Christian Worship and Gender Practices

Abstract

The foundational materiality in Christian worship is the bodily presence of worshippers. Gender differences—and the manifold ways in which they are embodied and performed in different cultural contexts—are therefore inscribed into the very fabric of liturgical practices, past and present. In Christian worship today, the workings of gender are evident across a broad spectrum of ecclesial traditions. Some churches have authorized rituals for the blessing of same-sex unions; some are ordaining openly transgender priests. Other churches continue to struggle with the ordination of women, while a few aim for explicitly “masculine” worship experiences. Feminist concerns over liturgical language mark some communities, while churches rooted in more traditional contexts maintain seating arrangements that separate women and men. Clearly, the workings of gender in Christian worship today span a broad spectrum of quite dissimilar concerns. At the root of all these concerns, however, lies the same vital reality, namely that worship is an embodied practice and therefore never gender-free. What often goes unnoticed in contemporary discussions is the fact that gender differences have marked liturgical practices in Christian communities since earliest times. The workings of gender, in other words, have a genealogy in Christian worship. Scholars have only recently begun to map this terrain, by bringing the interpretive tools of gender theory to bear on liturgical historiography. Paramount among these interpretive tools is an understanding of gender as attending to all gendered particularities and sexualities (e.g., eunuchs in Byzantium, ascetic virgins in Merovingian Gaul, transgender people in contemporary North America, etc.). Gender, in other words, is understood to encompass much more than the traditional binary of “women” and “men.” The emerging gender-attentive insights into liturgical history have been intriguing and at times quite surprising. These insights span the whole of liturgy’s past, from ways in which gender shaped early baptismal practices (e.g., in the choreography of the rite, in questions surrounding the minister of baptism, in the bodily proprieties considered appropriate at the font) to the workings of gender in the 20th-century Liturgical Movement (e.g., its first important text, Tra le Sollecitudine (1903)—usually hailed for its evocation of an “active participation” of the faithful in worship—also sought to discontinue the presence of castrati singers in the Sistine Chapel choir while ensuring that women would not take their place). In between earliest glimpses of the workings of gender in Christian worship and our own times lie approximately a thousand years of a complex history. Tracing this history of the interplay between gender differences and Christian worship not only constitutes an important task for historians of liturgy, but also provides rich resources for addressing contemporary issues.