For an 89-year-old man, former President Jimmy Carter sure is active. During the last several weeks, he has appeared on countless news shows, late night television, and radio. He’s been on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Charlie Rose, and even The Colbert Report. These appearances coincide with the release of his 28th book, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power.
As the subtitle suggests, A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power explores the intersection of gender, religion, and the struggle for power. In many ways, it’s the next installment in the growing conversation about the global discrimination and abuse of women. Following in the steps of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky, the film It’s a Girl, and the story of Malala Yousefzai, Carter aims to spread awareness of what he describes as “the most serious, pervasive, and ignored violations of basic human rights.” A Call to Action is rooted in Carter’s experiences as a humanitarian (for which he has won a Nobel Peace Prize) as well as the work of The Carter Center, a nonprofit he founded in 1982.
Brief Summary
The message of A Call to Action is based on the premise that women and girls are most affected by violence and the struggle for power. As Carter observes:
Wherever men are plagued with poverty, disease, or persecution, the women are suffering more. When there is a shortage of food or limited access to education, the men and boys have first priority. When civil conflict erupts, women are the primary victims . . . the displaced adults in charge of children, and the victims of rape. (71)
As a result, Carter issues a call to those with privilege to stand up for the weaker members of society. In particular, he wants the United States to use its position on the world’s stage to actively promote the global well-being of women.
The book is loosely organized with chapters addressing atrocities like sexual assault and rape, gendercide, spouse abuse, honor killings, child marriage, and human trafficking. At times the statistics are staggering. Of the 800,000 people trafficked across international borders, 80 percent are women, and three-fourths are sold into the sex trade. It’s estimated that anywhere between 160 million and 200 million girls are “missing” in the world’s population due to sex-selective abortion and infanticide. Or take something closer to home. Between the years 2000 and 2006, the FBI reported 10,600 domestic homicides in the United States; 85 percent of the victims were women.
A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power
Jimmy Carter
One thing that sets A Call to Action apart from similar works is that Carter attempts to evaluate the role that religion plays in the conversation. Carter, a lifelong Baptist (the majority of those years spent in the Southern Baptist Convention), is also a Sunday school teacher, deacon, and the author of several faith-based books. In this sense, he comes to the topic with something of an invested interest in understanding how religion can be manipulated to subjugate women. He writes: “When our mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters are considered both different and inferior in the eyes of the God we worship, this belief tends to permeate society and everyone suffers” (105).
Left of Center
It won’t surprise those familiar with Carter’s politics that parts of A Call to Action fall predictably left of center. For example, while he rightly deplores sex-selective abortion and infanticide, Carter is silent about China’s one child policy and the practice of forced abortions. Apparently such policies only violate a woman’s human rights if the child is aborted on grounds that she is female.
Carter is also inclined to link the global oppression of women with the fact that some church traditions restrict clerical offices to men and ascribe to models of male headship. In Chapter 3, titled “The Bible and Gender Equality” (and ostensibly designed to showcase Carter’s understanding of how Christian teaching intersects with gender), he suggests that “one of the most prevalent and divisive issues [between individual faiths and denominations] is whether or not women are equal in the eyes of God” (20). As proof, he offers his experience in the Southern Baptist Convention with the question of women’s ordination. He returns to this question later in context of the Roman Catholic Church.
Unfortunately, those outside the religious landscape will have a hard time grasping the nuance of such internal debates—debates heavily influenced by denominational polity and hermeneutical approach. As Carter presents them, denominations espousing such “outmoded traditions” are discriminatory and would do well to adopt more “enlightened policy” (113). And while only a fool would claim the church is immune to chauvinism, tying gender roles to the global oppression of women may harm Carter’s cause more than he realizes. By discussing the question of women’s ordination in context of honor killings, spousal abuse, female genital mutilation, rape, sex-selective abortion, and forced prostitution, Carter runs the real risk of distracting from the seriousness of such abuses. It’s tempting to file his concerns about women’s ordination under #firstworldproblems.
What to Take Away
Despite Carter’s left-of-center perspective, A Call to Action issues a call that, in many ways, conservative evangelicals can particularly appreciate. Those who believe in the depravity of man and a historical fall should be the first to acknowledge we live in a broken world. As such, we should also be the first to recognize and fight the evils perpetrated against women. Unfortunately, because of the polarizing nature of the gender debates, it’s easy for conservatives to miscategorize Carter’s concerns as “women’s issues” and end up relegating them to a place of secondary importance. But we must not. We must remember that an attack against any image bearer of God is an attack against God himself. As Carter writes near the end of the book, the goal is “human rights,” not simply “women’s rights” (194).
Additionally, since the question of gender roles is often misunderstood, conservatives must be the first to fight gender-based abuse in order to affirm that specific roles do not necessitate inequality. The best response to Carter’s conflating of women’s ordination with discrimination isn’t just more argument but actions that protect and defend women as equal image bearers. If, when half of the human race is suffering systemic injustice, we shrug our shoulders and return to our debates about proper roles in church, we reveal what we truly value, because we reveal what we will fight to protect.
Carter ends A Call to Action by asking men who hold positions of privilege and authority to take the first to step forward to defend the weaker members of the human race:
Some of us are paralyzed by the extent and complexity of the problems. Some of us have become desensitized by societal violence and no longer recognize when it occurs. . . . Political and religious leaders share a special responsibility, but the fact is that all of us can act within our own spheres of influence to meet the challenges. (195–196)
While he may not recognize it, this call squares nicely with a gospel understanding of headship. Like their own head Jesus Christ, Christian husbands are called to sacrifice themselves for the good of their wives. But this call is not simply for men. Whether we are male or female, married or not, the gospel calls each of us to follow Christ by laying down our preferences and using our privilege to protect the weakest among us. And in a world as dangerous as this, it’s a call to action we must heed.
