Why Religion Opposes Female Rights

Recently, the Catholic hierarchy moved to bring the Leadership Conference of Women Religious into line with orthodox Church teachings . This organization of American nuns had been in conflict with the Vatican over issues related to women's rights, including reproductive rights. The spectacle of an all-male task force being brought in to tell women what they must think may seem badly dated. Yet, male priests still tell most of the world's women what to think and their message is often anti-feminist.

Anti-feminism and inequality

Popularly floated explanations for clerical opposition to female equality with males are unsatisfying. Most reduce to a single word: conservatism; tradition; family; patriarchy, and so forth. This is a problem because it does not explain why the conserved tradition is biased against women to begin with instead of being biased against men.

It is not just that the priests are male. In some societies, women take a leading role in specific religious rituals. This was true in ancient Greece, for example, where priestesses presided over festivals in honor of the god Dionysus, but this was nevertheless a heavily male-dominated society and the priestesses did not advocate female domination.

In many world religions, women are making inroads in religious professions but the trend is resisted by the Catholic Church that allows women to serve as nuns but bans ordination. When one considers that some religions face a crisis of falling priestly vocations, yet refuse to ordain women, it seems that the churches would literally rather die than accept women as equals of men.

One way of thinking about this puzzle is to see gender inequality within the broader framework of social inequality. Religions that have been around for a long time tend to accept, or support, the status quo in practice. Even if some of their texts are hostile to power and pomp, they cozy up to the politically powerful.

Religions are useful to political leaders because they can justify steep social hierarchies. From the deified Pharaohs of Egypt to the divine right of English monarchs, the beneficiaries of inequality used religion to justify their elevated status.

Contemporary research also finds that religion thrives in situations of inequality. Places where there is highly unequal distribution of income (Gini coefficient) are significantly more religious (2). With the establishment of more equal social democracies, religion declines as illustrated by the decline of the majority Christianity in Europe.

So the aversion of religious leaders to gender equality may be a specific case of their more general endorsement of social inequality. To be more specific, conservative churches endorse male supremacy in the household for much the same reason that they endorse the power of kings, dictators, oligarchs, and elites.

By endorsing the existing power structure, religions serve a useful function for the powerful whether they are monarchs, or men in a male-dominated society.

To say that religious leaders merely mirror the power structure of the society may be an intriguing idea but is there any concrete evidence that anti-feminism in the church is caused by anti-feminism outside the church?

Evidence that religious anti-feminism mirrors the overall society

One way of analyzing this problem is to ask what sort of society ordains female priests. These are generally societies in which women have taken strides toward equality in most other professions.

So countries like Sweden and Denmark in which women achieve at the highest level in most professions -- and are broadly represented in political life -- are also places where women serve as ministers and adopt other leadership roles in churches. The official Church of Sweden has ordained women since 1958 and the Lutheran state church of Denmark also ordains women and admits them as bishops.

In countries like the U.S., where there are comparatively few women in politics, there are correspondingly few female ministers and bishops, although protestant denominations and non Christian religions are more open to female clergy than Catholics are.

In countries of the Middle East, female imams are generally not allowed to lead congregations containing men. Women play little role in public life (although some, like Benazir Bhutto, of Pakistan, rose to the top).

So, if you want women to be better treated by their church, ordain more women! If you want more female ministers, begin with gender equality in the society!

 

Comments

[Morgaan Sinclair]

08:47 PM on 08/10/2012

AND FINALLY ... But the Athenian power-wielders knew when to toss a crumb to a fed-up woman, so once a year, men left the Acropolis and gathered at the edges of the city. The women then gathered for the Thesmophoria where they vented, ranged, ate, drank, swapped sexual self-satisfaction techniques, and saw their mothers, sisters, cousins, and other women ... for ... a weekend. Men went nuts trying to figure out what the HELL they were doing, and there are some neat Greek plays about this frustration of not being able to control women absolutely ALL the time. The sad thing, of course, is that a woman's mother or sister might die, and she will never have known until this moment. Greek women were incarceratives. Period. The whole notion of Greek egalitarianism and "democracy" is based on the inability of an utterly powerful ruling class (male) to even THINK about including in the concept of populus 1/2 of the native population and 100% of the foreign population. On a human rights level, the Greeks are neither famously egalitarian nor democratic. We should stop advancing historical "truths" that are based on the rights of only one group of people. The land of the free wasn't free until after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Amendment that gave women the right to vote. And neither was Greece.

[Morgaan Sinclair]

08:45 PM on 08/10/2012

TO WIT ... In one famous case of a hetera, Phryne (4th century BCE) was accused of heresy against the Eleusinian Mysteries and promptly brought to trial. Her lawyer lover sensed he was losing the case, and ripped all her clothes off. She was acquitted on the basis that the gods HAD to favor her to give her such beauty. She continued in her chosen profession and became so wealthy that when the walls of Thebes were destroyed by Alexander the Great, Phryne offered to rebuild them at her own expense. So note here a few things: Only men were citizens of Athens. Only virgin priestesses and courtesans ever saw theater. Sexual servants -- pornos and heterae -- are always foreigners. This means that the common Athenian woman has NO citizenship, NO freedom, NO education, and NO rights. ... See next post ...

[Morgaan Sinclair]

08:44 PM on 08/10/2012

PART DEUX. She wasn't allowed at the Symposia or at the theater. Now for the exceptions: Temple "nuns" who could go to the theater and walk the streets, but they were virgin, so no harm to male sensibilities there as no jealousy arose, of curse ... oops, of course. Then there were the "pornos" (yes, origin of the word). The pornos were foreign women prostitutes who wore little sandals the heel of which was shaped like a butt, and as she walked in the muddy streets, men could find their way to an evening's love. Then, of course, there were theheterae, the courtesans. These were highly educated women, foreign, drop-dead gorgeous -- and THESE were women with whom men had extraordinary relationships. They were not unlike their historical daughters of Venice, courtesans talented in the arts of love, capable of the erudite conversation -- and RICH. They made money hand over fist. ... See next post

[Morgaan Sinclair]

08:42 PM on 08/10/2012

I love this article, but I must offer a little bit explanation about our dear fiends (oops ... friends) the Ancient Greeks. Here is the REAL skinny on women's rights in Ancient Greece. Yes, the Lysus Mater was the head of the Temple of Athene, for whom Athens was named. She was the extraordinary exception that proved the rule of total male hegemony and egregious disenfranchisement of women. Women, you see, couldn't be citizens of Athens. A GREEK woman was not allowed in the street, confined to the home but for one long weekend a year, bore and taught children with her extremely limited education, managed the household, and was available for pleasure (his) and child-bearing. She was not allowed in the streets, and often her marriage meant the end of seeing female friends and relatives but for the aforementioned long weekend (see below). ... Please see next post

[nfarrah]

01:41 AM on 08/07/2012

The Catholic Church does not "tell women what they must think." It does, however, declare what both men and women must believe in order to be Catholic, and it does so evenly and consistenly without regard to gender.

Some examples: The Society of St. Pius X is in trouble for not fully accepting the dogmatic content of the Second Vatican Council. The Church recently censured the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru for not teaching proper Catholic doctrine. Fr. Kevin Lee from the Padre Pio Parish in Sydney, Australia, was recently excommunicated after revealing he had been secretly married for 20 years. A priest who was consecrated as a bishop in China by the state-sanctioned Catholic Church without Pope Benedict XVI's consent could face excommunication.

The list goes on and on, but the bottom line is that the Catholic Church applies the same discipline equally to both men and women.

[dasher333]

05:59 PM on 08/07/2012

@nfarrah....how the hell is that a reasonable comparison?

You pick out a few select stories where men are punished or "limited" by the Catholic Church and think that it evens out with the centuries of gender inequality they have preached and practiced? I'm sure your list "goes on and on" but the Catholic Church has been around for over 2000 years so I would expect a decent amount of punishments to be dolled out to both genders during that time. It stuns me how black and white you think this all is. What do I mean by that? Let's just say I wouldn't want to be a scientist 400 years ago.

Never mind the fact that most of your examples are vague representations of the overall picture (i.e. the phrase "not fully accepting dogmatic content of the SVC"), or that one of them actually represents gender inequality (excommunication for having a wife). You miss the point of the artical, that is, these inequalities are based on societal values that were practiced over a millennium ago (also see: slavery, trial proceedings, human rites, o yea....the list goes on and on).