[Dialogue] Spong lays it out.

[kroegerd@aol.com]

November 15, 2005
Women: Religion's Traditional Victims 

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 appears 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 our 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 insured the life of the tribe's progeny. Those were essential functions for tribal survival but they were not valued in the same way as were 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 women'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, lightening, wind and rain. The earth was seen as passive and feminine. It absorbed the fury of the sky god, 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, 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 different 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 can say 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 
Note from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at bookstores everywhere and by clicking here! 
Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong
Christina, a television producer at Fox News asks: 
How do you respond to the Rev. Pat Robertson when he warns the citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania, that God might strike them with a disaster since they voted out the School Board members who favored "Intelligent Design?" 
Dear Christina: 
Pat Robertson has said so many silly and ridiculous things that I wonder why anyone would pay much attention to him on any subject. He warned Orlando, Florida, that God would send a hurricane to destroy them when Orlando's decision makers added "sexual orientation" to that city's civil rights ordinance making it illegal for an employer to discriminate against a person because of race, ethnicity, gender, creed or "sexual orientation." He suggested that Hollywood would be the victim of an earthquake because that is where Ellen Degeneres works. With Jerry Falwell he agreed that the 9/11 disaster was brought upon this nation as God's judgment for harboring "feminists, abortionists, homosexuals and the American Civil Liberties Union." He suggested that the CIA should assassinate the duly elected President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. He has said that the feminist movement is about those women who want to "leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft and become lesbians." The tirade of absurdities goes on and on. 
This country treasures the precious gift of free speech and Pat Robertson can obviously say any foolish and ignorant thing he wishes. When he pretends to speak in the name of God, however, I think his fellow believers have a right, indeed a necessity, to speak a word of judgment on his behavior since his words slander the Christian definition of God as Love given to us first by the author of the First Epistle of John and even more important, lived out by Jesus, who called us even to love our enemies. 
I want to make only two points about this issue. First, I wonder who, other than Pat himself, designated Pat Robertson to be God's spokesperson? How dare Pat assume that the God revealed in the Jesus I serve is filled with all of Pat's peculiar prejudices. Why does he not understand that God is God and Pat Robertson is not? Why does he not see that when he tells the world with an unashamed certainty what God thinks and what God will do, he is only revealing what he thinks and what he would do if he had God's power? Pat needs to understand that he is acting out the very meaning of idolatry. He has confused God with himself. 
Second, some one needs to inform Pat Robertson that the idea of God sitting on a throne above the clouds manipulating the weather in order to punish sinners is so primitive and so naïve that it is staggering to the educated imagination. It is bad enough that his mind cannot embrace the thought of Charles Darwin from the 19th century, but Pat has yet to embrace the thought of Copernicus from the 16th century or Galileo from the 17th century. No educated person today believes that the earth is the center of the universe and that God lives above the sky, playing with low-pressure systems and planning revenge on those who are not believers in Intelligent Design. Indeed why would anyone be drawn to the demonic deity who emerges in Pat's thinking and teaching? It is surely not a God of Love who punishes New Orleans' poorest citizens with a hurricane that New Orleans' wealthiest citizens could and did manage to escape at least with their lives, because they had cars. Did God kill the poor in New Orleans in order to send a message to New Orleans's prostitutes and those who create its raucous nightlife? Is that a rational concept? Did God cause two tectonic plates to collide under the Indian Ocean because there were some 350,000 evil people, with fully one-third of them children, whom God desired to kill in a tsunami wave? Is that how God communicates divine displeasure? Is that a God worthy of worship? Were the 3000 who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11 or the 2100 members of our Armed Forces who have thus far died in Iraq during this war somehow worthy of this ultimate punishment either because of their own evil or because God sacrificed them to send a message to someone else? Those ideas are so ludicrous as to be laughable, except for the fact that for anyone to suggest such incredible things is still painfully hurtful to those who are the victims of both natural and human disasters to say nothing of their surviving loved ones. I, as a Christian, am embarrassed by the public face that Pat Robertson puts on the religious tradition to which my life is dedicated. 
I have known the Robertson family for a long time. His father was the Democratic Senator in my state of Virginia from 1946, when he was first appointed to succeed Senator Carter Glass who had died in office. He was re-elected by the people of Virginia in 1948, 1954, and 1960. In the Democratic Primary in 1966 he was defeated in a very close vote by my first cousin William Belser Spong, Jr., who went on to fill that seat in the United States Senate Pat is a 1955 graduate of the Law School at Yale University and received a Master in Divinity degree from New York Theological Seminary in1959. He cannot possibly be as dumb as he sounds in his wild and thoughtless utterances. If ignorance is not his excuse, then one has to wonder what motivates him. In academic theological circles he is treated as a buffoon. No one takes his thought seriously. It is a pity that some people do actually believe the things he says, but they are far fewer than he imagines. It is an even greater pity that the news media think that his continued utterances are worthy of any public attention at all. 
John Shelby Spong 
- John Shelby Spong 







 
Dick Kroeger
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20051117/19956513/attachment.htm