By Nadia Andrilenas
Nadia Andrilenas is a PhD student in the Department of Religion in Historical Studies at Baylor University. Her research examines women’s experiences in Christianity, especially in East and Southeast Asia, and draws from World Christianity methodologies. Her dissertation will explore how Vietnamese and Christian and Missionary Alliance missionary women shaped early Vietnamese evangelicalism.
Editorial Note, Stephen Di Trolio: For the following weeks, we will explore the theme of women and world Christianity. We will highlight the work of Baylor University PhD students and graduates as they discuss the centrality of women within the discussion of World Christianity and their research. This series provides a path for thinking about the manifold ways in which the theme of women and world Christianity intersect in their research and study. We are grateful for sharing these insights on their ongoing research.
Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi likes to reframe the historian’s task as one of memory, experience, and expectation rather than modern, chronological past, present, and future. As World Christianity reveals so well, religious communities exist alongside their ghosts and future hopes. Even in an academic field such as World Christianity, the conversation takes place between the doyens whose works are read, the experts who now write and teach, and those still being formed but who are becoming teachers themselves. The four of us have been formed as scholars of World Christianity within Baylor’s Religion Department. Present mentors like Cardoza-Orlandi and memories enshrined in books have given us hope—and a posture of expectation—for World Christianity’s future.
Like others, we’ve found that dialogue and working together is critical to that future. Thus, despite being continents apart, we wanted to show how our research cross-pollinate. We wanted to show how our research experiences help enlighten each other’s historical memories. We hope to push forward the hope of World Christianity, testing how far the “plurality of cross-links” (to use Koschorke’s phrase) can go. Rather than link with historical connections (as desirable as those may be to find), we here offer ways our research subjects link thematically, shining light on the realities our research subjects faced and faced. We all work on the Christian religious experiences of women, a subject that World Christianity has long considered profoundly and will continue to do. We’ll start with how studies of gender and women can push forward some of World Christianity’s most salient questions.
Aunt Luck, a Bible-woman (female evangelist) in 19th-century China, decided to become a Christian after hearing her nephew Leng preach. He declared there was one god who was everywhere and controlled creation, and so in response, she initiated some housecleaning. As she carried out the censers used for spirit worship in her home, her sons cautiously asked if she was afraid to discard them, to which she replied, “what I had myself set up I could myself take down” (in Pagoda Shadows by Adele Fielde).
Aunt Luck’s response to encountering a Christian message is one of my favorite examples of how women’s experiences enrich the historical narrative and redirect where we look for the story of Christianity. In this story, it is not only in a sermon that Christianity takes shape but also in the hands of a spiritual matriarch. She enacts her religious authority by demonstrating simultaneous continuity with and challenge to tradition. She does what her nephews and sons could not or dared not do; she uniquely embodied Christianity.
World Christianity has a deep tradition of considering female religious experience. I believe this is because the field is primarily concerned with the embodiment of Christianity. Women, gender studies, and World Christianity share this attention to lived experience, which I’ve learned to explore through the study of lived religion. Christianity lives in bodies; it doesn’t float around in concepts or remain confined to a page. Thus, gender, as an embodiment, will always be part of the story of Christianity.
Intentionally attending to gendered experiences in Christianity is poignant because female bodies often tell a different, lesser-known story. While studies of gendered experience are not necessarily female-centric, they often get coded as such because they disrupt the normative spotlight in Christian history that shines on men. Male-centric scholarship, for example, often only looks within congregational boundaries, denominationally-defined pulpits, or theological texts, often without attending to gender. Women do not often show up in these spaces. These sources, while crucial for capturing the history of male presence in Christianity, often leave out the participation of female bodies—which, of course, also diminishes distinctively male experiences.
Including women in the story up front immediately expands the sites for religious life and sources for research, another welcome practice among World Christianity scholars. No longer is Christianity solely a study of doctrine, congregations, denominations, or institutional religion; now, we look at songs and fabrics, migration patterns and political movements, stories and families, newspapers, novels, and social media. Women lead the way in my study of World Christianity, and I’m finding that their presence liberates my understanding of how Christianity shows up in the world.
