Dissenting Catholic and Muslim Women’s Movements in the U.S.

Last week I turned in my MDiv thesis, the culmination of three years of graduate work at Union Theological Seminary. This obviously happened under strange and unforeseen circumstances. I have been living with my parents in Vermont rather than in my Manhattan dorm, for one, and my cats have been unexpected writing partners over the past month and a half. It was jarring to say goodbye to my classmates with so little notice. Even so, though, the thesis has felt like a fitting capstone to my time at Union. I went to divinity school because of my experiences of an interreligious feminist community in college, which I wrote about for The Table last year. It was only after coming to Union that I connected with leftist and feminist Catholic communities. The thesis gave me the opportunity to weave those commitments together.

The thesis is titled “Women Leading Men in Prayer: An Interreligious Analysis of Dissenting Catholic and Muslim Women’s Movements in the United States.” I put the Catholic women’s ordination movement into conversation with the movement for Muslim women to lead mixed-gender congregational prayer. Rather than make a theological argument in favor of women’s leadership, I compare the two movements through feminist, interreligious, and sociological methodologies.

The paper is divided into two parts: “comparative” and “constructive.” In the “comparative” section, I compare the activist strategies employed by the two movements. I identify two broad categories of activism, which I call “advocacy” and “embodiment.” Though many activists employ both strategies strategically or even simultaneously, many show preference for one or the other.

On the Catholic side, WOC is my case study of an organization that “advocates” for women’s ordination. Advocacy includes publishing or distributing propaganda, lobbying authorities, giving speeches, cultivating leadership through training programs or scholarship funds, and staging public protests. My Catholic case study for “embodiment” is the Roman Catholic Women Priests movement. Embodiment describes an authority claim made through ritualistic enactment – essentially, going ahead and doing it anyway, saying that you have the authority to do so through theological maneuvers or claims to “authentic” Catholicism.

My Muslim case study for advocacy is Muslims for Progressive Values (MPV), a U.S.-based nonprofit founded in 2007. Unlike WOC, MPV is not a single-issue organization: it advocates for a range of “progressive” causes, including LGBTQ inclusion, separation of church and state, and woman-led prayer. In the embodiment section, I look at the 2005 woman-led prayer in New York City, when Islamic scholar amina wadud famously led a “first of its kind” Friday prayer service. I also examine alternative woman-led Muslim communities like Qal’bu Maryam Women’s Mosque in Berkeley and Masjid al-Rabia in Chicago.

A caveat here: I’m distilling a hefty academic paper into a blog post, so you’re not getting the nuance that this subject deserves. In broad strokes, though, I look at some of the factors that shape activist strategies. Why does Catholic women’s activism look different from Muslim women’s activism? The historical moment of each movement is a big one. The contemporary Catholic women’s ordination movement came of age in the 1970s. It was formed in the crucible of post-Vatican II America and second wave feminism. The contemporary progressive Muslim movement in the U.S. came of age in the wake of 9/11. It is entwined with the third wave of feminism, but it is also a response to trauma. Because of the cultural context of Islamophobia, Muslim feminists or progressives face suspicion because of their religion – and are often tokenized as a “corrective” to the shadowy threat of the Muslim terrorist. By the 1970s, on the other hand, American Catholicism had been broadly assimilated into American civic religion. Some Protestants certainly harbored anti-Catholic sentiment, but there were no broad restrictions on Catholic immigration, fears of Catholic terrorism, or restrictions on building Catholic churches.

I also look at the differences in the construction of authority in each tradition, theologies of space and worship, and public reception. For Catholics, of course, papal authority and the top-down structure that props it up is seen as God-ordained. Islamic authority looks very different: Qur’anic knowledge and traditional Islamic education are authoritative, various schools interpret and codify Islamic law, and in the contemporary U.S., cultural and political leaders who aren’t traditionally trained have unique authority as representatives of “American Islam” in wider society. I look at similarities, too: alternative woman-led communities in both traditions often lack space and resources, for instance; organizations for advocacy are incorporated as 501(c)(3)s; and each movement has been shaped by scholar-activists.

The second part of the paper (“constructive”) examines the history of interreligious engagement among these movements and looks forward to how they could engage with each other. A crucial part of this, though, is actually acknowledging that collaboration may not be always necessary or healthy. There are some logistical reasons for this – small organizations have limited resources, for instance – but race is also a major factor here. The Catholic women’s ordination movement has been predominantly white since its early years, and despite important ongoing efforts to build a more inclusive movement, we still have to acknowledge this dynamic.

 There are real power dynamics in any interreligious interaction. Though most activists for Muslim women’s prayer leadership are highly educated like their Catholic counterparts, most are non-white. We Catholic feminists may not have the ear of our bishop and often experience real spiritual distress, but many of us are relatively socially privileged because of our race, socioeconomic status, immigration status, or level of education. Muslims face specific oppression and suspicion in the majority-Christian U.S. context; it’s understandable that Muslim women may not want to use limited resources to collaborate with Catholic feminists who might lack a base-level knowledge of their concerns, especially when they could face backlash from the powerful Catholic hierarchy. (An infamous and illustrative incident: when a St. Louis synagogue hosted RCWP ordinations in 2007, a priest at the archdiocesan interfaith office said that the event could hurt Jewish-Catholic relations – and even compared an RCWP ordination at a synagogue to a Holocaust denier speaking at a Catholic church. Seriously.) At the same time, Catholic feminists should be careful not to reinforce imperial dynamics by propping up projects that use the language of progressivism and women’s rights to advocate for Muslim assimilation.

To that end, I suggest that we should be intentional about why and how we engage in interreligious political collaboration (note: political collaboration is different from personal friendship!). I explore how Catholic and Muslim activists could employ Ignatian discernment, feminist consciousness-raising, and istikhara (consultative prayer) to examine power dynamics, consider their goals, and consistently orient themselves toward God’s will for their entwined lives. I finally suggest how the movements could decide to collaborate. One of my ideas was an interreligious coalition of organizations that advocate for women’s ritual leadership (like the Equal in Faith project, but on a larger scale). Such a coalition would have to develop strong anti-racist and anti-imperialist principles – and reckon with the harms of Christian supremacy. This work is hard, but it could be done.

I’d like the main takeaway from this distillation of my MDiv thesis to be that this stuff isn’t easy. We often romanticize interreligious/interfaith engagement, but it can quickly become painful, messy, personal, and deeply political. Believe me, I know. At the same time, though, I know that it can be uniquely powerful when we act prayerfully and intentionally together.

Catholic feminists who want to learn more about Muslim women’s prayer leadership may want to check out amina wadud’s Inside the Gender Jihad as a starting place! I’d also recommend Divine Words, Female Voices (witten by my advisor, Jerusha Rhodes; published under the name Jerusha Tanner Lamptey), which critically engages Islamic and Christian feminism through a comparative theology.