And He Shall Rule Over You
Staring down a curse during election week
It’s been a loud week. It hit home when I saw a creator on TikTok calmly sketch out the predictions for violence following the American Presidential elections. Make sure your errands are done before they start the final count. Make sure you don’t walk alone at night. Stay in. We know the answer to the unrest in our hearts and tummies is to breathe, pray, and plan to watch Will Ferrell be a fool in some film even though we know we will be glued to election updates. We also know the answer for certain men is violence. In my home state, an 18 year old was arrested for menacing a 76-year-old woman with a Kamala Harris sign. He was joking. He wasn’t going to do anything. He’s just young.
It’s quite old though, isn’t it?
This place is dangerous for my readers who are women. There is a violent din that silences the stories that women try to tell about their own lives, bodies, and experiences.
The ways American men corner, accost, coerce, drain, and kill women here consistently take my breath away. This is not to say that this is a product of their nature, but a product of using nature to advance power. And any man who uses that should be called out.
Many of you, whether you come from either major political party, have heard in the lead-up to this week crude, sexist, demeaning language and insinuations about the Democratic Nominee and our Vice President Kamala Harris.
Regardless of what you think of the last four years, this is no way to speak about an objectively competent and polite human who does not traffic in dangerous conspiracies running for office. It reminds us in our various camps what people think of women they do not respect or like. To be reduced to who we might have had a relationship with (alleged or not). To be judged on sex, instead instead of our capabilities or thoughts.
Regardless of your political party or how you have voted in the past, if your party’s strongest attack is about their opponent’s gender and an alleged noncriminal sexual history, you have to ask yourself what kind of party tries to score points with what kind of base on sexism? What kind of man running for president fantasizes out loud about putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad?
Like some of you, I too had my time muddling through the history and theology of one of the most powerful voting blocks in the country: The Evangelicals. These are my people. Born and raised. And then when we went on to other churches or traditions as Christians, in a sense trying to leave the problem behind.
I am currently reading the best-selling The Making Of Biblical Womanhood by a Christian academic, pastor’s wife, mother, and long-time Southern Baptist by Beth Allison Barr. It is very clear the problem is not behind us and it is becoming everyone else’s problem. For the husband who finds out his wife cannot get a DNC abortion and come home alive from her complications in the hospital. For the people who are about to lose access to the 62k monthly medicine that keeps them alive. To the woman who hears that men who want to take away women’s rights to vote are preparing to come into power.
Beth Allison Barr’s work as a historian and professor takes us back in an approachable way to the roots of patriarchy and the moment in American history when our revolutionary faith was reworked to become a tool for male power in a country that could dignify all people or just a few.
The current numbers show how many women every minute face the violence of men. We are nowhere close to having this magically kind patriarchy that is being sold in Conservative Churches weekly.
Professor Barr’s work also reveals that the alleged idea that we can keep patriarchy in our marriages but not in society does not work. All men under this theology are endowed with the power to judge and hold accountable all women to their husbands. Any Christian man can identify a woman acting “out of her place” and deem her work, her vocation, and her bodily choices as “unacceptable” and worth challenging.
There are two main reasons you will hear Kamala Harris’s detractors from the Trump campaign and camp referring to her as a toy, plaything, ho, slut, and a bad woman.
One: This plays into a large chunk of the Evangelical base’s beliefs that a woman like her is out of turn, out of line, and play-acting with men’s work. She, after all, is just a woman. She is in a world where men will disrespect her, and instead of calling men to respect women, they call women to hide themselves and their bodies from view.
She could not have possibly passed the bar on the second attempt, built a career, or intentionally planned for a leadership position. She is only there because she has the kind of lady parts a man can use and trade sexual favors for. This is the imagination of a certain kind of man towards certain kinds of women.
Which brings us to point two: She is a woman of color in America.
Cue Tucker Carlson mocking and making up a new ethnicity for her.
What are Black women and women of color FOR in America? The newest, most recent story as of the 1960s and 70s is that we are human beings with feelings and desires and hopes and dreams. Isn’t that precious? It’s a story that has had a hard time truly catching on, because the older more popular story, that we are for whatever men want us for, was a best seller.
In this country legally, men deemed White were allowed to do whatever they wanted to women of color. These women were not marked as respectable housewives, leaders, or for living out their American Dreams. They were for assault, hard outdoor labor, domestic labor, and service.
Oh but have we not moved on? The porn industry, entertainment industry, and a good swath of this country have not. The sexually explicit materials in which young men and old men (who should be treating their granddaughters with the money they spend to gawk and peep and young women who could BE their granddaughters) learn the sexual scripts are still racialized along these stories, even if the stories have softened a bit.
The churches that choose to continue to take the apostle Paul’s great, revolutionary theological letters that call for subversion of and resistance of the patriarchal household codes out of context continue to train men what women are for. Women are the people who are asked to be “equals” who “joyfully” give up any power to their leader. They must submit their actions, time, choices, sex life, childbirth, clothing, and beliefs to the approval of a man they must hope treats them like he treats himself. They are not owed equal standing and respect on their own, but the “gracious” offering of a man who might choose to respect them as he respects himself. An empathetic, thoughtful woman leading a nation does not work in this configuration. Instead, an accused rapist and conspiracy theorist who is better than a liberal with lady bits.
In the book of Genesis, the text many Christians mistakenly point to as the blueprint of their beliefs (text is not the same thing as interpretation) when the world becomes cursed and broken, the standing of two people in harmony is broken into a deadly hierarchy. Beth Allison Barr points out that when sin and disharmony enter the world in this text, Eve is told that she will reach for her husband, and instead, he shall rule over her. She will find pain, suffering, and abuse.
For generations, this curse has been reworked into a blessing. Women have been told over and over again that losing their agency, their ability to make choices, and their standing as fully equal human beings is not harmful to them or democracy.
The cost of this lie is death. We have found pain, suffering, and abuse under policies that seek to subjugate us to big businesses ruining our environment and backyards, regulating our access to life-saving care, and regulatory protections that consider community impact.
It was and is difficult as an Evangelical Christian, to face the ways my tradition’s interpretations have helped prime society to reject an experienced candidate based on her gender. Professor Barr’s presentation of the data that backs that statement was hard to read, even after all these years.
Facing the fruit we have reached for over and over again and naming its harm on us all is work that extends far beyond this election. This week we have a choice between the past and the future in our candidates Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. There will be a future to fight for after the election of course - this country has serious commitments to unjust actors and states- but I specifically ask my Christian audience to consider the past our people built and legalized and choose a new way in Kamala Harris.
The irresponsible, dangerous machismo of American traitor Donald Trump must be rejected once more.
Please stay safe and vote in these final voting days.
I will see you, no matter what happens, next week.
October 2024. A young boy cheering at the Ellipse during Kamala Harris’ closing argument to the American people, photo credit Kamala HQ. He waves two American flags on the ground where former President Trump incited an insurrection against the American people.
Regarding "the moment in American history when our revolutionary faith was reworked to become a tool for male power": I had to sit with that thought for a minute. "Whose male power is this?" I asked myself. I wonder if the term "male power" here is a duality, in that it is both palpable and chimeral.
I see a bait-and-switch that occurs with a faith that uplifts male power. Many men might assume this patriarchal power is advantageous for all of them, and they might believe (as so many believe) that if the collective of men is lifted up, that tide will lift all (men) boats.
This reworked faith loses sight of the fact that, as humans, we are nothing - we are abjectly failing - if we are not focused on being the best individual we can be. Instead of calling men to aim for our personal bests - the best father, the best neighbor, the best spouse or family member that we can be individually - the reworked faith calls us as men to dedicate our energy to securing power for the collective of "male power." Those who do so betray themselves and consign their energy to building a palpable male power that is consolidated among the few who already have that toxic power and crave more of it to exploit it for their personal gain.
Patriarchal power is also chimeral in the sense that it is a false prophet that men choose to follow in the direction that runs 180° away from becoming the best possible version of themselves. The violence, and the dominion in the home, and the diminishment of caregiving, etc., are all poor substitutes that patriarchy recommends to men who are seduced into not focusing on seeking to be their best selves.
For example, the election night violence you reasonably fear serves no personal end for those men who engage in it. In fact, they diminish themselves in fealty to the end of building a male power that's ultimately less and less personally attainable the more invested they become in their well-disguised servitude toward building up the palpable power for the Trumps and Musks who depend on so many "manly" dupes to be their handmaids.
Stay safe.