Half the Church (Book Review)

(This review is part of a blog book tour taking place this week.  I'll add links to other reviews as I come across them.  I received copies of the book ~ and nothing else ~  from the publisher, and offered no guarantees in return.)

I should like love this book.  Seriously.  Carolyn Custis James brings an easy style and a creative interpretation to issues with which women around the world contend.  Issues which should challenge and embarrass and horrify those of us who live in comfort and relative security, who are well-educated and work in comfortable and accepting environments.  We carry with us a host of presumptions about our freedom to travel, to work, to engage in relationships ~ and about our value to our families and friends and in the world.  When daughters arrive in our midst, we are wild with joy, and we imagine and expect that their lives will be marked by the same forces:  freedom, education, meaningful work, love, and hope.

James writes about girls and women whose lives are markedly different from ours.  Half the Church is evidently intended as an evangelical Christian counterpart to Half the Sky, the book by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff and and his wife, Sheryl Wudunn, the husband and wife team who have written about the terrifying realities of life that challenge those females whose faces never reach our television screens.  Women whose lives are marred and shortened by forced marriages, by early and repeated childbearing without adequate  medical care, by lack of education and training, by abuse and violence ~ and, most of all, by the presumption that they are little more than chattel, born to be traded by men, to produce sons for men, and otherwise to serve men in whatever capacity men choose.

Caroyln Custis James's response to what she has seen and learned to is wrestle creatively with those Biblical texts which might be read as promising less for women than for men.  Her conclusions ~ that God creates both women and men in God's image, that women are created by God to be warriors for justice, and that God creates women and men to be in a "Blessed Alliance" of equality in which to serve God and bring God's love to bear in this world ~ are intended to affirm that Christianity has much to offer all peoples of the world.  The Christian story and message bring women and men together in unity and love.   The gift of God's love through Jesus Christ should transform both the status and roles of women and the relationship between men and women; it should not be misused to preserve a status quo in which women are undermined, disregarded, devalued, and forsaken.

So why don't I love this book?  Something irritated and troubled me as I read it, something that did not become clear until almost the end, when the author reveals a bit about the evangelical framework in which she lives and works. As someone who participates in the mainline Protestant church and who self-identifies as a progressive Christian, I seldom never encounter debates about whether the roles of women and men should be understood in complementarian or egalitarian terms.   I don't encounter debates about women's ordination (except in the Catholic Church, and that's a whole 'nother story, isn't it?).  When James addresses these issues, it becomes clear that she does, in fact, live in a world in which they are debated.  Her insistence upon God's hopeful project for women and men alike might be viewed in her church world as a radical re-interpretation of Biblical passages, passages that have long been understood by many as establishing secure and differentiated roles for women and men.  Consequently, she has to defend her approach.

And that, I suppose, is the heart of what rankles me about the book: its emphasis on evangelical assumptions that women and men are so different from one another in such fundamental ways that we actually have to debate whether we both have a place at the table.  Any table, let alone the table of leadership or service on behalf of Jesus Christ.  I understand that those are the assumptions that James must challenge in order to be heard in her world, but they are not the universal assumptions of all Christians.  My sense is that she is wrangling with a faith of liberation in a personal context of confining parameters, a context in which she is apparently pushing boundaries by asserting that God calls both women and men to leadership and to participation in all ways. (There seems to be a second book lurking inside the covers and between the lines of Half the Church.)

Perhaps unintentionally,  Half the Church brings to our attention two separate and yet similar worldviews in which the value of women is routinely diminished.  In the world of secular political, social, and economic realities, as James shows us, women are often ignored ~ overworked, undervalued, and seldom sought for the gifts we have to contribute to the shaping and flourishing of our world.  We who live in the United States can conveniently ignore this reality in the secular realm, but reality it is for most women across the globe.  And in the world of the church?  In its evangelical expression, there is an unfortunate strain of theology and practice that, contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ, seeks to limit the offering of the gifts of women to arenas delineated by misreadings of Scripture and by rejection of the realities of ordinary life.

What Carolyn Custis James wants to show us is that, although it might be (mis)understood in traditional, evangelical interpretations, Christianity presents an alternative vision: a vision in which women are created and called by God as persons of strength and power, as individuals with gifts and skills which should be nurtured and welcomed in the building of God's Kingdom.  The gospel should be a powerful force for liberation of all people; it should not be corralled into the service of those who would use it merely to perpetuate outdated  political, social, and economic patterns of life.  Perhaps James is precisely the person needed to make this point, as she understands the pressures of conservative Christianity from the inside.

In any case, we should read this book.  The author may be trying to soften her approach in order to reach a broader audience, but the basic message is forthright and is supported by Biblical references explored in scholarly and imaginative ways..  Carolyn Custis James  brings to our attention much that fosters injustice and outright evil toward girls and women in our world, reminds us that the God of Jewish and Christian Scripture affirms the essential dignity of all human beings, and tells us that there is much work to be done.

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If you'd like a free copy, the publisher has kindly provided me with an extra.  Leave a comment, I'll draw a name, and I'll contact you for mailing info if you win!

Another review ~
A review from another RevGal ~
And from Quotidian Grace ~
From Diane ~
And one from Dorcas, who really "gets" the paradox of injustice at issue ~