A Lutheran church in Wisconsin runs a school (unfortunately). The school council has ‘doctrinal issues’ with the fellow they hired as principal — he seems to think that the idea that men have authority over women is invalid. So they had a meeting to fire John Hartwig, and something at the meeting shocked the audience.
Supporters of Hartwig said they were shocked to learn that women church members would not be permitted to speak during a meeting to decide Hartwig’s fate.
I’d be shocked, too. Except that I’d also be shocked by this, which everyone there seemed to take for granted.
Females do not have voting privileges, but are generally allowed to speak at meetings, according to Klaetsch. Sunday’s meeting was the first time in recent history that St. John’s Council President Don Finseth exercised his authority to prevent females from speaking, church members say.
Please, women of St John’s Lutheran Church of Baraboo, Wisconsin, WAKE UP. Leave that awful institution. Why are you continuing to wallow in a poisonous environment that treats you like scum?
I don’t understand how anyone can be so accepting of being a second class citizen? I can’t imaging how much childhood conditioning it took for those women to accept that all people are equal, but some are more equal then others.
No Gods, No Masters
Cameron
Well! These people only follow a bit of their crazy book. (They probably dismiss a shitton of the book too… Pick and choose, you know.)
While the girls should’ve known they’d do that just by reading the “scripture”, I forgive them. But now they have no excuse to be ignorant… Ladies, DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY THINK OF YOU NOW? Get out of that crazy religion! And take your children with you!
An organization which does not allow women to vote, and they’re shocked at not being allowed to speak?
These women need more than a wake up call, they’ve had their brains on hold for much too long.
As a woman I am not just disillusioned with religion, but generally disgusted and at times afraid. How could anyone buy into a system where you’re lucky to garner the status of property? LADIES WAKE UP!
WELS and LC-MS to a lesser extent are quite happy to make up for the Midwest’s shortage of evangelical/fundamentalists. WELS did a ‘review’ of their stand on women in the church a few decades ago and decided that they were right. It is rare to see anyone question this.
How shocking that a church with an official policy of sexism acted in a sexist manner!
That’s like being shocked that water is wet.
Cameron:
Yeah, these women had to be steeped in the nonsense from the beginning. Still, it’s hard for me to imagine none of them having a problem with it. I used to be highly annoyed at having to wear a mantilla in church as a child; took the damn thing off at every opportunity.
Ah, the WELS Church, always good for hatin’ on the wimmins.
I don’t understand why people put up with it either. My guess is that they value tradition and want to preserve what they believe to have been a “natural” part of the past. Interestingly, I’d ask which past but that’s irrelevant.
I remember going to a friend’s church with a group of kids when I was a little girl. I have no idea what type of Christian religion, possibly Lutheran or Episcopalian. The woman who had received the group of kids took us all over the church and explained what they did and how they did it.
Being young and naive I asked if she was the minister and she laughed and said “women can’t do that” and I said “why not?”
I don’t remember her giving me a good answer. She probably said something. I kind of wish I could remember now.
Meh, my problems started early with religion, very very early.
isn’t it ironic. don’t you think.
Why are you surprised at this?
After all, almost all gays are Christian..
A lifetime of fear, subjugation, mental and sometimes physical abuse without even the slightest intervention will often produce those results.
Ah, yes, the Timothy bit. I actually had a huge argument with a co-worker, when I said that St Paul was a misogynist and when he said no, I told him to bring his own Bible and I would show the passage.
I did. First, he tried to get away from it by mistranslating the original ancient greek. Then he said “you know, we should believe and not research” (this is a saying in greek and it sounds better).
This kind of intellectual dishonesty is what turned me away from organised religion, to the point I wouldn’t care and return to the fold if Jesus got his own talk show.
Lysistrata.
It might not get us all the way to the 21st century, but we’d at least get up to 411 BCE.
Tronzu @11: Wait. What?
If this church is like others, a lot of the work is done by women, to the point that it’d probably collapse without their support. Hopefully at least some of the younger ones have now got the message.
Tronzu:
And? Your point isn’t as clever as you think it is. By the way, I’ve been to more than one service at a Metropolitan church, don’t ever recall anyone sayin’ those there gay people weren’t allowed to speak.
After all, almost all gays are Christian..
[citation needed]
The vote is reported as 76-74, so there will be a lot of hard feelings in that church for a while.
#11’s point is that millions of gay people continue to identify as Christian, despite the Bible’s low opinion on sexuality.
In their defense, if you ignore the Old Testament the Bible is only a little anti-gay. That hasn’t stopped most major Christian denominations from treating homosexuality as one of the greatest sins ever, but Jesus himself didn’t mention it.
PZ should be impressed that much of the St. John’s website is in comic sans.
Baraboo is full of nuts; my sister’s husband knew some people there and apparently it’s just crazy.
Is there a trend wherein Lutherans are becoming more fundamentalist? Sometimes I think so because I’ve been seeing more mentions of stupid crap like this happening in Lutheran churches lately. I’m sure that there will be a good level of backlash; if not, then my confidence in humanity will be slightly shaken.
Chris
http://hegartyblog.wordpress.com
@truthspeaker: ahhh.. that makes sense. My brain had latched onto the reading that it meant “The church is full of the gheys and they are the only ones who hate the wimmins”. FWIW I’m pretty sure “almost all gays are Christian” is false but adding “in the US” might fix it.
Lysistrata, eh? Why not. It still works
Yes I think this is the case.
There is more though, because turning from that means also turning from everything.
I will never understand how any woman can buy into this shit. Yeah, I know about all the conditioning and peer pressure and whatnot, but it still just won’t register right in my mind.
I think I hate the world.
Oppression works much better when you get the oppressed actively involved in their own oppression. It’s mystifying.
There is also a lot of bending over backwards within religion to make the theology and the texts seem supportive of, in particular, the LGBT community. I find all the backbends to be tiresome.
Perhaps if you have to work so hard to make something OK with you, it’s not OK.
????WTH!!!!
How weird and sick can these idiots get? Never mind, there is no lower limit to the cultist’s derangement.
This probably isn’t the mainstream Lutherans. Like every sect, they have split into a large and ever growing number of cults.
My guess, these are fundie Lutherans, WELS, the church of Michelle Bachmann. Oddly enough, she doesn’t seem to be all that quiet, meek, and mild.
Possibly Missouri Synod.
It’s not a particularly recent one. Lutheranism in the US started out being divided into dozens of church bodies. As the groups merged into larger ones, ELCA became the surviving denomination that picked up the vast majority of churches that were founded by Nordic immigrants and their descendants but only a minority of the German-heritage churches.
WELS and LC-MS are primarily German heritage and have long been much more conservative than the Nordic congregations. Battles over ‘conservative enough’ have been fought for decades in WELS and LC-MS. This is just another example of the problem of being too certain. Monty Python’s Life of Brian describes the dynamic, splitter! And, yes, there are small bodies that have split off from WELS because they didn’t consider it to be adequately ‘following God’s Word’.
They can these days in most mainline protestant denominations.
The only minister I know is a boomer female.
Several recent “prophets” have been female. The foundresses of the Seventh Day Adventists and the Christian Scientists. Although that isn’t necessarily a good achievement.
Sounds like sharia law has come to baraboo.
I agree with Ol’Greg, #26. And even more than just the church and its community, which rebels would stand to lose. If the church controls the school, I can only imagine what else the church has sunk its fangs into.
I have a hard time imagining how a man can behave this way, toward his wife, or mother, or daughter…or anyone else’s. Bunch of misogynistic twits should go sleep on the couch.
So now people are worshiping a rare mineral used for superconducters but only found on the now-destroyed tiny island of Waponi-Woo?
Oh wait… that’s Boobaroo…
Carry on…
The women should break from the church in response. (They probably won’t. However, that would result in a distinctly evolutionary de-selection.)
I like the idea of making the Lysistrata a standard part of High School education curricula; it might help cut this nonsense.
Why do women remain in a religion that devalues their opinions and tells them they are, in the grand scheme of things, irrelevant?
That’s a question that could be asked of all Christians, not just Lutheran women. If they’ve already accepted the “We are all miserable worms compared to our invisible sky fairy” story, then why is it surprising that they’ll eat the same thing in relation to men?
Yeah, but it maybe called Wisconsin Evangelical Synod Lutherans, but the church base is in Minnesota.
As a former Lutheran, I can say that the Wisconsin Evangelical Synod Lutherans (WELS) and Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) are very conservative. I wouldn’t call them as outright crazy as the hardcore Southern Baptists. But I do remember going to a WELS church and the sermon was always hellfire this and hellfire that. However, the major branch of Lutherans in America (ELS) is fairly liberal.
tytalus:
The church sponsors the school. It pays most of the cost. Of course it controls it.
If I’m not mistaken, Michele Bachmann is a wels church member, too. She obviously likes and approves of being a second rate citizen and politician.
The Bible clearly says women should not speak at meetings.
But this “voting” thing — the Bible does not mention it at all, let alone women doing it.
R. Schauer:
In her particular case, it’s a pity she doesn’t believe in keeping her mouth shut.
Women at that church reminded me of the entire question of hazing and college fraternities.
Why in this green earth would ANYONE want to belong to an organization that belittles and ridicules you, ignores your input, and makes you second- or third-class citizens?
All they expect women to say at that meeting is, “Here’s your sandwich.”
I think that’s how they imagine it…
Becaause after you’ve taken your lumps, it becomes your turn to torture the new kids.
My father was a LC-MS minister for more than 50 years. Starting sometime in the 1970s, he tried to persuade the men at his various congregations to grant the vote to women. Largely on the basis of this …. “theological shortcoming” …. and his occasionally reading from a non-King James bible translation, he was harassed out of every pulpit he ever had over the last 30 years of his career. The churches couldn’t actually fire him since he had been “called” by god. But those good xians could make his life miserable and so that is what they did.
I never understood why he didn’t leave the MS and he clearly didn’t want to talk about it.
But I think the treatment he received at the hands of his congregants may have contributed to 4 of his 5 children becoming atheists. Only one — a female, of course — turned out to be even more fundamentalist than her father. She proudly belongs to a church that won’t recognize her equality. Stockholm Syndrome, I guess.
Why, it says so right here in this holy book over here, which even has in it a claim that all it says is the truth.
What, are you doubting a holy book that declares that it is true? How could you, you… apostate! Burn him/her!
I imagine the women being squashed by this treatment to be militant and hating the obvious slight to their human intelligence. I see them chaff at being relegated to chattel status. I envision revolt and overthrow.
Imagination indeed. Any few that share that vision will leave the church as soon as they are able. The rest will bow their heads and psyches to what they see as god’s will. Most accept the degrading position they inhabit as correct interpretation of the word of god.
That is the true blaspheme. To treat the intellect and value of another human being as deficient by reason of gender is the greater loss. Sky-farie worship be damned but religious slavery is much worse.
Sheesh. Even at the conservative country Southern Baptist church I attended with my family as a kid, women could vote. Even while the national organization was telling women to submit to their husbands etc., we had the friggin’ *vote* on church business. And I got the impression this was business as usual for the denomination.
When you are less egalitarian than conservative country Southern Baptists you are doing it wrong!
It might make for an interesting history project to trace just how the various common denominations these days have developed their views on gender (in)equality. There’s a general thread of misogyny running through most of them, but it seems to differ greatly in its degree of expression. I don’t have the time for it, but I wonder what such a study would find?
The “women are second class citizens” thang permeates the xtian religion but the “women are not allowed to speak” thang specifically comes from ICorinthians 11:3
More good ones on this subject:
Women will not be among the 144,000 called during the so-called rapture
Revelation 14:3
Never help widows. They’re 4rd class (below regular women and animals) until they reach the age of 60.
ITimothy 5:9-13
Divorced women lose all rights and can be put to death
(Jeebus – In all 3 synoptic gospels)
A friend of mine from college joined the “we can find 1,000,000 people who don’t believe in evolution” blah blah facebook group. I had no idea there were bat guano crazy fundie creationist Lutherans until I started reading up on WELS.
Oh, I’m sure they do. But speaking up about it means risking the loss of your entire social support network, which has been constructed around you since birth. That’s a tough thing, a terrifying thing, for almost any human being to contemplate.
I suppose the other options are to accept it and flush your self-esteem down the toilet, or to integrate and manipulate the system to your own advantage from within. Which in such systems probably entails finding a sufficiently pliable man to manipulate into being your “front”.
Which means one curious as to how many of these upstanding church fathers actually “wear the pants” as it were, in their own personal relationships, and how many think they do but actually don’t.
The WELS hate catholics. It says right on their website that the RCC is the church of satan and the pope is the antichrist.
The Lutherans and Catholics fought a vicious war 450 years ago that killed tens of millions. No point in letting all that hate go to waste.
But then again it is in the Bible.
@raven – Then I’m surprised he even talked to me, as I was very Catholic back then. Oh well, I guess we all go our separate ways. He slid into fundie-town while I lost the faith entirely.
Is faith transferable? Is faith conserved? If ten people lose faith, to two people gain it all and go off the rails?
I remember when the ignorant pissants that make up the majority of the electorate in Wisconsin voted to make the institution of marriage between one man and one woman only.
Wisconsin sits firmly in the 14th century, just like its spiritual brothers Iran and North Korea.
Would any of the ladies in that church refuse to ‘submit to their husbands’ as long as their husbands refuse to allow them to speak (or vote) in their church?
How long would the ‘good ol’ boys’ last if the women held out?
Sadly, my question would be “would the cops in the area take the domestic violence charges seriously?”
I grew up in the WELS church, and remember very clearly the moment I got fed up enough to leave. It was during a sermon on the integral primacy of men over women. I honestly don’t ever remember actually believing any of the religion, ever, even though I went to church-sponsored schools for several years, but that was the point where it all came together for me. I was just disgusted and never went back, even though I really did (and still do) miss the weekly singing.
Another anecdote – I was sent to the principal for wearing shorts once. I think that was first or second grade, and I clearly remember the humiliation. The parents put me in public school not long after.
So, on a scale of zero to taliban, where would the WELS church of Baraboo fit?
I’d put that particular congregation at less than 0.5 T on cag’s scale.
WELS congregations do have a personality of their own and most of those that were the large, well established Lutheran Churches (as St. John’s Baraboo is) in the area tend to be more easygoing, more willing to find ways to soften the rough spots when there are disagreements. The close vote tells me that this is far more likely to have been a personality battle and had almost nothing to do with doctrine.
Hey, I live here! I’m good friends with the son of the man who apparently made this decision. When I asked what was going on, he sort of just shrugged. I’ll press more tomorrow.
In the long run, it will be interesting to see what effect this has on things.
I grew up in a LCMS church in southern California. I even went to the jr. high there in the early 70’s and they actually taught us about evolution!
It was all pretty liberal back then and I know for a fact that teh wimmins was allowed to vote because my mom did it every time they had to call a new pastor. My mom was very churchy, but would never have tolerated not being able to have a voice in the church.
I left the church and religion in general about 15 years ago and I think they’ve gone a bit hard line since I left, but can’t swear to it.
I do know the congregation was dwindling to naught but the old timers a few years ago before my dad quit going.
dwarf zebu
Why blame the victim, in this case the women, for their oppression? Why not blame the men for doing the oppressing and being the oppressors?
By framing this issue as “why don’t the women leave?”, PZ and everyone are effectively letting the men off the hook. In slavery times, did people ask “why don’t the slaves just leave?” or did they put the blame on the slave owners? We need to do the same for sexism: shame the men for their inhuman, cowardly behavior – not blame the women who are the victims in that community.
following is EmilyH, daughter of John Hartwig, comment on the news article.
The short answer. The men are chistofascist fundies and likely to be about as intelligent and flexible as a rock. Many slaves did run away to the north. The ones who stayed and demanded to be free most likely got beat up or killed.
The long answer. It isn’t the men per se. They are just channeling their magic book, the bible. Filling in for god who hasn’t been around much in the last few millennia. Several posters on this thread posted the passages in the NT which say that women are supposed to shut up and act like a plastic flamingo in church. The Book said it, they believe it, and that is the end of the story.
Cassie #64 – What the women should leave behind is the superstition that created the discrepancy in the first place. What is perhaps not stated is that the men who have a scintilla of reason and decency should also leave both the church and religion.
CassieC,
There is nothing more pathetic than a willing slave.
Paul @58:
Sadly, I agree unless the ladies give the b@stard the bobbitt treatment.
Forgot to add a /facetious tag in the previous post (from work) as I do understand that the suggestion to cut the guys off wouldn’t work in the real world.
1> Domestic violence.
2> Infidelity.
3> Cultural pressures.
to name some examples of why it wouldn’t work.
Gee whiz. We aren’t past this? I mean, “Holy Mutthead, makeral!”
It has been my experience for some time that women do speak with a degree of authority and insight commensurate with what men are usually pleased to claim or exhibit. I’d say that . . .
(pardon the lapse, an advertisement for bacon just aired on my Tee Vee.)
Why the overall “wisdom quotient” of women relative to that of men is a concern to political society let alone just guys is beyond me. (Yes, I know so many of the old stories.) But not beyond the ken of some. Perhaps they are not well grounded. Perhaps they are too committed to the cause. sigh
Some guys and some girls stand out but so what? Standing out is not hard if you don’t mind being diligent. It is hard when you do mind. Root of many problems?
OT but perhaps an audio analgesic. I’m listening to Peter Katner and Carlos Nakai. The album is Migration. There is sweetness here that is scarcely bearable. Sometimes I play it at beadtime on repeat. It is as nice to wake up to.
And withal, goodnight, dear freinds.
Because we get told that in every other endeavor, too? It’s hard not to internalize the message that women don’t matter when you hear it in so many ways.
Why should one more misogynistic practice in society really make much of a difference when you deal with being considered less worthy than a man every day? Religion is just one outlet. It’s not even the most pernicious or harmful, really. I’m more worried about princess culture and girls not having enough role models (and encouragement) in math and science classes. Or the pay gap.
Yes, how awful it is that the Lutheran church is still discriminating against women! We should be shocked! Outraged! Voice our concern!
“Please, women of St John’s Lutheran Church of Baraboo, Wisconsin, WAKE UP. Leave that awful institution. Why are you continuing to wallow in a poisonous environment that treats you like scum?”
Oh, I see: the women must be too stupid to realize that they’re part of an institution that assumes they’re fundamentally too stupid to be considered equal.
The level of misogyny in this thread is astounding. Please place your derision and disgust where it belongs: on the men of the Lutheran church who uphold this system, not on the women who are the victims of it.
@Raven, #66: “It isn’t the men per se.”
I’m confused; who is it, then? If it’s solely the Bible’s fault, why isn’t the inherent destructive power being channeled through women as well?
As this thread demonstrates, even if a women managed to sever all ties with the Lutheran men in her family and friends (and the women who agree with them), and leave the life she knew behind, and start over from scratch, the world in which she would be arriving isn’t much better.
How else would you explain the Women against Women movement?
Note: For what I consider obvious reasons, I’m not insulting women as a whole. I’m insulting religious people. I am surprised there is shock that we consider religious women dumb when we consider religious men just as dumb.
xian god is a sexist pig
The Big-3 theisms are paternalisms (judaism, islam and xianity) sharing a militantly misogynist ideology.
In particular, xians have Saul of Tarsus (aka St. Paul) as the voice of god on the matter:
As in all the congregations of the saints, women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. 1Cor14:33-35
The “bible” look into it — but put on your latex gloves first — the presence of so much mind filth may damage your nerve endings.
the anti_supernaturalist
Pastor Fricke is perhaps one of the most ignorant, closed-minded, and bigoted people ever to be an ordained pastor. He is a beautiful example of “cultural encapsulation” – where someone is so satiated in their own cultural ignorance that they lose the ability to think outside the box because they do not even realize that they are in a box. Of course I am sure that he would have some great Bible passage taken out of context to apply to cultural encapsulation. However, this is exactly Pastor Fricke’s probelm – he is too insecure in his faith to realize that the Bible’s purpose is not to prescribe culture.
@Rutee: Do you mean Ladies Against Women? If so, you might want to take a closer look at that website. If not, please correct me, because my Google skills might have failed me.
Actually, that’s exactly what you’re doing. When you say “women are this” or “women do this,” that’s a monolithic entity that includes all women (and pointedly excludes men).
I’m not shocked by the revelation that religious women are “dumb.” I’m shocked by the fact that people on this thread are blaming women for their own oppression. What’s worse is backing up that assertion by blaming black slaves for slavery.