Here’s an interesting article from the Washington Post. (H/T Lenny from Come Reason)
Excerpt:
Religion historian Marie Griffith has been watching this shift, and recently wrote an essay titled “The New Evangelical Feminism of Bachmann and Palin.” She caught all kinds of heat from feminists on the left who say that neither Bachmann nor Palin, whom some have dubbed “the spiritual heads” of the tea party, can remotely be regarded as their conceptual colleagues.
While Griffith agrees that these women do not resemble traditional feminists in their political views, she believes that they have captured the hearts and minds of conservative Christian women in a historically significant way. Two generations ago, a conservative Christian woman would have been encouraged to have babies and keep house; work would have been seen as an economic necessity, not a higher calling.
“Now,” says Griffith, director of the new John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, “I really see evangelicals taking hold of that view that women can speak about righteous godly things, just as men can. They can make an impact on the world. Not only that, they should make an impact on the world.”
Nance points out that the abortion wars used to be fought by men. Today, the most prominent antiabortion warriors are Christian women, most of whom have young children.
It’s their focus on motherhood, I think, that makes these new Christian feminists so appealing to millions — their unflinching insistence that their families come first, that even the most ambitious among them occasionally have spit-up on their blouses.
Palin has her entourage; Bachmann, her brood, which includes that staggering number — 23! — of foster kids. Nance describes taking a call from a member of Congress while in her car with a baby screaming in the back seat. “Sir,” she said, “you’ll have to listen to the baby crying — or you can wait.”
Remember though that Michele Bachmann took time out from her career to homeschool her 5 children, so family comes first. Michele has denied that she is a feminist, and I agree with her. To be a feminist in the traditional sense, you have to favor state-run day care, state-funded abortions, selfishness, premarital sex, contraception, no-fault divorce and gender neutrality. Feminists also oppose marriage, limited government, personal responsibility, fathers, and husbands. I don’t think that Michele Bachmann is a feminist in any way whatsoever. She is a woman, her way of life is being threatened, and it’s all hands on deck.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Mr. Knight,
You’ve delineated one subset of feminists. Feminism is not a monolithic entity. It comes in a lot if different varieties. At their root, though, is one common error: they deny the created order of the sexes. Bachmann may be a conflicted feminist, but she is still a feminist.
Two things to keep in mind about supposedly conservative evangelical Christian women in politics. First, they lead a sort of split existence, submitting at home and in church but ruling in the world/government sphere. Second is that, biblically, it is never a compliment to a nation to say that women rule over them.
If a woman’s submission is rooted in creation, which St Paul teaches, it applies across creation, not just in the home And church.
Kamilla
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The OT judge Deborah was never called a curse to her nation no matter how Bayly brothers and other present day neo-patriarchs try to twist scripture to make her so.
There were a lot of very good men living in the days of Deborah. God selecting her to be judge of Israel was never intended to be an insult to all the men living in Deborah’s day.
I’m thrilled for the Palins and the Bachmanns who represent strong women who put family first.
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Also, Kamilla, you are in error. St. Paul was speaking specifically against the false teaching of a particular woman back in the day. It is a letter to a specific group of people and not intended as a catch all for all people of all time.
Even nature, teaches that women can be leaders. Bees have a queen, not a king. If God were opposed to this, there would be no such thing on His green earth as queen bees.
BTW, Deborah mean “bee”.
Kamilla, why do you make God so small and disallow Him to shake things up a bit by creating strong, female, mama bear leaders?
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Minor tangent here, as hive societies happen to hold a certain fascination for me. The “Queen” part of queen bee is really a human construct and not a fair representation of her purpose in the hive. The queen bee does not in any way control the behavior of the hive, she is only central and special because she is the only fertile female and therefore the source of the entire colony.
There is, in fact, no “nerve center” for the hive–no single source from which the orders come from. A hive can more aptly be thought of as a group of neurons all firing together as part of one organism, without any clear central command. The entire hive together “is” the centralized command.
Like I said, hives are fascinating.
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Sure.
Still.
Don’t you think it is interesting that Deborah’s name means bee?
I actually like the idea of the hive together as the centralized command.
It is so much nicer than the Borg collective’s Queen. I didn’t like her cause it was all about her.
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Oh of course. Sorry, it was totally a tangent. The queen thing in hives is a very common misconception (we humans can’t grasp the idea of a community of separate organisms working in sync without some kind of command structure). It still kind of baffles my mind.
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Hives are fascinating. And on another tangent, naked mole rats are the world’s only known hive mammal. They have one central ‘queen’ who births all the children, two to three males who serve as fathers and the rest of the ‘hive’ are workers/soldiers.
They also have a neural resistance that allows them to breathe a much higher concentration of CO2 than any other mammal (they live in underground tunnels that sleep up to 20 mole rats in something the size of a shoebox…that’s a lot of contained respiration! Humans start feeling woozy if we stay with our head under a blanket long enough). This same resistance makes them resistant to pain from acids (not resistant to the damage from acid, just the pain).
Naked mole rats are very cool.
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Em, you are very strange. Can you send me an e-mail and tell me what your educational background is? How did you ever come to be interested in hives and mole rats? My e-mail is in described in the contact page.
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I did not know that! That’s awesome. I think I may have a new fascination.
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Bravo! If Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin are not “traditional feminists,” can we responsibly describe them as “pro-family feminists”? To call them “evangelical Christian new feminists” puts them in immediate distain, at least in Canada, where “REAL Women” are routinely dismissed that way, and characteristically portrayed as wrinkled octogenarians.
Of course, there are many varieties in every category. For every group we can always say on some issues, “Some do and some don’t.”
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Mara,
Just plain old Patriarch will do for me, I have no need of neo- anything. And I’ll take the cosmologically symbolic significance of sex and male and female as my “small” God has designed it over your shake and bake godde anyday. (I am presuming you are not averse to that appellation for your deity since it is used over at ECA).
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Actually, I prefer the God of the Bible who did the opposite concerning women of what you claim Paul’s views are.
I prefer the God of the Gospels who sent Mary Magdelene to go tell the male disciples that Jesus was risen and when they didn’t believe her, Jesus rebuked them.
I prefer the God of the incarnation who silenced Zacharias, the patriarch of the home, while he filled the mouths of the women with words for the Holy ghost for him to listen to and learn from. And finally, when he agreed with his wife and submitted to God, his mouth was opened and he praised God along with the old, used-to-be-barren women and the young, unmarried, pregnant teenager.
The God of the Bible doesn’t uphold patriarchy.
Jesus very specifically undercut it.
Matthew 23:8 But do not be called Rabbi; for One is your Teacher, and you are all brothers. 9 Do not call anyone on earth your father; for One is your Father, He who is in heaven. 10 Do not be called leaders; for One is your Leader, that is, Christ.
What men do to Paul’s words to try to build patriarchy back up defy the heart of God and the Bible.
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You go ahead, Mara and re-write those Scriptures, make them mean something no orthodox teacher or believer in the history of the Church has *ever* held them to mean.
And when you try to claim patriarchy is foreign to God’s purposes, explain how it is written into the very fabric of Sripture from the first wedding to the last. From the creation of the first woman from the man and for the man. How God, by his own sovvereign choice established Israel, his chosen race, as a patriarchy. And then, how He sent forth his son *in the fullness of time* (Galatians 4:4) – and how that full time was a patriarchal time.
For the feminist exlanatory burden is a heavy one to bear. Not only do you have to explain how God was so thoroughly incompetent and powerless that throughout the Sriptures, He kept falling back into Patriarchal structures even though they were foreign to his nature and purposes — but you then have to explain how the Holy Spirit was so utterly incompetent or negligent that he never got around to explaining the true and real meaning of all those words He authored until you feminists arrived on the scene to help him out.
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for there is neither male nor female, Greek nor Jew, bond nor free
in the image of God, created he them
words not written by feminists
don’t make the mistake of confusing God with man.
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