Wanting More Change: A Few Reflections from a Secular Menace

It was a delight to be invited to participate in the 2005 conference "Teaching for Change," which celebrated twenty years of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR). I anticipated that the gathering would serve as a unique and privileged opportunity to commemorate scholarly and activist successes as well as a forum within which to identify strategies for addressing the difficulties in advancing equality that lie in the decades ahead. Although the conference constituted one of the most pleasurable and defining moments in my life as a scholar, our discussions then and in the intervening two years have also underscored for me the great challenges and limitations that continue to characterize feminist scholarship in religious studies.

Like many students majoring in the field of women and religion in the 1980s and 1990s, I was moved by the work of pioneering feminist scholars, particularly Mary Daly. While other scholars argued for reinterpreting, reforming, and reconfiguring so-called sacred texts and religious institutions in order to recognize and create new opportunities for women's equal contribution and participation, Daly anticipated that the women's movement could "become the single greatest challenge to the major religions of the world."¹ Similarly, my graduate advisor, Naomi Goldenberg, argued that as women took positions of power in society and religious institutions, it would "bring an end to God" who simply wouldn't "fit in anymore."²

Nevertheless, this trajectory of argument regarding the irreconcilability of patriarchal religions with women's emancipation has not become the dominant characteristic of feminist studies and religion. Instead, feminist analysis in this field has predominantly focused on questions regarding women's experiences in religious contexts. In my presentation at the 2005 conference, I challenged the limitations of this focus and the presumption of some scholars that women's experiences in religion should constitute the sole preoccupation of our field. Despite the promise of her book's title Feminism and Religion, for example, Rita Gross suggests that the scope of the field of women and religion only encompass information about women's roles in major religions in tandem with feminist perspectives on each of them.³ In a recent article entitled "Whose History Are We Writing? Reading Feminist Texts with a Hermeneutics of Suspicion," Carol Christ expresses concerns about the number of chapters in recent publications about women and religion that have been written by scholars outside the field. These contributions do not broach what Christ considers the subject of religion, the parameters of which she does not define. She worries that the inclusion of work by scholars outside the field implies that "exciting feminist work in religion is not being produced by feminist scholars within the field."⁴ Gross's and Christ's interpretations foreground what appears to be an unfortunate desire among many scholars of women and religion to delineate the parameters of our discourse around at least some explicit affiliation to religion or commitment to religious scholarship even though the term "religion" remains obscured and uninterrogated.

Aside from raising concerns regarding the potential exclusion of valuable scholarship from our field, I fear that this rather theologically orthodox approach reinforces a definition of our field as primarily an ecumenical dialogue among women committed to various religious traditions.⁵ Moreover, I am concerned that the failure to problematize the very definition and practice of religion itself will lead us to neglect critical issues of our time. In her paper "What's God Got to Do with It? A Call for Problematizing Basic Terms in the Feminist Analysis of Religion," Goldenberg calls on feminist scholars of religion to "open up spaces to discuss the grounding of assertions based on appeals to religion."⁶ She provides various examples of the ways in which religion and belief have acquired an almost untouchable and sacred status in social and legal arenas and how this discursive protection can serve as a basis for discriminatory acts that would otherwise be prohibited.

After exploring how attempts to introduce Sharía law and religious courts as alternative adjudication methods for family law have nearly succeeded in Canada, Goldenberg...