ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

My husband and I recently finished The Way of Kings, an epic fantasy novel by our friend and LDS author Brandon Sanderson. The book features characters who can turn one type of matter into another, people who walk on walls and ceilings, swords that are summoned out of thin air, and warriors faced with impossible odds—things that are probably pretty standard fantasy fare. However, Way of Kings features deeply intriguing characters (such as a no-nonsense scholar who is a heretic among her people for adopting atheism), lively dialogue and a well-planned magic system that gets stronger and more interesting as the book progresses. Most of the major characters also live in a society that adheres to a strict set of gender roles, which is the subject of this post.

From birth, the men and women of the Vorin societies in Way of Kings have their lives and opportunities dictated by their sex. Women are the scholars, academics, mathematicians, and engineers in this world and the only ones who are taught how to read and write. If a man desires to have something read to him or send a message to someone, he has to rely on a woman to come and do it for him. Men are the ruling monarchs and warriors and are also primarily responsible for commerce—all important jobs, especially given how often these societies are at war.

There is some overlap. The wife of the Alethi king is tasked with ruling the kingdom while her husband is away at war and is apparently very capable at it, and some people are able to cross-specialize vicariously through their spouses. In general though, a man will not be permitted to train as a scholar no matter how much he desires it, and a woman will not be permitted to serve in an army no matter how good she might be as a soldier. The roles are dictated by gender, not gifting.

Now, make no mistake: I would never want to live in a society with a division of gender roles like the one found in The Way of Kings. I think opportunities should be dictated primarily by ability, not gender. However, what I found intriguing about the system found in The Way of Kings was that the gender roles were truly interdependent. Both genders had access to prominent and valuable roles in society and neither was subordinate to the other, nor was an appeal to biology necessary to make up for a perceived imbalance in roles. Truly, the man could not function without the woman nor could the woman without the man.

I hope that this summary of the gender roles in The Way of Kings helps to illuminate my disappointment with the gender roles taught by both evangelical complementarianism and Mormonism. In both of those religious traditions, interdependence between the sexes is minimal to non-existent. Men receive roles that can only be done by men that are essential to the organization of the church, but women receive few (if any) roles that can only be done by women that are essential to the organization of the church. Men largely function independently of female leaders while women are entirely dependent on male ones.

To illustrate this principle, let me repeat a standard argument against the “complementarian” label. Evangelical complementarians believe that men provide the leadership in their churches while women provide the “follower”-ship. Only men can serve as senior pastors and elders and often deacons, associate pastors, etc. However, men are also perfectly capable of providing the “follower”-ship. There are no roles that men are absolutely restricted from. Since women lack a complement to the male role of pastor and elder, the defining aspect of “complementarianism” isn’t complementary roles for both women and men; it’s patriarchy or male privilege. As far as church organization is concerned, women are theologically unnecessary and the “gender roles” in complementarianism are not truly interdependent like the gender roles in Way of Kings. Furthermore, marriage and childbirth are not theological necessities for evangelical Christians, so women aren’t even needed for that. “Complementarian” is not a good label for their system, then, because it does not get to the heart of what complementarianism is really about.

Mormonism does slightly better, but not by much. Getting married and bearing children is a theological necessity in Mormonism, so women are required for that. Women are also needed to stand as proxy for post-mortem ordinance work on other women, and it’s women who perform the washings and anointings on other women in the temple. But that’s it. [1] Like their evangelical complementarian cousins, Mormon women are unnecessary for church organization. Every single calling and every other ordinance in the LDS church can theoretically be filled or performed by a man. In many cases, they must be filled or performed by a man.

So far I’ve been talking absolute necessity; now I’m going to talk about functional necessity. Functionally, evangelical Christian women are needed to run women’s ministries and tend to be heavily involved in leadership of female teenagers and children’s ministries. Functionally, women in Mormonism are needed to run the Relief Society, Young Women’s program, and Primary program. These are very important ministries and I don’t want to give the impression that I do not value seeing women in these roles.

Still, no matter how much these traditions may be fond of quoting 1 Cor. 11:11, I just do not see a very strong interdependence between the sexes on an institutional level. Men do not need women ministering to them the way women require men.

I think this sort of a system creates a number of unfortunate problems, not the least of those being that a woman’s role in the church is so often defined by what she’s not instead of what she is. When I first moved to Illinois last year and began hunting for a local church, I e-mailed several pastors to ask for information about the role of women in their ministries. I was careful to word my question in a positive fashion: “What roles do women play in the weekend services and church life in general at your church?” I wish I could say I was surprised when several complementarian pastors e-mailed me back and basically said, “Women cannot be pastors or elders at our church. They do lots of important stuff that I’m going to be horribly vague about.” These responses were disappointing. I really wanted to know (even in complementarian churches) what women were doing, not what they were not doing. [2]

When I was still attending a branch of NewFrontiers, the July-September 2009 issue of the church’s official magazine dealt heavily with gender. Promoted on the cover were three articles:

1. “What Makes a Man?” by Andrew Haslam

2. “Why I Would Never Want to Be an Elder” by Emily Woods [3]

3. “Where Are the Men?” by Joel Virgo

Now, stop and think about that. On its cover this magazine promoted two articles that offered positive calls for men to embrace masculinity and male roles. What did women get though? An article aimed at telling them what they aren’t supposed to be. Why didn’t the women get an article calling them to step into their roles as women? Why didn’t the men get an article telling them to stay away from the women’s roles, like “Why I Would Never Want to Be a Nursery Worker?”

I would wager that the reason so many complementarians are reluctant do discuss positive affirmations of women’s roles is that they know the list is embarrassingly short. Nor do they want to discuss what men can’t do because men can do anything.[4]

I feel like I see similar problems in LDS church discourse where significant time and energy is spent getting women to understand that they aren’t losing anything significant by not having the priesthood rather than offering positive affirmations of their roles. [5] Nor do I ever hear attempts to soothe men because they aren’t able to give birth or serve as Primary Presidents or perform washings and anointings on women in the temple. Men get most of the positive affirmations of their roles and women get most of the discussion about what they are not.

In the end, I think that these efforts are futile because women really are missing out on something important, and many of them are going to know it and yearn for it. And I think that many women know that they aren’t being given complementary roles that are uniquely theirs, either. The gender roles promoted by both complementarianism and Mormonism do not create interdependence between the sexes like we saw in The Way of Kings. The only thing they create is male privilege.

But wait! There’s good news! Because both Mormons and complementarians do experience a good deal of gender complementarity and gender interdependence.

They just experience it for the same reasons egalitarians experience it.

And I’ll discuss that in the next post on this subject.

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[1] There’s also the Second Anointing, but it’s not an essential ordinance and the LDS church does not formally acknowledge its existence.

[2] There was one complementarian pastor who sent me back a very gracious, in-depth e-mail explaining in great detail what women do at their church and how they had come to their position on women in ministry. This was obviously a “heart issue” for him and he was very compassionate. I loved him and that he took care to answer my question in positive terms, even if I ultimately could not choose to go to church there.

[3] If you’re wondering why I did not link to this one, it is mysteriously absent from the site. NewFrontiers switched domains sometime in the last year, so it’s possible the article was lost in the move, but my hope is that they realized what an embarrassingly bad article it was and tried to make it disappear.

[4] In fairness to NewFrontiers, there were two other articles in the same issue of this magazine that dealt with gender: “Wisdom for Fathers From Proverbs” by Jonathan Bell andExcerpts from Wendy Virgo’s book Influential Women. I personally did not find the excerpts from W. Virgo’s book to be very helpful in describing how a woman might become an “influential woman,” but you can judge for yourself.

[5] While I reject the possibility that motherhood is the complement of priesthood, I do see significant discourse aimed at positively affirming women in their roles as mothers. My reasons for rejecting motherhood as the complement to priesthood are a subject for another post.