Search Results

This chapter links mission Christianity to the more radical strains of the feminist movement in Britain, by showing how overseas evangelism worked to justify and to mobilize support for women's suffrage and women's ordination. Through the work of Dr Helen Hanson and the League of the Church Militant, Anglican feminists were able to use the missionary movement as a framework for arguing that women's political and religious authority was necessary to meet the domestic and international challenges of the day. The Anglican suffrage movement set the stage for subsequent activism around women's preaching and ordination by drawing on the professionalization of women's missionary labour and mobilizing transnational and trans‐colonial church and feminist networks. Both phases of the movement also struggled with how to construe the essential sameness versus difference of women and men.

This chapter focuses on the history of interpretation of Galatians 3:28 and its application to women’s ministry and ordination in the American context. Not until the nineteenth century was the text understood to mean anything other than a person’s standing before God. However, the coalescence of evangelical revivalism and the first women’s rights movement in the 1840s shifted the text’s meaning to the human dimension, namely, to a woman’s right to serve in an equal capacity to men as ordained ministers.

This chapter discusses the campaign for women’s ordination to the priesthood in the Anglican Communion between 1913 and 1945. Church feminists saw ordination as a natural progression from political emancipation. The established Church struggled to come to terms with this suggestion. Despite holding several theological commissions, the Church was unable to come to a satisfactory theological position on women’s ordination. The demand for sacral equality in the priesthood brought the interwar Church to the limits of its capacity to imagine sexual equality.

Wong Wai Ching Angela takes a closer look at the groundbreaking ordinations of the first five Anglican women priests in the Diocese of Hong Kong and Macau, originally a part of the CHSKH. She examines the controversy surrounding the debate of women’s ordination in the province before and after the war, tracing the roles of Bishop R. O. Hall and Bishop Gilbert Baker. This chapter highlights the “Chinese factor” that specially made the four first ordinations of the Anglican Communion possible. Wong argues that this distinctive Chinese contribution to women’s ordination in Hong Kong took place at an ambivalent crossroads, where cultural transition and the transformation from an English to a Chinese church, endowed with a Chinese reformist spirit of the time, met. The Chinese church decided to take the right opportunity at the right place at the right time and so made a distinctive decision in the Anglican Communion.

This chapter presents a cross-cultural study of gender, religion, and culture, using the history of Chinese women and the Anglican Church in China as a case study. Instead of focusing on mission history as previous studies usually have done, it treats the missionary movement as a part of the globalizing modernity, which affected both Western and Chinese societies. The attention shifts from missionaries to local women’s agencies, introducing figures such as Mrs. Zhang Heling, Huang Su’e, and female students in mission schools. It uses a wider comparative frame (beyond China and the West) to contrast women’s work by the Church Missionary Society in China, Iran, India, and Uganda. It also places the ordination for the first woman in the Anglican Communion—Rev. Li Tim Oi—in the development of postcolonial awareness of the church.

The ordination to the priesthood of Florence Li Tim Oi (1907–1992) in 1944 was an extraordinary event. She became the first woman priest in the Anglican communion but from the very beginning her ordination was full of controversy. This chapter is a detailed historical reconstruction of her ordination and related events, drawing on letters and other documents written by Li Tim Oi and others that have not been used before.The ordination of Li Tim Oi helped start the process leading up to the ordination of women in the Anglican Communion. Her license to the priesthood was withdrawn, but four decades later wasrestored. She has been rightly hailed as a forerunner in the movement for women’s ordination.

This chapter examines the “who” of support for women’s ordination: who supports and who opposes female clergy in their congregations? It examines the nationwide Gender and Religious Representation Survey to uncover which factors are associated with support and which with opposition, paying special attention to things like personal demographics, religious behavior and attitudes, congregational context, and political orientations. The results show that support for female ordination is much more a function of congregational context and religious and political orientations than it is of demographics, most notably gender. Political and theological liberals as well as those currently attending congregations that admit female clergy support women’s ordination regardless of whether they are male or female. Also, those who have lower levels of sensitivity to “sanctity/purity” moral reasoning are more supportive of women’s ordination.

In 1910 women’s experience of church was distinct from men’s. Women could usually be found in the pew or active in women’s organizations but they did not exercise institutional or liturgical leadership. Over the course of 100 years changes in women’s political and social roles in secular society and new understandings of ministry and gender in the Church opened up new opportunities for women to exercise their spiritual gifts as members of the body of Christ. This chapter explores the steps by which the various constituent Churches of Western Anglicanism adjusted their ministries, organization, and theologies to include women. Nonetheless this process was different for each Church, illustrating both the unity and diversity of the Anglican experience.

The final chapter reviews the evidence that is presented throughout the book and discusses its implications for current conversations regarding female ordination in American congregations as well as wider societal forces at play. It also assesses the evidence in light of previous research on female ordination—finding, for example, empirical support for the idea that politics can drive religious behavior, and empirical disconfirmation of the notion that having female clergy will reduce religious attendance and involvement. In fact, levels of attendance and other religious behaviors are slightly higher in congregations that ordain women and moderately higher for younger women in congregations with a female pastor or priest. The chapter concludes by offering some thoughts on the issue of women’s ordination to religious congregational leaders and decision-makers who control access to leadership positions.

This chapter presents a thematic analysis of official Church discourse on sex and gender—issues central to Catholicism and, beyond religion, publicly salient to contemporary questions of personal identity and social relationships. Focusing on abortion, same-sex relationships, and women’s ordination, it assesses the postsecular attunement of the Church’s respective arguments, and it notes the continuities between its reasoning on abortion and on social justice. The chapter argues that Pope Francis is symbolically disrupting Church discourse by recalibrating the Church’s public priorities, moving them away from sexual issues, offering a more compassionate framing of abortion, and using a more inclusive vocabulary, as well as meaningful silences on gay sexuality. His stance on women’s ordination, by contrast, especially the continuing ban on its discussion, defies postsecular expectations. The chapter probes the tensions in Francis’s construal of women’s equality and concludes by highlighting how clericalism may perpetuate Church officials’ biased understanding of women.

This chapter provides an introduction to the current conversation in American religious congregations about women’s ordination. It describes a series of vignettes about controversies over the role of women and leadership in a variety of different religious traditions and denominations over the past several years. It also places the conversation about women’s ordination within the wider discourse on women’s equality in the social, economic, and political spheres. It then explains why a new perspective on women’s ordination is needed and how the book will contribute to the conversation. The chapter finishes with a preview of the content of the book’s chapters.

This chapter provides a brief overview of both the historical and contemporary “lay of the land” of women’s ordination in American religious congregations. It shows how the extension of ordination to women has progressed throughout American history and examines recent statistics about how many congregations theoretically permit women to serve in the pulpit and how many currently have a clergywoman in the main leadership role. Drawing on the Gender and Religious Representation Survey, it also takes a brief look at stated preferences for gender and leadership in these congregations: how many people say they would prefer a man or woman as their personal religious leader? The study finds that female clergy are more common in theory than in actuality. Whereas more than half of respondents say they are supportive of women pastors, fewer than one in ten attends a congregation that is led by a woman.

The most controversial statement that came from the Holy See during the pontificate of John Paul II concerned the priestly ordination of women. This chapter takes a look at this question of woman's ordination, examining the arguments in the Bible, tradition, theological reasoning, and magisterial authority. The biblical component argues that Christ and his apostles selected only men as members. The argument from tradition is that the Catholic bishops have always observed the norm of conferring sacred orders only on men, whereas sects that ordained women to the priesthood were denounced as heretical. The theological reasoning is to the effect that the ministerial priest shares in a representative way in the office of Christ as Bridegroom of the Church, and must therefore be, like Christ, of the male sex. The teaching of the magisterium is unwavering in holding that the ministerial priesthood cannot be exercised by women.

This chapter focuses on why some people support women’s ordination while others oppose it. It takes a deep dive into face-to-face personal narrative interviews to uncover the common themes and patterns of explanations that people give to justify their positions. It uncovers a few key themes that are common to individuals in a variety of religious traditions, including scriptural authority, personal experiences, and gender stereotypes about the gifts and talents that men and women possess. It is striking that despite interviewees’ reasons for supporting or opposing women’s ordination, many indicated they would gladly change their position if their congregation changed its policy. Middle-aged and older women, however, seem to have the most difficulty overall accepting women as pastors.

This chapter asks whether it is reasonable to expect that the data is revealing a fully accurate picture of the prevalence of support for female ordination in the United States. When asked by a telephone surveyor whether they are in favor of women being allowed to serve as clergy in their own congregation, respondents might feel social pressure to say “yes” when in actuality they are more hesitant. This chapter takes advantage of a survey tool called a “list experiment” (or “item-count technique”) to examine whether there is any evidence that support for female ordination is either over- or underreported in our public opinion surveys. It finds this is indeed the case: support for female clergy is likely overreported among our survey respondents, especially among women, meaning that there are fewer supporters of female ordination than our public opinion surveys would lead one to believe.

Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier reads classical Indian theological arguments on women’s virtue as an analogue for rethinking Catholic teachings on gender complementarity. By a sustained comparison of depictions of female virtue in the fifth-century South Indian Tamil epic, the Cilappatikaram, with Catholic hierarchical and feminist approaches to women’s roles in the Church, she constructs a theology of gender that embraces women’s bodily and ritual power without falling into a reductive or essentializing complementarity. Tiemeier finds more complex ways for talking about women and power in Catholic theology, makes a case for women’s ordination by deconstructing and reconstructing the Church’s fundamental anthropological arguments against women’s ordination, and makes a comprehensive argument for the significance of varied roles for women in the Church.