The Role of Women

Whenever I describe the IVCF to non-Christian academic peers, they almost invariably express their astonishment at the fact that at virtually every IVCF event I attend, approximately 70% of the participants are women. Perhaps this level of involvement is not unusual in the world of contemporary Protestantism; after all, in many of the churches IVCF members attend every Sunday, women outnumber men. However, the proportion of women to men is not as high in evangelical churches as it is in the IVCF (Bibby 1987:102; Rawlyk 1996:143). As well, women’s roles are usually much more tightly controlled in many if not most evangelical churches than they are in the IVCF. In fact, IVCF participants who attend churches in the Fellowship Baptist, Christian Reformed, and Brethren traditions may never see a woman in the pulpit, or, if women are allowed to speak at the front of the church, they are not usually permitted to become senior pastors or interpret the Bible. At the IVCF functions I have attended, however, women are in no way restricted in their abilities to lead worship, deliver sermons, organize events, or perform any of the myriad tasks involved in maintaining the group. In fact, the chapter’s paid staff worker is a woman, and she tries to ensure that the position of president alternates between a male and a female student every other year. I began to wonder how to make sense of the high level of female participation at every McMaster IVCF event I attended, especially in light of the fact that the scholarly literature on evangelicalism in North America often depicts the tradition as inimical or opposed to the egalitarian or feminist values that are so prevalent at universities. During my research, I found that many, but not all, of the evangelical women I interviewed maintain nonegalitarian views on the role of women. In other words, the common academic depiction of the place of women in evangelicalism seems to be confirmed by my experience, even though I hope to nuance this portrayal somewhat.

Otherness

Throughout the previous three chapters, I have introduced (i) the set of questions A I am asking in this book, (2) four members of the IVCF, and (3) the ways these believers communicate among themselves and with non-Christians. By now it should be clear that IVCF students often feel separated from their non-Christian peers and professors. Moreover, as I have explained, many IVCF students feel that McMaster privileges the beliefs, values, and worldviews associated with liberalism, pluralism, materialism, and permissivism. According to Reginald Bibby, this evangelical perception is largely correct: . . . Education stands out as an institution that not only has been strongly influenced by individualism and relativism but also has done much to legitimize the two themes. Indeed, the mark of a well-educated Canadian is that he or she places supreme importance on the individual while recognizing that truth is relative. To decry individual fulfilment or to claim to have found the truth would be a dead giveaway that one has not graced the halls of higher learning. (1990:71) . . . This situation marginalizes, alienates, or (to make a verb of an adjective) others evangelical students who generally do not embrace these traditions (or many core elements of these traditions). However, although it might appear that IVCF students would suffer unrelenting and agonizing psychological difficulties during their years at McMaster, the majority of IVCF members do not seem to share such an experience. On the contrary, most IVCF participants I met struck me as no less sane, healthy, contented, and well adjusted than the non-Christian students I have met during the many years I have spent in Canadian universities. In fact, I have found that, with a few exceptions, evangelicals at McMaster seem slightly “happier” than non-Christian students. This obviously unscientific impression is consistent with Frankel and Hewitt’s (1994) findings that involvement in religious groups during one’s university years is positively correlated with higher levels of physical and psychological “well-being.” This observation raises an obvious question: how do evangelicals retain these relatively high levels of psychological well-being in an institution that not only ignores their values and beliefs but also, according to IVCF students, often promotes “anti-Christian” principles? The main insiders’ (or “emic”) answer to this question is simply that well-being is a natural by-product of a personal relationship with God (Little 1988:38).

Introduction

One warm Sunday evening in September 1993, I found myself walking aimlessly around the McMaster University campus. Earlier the same week, I had seen a poster advertising “Church at the John,” an event organized by the McMaster chapter of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF). Since I was academically interested in conservative Protestantism, and since at that point I knew no one in the city, I decided, for lack of other options, to attend this meeting. What I found there fell completely outside my expectations, prompted an elaborate series of questions, and ultimately resulted in the present book. Since I assumed that the meeting would be small, I worried that being ten minutes late might draw unwanted attention to my presence. As I descended the stairs of the Downstairs John (or simply “the John”), McMaster’s largest student bar, I could hear the noises of a large group of people. I thought I might have misread the poster a few days earlier; when I entered the bustling room, I was virtually certain I had. Except for the well-lit stage at one end of the room, the John was dark, and almost six hundred people were crowded into a space designed for no more than four hundred and fifty. The room was narrow and long, with a low stage at one end, pool tables at the opposite end, and a bar along the side of the room. People were standing and sitting in the aisles, on the bar, and against the walls beneath the bikini-clad models and slogans that festooned the neon beer signs. I discreetly asked one person who was standing against the wall if this was the right room for the IVCF meeting, and he replied that it was. I looked at him more intently to determine if he was joking, but he just smiled at me politely and bowed his head. After a few confusing moments, I realized he was praying. I turned away from him and noticed that all the other people in the room had bowed their heads in a prayer being led by a demure young woman on the stage.

Satan and the Spiritual Realm

Although the prominence of women in the McMaster IVCF challenged my presuppositions about several elements of evangelicalism, the role of Satan in this group’s discourse simply bewildered me. Whenever this topic arose during conversations with IVCF students, I became somewhat disoriented. For the first several interviews, I was incredulous and found myself rephrasing the open-ended questions I had posed, seeking more and more details in the answers that were offered to me. I had encountered references to Satan, demons, and angels in most of the scholarly and popular texts I had read before I started fieldwork. However, there is a significant and sometimes categorical difference between what one reads about in the comfort of one’s home and what one experiences in the field. In other words, although I was intellectually prepared to encounter Satan, demons, and angels in evangelical discourse, on a deeper level, I was unable to accept that contemporary North American university students would believe in the existence of such entities in quite the way that IVCF students actually do. Eventually, I was able to understand more clearly and without puzzlement what IVCF members mean when they speak of the spiritual realm. In fact, by the end of my fieldwork, I found myself interpreting several unsettling experiences in my own life according to the IVCF’s relatively “enchanted” worldview. Initially, I began investigating this issue by asking students questions about the role of Satan in their lives at McMaster. However, my respondents rarely referred solely to Satan, but rather to a much more elaborate array of nonhuman entities working for and against Satan. In referring to these entities, I use the phrase “spiritual realm” in addition to God, Satan, demons, and angels, partly for the sake of brevity but in addition because I seek to connote by this phrase an entire cxtrahuman dimension that includes all these figures. Because students talk about the demonic elements of the spiritual realm much more frequently than the angelic elements, this chapter focuses on the former. The evangelical discourse on the spiritual realm is rooted in both ancient Christianity and recent popular fiction.

Four Life Histories

One of the challenges of ethnography is that it requires one to enter into a community and become enmeshed in the web of affinities, opinions, gossip, rhetoric, and beliefs that characterize this group. Then, at the end of fieldwork, one must step outside the others’ world and interpret it for (other) others and oneself. This analytical stage, however, compels one to condense one’s experiences and, indeed, one’s newly acquired friends, to make them more manageable, less indeterminate elements of an academic study. This challenge constitutes both ethnography’s strength and its weakness. Moreover, such a challenge is what makes ethnography a social science: that the vast array of fieldwork experiences must be distilled and communicated in a nonidiosyncratic manner. Unfortunately, the very analytical processes by which the ethnographer’s personal experiences are rendered communicable often flatten out the most interesting parts of the “other.” Ethnographer David Mandelbaum describes this dilemma with poignant clarity: . . . When an anthropologist goes to live among the people he studies, he is likely to make some good friends among them. As he writes his account of their way of life, he may feel uncomfortably aware that his description and analysis omitted something of great importance. His clear friends have been dissolved into faceless norms; their vivid adventures have somehow been turned into pattern profiles or statistical types. (1973:178) . . . Such diminishing of the unique features of specific individuals is rarely the intention of the ethnographer; rather, this effacement is a natural by-product of analyses in which one attempts to make, as I do, for example, broader claims about the place and coping strategies of traditionally religious individuals in a secular culture. Even when the means of making such assertions is a “thick” description (Geertz 1973) of a religious group, it is inevitable that individual differences are sometimes effaced by broader conceptual reflections. Throughout the following chapters, I refer to and often quote many IVCF members at length. The ideal way to render these students’ comments comprehensible would be for me to provide a life history of each speaker before quoting him or her.

Witnessing at McMaster and Abroad

At a Friday lunch meeting in October 1996, a local fundamentalist pastor spoke passionately to a group of eight IVCF students. The meeting was held, as usual, in the corner of a large multipurpose room in the basement of Divinity College. Several of the students seemed uncomfortable with the young preacher’s zealous approach, somewhat out of place in the midafternoon of the week before midterm exams. The preacher exhorted: Are you excited about your faith? You and you and you [pointing]. I mean, are you really excited that Jesus voluntarily came down to earth and died for each one of your sins? Your sins. That’s pretty exciting if you ask me. I don’t think I deserved it, do you? And now, in this place, how are you sharing your faith? Are you doing all you can to spread your faith in our Lord to the world? Are you sharing your faith with your professors through your papers and with your friends in class? Or do you not believe that the power of God is great enough to protect you? Mac is the most challenging mission field because what is at the forefront of the teaching today will be at the forefront of thinking tomorrow. And some people will tell you that this university is a non-Christian place. But I tell you that this is true, but not completely true. Actually, this university is a pagan place. So, again, what did Paul do? He went to the world of the lost people and did not expect them to come to him. Are you doing this? Are you going to the world of the lost people all around you or are you waiting for them to come to you? . . . And don’t forget: you are disciples of Jesus Christ cleverly disguised as students who have to go to the world of the lost people and not expect them to come to you. It’s like people here don’t know they’re lost. It’s like convincing a sick person they’re sick. But we have to do it.

Conclusion

In The Struggle for America’s Soul: Evangelicals, Liberals, and Secularism (1989), Robert Wuthnow summarizes the support for the conventional notion that university education and religiosity are incommensurate in some fundamental way: “Virtually all surveys and polls, whether of the general public, college students, church members, or clergy, show inverse relations between exposure to higher education and adherence to core religious tenets, such as the existence of God, the divinity of Christ, the divine inspiration of the Bible, life after death, religious conversion, and the necessity of faith in Christ for salvation” (1989:145). Given the congruity of the surveys and polls to which Wuthnow refers, how can one explain either the sheer size of the McMaster IVCF chapter or its success at facilitating the retention of its members’ faith commitments? On the surface, it seems reasonable to expect that a religious group devoted to markedly conservative ideas and values would not flourish at a secular university. Since precisely this is happening at McMaster, we are left with three possible explanations. First, one could argue that these two hundred evangelicals are totally unaffected by the secularizing effects university education is supposed by some scholars to have on believers. This hypothesis is obviously untenable, because students consistently speak of their frustrations about the secular ethos of the campus. Second, one could suggest, following Hammond and Hunter (1984:233), that these believers inhabit a well-fortified “Christian ghetto,” the natural consequence of living among so many nonbelievers. I have suggested throughout this text that IVCF members do, indeed, have access to an evangelical fortress that protects them and their besieged subculture from certain elements of secularism. However, this interpretation overlooks another major source of the group’s strength: that in a variety of ways the IVCF facilitates constructive interaction between its members and non-Christians, interaction that is not oriented primarily toward witnessing. The third and, I would argue, most plausible ‘explanation of the vitality of the McMaster IVCF is that this group helps its members to mediate difference (Warner 1997a:219). In other words, the IVCF provides its members with a framework within which to negotiate contracts between its members’ evangelical convictions and the university’s broadly liberal and pluralistic conventions.

IVCF Rhetoric

Anthropologist James Clifford asserts that “the return of rhetoric to an important place in many fields of study . . . has made possible a detailed anatomy of conventional expressive modes.” This new focus on rhetoric, Clifford continues, “is less about how to speak well than about how to speak at all, and to act meaningfully, in a world, of public cultural symbols” (1986:10). Even when groups use the same official language as the mainstream culture in which they exist, a distinctive pattern of communication usually emerges within each group. In various ways, this new pattern separates the group’s members from nonmembers. This pattern of speech is often unique in terms of its characteristic intonation (cf. Tedlock 1983), or a group may distinguish itself through the rhetorical medium of song by virtue of the use of archaic language, as in the case of Roman Catholic monastic chanting, or through the employment of slang, as in the case of rap music. As anthropologist James Fernandez has observed, a sensitivity to local figures of speech is necessary for any good ethnography (1974:119). The most obvious distinguishing feature of a group’s mode of communication is the array of insider’s words — for example, words such as “outing” among gays and lesbians, “fly” among young inner-city African American men, and “away” among residents of Prince Edward Island. These words are not always incomprehensible to people outside of the group; I am neither homosexual, African American, nor an Islander, but I know what many of these group-specific terms mean. However, these terms originate in local communities and have a special significance within them that casual observers cannot always fully appreciate. In this chapter, I introduce and interpret the IVCF’s insider words, phrases, and gestures and the broader rhetorical and social contexts that give these phenomena their meanings. My experiences with non-IVCF evangelicals lead me to believe that the majority of IVCF rhetoric is shared by believers in the wider evangelical community. Therefore, the strategies manifested in IVCF students’ uses of distinctive rhetoric may shed some light on the role of the same or similar terms and gestures in North American evangelicalism in general.