Have you ever noticed that organized religion has historically been a major force in the oppression of women? Have you ever wondered why? The battle over abortion being waged in America today, with the support of both the Vatican and the religious right, is simply the latest chapter in this perennial war.

Since ‘religion’ is assumed by many to be something that is basically good, its negativity toward women is thought of as proper and justified. So, the irrationality of sexism is, first, hard for some to understand and, second, even harder to banish. So, let me begin by establishing the reality of the sexist hostility that permeates religious traditions.

Throughout the world, a quick survey will reveal that the more religiously oriented a nation is, the lower the status of women is in that country. In Europe, one can document a direct correlation between those countries where people still largely honor and even worship the Virgin Mary and the entrenched second-class status of women in those nations. In most religious systems, women are regarded either as less than complete or as actually flawed human beings.

In the United States, during the struggle in the early part of the 20th century to amend the constitution to enable women to vote, the primary opposition came from the Christian Church, with the suffrage movement being condemned regularly from most Christian pulpits. The later defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982 was brought about by the combination of religious forces together with a right-wing Republican administration. It is worth noting that the impetus toward equality for women in the Christian West did not begin in earnest until secularism’s rise signaled the decline of religious power.

In the Islamic Middle East, the impact of Shariah law on women reflects the same pious hostility by stripping basic human rights from women. Shariah law says that girls can be married at the onset of puberty and that a man may divorce one of his multiple wives by simply saying: “I divorce you,” in the presence of two male witnesses. The Taliban in Afghanistan acted out these laws with a terrifying severity, producing a “Catch-22” situation for women in that women could not become doctors, and no male doctor was allowed to treat Islamic women.

In China, where the principal religions were Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, binding the feet of girls and women developed in response to cultural pressure informed by religious rules. This practice kept women weak, out of power, and under male domination.

In India, a land shaped primarily by Hinduism, the religious custom for centuries called for the widow to throw herself on her husband’s funeral pyre since the loss of a husband was deemed to be tantamount to a proclamation of the surviving widow’s worthlessness.

How did this universal human negativity toward women develop? Why was it endorsed and thus blessed by almost every human religious system the world over? What is there about women in general and women’s bodies in particular that appear to be so threatening to males that they have to employ religion to help in the process of female suppression? These are the questions I would like to raise and address.

I begin this quest by looking for clues in our human origins. Human life has been on this planet for no more than two million years and no fewer than one hundred thousand years, depending on how one defines human life. I tend to lean toward the more recent number since full humanity to me requires a brain sufficiently developed to become both self-conscious and self-aware, including the ability to live in the medium of time, which allows us to remember the past and to anticipate the future. It also involves the ability to think abstractly so that sounds can be turned into symbols called words, which in turn enables language to develop.

However, there is a huge emotional price that self-conscious, self-aware, time-oriented abstract thinking human beings must pay for these evolutionary advances. That price involves living with chronic unabated anxiety, having to anticipate our own deaths and thus to be forced to wage an unending, but always losing, battle for our own survival. It takes enormous courage to be human, and our constant fears force us to seek security in a variety of ways. Our first response is to become deeply tribal in our thinking since tribal membership gives us a better chance at survival than we have as individuals. The tribe then defines what is needed for survival and forces those definitions on the people. Assigned roles for both men and women are part of that. Tribal religion is always the enforcer of these behavior patterns since it teaches the people to accept their assigned places in this tribal pecking order. That order, we are told, was set by God. God chose the tribal chief to be God’s earthly ruler. The Divine Right of Kings was born here. In our hard-wired tribal mentality, we learned to fear and to hate those who were strangers with whom we were destined to come into contact periodically. An alien would be outside our organized structures and thus a threat to our tribe. That fear still feeds our xenophobia and our irrational prejudice against those who are different by race, language, or physical characteristics.

This same value of tribal survival also compelled our ancestors to define women biologically and to reduce them almost universally to a second-class status. Women were clearly recognized as the bearers of life and as those whose lactating skills ensured the life of the tribe’s progeny. Those were essential functions for tribal survival but were not valued in the same way as strength and speed, which were the male values that assured survival in warfare and success in the hunt. Women, particularly when pregnant or nursing, were liabilities in this survival struggle. Since they needed to be protected and defended, they came to be thought of as childlike, helpless, and dependent. So, women were taught from the very dawn of civilization that their role had been defined, handed down, and circumscribed by God, who made them the way they were. As dependent, second-class creatures, their need to be educated was minimized, and that, in turn, caused them in time to be viewed as incapable of learning. A woman’s potential was thus effectively muted. The clear law of nature said that women were divinely fashioned to serve the needs of the male for support, sexual pleasure, comfort, and the flattery of ego fulfillment. The male was obviously meant to be the dominant member of the species.

Tribal religion enforced these survival patterns and explained them in mythological language. The sun was thought of as a symbol of the male deity who lived beyond the sky and who ruled the day. The moon became the symbol of women, smaller, less illuminating, dark, and even seductive. The sky, as the abode of the male God, brought forth powerful male-like things: thunder, lightning, wind, and rain. The earth was seen as passive and feminine. It absorbed the fury of the sky god and received the falling rain that came to be thought of as divine semen sent to impregnate Mother Earth, causing her to bring forth life. Since the woman was defined as subhuman, it is easy to see how polygamy developed. Powerful men laid claim to many wives. Harems were a fact of life. The woman’s destiny was to go from being subservient to her father to being subservient to her husband. She had few rights. It was her duty to obey the dominant male in her life. Her body belonged to her husband whenever he desired it. In most ancient cultures, the husband had the right to punish his wife, even to the point of death. She had no right of appeal since nothing he did to her was a crime. It was inevitable that women, who are also driven by the ultimate human battle for survival, would develop survival skills of their own. They would take the only asset that they possessed that seemed to have value, namely the allure of their bodies, and use it to gain some control over their lives. They would flirt, tease, seduce, withdraw, and taunt until they achieved power.

Since women were relegated to managing the hearth, they developed the intuitive skills required to allow them to live in close, interdependent communities, while the males developed the individualistic skills that enabled them to be successful in their quest for food or victory. The stereotypes that still underlie our sexist prejudices were born in this primitive context. The stronger male almost inevitably translated differently as inferior and complementary as unequal.

To make it even more difficult to escape these survival-imposed definitions, tribal religion almost universally asserted that these patterns were God-given, God-imposed, and God-ordered. To question them, to undermine them in any way, to rebel against them was to oppose God and all that was holy. Sexism thus came to be thought of as ‘the will of God.’

This is why the feminist revolution is today so viscerally opposed by both the Vatican and right-wing religious leaders. This is why Pat Robinson said on The 700 Club: “The feminist agenda is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.” That is why religion has always been a foe of the female struggle for equality. That is why even today, that male-dominated institution we call the Church believes that its leaders have a right to sit in all-male circles, wearing the frocks of their religious profession and to pronounce, in the name of a God called Father, what a woman can do with her own body. This is also why organized religion is so viscerally opposed to homosexuality, leading as it does to persecutions, purgings, and constitutional amendments. The religious definition of a male homosexual is that he, though a man, condescends to act like a woman. Sexism is a very complex mixed bag of irrational and emotional elements. However, that is where the religious negativity toward women originates. We must embrace this insight first before we can move on to others.

~John Shelby Spong

Published exclusively for Progressing Spirit

November 15, 2005