One response to folks on the religious left runs, "So you want us to pander to Christians so we can win some elections?" A look at the work of Carol Christ should dispel the assumptions behind that question. This diary is the second installment of "The Religious Left" series, after the profile on
Rosemary Radford Ruether.
Carol Christ (rhymes with "dissed," not "iced") is a pioneer in thealogy - thought about the Goddess, rather than God. She is among those who have found traditional religions wanting and have moved to find new ways of reflecting on the divine and to attempt to reconstruct pre-patriarchal religious insights. With the Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow, she co-edited the anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions. The first volume is still the best overall introduction to the themes and issues in feminist theology, while the sequel pays greater attention to racial and ethnic diversity. The clearest summation of Christ's own thought can be found in her book, Rebirth of the Goddess. More below the flip.
Christ developed an interest in religion very early in life. However, as one of the first women in Yale's graduate theology program in the late 1960s (and one of two women in a class of around one hundred), she experienced growing alienation with the academic world of theology and religious studies. She wrote her dissertation on Elie Wiesel, whose profound religious reflections on his experiences in the Nazi extermination camps has challenged many theologians to push the envelope of religious thought. Both her experience as a token woman in a male-dominated field and her engagement with Christian anti-Semitism left her increasingly estranged from the Christian tradition. When she attended the ordination of the first female Episcopal priests in 1974, she felt a physical sense of revulsion at the biblical imagery used there and left the church for good.
Yet Christ's anger at Christianity did not translate into a rejection of religion, altogether. In working her way through Wiesel's novels, she began to chart an alternate course for her spiritual quest. Participation in various aspects of the Women's Movement of the 1970s enabled her to explore more fully explicitly female metaphors for the divine. Later in life, at the death of her mother, she felt a profound sense of love surrounding her that gave her a nonnegotiable sense that love is at the heart of reality - an experience that led her to define the Goddess as the "intelligent, embodied love that is the ground of all being." This definition marks a shift in emphasis in Christ's work from a more open sense of the Goddess as a symbol that can be interpreted in many ways to a more firm conviction of the actuality of the divine.
In her most famous essay, "Why Women Need the Goddess," reprinted in her collection of essays, Laughter of Aphrodite, Christ describes the symbol "Goddess" functionally. Working with the anthropological analysis of religious symbols by Clifford Geertz, she contrasts the "moods" and "motivations" the symbols "God" and "Goddess" promote. She delves into how the symbol "Goddess" affirms female power, the female body, the female will, and women's bonds and heritage. Geertz holds a kind of critical neutrality with regards to the truth content of religious symbols. In this essay, Christ points out the diverse ways women relate to the symbol of the Goddess - ranging from those who insist on Her being an actual deity to those who find Her to be a projection of an inner source of female strength - as a way of shifting the emphasis from the explanation of a symbol to the experience of a symbol. Furthermore, her reliance on anthropological work here make a split between "personal beliefs" and "social structures" impossible, because of the way symbols legitimate social realities.
Christ's early work, Diving Deep and Surfacing, probed women's fiction as an alternate resource for spiritual reflection. In her analysis of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Christ demonstrates that an individualistic conception of spirituality is inadequate because the tension between a woman's spiritual quest and a social structure that offers no room to express that quest can only end in suicide. (The movie Thelma and Louise offers a similar message.) This emphasis on the relation between individual spiritual quest and social mores differentiates Christ's work from common understandings of spirituality, in which overcoming suffering becomes simply a matter of "adjusting attitude." Rather, spiritual self-discovery and political commitment to changing social structures must go hand-in-hand. In her later book, Rebirth of the Goddess, Christ lists nine basic ethical principles that can mediate between the individual journey and larger questions of justice and sustainability.
Nurture life
Walk in love and beauty
Trust the knowledge that comes through the body
Speak the truth about conflict, pain and suffering
Take only what you need
Think about the consequences of actions for seven generations
Approach the taking of life with great restraint
Practice great generosity
Repair the web
The theologians Gordon Kaufman and John Cobb diagnosed Rebirth of the Goddess as an implicit example of Process Theology, a theological movement associated with the philosophy of Alfred Whitehead. At their suggestion, Christ turned to the work of Charles Hartshorne, author of Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, to ground her thoughts philosophically, a change from her more narrative orientation at the outset of her career. In the book that followed, She Who Changes, she also moves from reflecting on the Goddess as the primary expression of deity to a more expansive notion of Goddess/God.
The previous installment of "The Religious Left" series focused on Rosemary Radford Ruether. Christ and Ruether have far more in common than not. Both confronted the anti-Semitism of the Christian tradition before moving on to explicitly feminist thought. Both believe that female metaphors for the divine are important for women's sense of well-being. And both proclaim that desires for immortality are at best distracting from the quest for connection and justice on earth and at worst symptomatic of an overblown ego. Yet Ruether finds reasons for maintaining a critical fidelity to the Christian tradition. Christ does not. A major reason for this difference lies in their interpretation of the prophetic tradition of the Bible. Although the prophets rarely extend the imperative of justice to women explicitly, Ruether insists that women can legitimately claim this imperative and use it to demand justice for themselves. Christ, on the other hand, feels that the desire for justice found in the prophetic tradition is too dependent on a vengeful and patriarchal God to merit continued use in religious reflection.
Kathleen Sands has written an excellent account of the place of tragedy in feminist theology, Escape from Paradise, that builds on the basic commonalities in Ruether's and Christ's work. By drawing increased attention to the tragic elements of life, she gives increased richness and depth to their insights. Perhaps more importantly, Sands explodes the notion that the relation to specific traditions needs to be a point of division, and shows how those who need to leave traditional religions and those who wish to remain in them can find more important points of contact where the task of pursuing a just world can be shared.