Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour cleverly hidden at the intersection of religion and politics. This is an open thread where we can share our thoughts and comments about the day. Let’s talk about how patriarchy—the idea that men should somehow have more social power than women—may be reinforced by religion.
In many societies, religious teachings emphasize the “naturalness” and “sacred nature” of the patriarchy in which men are viewed as superior to women; men are more important than women; men are to be “breadwinners” while women are supposed to be mothers, “housewives,” and breeding machines. The social roles of men and women, according to religious teachings, are not only sacred truths but many people believe that they are scientific facts. Many religions emphasize or reinforce the idea of patriarchy as natural, as given to humans by a deity, and therefore women are to be subject to rule, domination, and ownership by men.
In Confucianism, a highly ceremonial religion with a greater concern for ethics and social relations than for mystical experience, women are seen as inferior to men. In Confucian society, the primary role of women is to obey their husbands and their husbands’ parents and to bear healthy male children. Strict segregation of the sexes is the ideal, and in 585 CE, one council degreed that no male corpse was to be buried next to a female corpse that had not decomposed.
One example of rigid religious patriarchy can be seen in the Hutterites, a communal Christian society with a worldview that was common to medieval German-speaking Europe. According to this worldview, everything is ordered in a hierarchy. In their ethnography The Hutterites in North America, John Hostetler and Gertrude Huntington report:
“The right order regulates all things, the moon and the stars, the plants and animals, and also man. Just as day is separated from the night, so God established order among human beings. The right or divine order requires a hierarchy of relationships. One part is always superior to the other.”
They also report:
“By divine order male is over female, husband over wife, older over younger, and parent over child. Women have neither vote nor a passive participation in the formal decision.”
In the Hutterite world view, woman must be under the yoke of man and obedient to him. In his book Extraordinary Groups: The Sociology of Unconventional Life-Styles, William Kephart reports:
“Female emancipation has no place in the Hutterian scheme of things. Anachronistic or not, the Hutterite world is a man’s world. It has always been and probably always will be.”
Patriarchal religions emphasize the need to maintain gender binary, a view of social organization that defines sex and gender as two rigidly fixed categories known as male and female. In many non-patriarchal societies, it is not uncommon to find that there are more than two genders.
In his book God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World—And Why Their Differences Matter, religion professor Stephen Prothero reports:
“Traditionally, Judaism has been the epitome of patriarchal religion. The biblical covenants were made with men and passed down through male circumcision. The minyan (quarum) required for certain religious activities has traditionally required ten male adults.”
In some Christian traditions, women are seen as inherently sinful, as tempting men to disobey their god. In his book Sex and Spirit, Clifford Bishop writes:
“Because Eve had tempted Adam in the Garden of Eden, women were seen as the vessels of sin, which was transmitted to their wombs at conception.”
Thus, in some Christian sects, women are not allowed to conduct religious ceremonies. The great Roman Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas once taught that females developed from a defective seed.
Many believe that women are, of course, incomplete unless controlled by a man. This also means that for a man to be complete, he must be able to control women. Psychologist Darrel Ray, in an article in American Atheist, writes:
“In a patriarchal society, a man is only a man in relation to his status with women. If other men see him as submissive or subservient to a woman, he is less of a man.”
Part of the religious control over women can be seen in the religious rules regarding sexuality and sexual relations. In some Christian denominations, for example, the only acceptable goal of sexual relations is procreation within marriage. Contraception is seen as almost as sinful as murder. Clifford Bishop writes:
“The Church also attempted to limit the days on which a married couple could try to procreate. Sex was made illegal on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; for forty days before Easter and Christmas; and for three days before communion.”
Atheist Christopher Hitchens, in his introduction to The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, writes:
“If anything proves that religion is not just man-made but masculine-made, it is the incessant repetition of rules and taboos governing the sexual life.”
Psychologist Darrel Ray writes:
“Patriarchal religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are rooted in the gender binary and dismiss all other forms of sexuality as unnatural and morally wrong. Sexuality not condoned by the religion is a sin and impacts the status of the man.”
During the nineteenth century in the United States and in some European countries, women began to be vocal about their subordinate legal, economic, social, and political states. Women began to question if patriarchy was really “natural” and “god-given.” As women in the United States began to organize to obtain more rights, including the right to vote, there were a few who began to question the religious underpinnings of patriarchy which were used to suppress women’s rights.
In 1895, Elizabeth Cady Stanton published her book The Woman’s Bible and argued against the biblically based arguments which call for the subordination of women. She wrote:
“The real difficulty in woman’s case is that the whole foundation of the Christian religion rests on her temptation and man’s fall.”
Stanton embraced the theory of evolution as put forth by Charles Darwin as an argument against the subordination of women. She wrote:
“If, however, we accept the Darwinian theory, that the race has been a gradual growth from the lower to a higher form of life, and the story of the fall is a myth, we can exonerate the snake, emancipate the woman, and reconstruct a more rational religion for the nineteenth century.”
More recently, writing for Free Inquiry, a publication of the Council for Secular Humanism, columnist Katha Politt has suggested that:
“…the subordination of women has historically been one of the main purposes of religion—the original rulebook for patriarchy.”
Patriarchy refers to a society in which men tend to exert a great deal of control over women and the ideology of a male god is often used to make the economic and political subordination of women seem legitimate, sacred, and somehow natural.
When the first English-speaking colonists began their invasion of North America, they described Native Americans as “living by the hunt” in spite of the fact Native Americans were farmers whose surplus agricultural products fed the first English colonists. The problem was that Indian women were the farmers and owned the fields and the produce. To those who viewed the world through patriarchal eyes, the work of women didn’t count and hence it was important to create the hunting myth to reinforce men’s economic contributions.
Under the patriarchy, men control women’s bodies. Thus, the first Europeans were shocked by the fact that Indian women controlled their own bodies and could freely express their sexuality.
Under the patriarchy, men owned their wives and the children they produced. This was expressed—and continues to be expressed—in having the wives and their children use the man’s surname. The Europeans had a difficult time understanding that in many American Indian cultures, women could freely divorce their husbands, that they could have more than one husband at a time, and that their children belonged to the mother’s family rather than to the father’s family.
Rather than see the numerous American Indian examples which surrounded them as evidence that patriarchy wasn’t “natural,” the Europeans simply forced patriarchy and Christianity upon the Indians.
Many writers have commented on the sexism and patriarchy of today’s major religions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism—which places women in secondary roles in both religion and in daily life. A number of scholars who have explored the foundational history of these religions, however, have pointed out that initially these major religions tended to be egalitarian and that patriarchy came later. With regard to Islam, Karen Armstrong, in her book Islam: A Short History, writes:
“The women of the first ummah in Medina took full part in its public life, and some, according to Arab custom, fought alongside the men in battle. They did not seem to have experienced Islam as an oppressive religion, though later, as happened in Christianity, men would hijack the faith and bring it into line with the prevailing patriarchy.”
Within many religions, fundamentalism seeks a return to an idealized past which is often strongly patriarchal. Karen Armstrong writes: “Because the emancipation of women has been one of the hallmarks of modern culture, fundamentalists tend to emphasize conventional, agrarian gender roles, putting women back into veils and into the home.”
In the twentieth century, many women began the search for possible women-centered religions which would reinforce their ideals of feminism. Katha Politt writes:
“To find a woman-centered religion, you have to go back into prehistory, to mother-goddess cults about which we know little and that in any case cannot be proven to have reflected or shaped a matriarchal society in which women were powerful and independent social actors (though it would be nice to think that they did so).”
In her book When God Was a Woman, Merlin Stone writes:
“In prehistoric and historic periods of human development, religions existed in which people revered their supreme creator as female. The Great Goddess—the Divine Ancestress—had been worshiped from the beginnings of the Neolithic periods of 7000 BC until the closing of the last Goddess temples, about AD 500.”
Merlin Stone also writes:
“Archaeological, mythological and historical evidence all reveal that the female religion, far from naturally fading away, was the victim of centuries of continual persecution and suppression by the advocates of the newer religions which held male deities as supreme.”
In seeking spiritual and religious alternatives to the traditional patriarchal religions, the ancient pre-Christian European religious traditions have inspired new religions which are often grouped as Neo-Pagan by scholars. In her book Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshipers, & Other Pagans in America Today, Margot Adler writes:
“It is not surprising that spiritual feminists, in their explorations of the hidden and distorted history of women, have been attracted by the idea of a universal age of goddess worship or a universal stage of matriarchy. These women have been reexamining those philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and psychologists who have argued that women in the ancient world held a position of relative power.”
The best-known of these Neo-Pagan religions is Wicca, a designation that includes many diverse religious traditions which tend to be experiential rather than dogmatic.
Open Thread
This is an open thread—all topics are welcome.