I Didn't Know - On Self Censorship


Recently, I was chatting with a friend about internal censoring. As an Evangelical woman, I've learned how to censor myself without even consciously thinking about it. A thought would enter, I would automatically assess whether or not it would offend the male leaders of the church (or the core Patriarchal ideologist that is present in general) and would either discard it or keep it accordingly.

After a while, that becomes something one does even if one is trying to stop. 

In the last several months however, my husband and I have studied ourselves right into Egalitarian thinking and that means that everything has to shift in some specific ways. One of those ways is that I am trying to evaluate my thoughts through the lens of what Christ would want said and intentionally disregarding whether or not it will offend Conservative Male Christian Leaders (CMCL). 

The thing that is interesting to me is that over all of these years of auto-censor kicking in, I've never been comfortable with it. Never. There has always been a niggling seed of doubt as to whether I was doing the right thing. 

Because I am who I am, not every offensive to CMCL thought managed to stay in the vault (my vault is always bursting at the seams so there's that). A great many rhetorical questions remained silent, dormant, waiting for the right time to be posed. The vault's contents grew and grew. Each censored thought waiting and wondering if it would ever gain release from the suffocating captivity.

Why did I censor myself? I had been taught that men alone are tasked with Spiritual Leadership among the people of God, or more specifically, the men of God. As such, it is they alone who are blessed by the Spirit of God to accurately teach the Word of God, lead the People of God and the guard theTruth of God. 

Women might find a place inside of Women's and Children's ministry, but their task was fairly limited in this regard, the best subjects being how to be a good and submissive wife to a godly husband who would obviously be disposed to lay down his life for her good. This of course, made it perfectly safe to submit oneself and one's 'errant ideas' to the good wisdom of our husbands and CMCLs. When we had a question, we were encouraged to ask our husbands. Never mind that they might not be even half as spiritually mature as we were, if they were interested in spiritual things at all. It was assumed that we could even encourage them in a (we're not calling it manipulative of course, but really it's manipulative) desire to search the Scriptures for the answers to their wives questions.

And while my gut never quite squared with the idea that this was actually God's good and perfect will, a cursory reading of a few choice passages made it seem impossible to deny. Well, that and a constant message that a good woman had a quiet, gentle, submissive spirit. There always seemed to be special emphasis on quiet, but maybe that was just for the benefit of 'loud-mouthed, bossy women' such as me.

Today, I'm inclined to openly disagree with the kind of teaching I've outlined above. A thorough study of the Scriptures, from Genesis to Revelation demonstrates that God is not a respecter of persons or of genders. He chooses and uses whomever is willing and desires to walk fully in submission to Him alone. 


In fact, sprinkled throughout the Scriptures are a whole host of women on whom the Spirit of God moved to bring His kingdom to bear on the earth. I think perhaps they are sprinkled relatively evenly, albeit sparsely, throughout the text and time to demonstrate that God's desire for women has been the same from the start. Women are Image bearers called to take dominion over the earth and subdue it, as equal partners to their male Image bearing counterparts.

Deborah              
Huldah                  Esther              Mary Magdalene and Mary          Priscilla

These are only a few of those whom God chose to use to accomplish His purposes. In a time when women were treated as property, when their testimony wasn't even valid in court, when they weren't even allowed to be taught the Torah, God made certain that their valiant acts on His behalf were recorded so that we could SEE CLEARLY that He doesn't distinguish between genders. 

What does this mean for the kind of self-censorship that many women practice in the Church? This means that rather than allowing other, fallible humans tell us how we may, or more likely, may NOT serve, we need to go no further than the Bible itself to see how women actually did serve, to learn whether it states that God only gives gifts of leadership over men, to men. If even one time in the bible we see that God himself anoints women to lead men, then we have to study the passages that seem to silence women in light of those other passages and understand that God doesn't change how he views His people.

I regret the years of ignoring what I now understand was the Holy Spirit telling me that I didn't need to stay silent. 


But I didn't know.

I had a very narrow and limiting view of how to know God as a young woman. I've realized that the Evangelical lenses for such knowing are narrow indeed. They limit not only women, but also men, to conforming to standards which, rather than adhering to the Scripture as a whole, adhered to the curse specifically and the unhealthy and oppressive way male/female relationships operated in ALL the world, regardless of religion.

I didn't know that there was more to be learned. I didn't know that there was freedom that I could step into. I didn't know for certain that the God I love so deeply was calling not just men, but that he was calling me too. He was calling women just as often as He called men, but we were self-censoring and men were often squashing. 

Now I know.


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