor, for instance, keeps thinking Ault must live with his parents because he’s single, or at least that they live in Northampton with him, even though Ault has told him that his parents live in Pittsburgh. At another point a prominant churchman runs for public office partly on a platform of turning all welfare matters over to local church programs, not realizing how logistically impossible this would be with a mobile urban population.

They also resist the idea that anyone, unless they suffer a severe problem like a disability, should receive something without giving back. This was interesting, because like most leftish types I’ve always assumed this was a capitalist-individualist ethic of self-sufficiency, but Ault says in this subculture it is actually an expression of their belief in interdependence. The idea that a person simply has a freestanding right to a certain standard of living, without being bound to anyone for it, just seems all wrong to them.

It gets even more interesting when Ault ties this to the Shawmut Baptists’ view of the Atonement. The substitionary theory of atonement, which seems so barbaric to liberals, actually fits quite well with their attitude that everything has to be balanced and reciprocated. If God had simply declared redemption without somebody paying, it would have completely thrown off these karmic laws that the Baptists see holding their whole society together.

This also affects how the believers react to the idea that their salvation has been purchased. My readers who love to love, and who love to hate, Marcus Borg might be interested to know that Ault takes issue with him in an endnote:

To say this understanding of Christ’s passion as substitutionary atonement leads to “passivity” in religious life, as Marcus Borg argues, depends on ripping this doctrine out of the cultural context within which it emerges and has its meaning. … Members of Shawmut River would hardly be considered passive in their faith, nor do they see Christ’s work on the cross as the end of their spiritual journey, as Borg sees it. Instead, presuming this cultural context, they feel obliged to pay him back with their lives. The activism they pursue, of course — including fulfilling self-sacrificial duties to others, spreading his good news, supporting his church or fighting to see their nation turn back to God — does not go in directions Borg sees as real activism: that is, to “challenge the culture,” as he puts it, or, we might go on to imagine, to promote programs for human welfare or social reform relying on impersonal bureaucratic means of the state or church.

True enough. But all this makes me wonder what happens to the concept of grace. Salvation is supposed to be a gift, a free and unmerited gift, and yet nothing in this culture really seems free. But are they the ones not getting it, or are we? I find myself thinking of how the epistles employ the same sort of karmic language when talking about forgiveness: as you forgive others, so you will be forgiven, but if you do not forgive others you will not be forgiven.

The reciprocity system that Ault describes here is incredibly ancient. Back when I was studying the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari in college anthropology they described a very similar system of exchange, in which someone would spontaneously give you a gift on the understanding that one day or other, you would give him one. By this means practically all movable objects circulated among the tribe. But the fact that it is so old and widespread makes me wonder if that could possibly have been what Jesus meant. God did not need to come to earth to enforce a system that everybody knew. When he said “Give, and expect nothing in return,” did he really mean it?

I said a while ago that another post in Spirit and Flesh would deal with how the Shawmut River Baptists read the Bible. This brings us, of course, to the heart of the current debate about biblical literalism. Many scholars say that reading the Bible literally is a modernist invention, while others hotly dispute this. (If you want to see this debated ad nauseum, see here.) Reading about Ault’s community, which is in many ways like a premodern one, my feeling is “yes and no.”

The Baptists in this book are very concrete thinkers. They don’t go for big abstractions and theories. But the word Ault uses to describe their hermeneutic isn’t so much literal as personal. They live in a world of persons and interpersonal relationships; they don’t have much connection, even vicariously through the media, to people they don’t know. So it’s not surprising that they hold staunchly to the personhood of God, Jesus, Satan, angels, demons and so on. They like the “family stories” of the Old Testament (Abraham, Jacob, etc.) and can readily relate to them. The Bible, Ault suggests, was written for a similar audience, and so even its more cosmic points tend to be made with stories of persons. The whole Fall of Man becomes a four-character drama in a garden, with a man called Humanity and a woman called Life and so on.

There’s another way that they read the Bible that’s very premodern, which is perhaps less obvious. Back on the now-vanished Among the Ruins somewhere, there was a discussion of the fact that up until the printing press came into being, it was unusual for anybody, even a church, to have the entire text of the Bible in one piece. They were possessed mainly in parts, which were used for reading aloud in services. In other words, in contrast to the centrality of the Bible after the Reformation, texts were used as a support for an oral tradition. (I think this referred to a post on Sacra Doctrina, though I can’t find it now. Keith, Andy, do you remember what I’m talking about?)

The Shawmut Baptists have, of course, a typically Baptist reverence for the Bible as a book. But they read it and, more importantly, remember it in a way more typical of an oral culture, namely as a series of disconnected stories, poems and homilies. Also, like the medieval churches they tend to turn everything in it to pastoral use. Since the Bible, in fact, is a collection of stories, poems and homilies that were collected only long after some of them were written, this may be a more historically correct way to read it.

What’s “modern” about Biblical literalism, then, is attempting to use the Bible as a source of data unrelated to the points of the particular stories it’s telling. I mentioned earlier that it wasn’t until the 1600s that somebody calculated the age of the earth using the Bible, and that seems like an early example of the more modern use of the text. It assumes, for one, that all the stories and all the begats in Genesis are one cohesive thread without gaps, rather than the patchwork of tribal folklore that they more evidently seem like to me. This creates problems, such as how Cain married and built a city when he was only the third person to exist on earth, that probably never occurred to people who were accustomed to hearing his story separately from that of his parents, and as an illustration of fratricide rather than a chronology of early Earth.

By the same token, that radio preacher who said Christ never descended into hell because of his line to the thief on the cross also seems like something that could only happen in the modern era of building abstract theories from texts with different pastoral uses. The story of the thief is the sort of thing you’d tell someone to assure them that no matter what they’ve done, it’s never too late to come to Christ; the descent into hell is more an illustration that Christ’s saving power extends even to those who lived before him. Neither one was meant to aid a police-like effort to account for all of Jesus’ movements throughout the Triduum.

Nonetheless, the Shawmut Baptists stand staunchly with “creation science” and other modernist incarnations of biblical hermeneutics. And this may be, Ault says, because the attempts of more liberal Christians to reinterpret the Bible leave them cold. They tend to turn the personal God and the personal stories into depersonalized abstractions that the Baptists find hard to understand and even harder to relate to. And they’re not alone in feeling that this changes the nature of the faith. A blogger no less capable of abstraction than Steve B. of Harbinger writes:

For me, accepting Barth and Frei means not translating Christian language into other idioms. A prime example: God is not “the ground of being,” as Tillich says, drawing on Heideggerian ontology. Also, contra Schleiermacher, knowledge of God is not equated with a universal human sense of dependence. God is not “the forces which bear upon us” (Gustafson, I think). God is not the “matrix of being” (Rosemary Radford Ruether). God is the Person who raised Jesus from the dead!

Of course, we are obliged to do a certain amount of abstracting of the Bible, both to deal with the discoveries of science and to translate the Bible into a society a long way from first-century Judea. But as I wrote here, finding the abstract principles that a Bible story illustrates is only the first step. If it’s going to affect your life at all, you have to retranslate it into the particulars of your own life. And that’s where the devil of it is.

Yoder, in fact, wrote The Politics of Jesus partly to counter too much abstractifying of Christianity. Only if you take Jesus at face value, he says, does he really become radical. Mennonites are what they are precisely because of the ways they take Jesus literally: love your enemies, turn the other cheek, give to the poor etc. The more abstract you get, Yoder implies, the easier it is to translate the abstraction into what you’re already doing.

Ault doesn’t go into that, but he does warn against the assumption that abstract thinking is inherently superior to the concrete type. In an endnote he takes on both Lawrence Kohlberg, who devised a well-known theory of stages of moral development, and James Fowler with his similar theory of stages of faith, for assuming that abstract principle and personal conscience are more “advanced” than Shawmut River’s practical, interpersonal approach to moral and spiritual questions. They are better adapted to industrial and post-industrial society, he says, but that doesn’t make them inherently more mature. Ault notes that in his observations of the church’s children and teenagers, he sees them going through a learning curve in adapting to their society just like other children.

It’s a provocative point, and it reminds me of nothing so much as a whole lot of frustrating conversations I used to have with my Lutheran pastor. He was good-hearted, strong in faith, and very attentive to me, but abstract thought was definitely not his forte. And I found that, although I am a professional communicator, I really did not know how to communicate anything meaningful to him. I grew up among intellectuals, and all the arts that I learned and gained praise for in writing and speaking in that milieu were pretty much useless. It’s a problem I never overcame, and the failure still haunts me. And if Ault is right, it’s a failure that’s occurring on a national, even global scale.

Rilina read God’s Politics right after The Politics of Jesus, and makes some interesting comparisons.