Original Egalitarian Order of Most Religions "Hijacked" by Men: Part 2 (The Eve of Destruction)

Still reeling from last year’s virulent dispute about the foiled appointment of its first gay bishop, the Angelican community is now faced with another potentially irreversible spilt. Forward in Faith, a group opposed to women priests, has proposed the idea of a province separate from but parallel to Canterbury and York, with its own exclusively male hierarchy. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has apparently hinted that he would be prepared to consider this suggestion, designed to prevent a mass exodus from the church when women are consecrated as bishops.

More liberal Anglicans condemn the plan as a form of sexual apartheid, even though the Forward in Faith has 4000 women members. Nevertheless, the new province would represent a male bastion in a world in which women are increasingly entering spheres that were formerly the preserve of men. The fantasy of an all-male enclave is not new in the history of religion. In the ancient world, women often served alongside men as priests. This did not affect their inferior social status, but they were regarded as worthy representatives of the divine. That changed during the axial age, from circa 800 BC to 200 BC, when all the world faiths that have continued to nourish humanity came into being at roughly the same time.

These axial religions hold many values in common, but they all share a fateful flaw. Whatever an axial faith took root, the position of women underwent a downturn. Most of these religions had an egalitarian ethos, but they were and have remained essentially male spiritualities. Confucius, for example, seemed entirely indifferent to women; Socrates was not a family man. In India, the Jain and the Buddhists orders were irenic forms of the ancient Aryan military brotherhoods, and though nuns were permitted to join, in a second-class capacity, many felt that the presence of women is inappropriate. Even the Buddha, who did not usually succumb to this type of prejudice, declared that women would fall upon his order like mildew on a rice field.

Such misogyny damages the integrity of faiths that insist that male and female are both created in God’s image and that all human beings are capable of attaining nirvana, knowledge of Brahman or the Tao. Yeshivas, madarasahs, seminaries, monastic orders and colleges of cardinals are all-male clubs that rigorously exclude women. This chauvinism infects the spirituality of the faithful, male and female alike. Male Jews are supposed to thank God daily for not creating them women; every Christmas, Christians sing “Lo! He abhors not the Virgin’s womb”’ as though Jesus’ tolerance of the female body was an act of extraordinary condescension on his part.

Even when there was an initial attempt to introduce greater sexual equality, men hijacked the faith and dragged it back to the old patriarchy. This happened in both Christianity and Islam, later-day reassertions of axial age monotheism. The Prophet Mohammad, for example, was anxious to emancipate women and they were among his first converts. The Quran teaches that men and women have exactly the same responsibilities and duties, and gives women rights of inheritance and divorce that we would not enjoy in the west until the 19^th century. There is nothing in the Quran about the veiling of all women or their confinements in harems. This practice came into Islam some three to four generations after the Prophet, under the influence of the Greek Christians of Byzantium, who had long covered and secluded their women in this way.

Jesus would have been surprised by the confinement of women. Both he and St Paul had women disciples. They did not ordain them as priests, because there was no Christian priesthood until the third century. The early Christians espoused a revolutionary egalitarianism; a priestly hierarchy was too reminiscent of Judaism and paganism, which they were beginning to leave behind. Those who today condemn women’s ordination should be aware that priesthood and episcopacy are themselves innovations that depart from the practice of the primitive church.

The gospels give women a good press: it is the women who stand by Jesus throughout the crucifixion, while his male disciples are sulking in hiding, and it is women who receives the first news of the resurrection and bring it to the men. They were, it is often said, “apostles to the apostles”. St Paul proclaimed that Christ was neither male nor female. Most of the misogynist passages attributed to Paul are taken from epistles written decades after his death, when Christianity was being to retreat from its radicalism.

Once this had happened, Christianity found issue of sex and gender more difficult than any other faith. Some of the fathers of the church seemed totally unable to deal with women, and attacked them in vicious, immoderate and, indeed unchristian language. Because they believed that celibacy was the prime Christians vocation, they projected their own frustration on to women, whom they castigated as evil temptresses. Tertullian told women to shroud their bodies in veils and make themselves as unattractive as possible. He blamed them for the sin of Eve: “You are devil’s gateway….because of you Son of God had to die!”

Many of the fathers wanted to make the church a male enclave. St Augustine told his priests to shun the company of women, even if they were sick or in trouble. Even mothers were not safe: “It is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in every woman.” The fathers’ ideal woman was a virgin, who had renounced her sexuality and thereby become an honorary male. Some women, such as John of Arc or Catherine of Siena, exploited their symbolism and used their virginity as an entrée into the male spheres of war and politics, but in general virgins were supposed to retreat from the world and leave it to men. They would eventually be blocked away in enclosed convents.

Later St Thomas Aquinas saw woman as biologically flawed, “defective and misbegotten”, and thus inherently inferior to male sex, to whom it was there duty to submit. Even Luther, who left his monastery to marry, believe that, as punishment to the sin of Eve, women must be driven from the world of men and confined in the home “as a nail driven into the wall”. Protestantism made Christianity more male than ever; by abolishing the cults of the Virgin Mary and the women saints, it banished all female imagery from the Christian consciousness.

Forwards in Faith’s dream of an exclusively male preserve draw its strength form a Christian tradition on denial, frustration and disgust that can by no stretch of the imagination be regarded as spiritually wholesome. In all the world faiths, women are trying to redress the pernicious chauvinism that has tainted their traditions. We are now living in a world that’s perilously torn apart by religious extremism. We can no longer afford faith that feeds in anyway upon hatred, exclusion and disdain. Before we condemn the bigotry of other traditions, we should try to heal the prejudice that has damaged our own.

By: Karen Armstrong

Original Egalitarian Order of Most Religions "Hijacked" by Men: Part 1

Not one of the world religions has, in practice, been good to women and this is one of their major flaws.

They did not set out to be hostile to women, but they developed in patriarchal societies, where masculine skills, such as warfare, had become more highly prized in the newly developed cities than they had been in the villages and rural areas, where women contributed more to the economy.

Thus Confucius, a genial man, seems quite indifferent to women. The same is true of Socrates. Nevertheless, some of these faiths did initially attempt to give women a role. In the early Upanishads, women take part in the abstruse mystical discussions. This is simply taken for granted and there is no need to comment.

In Buddhism, women were allowed, eventually, to become mendicant nuns. Nevertheless, there is a story that the Buddha originally opposed this. But when it was pointed out to him that women were able to attain enlightenment and be proficient yogis, he relented, but commented sadly that they would fall upon the Buddhist order like mildew on a field of rice. Some scholars believe that this was a later story, projected back onto the Buddha by monks, whose lustful thoughts interrupted their meditations and blamed their failure to attain Nirvana on women. In fact, Buddhism gave women an opportunity to have a role other than the domestic that was absolutely unprecedented at that time, even though the nuns were seen as subordinate to the priests.

Both Christianity and Islam were initially very positive towards women. In the gospels, women are the first to receive news of the resurrection of Jesus; St. Paul insists that in Christ there was neither male nor female. He greets women as co-apostles and fellow workers, on the same level as the men. But in later books of the New Testament, notably the epistles of Titus and Timothy, which were not written by Paul, women have lost this equality and are told that they are subject to their husbands. What has happened is that the originally egalitarian gospel has been hijacked by the men and dragged back to the old patriarchy.

The same happened in Islam. The 7th century Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce that women in the West would not get until the 19th century. There is nothing in the Quran to suggest that all women should be veiled or secluded from society. Only the Prophet's wives were to be covered, and this was a security measure. Muhammad's position in Medina was very insecure and his enemies were harassing his wives. But the other Muslim women were not veiled and took a full and lively part in the life of the city. The Quran makes it clear that men and women have equal rights and responsibilities.

But later, the position of women deteriorated. The early Fathers of the Church were sometimes viciously misogynist. In early Christianity, women were blamed for the sin of Eve and, as the cult of celibacy grew, were castigated for being sexual temptresses. Tertullian called women the devil's gateway: they were responsible for Jesus' death. St. Augustine said that all women, even wives and mothers, must be avoided, because they were all associated with Eve, who was responsible for the fall of humanity into sin.

Most religious law codes were devised in the premodern period, when all women in all societies were regarded as second-class citizens. The emancipation of women has been one of the hallmarks of modernity, so that in 'fundamentalist' movements, which rebel against modernity, the traditional inferior status of women is stressed as part of this counter cultural revolt. And people are always reluctant to lose power.

Things are beginning to improve. Buddhist nuns are demanding that the men recognize their status in the Sangha, the Buddhist order. Women are becoming priests in many of the Protestant denominations, and except in Orthodox circles, Jewish women are becoming rabbis. Muslim feminists are developing an Islamic feminism, which looks back to the Quran and the Prophet, pointing out that the emancipation of women was a project dear to Muhammad's heart. In the Roman Catholic Church, there is no chance as yet of women being ordained as priests.

But there is still much work to be done. Historically, when a community feels threatened, the bodies of women come to represent the beleaguered society, and this applies to some Muslim communities, which feel threatened by he West, and to those religious groups that feel threatened by the secular world.

By: Karen Armstrong