The Sins of Scripture (9 page)

So the biblical writers said, “This is how the first woman was created.” She, like the animals, was made by God, but she, like the animals, was also subject to Adam. He named her, as he had named all of the animals. She did not share his status, his glory or his divine image. He was made by God. She was taken out of his body. She was kin to him in a way that the animals were not, but she was to be subservient, obedient and aware of her second-class status. Her chief role in life was to be the male’s helpmeet, to bring him pleasure, to relieve his need for sex and companionship. Sex, incidentally, was originally meant for recreation, not procreation. The story hints that childbirth, with its resultant pain, was punishment handed out after the fall, not something that was part of the original intention in creation.

So in this way, according to this dominant biblical narrative, the sexes—male and female—came into being. Theirs was to be the relationship of the superior to the inferior, of the lordly male to the submissive female, of the master to the servant. No one could argue with this order since this story taught all who read it that this was God’s very purpose. To argue was to violate or to subvert God’s plan. One
relates
to this ultimate truth. One does not try to
change
it. So it was that the religious system called Christianity, which grew out of the Jewish womb that birthed this story, carried with it this God-given definition of female inferiority and installed it in our civilization as one of its unchallenged suppositions. Women were taught that they fulfilled their purpose by accepting this divinely imposed understanding. If they rebelled, the superior men in their lives could punish them, divorce them and even kill them without any fear of any other authority. Women were defined as less intelligent than men and therefore incapable of being educated, entering the professions or voting.

Long after this story was abandoned as literal history, the implications in this narrative continued to hold sway. This is true even today as these definitions splinter and break apart under the impact of our secular society. “Holy men” still quote these verses to keep intact the operative principle of male superiority and female oppression. In the name of God, women are still told that their sole purpose in life is to satisfy the man. They are told to obey their husbands in all things. Slowly but surely patriarchy turned into misogyny, and we are still dealing with the effects. Can Christianity in particular, or any religious system in general, continue to define any human being as subhuman or second class by nature and expect to be taken seriously by anyone?

The biblical story, however, went on. It was through the subhuman woman that evil entered the goodness of God’s creation and subverted it. So the woman is to blame for sin. That is the next story that I must tell in order to expose these sins of the scriptures in all of their perversion.

O
ne of the most sexist institutions in the Western world is the Christian church. Its sexism is deep, pervasive and quite destructive. What makes this negativity doubly tragic is that the Christian church has wrapped this evil inside the rhetoric of sweet piety. For centuries this overt prejudice against women has been called “the sacred tradition of the church.” It has been attributed to God and is an expression of the divine will from which there is supposedly no appeal. It has been justified by quotations from the Bible that the church calls the “Word of God” and for which excessive claims for truth have been made. In the Western world it is not easy to escape this systemic sexism. The church’s powerful influence has shaped the stereotypes, definitions and role models of what a woman is or can be that permeate not only the religious institutions but the whole culture of our civilization. It has set the limits within which women have been forced to operate. It has introduced responses of both violence and rejection when those limits have been transgressed. It has claimed that to oppose the church’s views on human sexuality, and especially the sexuality of a woman, is to oppose God, the Bible and human decency. For these reasons the emancipation of women has been a gift won by women and for women, in spite of the consistent opposition of institutional forms of religion. It has been the specifically nonreligious, secular society that has been the champion and chief ally of women in their quest for equality.

No one can doubt the progress women have made toward full humanity in recent times. They won the right to vote in 1920 in the United States. They entered the cabinet of the president of the United States in 1932. They flocked to coeducational private and public universities following World War II. They entered the U.S. Supreme Court with a Ronald Reagan appointee, Sandra Day O’Connor, in 1981. Today in the United States there are woman governors, senators and representatives and their numbers are rising in all three categories. Women have been heads of state in Great Britain, Norway, Israel, Pakistan, India, Argentina, the Philippines and New Zealand.

Following World War II the professions began to open up to women. The hiring was tokenism at first, but the trickle has since become a steady stream. Law schools today have student bodies that boast 50 percent female students. The sexes are also relatively even in schools of medicine and dentistry. Wall Street and its various outlets today have so many bright female analysts and stock managers that some of their names have become household words. Large Fortune 500 corporations today have female chief executive officers and few boards in corporate America fail to advertise the presence of women in what was once thought to be an exclusively male preserve.

In almost every instance of this cultural redefinition process, however, the Christian church has been on the wrong side of the debate, bitterly resisting what the secular society has acted to empower. Even today as the progress of women in every walk of life continues at a lively and brisk pace, the leaders of the Christian church persist in pontificating about women, using archaic words to make indefensible pronouncements clearly belonging to a world that no longer exists. Many of us who still call ourselves Christians find these ecclesiastical spokespersons an embarrassment. If one has to cling to antiquated definitions of the past as the price of religious devotion, that price becomes too expensive.

Among the images from the church that modern women have to confront is a gathering of pious, all-male Roman Catholic Church leaders, clothed in their ecclesiastical dresses, pronouncing in the name of a God called “Father” what a woman can and cannot do with her own body. It should not be surprising how few women, including Roman Catholic women, either listen any longer to that message or care what their leaders say. Not to be outdone in irrelevance by the Roman Catholics, the Southern Baptist Convention—America’s largest Protestant decision-making body—recently added to the core teaching of that church the idea that a woman must be subject to her husband in all things, for that, convention leaders said, was God’s plan in creation. Women can be pastors, this convention stated a year later in a tip of the hat to a changing reality that they cannot control, but they are not to be
senior
pastors, for that would require a man to be submissive to a woman, which is a power equation specifically ruled out, they claim, by the “Word of God.”
⁵

These ecclesiastical attitudes enrage and alienate the people who still attribute some authority to the teaching of their churches, but in the secular society they are viewed as quaint glimpses into a past that is gone and will never return. They are but echoes from a world from which they have escaped and into which they have no desire to return.

On the first Sunday in Lent of the year 2000, Pope John Paul II issued a widely publicized apology to those people who had been hurt by the “sons and daughters” of the church. It was an interesting choice of words. It was not the Catholic Church, which by definition cannot be in error, but the “sons and daughters” of that church who can be, are and have been sources of both hurt and error. Among the Roman Catholic Church’s victims, to whom this apology was addressed, were women. An apology implies that something wrong has been done. It is an admission of fault and normally carries with it a promise to make amends and to see that the hurting pattern is not repeated. But can this church’s apology to women represent anything other than a fond hope or pious dream? Sexism runs so deep in Christianity that a change in the perpetuation of the hurt that it has caused women in particular would constitute a radical redefinition of everything from God to priesthood—a redefinition that this church shows no eagerness to encourage or to engage. As the necessary changes inevitably occur, they will be forced on a reluctant and resisting church by a secular mentality that will no longer tolerate the definitions of the past, no matter how ancient or how holy they are thought to be by the institution that promulgates them.

I think it is fair to say that every American man in my generation, raised in what people would call a Christian tradition, was infected with a deeply patriarchal mind-set, which institutional Christianity in all its forms clearly undergirded and enforced. That mind-set was not always conscious, but it was inescapable. It permeated the very air we breathed. It was incorporated into our rules of etiquette and our most intimate sense of the way things were and even ought to be. Since the men of my generation, certainly including me, were by and large beneficiaries of this patriarchal system, we could hardly have been expected to seek its overturn. Vested self-interest does not respond that way, unless something forces a reevaluation.

I was, for example, the first member of my family to receive a university degree. I have an older sister, but no one ever thought of encouraging her to enter a university. She was a woman. Her role in life, overtly stated and clearly understood even by her, was to get married and to have a family. Until she was married she might be gainfully employed in one of the underpaid, secondary positions of secretary, nurse or teacher, but no woman in that era was thought competent to reach a higher level of accomplishment.

My childhood ambition was always to be a priest, an ambition that was nurtured and encouraged by both my family and my church. My sister, however, could not even imagine that possibility for herself. It was not spelled out overtly in some set of rules. It was simply assumed.

By its deeds, my church, locally and nationally, made it quite clear that in regard to the teachings of God, women were disqualified for church service and need not apply. I was an acolyte who could live into the status of being vested in a distinctive garment and invited, after training, to serve at the altar during the sacred liturgy. As such, I was allowed to enter into holy space that women were prohibited from entering, except as they served in the necessary but menial details of the preparation and clean-up before and after divine worship.

The governance of my church was exclusively male. Women were, both by definition and by common consent, not included in the ranks of the eligible. My church even referred to the organization for women as “the Auxiliary.” Only men could be readers or occupy the other nonpriestly roles in the Sunday services. Only men could serve as ushers. Only men could be elected to the vestry, or governing body, of the church. Only men could represent our church at regional, diocesan and national gatherings where all the decisions that governed our church were made. Obviously only men could be ordained. All of these prohibitions against women were based on the biblical idea that only the man was made in God’s image. The woman’s role was secondary, dependent and supportive. That had been the way God created things to be. It said so in clear and unambiguous detail in the sacred scriptures. We were bound by those definitions since that book was the “Word of God.”

If that were not power enough, the history of the Christian church revealed its portrait of the ideal woman against which all women were to be measured. This ideal woman happened to be a “virgin mother.” Since it is quite impossible in the normal course of events for a woman to be both a virgin and a mother, every other woman was immediately, by definition, assumed to be less than the ideal. Women could aspire to be virgins and enter the convent to serve the male God in poverty, chastity and obedience. That life choice was a way of holiness, but it was still short of the ideal for which their bodies were especially crafted. Women could also be mothers, the bearers of sons and daughters, thus fulfilling their God-given, biological necessity. That too was a way of holiness, but it was also not ideal. The mother had to engage the world of the flesh in order to bear children, which meant that her virginal purity had to be destroyed. Motherhood was nonetheless redemptive—but only if no barrier between sexual practice and procreation was erected, since the only redeeming feature to sexual practice was procreation. With the virgin mother as the ideal woman, all other women were reduced to a state of chronic unfulfillment. The very definition of a woman was now filled with the guilt of inadequacy by a church bent on keeping women in their place. The pain the church has inflicted on women, however, does not stop there.

Look next at the way the virgin myth developed in Christianity as it journeyed through Western history. Mary did not become the virgin mother of Jesus until the ninth decade, when Matthew first, then Luke, introduced that idea into the Christian tradition. Once introduced, however, it quickly swept all other ideas from its path. The virgin birth entered the creeds in the third and fourth centuries and became the chief bulwark in the battles that engaged the church in later centuries as that body sought to define the divinity of Jesus and to spell out the central doctrine of the Trinity.

As the church moved out of Judea and increasingly into the Mediterranean world, dominated as that area was by the dualistic thinking of the Platonists and the Neoplatonists, it denigrated bodies, flesh and sexuality itself—especially the body, flesh and sexuality of the woman. In response to this prevailing mentality, the church’s depiction of Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus, evolved into Mary, the perpetual virgin. The holy womb, which bore the Christ child, could not have been contaminated later by other babies. Suddenly the brothers and sisters of Jesus, mentioned in Galatians (1:19) and Mark (6:3), had to be reconfigured: they became half-siblings, cousins or perhaps Joseph’s children by a prior marriage and thus no kin at all, since Joseph was not really, it was said, related to Jesus. As the flesh of the Virgin Mary became more holy, so in an exact but reverse sequence the flesh of ordinary women became more evil.

Next, in the common devotion of the people, it began to be asserted that even when Mary bore Jesus, her virginity had been preserved both during (inpartu) and after (postpartum) the birth of the holy child. Tales actually began to circulate about Jesus being born out of Mary’s ear! The church fathers (there were no mothers, of course) rushed to the scriptures to find validation for this new idea. The scriptures yielded the reward they sought. The prophet Ezekiel had written in the sixth century BCE that “this gate shall remain shut; it shall not be opened, and no one shall enter by it; for the L
ORD
, the God of Israel, has entered by it; therefore it shall remain shut” (44:2). Without so much as an apology to Ezekiel, they leaped upon this text to prove that even the prophets had foretold the postpartum virginity of the Blessed Virgin. Later they saw in the Johannine story of the resurrection an account in which Jesus came into a room even though the windows were shut and the door locked, another indication of the ability of Jesus to pass through the birth canal without destroying the virginal hymen. With each new step Mary was desexed in order to emphasize her holiness, but in that process women in general were both consciously and unconsciously denigrated and their bodies were increasingly treated as base, sinful and evil.

The next step in the development of the virgin myth was to proclaim that Mary herself had had an extraordinary birth. Such a miracle was necessitated by the need to protect the Blessed Virgin, who as the child of Adam must also have been tainted by Adam’s original sin which plunged the world into a fallen state. This explanation of her special birth, escaping the stain of sin, came to be called the Immaculate Conception. This addition to the Mary myth became official dogma in the Roman Catholic Church on December 8, 1854, in a proclamation issued by Pope Pius IX. In this step Mary was officially decreed not to have been born like an ordinary person, and thus she could no longer be thought of as human in an ordinary sense.
⁶

Almost one hundred years later Pope Pius XII took the next step in Mary’s evolution by pronouncing, on November 1, 1950, the doctrine of the bodily assumption of the Blessed Virgin into heaven. In other words, the church concluded that Mary did not actually
die
. Death, you see, was the punishment for the fall meted out by God to all creatures in the Garden of Eden. By her immaculate conception, Mary had been lifted out of the fallen human enterprise; likewise, by her bodily assumption she escaped the punishment of that sin.