Christianity didn't invent violence to women - but it hasn't helped either
The Bible may brim with female oppression, writes George Pitcher, but it's time for the Church to confess its own shameful record and stand up for women
There’s a wonderfully revealing Bible story of how a woman could expect to be treated if she stepped out of line – indeed, it’s resonant of the experience of a high-profile woman of today who has raised her voice against the establishment.
It’s about Miriam, who is the big sister of Moses, the great liberator of the Jewish people. Miriam, along with her other brother Aaron, is snarky about Moses taking a Cushite as his wife. A Cushite is from north Africa – so she’s black. Whether Miriam was speculating about the skin colour of any baby from her brother’s union isn’t recorded.
But God doesn’t like her attitude and calls a management meeting with her and Aaron. The Almighty appears in a pillar of cloud – the ancient Hebrew version of Microsoft Teams – and delivers an appropriately almighty bollocking, then departs.
When Aaron looks at his sis, she has leprosy, her skin “white as snow” (white – ironic huh?). A settlement is reached with the Boss – if she self-isolates for seven days, she’ll be cured. So she goes into quarantine and emerges healthy and duly chastened.
Aaron of course escapes such a forfeit, because he’s a bloke and a high priest and therefore an essential worker who’s too busy to shield. It’s all very typical of how women are treated in the scriptures – there to provide progeny for patriarchs (the elderly Sarah for Abraham), to be offered by their father for rape to an angry mob (Lot’s daughters) or turned into a pillar of salt for wanting to return safely home (Lot’s wife – what a family).
It all started with Eve, who is beguiled by a serpent into eating forbidden fruit and is shopped all too readily by her bloke Adam, starting the whole rotten idea that a man’s dirty behaviour is a woman’s fault. There are indeed scriptural women who are strong and independent – Judith beheading the monstrous Holofernes and the noble emigrant Ruth spring to mind, though even the latter had to sleep with Boaz on a threshing-room floor in order to prosper.
Tempters and tarts
But generally, if not wives, they are tempters and tarts, bit players with no real life of their own, at least not one worth valuing. It’s this idea of worthlessness or sheer utility, even what Friedrich Nietzsche coined as the “untermensch” - a mindset hijacked most hideously by the Nazis – that may be worth pursuing as we search for causation in the wake of the abduction and murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard from Clapham.
Certainly it might be a more fruitful avenue than some of those explored so far. Voices have claimed that Ms Everard’s atrocious fate was a consequence of the lack of “respect” for women being taught to boys in school, which is truly odd – we can be pretty sure that “most men” don’t rape and murder women because they were taught that it was bad as a child. Others have indicated that it’s caused by poor street-lighting, or fewer police officers on the beat or in plain-clothes in nightclubs. Or, much much worse, that it’s women’s own fault for taking risks like going out after dark (there’s that tempted temptress Eve again).
It should be obvious that the kind of murderous misogyny born of violent psychopathy isn’t likely to be restrained by town-planning regulations any more than by education – that #mostmen aren’t dissuaded from violence against women because the street-lights are too bright or that there’s CCTV, monitored by sympathetic and observant women. What we need to address by contrast is that there is a disordered mindset that can view women as a disposable subspecies.
Religion isn’t to blame for that, but we can admit it hasn’t helped. If we live in a culture that objectifies and devalues half its species, it’s as well to acknowledge honestly what that culture is founded on. We might live in a secular society, but at the very least there is a folk memory of a religious misogyny at its foundations.
European Islam can serve as a distraction here. Those who are paid to wet themselves at the prospect that western values are being overrun by immigrant Muslims are spectacularly missing the point – Pew Research Center in the US projects that Muslims may account for 8 per cent of the EU population by 2030, an uptick of two percentage points over 20 years. Some “invasion”.
Nevertheless, you don’t have to be a prime minister who compares burqa-wearing women to letterboxes to hold that Islam subjugates women. Liberals like me might wring our hands at the dilemma of condemning institutional female oppression while simultaneously not being in the business of “telling women what they should wear”, but we can say that Islamic reformation is undeniably desirable.
The danger of such finger-pointing, though, is that it can make predominant Christians dangerously smug. Wasn’t the Nazarene a right-on feminist? Didn’t the Christ liberate women from their sub-status? Wasn’t Martha told that her sister Mary was right to abandon the housework and join the Messiah and his men (albeit “at his feet”)?
Apostle to the apostles
Well, yes. The woman “taken in adultery”, the Syrian woman begging “crumbs from the table”, the Samaritan woman at the well, the bleeding woman in the crowd and many others besides are all cases in point. Not least Mary Magdalene too, first witness to the risen Christ, who is given the mission to tell the others what she has seen and, in doing so, rolls a tomb stone through the doctrine that apostolic descent – and therefore priesthood – must remain as male as “the twelve”. Pope Francis has agreed to dub her the “apostle to the apostles”. Which part of the clue in that title do we not get?
None of that is to say that Church history hasn’t amounted to centuries-long misogyny and oppression. It starts with Mary, the mother of Christ, and her vaunted obedience. The catholic tradition, Anglican as well as Roman, holds that God the Father (and Holy Spirit) enacted the incarnation through Mary, the Mother of Heaven. But she is mortal – despite her own immaculate conception – and her Assumption doesn’t make her equal with God. We’ll have none of that ancient Greek dualism, a cosmic competition between deities, thankyou very much.
Then St Paul gets hold of the script. Women’s witness doesn’t come well out of the Pauline epistles: They are told they shouldn’t speak or teach in church and must submit to their husbands, for “Christ is the head of the every man and the husband is the head of his wife”. Those were the days, murmur not a few of today’s churchmen.
Admittedly, nowhere do the Christian texts say that it’s okay to be violent towards women. But the early Church fathers found enough scriptural support to subordinate them, to make them vassals, servants and addenda to men’s wills and desires. For goodness sake, the Book of Common Prayer, still on the canons of the Church of England, has a liturgy for the “Churching of Women”, directly descended from ritual purification after childbirth.
Women are bishops now in the reformed tradition, but men are still in charge. At least, that’s the dangerous male psychology. And so the Magdalene is relegated from apostle to mere messenger between men.
Shame and rage
And it’s on this horrific premise that Christian culture was built. In a post-Christian society (if this is one), such considerations may not consciously be on the agenda either of psychopaths or of male police officers kneeling on the backs of shackled women who hold a vigil for a murdered sister. But an undercurrent, pulling at the psyche of the unbalanced and inadequate and fuelling his shame and rage, is still there.
It’s difficult to know what we can do about that, but let’s hazard a guess that it’s more than improve street-lighting and allow women to carry tear-gas, at least for those of us who would wish to reclaim the freedom that the Nazarene originally gave the women of Judea from stoning or servitude.
One thing that the Christian Church can do is something that’s been made fashionable lately by other acknowledgements of historical oppression. It can own – or even own up to – its history. Just as it did so for historical child abuse, the Church can admit that its heart has been historically violent towards women.
To condemn acts of rape and violence towards women is the easy bit. But none of that is worth a light unless women can feel that the powers that created the culture in which they’re made unsafe are now standing resolutely in their corner, playing an active part in transforming that culture. And in doing so liberating them, making them safe again and welcome in the world.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest.