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Western social movements have a tendency to "trifurcate" into three trends: liberal reformist, socialist and countercultural romanticist. This division was evident in the movements of the 1960s and it is not surprising to find similar trends in feminism. Liberal reformers are basically concerned to achieve greater democratic participation and access of all persons to the existing system. Socialists doubt that this can be accomplished within the system and project a transformation of the economic-social structure within which persons exist. Countercultural romantics try to adopt an alternative culture and life style.

Within feminist religion and spirituality, there seem to be similar tendencies. The liberal reformer wants to gain greater access to education., ordination and employment for women in the church and to carry out some reform of language and exegesis, while maintaining a belief that the dominant religion itself is reformable in the direction of equality between the sexes. Feminists who espouse liberation theology believe that within biblical faith there is a critical tradition which can be the basis for the liberation of women, as well as of other oppressed people. But they see this tradition as being informed by conflict. Just as society is divided by class struggle, so the church and its theology are divided between an ideological use of religion to sanctify the ruling class and a prophetic tradition that denounces this misuse of religion.

Countercultural feminists reject the idea that any critical biblical tradition or any theological tradition has relevance for women. What liberation feminists would call the biblical tradition’s patriarchal ideology, countercultural feminists would declare to be its only ideology. In their view Judaism and Christianity exist for one purpose only -- to sanctify patriarchy. Consequently, any woman who is concerned to find a feminist spirituality must withdraw from these religious institutions, purge herself of any inherited attachment to their authoritative symbols, and seek an alternative female-centered religion.

Since there are no established female-centered religions around, countercultural feminists have been engaged in trying to rediscover or create them. Following 19th century anthropologists such as Jakob Backofen, countercultural feminist spirituality accepts the idea that human society was originally matriarchal. The original human religion, during the long millennia of Stone Age culture, was the cult of the Mother Goddess and her son, the hunter, which reflected matriarchal society. This religion was subdued by the patriarchal nomadic warriors who conquered the Indian subcontinent and the Mediterranean world in the second millennium BC. These nomadic warriors replaced the dominant symbol of the Mother Goddess with that of the sky god, and subsumed the goddess into the cult of Zeus Pater in the form of subordinate wives, mistresses or daughters. From the eighth century BC. to the seventh century AD., the patriarchal reform religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam suppressed the goddess altogether and substituted the exclusive reign of the sky father.

The Maternal Ground of Being

However, the cult of the Mother Goddess did not die out altogether. It survived underground as a persecuted religion, named witchcraft or devil worship by its patriarchal enemies. Medieval witchcraft is believed to constitute the continuation of the cult of the Mother Goddess and the horned god (cf. the writings of Dame Margaret Murray). Either in exclusively female or in mixed groups, her followers gathered in secret societies called covens, limited to the mystic number of 13. Reportedly, 9 million women were sacrificed to the fires of persecution. Nevertheless, a remnant of the true believers survives into the present. Today this "old-time religion" is being revived in the movement known as Wicca (supposedly the Anglo-Saxon word for witches). Followers of the Wicca movement believe that the dominant patriarchal history suppresses the truth about these matters.

Wicca, as delineated by its, theoreticians -- such as Starhawk (Miriam Simos) in her book The Spiral Dance (Harper & Row, 1979) -- is a feminist and ecological religion. It operates on the natural rhythms that connect our bodies with the cosmic body around us. It is not without its own ethical code, since to bring the human community truly into harmony with nature is not merely a personal but a social discipline as well. We must not only alter our personal life style but also struggle against the polluting systems of corporate capitalism that proliferate warfare and waste. Starhawk sees spells and incantations as ways of transforming one’s own consciousness, purging oneself (individually or in groups) of depression, anger and hatred, and putting oneself in right relation to the self, others and the universe.

Starhawk would also reject female-dominant and separatist interpretations of Wicca, believing that such narrow forms lack the redemptive vision of the "craft" and could be destructive to men just as patriarchal religion has been to women. Her version of Wicca would include males and females as equals. Both men and women are able to integrate the intuitive capacities of the right hemisphere of the brain, which has been repressed into unconsciousness by the cerebrally one-sided patriarchal religions.

The Mother Goddess is fundamentally an immanent deity, the maternal ground of being of the coming-to-be and passing-away of all things, the womb of creation. In relating to her, we relate ourselves to the true divine foundations of reality that do not force us to deny our bodies and our material existence, as does patriarchal transcendence. Matriarchal religion allows us to accept the naturalness and goodness of things as they are. It teaches us to see not only all human beings but also the animals and plants, stars and rocks as our sisters and brothers.

Starhawk presents Wicca in an attractive manner. She is concerned to imbue it with an ethic of social responsibility. Another spokesperson for the movement of feminist witchcraft is Z. (Zsuzsanna) E. Budapest, who outlines the, female-dominant or "dianic" form of Wicca in her book The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Two women professors of religious studies influenced by Budapest are Carol Christ (Woman Spirit Rising) and Naomi Goldenburg (The Changing of the Gods). The magazine Woman Spirit, published in Wolf Creek, Oregon, is a popular organ of the movement of women’s spirituality and communalism.

If feminist spirituality claims to be making public statements about truth and liberation and not just idiosyncratic statements concerning personal preference, then those claims need to be tested for the sake of the best interests of such movements themselves, as well as for their possible impact on the rest of us. Several pertinent questions arise, which can be discussed under the following headings: (1) historical. truth and self-knowledge; (2) anthropology, maleness and femaleness, good and evil; (3) nature and civilization; (4) the relation of immanence, transcendence and fallenness; and (5) the methodology for a feminist critique of culture.

Historical Truth

Although feminist scholarship as a whole is developing an impressive record in new historical research, it is characteristic of countercultural spirituality to be quite arbitrary toward historical data, often relying on repeated quotation of outdated 19th century works on matriarchal origins. There is little effort to conduct new research or to consult primary documents. Most of all, there is little interest in dealing with such cultural artifacts in the complexity of their cultural and historical settings. A tendentious use of historical material reduces everything to one drama: the story of original female power and goodness, and the evil male conquest and suppression of the same.

For example, it is true that ancient Near Eastern cultures had female deities -- goddesses who were powerful, sexual, warlike, independent, and dominant over their male consorts. It is not true, however, that this picture of female deity can simply be read as an image of women in those societies and their relation to males. Nor is it clear that women created or defined these cults or predominated in their sacerdotal elite (even though women may have been included in them). E.g., in the neo-Babylonian psalms to Ishtar, the devotees who address the goddess are clearly of, the ruling class -- propertied persons who are concerned with restoration of economic prosperity and with victory over enemies in war and politics. If the devotee might occasionally be a queen rather than a king, the concerns are identical with those of the male ruling class.

The, parallelism with Old Testament psalms is striking. In the cult of the goddess and the king, it is the latter who represents the human community. The goddess represents the encompassing divine-material cosmos on which the king and the human community that depends on him rely for their fortunes. The king is the son of the goddess, much as the Davidic king in the Hebrew psalms is the son of Yahweh. The Near Eastern goddess has no daughters! Although it is not insignificant that the female image can be used to portray this concept of god, the result is not a feminist religion or one concerned with liberating the oppressed; rather, it is a religion fundamentally interested in keeping Middle Eastern male kings on the thrones of their city-states. One might argue that these historical texts of goddess religion represent the transformation of a still earlier truly female-centered pattern to a patriarchal system. But no one has yet discovered the sources for determining whether that is so.

Let us turn to another example. I have not seen the slightest evidence from medieval records that witchcraft was regarded by either its opponents or its alleged proponents as being centered in a female deity. The "devil," who is regarded by the inquisitors as the center of this cult, is always male. Nor have I seen satisfactory evidence indicating that witches, or those accused of being witches, were organized in any way into cubic groups such as covens. The former idea appears to have originated with Margaret Murray, drawing on 19th century romantic scholarship. The latter idea is a fantasy contrived by the medieval inquisitors in order to make the case that witches constituted a heretical sect.

Although women came to predominate among those accused of witchcraft, they were never the sole targets. Almost a quarter of those who were put to death were male. Responsible scholarship sets the number of those executed at several hundreds of thousands. Given the fact that for every person finally executed, dozens more were interrogated and tortured, the result -- in the period roughly from the 14th to the 18th centuries -- was no small atrocity. Nevertheless the figure of "9 million women burned," which is continually cited in feminist literature on the issue, appears to be completely unsubstantiated. So far as I can figure out, the motivation behind the repetition of this fallacy is a desire to "top" the Jewish Holocaust. I personally have trouble with competitions for top atrocity honors. Things have been bad enough without making them worse.

Self-Knowledge

The creation of a feminist goddess-centered religion need not be dependent on whether the worship of Ishtar or the practice of witchcraft was such a religion in the past. It is possible to start something new, using images from the past but transforming their meaning and imbuing them with contemporary experience. Every existing historical religion once did exactly this, and there is no reason why it cannot be done today by women concerned with a spirituality of women’s liberation. But to make up a history out of misinterpreted evidence is a dubious procedure. At the very least it means that one does not really understand either the meaning of appropriated symbols in their original context or their subliminal effects when unleashed into present-day experience.

To take over the goddess-king mythical pattern uncritically, and to misinterpret the goddess as a divine identity for women, may have an effect that is far from liberating or egalitarian. To do so may actually allow women to play the role of imperial dominance and vengefully and contemptuously to seek to reduce the status of males to that of dependent children, sexual toys or alien devils -- in short, to do unto males very much what feminists have accused males of doing to women in patriarchal religion. Dianic Wicca, as described by Z. Budapest, has a strong flavor of this tendency of "reversal of dominance." Revenge may be sweet, but can it be the mark of truly feminist spirituality or ethics?

Dubious historical pedigrees should be challenged not merely in the interest of academic fastidiousness, but because bad history never leads to good self-knowledge. Bad history is a tool of delusion, self-inflation and negation of others. One of the great contributions of reformed Christianity is that it has established the norm of self-critical knowledge of one’s own origins and history as the key to religious self-knowledge. It seems to me that a feminist religion that would be better cannot do less.

Assigning Good and Evil

Anthropologically, separatist spirituality embodies a broad general typology of maleness and femaleness. Females are seen as loving, egalitarian, mutual, holistic, ecological and spontaneous. Males are seen as oppressive, alienated, dualistic, rapacious and destructive. In short, women are the authentic human beings, while males are inauthentic and evil subhumans. The origin of these stereotypes lies in the 19th century Victorian cult of femininity. Victorian women, confined to the private, domestic sphere, were idealized as the incarnation of a higher and better humanity; males, split between the private personalized life and the public competitive life, were considered less moral, less spiritual, less altruistic and sensitive, and needing the "feminine touch" to humanize them. Separatist feminism "radicalizes" the Victorian doctrine of complementarity.

Most feminists use some version of this "critique of masculinity." But they view it as a matter of social systems that have socialized males to an extreme that favors power and control, while assigning women the more "humane" qualities but placing them in a powerless and dependent position. Separatist feminists move from identifying this split with socialization to seeing it as constituting inherent male and female "natures." This, of course, is what patriarchal ideologies have traditionally done to women. Mary Daly, in her most recent work, Gyn/Ecology (Beacon, 1979), comes close to such identification of goodness with women and evil with men.

One can well ask whether such stereotypes are not unfair and wounding to males. But more important here (since few males are going to expose themselves to being wounded by feminist separatists!) is the question of whether those stereotypes are conducive to valid female self-knowledge and development. If evil is male, then women don’t have to take any responsibility for it. They can be the great innocents or victims of history. Their only ethical task is to purge themselves of all traces of male influence; then their naturally good selves will be revealed and will re-create the world. There is no need for women ever to examine themselves to see whether they are capable of oppressiveness and injustice. In such an outlook, evil is always alien to true femaleness.

Oddly enough, such a position does not lead to female bonding or sisterhood, as is claimed, but to increasing paranoia and sectarianism on the part of women in their dealings with each other. Having relegated all males to the subhuman, women eye each other suspiciously. Few are believed to have true "feminist consciousness"; most are dupes of males. One shares sisterhood with fewer and fewer women. One cannot have sisterhood with any women who are married, who have male children, who engage in heterosexual relations, who remain within patriarchal religions. These limitations exclude most women. The circle of the elite becomes smaller and smaller, and less and less relevant to the day-to-day needs of most women.

This sectarianism is rooted in a false anthropology. Women need to acknowledge that they have the same drives and temptations to sin as males have -- not just sins of dependency but also the sins of dominance, of which they have been less guilty (not for want of capacity, but for want of opportunity). When women are given more opportunity to play the power games, they do so and can learn to like it.

If we are really to effect change, we must take responsibility for the capacities for both good and evil in all people. We must stop projecting evil onto the "other." And in this way women will be liberated from the self-absolutization and paranoia that have so often created "revolutions," with the result that seven devils return to occupy the place, from which one has been driven. We will be able to cultivate a sense of humor, to be sensitive to the ambiguity in all of our efforts to do good, to be inclusive in our sympathies toward all persons. This is a better pattern not only for liberation but also for personal psychic health and equilibrium. To follow, it does not mean any lessening of judgment on the evils done in the name of male prerogatives, but rather not to allow the evil to overwhelm and destroy our souls.

Nature and Civilization

The male-female dualism of countercultural spirituality tends to be identified with the dualism of nature and civilization. Nature is seen as an unspoiled realm of spontaneous harmony that is to be found by getting in touch with the world outside of human intervention. In so doing we rediscover the deep rhythms that connect unspoiled nature and women’s bodies. A woman’s body becomes a microcosm of the universe, rather than an object of exploitation and contempt. Much of separatist ritual has to do with celebrating those rhythms and connections. Although there is much in this perspective that is an important corrective to the negation of woman, of the body, and of nature in patriarchal religions, one must also be aware of certain dangers in it.

The source of this type of nature-civilization split (and its connection with femaleness and maleness) is again 19th century romanticism. In separatist spirituality the split is typically identified with ancient "paganism" or goddess religion. But in actuality the concept of goddess worship as nature religion is a fantasy of European Christianity. Ancient Near Eastern goddesses were not figures of "nature religion" in this sense; rather, they represented wisdom and order that restore the harmony not only of the natural environment but also the humanly managed urban and agricultural worlds, rescuing them as well from threatened disruption by the forces of death and chaos.

The romantic nature-civilization split seems to me to be an essentially escapist notion, rather than the basis for a genuine social ethic. One projects onto the world of human artifacts one’s sense of frustrated alienation, then imagines that an escape from this system is by means of a retreat into an unfallen paradise of "nature." This attitude relieves one from ever really having to take responsibility for trying to change the human world. Western males have been playing various versions of this "retreat into nature" for some time; they have stereotyped women, Indians and South Sea islanders as the "natives" in Eden. It is rather odd to find women identifying themselves with the same labels.

A much more sinister use of the nature-civilization dualism characterizes the type of German romanticism that was exploited by Nazi ideology. Here Germanic blood and soil were identified with the unspoiled realm of organic nature -- a realm to which the German Volk needed to return in order to be made whole. Urban civilization and technology were viewed as the realm of alienated rationality, which is the destructive virus of modern civilization. Nazi ideology took up this romantic dualism and related it to the racial split between German and Jew. The Jew was seen as the secular urban rationalist who alienated the German soul from its organic spiritual wholeness with nature and the cosmos. If the Jew could be purged from the German body politic, it was argued, this wholeness could be restored.

Some forms of feminist separatism seem close to making the same kind of identification of females with the organic true Volk and males with the rationalist, materialist alien. Not surprisingly, such circles seem "fascistic" in some ways. We find abrupt refusals to allow males to speak in assemblies, or to be present at all, and even efforts to purge women of all connections with males by refusing entry to those who engage in heterosexual relations or who have male offspring. One thinks of the Nuremberg laws which tried to ban all interpersonal relations between Germans and Jews. Although obviously such feminist groups lack the power to do to males what Nazis did to Jews, one shudders to think what might happen if they were in power -- or, more important, what these women are doing to their own humanity when they reduce the rest of the human race to nonpersons.

Immanence and Transcendence

It is widely assumed in feminist spirituality that the concept of transcendence represents an alien patriarchal ideology that separates God from nature, mind from body, heaven from earth. Feminist theology, therefore, must be a theology of immanent divinity. The goddess represents the immanent harmony of the existing natural ecology found in the turn of the seasons, the tides of the sea, the cycles of the planets. Once one has repudiated the alien world of male civilization, this natural mother is waiting for us, her arms outstretched. The concepts of sin and fallenness are lies which males have imposed on females in order to subject them to an inferior status.

In my opinion this kind of immanentism is an inadequate base for the feminist theological agenda. Although feminists obviously have to reject certain understandings of sin, fallenness, transcendence and future hope found in patriarchal theology, these concepts themselves need to be appropriated and reinterpreted in feminist terms. If human history has really been a history of genocide, rape and war, then that fact itself bespeaks a formidable reality of sin and fallenness. It means that human nature has the capacity to depart from and destroy its own harmony with the cosmos and, in the process, not only to distort its own nature but also to distort the cosmos itself -- in a way that today leaves very little of "nature" unspoiled by human intervention.

The original goodness of humanity and nature is not available simply for the price of a romp on the beach or a chant around the campfire. Original goodness exists as a lost potential that has to be reimagined and reclaimed, not simply by changed consciousness but through an ethical struggle to recreate the world and our own individual and social existence in it. The original harmony of humanity with nature and God exists not as a present reality but as a lost paradise and future hope, which we taste now and again in the midst of our broken existence. It is that future Shalom of God on earth for which we hope and struggle -- and which was announced by the prophets of Israel and by Jesus of Nazareth. Far from repudiating this biblical pattern of thought, a feminist denunciation of sexism as a primal expression of human fallenness can reinterpret that pattern with new power and meaning. In so doing we can also rediscover the union that the Hebrew tradition itself makes between God’s Shalom as social justice and as ecological harmony.

A Methodology for a Critique of Culture

Judeo-Christian religion and its stepchild, Western culture, have succeeded in monopolizing public reality, at least in our experience. This means that those who are a part of and yet are alienated from this culture have a difficult time arriving at a genuinely holistic alternative. If they try to negate the culture completely, they find themselves without a genuine tradition with which to work, and they neglect those basic guidelines which the culture itself has developed through long experience in order to avoid the pathological dead ends of human psychology.

This religious and cultural monopolizing of public reality has a formidable shadow side, a suppressed animus forming the underside of its own dominant identity. This animus is commonly identified with all those cultural "enemies" conquered in the past; it is called nature religion, goddess worship, paganism, witchcraft, demonism and the like, For a long time, Judaism also existed in Christian consciousness as a force in this suppressed animus.

The great mistake of any group seeking an alternative is to identify that alternative with the Christian animus. Jews, fortunately, were able to keep alive a genuine alternative religion and culture through centuries of Christian suppression, and so they were always able to differentiate between authentic Jewish identity and the Christian anti-Jewish animus.

But women are not so lucky in this regard. If there ever was an autonomous women’s religion, it has not survived as an existing independent tradition. It is doubtful that the goddess worship of antiquity was such a religion. And even if it should hold clues to some alternatives, it has not come down as living tradition. To pretend that it has and to construct an imaginary line of descent for a feminist religion indicates a false understanding of origins. To a large extent this means that instead of creating a more holistic alternative, such feminist spiritualities succumb to the suppressed animus of patriarchal religious culture.

There is nothing objectionable in the effort to create a feminist spirituality is such. But actually to do so is both more difficult and more dangerous than one might realize, and demands both greater modesty and greater maturity than those still deeply wounded by patriarchal religion have generally been able to muster. The best way to create such a spirituality is not by means of separatism and rejection, but by means of synthesis and transformation. We need to work through, with great breadth and depth, what our actual experience has been, both in the dominant culture shaped by males and in the suppressed experiences of women. Then we can begin to put together a new synthesis that utilizes many of the elements of earlier traditions, but within a new and liberated context.

Reflecting on one’s intellectual development prematurely may be a mistake. A relatively young scholar may easily confuse fragmentary and tentative ventures with significant and formative patterns of thought and action. Nevertheless, as I look back over a journey of approximately 25 years, since I was first catapulted into intense intellectual activity at the beginning of my college work, I can discern certain basic patterns of thought and action that I have followed. These patterns show up as movement in a great variety of directions; sometimes they have been formulated as conscious principles, sometimes manifested more as a gut instinct for what is "right." I will discuss these in terms of four large areas of personal reflection and social action: (1) the relation of Christianity to other religions; (2) the relation of Roman Catholic Christianity to other Christian bodies; (3) the relation of American identity to anti-American criticism; and (4) the relation of feminism to male-dominated culture and institutions.

My intellectual questions and research have never been purely theoretical. I have in every case dealt with existential questions about how I was to situate my life, my identity, my commitments. I have never taken up an intellectual issue which did not have direct connections with clarifying and resolving questions about my personal existence, about how I should align my existence with others, ideologically and socially. This is true of my research into the rise of Christology or the formation of the doctrine of the afterlife in late biblical Judaism as much as it is of my more obviously contemporary, topical writing.

In this sense all my varied intellectual interests have cohered in one way or another as an interaction of reflection and practice. This may actually be true of all intellectual life, although our concepts of "pure research" tend to deny it. But I suspect that it tends to be more consciously and concretely the case with those whose identities do not cohere readily with the dominant systems of thought and society.

Christianity’s Credibility

The question of the church’s claims of faith and morality vis-à-vis the other traditions of world culture was posed for me early in my academic career. Much of the church’s record of social morality appeared discreditable. The problem of the church’s moral and intellectual record was aggravated, in the Roman Catholic context, by the hierarchy’s inability to admit to serious error in official policy (infallibility means never having to say you’re sorry!). That the church as a historical body had made serious errors, such as justifying slavery or sexism, did not surprise me. But the fact that it has been unable to admit error is a serious problem for the church’s understanding of its own humanity, as well as of the Christian message of salvation through repentance and forgiveness of sins. The inability of this church to resolve any of the serious pastoral dilemmas that beset it is rooted in this authority problem.

But the credibility of Christianity became suspect for me also in its foundations, not just in its later development. Things did not happen the way the official history said they did. Key ideas, such as Christology and the Trinity, had a hidden pedigree in Near Eastern and Greco-Roman religion and philosophy that contradicted the biblical heritage from which these ideas purportedly were derived. These questions launched me on a wide-ranging search into Christian origins. By unraveling the strands of early Christian development and tracing them to their sources, I hoped to discover what it all could mean to me.

During this period (1954-60) I was influenced by two brilliant classicists, Robert Palmer and Philip Merlan at Claremont. Both of these men preferred the culture and philosophy of Greco-Roman antiquity to Christianity. Their perspective transformed my stance toward Christianity. I learned to look at the whole Judeo-Christian tradition through the eyes of those alternative communities in antiquity that were defeated by the church. The triumphalistic presumptions about the superiority of Yahwism to Ba’alism, Christianity to paganism were no longer possible. Both biblical and nonbiblical faiths seemed to me to have good and bad points. If Christianity finally won, it was not because of its absolute difference but rather because of its ability to absorb all the viable elements of ancient Mediterranean cultures into a new synthesis. But the synthesis was itself a peculiar one and posed problems of reappropriation for today.

These questions directed me to research into early Christian development in relation to a number of specific issues. I was particularly concerned with the intersection of intellectual constructs and particular social conflicts. My Ph.D. thesis on Gregory Nazianzus: Rhetor and Philosopher (Cambridge University Press, 1969), as well as my research into patristic sexism, anti-Semitism and Christology, reflects these concerns.

A period of estrangement from biblical religion in favor of alternative perspectives eventually led me back to a positive interest in Christianity and then to a clarified identification with it. If Christianity was the only viable synthesis of the traditions and cultures that remained at the end of the ancient world, then it is Christianity itself which represents the most interesting legacy of this era of human consciousness. But I am always aware that I reappropriate Christianity from a markedly different basis than do traditional Christians. I reject absolutist views of biblical religion, while at the same time finding biblical religion in its Christian form the most viable language for me to express the dialectics of human existence in relation to God. I believe that. God has truly spoken through Christianity. But God is not a "Christian" and does not prefer Christians (or Jews) to the rest of humanity.

As I began to clarify my Christian identity, I asked what form of Christianity would best fit my sensibilities. The Protestant critical consciousness was academically helpful, but Protestant worship life lacked depth for me. I had grown up as a Roman Catholic, but in an ecumenical atmosphere. My father and his family were Anglicans. Other friends and relatives were Jews, Unitarians and Quakers. Along with Catholic worship I also at various times attended Episcopal or Quaker worship. But these others were not "mine" in the same way that the Roman Catholic community was. This I have come to regard as more a matter of ecclesial "ethnicity" than of points of "superiority."

Catholicism and Ecumenism

The unleashing of the waves of renewal through the Second Vatican Council was undoubtedly a crucial fact in my development at this stage. Instead of a church sealed off against self-doubt, there suddenly appeared a church engaged in intense self-questioning. This development made Catholicism an exciting and open community within which to contribute my insights. The 1960s occurred for me between the ages of 23 and 32. This means that a critical state of my adult identity coalesced both with the decade of Catholic renewal and the decade of American social crisis. If I had been born ten years earlier, I might well stand in a different place today.

The renewal of Catholicism meant that a whole host of teachings became open questions for at least a significant sector of Catholic Christians. These ranged from current pastoral conflicts over birth control to the basic questions of how we could speak of Jesus as the Christ. My thinking could be translated into a series of writings that were part of a community engaged in revising its identity.

But Protestants also wanted to hear about these and other questions in their own terms. I have come to work and teach both as a Catholic among Catholics and as a Christian among Christians. Today I teach simultaneously at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, an institution that amalgamates the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren traditions, and at the graduate program in religious studies at Mundelein College, a Roman Catholic institution. Previous to this I taught for ten years at a black seminary, the school of religion at Howard University (1966-76). I have also had visiting appointments at various other Catholic and Protestant institutions, as well as speaking engagements throughout the country. I have encountered American Christianity in much of its variety.

Being a Catholic Christian means, for me, being an ecumenical Christian. I identify myself as a Christian in terms of what I would call the "prophetic-messianic core" of biblical faith. This I see as the norm for judging both Scripture and tradition. I do not believe that Scripture is "enough" to create the content of Christian identity. The Protestant tendency to evacuate church history into the reapproximation of the Bible to one’s contemporary preferences I find self-deluding.

We are a people with a history, much of it bad. But its bad parts also teach lessons that we should not forget. One understands the full dimensions of Christianity only by appropriating the whole of this history in its various traditions -- East and West, Catholic and Protestant, the Magisterial and the Radical Reformations. Each tradition emphasizes a major element that others neglect. This is not exactly the Tillichian dialectic of "Protestant principle and Catholic substance," as though there were a dualism that could be apportioned to opposite communities. A living people exists through the constant fruitful interaction and reintegration of critical principles and historical tradition.

I would define Catholic Christianity as this whole ecumenical plurality. All particular churches exist within it as broken and partial sects. Even that communion which calls itself Catholic is also a partial and distorted reality. If I identify with this community first of all, it is not because it is the best, but because it is mine. The others are also mine in a somewhat lesser sense. This special claim on Catholicism does not mean that I have a special need to defend it. Rather it means that I have a special responsibility to question it, I have less of a responsibility to deal with the contradictions of Methodism, Lutheranism or Eastern Orthodoxy.

The prophetic ministry can be carried out authentically only within one’s own community. It is only when we struggle with and for what we love that we speak responsibly. The more distant one’s ties, the less one has a common base for critical conflict. What I have a right to say as a Catholic to Catholics is different from what I can say as a Christian to Protestants, as a sharer of biblical faith to Jews, as a religious person to Hindus. In each case we can engage in fruitful communication only when we have first established the ties that bind us together in community in a way that also respects the particularity of the other. Ecumenism means a shifting of the focus from attack on others to self-criticism. For example, the only group that could appropriately criticize the pope’s pastoral messages in the United States in October 1979 was not the Protestants, much less the "atheists," but the Catholics. This is as it should be.

Christians and Socialism

But the 1960s were the years not only of Catholic renewal but also of exploding social consciousness in America. I, like others in that "generation," became intensely involved in the civil rights movement in the south and urban north, in the antiwar movement and in feminism. I experienced these issues not as a series of alternating commitments but as an expanding consciousness of the present human social dilemma. This dilemma appears on many levels, from the intrapersonal and interpersonal questions of identity and relationship to the social, economic and ecological systems that we construct to incarnate human life in expanding networks. The pathology of unjust and distorted relationships takes different forms on different levels. But one can understand the ramifications of one such relationship, such as racism or sexism, only by tracing it in relation to the others.

I have gradually developed a methodology of analysis which I share with a community of thinkers who would identify themselves as both Christians and socialists. This means that, even when speaking of a particular issue, such as sexism, I am concerned to situate this issue in its interconnections with class, race and economic structures. This means also that I relate the critique of social pathology and the lifting up of social alternatives to the biblical prophetic-messianic tradition. This does not mean that the biblical heritage is just a parallel language for saying the same thing. Rather it is a way of grounding the whole struggle in order to give it both greater faith and endurance and better resources to criticize its own pathology than would be the case with a secular social analysis. But I believe that socialism and biblical faith are not for two different communities, one secular and the other religious, but for the same community, the human community, divided between its ambivalent reality and its hope for salvation.

Although many social critics have taken America as the particular scapegoat for contemporary evils, I have rejected anti-Americanism. If I criticize America more severely, it is again because it is my own, not because it is worse. I find it unhelpful and self-righteous to gorge oneself on self-loathing and to establish an imaginary relationship with foreign "guerrillas." If Americans are to relate social and religious criticism authentically to themselves, they have first to take responsibility for who they are. This means finding the points at which the American tradition of religion and politics can provide a positive base for change. For example, we should not reject the dearly won tradition of civil democracy but should expand its logic to include economic democracy in a way that can speak to the American conscience. It is at this point that I have disagreed with some of the more apocalyptic or countercultural critics on the New Left.

A Feminist Analysis

My concern for feminism has been long-standing but never exclusive. I have wished to ask which feminist perspective is most adequate to address the problem of sexism. Yet feminists fear the conflict between the desire for internal criticism and the need to avoid acrimonious factionalism. Feminism in the United States spans a broad ideological spectrum. Civil-libertarian feminism is primarily concerned with "equal rights" -- i.e., equal access of women to the public world of work, power and education. This feminism doesn’t question the economic system within which it seeks these equal rights. Another, much smaller group of feminists is made up of socialists who link feminism with fundamental changes in the economic relation of home and work, and the class structure of paid labor. A third feminism is countercultural. It is concerned more with radical changes in symbolic consciousness and sexual identities.

There are also religious counterparts to these positions -- evangelical and liberal Christian feminists and socialist Christian feminists. Radical cultural feminists believe that God the Father should be rejected in favor of a revived religion of the Goddess. Distinct feminisms appear in different ethnic and religious contexts -- black feminism, Chicano feminism, Jewish feminism and (let us hope) Muslim feminism.

Feminist ecumenism is no easier to establish than Christian ecumenism, especially because feminists are forming an identity in an embattled relation to dominant institutions. My view is that none of these feminisms are "wrong." Although women as a whole are marginated by sex, they also exist in relation to males of every class, race and religion. This means that feminism necessarily must take a number of specific forms in different contexts. A feminism that deals only with equal rights or only with sexual orientation is valid in its context. But an adequate feminist analysis must embrace the whole spectrum of the female condition in such a way as to take into account the different situations of non-Christian women, working-class women, black women, married women, etc. Ideological conflict comes from absolutizing a particular limited context and drawing dogmatic conclusions; i.e., "only lesbians are truly feminists," "feminists can’t be Christians," or "feminism is a white, middle-class women’s problem."

In terms of religious feminism, I have been critical of an evangelical feminism whose proponents believe that they can solve the problem with better translation and exegesis but cannot reckon with serious ideological and moral error in Scripture and tradition. On the other hand, I find the "rejectionist" wing of feminist spirituality engaged in serious distortions and pretensions. Although biblical religion is sexist, it is not reducible to sexism alone! It has also been dealing with human issues, such as estrangement and oppression and the hope for reconciliation and liberation. It has been doing this on male terms, failing to apply the same critique to women. Biblical feminists use these same liberating principles of the biblical tradition. But they make the principles say new things by applying them to sexism.

I believe that countercultural feminists delude themselves when they hope that somewhere there is a "pure" feminist religion or tradition from which one can overthrow. "patriarchy." All inherited culture, including the texts of goddess religion, has been biased in favor of men. Therefore, everywhere we must be engaged in a version of the same critique of culture. We must be able to claim the critical principles of every tradition and also to find how to transform the tradition by applying these principles to sexism. This means that our relation to every inherited tradition must be dialectical.

Finally, and most importantly, feminism must aim at a new community of mutuality for women and men, not a rejectionist community of women that impugns the humanity of men. This latter stance I regard not as a radical but as an immature position. That humiliated people succumb to desires for revenge is understandable; it is "only human." But it is not what I want to call "feminist ethics"!

If I were to define a common thread of thought and action that runs through the various issues, it would be that of dialectical methodology. A dialectical methodology seeks to be both radical and catholic in such a way that the radical side is not just an "attack," but the critical word of the tradition itself to judge, transform and renew it in new and more humanizing ways for all of us.

One of the early peace groups to draw a connection between feminism and peace was the Garrisonian wing, of the New England Non-Resistance Society in the 1830s, including among its members such prominent early abolitionist-feminists as Maria Weston Chapman, Lucretia Mott and William Lloyd Garrison himself. The group was also responsible for arranging the New England tour of the most prominent feminist abolitionists of the era, Sarah and Angelina Grimke. The Garrisonians based their view on a radical concept of nonresistance as conversion to perfection or holiness. They believed that conversion to radical Christian ideals entailed repudiation of all unjust structures of government, including those which subjugated women or which countenanced the enslavement of Negroes.

Christian perfection demands an immediate rejection of war and social injustice, they taught. There is no difference in. this ideal of converted life for men or for women; both sexes are called to the same life of perfection. Thus the Garrisonians both affirmed the connection between nonresistance and women’s equality, and repudiated any special gender differences between men and women. Both men and women must be converted to this single ideal, they believed -- men from their socialization in patterns of violence and women from their socialization in timidity and acquiescence to unjust social patterns.

The connection of many early pacifists and feminists with Quakerism is not accidental. The Society of Friends offered a congenial environment for both women’s equality and nonviolence through a common understanding of a radical Christian ethic of love. The Shaker Society in 19th century America also combined rejection of violence and war with the affirmation of women’s equality. For the Shakers, this equality of woman was the revelation of the feminine side of God, or the feminine Christ, the revelation of divine Mother Wisdom. Through this revelation of God’s female aspect, woman’s full humanity is affirmed and she is able to take her rightful place in the church and in the order of redemption. The leading Shaker eldress of the Mount Lebanon community, Anna White, was an active worker in international peace organizations. She was the vice-president for the state of New York of the International Petition on Disarmament, which White presented to Theodore Roosevelt. For these radical Christians, love and peace were not specifically female qualities, but common ideals for both men and women.

For many 19th and early 20th century women’s rights and women’s reform societies, the virtues of peace and love were linked particularly with women. These groups believed that men too must be converted to these ideals. But they accepted the current cultural identification of these virtues with women’s nature and concluded that the vindication of peace would be linked with the ascendancy of women’s influence in the public order. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union promoted a department of Peace and Arbitration, headed for many years by Mary Woodbridge. In her oft-delivered speech on Peace and Arbitration in National and International Affairs, Woodbridge saw the day of world peace hastening as women’s influence in government grew. Women’s influence in the establishment of peace would also hasten Christ’s reign as Prince of Peace over the world. Women around the world were seen as joining with American women in the establishment of arbitration as the alternative to settling international conflict through war.

The women’s organizations of 1880-1915 generally accepted a close relationship between peace and women’s suffrage. To be a suffragist was also to be antiwar. The progress of the human species demanded that war be replaced by arbitration and that there be general disarmament. However, in their view, the male had been socialized through his long association with war to seek violent means of resolving conflict. Male socialization thus preserved regressive and antisocial psychological traits. The enfranchisement of women would bring into political decision-making that half of the human race which had never participated in war as a direct protagonist and which, through its nurturing role, was innately against war. As women gained equal rights and were able to enter parliaments and decision-making bodies in equal numbers with men, their influence would be able to sway societies away from war and toward nonviolent political means of solving disputes.

The suffragists realized that most women throughout history had been the loyal supporters of their husbands’ and sons’ military activities, but they linked this female support for war with woman’s unemancipated condition. As women were liberated from passive dependence on men, they would be able to direct their naturally pacific tendencies into the public arena as an independent force for peace and disarmament.

Suffragists and peace activists saw a connection between women’s rights, peace and a new concept of citizenship and nationalism. Jane Addams said in Newer Ideals of Peace, published in 1907, that the old concepts of citizenship were based on the society of males as warriors. Citizenship was related to the ability to bear arms in war; thus women, excluded from bearing arms, were also excluded from citizenship. Citizenship based on bearing arms fostered a hostile, competitive, chauvinistic concept of patriotism, which precluded international solidarity between national groups. The giving of citizenship to women would demand a new definition of citizenship based on nonviolent political methods of resolving conflict.

These links between feminism, peace and a new internationalism were developed in the Women’s Peace Party founded by Jane Addams in 1915; the group later became what is still the oldest women’s peace organization, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The Women’s International League, after its founding congress in April 1915 in the Hague, soon gathered national sections throughout Western Europe and began to reach out to found groups in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. Much of that small but heroic generation of women who entered their national parliaments or were sent as delegates to the League of Nations in the 1920s and ‘30s were members of the Women’s International League.

The league saw itself as modeling a new internationalism through the relationship of its national sections to each other. National sections of the league were expected to transcend a chauvinist concept of nationalism. Instead, each national group was expected to be the foremost in criticizing the unjust and war-making tendencies of its own national government. American women would take the lead in criticizing the American government, etc. A model of arbitration was set up in which the women from warring sides of a conflict would arbitrate the dispute, with the women from the aggrieved nation defining the situation, while the women from the aggressor nation would accept and announce this criticism of their own government.

The league hoped to present to male statesmen and parliamentarians a new model of arbitration devoted to the international good of the human community, rather than to the narrow advantage of nations at the expense of the whole. Although this model of internationalism became increasingly difficult to practice with the rise of the ideological movements of fascism and communism, even during the darkest days of World War II and the pressures of the cold war, the league has sought to maintain a model of friendly communication and solidarity across national divisions.

The secularization of the values of peacemaking left groups such as the Women’s Peace Party and the Women’s International League with only a quasibiological link between these values and women’s influence, however. It was presumed that women sought peace because their biological roles as mothers inclined them to biophilic activities. By contrast, males were thought to have fewer loving and peaceful impulses. Thus the women’s peace movement was left with an implied doctrine of split natures and split ethics between men and women. Women were urged to gain power and influence in the world in order to counteract the male tendency toward aggression, but there was no longer a basis for a common ethic of peacemaking to which both men and women were called. By contrast, the forms of pacifism based on radical Christianity had not started out with a presumed ethical split between male and female genders. However much those forms recognized that males were socialized more toward war than were women, they featured an ethic of peacemaking based on Christian conversion to God’s will for peace on earth that was directed to men and women equally.

With the rise of the new feminist movements of the late 1960s, new rifts appeared in the earlier connections between feminism and peace. The feminist movements of the 1970s could no longer make the connection which many feminists of the 19th century made between women’s rights and Christianity:. They found their 19th century forebears in those anticlerical and even anti-Christian feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Matilda Joselyn Gage, who suspected that Christianity was basically a religious agent of patriarchy and thus intrinsically hostile to feminism.

In addition, contemporary feminists have grown much less sure about the connections between feminism and peace. Although many feminists continue to believe that males tend toward hostility and violence, they are no longer sure that women s mothering role inclines women to nonviolence. Further, they are not sure that women should pursue a peacemaking ethic as an expression of their true or emancipated humanity as women. Rather, they suspect that women have become pacified through this ideology of woman’s pacific nature and thus socialized into being passive victims of male violence. Women must learn to oppose male violence, to fight back by violent means, if necessary. With this assertion of a counterviolence of women against men in self-defense, the last strands in the fabric of the relationship of feminism and peace threaten to become unraveled.

Against this background of militant feminism, which did not hesitate to advocate counterviolence -- at least in self-defense -- to male violence against women, pacifists in the women’s movement were made to feel isolated and defensive. Women who advocated nonviolence as the superior social ethic for dealing with conflict felt the need to defend themselves against the charge of antifeminism by the militants. They had to defend and redefine the links between feminism and nonviolence against a new assumption that female nonviolence promoted their passivity and victimization. Thus Kate Millett in her book Flying (Knopf, 1974) describes herself as approaching the podium with great trepidation during a panel at a 1971 women’s conference on "Violence in the Women’s Movement." Most of the other speakers -- such as Florynce Kennedy, Gloria Steinem, Myra Lamb, Robin Morgan and Ti-Grace Atkinson -- as well as most of the audience -- seemed either to favor female violence or else to look at it with analytical detachment. With fear and trembling, Millett declared that she was about to "come out" as something far less acceptable than a lesbian in the women’s movement. She was about to come out as a pacifist. "I wait wondering how they will take it. The word is so hated in the Left. To the hecklers ‘all I can do is to ask you to be human to me. To listen.’ Finally I have said it. . . . ‘I want to speak in favor of and as an advocate of non-violence.’"

Although the links of an earlier feminism between women and peace seemed totally broken in such a gathering of militant feminists of the 1970s, in fact bits and pieces of the old assumptions still survive today in feminist ideology. The connections between patriarchy, violence and war which were first explored by feminist pacifists in the first decades of the 20th Century have been revived today. Although contemporary feminists may champion women’s self-defense, few are anxious for women to engage in aggressive violence or to emulate male war-making as a way of proving women’s equality. Underneath the rhetoric of militance there still survive presumptions about women’s moral superiority -- although it is no longer clear on what basis women claim to stand for a superior nature or ethic.

In a recent volume of essays, Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence, edited by Pam McAlister (New Society, 1982), feminists in the peace movement struggle to find a higher synthesis between the denunciation of patriarchal violence, the advocacy of feminist militancy and a vision of a new humanism that could shape a world without war. For many women in the peace movements of the ‘60s, feminist consciousness was sparked by increasing recognition of the sexism of the male leadership in the peace movement itself. Women in peace organizations began to recognize that traditional patriarchal assumptions about male, and female roles still prevailed in these groups. Women were expected to do the rote work of typing and filing; men, to have the ideas and make the decisions.

One of the most extreme cases was the antidraft movement. Since only males could be drafted, the ritual act of resistance to war, turning in or burning one’s draft card, was an exclusively male event. The draft resistance movement cultivated a macho image to counteract the image of the dominant society of draft resisters as cowards. One slogan of the movement, "Girls say yes to men who say no," revealed the sexist insensitivity of the male leadership of the movement, it was assumed that women working in the movement were simply molls of the male resisters. Consciousness of sexism in the peace movement caused women to form networks and caucuses among themselves; many woman split with these peace organizations and joined the feminist movement.

Feminists who wished to maintain their connection with older peace organizations struggled to sensitize male leadership to sexist attitudes and to bring about more shared leadership between women and men. One way of drawing the connection between feminism and peace for many of these women was to demonstrate the continuity between male violence toward women in the home or in the streets, and war. For many men, violence in Vietnam was serious and important, whereas violence toward women was merely private and trivial. Feminists argued that both were expressions of the same mentality of patriarchy. The socialization of women to be victims and men to be aggressors is. the training ground for the culminating expression of male violence in warfare, they said.

The exaltation of war in male culture has typically been accompanied by a strident sexism. The slogan of the Italian fascist writer Filippo Marinetti in the 1930s, "We are out to glorify war, the only health-giver of the world, militarism, patriotism, ideas that kill, contempt for women," vividly illustrates the emotional and ideological connections between supermasculinity, violence and negation of women or the "feminine." In macho mythology, women stand for a feared weakness, passivity and vulnerability which must be purged and exorcised from the male psyche through the rituals of war. Feminists have pointed Out the close connection between military indoctrination and sexism typical of the U.S. Army’s basic training. A key element in the rhetoric of basic training is the put-down of women, and, by implication, all that might be "womanish" in the recruit who is being trained. The recruit is shamed by being called a "girl" or a "faggot," thereby inculcating a terror of his own feelings and sensitivities. Through his assault on his fears of weakness, a psychic numbing takes place which is then intended to be turned into aggressiveness toward a dehumanized "enemy."

The emotional identification of the male sexual organ and the gun is a recurring theme in basic training rhetoric. The U.S. Army training jingle "This is my rifle [slapping rifle]; this is my gun [slapping crotch]. The one is for killing; the other’s for fun" makes the psychological connection between violence and sexual dehumanization of women clear. The role of rape or the capture of women as part of the spoils of war can be illustrated by virtually every war in recorded history, not the least of which was the Winter Soldier Investigation of combined rape and violence toward captured Vietnamese women in the war in Southeast Asia. Patriarchy turns the sexual relationship into a power relationship, a relationship of conquest and domination. Women are the currency of male prowess, to be protected and displayed on the one hand; to be ravished and "blown away" on the other. The linking of male sexuality to aggression is the root of both patriarchy and war.

For many contemporary feminists, the response of women to male violence cannot simply be a contrary assertion of feminine values of love and nurture. These qualities themselves have become distorted in female socialization into timidity and vulnerability. Women are not so much peacemakers within the present order as they are repressed into passive "kept women." They acquiesce to male violence in the home and accept it in society. The first step for women, therefore, is to throw off these shackles of fear and lack of self-confidence. Feminists have pointed out that, although most women are of slighter build than most men, physique does not mean that women need be passive victims to every random male assault. Training in martial arts could equip women to defend themselves in many situations. Women who have gone through such training find that the greatest gain is a new sense of self-esteem. They no longer, feel helpless before the possibility of attack. In the very way they now carry themselves, they signal to the male world that they are no longer an easy prey.

True nonviolence must be based, first of all, on a secure sense of one’s own value as a human being. Violence toward others, far from being an expression of self-worth, is based on a repression of one’s sense of vulnerability which then translates into hostility toward others. The most violent men are those with the deepest fears of their own impotence. Training in nonviolence must be based on spiritual or personal development and empowerment of the self. An empowered self will not accept its own degradation, or that of others.

At this point, it becomes possible to forge hew links between feminism and peace. Feminism fundamentally rejects the power principle of domination and subjugation. It rejects the concept of power which says that one side’s victory must be the other side’s defeat. Feminism must question social structures based on this principle at every level, from the competition of men and women in personal relationships to the competition of the nations of the globe, including the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. We seek an alternative power principle of empowerment in community rather than power over and disabling of others. Such enabling in community is based on a recognition of the fundamental interconnectedness of life, of men and women, blacks and whites, Americans and Nicaraguans, Americans and Russians, humans and the nonhuman community of animals, plants, air and water. Nobody wins unless all win. Warmaking has reached such a level of destructiveness that the defeat of one side means the defeat of all, the destruction of the earth itself. Feminism today sees its links with the cause of human survival and the survival of the planet itself.

Biophilic values, therefore, cannot remain the preserve of women or women’s supposed special "nature" or ethics. As historic victims of violence and repression, as well as those socialized to cultivate supportive roles -- but in a disempowered sphere -- women may have a particular vantage point on the issue. But they are not immune to expressions of hostility, chauvinism, racism or warmongering, even if their role has more often been to be the backup force for the main fighters. Conversion to a new sense of self that wills the good of others in a community of life must transform traditional women as well as traditional men.

Both feminism and peacemaking need to be grounded in an alternative vision of the authentic self and human community that was once provided by radical Christianity. This alternative vision must be clear that we are children of one mother, the earth, part of one interdependent community of life. On this basis we must oppose all social systems that create wealth and privilege for some by impoverishing, degrading or eliminating other people, whether they be the systems of domination that repress or assault women, or the systems that plan nuclear annihilation in a futile search for security based on competitive world power. Only on the basis of such an alternative vision can men and women join together to rebuild the earth.