I suppose I come across in these posts as a fairly reasonable, analytical sort of bloke, but I actually have to suppress quite an upwelling of emotion, especially angry emotion, from time to time. For example when I witness bullying behaviour, even if only in a movie, I become agitated, unable to keep still. If I’m alone I’ll start pacing up and down, I’ll change the channel, but too late, I’ll remonstrate with the bully, I’ll expose him, humiliate him, perhaps even murder him, or her. And then I’ll tell myself to calm down, why do I over-react like this, where does all this anger come from, almost with the flick of a switch, is there something really wrong with me, etc etc. I’ve gone through this little cycle – the flaring up of anger, followed by the calming-down, the wondering at my semi-unhingedness, the concern about my sanity – literally a thousand times. It can be brought on by stories told to me by third or fourth or fifth persons, or by something I’ve witnessed or been subjected to, or unreliable memories, or my reading of ancient history. But no matter how much I admonish myself, like Beckett’s Krapp telling himself to stop eating bananas, I’m unlikely to change.
Certain benighted characters, from Josef Stalin to Gordon Ramsay, can trigger this cycle in me through the mere mention of their names, and some of them, like the current Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, don’t even seem to fit the general profile of a bully. It’s a puzzlement. But while I can’t expect to cure myself, I can perhaps reduce the symptoms by a little tried-and-true analysis.
So, to Jensen.
My most recent sighting of him was on ABC-TV [I think] the other day, in relation to a quirky little piece on a recent marriage ceremony in which the female party chose to submit to her husband. This ceremonial wording, apparently deliberately chosen by the devout couple, has caused a bit of a stir, apparently. Switch to Jensen’s smiling dial as he ‘explains’ that men and women are different and need to have different roles within a marriage, because a man, you see, is a man, and a woman is a woman, and therefore, well, the conclusion is obvious, surely, and it’s so good that we’re having this debate at last.
Jensen is, of course, a staunch conservative, who’s totally opposed to the ordination of female clergy in the Anglican church, as well as gay marriage and homosexuality generally. The CNNNN team did a great job of questioning the Biblical basis of his views here, and though you could argue that the man was ambushed, he did a notably poor job of defending himself. For this reason I’m a bit uncertain of the value of this post. The fellow seems so feeble-minded, and his views so laughable, that I’m really not sure he’s worth expending energy on, or that his views should be given even the tiny piece of promotion my blog can offer.
However, for my own equanimity’s sake, I will continue. Jensen expands on his views in this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, and that’s what I’ll focus on.
Marriage really matters. Thank God we are talking about it. As Professor Patrick Parkinson said in these pages last week, marriage is ”by far the most stable, safe and nurturing relationship in which to raise children”. However, fewer people are choosing marriage as a way of relating to someone of the opposite sex and fewer people are nurturing children in a family with marriage at its heart.
I can understand that. Individualism leaves us with little reason to join our life to that of someone else. Apart from that, for many marriage has become an arena of suffering, exploitation and disappointment. We choose to bypass it. Yet I would say that we need to go back to biblical principles and understand, improve and support marriage rather than abandon it.
First, I don’t think we’ve ever stopped talking about marriage, which is the main reason it has changed so much over the past century, with both first and second wave feminism being at the forefront of these analyses and debates and changes. The quote from Professor Parkinson doesn’t really get us anywhere, because marriages are so diverse. You really have to look at each particular relationship in which children are reared to determine whether that relationship – or environment, in the case of single-parent child-rearing – is stable, safe and nurturing. The variations are so enormous that no statistical analysis is likely to be helpful.
Marriage isn’t exactly dying as an institution, as the above quote seems to be suggesting. I don’t have any particular investment in it myself, and my observation of the institution’s continued strength is quite a rueful one. The gay marriage push is yet another testament to that strength, and I note it with some ambivalence, but ultimately with the view that gay couples should be just as free to indulge in solemn vows, funny speeches, fancy outfits and horrendous catering bills as heterosexuals.
As to biblical principles, my reading of the Bible has uncovered no such entities, the Bible being as full of contradictory claims on the subject as you would expect from a work written over nearly a millenium by scores of authors. More importantly, the Bible reflects the attitudes of its various authors from about the eighth century BCE to the second century CE, who operated out of largely tribal, patriarchal societies which bear little resemblance to our own.
I freely admit that for me, the earthly title and vocation I cherish most is ”husband”. It all began with promises, and each day I try to live out the commitment I made. Marriage is not always easy and I know that for some it proves painfully impossible. But, mostly, making our promises before witnesses and trying to keep them is what works best.
Public promises make a marriage. Marriages are founded on promises of lifelong, exclusive bonding. Provided that the promises commit both man and woman in good times and in bad ”till death do us part”, and that both intend to relate only to each other, the promises are effective in creating the marriage. Husband and wife can certainly make identical promises.
None of the above is particularly objectionable to me, though I can take or leave the terms ‘husband’ and ‘wife’. Preferably leave. They sound quaint and overly domesticated, tamed.
In fact, ‘husband’ comes from Old Norse, meaning ‘master of a house’, with the second part, ‘bondi’ meaning someone with land and stock . To husband our resources means, basically, to be careful and thrifty with them. Jensen, hasn’t, so far, explained why he cherishes the term ‘husband’ or prefers it to, say, the term ‘partner’, assuming he does. In this passage he focuses on commitment and the usefulness of making promises in a public and ceremonial way, none of which seems problematic. What does seem problematic, and we await an explanation, is the term ‘husband’ and its patriarchal origins, given how far we’ve moved towards more equal relations between men and women.
But promises can reflect something even more profound. Since they unite not simply two people but a man and a woman – two different bodies for whom marriage holds different consequences, needs, expectations and emotions – the promises can express these differences, and traditionally have done so.
Many of our young people want to be ”wives and husbands” rather than simply ”partners” and in their weddings they come as ”bride and groom” rather than simply two individuals. They believe that expressing these differences, including different responsibilities, makes for a better marriage.
Here’s where Jensen’s views really start to reveal themselves, though the language continues to be slippery and evasive. For example, what is this ‘more profound’ thing that wedding vows can reflect? Well, apparently it’s that men and women are different and this means different ‘consequences, needs, expectations and emotions’. None of this is spelled out, and again I would argue for a great diversity of needs and hopes being tied up with marital decisions, without our being able to sort them neatly into gender divisions. What both feminism and a mountain of scientific research can agree on is that, whatever essential differences there are between men and women, they aren’t so great as to stop women being excellent doctors, lawyers, academics, business leaders and even Prime Ministers. In other words, men and women are not so dissimilar as previously accepted. This realization, quite recent but hugely transformational, has naturally had a big impact on marriage and the domestic sphere. When Jensen says that marriage vows traditionally expressed major differences between the sexes, he’s clearly harking back to the times when women were not allowed to attend universities, to pursue particular careers, or to have a drink in the front bar, and when men were ‘naturally’ the heads of households.
The vast majority of Australians already find these prohibitions, even though they were dispensed with only recently, quite quaint and bizarre, even primitive. This was brought home to me the other day, when as a community educator I was teaching someone [aged 91!] to find her way around the internet. She wanted to visit ancestry.com, one of those tricksy sites that offer a tiny glimpse of records that may or may not relate to your great grandcestor, then ask for money to take you further. What we did see was a scan of some census records from early in the twentieth century, in which the head of the family wrote his name and details first, followed by wife, and then sons and daughters. I can’t remember whether the title ‘head’ was actually printed on the form, but I did notice that each husband/father identified himself as ‘head’, clearly showing that this was an expectation of the form, and of society as it was constructed at that time. I wonder when this title became démodé?
It becomes increasingly clear what Jensen is on about. He makes the surely dubious claim that many of our young want to be ‘husbands and wives’ rather than ‘partners’, and it’s increasingly clear that he’s talking about a dominant-submissive relationship of the type most people now find quaint, or worse. His claim about the ‘many’ probably means that many young people who come to him want this type of relationship and these types of vows, because he’s a magnet for arch-conservative attitudes. This is called confirmation bias.
But note the slipperyness of Jensen’s language. He emphasises ‘different responsibilities’ and the difference between ‘husband/wife’ and ‘partner’, but is quite keen to avoid spelling out what those differences are. You have to wonder, if he’s so enamoured of the traditional husband/wife, dominant/submissive roles, why doesn’t he proclaim the fact in a loud, clear, unambiguous voice?
Both kinds of promise are provided for in the Sydney Anglican diocese’s proposed Prayer Book, which has been the subject of commentary this week.
There is nothing new in this – it is the same as the Australian Prayer Book which has been used for decades.
Where different promises are made, the man undertakes great responsibility and this is also the wording of the book, as it has always been. The biblical teaching is that the promise made voluntarily by the bride to submit to her husband is matched by the even more onerous obligation which the husband must undertake to act towards his wife as Christ has loved the church. The Bible says that this obligation is ultimately measured by the self-sacrifice of Christ in dying on the cross.
So apparently there’s some disquiet about a proposed new prayer-book for this arch-conservative diocese, which Jensen dismisses because it’s the same as the old one. If that’s so, why are they proposing a new one? Jensen just leaves us more confused with his slippery, evasive language.
More importantly, Jensen finally comes out here with the ‘submit’ word for females, which is ‘balanced’ by the male role term, ‘great responsibility’. This great responsibility comes with being the ‘head’ or the dominant member of the family. Note that the title of Jensen’s piece is ‘men and women are different and so should be their marriage vows’, from which it’s surely reasonable to infer that Jensen is advocating this dominance/submission marriage arrangement, this ‘great responsibility’, which he personally feels, about being Lord and Master in his own personal household. The references to Jesus are bizarre, and irrelevant to marriage in general. The last sentence from the above quote, in particular, has been received with great good humour on various netspaces. Who in the Bible says that a hubbie’s onerous responsibility is akin to Jesus’s death on the cross? Sounds like that ole feminist Paul of Tarsus to me. Better, marginally, to be crucified than to burn.
This is not an invitation to bossiness, let alone abuse. A husband who uses the wife’s promise in this way stands condemned for betraying his own sworn obligations. The husband is to take responsibility for his wife and family in a Christ-like way. Her ”submission” is her voluntary acceptance of this pattern of living together, her glad recognition that this is what he intends to bring to the marriage and that it is for her good, his good and the good of children born to them. She is going to accept him as a man who has chosen the self-discipline and commitment of marriage for her sake and for their children. At a time when women rightly complain that they cannot get men to commit, here is a pattern which demands real commitment all the way.
Secular views of marriage are driven by a destructive individualism and libertarianism. This philosophy is inconsistent with the reality of long-term relationships such as marriage and family life.
Actually, it is an invitation to bossiness and abuse. Domestic violence is most prevalent, unsurprisingly, in the conservative Christian heartland of the USA, and in highly patriarchal societies everywhere, not to mention rape, ‘honour’ murders and other forms of ‘control’ of insufficiently submissive women. I note that submission, generally regarded as the English translation of Islam, is a hugely popular concept among the fanatically religious. Humans are in the image of their god, but the gods of all the monotheistic religions are all male, so males must be more godlike, more Lord-and-Masterish, and boy are these gods Lord-and-Masterish. Men need a respite from this constant grovelling to their god, and that’s where women find their role. That given, I wonder why Jensen puts ‘submission’ in quotes here? It seems to be a pattern with him, trying to worm out of saying what he’s really saying – well it’s not really submission, girls, it’s, well it’s just a word…
Well, the obvious question, apart from the one about why I’m taking this seriously enough to write about it, is where does this submission begin and end in a world of female heads of corporations, heads of law firms, heads of academic institutions and heads of state? For Jensen, who’s implacably opposed to females playing any ‘head’ role in the Anglican church, at least in the Sydney diocese, the only place where he has any power, the answer is plain – a woman’s role is to be submissive in every sphere of life. Any other position would be incoherent – you can’t expect a female CEO to come home and serve her husband, accepting his ‘responsibility’ over her. And if she can’t be responsible in the home then obviously she can’t take on major responsibilities outside of it either.
Jensen’s remarks about secular marriage are just gratuitous, non-evidence based opinion, the only value of which is to reveal his own shallowness, as if that wasn’t already abundantly clear.
Okay, there’s little point in analyzing the rest of this article, it’s too silly and too depressing. The remark by somebody that Jensen wants to turn back the clock is quite precise, given the census data quoted earlier. We’ve virtually forgotten that, only decades ago, it was taken for granted that males were regarded as the heads of households. There’s no doubt in my mind that society is much better for that no longer being the case. Jensen’s obsession with masculinity and submission does seem rather kinky, but unfortunately not in a fun way. It just strikes me as adolescent, as well as creepy.
While I accept that Jensen is hardly your typical Anglican, and that they’re by and large a fairly liberal lot, I still find it satisfying to note that that particular denomination is declining faster than any other Christian denomination in Australia [and they’re all in decline]. It’s hard to know when or if it will level out, but I suspect there’s still a fair bit of falling to do , but there’s absolutely no chance that the trend will reverse.
A note to end. While writing this piece and trawling for other responses, I came upon this
delicious and highly recommendable website , at which I also found links to
this piece, and another nice piece by a journalist named Catherine, I think, but I’ve lost the link. Anyway I was so enamoured of the above-mentioned website, loon pond by name, and written by the fabulously-resurrected Dorothy Parker, that I tried to leave a comment, but was defeated by the ‘prove you’re not a robot’ screening thingy, after a dozen attempts. Please Dorothy, let me into your heart!
