Why the Church Stayed Quiet About Patriarchy | Be Quiet | Chad Belew

And this morning, I am starting what's going to be a two-week talk.

And I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I felt like a lot of times when things, terrible

things like what happened at Cornell, come out in the news and become major talking points,

that the church just kind of glazes over it.

It doesn't ever talk about it.

And I said, I was going to do that, and so this is the, I'm going to do that.

We're going to talk about some of the, some of the things that are so harmful in our

culture, our society, and in our churches.

And so I'm going to talk about today, I'll talk about the manosphere, I'll talk about

patriarchy, and how the church has been complicit and actually kind of a front-runner in a lot

of things with this idea.

I understand that this could be a tough topic for quite a few people.

And so as I wrote this, I had you in mind, so I tried to focus on systems, historical

facts for us to look at and not rehash trauma.

So hopefully I was able to do that in a way that we can listen and have questions and

be okay with this conversation.

It won't be easy, but that's okay.

And I, I know Britney mentioned already that we have a care team here who if at any moment

you're like, I need to talk to somebody.

Please go do that.

If you need to leave, you do that.

You're not going to hurt my feelings, I understand.

So if you need to do that, you're welcome to do that.

We're going to talk for a few more minutes about this topic.

I called it be quiet, and you can notice the crossout of the quiet.

I'm going to, I'll get into that in a minute.

So I have four kids, one of my kids, he's a 12-year-old boy.

His name is Jett, most of you guys know Jett.

He's probably hiding in the back right now.

He's curious about everything.

He asked real questions.

I told you one night we sat down and had a conversation about a, oh man, biomimicry and

how we look at animals and we create things and we sat and just talked and went on a rabbit

hole down YouTube and he asked real questions.

And here's the reality.

He's exactly at the age, a lot of very expensive software is looking for.

A couple years ago, researchers in Dublin set up a brand new accounts on, I believe it's

on YouTube for YouTube shorts and on TikTok on brand new phones.

So no history at all on the phones or the platforms.

They registered as young guys and then they just watched what the app served them.

Within 23 minutes, those feeds were serving up what people call the manosphere.

Men teaching boys that women are beneath them, that a real man is in charge, that softness

is weakness, nobody went looking for it.

It went looking for them.

But here's what I noticed is I read those studies.

The men in those videos aren't saying anything new, they're not inventing a story.

They are repeating one that women are less, men are made to rule and that's just how it

is.

And it's not a TikTok idea, that's just the platform that has carried the story now.

It's one of the oldest stories human beings have ever told.

And for most of the last 2,000 years, the church told it louder than almost anybody.

So this morning I want to take the question that we've asked all year about all kinds

of things and pointed out the biggest target yet and that question is who told us this

was just the way things are.

And I want to say this again about how I'm going to go and do this.

I'm not going to retell anyone's pain this morning.

I know again for some of you this subject is not an idea, it's a memory.

You don't need me to describe it to you and I'm so sorry that this is your reality.

I wish that wasn't true but I know data tells me that it is reality for many in this room.

And you need the people in this room to understand how it happens and to help stop it.

So that's what we're going to do.

Again, if you need to step out please do that.

Somebody took over my computer.

By now most of you have seen the story out of Cornell, that they've dubbed Cornell 7.

One man, a woman talked about like she was inventory, that young woman sexually assaulted

and raped by people she thought were her friends.

And then a fraternity group chat where dozens of guys read a message and said nothing.

And I'm not going to walk through it again, like I said, we're not rehashing that.

But I want to ask about the part underneath all of that.

How does a 19-year-old learn to see a woman as less than him or as less than human?

Nobody's born with that.

Somebody handed it to him.

And I'll say this once is my own observation.

I follow a lot of big platform evangelical pastors online and I've watched that feed

fill up all year with what they're against.

And I've watched it stay quiet about this.

You've got the same feed, you scroll it, you probably see it, maybe you don't follow a

bunch of pastors.

I'm just glutton for punishment I guess.

As part of why this series is called be quiet with a quiet crossed out.

Be quiet is one of the oldest words the church has given women.

It's in our Bibles.

First Timothy 2 says she must be quiet.

First Corinthians 14 says women should remain silent in the churches.

And for a lot of the women in this room, that's the word they heard most.

And be quiet is what the guys in that chat did.

And here's what the research tells us about a room like that, this group chat.

One study found that the strongest predictor of whether a man would step in was whether

he believed the other guys would.

Most of the guys in the room like that are uncomfortable too.

They just think they're the only one.

So it takes the one.

A voice that tells everybody else in the room that they're not alone, that this is not okay.

But they're all waiting because they've got something to prove.

So this is the word we're crossing out for the next two weeks.

We're not going to be quiet.

Before we go any further, I want to define a word that I use a lot this morning, patriarchy.

Some of you hear the word and maybe your shoulders go up a little bit.

So let me tell you exactly what I mean by it.

And I think we need to define this so that we're all working with the same definition

and the same idea of the word that I'm talking about.

The word literally means rule of the fathers.

Here's how I'm using it this morning.

Patriarchy is a system that ranks men above women and then makes that ranking feel natural,

normal, maybe even holy.

Notice it's a system.

It's not another word for men.

It's not a word for dads.

I'm a dad.

It's a story all of us were born into.

It's a system.

And it shows up in our homes, our jobs, our laws and our churches.

Because it's a system, anybody can carry it.

Men can push back against it.

Men can walk in it blissfully.

Women can be taught to defend it.

And that's how systems work.

So when you hear me say patriarchy this morning, I'm not pointing at the man sitting next to

you, I'm pointing at the story we were all handed.

And here's a problem with a really old story.

After enough, generations, it stops sounding like a story and it starts sounding natural

like nature.

You maybe heard the phrase saying a fish doesn't know it's wet, water is just what

the world feels like.

Psychologists have spent decades studying how this thought process happens for us.

The story, how it becomes natural, how we hear a story long enough that it just becomes

like this is how it is.

And two findings explain a lot.

The first is about roles.

Researchers Alice Eagly and Wendy Wood have shown that when one group of people hold certain

roles for long enough, we start believing the roles reveal who they are.

So for centuries, men were the only ones allowed to lead.

So men were the ones we saw leading.

So we looked around and said, "See, men are natural leaders."

But the reality is the role came first.

The nature got invented afterwards to explain it and to hold up a system.

The second is about fairness.

Psychologist John Jost calls it system justification.

Human beings have a deep need to believe the world we live in makes sense and is fair.

So we defend the arrangement we've already got even when it costs us.

And his research finds this even among the people the system works against.

It's always been this way, feels like evidence, but it isn't.

It's just familiar.

And there's a reason it's so hard to let go of.

I saw a post this week on Instagram, a bunch of slides from an account called the Philosophy

Dose that said it better than most textbooks I've looked at.

It says this, "Most of the beliefs we hold most firmly were handed to us before we were

old enough to examine them.

And once a belief becomes part of who we are, questioning it stops being an intellectual

exercise.

It feels like questioning your family, your upbringing, your community."

And then this line, which is basically the story of half this room, they said this, "What

begins as a search for truth can feel like an act of betrayal."

Even studying this and having this conversation, there is that like, "Am I doing right?"

Everybody else is not saying it, why should I?

It's because it just feels familiar and it becomes who we are.

Psychologists have a name for this.

They call it identity protective thinking.

When a belief is tied up with who we are and who we belong to, we stop weighing the evidence

and we start defending the identity.

We see this.

This is what identity politics is.

That's why you can almost never argue somebody out of patriarchy with a Bible verse.

It isn't living in their head, it's living in their belonging.

And I know somebody's already thinking, so I'll just say it, but men and women are different,

Chad.

Yes, they are.

Like, there are real differences on average and there's a lot of overlap, but different

isn't the same as ranked.

Like your left hand, your right hand are different, but nobody's ever looked at them

and been like, "Okay, this one gets to vote.

They're different, but we still use them."

If the ranking was like the idea is that the difference is a real, but the ranking was invented.

This is a system.

This is something we've been told is a story we've been told.

The ranking is something we were told.

It was invented.

And if the ranking was invented, then it has a history and a beginning.

Somebody built it.

So we're going to look at that today.

The historian Gerda Lerner spent her career showing exactly that.

She says this, "The patriarchy isn't biology.

It's a system with a history.

It was built over centuries, written into laws, and held in place by institutions.

And here's why that matters.

Anything that has a beginning can have an end."

Kristin Du Mez ends her book, "Jesus and John Wayne," which is a great book you should

read it, "with one sentence.

What was once done might also be undone."

You can watch it get written down in history.

We can trace this back.

About 400 years before Jesus, the philosopher Aristotle, put into his book on politics.

And about as plain a sentence as you'll find.

He says this, "The male is by nature superior and the female inferior.

One rules and the other is ruled."

This idea shaped how households were run across the whole Greek and Roman world.

In that same book, Aristotle actually makes the point.

He says this, "The same argument that says men are born to rule women, also says some

people are born to be slaves."

It's one idea.

Some people are made to rule and some are made to be ruled.

Now here's the sad reality.

The church inherited both halves of this story.

And for centuries, it used the Bible to defend it.

Beth Allison Barr says it like this, like racism, patriarchy is a shape shifter, conforming

to each new era, looking as if it has always belonged.

Which matters, I think, for a lot of us.

Because this is also the world that the New Testament was written into.

This was what was happening at the time, that the New Testament was written.

This was the story that was told, Barr goes on to say in her book The Making of Biblical

Womanhood, "Patriarchy exists in the Bible because the Bible was written in a patriarchal

world."

The Bible was written in that world.

The question has always been whether it was written to keep us there or to lead us out.

So we've got to go back to the beginning of the book.

Let's go back to the beginning of Genesis.

In Genesis 1, God makes humanity in His image.

Male and female, He created them both equally, image-bearers side by side.

There's no delineation in Genesis 1 where they're created.

The second creation story, you know there's two, right?

Second creation story in Genesis 2, the woman is called a helper.

And we grab on to this and we created the theology out of it.

For a long time, that word got read as assistant.

The Hebrew word is ezer and the Bible uses that exact word for God.

My help comes from the Lord, same word, but nobody thinks God is our assistant.

And then you get into Genesis 3.

After the fall, Adam and Eve have eaten of the fruit.

They realize they're naked, they cover themselves, they're hiding from God.

God comes looking for them.

God asks Adam, like who told you you were naked?

Remember all of this?

And then after the fall, God describes what's going to happen now that sin has entered the

world.

The ground will fight back.

Work will hurt.

Death is coming.

These are all things that we inherited from the fall.

And to the woman, He says, "Your desire will be for your husband and He will rule over you."

Look where that line is in Scripture.

It's not in creation.

It's in the curse.

He will rule over you.

Isn't the blueprint that we're supposed to live by?

It's the damage report.

This is the wrong way to do this.

God says, "This is what the curse is going to do."

And if we're new creations in Christ, we're supposed to step out of the curse and no longer

live that way.

Rachel Held Evans who was an incredible writer who asked an incredible question.

She died way too early.

She said it in seven words.

"Patriarchy is not God's dream for the world."

And for most of church history, we read the damage report as the blueprint and we've put

it into practice.

You can hear it in the people we call church fathers.

If you go back in church history, you can hear it in the people we have read and created

theologies off of.

Tertullian, around the year 200, told women, "You are the devil's gateway."

We carried that.

Thomas Aquinas, maybe the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, wrote that women, that

woman, is naturally subject to man.

And then Martin Luther said, "A woman should be as a nail driven into the wall.

She sits at home."

You can watch it happen in translation, too, like the way that scripture has been translated.

In Romans 16, Paul greets a woman named Junia.

He calls her outstanding among the apostles.

And for centuries, translators that took Romans 16 to write it into another language,

turn her into a man.

They put an S on the end of her name and called her Junias, and they said she was a man,

which Junias is a name nobody has found anywhere in the ancient world.

It was a made up name.

They wrote it because they didn't want Paul talking to a woman and saying that she was

among the apostles.

When the text didn't fit the story, we just changed the text.

This has been our history.

It's not just ancient history.

The system that most evangelical churches call complementarianism, got its founding

document in 1987.

It's about 40 years old.

Do you guys know what complementarianism is?

The woman is the helper, she is, this is in the year 2000, the largest Protestant denomination

in America, Southern Baptist Convention, wrote into its statement of faith that a wife is

to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.

And in just the last three years, that same denomination voted overwhelmingly to remove

a church for having a woman pastor, and voted this June to write a ban on women preaching

into its constitution.

In the same years, it approved a database to track abusive pastors and never built it,

because women are more dangerous.

And I'm not trying to guess at anybody's heart that's in these places.

I think that's simply where an institution chose to spend its energy, and we've got to

ask why.

Beth Allison Barr again, similar to what she said before, she says, "Patriarchy may be

a part of Christian history, but that doesn't make it Christian."

And I'm not talking about the history of this from the outside, I believed it.

Some of it I taught, I grew up in a system like this.

And honestly, the thing that finally cracked it open for me, it wasn't a sociology book,

it was two things, it was my wife, who has always been like, "Wait a minute, what do you

mean?"

She didn't grow up in the same system I grew up in.

She grew up in her own systems that we've had to work through.

It was my wife, and it was the Bible.

I grew up hearing this story, and you guys have heard this, I've preached this before.

I grew up hearing the story of the woman at the well, the Samaritan woman at the well.

It's in John chapter 4, I'm not going to get way into it right now, but I always thought

John 4 · chapter mention

one thing about her, she was the sinful woman.

The woman with five husbands, do you remember this?

Jesus is talking to her at the well, she comes in the middle of the day because she's sneaking

out to the well, so that nobody sees her, this is a story we were given.

She had five husbands, and now the man she's living with now isn't her husband.

And we were told Jesus is calling her out in her sin.

I heard that sermon so many times.

It was a way to say, hey, Jesus sees us in our sin, and he invites us in to be with him.

I probably preached it that way.

Then about 10 years ago, I found out that a lot of Christians in the world, Christians

outside the world that I grew up in, have never read this story about her that way.

Like think, what we didn't do was ever ask the questions, you have to think about her

world for a second.

Back then, this woman, this Samaritan woman, usually legally couldn't divorce her husband.

And she sure couldn't cheat on him, because if she had and she was caught in adultery,

we've seen what happened, she would be stoned to death.

Now he could divorce her, because in that age, in that time, she was basically property.

She couldn't work, she couldn't make her own money.

So if a woman sitting at a well has had five husbands, this isn't a list of her sexual

conquest.

It's much more likely a list of her losses.

Men who died that she had to bury, or men who sent her away, for whatever reason.

This is a woman who is carrying trauma and hurt, and seen as something less than because

she's been through five husbands.

If you look at the story again, Jesus never calls her a sinner.

He never tells her to repent.

He never says go and sin no more.

Which when I've taught this in this new way, people have come up and been like, but Jesus

told her go and sin no more.

No, that's a different woman, different story.

What he does is have one of the longest conversations in all of the gospels with her.

She pushes back in the conversation.

She asks him, well, hold on, we worship here, they worship there.

Where are we supposed to worship?

Which one's right?

Where are we supposed to worship?

And she is theologically debating Jesus.

And then after this conversation, she runs back to town and John says many people believed

in him because of her testimony.

And you might remember the verse that we started Arsenal Stories with it a while back.

In the Eastern Orthodox church, she has a name.

They call her Saint Photini, she's a saint equal to the apostles.

Photini means the enlightened one.

They honor her as equal to the apostles and they set aside days every year to celebrate

her.

I never got that story.

Same woman, same verses, a completely different story.

So when I heard this, I had to ask myself if the text didn't change, what did?

Well, the lens did, the way that I read the story did, my lens changed.

And she's not the only one.

For about 1400 years, Western art and preaching painted Mary Magdalene as a repentant prostitute.

The Bible never says that, not one time.

It goes back to a sermon by Pope Gregory the Great in the year 591, where he blended her

together with an unnamed sinful woman from Luke's gospel.

One man's sermon and the first witness of the resurrection got remembered as a sex worker

for 14 centuries.

The Catholic church actually quietly corrected her title in 1969.

And in 2016, the Vatican raised her day to a full feast.

And now they celebrate her, but for 1400 years, she was just a sex worker.

With Junia, we changed the text.

With these two women, we didn't even have to.

We just read through the story we already believed.

We wrote it into the text.

It wasn't even there.

This is what happens when you have a system that creates a way of thinking that you have

to see things through that lens.

I've had to unlearn a lot about what a man is, what a woman is, and who's supposed to

be in charge that I'm not done.

There's a lot of unpacking.

But if a white dude named Chad can do it, so can you.

There's a book I read last year called Men Who Hate Women, and it is so sad, and there's

a lot of just really, really terrible things in it, but this woman is doing a study on

incels and the incel world.

And I found out that in the incel world, the guys that they don't like, they call Chad's.

So whatever.

So if I can do this, so can you, that's what I'm saying.

How does belief like this actually get into a person that's not usually through one terrible

sermon, but it's through a hundred small, nice sounding ones.

Psychologist Peter Glick and Susan Fiske found that sexism comes in two flavors, listen

to this.

There's the hostile kind you can expect that women are trying to control men or against

them.

Like we know this one.

This one's easy to find.

This dude's a sexist, like we could probably name some pretty high up people.

But then there's the benevolent kind that says women are pure, delicate, they need protecting.

We put them on a pedestal and it sounds good.

It sounds like a compliment.

A lot of us have heard it from a pulpit as a compliment.

But here's what the research found.

The two ideas travel together.

People who score high on one tend to score high on the other.

In the nice kind, predicts blaming women for what men do to them.

Let's say this.

A pedestal is still a place you put something so they can't move.

It gets more specific than John Jost, the same research I mentioned earlier.

He ran studies where women read descriptions of men and men and women as complementary.

Men strong and capable, women warm and nurturing.

And afterward, those women were more likely to say the whole system was fair.

And complementary.

That's the exact word for the theology that we've built it on.

It's the exact mechanism that makes an unequal arrangement feel fair to the person it's working

against.

Then you add in purity culture.

If you grew up in this, the way a lot of us were raised, boys learned two lessons.

Your desire is a beast you can't control, and her body is the problem.

Researchers at a Christian university found that the more people held purity culture beliefs,

the more willing they were to excuse sexual violence.

He couldn't control himself.

Nah.

Now teach your boys that they can, that they can control themselves.

That it's on them, not on her.

Every single Sunday, without anyone saying a word, a church teaches its children whose

voice carries the word of God, and we are complicit in this, I believe.

And it's something that we're trying to work on that we've made some steps for.

Kids learn who matters by watching who holds the microphone.

A white dude, sitting on the stage talking, we're complicit.

I don't think that that means we remove it.

We're trying to figure that out, but this is how our kids learn, and they see.

Put these lessons together, she's the temptation.

He can't help himself, he's the head, her voice doesn't carry, and you don't need a sermon

that tells a boy to treat a woman like inventory.

The theology never has to tell him to do it, it just has to teach him that she's less.

And I want the men to hear this part because the story doesn't only cost women.

bell hooks, who may read her books, one of the wisest writers I know on this topic, put

it like this.

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women.

Instead, patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation,

that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.

And she says the very first lesson a boy learns is how to wear a mask.

Asks to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal idea, boys learn self-betrayal

early, and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder.

A couple weeks ago, I told you if you wear the mask all day, and you go home and you

take the mask off, you were never truly loved that day.

Only the mask was.

And we hand this mask of patriarchy of what masculinity is to boys that grow up and to

be men, and they have gone through acts of soul murder.

They are disconnected from who they really are.

This is where the mask comes in.

We hand it to boys before they can say no.

It's what's happening in that group chat.

A creator, I follow, put it this way.

Those men were loyal to a twisted and distorted sense of belonging.

More loyal to that than to her humanity.

The mask was doing exactly what it was made to do there.

Researchers looked at young men who most believe the rules of what they call the man box.

Be tough, stay in control, never need anybody, treat sex as a scoreboard.

And those young men were six times more likely to say they'd sexually harassed a woman in

the last month.

To be tough and to be staying in control and never need anybody to ignore emotions led

men to a place where they were six times more likely to say that they had sexually harassed

a woman.

last month.

The same set of rules tracks with worse mental health and men refusing to ask for

help. This hurts men. Men in this country die by suicide at four times the rate of

women. The story that makes a boy dangerous to her makes him dangerous to

himself. It costs us our friendships, our feelings, sometimes our lives. And

patriarchy promised men the top of the ladder. It never mentioned what the

climb would cost us. This is not a good system for anybody. Not to be a healthy

human being. Here's the good news and I'll try and rush through this a little bit.

Jesus walked into that world. Aristotle's world. The world where women were

property and their testimony often didn't count. And he told a completely

different story. Luke tells us that traveling with Jesus were a group of

women who were funding the whole ministry out of their own money. Mary of

Bethany sits at his feet the posture of a rabbi student. The place women were not

supposed to be. And when she's criticized Jesus defends her right to be

there. The longest theological conversation I said earlier is Jesus

has is with in any of the gospels the longest conversation he has one-on-one

with somebody is with a Samaritan woman at the well. St. Photini. And then the

resurrection in a world where a woman's word often wasn't trusted. God chose

women to be the first witnesses of the most important event in history if we

believe this. And Jesus sent Mary Magdalene to go tell the men who were

hiding because they were scared. The church would later call her the apostle

to the apostles. Even Aquinas who had had talked down on women called her the

apostle to the apostles. And Paul writing to the church in Galatia says there's

neither Jew nor Gentiles, neither slave nor free nor is there male or female for

we are all one in Christ Jesus. So here's the reality of this. The curse said he

will rule over you and Jesus came to undo that curse. We just haven't

listened. Maybe some of us have. And I think there's real hope in the research

to you. You see them going back and forth here because I think it matters. A few

years ago researchers ran a randomized study in Ugandan churches. They

trained pastors to teach shared power between husbands and wives straight

from scripture. Afterward fewer wives in those congregations were being hit. Go

figure. What gets preached changes what happens at home. And it cuts both ways.

And for most of the 2000 years it has cut the wrong way. And it doesn't have to

anymore. I realize we're a little church and we're a little community and this

isn't always a popular message. Like I watch guys who have thousands and thousands

and thousands of followers who are going to preach the opposite of this today.

Not directly. But that's not the message of Jesus. And we can be people who stand

against it. And men you have to be. We have to ask these questions. Because if we

don't again if we live in this patriarchal system you're four times more likely to

take your own life. I don't want anybody to do that. So let's get you out of a

system that tells you that you're not enough. And let's teach you that you can

say that something's wrong. Next Sunday we're gonna go to the next half of this

and talk about exactly that. How we tell our boys a different story. And what it

looks like for this church to fight for women to be treated as full equals.

Starting with us. We're gonna look at the story the way that Jesus showed us. I'm

going to give you a practice this week. It's kind of the same thing as always.

And I don't think I mentioned this at the beginning. In the app there's like a

note section that has some of the points from this in there. And this is in there.

I want you to pick one thing you believe about what men are and what women are.

Just one. And ask it the question we've asked all year. Who told you that? Who's

supposed to lead? Who's supposed to be emotional? Who's supposed to take care of

the kids? Who's supposed to speak first in the meeting? Like pick one of them.

Ask where it came from. You don't have to fix it this week. Just ask the question.

Some of you are like I know where it came from. I hear me asking this question. I

don't think it's a verdict. Something you were handed isn't automatically wrong.

And something new isn't automatically right. So that's something I'm saying.

Like that same post I talked about earlier from the Philosophy Dose ended

with a line that I love. This is this. A belief doesn't become true because it's

yours. And it doesn't become false because someone else gave it to you. The

question doesn't decide anything. It just makes you look. Because the story only

feels like nature until somebody asked where it came from. And if you want to

keep going in this, there's a lot of the books that I've mentioned. I'll put a

list up. I'll put it out on the app that you can see like Jesus and John Wayne,

bell hooks' book, The Will to Change. They're books that help me unlearn. And I

want us to be a place as unlearning harmful things that are hurting all of

us. Because at the end of the day you're made to be a conduit and a

representation of love. And we talk about this every week. You were made to

practice love and love never ranks the people it was made for. So Arsenal, I'm

done. If you have questions, please come ask or send them in the in the app but

go love well. Ask the questions. Where did this come from? Who told me that? And

love well, it's who you're made to be. We'll see you next week. We're gonna learn

how to teach our boys different. Thanks.