It's in the Code Ep 106: "Why Do They Support Their Own Oppression?”
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Why do people who are oppressed within high-control religious contexts so often support their own oppression? This is a question that baffles critics of high-control religion, particularly as it relates to such issues as gender relations and sexuality. Dan tackles this question, suggesting that this is a phenomenon that is not limited to religious contexts, but which is especially pronounced within them. He argues that in order for people to recognize their subordination as oppression, they have to encounter alternatives to the institutions, practices, and structures with which they are familiar.
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As always, I want to say welcome to everybody coming into It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I, Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, am delighted to be with you.
And as always, thank you so much for listening, for taking the time to tune in, for those of you who are able to subscribe and support us in that way, for doing that.
And thank you for the comments, the feedback, the questions.
I continue to close the gap on the emails.
My aim is to completely close the gap by the start of the new academic year in late August.
So hopefully, if you have not heard from me, you will.
That's my aim.
But at any rate, it's always so meaningful to read those.
Keep those coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
I do value them.
I have a long running list of topics and thoughts and concerns and interests and so forth.
So, thank you.
Let's just dive in here.
Today, this episode, I want to respond to a question that I encounter a lot.
I encounter it from listeners, you know, and again, sort of rounding up all the emails and stuff, you sort of see, I see all these kind of in batches.
I hear it from students.
When I teach, I talk about it and work through it a lot with clients.
I just, you know, regular people, you know, you're sitting around talking to another parent at a school event or something and they find out some of the things I do and they will ask this.
And it was also spurred by a recent CNN article.
It was an article that basically looked at, specifically focused on, I think, the Southern Baptist Convention, but it looked at why women remain within religious organizations that deny them leadership positions.
And basically, this is a question I get a lot, and it's not limited to women, but I want to focus it there because I think that's an inflection point for this kind of high-control religion.
And really, the question is, why do they support their own oppression?
People come to me and say, I don't understand why a woman would stay in a context that emphasizes For example, male headship, or feminine submission, or very traditional sexuality and gender roles, or denies a woman's right to have bodily autonomy in various domains, and so forth.
Why do they support their own oppression?
And that was basically the focus of this CNN article.
And so that's the question that I want to look at.
And I want to decode it a little bit.
Because I think it's a bigger question than we can get to today.
It's a whole topic, and I'll say a little bit more about that.
But I think that to understand that, because it is baffling to people, right?
People are baffled by this.
When I hear, like, why in the world, they say, would anybody stay or, you know, specifically, why would a woman stay in a place that says that they can dictate what she does with her body, that she can't have leadership roles, that she has to submit to men, sort of on and on and on.
And it leads to bafflement.
I think we need to decode a little bit of what's going on in those dynamics to be able to make sense of that, okay?
And I should say, to my thinking, that's why I say this is a bigger question, this is actually a subset of something that is much broader, a much broader kind of social issue, which is basically, why do any social groups work to support or uphold or defend or maintain social structures and institutions that lead to their own subjugation or their own subservience?
We can find lots and lots and lots of examples of this, I would argue that for many of the white Americans who support Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, this applies to them.
I think it does not actually serve many of their interests the way that they think it does.
And so that's a broad question.
And religion isn't unique here, nor is it the only high-control social formation.
We can be very aware of high-control political organizations.
We can be aware of other kind of high-control groups and so forth.
Given our context—context is a podcast about religion and culture—it is the issue around which I mostly encounter this question, right?
Most people, when they come to me with this question, they're not asking the broader political-theoretical question, they're asking specifically about religion, okay?
And what I want to argue is that, again, to kind of demystify this, if we unpack and decode this phenomenon, it's a lot more complicated than it might initially seem.
But I think, again, it can also make people's behavior at least more intelligible.
That doesn't mean we accept it.
That doesn't mean it's the behavior we would adopt.
It doesn't mean we agree with it.
It means that maybe we can come some way to at least understanding it.
Okay?
So there is no doubt that high control religious contexts, like the Southern Baptist Convention, and again, that was the focus of the CNN article.
It's also a denomination I used to be a part of.
I'm very familiar with it.
And so I, you know, it's a great illustration of sort of everything that goes on in American evangelicalism.
So that there's no doubt that those kinds of high-control contexts explicitly endorse relations of subordination between men and women, right?
It's explicit in structures like the nuclear family and the church.
They explicitly say that's how they're supposed to be structured.
It's explicit oftentimes in their doctrinal statements and their preaching, right?
So, relations of subordination.
And hold on to that word, subordination, because it's going to be important, okay?
Disemphasis on subordination, I think, is also oftentimes implicit in other areas, areas such as sexuality.
And I don't just mean notions of, you know, having to wait until you're married or purity culture or things like that.
I mean just broader notions like, you know, that men should be the pursuer in the relationship and women should wait for them and so forth.
That is rarely sort of Preached about, you're not going to find lots of Bible verses about it and so forth, but I think it's a piece that's there.
It's often implicit rather than explicit.
Also other issues like asking questions or pursuing education and different things like this.
I run into this all the time in working with my clients, okay?
But here's the key idea that I think most people miss, okay?
And stay with me here.
Subordination is not the same thing as oppression.
Okay, a relationship of subordination is, I would argue, structurally and by definition, a relationship of some level of inequality, right?
One person's in a dominant position, one person's in a, as the word says, a subordinate or submissive position, and so forth.
But subordination is not inherently the same thing as oppression.
And I want to sharpen that up, but let's just start with this, because you're sitting there and you're like, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
That can't be right.
Those are the same things, subordination and oppression.
Well, if we think of a couple simple examples, we'll see that they're not.
If you're listening to this, odds are you have a job, and odds are that you have people that you answer to.
You have bosses, you have supervisors, you have advisors.
Entering into work or employment relationships or into contracts is, in a certain sense, entering into a relationship of subordination.
Child-rearing.
Our children, you know, before a certain age, they are subordinate to adults.
We even obviously recognize this in our legal system with notions like, you know, legal adulthood and ages of consent and so forth.
Institutional arrangements often line this up.
Institutions such as the military or the police are very explicit with this.
I think that even our political system is set up to elect leaders to whose authority we are expected to submit.
that has quote unquote orders, but also other organizations like, again, businesses and corporations, schools, colleges, right?
I think that even our political system is set up to elect leaders to whose authority we are expected to submit.
Certain people are empowered to do things like put policies in place or enforce them or enact laws, and we are subordinate to those.
And of course, we have redress if we don't like that and so forth, but that's the idea.
So none of these are perfect, okay?
But I would suggest that when they operate as they ought to, we typically would not describe them as oppressive in nature.
Again, I know it's not perfect.
I know there are terrible bosses and there are abuses of power all over the place and things like that.
But when those things aren't happening, when the systems work the way that they're supposed to, you know, in a kind of ideal world, what I'm trying to show is it is not hard or foreign to think of relationships of submission or subordination that are not oppressive in nature.
But we also know that there are relationships that are oppressive in nature.
So what's the difference?
What's the difference between an oppressive relationship or an oppressive structure and just a structure of subordination?
I think it's an issue of legitimacy.
We assume that there is something legitimate or acceptable about a relationship of just what I'm calling subordination.
Or better yet, we accept it because we view it as legitimate.
Okay, so, okay, Dan.
What does that mean?
What I think that means is that those relationships, if they are legitimate relationships of subordination, there are a number of related issues at play here.
And this is not an exhaustive list, but as I was thinking through this, these are some things that I was thinking that are there.
I think notions of autonomy.
So, for example, we choose to enter into these relationships and we could leave them.
Even something like military service has a fixed term at which point you can leave, right?
If you don't like your job and something's wrong, you can quit, right?
You can go do something else and so forth, okay?
And then these things are related.
Another one is what I will call contractualism, but I don't just mean literal job contracts, but I mean there's some sort of agreement Through which we enter into these relationships, which means that, yeah, we have things we have to do, but the person to whom we are subordinate or the person who's subordinate to us, they have obligations, but so do we.
And if either side sort of violates those terms, Then the thing is sort of null and void, or there's some method of redress and so forth.
And that brings up the next one, which is a degree of equity.
We receive something from these relationships in return for our subordination and vice versa.
And again, there are systems of redress.
I think tied in with all of that, they're provisional.
That form of subordination is provisional.
They are not forever relationships.
You know, I mentioned child rearing, and I think that's a great model for this.
I think that, I hope, most of us as parents, as our children get older, That level of subordination diminishes until eventually our children are not subordinates.
They are fully-fledged, autonomous people on an equal standing with us.
These things are always provisional.
You're at work, and you've got work tasks, and your boss is your boss.
But guess what?
Out of work hours, or you run into the person at, I don't know, a soccer game on the weekend, or out of the movie theater or something, they're just a person, and you're just a person, right?
It's a circumscribed, provisional context where this happens, okay?
So the point is, I think that when we view a relationship, a subordination relationship, as legitimate, we don't view it as oppressive.
Okay?
So on the flip side, I think that when we see a relationship or an institution or a structure of subordination that we believe is also oppressive, I think it's because we find it illegitimate.
Those features are missing.
And others.
Again, it's not an exhaustive list.
It would be interesting to just sort of have conversations about what demarcates legitimate subordination and so forth.
But they're missing.
Those safeguards are missing.
And when we don't experience or observe relationships with subordination devolving into oppression, I think it's because we think they're legitimate.
And when they're not legitimate, that's when it crosses that line.
That's when we look at it and say, this is not merely a relationship of subordination.
This is something that is oppressive.
So here's what I think.
I think that when we, or critics of high-control religion, look at something like the Southern Maps we mentioned and say, oh my God, why would they stay there?
We are clearly seeing it as an oppressive structure.
And my suggestion is that when people remain willfully within those structures, and they even defend those structures, there's an experiential dimension because they don't experience them as oppressive.
Yes, they recognize the element of subordination, but they do not experience them as oppressive.
And I think that that's the experiential dimension, okay?
And why does that happen?
Why is it that one person will look at this or experience it and feel oppressed and another person doesn't?
I think it's because many relations of subordination, like religious relations, like sexual relations, like many family relations, they are naturalized for us.
They are simply how we're socialized.
They're how we've grown up.
I mean, everybody's had this experience, right?
The first time that you have, like, a friend or maybe a cousin or something, and, like, you go and you spend some time with them, and you figure out that their family works really differently than theirs, right?
Yours?
The house rules are different.
They're allowed to do things you're not, or vice versa, or maybe things feel really restrictive for them, or they feel restrictive for you, or whatever, but you become aware that, wow, okay, like, this is different than mine, but...
When we've simply grown up in it, when we're socialized into it, we don't have that frame of reference.
These relations of subordination are simply how the world is as how we've always experienced it, right?
We don't experience it as even a relation of subordination per se.
It's just the way things are.
That's just how it is.
And that illustration I just gave sort of shows that changes.
When we encounter something different, and there's a political theorist who was very influential for me over time, who I'm relying on here, he'll talk about what he calls counter discourses, right?
And it may be contrary experiences is maybe a better way to think about this for, you know, regular people who don't want to delve into post-structuralist political theory.
But as I say, like, you go and you spend some time at somebody else's house, you're like, wow, they get to stay up, like, way later.
And, like, when I was a kid, I know I'm going to date myself, I had friends who were allowed to watch MTV, and, like, I wasn't.
I was allowed to watch HBO, and I wasn't.
Or you've got the friend now, like, I don't know, maybe it's your kid comes home, and they're like, well, how come, like, Timmy, like, he doesn't have screen limits?
I want to do more screen time.
You know, Becky gets to go to rated R movies, how come I don't?
Or whatever it is.
What it means is that we encounter something different.
We encounter a different structure.
We encounter a different narrative of how we relate to each other.
We encounter a different kind of myth about how the world is.
And by myth I just mean a kind of interpretive story.
We encounter something different, a counter narrative, a counter experience, a structure that is different.
And basically what happens is that somebody from the outside, somebody who is not a part of our structure, our institution, our family, or in this case, our religious structure, somebody for whom that subordination relationship is not naturalized, they come along and present an alternative.
They expose us to something different.
Or, Somebody who used to be on the inside presents such an account.
In the world of people, quote-unquote, deconverting or deconstructing their faith, or in my own experience of having grown up in evangelicalism and now working with people who have left that or are curious about it or whatever, again, somebody, a former insider presents this kind of outside What happens is that these competing narratives or these competing experiences, they destabilize or denaturalize the taken for grantedness of those institutions or structures.
People are confronted with something that raises the question that maybe what they're experiencing is not simply natural, not simply the way things are, but is provisional, is cultural.
is very particular to a region or a religious articulation or something like this.
And it's that destabilization that opens the possibility for what was previously experienced as a legitimate form of subordination to be experienced as an illegitimate form of oppression.
And that's what you have, right?
When somebody on the outside or a journalist or somebody looks and says, why in the world do people stay in these relationships or these institutions?
The person asking that question views it as oppressive in some way.
The people who remain in it, I think most of the time, don't.
And what that highlights is that that destabilization, this clash of narratives, these counter-experiences, They're not automatic.
They don't automatically make us leave, right?
When somebody comes along and says, you know, you're in an oppressive relationship, or people do this in relationships in real life, you know, I think your relationship is manipulative or coercive or abusive.
And the person says, yeah, I hear what you're saying, but I don't think so.
In other words, destabilizing those relationships, it doesn't always succeed.
We are confronted with a range of responses when that kind of destabilization occurs.
And some people come to experience their current situation as illegitimate and as oppressive, and they take whatever steps they take from there.
But others double down.
They defend those institutions, right?
They defend those structures.
And so the effort fails, right?
And I've had conversations with lots of women in evangelicalism.
I've read accounts of women in evangelicalism who will defend purity culture, who will defend opposition to abortion, who will defend male headship, who will defend what they view as traditional gender roles and so forth in the face of those kinds of criticisms.
Okay.
So that's what I mean when I say that we have to decode what's going on.
I think it's not enough to just say, oh, they're being oppressed and they don't know.
Well, what I think is going on is that they don't experience that relationship of subordination as a relationship of oppression.
And if they don't, if it's legitimate for them, if in fact it might even be a source of deep meaning and value for them, of course they're not running to change that.
Okay.
So the next question I'll get, and I got to kind of wrap this up, but the next question, the very natural question is, okay, so what determines how that happens?
I talk to clients about this all the time.
I talk to clients who come to experience their time or their place in high-control religion as oppressive.
They leave it.
But they have friends or they have family members who remain within those structures, often who, you know, they've tried to talk to, they've tried to share their perspectives, and with great sadness and frustration, they'll say, they just don't get it.
They don't feel it.
They don't experience it.
Like, why?
Why do I see it this way and feel it this way and they don't?
And folks, there is no simple answer to that because I think the reasons are as varied as the individuals involved.
I will say this.
High-control religion, and specifically if we're thinking about conservative American Christianity, has built-in mechanisms to resist that kind of destabilization.
That's what apologetics is all about.
That is why they have this whole discourse about how the world has fallen and will judge us for what we do and so forth, right?
The ones trying to oppress you are not us in the church, it's the people out there telling you you're oppressed, right?
You see, there are mechanisms in place to try to deflect or blunt the force of those kind of counterexamples and those counter-narratives.
So this isn't unique to religion, but I think it is heightened in religion.
It is turned up in religion.
So I think those same dynamics hold in a broad range of social issues and social identities.
But I think religion sort of turns this up because, for example, the naturalizing isn't just, this is how we were brought up, this is our culture.
It's, this is how God made things, and if you challenge them, you're going against God.
That's a lot of work to do or to overcome with a counter-discourse or a counter-narrative.
And I know full well how frustrating and disheartening it can be when we engage with people, especially people we care about, who do not share our experience of or our perspective on those kinds of high-control contexts.
I know how painful that is.
So I'll encourage you with this, we'll wind down with this, because people will say, well, if there's no guarantee that this works, why bother?
And it's really painful.
Why should I bother, you know, putting stuff on TikTok?
Why should I bother engaging Uncle Ron?
Why should I bother talking to anybody at all?
My answer is this.
No one will become aware of their oppression unless they encounter an alternative.
If it is just how their world is, they will never question it.
They won't have an outside perspective to create that space of questioning.
So there is always value in providing that alternative perspective and creating the space for that new experience.
And where it goes from there is beyond our control.
But that is something that I think is our task.
As you probably know, that's a driving aim of this podcast.
It's a driving aim of the work that we do here.
Right?
So that would be my encouragement.
So, why do they support their own oppression?
The answer is because, oftentimes, they don't experience it as oppression.
They simply don't experience it the way that we experience it.
And this is why I think social change is hard, because you have to change not just beliefs, but the very way that people experience themselves and the world that they're in.
As always, Thank you for your time.
Thank you for supporting us in all the different ways.
Welcome your thoughts or comments, whether it's on this episode or others.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Value those insights.
Again, I am closing the gap.
If you are not a subscriber and you would consider doing that to help us keep doing the things we do, we're just a couple people putting out an awful lot of content, and that is a way of helping us do that.
Other series and interviews and all those kinds of things.
If you would consider doing that, we would thank you.
If you can't, I understand that.
I get really touching emails from folks who are like, I support what you're doing, and I just don't have the discretionary income to do that.
This is not a place of guilt.
We get it.
Listening is support.
The emails are support.
There are things you could be doing besides this.
If you go out and have one gentle conversation with somebody you care about in the world and suggest to them that maybe the subordination relationship they're in is problematic, that is all the support we need from you.
