I remember the day the pastor announced that our church was seeking a volunteer to fill the recently relinquished role of head usher. The new head usher, he explained, would write the schedule for all of the ushers and sometimes usher himself. A friend whose dad was on the church board leaned over to me during the announcement: “You know, a woman volunteered and they turned her down. They said it was inappropriate for a woman to schedule a man’s time, so she couldn’t take on the role.”
For some reason, this information shocked me. I had been tacitly accepting that women were banned from certain roles in the church for years. But the absurdity of a woman not being allowed to say, Randy, you’ve got the fifth; Isaiah, you’re the twelfth; Oh, you’ve got a wedding out of state that day? Okay, Randy can you swap with Isaiah? Great, made all of the rules about what women were and were not allowed to be and do seem suddenly crazy to me.
Week after week, the pastor stood at the pulpit pleading for someone to volunteer for the position, and I burned inside knowing that someone had. Still, if someone were to have called me a feminist in high school, I would have recoiled.I
There is a lesson in the 2004 version of the popular sex education curriculum Choosing the Best, which I mentioned in the opening (it’s the one that claims to have reached over 4 million students in forty-seven states), called “Knight in Shining Armor” that illustrates complementarianism well. The lesson features the story of a knight in shining armor and a princess. This princess happens to know a thing or two about how to slay dragons. So when a dragon threatens them, she suggests the knight in shining armor use a noose on the dragon. He does, and it works. But the knight, the lesson tells us, would have rather used his sword. When the next dragon comes, the princess suggests the knight use poison. Again, he follows her advice. And again, it works. But again, the knight is unhappy, because it wasn’t the weapon he wanted to use. One day, the lesson continues, the knight hears another maiden calling for help. The maiden doesn’t have any advice for the knight, so he uses his sword to protect her. Afterward, the knight leaves the princess for the maiden, and—as the story goes—they live happily ever. The moral of the story, as shared in the curriculum? “Occasional suggestions and assistance may be all right, but too much of it will lessen a man’s confidence or even turn him away from his princess.”II1
How was Piper, who wanted to be the president of the United States since she could remember, to function within the complementarian context? Piper who asked her mom what the Anti-Christ was when she was in the third grade and, when her mom responded that the Anti-Christ would be the leader of the world before Jesus came back, thought that sounded like a pretty good gig?
“I can think of several times when I was very explicitly told, ‘No man will want you if you’re like this,’ ” Piper said sitting on the edge of my couch in New York City when we were both in our late thirties. Piper was wearing a chic, gray tailored dress, a far cry from the kinds of baggy clothes I had grown accustomed to her wearing when we were growing up. Her hair, bleached and dyed a pale blue, was slicked back in a way that gave her more class than edge. She was visiting New York City for her high-powered job.
“The common thread was always that I was vocal and opinionated,” she continued, holding the cup of espresso I had just made her on my stovetop. “I was essentially told, ‘Don’t disagree with the men around you. They don’t want you to be smarter than them. They don’t want you to have opinions. You’ll make them intellectually uncomfortable. No one will want you if you’re like this.’ But being sexually fulfilled in a context that would lessen me intellectually? I didn’t want that,” Piper said definitively.
No matter how many warnings she received from people like our cabin mom, she wasn’t willing to give up her ambition or her desire to prove she was the smartest person in the room. So instead, she gave up guys. Piper interpreted the story that all of us girls were told about who we could and must be if we wanted to be loved in a way that allowed her to live. At a young age, she accepted that she would never be attractive, never date, never kiss, never marry, never have sex, and if any man was ever fool enough to love her, she would warn him that she would likely destroy his life. But she would—dammit—become president.
As I listened to Piper, I thought back to the experiences of others I’d spoken with. Two other women had told me almost the same story—that they didn’t want to give up their intelligence so they shut off their sexuality, wishing they were boys so they could be fully free of it. One even thought deep down she was a boy for the sole reason that she really liked books. When she got her period, she was disappointed to see she was a girl after all.
“I think we joked about my prolonged grunge phase,” Piper said to me, raising her eyebrows as though challenging me to tease her. “But I wouldn’t say that I repressed my sexuality. I just sort of nothinged it,” she explained. “I said, ‘This doesn’t matter.’ ” At least it didn’t matter to Piper. Making it not matter to everyone else, on the other hand, was more of a challenge.
“We had a square dance during my college’s freshman orientation,” Piper said, setting her cup of espresso down on the coffee table. “There was this guy on the basketball team who was 6'8'' who was my square dance partner. We would talk about basketball. And it was kind of funny because he was so much taller than me, and we were like do-si-do and he would put his hand on my head because he couldn’t reach my arm. And I remember coming back from that—this was my third day at college—and a taller girl who lived in my dorm, I mean she was probably 5'11'', came up to me and said, ‘Why do all the short girls always take all of the tall guys?’ ” Piper gave her a great Valley girl accent, and she and I both laughed.
“I was like, ‘This is a fucking square dance,’ ” she continued.
“You said that?” I gasped, knowing her Christian college well enough to know how people would have reacted.
Piper nodded. “And I definitely used the f-bomb, which also freaked her out. I think I started using that word in particular once I got to college. It became an easy way for me to signal to people, ‘I’m not like the rest of the girls here.’ I felt like a misfit. Almost like in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys? Where you’re half teddy bear but there’re all these weird things there?”
Eventually, Piper explained, the feeling that “there’s no place for me here” can lead to the belief that “there is no place for me with Jesus. And the flip side of that coin is eternal damnation,” Piper said dropping her voice. “And that’s terrifying. The hatred of self that comes from that lack of place in the community.”
Within the various complementarian communities she found herself in over the years, Piper remembers two types of standouts: a handful of women vehemently chastising her for her subversion of the gender expectations—from the cabin mom to some of her best college girlfriends—and a handful of men subverting the expectations and affirming her just as she was.
“Senior year of college, I went on a Student Activities Council retreat led by the assistant dean of student life or whatever, I don’t even know,” Piper detailed. “We were playing Trivial Pursuit and the last question that our team had to answer to win the game was a question about who played for the Cleveland Browns, held all these NFL records, and is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The two guys on my team looked at each other and they kind of shrugged their shoulders. And I said, “Guys! It’s Jim Brown!” I was right. We won and our advisor looked at me and he said in a very non-gross way, ‘Gilbert’—my nickname was Gilbert because my last name is Sullivan. He said, ‘Gilbert, you’re going to make some guy so happy someday.’
“I’ll never forget that moment. We were on this retreat and . . .” Tears gathered in Piper’s eyes. “I haven’t thought about this in a really long time . . . but it was so affirming. We were on this retreat and we had decided, for whatever ungodly reason, we weren’t going to shower and so, we were just all gross. We’d been camping in the woods, so I looked like h
ell. It was totally asexual. But, it was the first time the smart, sports-loving part of me was explicitly affirmed and that it was in such a hardcore evangelical setting . . . it was really awesome.”
Research shows that people tend to shame others for what they are ashamed of, which might explain Piper’s experiences with women’s judgmentalism. But sharing shame doesn’t have to pit us against one another, making us enemies; it can go the other way around.
Within months of her experience on the Student Activities retreat, Piper became very close to a female friend. “My last semester of college, my friend Lucy and I realized that each of us had latched onto what we called ‘The Lie,’ ” Piper said, her voice beginning to tremble again. She paused and took a deep breath. “I’m really emotional about this,” she tried to explain. “Because I realize how lucky I am that I had people in my life that I could engage with on this. I’m—I’m absolutely terrified of what would’ve happened to me if I didn’t have those outlets.” I nodded as she wiped her eyes. “Lucy’s version of The Lie was almost the exact opposite of mine,” she continued. “Mine was ‘no one will want you if you’re smart and opinionated,’ and hers was ‘I have to put up with everything in my relationship because my opinions don’t matter and what I want doesn’t matter.’ ”
“I don’t know that those are opposites,” I suggested. “You were both reacting to the same gender-based lie: Be submissive and be loved, or be a leader and be alone forever. It’s the same story, the same lie. You just made different choices within it. Lucy chose submission for the sake of having a relationship; you chose being alone forever so you didn’t have to submit.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Piper said. “And we were well-positioned to see one another’s stuff. I saw what happened to Lucy when she clung to The Lie—she stayed in a very abusive relationship. And Lucy pushed me to see that my acceptance of The Lie had consequences too.”
The shared root of Piper’s and Lucy’s challenges is important to recognize. Research shows that complementarianism upholds abusive dynamics among conservative, evangelical women whose religious lives are integral to their sense of identity. The women in one study, “The Process of Recovery and Rebuilding Among Abused Women in the Conservative Evangelical Subculture,” reported facing many challenges to their healing post-abuse, but said that the challenge that posed the greatest threat to their recovery was the church’s emphasis on traditional gender roles. And yet, this is often the last thing the church looks at when addressing intimate partner violence.
The authors of the study write: “The contrast between the church’s ideal of the family and the reality of the abusive situation created problems for both the church and these women. The church’s idealized conception of a dutiful wife in submission to a loving husband under the authority of God was threatened. . . . As in other family systems, the church family system sought to maintain its own equilibrium and belief system through denial, minimization, and spiritualization of the abusive situation. The women experienced isolation and alienation as the church denied or minimized the severity of the family violence problem. When counseling was provided, the church often suggested the problem would be alleviated if the abused woman followed what the church believed was the Divine pattern of loving obedient submission to her husband.”III2
As an illustration, one woman who came to her pastor about the abuse was advised: “Pray more. Submit more.” After being given this advice, the woman reports she “was feeling sad and hurt, and I felt like the Lord was telling me, ‘don’t feel sorry for yourself: you have to forgive this guy.’ . . . God doesn’t feel sorry for me because I have to forgive him . . . and carry on, so I said, ‘okay, I’ll get strong and suck in my guts and when he comes home I’ll tell him that I’m sorry’ . . . and I did. I went and apologized to him for [his] being abusive to me.”3
And yet, the study’s researchers report that when these women stopped listening to the black-and-white gender-based analysis of their religious leaders, and developed a healthier spiritual life in which they allowed themselves to reframe their understanding of how God saw abuse, their faith was transformed from a dangerous influence that maintained their abuse into “a powerful source of comfort, hope, and insight” that allowed them to heal from that same abuse.4 The researchers explain: “The women’s faith functioned as a meaning-making framework that could either engender shame and guilt or inspire hope and empower transformative change. The church functioned as an extended family system that could minimize, deny, and enable abuse or provide much-needed social support, spiritual encouragement, and practical assistance.”5
Like the women in this study, Piper and Lucy healed themselves and each other by developing greater spiritual autonomy, unleashing themselves from religious leaders who hurt them with their analysis of what was right and what was wrong—which they called “the truth”—and doing their own spiritual analysis, which included naming some of that “truth” as lies.
“One of my most poignant memories is laying on the bedroom floor of Lucy’s apartment and just crying,” Piper told me. “I knew something in how I was perceiving and acting in the world was just horribly askew. I just couldn’t reconcile it. I couldn’t manage it. And I remember Lucy put her hand on my head, and she prayed to let me release The Lie. She prayed that God would let me realize how I was made and that I was loved. It was really powerful. It felt—I started to be able to put the pieces together. I stopped fighting with God because I thought he made me in a way that set me up to fail, and started thinking about how I could better reflect what he had made me to be, and accept it as a gift.”IV
* * *
A little more than a year after she graduated from college, Piper moved to Washington, DC. Save the occasional pity date with some poor sap who Piper saw as foolhardy enough to like her despite the dangers she still believed she posed to him as an intelligent woman, Piper had lived entirely without romance up to this point in her life. Listening to her tell her story, I couldn’t help but smile at my memory of seeing her at a wedding when we were both in our early twenties. All of the unmarried women were called into the center of the reception hall to try to catch the bride’s bouquet. As Piper and I walked forward, I remember her uncharacteristically clinging to my arm with discomfort, whispering into my ear: “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this.” When the bride threw the bouquet, she abruptly let go of me and ran. I remember watching the mass of huddled women heave toward the bouquet in one direction, and then Piper, running the opposite direction as though the bouquet was a bomb.
But in DC, “it was just weird,” she said. “All of a sudden I was going to receptions and getting hit on by important people.” For the first time, she went on a few real dates and even had two “half-kisses.” Then she began hanging out with a group of friends from her Christian college who had also moved to DC, including a young man named Michael who she hadn’t really known well in college. “Our relationship was very DC,” she said. “We would go to embassy parties and receptions together. We would work the room and not talk to each other, but we were falling in love across the room.
“I remember three days before our wedding having a meltdown in the church parking lot,” Piper said. “Just saying to him, ‘Everybody’s coming here. Are you sure that you really want to do this?’ ” The Lie had reared its ugly head, and Piper was afraid she would ruin Michael’s life, just as the complementarian message she had been raised with promised. “Then after we got married, I remember one of Michael’s friends had a wedding close to the presidential election in 2004. It was a fun wedding. People got along well. I was chatting about politics, and Michael and I got into it like we usually do.” (Michael is a Republican. Piper is a Democrat. They actually spent their first wedding anniversary volunteering for opposing presidential campaigns.) “And a couple of people just dropped their jaws like, ‘You don’t agree on this?’ Multiple weddings, multiple times people have come up to him and said, ‘Wow, your wife is really opinionated.’ Or, ‘Your
wife doesn’t always agree with you.’ And without missing a beat, he’s always like, ‘Yes, and I love it. I wouldn’t want it any other way.’ ”
But twelve years into their marriage, The Lie still makes it hard for her to believe what Michael says.
“Even now, we laugh about it. That I have to work to remind myself that I know he loves me. It’s no shortcoming of his whatsoever. When I sit back and let myself be objective about my relationship with Michael, I know that the things about me that he loves are the same things that I fear are the nuggets of destruction. But there have been times where I have not fully allowed myself to experience everything with Michael because I just . . . it’s a pinch-yourself moment. It’s like, ‘This can’t be real.’ He would say, ‘I love you,’ and I would say, ‘I know.’ And then I would try to make myself know. It’s ridiculous to even hear myself say it. I’m a smart girl. I have fancy degrees. But the circuits still don’t fire for me on this.”
“On feeling loved?” I asked.
“On feeling romantically loved,” she answered. “We’ve had several conversations in which I’ve said, ‘I think you should break up with me because I think I’m going to ruin your life.’ He is always so steady, saying I don’t get to make that choice for him. I get to make that choice for myself in terms of whether or not I wanted to be with him, but I can’t decide for him whether or not he wants to be with me.”
“How do you fear you might ruin his life?” I asked.
“It’s a vague notion. I was taught smart, strong women destroy men. So it’s like, ‘Someday, somewhere you’ll regret that you were with me. You’re probably not going to want me. One of these days you’re going to wake up and realize you don’t want me. So let me save you from that experience.’ There was a time when I was like, ‘I have to be as horrible to him as possible, to make sure that he knows the absolute worst of me.’ Every once in a while, I just need to punch him in the face,” she said metaphorically. “I’ve never framed it in those terms, but that’s a lot what it’s like.
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