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Disruptive Christian Ethics
Especially when sorting out social problems related to gender and sex
uality, current mores in contemporary discussions of religion and politics
have made us accustomed to constructing analysis in terms of contrasting
dynamics between rival cultural groups. For example, at a 1994 meeting
of the largest black Protestant denomination, the National Baptist Con
vention, President Clinton received a warm response after he quipped to
his audience: “Thirty years ago, one of forty white births was out of wed
lock; now it’s one in five. Thirty years ago, one in five African American
births were out-of-wedlock births; now over half. But the white out-of-
wedlock birthrate is growing much faster than the African American rate.
So we’re going to have equal opportunity for all before you know it.”33
Though injecting humor, he appears to be demonstrating an awareness of
racial inequalities. Yet to make his point he relies upon a general accep
tance of the faulty assumption that race is the most useful category for
moral analysis and policymaking on this topic, as opposed to, for instance,
socioeconomic class categories across racial groupings, e.g., rates for poor
people across racial groups could have been rising. The president rein
forces a notion of racial groups as separate cultural entities that produce
distinctive moral patterns. Moreover, he supports the view that racial
groups are morally competing. We are trained to uncritically accept this
compartmentalizing form of racial logic as a way of thinking about con
temporary culture and morality. This training impedes an ability to grasp
the nuances of Luke’s cultural context that is so necessary for under
standing ancient women’s lives.
When focusing on Judaism as the cultural context for at least part
of the earliest Christian movement and trying to ferret out informa
tion about the content of women’s lives within this minority group,
sharp contrasts are sometimes made between Jewish women and Roman
women. However, this approach is misleading. First, this focus may
make it wrongly appear that differences between Jewish and Roman
women would have been more significant than class differences between
women across such groups. Such a view underestimates the over
arching manner in which social class determined one’s status in this
ancient world.
Second, some biblical scholars rely upon the Mishnah (codified around
200 CE) to describe Jewish women in antiquity. They point out, for exam
ple, that in Jewish law, unlike in Greek and Roman law, a husband is per
mitted to take the life of his wife if she committed adultery.H Assertions
about the lives ofjewish women and Roman women based upon suc h legal
comparisons need further qualification. Il is m.i< <m ite to assume that