What drove opposition to women's ordination?
The crusade against women's ordination was, in the first place, a contrarian pushback against the Church's commitment to the mix of toxic femininity and political posturing that later came to be called 'political correctness' and eventually 'wokeness'.
The church's toxic femininity was nothing new. In the Catholic Church it was held in check before the Reformation by a male hierarchy that exercised political power and waged war. Pope Julius II, fully armed, led papal troops into battle; Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII) had the Holy Roman Emperor kneeling barefoot in the snow at Canossa, begging not to be excommunicated. After the Reformation in Protestant lands where clerical positions were not high political offices and clergy did not lead the troops into battle churches, especially conservative evangelical churches, promoted 'muscular Christianity' – and still do. Genteel mainline churches, including the Episcopal Church did not. And by the late 20th century they had gone whole hog for the ewig weiblich: care, compassion, sentimentality, and the ethos of the 'helping professions' to which many clergy thought they belonged. St. Francis was in; Hildebrand was out. (I'd written a bluebook in a church history class comparing them. I liked Hildebrand – I did not warm to St. Francis)
Churches' toxic femininity was oppressive to many men. It was even more oppressive to women like me who weren't wired up for, it because we'd been pressured and bullied to fit the mold, and had psychotherapy inflicted on us force us into our 'feminine role'. As an ordinary pew-sitter it I could avoid the church's toxic femininity but in the inner circle, amongst clergy and church workers it was pervasive, as I discovered during my quest for ordination. One priest who supported me for ordination opined that I could do better if I 'wore softer colors' – and that I could have done better if I'd been in a 'softer profession, like biology'. Another remarked that I wouldn't have all this trouble if I were trying to get ordained as a Baptist minister.
Toxic femininity was not limited to the Episcopal church. Trying to get academic credits to use against seminary requirements if I were accepted for ordination I enrolled in USD's MA program in pastoral ministry. The classes were strange, particularly for someone coming from philosophy. While the instructor spoke students periodically cood softly, 'mmmm'. In class discussion they paraphrased the instructor and 'shared' their own experiences while other in the class nodded and cooed. I tried to participate but I just didn't know how to do this. After 30 years in the philosophy business, I just knew how to ask questions, ask for clarification, criticize points, and argue – to do what's done in philosophy classes and at papers' Q&A. I was on my best behavior, I was polite, I just did the normal thing but an instructor complained about me and I was kicked out of the program. Students had complained that I'd 'ruined the class' for them.
Along with the toxic femininity mainline churches in the 1970s had taken up the Revolution, as they saw it. Along with being therapists and social workers, clergy saw themselves as community organizers and political activists of the Left. The first women to be ordained in the Episcopal Church – illegally, shortly before women's ordination was accepted by General Convention – styled themselves 'the Philadelphia Eleven'. This branding established them as Revolutionaries – along with the Chicago Seven, members of the Yippie Party who demonstrated in Chicago during the 1968 Revolution, and the Catonsville Nine, priests and nuns opposing the war in Vietnam, who went to prison after breaking into a draft office and pouring their own blood on the files.
No one outside of the Episcopal Church bubble seemed to realize how ludicrous the Philadelphia Eleven's branding was. No one, apart from Anglo-Catholic clergy and their protégés had any serious objections to women's ordination: they were tilting at windmills. And the Episcopal Church had the reputation, not entirely deserved, of being the religious wing of the upper-crust WASP establishment so the whole affair seemed like a tiff at a garden party led by society matrons. It was Barchester Towers. Everyone knew that women's ordination would go through at the forthcoming General Convention. The Philadelphia Eleven, however, insisted afterwards that had it not been for their activism, being ordained by three cooperative retired bishops (including the father of one of the women) and then going around the country to celebrate underground protest masses, General Convention would not have passed women's ordination.
I went to an underground mass celebrated by Carter Heywood, the leader of the Philadelphia Eleven, in a Greenwich Village apartment, for which I brought the wine. I had a connection: a friend of my best friend was Carter Heywood's assistant and chief acolyte. The service was the usual thing for an informal small group setting, with various 1970sish politically correct interpolations and the discussion afterwards was reminiscent of SDS meetings I'd gone to as an undergraduate. SDS at the small, expensive liberal arts college I attended did not engage in any activities on the street but members were verbally militant. I was reprimanded by the leader at one meeting for my remarks about how to benefit the oppressed. He said it sounded like I 'just wanted them to have color TV sets'. That was, of course, exactly what I wanted. In retrospect it strikes me that SDS at Lake Forest College was all of a piece with the Philadelphia Eleven's revolution: leftist posturing in WASP-world.
The conservative contrarian response to women's ordination was understandable. The posturing of the Philadelphia Eleven and their supporters, their self-righteousness and self-satisfaction, their virtue-signaling, and their pretense to be courageous revolutionaries was offensive. And the church's toxic femininity, with which women's ordination was linked, was even more offensive. In sermons at St. Mary the Virgin the curate, who viewed himself as an intellectual and theologian in the scholastic tradition, preached against the fuzzy thinking, emotionalism, and the irrational sentimentalities of liberal religion which rejected clear, rational doctrine in favor of 'the roiling of the gut'. (I remember that phrase) And like the Roman orator my mother had told me about who ended all his orations whatever the topic with 'Carthago delenda est', all his sermons eventually came around to women's ordination as the embodiment of the irrationality and gut-roiling of liberal Protestantism.
I got it. It was toxic femininity that, in my teens, drove me and other children my age to Ayn Rand. It was her essays, 'On the Virtue of Selfishness' and 'For the New Intellectual' that impressed me – I found her novels crude and boring. She claimed to be defending Reason, as found in Aristotle, against 'Atilla' and 'The Witch Doctor'. Atilla was thuggish anti-intellectualism – in contemporary terms, MAGA. The Witch Doctor was religion, but a large part of it was the toxic femininity I found in the Church: sentimentality and irrationality – the mandatory compassion, currently packaged as the supposedly feminist 'ethic of care'. The alternative she offered was Reason, the Via Media between toxic masculinity and toxic femininity, which she and her followers understood as Libertarianism: the politics of sophomore boys and tech bros. For me it was, and is, analytic philosophy – anathema to religious studies faculty and suspect in the Church.
The Philadelphia Eleven posed a problem because their ordination had been declared 'valid but illicit'. No one outside of the Episcopal Church knew what that meant: how could you separate validity from legality? But many, possibly most Episcopalians and all Anglo-Catholics knew exactly what it meant: validity meant the Power – the power to turn bread and wine into the Body and Blood. And the Philadelphia Eleven had gotten it illegally, stolen it from under the nose of the Church. Anglo-Catholics, of course believed that they didn't have the Power because, as one put it, a woman could no more be ordained a priest than a radish could. Their concern was that if women were ordained then people would be getting duds for communion – and if women were consecrated as bishops then even the men they ordained wouldn't get the Power because only someone who had the Power+ of episcopacy, the power to make priests as well as consecrate bread and wine, could confer the Power. The rector of one church who was replaced by a woman is supposed to have complained 'she's putting blanks into my tabernacle'. (couldn't find the reference – but I couldn't make this up)
Many Episcopalians probably did understand this worry even though they didn't think women priests would be producing blanks. Of all the Roman Catholic stuff clergy tried to introduce into the Anglican Church at the Anglo-Catholic Revival it was only the Real Presence doctrine that had any popular uptake. In confirmation class we were told that it was customary to fast from midnight before communion. There were also other rules that reminded me of the rules for dealing with the American flag I learnt in Girl Scouts. Women must not wear gloves and in receiving communion you held your hands palm up with right hand crossed over the left. In response to the worry that drinking from the same chalice was unsanitary we were told that you couldn't catch anything from drinking the wine at communion, though there was some disagreement as to whether this was because the alcohol killed germs or because, as one priest put it in a letter to The Living Church, 'no germ could survive in that charged environment'.
Other imports did not get any real uptake. The Mary stuff Anglo-Catholics worked hard to promote never worked. I stayed for a few days at Mepkin Abbey where the services involved various Mary hymns and there, amongst Roman Catholics, it seemed natural and genuine. In Anglican settings it always seemed self-conscious and fake. On my last sabbatical at St. Mary Mags Oxford, the service ended with the Angelus, with the people responding to the priest's part with hail Mary's. It seemed fake. The rosary was also fake and, being a pedant, I thought importing it was silly. The point of the rosary was to have something for illiterate lay brothers and sisters in monasteries to do in place of the Offices that the literate monks and nuns sang in Latin. The Anglican Church had the Daily Office in English and didn't need the rosary. It could be used, I suppose, as a meditation technique like the Jesus Prayer, but it didn't work as a part of public liturgy. As for cults of the saints and other Roman Catholic devotions, to the extent that they figured in Anglo-Catholic settings they were completely fake. My husband remarked, accurately, that Episcopalians who went for this sort of thing were pretending to be Sicilian peasants. And in a way that was very much like the Philadelphia Eleven and members of Lake Forest College's SDS chapter pretending to be Marxist revolutionaries.
This posed the question of why Anglo-Catholics were so keen to be Catholic. Why didn't they just join the Roman Catholic Church and be done with it? Some did. But it wasn't easy because the Catholic Church had a culture that one couldn't just absorb. And because to some extent, especially to Anglo-Catholics, Anglicanism had a culture. It wasn't just generic Protestantism. Episcopalians by and large didn't just go to any church that was convenient or congenial regardless of denomination when they moved to a new town. There was a history (In confirmation class: 'Henry VIII did not start the Anglican Church'. 'Who did?' 'Jesus'). There was a liturgy with phrases that echoed in your head ('We do not presume to come to this thy table...', 'Meet and right and our bounden duty') and hymns ('Alleluia, Sing to Jesus'). Anglo-Catholic clergy who wanted reunion with the Catholic Church didn't want to let go of this: they fanaticized 'Anglican Rite' parishes.
And there was a deep reason why Anglo-Catholics identified as Catholic and wanted to be identified as Catholic. It was because Anglicanism was sacramental. It was primarily a religion of sacrament and liturgy, not of the Word. It was a religion of holy things and holy places. In a church you bowed to the altar. Churches were never, as I'd heard them called in other Protestant traditions, 'auditoriums' or preaching halls. If you went to an Episcopal Church for the sermon, you would be disappointed. Anglo-Catholics didn't want to be absorbed into a generic liberal Protestantism, which was where many were afraid women's ordination was taking the church. And Anglo-Catholics wanted to be identified as Catholic, not as fakers in fancy dress pretending to be Sicilian peasants. We, many of us I think, had the sense that people thought we were fake. This was understandable because there was a lot of fakery going on. But there was also a lot that was genuine, including imports from the Roman Catholic tradition. At St. Mary the Virgin during Lent there was a service of Stations of the Cross and Benediction on Friday evenings. This was real.
Beyond that, Anglo-Catholics wanted reunion with the Roman Catholic Church or at least intercommunion because it would be convenient. There were Roman Catholic churches all over the country and all over the world. In the US they were dense in urban coastal areas but sparse in most of the country. Where would you go if you lived in rural North Dakota? Of course, one reason why there weren't Episcopal churches in rural North Dakota is that no Episcopalians lived there. I wondered what I'd do if I were in the military where the only options were Protestant, Catholic, or Jew. I had no interest in generic Protestantism, especially the evangelical variety that was the industry standard in that setting, but I couldn't go to a Catholic service, at least, I couldn't go for communion and would, in any case, feel like an outsider.
As a faculty member at a Catholic college, I couldn't go for communion at the Mass of the Holy Spirit that kicked off the academic year. One year a directive to faculty came down from the head of University Ministry. He told us that non-Catholic faculty who attended the Mass of the Holy Spirit – which we were of course welcome at and encouraged to attend! – should not go for communion because, he explained, Roman Catholics believed in the Real Presence'. These were fighting words. A colleague in math, whose father in the UK was an Anglican priest, was furious. Neither she nor I ever went again. A colleague in my department, a Roman Catholic priest to whom I was close, told me that if I were to go to a service in Founders Chapel, down the hall from my office, I was not to go for communion. 'Don't embarrass us', he said. If I had been someone who just came in off the street it would be no problem but since I was known to be non-Catholic, he and other priests could not give me communion and if I went up it would be embarrassing. Being a known Episcopalian was like being a notorious evil-liver who, according to the official rules which, like 39 Articles, no one bothered with, could not receive communion in the Episcopal church. Regular evil-livers who just came in off the street could because that wouldn't be embarrassing.
After women's ordination got through General Assembly as predicted there were still dioceses that wouldn't comply. The last holdouts were, predictably, Fond du Lac and Eau Claire in Wisconsin, the heart of the Episcopal Church's Anglo-Catholic 'biretta belt', Fort Worth, and San Joachim. Birettas were another import from the Roman Catholic Church that I thought were silly. Roman Catholic priests who had gone to seminary in Rome wore them because they were part of the academic regalia of Italian universities.
I think the four dioceses who didn't accept women's ordination eventually folded though there are still isolated parishes where women priests are not welcome and Nashota House, the Anglo-Catholic seminary (in, yup, Wisconsin) still doesn't accept women studying for ordination. Overall, the ordination of women has become a non-issue. Anglo-Catholic clergy seem to have given up their fantasies of reunion with the Roman Catholic Church. In large part I think most did a volte face on women's ordination because gay culture changed. Most Anglo-Catholic clergy were gay or 'allies', and in the 1970s gay culture, at least in the church, was ingrown and misogynistic. When gay men and women united as LGBT people, gay clergy changed their minds and welcomed women priests – especially if they were gay.
Why was there a biretta belt in, of all places, the Midwest? Because in the 19th Century age of evangelism most missionaries went to Africa and other foreign places to convert the heathen; Anglo-Catholics went to the Midwest to convert the Protestants whom others didn't think needed to be converted. Why was Virginia churchmanship, emanating from VTS (Virginia Theological Seminary) to the South low church? Because Anglicanism was native to the High South, defined by R-less Southern, flowing from Tidewater, as distinct from the R-full Southern of Appalachia and through to Texas – George W. Bush's accent. Anglicanism was the religion of the High Southern gentry since the area was colonized. The religion of the North before the 19th century was a hodge-podge – with Calvinists in New England and in the Middle Atlantic states Lutherans in Scandinavian and German areas, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Dutch Reformed in the Hudson valley and New Jersey, Catholics in Maryland, and a range of other denominations spread all over the territory. Anglicanism only came in and took root amongst the Northern gentry in the 19th Century in the wake of the Oxford Movement, and what came in was high church.
Why did high church 'take', not only in the North but even in the South so that by the 1990s when I visited VTS the priests there would have been arrested for their liturgical practices and vestments in the UK during the 19th century, when mixing water with the communion wine and putting too many candles on the altar was illegal? One conjecture is that the US had an indigenous high Anglican tradition originating from Seabury, the first bishop of the Episcopal Church, who was consecrated by high church non-juring bishops of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Who knows? Maybe neither low church nor Evangelical, two different things, flourished in the Episcopal Church because for low church there were many mainline Protestant options competing and because there were over 65 Baptist denominations and, more recently, many non-denominational denominations, who did Evangelical much better. I'm a history buff, fascinated about how these things work.
I liked VTS, which I first visited to read a paper at a conference of SEAD (Scholarly Engagement with Anglican Doctrine) which I only later discovered was organized to oppose the ordination a gays and same sex unions. Leaving that aside, I liked the faculty and students, and I liked the place. It seemed academically rigorous for a seminary and, I'd been told, VTS students did better on the General Ordination Exams than students from other programs. There were faculty doing serious Biblical scholarship and I understood that the classes weren't like the ones I took for the pastoral ministry MA at USD. If I'd been accepted for ordination, it's where I'd have preferred to go.