THOU SHOULD SUBMIT TO YOUR HUSBAND: GENDER-ROLE IDEOLOGY OF CHURCH LEADERS IN INDONESIA

Abstract

Patriarchal culture has infiltrated many social, psychological, and historical aspects of Indonesian societies, including religious life. This study focuses on gender-role ideology of church leaders in Surabaya, Indonesia. As the second largest religion in Indonesia, Christian teachings inf luence 9.5% (or more than 19 million people)of Indonesian population. In this study, eight leaders of eight churches in Surabaya are involved in semi structured interviews, in order to reveal various aspects of their gender-role ideology. The member of these churches range from 1,000 to 17,000 people. The total number of people committed in these churches exceeds 30,000 people. The results show that most of the leaders believe in moderately egalitarian gender-role ideology. The most egalitarian aspects are privilege of man and household utility, while the mos t traditional are primacy of husband as breadwinner. The strongest traditional view – which is often overlooked by gender theories – is regarding the preference of male leadership both in spiritual, church, and family context. This is due to a Bible verse, Ephesians 5:22 – the most frequently cited verse by these church leaders in explaining male -female relationship – which explicitly states: “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord”. Although there are feminist interpretations on that verse, they are not known by most of these leaders. Feminist theology is still a
minority approach in interpreting Bible among churches in Indonesia. The implications of these findings are discussed.