The Christian Argument for Feminine and Masculine Roles
Reflections on C.S. Lewis's piece titled "Priestesses in the Church?" with Insights from Tupac Shakur
A Logical Argument for Gender Roles from a British Children's Author turned Christian Essayist and a Street Poet and Hip-Hop Artist.
He argues that the fact that men lead the church doesn't make them more valuable. Later, we will discuss that men who believe this do not have a love for life. Loving women means loving life. Just as the heart is as important as the brain, the brain gives commands, and the heart pumps life-giving blood that carries oxygen to each of the trillions of cells. We need logic and emotions, leaders and workers, mitochondria and ribosomes, white blood cells and red ones, warriors and peacemakers. In the Christian ethic, which was revolutionary for its time, all human beings are given equal value regardless of their characteristics or roles. Moreover, all sinners are given the potential to become saints.
Those who say if women are not leaders in the church, then they are deemed unimportant and inferior are simplistic. If both sexes can act in service of the other, with mutual respect and love, in theory, the machine can run adequately, and humanity can march on and flourish.
Additionally, it’s important to note that Lewis is keenly aware of the ability of women to do the same tasks as male priests; that's not the point. Have you wondered if there may be a critical reason males partake in their biblically defined roles? Additionally, Lewis points out that just because we can reverse the order of things doesn't mean we should. There could be unintended consequences. What if men need this role to become the men we desperately need them to be?
Have you ever had a friend lose their job and become depressed or get a new career and
become a “new person”? Roles can be life-changing, perhaps even life-giving.
Plus, male roles can be quite grueling; it’s hard work to earn respect in the male world, just as it's hard to be a selfless but wise mother…and the more we know, the more we find that we can only truly be fulfilled by completing demanding tasks. Lewis reflects on the difficulty of the male burden. Consider the following:
"It is painful, being a man, to have to assert the privilege, or the burden, which Christianity lays upon my own sex. I am crushingly aware how inadequate most of us are, in our actual and historical individualities, to fill the place prepared for us.... We men may often make very bad priests. That is because we rare insufficiently masculine. It is no cure to call in those who are not masculine at all. A given man may make a very bad husband; you cannot end matters by trying to reverse the roles. He may make a bad male partner in a dance. The cure for that is that men should more diligently attend dancing classes, not that the ballroom should henceforward ignore distinctions of sex and treat all dancers as neuter."
My personal belief is that Christianity centers the man in an effort to give him much-needed assistance to make him more like God for the benefit of all. In contrast, women have a more direct connection to the divine with the ability to become pregnant, represented by Mary with Jesus, the son of God, in the womb for nine months; is anyone closer to God than the virgin Mary? As for the feminine caretaking instinct, these tendencies come to most women as naturally as hunger or thirst; this can make women more spiritually connected with less of a need for external motivation to follow moral rules than their male counterparts. Haven’t you heard a million times over again that women mature faster than men? In the end, women may need less of the experience of sacrifice, risk, and grueling tasks to become closer to God as they have part of his life-giving force within their bodies.
My sister Samantha Chacon's drawing of rapper Tupac Shakur.
Christianity and male leadership, along with identification with God(as he is a man), aid men in
becoming closer to God and more like him in their actions, creators of the material world.
In contrast, women have within them the gift of creation; therefore, naturally, they are considered
holy. Street rapper and poet Tupac Shakur points to this intrinsic holiness of the female in his
hit Song, "Keep Ya Head Up" :
"And since we all came from woman
Got our name from a woman
and our game from a woman
I wonder why we take from
our women
Why we rape our women,
do we hate our women?"
Reverse the language, and have you ever heard talk of men with such universal holiness? Similarly
, Tupac points to a universally accepted moral code that any disrespect(rape) towards a woman’s
body(or children, including boys is one of the only(besides murder) sins humanity has uniformly
deemed reprehensible in all circumstances. ...he goes on:
I think it's time to kill for our women
Time to heal our women, be real to our women
And if we don't have a race of babies
That will hate the ladies that make the babies
Tupac also points to what Lewis explains above if females earn status through motherhood, then
men must step up and create something monumental to gain the same status...a woman earns
her status through the mandatory sacrifice of her body. “Real” men follow suit and try to develop
capabilities such as physical strength, material wealth, or building functional and enduring
structures- all in an attempt to become worthy of his counterpart and the gift she holds within
herself, the keys to creation, to life itself. Tupac goes on...
...And since a man can't make one
He has no right to tell
a woman when and where to
create one
So will the real men get up?"
For Lewis and Tupac, a real strong man does not feel superior to a woman or look down on her
but instead goes out into the world and makes himself stronger to protect her, and in doing so,
he respects life(God), the next generation, and himself. It's in his interest to protect her. Women
nurture and tend to other humans instinctively and, in doing so, honor life. Just as a woman has
to accept her bodily weakness in comparison to a man and learn to find a good reliable man to aid her if she needs protection(submit to a man?), a man must also accept his
duty to work to earn the embrace of a good woman through his actions and commitment to
sacrifice(to love a woman).
This is also why women can be like men if they don't have children(or can't) or refuse to assist in
caretaking roles, which would still require them to use their God-given feminine nurturing instincts.
If they instead choose the other masculine path, they must understand it’s a grueling, windy, lonely road. They exchange their intrinsic holiness to prove themselves like every
other man has to do. Men can behave like females by focusing on caretaking and declining their
male God-given potential for sacrifice and leadership. Then they, too, must accept the trials and
tribulations of the equally important feminine role, which involves endless selflessness and
patience for the others they care for.
The world always needs caretakers and warriors; we can handle a few men and women stepping
into opposite roles, and we have solid proof they can do it, and do it well. Yet, if too many
leave their roles, the world is at risk of becoming unbalanced; the consequences are dire; a society that skews feminine may be in danger of attack, and a culture that skews masculine is
without the expansion of life. Death and destruction are destined to ensue in both scenarios.
The suggestion for most is to lean into(or rather not deny) your feminine or masculine callings
but instead build up the ideal feminine or masculine as best you can throughout your life.
If you fail to try, the danger is you suffer confusion and lack of alignment within yourself and,
therefore, a disconnect in your relationships and community. It’s not easy being a human man
or a woman, but we must face the realities head-on, especially today in much of the modern
"Western" world where there is more freedom and choice with less struggle and sacrifice.
This makes sense to me.
Yours Truly,
TAN
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