In a recent ABC special, actor Will Smith is captured as saying, “If the leader of the free world is African American, then every glass ceiling is broken.”  I agree that the inauguration of Barack Obama marks a remarkable moment in US history, but I don’t agree that ‘every’ glass ceiling is broken.  It is a milestone and a major victory, but it is not the end of all inequality as we know it.  For the oppression of women, which began all the way back at the beginning of time at the fall, continues today.

Women are still paid less for the same job as men.  They are still treated as inferior even when they are not.  Just the other day, I was sitting down with two women who are both engineers, and they both shared stories about bosses who made inappropriate requests of them.  One of them said that her boss asked her and the other women in their group to pick up dry-cleaning for him, re-type some notes for him and choose the team shirts.  These are things that he has never and would never ask the male engineers on the team.  And female professionals are treated like this everyday.  Even with Equal Employment Opportunity Managers  in place in large companies, women are often reluctant to speak up, undesirous of making things uncomfortable for themselves in their work environment.  Most of all, they fear that they might lose their jobs if they speak up.  Some of them figure they’ll just wait til the “old boys club” retire and die off… which won’t be for another 10-15 years — at least, in the work world.  That’s a long time to wait, but at least, there’s an end in sight.

In the church, however, I’m afraid it may take longer as hierarchy and inequality are passed down in mainstream Christian churches as though it were the only Biblical interpretation of God’s view of women.  Young people, spurred on by the teachings of John Piper, Mark Driscoll and John MacArthur, have taken up the banner of inequality by making big black sharpie defined roles for men and women in the home and in the church.  Women are one way, men are the other.  Men are made to be leaders, women to be followers.  Men are to be kings in the home and women are to be submissive.   They say that men and women are equal, they just have different roles.  In other words, they are equal but separate – “Separate but equal.”  Such use of semantics has obscured, for the majority of Christians, the actual inequality behind such teachings.  According to hierarchicalists, women aren’t permitted to take up leadership roles in the church (pastoral positions are only given to men).  If a woman has teaching and preaching gifts, she is relegated to teach women and children only — as if somehow the Word of God and Holy Spirit in her is rendered invalid when falling on male ears.  Hierarchicalists believe that women’s rightful place is in the home and her highest calling is to be a wife and mother – even if she was a high executive with intelligent skills and incredible gifts which allow her to contribute to the world significantly before she was married.  And if a husband and wife disagree about a decision, she is to defer to his decision.  He has the veto power.  If this isn’t inequality, I don’t know what is.

But I believe this is truly a battle for men.  When men are willing to give up their positions, then will there be true equality.  Most of us who have ever tried to fight for equality realize that people who are in power will not give up their powerful positions when they feel like they have nothing to gain but everything to lose.  If only men would realize that they lose everything – everything – when they seek to silence and suppress the Holy Spirit’s gifting and calling upon women.  The whole church suffers.  When they realize this, the battle will be fought — and won.

I’ve been disenchanted with blogging recently, having the same sort of feeling about blogging as I had in my single days toward a boy after the passion had cooled and we had become distanced and estranged. I’ve been wary of coming near it but still had a nagging feeling that I’m not yet ready to walk away completely. I want to write candidly and unapologetically about the issues that burn in my heart and tear at its tissues without having to equivocate, adjust or soften my words or convictions. But when it comes to blogging, there’s a high price to pay for true authenticity. You either write with scathing honesty and lose your audience (and therefore your reason for blogging) or write for your audience and lose your message (and therefore your purpose in blogging). Of course, there’s the hoped-for middle ground where you are able to write carefully, gently and charismatically enough that even those who disagree will continue to read and inch slowly toward agreement — but is that really possible? Can revolutions be won through gentle step-by-step stepping such as this — or must one be in-your-face burning with passion?

Unfortunately, I feel so strongly about the issues I feel most convinced about (Jesus as the only way, Missions as the best career choice, Biblical Equality as God’s ideal for men and women, and taking care of the orphans as “true religion”) that it’s hard for me to rein in my passions well enough as to actually avoid making some kind of offense before I’m able to succeed at any gentle prodding. So what’s a wannabe revolutionist to do? What do others do?

I had a dream last night that I was a young South Asian girl — about 9 years old. I was one of the younger ones among a large family. I had at least two older sisters and some brothers. In this dream, the man who was my father told me that he had made the arrangements for me to be married. I had been in and out of the room earlier when my father had been speaking to another man, bargaining back and forth. I thought they were arguing over a cow or some livestock. Now I knew they had been talking about me.

My father informed me that we were to be married the following Saturday — so I was getting less than a week’s notice. I felt like the room was closing in on me as the news burgeoned into full understanding, and the ceiling seemed to squish down upon me as this boy, my future husband, suddenly appeared at the door, waiting for me. We were having our first meeting right then.

I went to the nearby playground with the boy (it was really just a vacant lot which kids, through constant use, had made claims on it to be their own) and very quickly found him to be really self-centered, vindictive, egotistic, and mean. He spoke to me with an air of condescension, his eyes gazing tauntingly at me with all the immaturity of an 8 year old boy. I couldn’t believe that he was the one I was going to have to marry. From just those few minutes of interaction, I knew it would be a lifetime’s ingratiating servitude to an unmerciful patriarch (though, as a 9 year old in the dream, I wouldn’t have put it quite in those terms).

And if that wasn’t bad enough, toward the end of our initial meeting, he mentioned (almost boastfully) that I was to be his second wife, actually. His father had gotten him another wife, whom he was also marrying on Saturday. This last piece of news left me devastated. Not only had I not been given a choice, not only had my life been bargained away like I was property, not only would I be married to a selfish chauvinist, but I wouldn’t even have the honor and value of his fidelity or devotion. I felt like I was suffocating.

As soon as I got home, I told my father, “Did you know I am to be his second wife? He already has another wife!” I thought there might be a chance that he hadn’t known and that the new piece of knowledge would rescue me from this ill-fate.

My father’s face revealed that he hadn’t known. He had gotten such a great bargain for me that it had somehow successfully distracted him from the fact that his business arrangements would result in a reality that would be my life. I’m sure he really believed that he was giving me the better life by doing all this. But my heartbroken cries snapped him out of his daze. “Well, he hadn’t been clear about that but…I suppose he alluded…” Looking into my sorrowful eyes, he muttered, “I will talk to him about it.”

I sat on the chair despondently as my father disappeared into the other room. I knew that even if he talked to the man, even if the man had not told him the whole truth, none of these things would change the ending of my story. The deal had already been struck. My fate was already sealed. My elder sisters, who were shuffling about in the kitchen, looked down and looked away and said nothing. My father was sending my sisters to school. They had not been married off, so I had thought I would be saved from the fate that was the lot of every other girl in our neighborhood. So why was this happening to me? I didn’t know. I was stuck under this hierarchical system, and there was nothing I could do about it.

This is when I woke up from my dream… and realized that though I could wake up, there are many young and old women who can never wake up and escape from this nightmarish reality.