The Assimilation Committee, Part 2

In the previous post, I told a parable about how committees work in my church. For the purposes of telling the story, I imagined that my old-line Presbyterian church was right next to a public housing project in Portland and that the residents of the project had begun attending our church, joining, and involving themselves in the work of our committees. That produced all kinds of difficulties for the chairs of the committees and even more for the Assimilation Committee, which had to solve this dilemma in principle.

I also said that the post was true in the way a parable is “true,” not in the way a newspaper article is “true,” and I promised to “interpret the parable” in the next post. That is today’s job. Let’s do the easy part first. All the descriptions of stylistic differences are actually true, but the parties about whom they are true are not “mature Christians” and “Project Rookies” of the parable. They are, rather, men (males) and women (females). The women are the “mature Christians.” The men are the “Project Rookies" and the work of the Assimilation Committee is a good deal more fundamental than I implied.

The picture below is typical of the man, looking at the "listener," but untypical of the woman, not looking at the speaker, according to the research Maccoby cites. That brings up the question of the source of the data. It is readily available. All the comparisons were taken from the first three pages of Eleanor Maccoby’s article “Gender and Social Exchange: A Developmental Perspective,” which appeared in Volume 95 of New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, the Spring 2002 issue. As an outsider to sociology and as a fan of Maccoby’s through her many years of publication, I offer my judgment that her work is impeccable. She is a careful, thoughtful centrist on gender questions and a capaious anfair-minded user of research. All of that says only that when I read something she wrote, I am likely to trust it.

Let me offer a few passages from the cited article, just to let you see how close to her findings I stayed in my adaptation of those findings to the “Project Rookies.” One: “In mixed-sex groups, men typically talk more, give more information and opinions, make more task-relevant suggestions, and express more direct disagreement. Women in mixed-sex groups more often express agreement with other speakers, express group solidarity, and adopt a warm upbeat tone of voice.”

Here’s one more. This finding actually comes from comparing groups of men with groups of women, but for my purposes, it didn’t really matter. “In all-female groups, women devote an even greater proportion of their interactions to socioemotional elements of the exchange, displaying more friendliness and mutual helpfulness than is typical in all-male groups. Men are more likely than women to initiate negative acts and to reciprocate another man’s negative with a negative of their own, so that conflict escalates. Men more often engage in seriously meant oppositional discourse, in which they may highlight their differences and forcefully argue opposed points of view. Women are more likely to soften opposition, to make their views seem more alike rather than more different.”

Conclusion: women are nicer than men.

Now let’s translate this into the area of Christian praxis, where it appears in a strange and unsettling light.What do you think? Is it more reasonable to say that women are naturally better Christians than men are? You look at the listed outcomes of life in the Spirit—love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—and tell me.

Or, is it more reasonable to say that in God’s Providence, disciples who are men will (and should) act differently than disciples who are women? The implication here is, first and easiest, that a man who is living the life that the Spirit makes available will behave differently than he would apart from that life. Second, it implies that if there is “a man’s style”—leaving aside individual differences for the moment—it will be different from “a woman’s style.” Third, it implies that these styles may appropriately be referred to instrumentally rather than morally, i.e., we might say about “the man’s style” what we would say about a hammer, that it is good for hammering nails and what we would say about a saw, that it is good for cutting boards. We would not criticize the hammer as “concussive” or the saw as “abrasive.”

Is it really possible that the kinds of differences Maccoby describes—in a very different context and for different reasons, remember—are different resources for the Christian community? That they are more like different grades of sandpaper than they are like saints and sinners?

Yes. I think so.