c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Rosemary Radford Ruether is a feminist theologian teaching at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill.)

UNDATED _ Conservatives often charge that”the liberal media”is biased against them and their cause.

But when it comes to news reports on feminists in religion, it is not hard to see the media bias has a conservative bent and some of the bias comes from a campaign to deliberately distort the truth by conservatives themselves.

The feminist Re-Imagining Revival conference, held earlier this year in Minneapolis, provides a good case study.

To tell the story in full, we must go back to the first Re-Imagining Conference, held in November 1993. More than 2,000 Christian women gathered in Minneapolis for a celebration of the Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women, which had been declared by the World Council of Churches to promote and affirm women’s leadership in the churches.

The gathering was intentionally international and multi-ethnic. Speakers included Asian, African, African-American and Hispanic women theologians, such as Delores Williams, Rita Nakashima Brock and Mercy Amba Oduyoye. The keynote hymn of the conference highlighted the biblical figure of Wisdom (Sophia in Greek), a feminine personification of God found in both Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament.

Conference organizers did not think their gathering was particularly controversial and made no provision for a press office. Indeed, the news media paid little attention. But the Institute for Religion and Democracy, a conservative think-tank, monitored the conference and put together a packet taking phrases out of context, making Sophia a”pagan goddess”while portraying the religious imagery of the conference as evidence of a pernicious infiltration of”paganism”by feminists into Christian churches.

The mainstream media took the bait, and soon stories appeared far and wide, distorting the conference experience along the lines drawn by the IRD. I received many calls from journalists asking about”Sophia, the pagan Goddess.” When I said this was a scriptural idea with a long history in Christian spirituality, I could hear the bored yawns over the phone. Clearly they were looking for a titillating story about risque goings-on in churches, not information about the scriptural meaning of an image of God.

The result of the campaign advanced by conservatives and abetted by the media was formidable. Presbyterian minister Mary Ann Lundy, who had headed her denomination’s delegation to the conference, lost her job. Inquisitions went on among Methodists and Lutherans.

More importantly, the fantasies unleashed by the misinformation campaign continue to dominate the media’s imagination. When the second Re-Imagining conference was held in April of this year, the press was there _ to see if they could witness some pagan action. One reporter who came a few minutes late asked another reporter if anyone was naked yet. Of course, the reality of the conference turned out only to disappoint their expectations.

But the media continues to be dominated by the conservative `idee fixe’ that feminist theology has something to do with”pagan goddess worship,”with all the lascivious fantasies the popular mind attaches to the words”pagan”and”goddess.” Such biases cannot be swept under the rug as innocent quests for an interesting story for they play into the crusade to drive feminists out of the churches. Furthermore, the bias means the real story is seldom told.

Feminist theology seeks to overcome the biases in the Christian tradition that have made women inferior and less than fully human, associating them with a sexualized body to be repressed or violated.

Feminist theologians seek to”re-imagine”Christian theology to reclaim its deeper truth that all humans equally are made in the image of God. Reclaiming the Wisdom tradition of Scripture and Christian tradition is an important contribution to this because it gives us ways of imaging God that include the female.

Reclaiming the Wisdom tradition might also help to overcome the endemic stupidity in our culture that trivializes and exploits women. In the words of the ancient Hebrew Psalmist:”In Wisdom there is a spirit intelligent and holy … that permeates all intelligent, pure and delicate spirits. She is the brightness that streams from everlasting light, the flawless mirror of the active power of God and the image of God’s goodness. … Age after age she enters into holy souls and makes them God’s friends and prophets. … Against Wisdom no evil can prevail.” DEA END RUETHER