Non-liberatory Agency

Congratulations! You read the title of my blog post this week and are still reading. Hopefully this post will be much less complicated that the title makes it seem. We will see. [edit: I don't think its any less complicated. You can bail out now.]

In my "Figurative Painting in Islam" class yesterday, we were discussing the role of the veil in the Muslim religion and culture. I am by no means an expert on this subject, even after the discussion yesterday.

There were many differing views about veiling. We discussed Quranic passages, the Bible, the hadith, colonialism, feminism--you name it, it came up. Everyone thought different things and we were really unable to reach a consensus besides "probably governments should not regulate veiling or not veiling in any way." Who knows if we were even right about that.

The class was the most strongly divided about whether or not the veil is a sign of oppression. Many thought that it definitely was in most, if not all, scenarios. Far fewer thought that, at least in some circumstances, the veil was not oppressive at all.

This is where the idea of non-liberatory agency (and the connection to Christian faith) comes in. One of the authors we read, Adair Rounthwaite, discussed the veil and the situation for Muslim women. She argued that Muslim women could gain agency by conforming to the religious or cultural standard set for them by others.
If my readers aren't familiar with the idea of "agency," it has a lot to do with personhood and voice. The more agency you have, the more you matter. If a person has agency, they are allowed to choose, and others in society recognize and allow their choices. (For example: it could be argued that an artist who does not sign their work has no agency, because no one can recognize his work as being his).
Anyway, this particular author argued that women who took the veil because they believed it would help them become closer to an ideal had more agency than we would typically ascribe to them. A woman who took the veil was able to take personal action to fulfill her desire to conform to a standard. Instead of the standard oppressing her, or taking away her agency because it caused her to conform, it actually enabled her to have agency. In this way, the agency was non-liberatory. The woman did not have to break free from this religious tradition to in some way reclaim her agency. 

I liked that a lot, because it challenged the prevalent assumption that rules necessarily oppress. People think that if someone tells you to do something that you don't want to do (or that is uncomfortable, or seems to you to be irrational), and you comply, that they are somehow forcing you or squelching your ability "right" to choose, and thus your agency is denied. People seem to especially think that with regards to religion--Christianity as much as Islam.

The problem with that logic is that actually Christianity gives us the ultimate choice. The Bible absolutely gives us standards, but then God gives us the ability to work toward these standards. He asks us to choose him by doing certain things being certain kinds of people, so that we can in turn be chosen by him. If I want to choose God and be chosen by him, I am absolutely allowed to. Part of choosing him is submitting to his standards and requirements. If I don't want to submit to his standards, I absolutely don't have to--nobody is forcing anybody to choose God. If, however, I want to choose God and be chosen by him, God isn't suddenly oppressing me. He is allowing me to become the type of person that can be chosen by him through the standards he has set out for me. Maybe some of his requirements are hard or uncomfortable, is it oppression then? Still no. We still have choice, and if we are going to choose to conform to his standards, we have to choose that.

I could spend pages going through every hypothetical question that could arise when I assert that God's rules aren't oppressive, but I don't think that I really need to. By following God's regulations for my life, I am choosing to act in a certain way. That's basically the definition of agency. Even if something seems oppressive to modern sensibilities (submit to your husband, for example), it doesn't mean that I lose agency if I do that. I'm still choosing. I'm still acting. I still have free will. I have learned that a certain way of living is right, and that God chooses a certain type of person, so I live and try to become that type of person. It's not oppressive. Nobody makes me--I can reject God if I want. But I don't, because he is alive and he reigns. I don't want this "freedom" that people think is offered by liberatory agency. If I break free from Christianity, not only will I have chosen to my own destruction, but I will also have no more agency than I did when I chose Christ in the first place.



(I think I will maybe turn this into a series about oppression. I think I've addressed here how Christianity is not oppressive in that it does not take away agency, but I think that there are other ways in which people could find it oppressive that I have not yet addressed. I've been meaning to write a post on freedom in Christ anyway.)