Passport to Heaven (RLE Women and Religion)

Gender Roles in the Unification Church

Kathleen S. Lowney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138813229
• eBook ISBN: 9781317590316
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book focuses on the gender roles within the Unification Church, and on particularly the gender roles as expressed through the vows of marriage. It examines the more widely shared patriarchal assumptions about women in a circumscribed socio-religious environment, with the Church's gender role system being investigated largely on the level of its theological explanations for gender roles. The Church's ethos, its lived reality, is also examined, and for this many interviews have been conducted with the 'blessed', the married couples.

First published in 1992.

Weaving the Methodological Tapestry

A FEMINIST FOREWORD

“Women … must deal with their situation as a precondition for writing about it.”¹ Such a statement may seem rather obvious at first glance; however such a simple sentence causes me to ponder, to think. What does it mean -- that any particular woman must deal with her own life experience in order to write? Certainly it makes visceral sense. The scholar must become conscious of her own social location, life history, and personal biases that will have an impact on her work.

I am a woman, Roman Catholic, a student of the sociology of religion, a feminist, middle class, white, and at the time of this writing, engaged to be married. None of these labels fully defines me, yet each is an integral portion of who I am. Religion has long fascinated me; through ritual I feel closest to God, self and others; and it is only in my affirmation of self as woman that I find my ability, dare I say my audacity, to investigate the lives of others. I am not male, nor do I wish to be. Yet every so often I ponder what it must be like to belong in so many ways that I as a female do not…in the Academy, behind the altar, in the executive boardroom.

So as woman I am socially located on the fringes of society, for I am Other.² That otherness which I feel frees me to sympathize with the many others in society who are left out, even persecuted. It has been the religiously marginal -- the fundamentalist Mormon polygamists, the contemplative Carmelite nuns, the Rastafarians -- who have fascinated me, who have held my attention throughout graduate school and into my teaching career. To the few who know me well, it is no surprise that the new religions play major roles in my sociological research. They too are persecuted and marginalized because they do not comfortably fit into what our society views as typical, as mainstream.

So I agree with feminist theoretician Maria Mies when she writes that “due to this ’inner view of the oppressed,’ women social scientists are better equipped than their male counterparts to make a comprehensive study of the exploited groups. Men often do not have this experiential knowledge and therefore lack empathy, the ability for identification.”³ Such personal knowledge of oppression, however painful and real, needs to be focussed, needs to be grounded. Women as a group must analyze our social situations. It is feminist theory which provides this linkage between knowledge of oppression and action to overturn systems which oppress us. As such, feminist analyses seek to comprehend and then critique structures of patriarchy. While such critiques are not the same as social change they are the first step toward it.

Whatever then renders women unequal, invisible, or “other” is in need of radical, that is to say to the root, change. This is the awesome, multi-faceted task to which we feminists have committed ourselves. One vital element in the feminist agenda is an examination of the Academy as a source of male privilege and male knowledge generation: it is a locus of socialization into patriarchy. What we have realized is that

Most of the knowledge produced in our society had been produced by men; they have usually generated the explanations and the schemata and they have checked with each other and vouched for the accuracy and adequacy of their view of the world. They have created men’s studies [the academic curriculum], for, by not acknowledging that they are presenting only the explanations of men, they have ’passed off this knowledge as human knowledge. Women have been excluded as the producers of knowledge and as the subjects of knowledge, for men have often made their own knowledge and their own sex representative of humanity; they have, in Mary Daly’s terms, presented false knowledge by insisting that their partial view be accepted as the whole.⁴

The feminist critique of patriarchy realizes however, that merely to add the history, sociology, economics, psychology, theology…of women into the academic disciplines is not enough, for while such an approach might highlight patriarchal power structures operative in society, it cannot overturn them. Feminists seek rather that the Academy and, most importantly, society change. We want male privilege and male half-truths to be revealed for what they are -- myths detrimental to women, half the human race. We seek to produce such change through our conscious commitment to work with the oppressed and through our writing projects which portray the realities of women’s experiences under patriarchal oppression.⁵ Further, feminism argues that these androcentric power structures are damaging to men, only more insidiously so.

Such a feminist critique however, should not be misunderstood. Recognition that the experience of the theorist shapes the theory does not necessarily lead to a radical relativism. Some feminists do hold the view that no normative judgments can be made. Others, and I include myself here, seek to shift the basis for such judgments away from male prerogative and we propose a new norm: what is not beneficial to women must be judged as non-functional for society, as somehow lacking in its fundamental nature. Thus this new norm has a corrective nature. It seeks to redress patriarchy’s systematic forgetting, indeed its suppression of women. Therefore any theory which does not promote female freedom and fulfillment should be rejected as a less than adequate view of reality. Thus it can be stated that

one framework [social theory] is not as good as another, that all descriptions of social reality are not equally valid, and that some societies are better structured than others to allow for human fulfillment….A successful feminist theory must provide us with the conceptual tools for describing our experiences as women and men in the world, including experiences of which we may hardly have been aware before encountering the theory.⁶

Fundamental to such new feminist theoretical endeavors is a concept of gender which affirms that it must be a key methodological tool with which we examine reality. Thus gender will become a “primary social category which cannot be directly subsumed under such analytical categories as class and caste.”⁷ It is no accident then, but rather conscious choice, that the bulk of feminist research analyzes women and/or the interactions between women and men. Such an understanding of gender as a social category explicitly repudiates any equivalence between gender and fundamental anatomical differences in the human gonads. Gender roles are socially constructed, biological distinctions are not. “Gender is not a rigid or reified analytic category imposed on human experience, but a fluid one whose meaning emerges in specific contexts as it is created and recreated through human actions.”⁸

Gender roles then, are culturally and socially specific. In order to analyze any particular, defined cluster of roles, the context within which these roles have emerged, and the manners in which they are negotiated and are maintained must be examined. Two important elements of any such context are the ideological component -- the overarching worldview constructed by the society -- and its ethos, its “lived reality.” The juxtaposition of these two elements allows the academician to evaluate the degree of conformity and the degree of disjuncture between the ideal and the actual. Such a lack of fit exists within every culture. Often this gap is easier to see in a culture which is not one’s own.

The Unification Church has been chosen as the topic of this dissertation, which will focus particularly on the Church’s gender roles as expressed through the vows of marriage. The Church has long been of interest to me (I recently re-discovered a paper I wrote on it while I was in high school) and I find it useful to examine the more widely shared patriarchal assumptions about women in a circumscribed socio-religious environment and in one which is not my own. The subject of the Church’s gender role system will be investigated largely on the level of the its theological explanations for gender roles. Buttressing this theoretical explanatory level will be another, that of the Church’s ethos, its lived reality. Interviews with “blessed,” that is to say married, couples have been conducted. Their insights will be woven into the narrative in order to understand the Church ’from within.’

Undergirding the project will be feminist theoretical methodologies, as has already been noted. Classical, that is to say male-oriented sociological theories, notably those of Max Weber and Peter Berger, will be applied when appropriate, although only with the necessary correctives to take account of women. Each chapter will take a vow that the couple makes during the Blessing Ceremony (the public affirmation of marriage) and analyze it from both the perspectives of ideology and the lived reality of its members. My research involved a convenience sample of Blessed couples. While I do not claim my sample was drawn systematically, I believe that the results can still speak to the reality of being a blessed Unificationist couple.

THE PERSONAL IS THE POLITICAL…AND THE ACADEMIC

A truism within the feminist movement is that “the personal is the political.” It serves as an emotionally charged motto, one that is multi-valent for us women. Sheila D. Collins, one of the current wave of feminist writers on the subject of religion, understands the motto in the following manner:

Women have come to an understanding that the personal is political through the consciousness-raising process. In the course of this process we came to learn that the problems we thought were purely personal -- that we thought were due to our own peculiar upbringing or to our own inabilities or neuroses -- were, in fact, shared by every other woman. We began to see that our relationships with our mothers, our fathers, our male and female peers, our bosses, our husbands, and our children followed similar patterns and met with similar resistances. We realized that while each woman’s life follows a distinctive course, there is a general pattern that unites us all.⁹

This general pattern gives us strength. It becomes the foundation upon which we stand to look at our own social locations as women -- personal and corporate -- and to analyze them. Consciousness-raising groups discovered that such deep analysis often occurred during crises in women’s lives.

Only when there is a rupture in the ’normal’ life of a woman, i.e., a crisis such as divorce, the end of a relationship, etc., is there a chance for her to become conscious of her true condition. In the ’experiences of crises’ and rupture with normalcy, women are confronted with the real social relationships in which they had unconsciously been submerged as objects without being able to distance themselves from them.¹⁰

I believe however, that these ruptures need not always be painful ones in order for women to examine our lives. Marriage can be such a self-reflective moment, albeit a happy one. A woman’s sense of self becomes refined as she ponders a union with one particular man. Will she choose or allow herself to be subsumed into the traditional gender role of wife, mother, and homemaker or will she opt for the far more fluid, more unknown role of juggling a career, her own personhood, being a wife, possibly even a mother?

Unification Church brides, through their marriage or blessing, experience such a moments of decision. Yet they are supported by a vast ideology-theology which reduces the experiential ambiguity. The Church affirms only one appropriate gender role for women -- that of mother. This role choice is made easy for churchwomen, for as we will see, even while celibate, they are the nurturing, supportive caregivers in the communal living centers. Thus almost from the moment women join the Church they are socialized into affirming motherhood as their rightful role, a role instituted by God.

In a concrete way, I have much in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chapter One: Weaving the Methodological Tapestry
• Chapter Two: Indemnified Love: Celibacy in the Unification Church
• Chapter Three: The Unification Family Ethic and Restoration History
• Chapter Four: From the Cradle to World War Three
• Chapter Five: Recapitulation and Future Conversations
• Bibliography