Sure! its super long, but here it is. I did post to Meta_feminism as demmian requested, but was promptly banned from there, too.
I've really enjoyed mostly lurking in this subreddit, occasionally answering questions, and more often engaging the discussion. I consider myself a feminist, and I am very glad to have a place I can go to discuss, defend, and debate my worldview that is separate from the for-feminist subreddits I belong to.
All that said, I have a concern about the moderation in this community.
I am on board with the rule that states that top-level comments should be written by feminists-- I think it suits the purpose of the sub. However, if we can't trust a moderator, or if there's no way to appeal the removal of comments designated by one of those moderators as "not feminist" I think we risk having a discussion about one, narrow view of feminism held by a small group, or even an individual moderator. If we can't trust a moderator, what are we missing, and who is being silenced, in the [removed] comment graveyards at the bottom of every post?
An interaction I've had with /u/demmian over the past couple of days has made me doubt the way she or he moderates. I'd like to recount it here, and see if I'm just taking this personally, or if the community agrees with me. If I'm out of line, that's fine.
The discussion took place on this question: Are there Christian feminists? I responded with a long, top-level comment describing my experience as a person raised in the church (among predominately non- or even anti-feminists), including the sentence
It's a big, multi-author, contradictory text, so you can get just about whatever you want out of it.
/u/demmian responded with a comment describing that statement as "whitewashing" and then saying:
If this is your position, then, as a mod, I must ask you to refrain from posting further direct answers in our community; if you ignore this, you will be banned.
At some point (perhaps immediately, and perhaps not) she or he deleted my comment (leaving it visible to me, so I was unaware of it until a friend pointed it out IRL). I don't know whether it's worth noting or not that from my account, my comment appears to have 7 upvotes, and hers or his has -4. It certainly made me feel as if the community understood that I was not attempting to excuse anyone or describing my view of the text, but simply describing how one must by necessity interpret the Bible if they do so as Scripture.
When it came to my attention that my comment was deleted, I responded, explaining in more detail the intent I just described. I think I did so respectfully. This defense was deleted without response.
A review of /u/demmian's comment history in the last few weeks reveals that she or he has very strong, negative feelings about religion in general, which is defended well in those comments and is of course within her or his rights, but might give some useful context. I do not consider myself religious any more, but if we have a moderator who is removing the comments of religious, feminist redditors as being "non-feminist," I think we have a problem.
If I were you, I would want to read the comments involved in order to form my opinion, but this post is already quite long. I can't link them, because they were deleted, so I will append them with the understanding that only the interested will read them.
I was indeed being kinder to Christianity than some in that thread (not all), but I think my defense (the final comment) is reasonable and a ban from top-level commenting is unfair. More importantly, I think /u/demmian may be imposing her or his view of what counts as feminism too narrowly on top-level comments, stifling the diversity of perspectives represented on this subreddit.
I look forward to hearing what you all think. Thanks for taking your time to consider my concern.
Discussion in question
kaswing: There are entire denominations that consider themselves feminist-- Christian Scientists come to mind.
I was raised in the kind of conservative evangelical churches that are particularly noisy in America, and I had a close friend who was a Christian Scientist in my twenties. I struggled a lot with my church's attitudes and policies toward women, and my friend helped me see that most of that was cultural, not scriptural.
The churches I was going to emphasized some of Paul's more controversial statements about women and men when talking about women -- for example "I do not permit women to speak in church," and "women will be saved by childbearing." My friend emphasized Jesus' behavior and teaching about gender -- for example, that in Christ there is not male or female. It's pretty easy, once you look at Paul's writing vs. Jesus', to treat Paul's writing as his, culturally influenced opinion for churches at the time, rather than a statement about all women ever. For example, the stuff about women not speaking in church may have to do with the fact that women and men sat on separate sides of the church at the time, and the sermon was often in a language few women spoke. It could refer not to teaching, but to bored chatter. Paul instructs women to cover their heads, possibly in response to how they would be perceived by the rest of the community if they did not (as prostitutes, perhaps.)
Given all this, one day friend pointed out that the very first person Jesus asked to tell others about his resurrection was a woman. So why would we give Paul's "I do not permit" more weight than this act of Jesus? The fact that I was in my twenties and raised in the church, had gone to endless women's Bible studies, and no one had ever talked about how cool it was that a woman was the very first preacher of the gospel really blew my mind. It made me happy, but also I felt betrayed by the churches I'd grown up in.
All this to say that the culture of a lot of churches is toxic and difficult to disentangle from its teaching and it's members beliefs about gender. But, there are other ways of seeing and teaching it. It's a big, multi-author, contradictory text, so you can get just about whatever you want out of it. And many people get feminism, but more (at least in the US) get something else.
demmian: I have a hard time accepting that someone who takes the bible, one of the most violent books in all our history, as sacred is someone who can also be a feminist. And I have little patience for all the mental gymnastics to try to explain away the prejudices.
It's a big, multi-author, contradictory text, so you can get just about whatever you want out of it.
I can't accept this level of whitewashing. If this is your position, then, as a mod, I must ask you to refrain from posting further direct answers in our community; if you ignore this, you will be banned.
here, another comment by another redditor was removed, but I didn't get to see it before it was removed.
kaswing: I was going to leave this be because it seemed like a miscommunication, but I see you've removed comment, which implies that I am banned from posting top-level comments here. This is within your rights as a mod, but I don't think it's just. I'll take a moment to explain myself, and if you stand by your judgement, I'll have to accept it.
I wasn't saying that anyone is being logically consistent by being a Christian feminist or a Christian anti-feminist or anywhere in between. I didn't say I was a Christian, and I really don't think i whitewashed anything. (In fact, the statement you quoted would be highly offensive to most of the Christians I know personally, because it implies that the Bible is not inerrant.) My point was that the Bible is complicated and seems to contradict itself. Therefore, over the course of history and across denominations at any given time, people have seen what they want to see in it. For example, as you pointed out, there's a lot of violence and wrath in the Bible. The so-called "fire and brimstone" preachers grabbed on to that and built their message worldview around it. There's also a lot of love your neighbor and, in fact, "God is Love." Other people latch on to and build their worldview around that. Both of these groups downplay the sections of the Bible that support the opposite worldview.
Frankly, I think a person's perceived "biblical worldview" says more about them and their social context than it does about their religion's God or their scripture. I am not sure a person could have a consistent worldview lifted straight from the Bible as we read it today, without (consciously or not) choosing to emphasize or deemphasize some things.
My point is not "the teaching of the Bible is feminist!" it's "the Bible has a lot in it, and people support a lot of different worldviews with it."
Hopefully that helps clarify what I was trying to say. It may be that I haven't persuaded you of my thesis, or that some Christians (by their own definition) could be characterized as feminists (by some definition), but I hope you'd agree that this description of how people interpret their scripture doesn't preclude me from being a feminist.