I'm a never-married female; in previous generations, I had a very distinct rank and it was on the bottom. Possibly the only people lower on the social rungs by gender and marital status would have been intersex folk who perhaps couldn't get married for biological/physiological reasons.
What people want - singles, LGBTQIA+, women, abuse survivors - more than anything, is to know there's a place for them in society. They want to know that there is a soft landing for them, people who won't care what happened to them, what they are. That they will be acceptable, included, affirmed as worth caring for.
We - as a society, as churches, as Christians - are bad at this. We are AWFUL at it. And I say this as someone with a supportive, loving family behind her: I still live in fear that the people at my church will kick me out for "bad thinking". Let's not even go into "doing the 'wrong' thing by conservative Christian lights". God is Love, His church is not so great at it. And if I can think that - as someone who generally follows the rules and is generally considered "acceptable" when it comes to being, personhood, and lifestyle - then I have zero surprise that people think Christians in churches are judgemental and would kick them out the instant they stepped out of line.
This desire to know there's a place for them applies to everyone: to never-married women in churches, to trans and intersex people throughout society, it applies to anyone whose sexuality is been publically unacceptable in our modern society, it applies to refugees and to immigrants, to indigenous peoples, to caste/class outcasts, and to those whose skin colour makes them everything from unwelcome to a threat.
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A lot of conventionally taught Christianity tends to be antithetical to this: "you must be [this] and [this] and [that] and then God will accept you". The strand of Christianity that
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Today's thought, brought to me by someone on Twitter:
"People who sow to partisanship can only reap mistrust of anyone outside their group. So if someone who is 'progressive' speaks out against abuse by conservative leaders in the church, partisans would rather tolerate abuse than align with progressives."
While this isn't an Australian Evangelical "brand" precisely, there's still going to be a lot of defensiveness about the theology of the leader, a lot of noise about what's been said from the pulpit (but perhaps not practiced in truth), a lot of dismissal of women and the "coloureds" who recognise abuse and speak out against it, to their own detriment.
And what does our defensiveness gain, in the end? Self-satisfaction at having backed the "correct" theologian, maybe? Entrenchment in the belief that "other denominations/belief systems fail, but ours is a shield against evil"? Reassurance that we haven't fallen to "wokeness" or "social justice" over the primacy of the gospel being teached and preached?
The problem I see with "the primacy of the gospel" is that we can talk about the love of Christ until we're blue in the face, but if we can't love people in a way they recognise as care, then all our protestations that this is the "proper, correct, and godly way to love" mean nothing.
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https://christianitytoday.com/news/2023/february/grace-community-church-elder-biblical-counseling-abuse.html
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I am exceedingly aware of my luck to have been born in a time when I am considered a person (not property) with legislated rights (even if bigotry still hampers my personal living), in a family that is loving and generous and has space for difference, with the personal and societal ability to be financially independent.
That said, I'm also aware that I'm quite likely the last generation of women who'll have this for some time - financial independence is a pipe dream for most women younger than me at the very least, and the steady removal of a woman's legislated right to bodily autonomy is going to trap many women into a financial and social situation where ending up as someone's junior wife might very well be more personally acceptable than struggling through life with a child she doesn't really want. (Maybe one of the other wives will be more maternal?)
My observation is that we middle-class Christians underestimate people's adherence to moral standards when life becomes materially untenable and they have little to no hope of material better. The whipoorwhill of eternity is easily lost beneath the clamouring rasp of one's own struggle to breathe. The promise of spiritual benefit after death is not something that our present society - materialistic and scientifically-oriented - can comprehend or trust, and particularly not when the people doing the promising are seen as the ones comfortably well-off, who've never had to make a harder decision than whether to take the family interstate rather than oversease for the holiday break.
