Historically, Christianity is the one religion that has furthered the cause of women more than any other. The people who first fought for a woman’s right to vote were Christians. The people who fought to end foot binding in China and female castration in Islamic countries of Africa and the Middle East were Christians.

But today’s Christians often don’t resemble their God- and woman-loving forefathers at all. Jesus began something that was revolutionary in making the world a better place for women. But now, in far too many places, Christians stand with the world against them, demanding that they behave and look a certain way and subjecting them to the foolish notion that they exist to please and assist men, to bear our children, clean up after us and do as they are told.

To ever give a woman the impression that she is only useful as long as she is pretty and pregnant and quietly submissive is a sin from which we must repent. But we don’t repent, and so it is that we lose the opportunity to speak into the lives of these women, this larger half of our population whom Jesus so dearly loves.

The truth is that most women are not willing to submit to the foolish ideals of society and misled Christianity. So we, (though we’d never say so) do not like very many of them, maybe even hate them. Just look at what we do to them. We feed them non-dairy, unsweetened, decaffeinated, low-fat, chemically altered foods (foods so common now that they have their own name among dieters and foodies – “nonundelows”). We suck cellulite out of their hips and inject collagen into their lips, convincing women that they’re fat or flat or just plain plain. And it’s killing them.

An estimated seven million women and girls in America suffer from eating disorders. Eighty percent of American women say they are dissatisfied with their appearance and shape. Half of the women in this country are currently on a weight loss diet. Though you may have come a long way, baby, this is still, in many ways, a man’s, man’s, man’s world. And so, it’s no surprise that voices would arise, placing the blame for all of this societal evil squarely on the shoulders of men. A man. The man. Any man.

Enter the feminists. Enter my friend Wanda.

Wanda wasn’t born a feminist any more than I was born a writer. She became a feminist in response to the circumstances she faced, the books she read and the people with whom she associated. In 1950, when she was a little girl, only two percent of elected officials to the U.S. Congress were female. Recently, this number has edged close to 10 percent, suggesting that we may achieve equality between men and women some time during this millennium, perhaps as soon as the year 2500!

In 1970, when Wanda was a young professional, the top managers of American corporations were 99 percent male. By the end of the century, that number had shrunk to an astounding 95 percent. At that rate, Wanda would only have to wait another 250 years before the scales were balanced.

During Wanda’s lifetime, it has been legal to discriminate against women in education, recruitment and advertising. There was a time, and it wasn’t very long ago, when women weren’t allowed to serve in juries. It was once legal to fire a woman for becoming pregnant. Women still make about 80 cents for every dollar men make.

It’s not hard to see how Wanda and other feminists might view this as a social justice issue. That cry for justice ought to make Christians take notice. Justice is, after all, something God takes very seriously. Christians have historically fought for the oppressed, standing up for their God-given rights, inherent dignity and the value of a human life.

So, how should a Christian interact with feminism? Maybe we could start by defining “feminism” — anyone want to take a shot at that?

While I was an undergraduate at Pepperdine University, my sister moved to San Francisco, that godless bastion of free love and uninhibited lifestyle that has become perhaps my favorite city in the world. Of course, moving there meant living there, and living in San Francisco has always been expensive. So, Sandra found a roommate.

Her name was Wanda. Wanda was a feminist, still is to this day. Let there be no doubt about it. Wanda was a larger-than-life, loud-mouthed, pot-smoking, hedonist who fought for her cause proudly and who took great pleasure in putting men in their place. Don’t get me wrong. I was always fond of her, and I like to think the feeling was mutual. She simply didn’t suffer fools gladly.

I remember once that a bunch of us went out to a Spanish restaurant with her. We ordered up so many tapas I was afraid the waiters would come out with weight-lifting belts on, and we drank sangria and laughed until we cried. Wanda loves life, and, those lucky enough to spend time with her learn quickly that that love is contagious. But beyond all the fun (or perhaps during it), Wanda taught me a lot about feminism.

I knew if I was going to talk to people about the ways in which Christians often talk down to people with whom they disagree, I would have to include Wanda. She would have some interesting ideas to add. I knew she’d talk with me honestly and wouldn’t pull any punches.

So I made some attempts to contact her, and I waited. And while I was waiting, I did a little research. And the more I thought about it, the more I found myself coming to the conclusion that we, as a society, don’t really like women. In fact, I began to wonder if our society might actually hate women.

American society seems to say (and stop me if I’m wrong) that if they’re not smooth-skinned, large-breasted, tiny-waisted and round-derriered sex machines, then there must be something wrong with them. We want women to sit there, look pretty and speak when spoken to. We especially do not like smart women. They are allowed to have a strong opinion, in a sassy sort of way, but they are not allowed to have thought through their arguments very well. Not if they want to make it to People Magazine’s list of the most beautiful women in the world.

Oprah Winfrey somehow managed to be granted an exemption, but I’m pretty sure she’s the exception that proves the rule.

Give us vapid, compliant, eye-candy girls, and we’ll come back begging for more. Until they experience a lapse in judgment of some sort, of course. Then we’ll set upon them like jackals (insert Britney Spears or Lindsey Lohan or whoever the female celebrity train wreck du jour happens to be). Let a woman tell us how she voted and why, and, once we’re done verbally abusing her, she shall forever be stricken from the record.

Am I missing something? Or does our society hate women?

I want to be involved in the political process of our nation. I know there are some who think this is futile — some who even think this may be contrary to our faith. I disagree. I think much good can be done from such engagement.

However, I must always remember that my ultimate goal, my greatest desire, the thing that keeps me going when nothing else will, is to see God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. I want there to be peace, and I want there to be justice. I want poverty to be eradicated, and I want the causes of poverty to be eliminated. I want babies to be born healthy and nurtured and educated well. I want evil to be punished, and I want good to be rewarded.

I want all of these things and more that I don’t have time or space to list here for you.

So, I’ll pursue these things personally, and I’ll involve myself in social/political engagement as well. I’ll encourage others to do likewise. But, as I do, my rules of engagement are these:

(1) I’ll avoid demonizing those with whom I disagree;

(2) I’ll entertain the possibility that I may be wrong from time to time;

(3) I’ll work with people to find common ground.

After all, I figure if I pursue God’s Kingdom in a way that runs contrary to what I know about the character and nature of Jesus, I’ve undone God’s will for my life.

Now back to my politically-inclined friend’s email:

For me as a follower of Christ, my agenda is peace and concern for the poor. That means the issue is first and foremost ending the horror of unnecessary war. No one talks about the 100,000 Iraqi civilians that are dead because of our war nor the 2,000,000 Iraqi refugees (and the tiny fraction of that number we have taken in in the US). We have allowed that to happen. I am incredulous that we just stood by and allowed and even facilitated the extermination of civilians in Iraq.

I share your view in that I am anti-abortion, but I am also anti-criminalization of abortion. Abortion should be legal, safe and very, very rare. If people did not live in poverty and had good health care, abortion would be much less of an issue. I have had the opportunity to talk to pregnant women and help them decide to keep the baby and have never personally had to go through the abortion process with anyone close to me, but I see that job as a function of the family and the community and, if applicable, the church – not the government criminalizing the wrenching decisions made by a family. This is an area where I agree the government should stay out of regulating the very personal, private and complex decisions families, communities and churches should be helping to make.

He went on even more about pro-life causes and John McCain. And he ended like this:

But, like you, if McCain ends up as President, I will work to encourage him to be concerned for the poor and the people for whom the American Dream has become a nightmare. His status as a nominally Christian candidate is okay by me and, hopefully, he will distance himself from the agents of intolerance once he actually is elected…James Dobson notwithstanding.

Thanks for a civil discourse. It was very refreshing.

Was that so hard? I mean, he was wordy and could have used a good, heavy-handed editor. But, other than that, is it so hard for us to be civil to one another? This gentleman and I managed to do it.

No, it was not.

But, yes, it was.

The hardest part was reading his email to me the way I want him to read my email to him – giving the benefit of the doubt, assuming the best, hoping the best, answering him in love without compromising my beliefs.

Actually, no, that wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was wrestling down my desire to be right, my desire to be superior to my friend, to instruct him and show him the error of his ways, to sacrifice winning my friend to my side for the sake of maintaining my relationship and my integrity.

That is, I believe, what makes it so hard.

Back during the last election season, I got an email from a friend asking me to join him in supporting the young Senator for Illinois. He wrote,

I share the same goals as Barack Obama: ending the Iraq War, honoring our commitment to our veterans, achieving energy independence, stopping the genocide in Darfur, improving our schools, and affordable universal health care for every single American. I know the political process sometimes seems superficial and worse. But Barack Obama gives me hope for a better America and a better world.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but he had sent this email to lots of people – including lots of “nice Christian” people who felt compelled to hit “reply all” as they showed their disgust for liberals. I wish I could say I was shocked by how uncharitable their responses were, but I think I may have been around so long that I’ve lost the ability to be shocked anymore.

Needless to say, it was not the church’s finest hour.

I wrote back (carefully avoiding the “reply all” button).

I have a lot of respect for Barack Obama. I admire his courageous words. I even like some of his policies. However, I will not vote for him. I am a conservative at heart. I believe government is at its best when it governs least, when it stays in its lane, does few things and does them very well.

Beyond that, and I hesitate to bring this up because I don’t want it to sound as if I’ve made this a single-issue election, but Obama’s stance on abortion is, in my opinion, deplorable.

Even if I were a moderate in my views about abortion (which I am not), Obama’s views are so extreme that I would have a difficult time endorsing him. I’m basing this on his 2007 speech to Planned Parenthood. It was either a lapse in judgment or just plain historical ignorance that would allow him to speak so positively of the racist agenda of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger.

That being said, if Barrack Obama becomes President, I intend to be a genuine Christian and help him where he is doing good. We have a lot to fix and heal in this country, and I’m not letting party affiliation keep me from lending a hand.

The next morning, I had a lengthy reply waiting in my inbox:

Thanks for the thoughtful and articulate response. I’ll try to respond in the same spirit.

I am a former conservative (of course, growing up in my church there was no other option) but have come to a different view this time. Part of it for me is that I am actually old enough to remember my childhood and the life and presidency of JFK. Even more clearly, I remember hearing the soaring rhetoric and the incredible courage of Dr. King, and I watched, as a child, that march on Washington and thought he was the bravest man I had ever seen. Then I went to church and heard deacons and elders talk about the ‘uppity n*****’ openly and heatedly. I guess the hope that this country might be something approaching post-racial transcends so many other issues and is so much of what I hope for my grandchildren. Sadly, some of the responses I got to my email had racist overtones, but only those sent from ‘Christians’. None of my non-religious friends are ‘afraid’ of Obama. I find that incredibly sad (your response was the lone voice of sane and sensible discourse – others sounded frantic and scared).

His email continued, but let me stop here for a moment and say I was really saddened by what he’d written about racism among Christians. I was saddened because I knew he was right. We’ve got racism in our past, and we haven’t really done all that much to correct it – aside from cleaning up our language.

I recently had a conversation with a very dear friend who pastors a church in the Deep South. He wants to hire a new youth minister, and one of the best candidates he’s come across is a black man – who is married to a white woman. My friend is strong and courageous and willing to do something unpopular if he believes it is the right thing to do.

But you tell me how many other church leaders would be that brave?

These are politically volatile times. Yes, this summer was tense — with the debt ceiling and the credit rating and the finger-pointing. But we endured a long, hot summer in 2009 – filled with tea parties and town hall meetings. The word Nazi was thrown around by both sides. “You’re a Nazi.” “No, you’re a Nazi.” “How can I be a Nazi when you’re the one who’s a Nazi?”

Pushing. Shoving. Shouting. A woman called the President’s plans “Nazi policies” and was told that she had the intellectual capacity of a coffee table. Seriously.

Liars and Nazis and coffee tables. Oh my! It seems we may have moved beyond simply disagreeing with one another to actually despising one another.

Back in 2009, President Obama delivered a speech to some students. It was said that he subliminally indoctrinated them all into a vast socialist conspiracy. And we all know what happened the last time a President addressed all of the nation’s students. That’s right. He subliminally indoctrinated them all into a vast rightwing conspiracy that exploded in this past summer’s town hall meetings. Yes, the seeds for all these emotional outbursts of late were planted in impressionable minds by the clever and sophisticated blinks and stammers of one George H.W. Bush back in October 1991!

I realize you can’t see that my tongue is firmly planted in my cheek as I type these words, so, for those of you who may be confused, I’m being sarcastic!

The Democrats booed during George W. Bush’s last State of the Union address. The Republicans shouted, “You lie!” during President Obama’s speech on healthcare. The Democrats accused George H.W. Bush of playing dirty politics by addressing students in 1991. The Republicans returned the favor in 2009.

It seems the more things change, the more things stay the same.

And yet….

There have been fistfights and actual, literal, physical duels in Washington before. I didn’t see President Obama challenge Speaker of the House John Boehner to pistols at dawn. No one slapped anyone in the face with a glove…at least not yet. So far, all they’ve done is exchange words, folks. Historically speaking, this was pretty tame.

Perhaps we are becoming a more perfect union after all. Not all the way perfect, mind you. But perfecter.

Remember that time when the President was giving a speech to a special joint session of congress, outlining his ideas for health care reform and was attempting to clarify what he considered to be misperceptions, and right then, right there in the middle of his clarifying, someone shouted, “You lie!”?

Yeah…that was something, wasn’t it?

That someone would be Rep. Joe Wilson – a Republican from South Carolina, a state where elected officials have often had their own troublesome relationship with truth.

Heads snapped. Faces dropped. Frowns. Sneers. Somewhere an angel cried. It was as if someone had passed gas during communion. You could hear the needle scratch across the record as everything came to a full stop for a moment.

Wilson seemed to realize immediately that he had messed up and began to study his Blackberry intently – the way Jimmy Connors used to look at the strings of his racquet whenever he hit a bad shot. Until then I never thought a full-grown man could hide behind something the size of a deck of cards. Perhaps he’d only meant to post his comment on Twitter and was no wondering how he had somehow gotten the two forms of communication mixed up.

I had been on Facebook earlier and had seen many people electronically shouting similar messages at the President. I guess it’s okay to call someone a liar when you know they’re not reading your Facebook status updates, but doing it while you’re sitting in the same room with them is anathema.

Never mind the fact that Democratic Senator Harry Reid (NV) once said, “President Bush is a liar.” This was different…somehow. It was a formal setting, and it was live on television, and the President was standing right there where he could hear it. At least Harry had the good sense to do it when the President was out of earshot.

Joe Wilson said something rude and uncalled for. Regardless of its whether it was true or not, it showed a lack of judgment and diplomacy – two character traits we should probably look for when electing representatives. He quickly apologized, and the President accepted his apology.

Still, the next day, this was the headline story for every news-related website. Men and women from both sides of the political spectrum denounced it, calling it unprecedented, demanding he be censured. The man Wilson had beaten during the election the previous November received a huge cash infusion – just in case he wanted to run again. Only time will tell whether or not Wilson loses his job over it or if this episode gets tossed onto the giant pile of embarrassing but long-forgotten outbursts that so frequently emanate from our nation’s capital.

Let me be clear: I wish Rep. Joe Wilson had more self-control. He admitted shortly after the speech that he let his emotions get the best of him. I think shouting “You lie!” in the middle of a televised speech is foolish and counterproductive.

But I’m not so sure it should be viewed as any kind of game ender. Wilson’s not the first congressman to lose his temper. Obama’s not the first president to fudge the truth.

Politics, for some reason, just seems to make ordinarily sane and rational people misbehave.

So, what shall we do? Should we move to a compound somewhere and withdraw from the political process altogether? Buy an island somewhere for Christians only and offer some sort of theocratic legal system? Put your head down and pretend everything’s a-okay? Throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don’t care?

How should we think about politics — especially when we encounter someone whose political ideology is different from our own?

Sitting with some very dear friends recently, I overheard a man say, “Looking at the election results, I have to say I was wrong.”

Good start, I thought.

“I had no idea there were that many stupid people in America!”

Oh boy, I thought.

Do I say something, or do I just let it go? This is a recurring theme for me. Usually, it happens while I’m sitting in Starbucks, but that’s not the only place I run into the opportunity to say something. I tend to vacillate between two extremes: either I say nothing at all or I over speak.

I tried to say something. “I’m not sure the people who voted for the other guy are stupid. Maybe they’re naïve or something. Maybe they just have a different perspective on the issues. I know some very thoughtful and intelligent people who voted for him, and so do you.”

The guy looked at me and said, “You’re right. Stupid may be the wrong word.”

Good start, I thought.

“Maybe a better word is idiots!”

Oh boy.

What is it about political discussions that so easily brings out the worst in us?