by Craig Wong
Society is now really ruled by its own logos; say rather by a whole pantheon of its own
hypostases and powers… we are beginning to suspect that the idols are vain, but their demonic
influence upon our lives is not thereby allayed. For it is one thing to entertain critical doubts
regarding the god of this world, and another thing to perceive the dunamis, the meaning and
might of the living God who is building a new world. —Karl Barth
Worship God, not your husband. —Sharon Gallagher
In the 60s, the decade in which I was born and raised, G.I. Joe was all the rage. Too young to comprehend the atrocities of Vietnam (let alone be aware of them), I instead venerated American military power which I obsessively enacted with my army of little plastic infantrymen, jeeps and tanks. My dad did what most “good fathers” did in those days: nurture their sons in violence-backed male authority by together watching countless war movies (think Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, and John Wayne) and primetime cop shows. One of my enduring memories is of lounging in the living room with Dad watching ABC’s hit series Starsky and Hutch over deep-fried pork rinds, while my mom and sister labored away in the kitchen. This is what the women in my family were expected to do.
I was not a Christ-follower at the time, but as church historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez argues in Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, the American church was already playing a formative role in propagating warrior masculinity in the domestic sphere. For example, she explains that according to Billy Graham, the stability of the home was key to both morality and security. In his words: “A nation is only as strong as her homes.” She goes on to say that, “in the evangelical worldview, Satan and the communists were united in an effort to destroy the American home. And for Graham, a properly ordered family was a patriarchal one. Because Graham believed that God had cursed women to be under man’s rule, he believed that wives must submit to husbands’ authority. Graham … didn’t hesitate to offer Christian housewives helpful tips: When a husband comes home from work, run out and kiss him. Says Graham: ‘Give him love at any cost. Cultivate modesty and the delicacy of youth. Be attractive.’ In short, keep a clean house, look pretty, and don’t nag.”
While I was busy playing out war scenarios through my little green soldiers, dispatching platoons of them across the living room floor, Sharon Gallagher was waging her own battles just a couple miles away from me in neighboring Berkeley. Gallagher tirelessly exposed liturgies of dominance in all its forms, including military supremacy, racial discrimination, and most of all, sexism and gender inequality. She was a fearless advocate, pushing back against biases within her own ministry community, the Christian World Liberation Front. Unlike Graham, she refused to capitulate to the curse’s narrative of unilateral submission to men but instead insisted that an entirely different world was possible. Hers was a biblical worldview that understood that worship of God resulted ultimately in a world where men, women, and the whole of creation lived in loving harmony.
It is no wonder, then, that Sharon would come to play a significant role in the writing of the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern in 1973. The need for such a declaration emerged at a time when the ecclesial community under the broad label of “evangelical” was contested ground, and possessed high stakes for large swaths of Christians both within and outside of the United States. For this reason, at the Conference on Christianity and Politics at Calvin College that spring, a group of evangelical leaders, including Ron Sider, John Alexander, Bill Pannell, Leighton Ford and Jim Wallis, began planning a Thanksgiving Workshop on Evangelicals and Social Concern. Sharon was invited to this workshop.
Ron Sider, took issue with then-president Nixon’s policies, “designed to slow down or reverse racial progress … expanding tax loopholes for the rich and failing to end the Vietnam conflict [which was] responsible for the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and even more deaths of Vietnamese innocents.” Asbury University professor David Swartz, a student of the Declaration, quotes Jim Wallis, “A vote for Richard Nixon is a vote for cabinet corruption and I.T.T. payoffs, for government secrecy and deception. A vote for Richard Nixon is a vote for southern strategies, for the manipulations of racial prejudice and patriotic fervor, for the erosion of basic civil rights. … [A] campaign characterized by the politics of fear—fear of blacks, fear of communists, fear of crime, fear of change, fear of not being number one.” The group discerned an American Church that largely maintained a blind eye to such matters. The Chicago Declaration therefore called evangelicals “committed to the Lord Jesus Christ and the full authority of the Word of God” to “demonstrate repentance in a Christian discipleship that confronts the social and political injustices of our nation.”
While “The Workshop” (as they would come to refer to it) was a remarkable group with like-minded concerns, it was not without its tensions. Swartz points out that “the drafting committee’s first attempt was so strident that Frank Gaebelein, a sympathetic editor at Christianity Today, proclaimed it ‘heretical.’ John Alexander, no conservative himself, agreed with Gaebelein, calling the initial draft ‘leftist propaganda’ [while]…black participants sharply attacked the planning committee for including only one black member.” The Mennonites in the room insisted on an emboldened emphasis on the evils of militarism.
However, it was Sharon, along with Nancy Hardesty and the handful of female participants in the workshop, who took issue with the first draft of the Declaration which made no mention of sexism or gender inequality. They took the fight to their male counterparts and, as a result of their persistent influence, the following two-sentence statement was included in the declaration’s final version: “We acknowledge that we have encouraged men to prideful domination and women to irresponsible passivity. So we call on both men and women to practice mutual submission and active discipleship.” While the language may seem tame by present progressive standards, it is important to underscore how radical and threatening this (inarguably biblical) admonition was to the evangelical mainstream of that day.
For Sharon, gospel faithfulness meant laboring against the grain of the prevailing culture, speaking out against deeply entrenched forms of domination that guised themselves as being Christian. She did so because she knew that the gospel was at work, redeeming the human community. Hers is a legacy of hope and courage, one that we at New College Berkeley and Radix Magazine can be proud of. But Sharon’s legacy should also provoke us. She leaves us with important questions: What does it mean for us to live faithfully to the good news of Christ in the current moment? What words must be spoken to the Church in our time? What is required of us, if we are to participate with God in the new world that He is building?
Dr. Craig Wong is the Executive Director of New College Berkeley (NCB), a theological “third space” to help the Church discern and contextualize the gospel in the San Francisco Bay Area. He recently completed a DMin at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, MI, after completing an MA at the same institution. Before NCB, Wong served on the staff of a Presbyterian church in San Francisco’s Mission District where he formed and led a congregation-based, community nonprofit that served immigrant families from Latin America and Asia. He also served for over 12 years on the board of the Christian Community Development Association and the corporate board of Dayspring Partners, a gospel-centered technology company in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco. He and his wife Tina have raised four children (now adults) in San Francisco’s Excelsior neighborhood.