The Women Men Don't See

At Obsidian Wings, May 12.

Authoritarianism and the Slut Who Walks*

At Obsidian Wings.

Catholics, Gay and Lesbian Issues, and a Null Hypothesis

At Obsidian Wings.

Lewis, Tolkien, and religion; Common law and originalism

DougJ at Balloon Juice posted about Right Bloglandia getting into a swivet about a Muslim Miss USA. Tangentially, I commented:

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@Amanda:

So would it be safe to say that the LOTR books are heavily influenced by JRRT’s bizarre personal blend of Catholicism and traditionalism, but are not meant to be overly polemical, while CSL’s works are merely apologetics dressed up as fiction?

Only half right.

CSL's works *are* pretty much apologetics dressed up as fiction -- but the dressing is IM[not actually humble]O done quite well, better than usual for the genre of apologetic fiction. The Narnia books are far less dogmatic than e.g. Pilgrim's Progress, or than the kind of children's books that he+ described as "They try to be funny and fail; they try to preach and succeed."

JRRT did *not* have a "bizarre personal blend of Catholicism and traditionalism", he had a pretty standard one -- for a well-educated Catholic of his era. He felt that LOTR (and the then-unpublished Simarillion from which it derived) was *pre-Christian*: it depicted an essentially Christian universe, but before Christ had appeared. LOTR resonates with Christianity, and specifically with Catholicism: the veneration of Elbereth, for instance, has no counterpart in CSL but is very familiar to any Catholic who's prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

It's surprising to me that conservative Catholics wanted to claim the movies for their own, because IMnahO Peter Jackson took out many of the most Christian parts of the books. Random example: in the movie (Return of the King) when Gandalf and Denethor have their confrontation, Gandalf calls Denethor "Steward!" with scorn in his voice. In the books, Gandalf reminds Denethor to be a good Steward, and says that he is one, too. Stewardship is a central Christian metaphor, and Jackson completely misses the point.


+ or maybe it was Tolkien? it's in the Essays Presented to Charles Williams, in any event.

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Meanwhile at Obsidian Wings, Sebastian posted on The Supreme Court Says. My comment:

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Troy:

The Constitution should mean what it says, not what we wish it to say.

I've been wondering recently how this kind of originalism squares -- or doesn't -- with the common law tradition of precedent. IANAL and many of those here are, so correct me, please: isn't one of the features of common law supposed to be that it evolves and that it relies on judges (aka "activist judges") for interpretation and extension? Whereas civil law, which the US supposedly does *not* follow, relies on the letter of legislation and other documents, such as written constitutions?

The Islamic Republic

hilzoy posted about the idea of an Islamic Republic. I commented:

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mds:

Was there something in the air in the late 70s / early 80s?

IMHO, yes.

All over the world, the rate of cultural change was becoming too much for some people to handle. It was (and IMHO is) Future Shock. Technology and capitalism are the twin engines of change, and by the 70s it was becoming clear that there was no way out of dealing with them: everyone was going to get a full meal of change whether they're hungry for it or not.

I perceive that the biggest emotional problem people have is with changes in sexual mores and the role of women. I don't know if this is because sexual issues are actually more emotionally important than other things (pace Freud), or if all the issues of technology and economics that people have trouble dealing with are projected onto women. Either way, restrictions on women are the banner of fundamentalists all over.

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I also find attempts by American Protestants to paint Shi'ites as "the more dangerous Muslims" rather ironic. When I read Hodgson's The Venture of Islam, it definitely seemed to me that over the course of history Catholicism:Protestantism::Sunni:Shiite.

It seems to me that Shi'a, like Protestantism, tends to be more doctrinally firm and thus prone to schism, and schism again, and schism again, so that today it is smaller but less unified than Sunni. Sunni is much more small-c catholic, more accomodating to different cultures and personalities, so it's got a lot of the amoeba-like quality of Roman Catholicism. I have the impression that Shi'a is also like Protestantism in being more apocalyptic than Sunni (or Catholicism).

In this analogy, the Wahhabis would be Opus Dei, I guess, but that may be a metaphor too far.

The Islamic Republic

hilzoy posted about the idea of an Islamic Republic. I commented:

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mds:

Was there something in the air in the late 70s / early 80s?

IMHO, yes.

All over the world, the rate of cultural change was becoming too much for some people to handle. It was (and IMHO is) Future Shock. Technology and capitalism are the twin engines of change, and by the 70s it was becoming clear that there was no way out of dealing with them: everyone was going to get a full meal of change whether they're hungry for it or not.

I perceive that the biggest emotional problem people have is with changes in sexual mores and the role of women. I don't know if this is because sexual issues are actually more emotionally important than other things (pace Freud), or if all the issues of technology and economics that people have trouble dealing with are projected onto women. Either way, restrictions on women are the banner of fundamentalists all over.

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I also find attempts by American Protestants to paint Shi'ites as "the more dangerous Muslims" rather ironic. When I read Hodgson's The Venture of Islam, it definitely seemed to me that over the course of history Catholicism:Protestantism::Sunni:Shiite.

It seems to me that Shi'a, like Protestantism, tends to be more doctrinally firm and thus prone to schism, and schism again, and schism again, so that today it is smaller but less unified than Sunni. Sunni is much more small-c catholic, more accomodating to different cultures and personalities, so it's got a lot of the amoeba-like quality of Roman Catholicism. I have the impression that Shi'a is also like Protestantism in being more apocalyptic than Sunni (or Catholicism).

In this analogy, the Wahhabis would be Opus Dei, I guess, but that may be a metaphor too far.

Now playing

Mixed bag of recent comments, to keep track of what discussions I'm in where.

More at Dreher's Culture and the knowability of truth:

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the stupid Chris:

Shucks, my blushes. But really, you *have* to laugh -- when Copernicus did it, it was a watershed in human thought. At this point, it's a long-running gag.

the essence of the contemplative life is to banish C/certainty and A/authority as we muddle our way toward T/truth.

I think it's significant that various schemes for contemplative lives (in many traditions) all involve great discipline and stability in what you actually *do* with your time. Contemplatives may banish ontological certainty, but they generally live to very strict schedules. They still meet the basic human emotional need for stability, just not in philosophical matters.

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at Ta-Nehesi Coates' It's the Racism, Stupid:

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What was the gain from white supremacy? If not material, then what spiritual gain could people think they were getting? Something big enough to kill over, something important enough to forgo material gain in order to preserve. What?

Their place in the hierarchy.

As long as blacks were "in their place", not being "uppity", a white man -- no matter how poor and ignorant -- could not be the bottom rung. Upper-class or educated white men can afford not to be racist, because they won't fall to the very bottom just because blacks are in the hierarchy. But the further down the ladder a white man is, the more threatened he is by black equality.

I think the exact same process drives homophobia in the black community. As long as homosexuals are despised, no straight black man can be the very bottom of the social scale.

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At Plumb Lines' Are "We" Guilty of Torture?:

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our shared cultural belief that the body is different from the person

Wow, do I disagree. One would then assume that a less dualistic culture would be less prone to war crimes — the Japanese, for instance.

No, I think the reasons for both the high-level and low-level torture policiess were perfectly outlined by John Dean several years ago, in Conservatives Without Conscience: this is authoritarianism.

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At Daniel Larison's Of “Centrists” And Moderates:

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what pundits and journalists usually describe as “centrism” is capitulation to the other side on high-profile pieces of legislation by going against the grain of one’s own party in a melodramatic way and usually by backing the position that had won the approval of political establishment figures.

This is why a *lot* of us wanted you to get a Times/Post slot. Still want — surely they can swap out Krauthammer, now that he has re-defined “bottom of the moral barrel”?

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At hilzoy's Disbar them:

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I also really, *really* want to see professional sanctions against the doctors and psychiatrists. Are there any moves being made in that direction?

Is there a "Religious Left"?

Tony Jones of beliefnet, responding to Jeff Sharlet, asks Is There a Religious Left? I wrote:

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As "Your name"* demonstrates, the answer to Tony's question is "Yes".

Back in November 2004, Jeff Sharlet confessed it quite clearly, talking about questions he and Peter Manseau were asked while discussing Killing the Buddha:

"What’s the common denominator of American faith? What is it that most of us share?"

We lied every time. We offered up sincere but misleading tributes to freedom of speech as the American devotion. We avoided the answer that had made itself as plain as the two-lane roads we drove on: The greatest common denominator of American belief is anti-homosexuality."

I will extend that to say that opposition to women's free choice of abortion is a cross-denominational metric of the "religious right".

What these two tenets -- anti-homosexuality and anti-choice -- have in common is opposition to anything other than traditional sex roles. So:

The "religious right" is anyone who believes that the most important function of religion is to support traditional sex roles.

The "religious left" is anyone who believes that the most important function of religion is *anything else*.

Anything. If opposition to abortion and/or gay marriage is not your first-tier, make-or-break religious issue, you're on the religious left. That's all it takes. So in a way, yeah, you could say there's no "religious left", because they have no unifying principle except not thinking the patriarchy is all that. The only way the religious left could be unified is by coming out (pun intended) as anti-patriarchal.

*the homophobic troll who had made the comment before mine on the blog.

False witness

Fred at slacktivist is really hitting it out of the park with False Witnesses, about lie- and rumor-mongering by supposed Real True Christians. I wrote:

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I can't really figure out how it *works*, that people so tolerant of false witness for "a good cause" (this is also a leitmotiv of one of the books I'm currently reading, The Devil in Dover: An Insider's Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America, by Lauri Lebo) can have so many serious discussions about whether it's OK to lie to save a life.

I mean, the point of such discussions in Sunday school, etc., is to get people used to the idea of consistent truth-telling as a highest goal, right? So why doesn't it take?

Do the discussions, sermons, etc., always involve dramatic and unlikely scenarios, instead of daily life? Or is it that Lying for Jesus is just too accepted for those in the culture to even notice it's happening?

Polytheism and What Would Jesus Do?

There's a rather free-form discussion at Slactivist, to which I contributed:

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Other people are addressing Greek/Roman polytheism, I'll talk about a couple others.

I recently asked some e-friends of Chinese background whether they thought most Chinese are atheists or not.

One said, "My parents seem to regard the gods as if they were a mildly corrupt, easily incensed government." This is IMHO very similar to ancient Greek/Roman religion: you worship the gods because it is prudent to do so. Pascal's Wager looks similar, but I don't think it is: for Pascal, you only find out if you won or lost the bet after you're dead. For these polytheistic religions, the bad consequences show up in the here and now: crop failures, bank failures, bad luck, bad water.

But my Chinese friends agreed that in general the theist/atheist distinction does not apply.

So maybe lots of Chinese don't have a deity they direct worship towards, and maybe they don't seem to carry out religious rituals or celebrate religious festivals all that often, but they live out their spirituality, if that makes any sense. What you might call "folk" beliefs are central to our lives in a way very similar to the way religious beliefs direct many Westerners' lives.

In contrast, a Hindu friend notes that

during my short stint teaching Religious Instruction, one of the main things I was told to emphasize to the students is that Hindus do NOT worship different gods. There is only One God, the Lord. He is in everything and in everyone and so his form is in thousands - Shiva, Rama, Lakshmi, Buddha, Jesus, etc. Which is why it's one of the few religions that doesn't preach converting, since my God and your God are the same 'person' (just with a different face).

So we give him different human characteristics, and different physical forms, to help in our own feeble understanding, but never one Ultimate form, because he is basically everything and nothing.

Each Hindu "god" is a Way, a path or discipline, much more than a separate god as in the usual Western understanding of polytheism. And this is despite the fact that the Greek gods and many Hindu gods are historically related -- the Hindu system has become something much wider and deeper over time, and Indra is no longer "really just" Zeus.

To dismiss either Chinese-style or Hindu-style polytheism out of hand is incredibly ethnocentric, given that between them they cover about half of all humans. But it's also incredibly *narrow*, because both types of polytheism acknowledge that not all people have the same minds and the same needs. "What Would Jesus Do?" implies that there is only one way to be a good human being -- it may be more helpful for more people to be able to have a variety of Best People to pattern ourselves after, so that some can say "What Would Ganesh Do?" and others "What Would Krisha Do?" without us having to say that only one of these can be *right*.

As an aside, this IMHO is one reason Catholicism is much more schism-resistant than Protestantism (see: Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915). The panoply of saints gives Catholics more heroes, more life-patterns to work with.

And then, of course, there's What Would Spock Do?

Atheism, Religion, Statistics

Left at Slacktivist under The Guinness Book, about the writings & advocacy of Os Guinness, an evangelical who is ticked at the political machinations of the Religious Right. Anyway, we wandered off to discuss "The New Atheists", among other topics.

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Froborr [who asked about statistics and a marble-picking game]:

The flaw is in trusting the person who told them there's a white marble in there.

Here's another example. Introductory statistics courses always have a Chapter One quiz where they ask, "if you toss a fair coin 99 times and get heads each time, what are the chances that the next toss will be heads?" And you're supposed to answer, "one-half."

But in life outside the classroom, the chances are that *the person who told you it was a fair coin is lying*, and you should keep one hand on your wallet as you back away.

In both the coin case and the marble case, the premise-behind-the-premise is, who do you trust to tell you the parameters of the situation?

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As far as I'm concerned, Christopher Hitchens is a successful one-man demonstration that atheists can be perfect jerks, too. So far, the score-card looks to me like:

Atheists: can be kind decent people or total douchebags.

Theists: can be kind decent people or total douchebags.

Society-level atheism: can be associated with war, genocide, oppression, etc.

Society-level theism: can be associated with war, genocide, oppression, etc.

hmm. Not very helpful, is it?

The only difference there *might* be in the "but do you get a better society?" sweepstakes is that the evil of rationalistic atheist regimes may have a shorter half-life than theistic evil. So for instance, the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge were just as high on the atroc-o-meter as a particularly horrible religious war, but they didn't keep going for generations. Atheist atrocities are easier to *stop* -- it's easier to get over a bad idea than a bad faith.

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Praline:

I should have said, "atheist atrocities run out of steam more easily." The Stalinist, Maoist, and Khmer Rouge atrocities were not stopped by external forces -- but they were all dependent on a particular individual, and when he was gone they withered away. As you say, the problem is authoritarianism and fanaticism, and atheism doesn't provide the structure that will keep it going into the next generation.

I consider both Kosovo and Rwanda atrocities of religious societies, not atheist ones. Yes, the Rwandan genocide was not along religious lines -- but religion did no good, either. Indeed, for me Rwanda was what pretty much destroyed any inclination to believe that Christianity might be good for a society, because Rwanda is not only Christian, but pretty freshly-Christian, without centuries of cultural bad habits intertwined with its Christianity.

And yet, when push came most directly to shove, Christianity did Rwanda as a society no *good*. If something that justifies an enormous investment of human energy, time & caring by saying "it's a moral system" is not able to get most people to act morally in the most blatant sort of moral crisis, how can it truly be a moral system?

Reproductive Justice

Amanda at Pandagon reported about the Reproductive Justice panel at the Women, Action and the Media Conference at MIT. I said:

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I just finished reading E.J. Dionne’s Souled Out. Dionne is a liberal Catholic of a sort that is very familiar to me, many of whom are/were heavily involved in the social justice movement. He doesn’t talk about “reproductive justice” by name, but he does talk favorably about the basic approach.

To what extent do you think Catholics can or will become part of a reproductive justice movement? Do we have to try to make people *consciously* aware of how their anti-abortion platform is

a stand-in for a series of anxieties about sexuality and ego

(which is IMHO certainly true), or is it possible to move them without forcing those issues into consciousness? Can we get them to agree consciously to the importance of empowering women *even though* that is the the thing they’re unconsciously afraid of?

Question about European social & religious history

Dear Euro-friends (or other knowledgable persons):

One of the most significant differences between Europe & the US right now is that the USans are extremely religious by comparison. This is particularly striking because most USans have ancestors from Europe, speak a European language, and have a substantially European ("Western") culture -- we think of pre-1600 European history as "our" history, for instance.

What is your understanding of the time frame in which European religious practice faded away? What historical events were most important? Do you think European religiousity was similar to USan levels before WWI? WWII? Or did the change start further back?

I am currently reading James Sheehan's Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe. He does *not* mention religion (or its lack) as being a factor in the post-WWII transforation of Europe into a civil state, defined by non-military institutions; do you think religion was involved? What do you (or the older people in your family) think about what caused the change?

References to sources available in English are especially appreciated, of course.

Gay-hatin' and Subtractive Masculinity

Fred Clark at Slacktivist has been asked to put in another post on the sources and support of the Gay-hatin' Gospel.. My comments got to be a bit long:

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I'm surprised, Fred, because I think you're overlooking the point, again.

A big part of the issue is gender roles. And that means that a big part of the issue is *women*. Even though (as several people have pointed out) 99% of the vitriol & repugnance is directed against gay men specifically and anal sex even more specifically, I think the thing which is being talked about without being named is *women*.

Same-sex marriage is in fact a threat to traditional heterosexual marriage, because SSM is obviously between equals. Anal sex is a deep threat to masculinity because it involves a man -- a full human being, just like the default "me" of patriarchal society -- being penetrated. And if human beings (=men) can be penetrated and not scorned, then maybe the people who are traditionally penetrated (=women) ... are human beings.

The idea that women might be human beings threatens J. Matt Barber profoundly, because the view of masculinity that has developed over the past century (I'm not sure about earlier) is subtractive. That is, a Man is defined as someone who is Not A Woman. This worked OK when men could do a lot of things women can't. But if women can be smart, then men must be stupid; if women can be moral, men must be evil; if women love beauty, men must love ugliness. You can see this all too clearly in the link Brel found in Part.5: creativity itself (long a male prerogative) has become suspect.

And at the end, Barber and his ilk are faced with the horrific consequences of their subtractive masculinity: if women are human beings, men ... cease to exist. He's reacting like he's facing an existential threat because he *is* facing one: he's standing what used to be a glorious castle but which turned out to be a pile of sand, slipping away into the tide. His idea of masculinity is part of his *self*, and eroding the one is eroding the other.
(continued on next rock)

One of the best illustrations of how subtractive masculinity works is in a old, not all that good science fiction story, "The Last Man" (written by Wallace West in 1929, anthologized in The Pocket Book of Science Fiction). My copy seems to have disappeared (or crumbled into dust), but IIRC the narrator talks about how women's energy and ambition couldn't be suppressed forever, and they moved into one field after another until all that was left for men to consider important were sports and war. And then war became unthinkable, and women got into sports, and then all the men just died out, useless (our hero is a throwback in a zoo).

Subtractive masculinity isn't confined to the evangelical Right in America, by any means. After the 2004 election, religion journalist Jeff Sharlet admitted what he'd been reluctant to say before: that homophobia is the true unifying factor for strongly religious Americans of every stripe. The stresses currently in the Anglican Communion over homosexuality are largely coming from churches in the Southern Hemisphere, based in societies that don't have all that much in common with the US Bible Belt. But they *do* still face stresses from changing gender roles, just as traditional Muslim societies do, too.

Amanda has a post up at Pandagon about the anthology Choice and about how too many men react:

abuse and control is less an obsession for a lot of men and more the natural result of thinking of women as functional objects in your life. Like if she starts behaving in ways that are inconvenient (like getting pregnant or trying to prevent pregnancy), then it’s appropriate to treat her like a malfunctioning appliance. ...

... Anything outside of functional use is considered irrelevant at best, an infringement on functionality at worst. Not that all men are like this, by any stretch, but this way of viewing women as objects is endemic and honest men will admit that even if they resist it, they get messages that it’s an appropriate way to view women.

But with a subtractive model of masculinity, men *have* to think this way -- because if women are not objects, then there's no humanity left for men.

Truth and Certainty

There's a long, fascinating discussion going on at Slacktivist's that I don't have time to sum up right now, but I wanted to put up a comment at Gay-hatin' Gospel Theory No. 4: The Exegetical Panic Defense:

I don't know if Exegetical Panic explains why homosexuality gets so much *more* panic than most of the many other things that contradict a simplistic reading of the Bible. But I do think that the risk for a fundamentalist of Exegetical Panic is going up all the time, so it becomes a constant source of stress.

A lot of this is due IMO to the greatest philosophical achievement of 20th-century science: realizing that the quest for capital-T Truth means you have to give up capital-C Certainty. It took a while, but I'd say most scientists are now content with the idea that there are things that are in principle uncertain, that one way to learn is to get proved wrong, and that your ideas about the world are going to change. That's why scientists can face situations like oops, we seem to have misplaced 80% of the universe -- AGAIN without getting terribly bent out of shape about it -- not that it wouldn't be nice to have some answers we all agree about, but it's not a horrible ontological trauma.

But I think I think living in a world like this *is* an trauma for a lot of people. Perhaps 20 years ago I remember reading an article in Biblical Archaeology Review, in which the author was expressing irritation at historical-critical analysis of the Bible, because "what kind of real knowledge changes every generation?" Well, that would be scientific knowledge, actually, where even if new knowledge doesn't sweep the old away, it changes it so it becomes gradually unrecognizable.

For a lot of people the result will be Future Shock. I think this is what a lot of the "culture wars" are about: people who've been trained not to expect the shock of the new, being hit with it wave by wave.

Feminism in unexpected places

Also: Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians and the importance of punctuation.

I don't actually know how I ended up here, but I recently came across an article by an Evangelical that I would say has a strongly feminist conclusion, though this guy doesn't seem to be particularly liberal in any other way. He's just a careful scholar who pays close attention to the text.

The text in question is from Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 11. Paul is writing about the question of what kind of head-coverings are appropriate in Christian services.

In the King James Version, the verses read:

4 Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head.
5 But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven.
6 For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.
7 For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.
8 For the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the man.
9 Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.
10 For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels.
11 Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord.
12 For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman; but all things of God.
13 Judge in yourselves: is it comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered?
14 Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?
15 But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering.

(You can compare various translations of this passage at Bible Gateway).

In my youthful Catholic education, I was taught that verse 10 meant that women should wear head-coverings in church lest the angels be tempted by their beauty -- which made no sense to my youthful mind, because one of the high points of dressing for Mass in those pre-Vatican II days was choosing which pretty veil I would wear.

Everyone who grew up in the 60s heard verse 14 quoted a *lot*, by people who truly believed it was unnatural for men to have long hair. It doesn't take much thinking, though, to see that the argument is patently bogus. If "nature" teaches anything, it's that human beings (especially men) have varying amounts of hair, which naturally grows to varying lengths.

Nonetheless, the traditional Christian interpretation is that long hair in a man is bad, while for a woman it is a "glory" -- though a glory that should be covered in Church. I myself have thought that this passage reflects Paul's messed-up-ness about sex: long hair is intrinsically (one might even say "naturally") sexy, and for a man to deliberately try to look sexy is bad, while for a woman it is good.

Then I came across a discussion of 1 Cor 11 which cited a novel interpretation. Evangelical scholar William Welty, following the turn-of-the-previous-century work of Katharine Bushnell, has done a word-by-word analysis of the "hair" passages and argues that Paul's intended meaning is almost the opposite of the traditional interpretation. So in Welty's translation v. 10 becomes:

The woman ought to have authority over her own head because of her [guardian] angels

-- that is, the woman's own conscience should be her guide. This is a pretty feminist conclusion, especially given that Welty doesn't seem to call himself a feminist, and he's certainly no leftist. But he is part of the non-fundamentalist Evangelical tradition, and I am not surprised to see that he got his M.Div. at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, also the alma mater of Mark Noll, perhaps the leading intellectual among American Evangelicals right now.

As an aside, it's a sign of how much fundamentalists miss out that Noll, who taught for years at staunchly Evangelical Wheaton College, has now moved to Notre Dame to take up George Marsden's chair in History. Even 50 years ago it would have been unthinkable for America's greatest Evangelical scholar to teach at her greatest Catholic university, but the net result of this kind of religiously tolerant cross-pollination is great intellectual growth for all participants. Fundamentalists won't let themselves play in that pool, so they can't get the benefits.

Back to the Bible. Welty reads verses 13-15 as statements, not rhetorical questions:

13 It is proper for a woman to pray to God without head coverings.
14 Nature in no way teaches on the one hand that if a man has hair it puts him to shame
15 nor does it teach on the other that a woman's hair is her glory. All of this is true because hair is given as a substitute for man-made coverings.

You'd think it would be hard to get this translation and the KJV from the same Greek original, but you have to realize that all the earliest copies of the New Testament had no punctuation, and indeed no spaces between words -- here's a sample page from the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest and most important surviving examples, to give you an idea what it looks like.

The people at bibletexts.com asked linguist Alexander Lehrman for his opinion of Welty's translation, and he says:

As far as I can tell, Welty is quite correct in treating verse 13 as an assertion, not a question (although that is not at all necessary: it may well be a rhetorical question). He is absolutely correct in interpreting verse 14 to mean "Nature itself does not teach you...," etc. The Greek verb komao does not mean "to have LONG hair," it means merely "to have hair (on one's head)." So the King James version represents a great distortion of the original, as does Waltke's interpretation. Most importantly, Welty's (i.e., Bushnell's) interpretation of verse 10 as something like "woman must have authority over her (own) head" is perfectly correct.

What we have here, then, is at least a few scholars who are translating the Bible verses to mean pretty much the opposite of their traditional interpretation. How could they be correct? I mean, this text has been read carefully for over 1800 years, how could the traditional reading be that far wrong?

I won't talk about the obvious "that's why we call it the Patriarchy" factors, but will just point out the crucial aspect of punctuation.

Punctuation is a replacement for breath, for the voice. At this point we're all familiar with online communication, and how useful emoticons can be to convey tone and facial expressions in a cold stream of text. Punctuation is Emoticons 1.0, the first step in adding back the human feeling plain text lacks.

So how could people read clearly and accurately before punctuation? My guess is: aloud. Punctuation came in (900 CE, many hundreds of years after the New Testament was written) when enough people were used to reading texts by themselves, silently; before then most texts were intended to be read aloud, and read by someone who knew how it was supposed to sound.

I assume that when Paul wrote his Letter to the Corinthians he read it aloud -- he is very likely to have dictated it to a secretary or scribe. The trusted messenger he sent with the Letter to Corinth would have heard the letter aloud when Paul was working on it. In Corinth that messenger would have read the Letter aloud to the congregation there, probably more than once, and he would have known what kind of tone or emotion Paul intended in each line. When the Letter was copied and redistributed, those copies would have been read carried to various congregations and read aloud there by people who had heard the Letter read in Corinth, and so on through the world and years.

When you see a page like the Codex Sinaiticus (above) with the words all run together in a mass, it's not intended to be read silently, by a single person sitting alone. It's meant to be read aloud by someone who has already heard it read, who needs to be reminded of the exact wording but not of every detail of the presentation. It's like the difference between the text of Shakespeare's plays and Shaw's. Shakespeare included very few descriptions of actors, set, action, or props, not because he didn't think about such things but because he didn't have to. He knew what the play looked like, and so did the people working with him, they just needed to be reminded of the words. Shaw, though, wrote very detailed introductory descriptive paragraphs for his scenes, because he knew his plays would be put on by people he would never speak to, and he'd have to give them detailed descriptions when Shakespeare could get away with waving his hands "like this".

But though it's possible to transmit para-textual meaning -- emotion, sarcasm, asides -- without textual evidence like punctuation or emoticons, it's fragile: it depends on the ease with which all the messengers in the chain of readers can "get into" the emotion you're trying to convey. If Welty et al. are right about Paul's original meaning, then I guess that interpretation was lost fairly early on, because it was just too hard for generation after generation of (male) readers to say, "the woman should make up her own mind". A leader like Paul or Jesus can only push an idea so far, after that it depends on the ability of his followers to accurately hear what he's saying and pass it along.


I seem to have undergone a bit of topic drift here. To summarize:

1. St. Paul: possibly not as sexist as he's drawn.
2. Evangelicals: can read the Bible in critical and novel ways.
3. Reading the Bible: not as simple as all that.
4. Punctuation: your friend.
5. Feminism: all over the place.