Jimmy Carter says much of the discrimination and abuse suffered by women around the world is attributable to a belief “that women are inferior in the eyes of God.” Carter called mistreatment of women “the most serious and all pervasive and damaging human rights abuse on Earth.”
I heard a spot on the national news on my local NPR station quoting a couple of comments from former president Jimmy Carter that caught my interest. When I searched for the speech, I found that Pres. Carter is considered a prominent feminist (at least, he is called that online in some places) and frequently makes similar points during some high prestige speeches. I respect someone who uses their bully pulpit to tell the Parliament of World Religions:
This view that the Almighty considers women to be inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or tradition. Its influence does not stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue, or temple. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths, creating an environment in which violations against women are justified.
The truth is that male religious leaders have had – and still have – an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter.
This.
Pres. Carter describes his experiences in the Southern Baptist denomination, which match exactly what I experienced growing up in several other denominations and nondenominational churches. He quotes and summarizes the Bible, and talks about how you can argue the interpretation and the examples either way, and ultimately it comes down to how you want to interpret it – and the fact that it is interpreted in a way that justifies and perpetuates harm to women is a matter of laziness and selfishness and fear, just as the interpretations that justify and cause harm to children, LGBT oriented people, etc. And while Pres. Carter in his speech to the Parliament of World Religions speaks at length about Christianity and touches only briefly on other religions (apparently because his knowledge and experience is on Christianity), he makes it clear he feels all the major religious traditions contribute to the problem, and can contribute to the solution if desired.
He says, “Having served as local, state, national, and world leaders, we understand why many public officials can be reluctant to question ancient religious and traditional premises – an arena of great power and sensitivity.” My natural cynicism about those with power and what they really want says many may not really care one way or the other, or may wish for little more than stability so they can maintain their power – but I think the point is an interesting one nonetheless, coming as it does from someone who has had that power, and still has a lot of power, and chooses to use it this way.
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I don’t know, actually. But you’re right, using He makes gender nutrality reing hollow to me too. Always has. It is not thusly in the Hebre text. God gets God’s own pronoun.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
This. All of this.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
This. A friend of mine was Catholic and married to a domestic abuser and rapist (in hindsight, she now believes he was raping other women as well as her). She tried for years to get help from the Catholic church; she talked to bishops, monseigneurs, priests, theologians, nuns, Opus Dei people, editors of Catholic magazines and a circle of lay Catholic women. She tried for ten years, probably asked at least fifty people. She desperately wanted at least one person to support her; she needed her decision to be right with God and wanted just one other person to validate her.
Some of them said her husband was sinning by hitting her, but told her the answer was religious marriage counseling. Well, that only works when the other person wants to be there and she caught hell from him for “airing their dirty laundry”. Some of them even said it was her fault for not being a good enough wife. None of them would admit she was being raped, because she was married after all. None of them would concede even the slightest bit that perhaps the marriage couldn’t be saved, because marriage is eternal in God’s eyes after all. Every one of them told her that God wanted her to save the marriage and save her husband’s eternal soul from the sin of abusing his wife.
When she finally screwed up the courage to leave her husband, she left the Catholic church as well. She feels very strongly that the church betrayed her and abandoned her, considering the vast number of Catholics she asked for help. She still considers herself a Catholic when it comes to beliefs about the next world, but when it comes to this one she is through with them.
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
Unless you’re one of those who believe that every author of the Bible was divinely and directly inspired by God, and thus every word of it is to be taken 100% seriously.
(I know the idea doesn’t hold logically, what with all the contradictions, but some people believe it. =/ )
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
It all sounds like it goes back to the Divine King idea, where a ruler had divine right, and *of course* he was going to rule with the gentle hand of God because he was God’s representative on earth (like the Pope).
All of this assumes, as Jenn said, that the person in charge is capable of compassion and holding to the highest standards.
Yeah, like that happens most of the time. /sarcasm
Gategrrl(Quote) (Reply)
*nods* Additionally, the religious idea that people can always be redeemed no matter what often gets in the way of church leadership recognizing: they have to WANT redemption. If they don’t, and they are seriously depraved, then they are just predators and will remain so until they are stopped or dead.
In truth, it really isn’t a conflict. Nothing in any religion I know of suggests that people can be redeemed against their wills.
I have known ministers and other religious folk who get all this and have no trouble making PRACTICAL recommendations to abused people. It’s hard to imagine someone like Jesus putting somebody’s ideal household arrangement ahead of the well-being of abuse victims, given how little regard he had for the Pharisees’ rules and how happy he was to hang out with outcasts they had no time for.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I didn’t know about a unique pronoun, that’s fascinating.
SunlessNick(Quote) (Reply)
<3 <3 Jimmy Carter <3 <3
Bless him.
I have explored a lot of different places religiously, and I have been most disappointed in my utter failure to find a truly gender-neutral religious community. To be honest, however, I have not been strongly feminist for long, and for many years, even as I was discontented and unfulfilled by all the divine manliness surrounding me, I believed that those who worship the divine feminine were "trying too hard". I cringed when people referred to God as She. These folks especially bothered me, even as they attracted me. At the same time, I could not accept the obvious sexism in almost every religious organization I encountered. After much meditation, it has come clear to me that if I’m going to follow any deity, it will be a nominally female one at this time in my life, as I submerge myself in birth work; and that language matters, and sexism is a plague in otherwise uplifting communities. So, that’s where I am, and thank the Lady.
Susannah(Quote) (Reply)
Yeah, it angers me no matter where it happens, but I think I take it more personally when people who claim to worship the same God I do abuse and enable abusers.
Dani(Quote) (Reply)
That’s a really good point. I wonder too if it has to do with people not wanting to get their hands dirty. Like, if the depraved person just says he’s sorry, then they can smile and forgive him and everything can be sunshine and rainbows again. Except…no.
Dani(Quote) (Reply)
That certainly could be.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
*nods* That makes sense – they’re damaging the credibility of a belief system you care about. I think it would do world religions no end of good if people would not only stop sheltering abusers, but call them out. Call out the members of their religion who are doing things that run exactly counter to it – stop making excuses for “one of our own” and give them an incentive to atone.
Interestingly, one of the reasons we don’t know for sure whether abusive personalities are capable of rehabilitation at all is that our society provides so little incentive for them to change. There are hardly any repercussions to what they do. If they were ostracized socially, whether by their chosen religion or other sectors of society, it might just turn out they CAN change.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I think that was a huge factor in my friend’s story. Taking her side meant turmoil and change and possibly other wives questioning how much shit they were obligated to take from their husbands. Taking his side meant status quo, everything normal is good just like we thought.
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
*No* religion extant today is ‘good news’ for women…
And this is why ‘Religion’ should be finally flushed down the S-Bend of History!
How do we do this, Anemone? By improving the lot of every person on earth to the extent that they are fully in control of every aspect of their lives, economic as well as social, and thus render meaningless their need to compensate for their shitty present circumstances by hoping for ‘pie-in-the-sky-when they-die.’
(Yes, I am prepared to debate the reasons for the re-emergence of religion, especially fundamentalist religion, on the late C20/early C21 landscape, but ‘Hathor’ is not the forum for doing so — let me simply paraphrase Trotsky’s summary of the rise of Nazism … “Every so often, humanity needs to spew up its undigested barbarism.”)
Sally(Quote) (Reply)
I remember reading an article on Feministing.com once (it was years ago and i can’t remember the author or the link right now) talking about this idea that – in a nutshell – we should simply abandon religion because so much of it has been shitty for women for so long and nothing good can come of it. The article raised a very interesting point that I’m going to try to summarize from memory:
Religion and spirituality are important to a lot of people; they derive a real sense of comfort and community from their beliefs. We can’t completely ignore their needs and shut out the concept of religion entirely. A better idea would be to change it, just like we did with every other sphere of life. Organized religion can be seen as just another example of the “Old Boy’s Clubs” that have infested so much of the public domain and make all efforts to shut out women. But we fought for the right to vote, to own property, to work, to be part of a governing body, to not face harassment simply for existing, to be seen an human beings.
Dismissing religion in its entirety – and this was the author’s point that really stuck with me – would be just another way of saying “Boys will be boys”. Instead, we should hold them to the high standard that they deserve. Religion IS capable of being better and we shouldn’t let it get off so easily. We don’t detroy the old boy’s network by ignoring it or demanding it go away. We bust in there and smash the thing to pieces by our very presence.
Okay the last line about smashing things was entirely mine. I’m pretty sure she didn’t say anything like that.
Personally, I’m not religious and not a big fan of religious tradition. I fall on the side of, “Prove to me it’s NOT shitty towards non-cis-men and then I’ll decide if it’s worth it.” I don’t need to fear divine punishment or be bribed with some eternal reward to be a decent human being. But I can accept the comfort it brings to others and its importance to them. It’s fine by me AS LONG AS it’s not causing harm.
Cinnabar(Quote) (Reply)
I’m sceptical that there are any written documents from before the Second Temple period at all. Conflicting versions of oral narratives, sure, but the First Temple period doesn’t come across as an organized, literate culture to me at all. Big shift with Ezra at the beginning of the Second Temple period. Plus, that’s when they “found” these texts written up and stored somewhere in the old Temple.
Anemone(Quote) (Reply)
This may seem somewhat off topic in places to people, but I have a new laptop and am at the library, so can post really really really long answers today!!
People will always have spiritual needs, no matter how bad religion is, just as people will always have emotional needs, no matter how abusive relationships can be. (Ditto for intellectual and physical needs.) The problem is not the having of spiritual needs, but the inadequacy of religion as it currently exists to meet those needs, free of dogma.
We live in a world where most educated adults use linear logic to make sense of things. Linear logic is simple machine logic, not the complex logic of living organisms, but we and our society are living systems, not machines. Linear logic has a tendency to assume (or want to assume) that there is one right answer, and that we need to order things into linear hierarchies (with men at the top, of course!) to make sense of the world. People who are limited to linear logic tend to ignore or suppress anything that conflict with the world view they go by, because that is the best they can do. It is not a choice for them, because they cannot imagine doing anything else. Fortunately not all linear world views involve oppressing people – some include an abstract sense of universal human rights.
Also fortunately, we have been moving away from a strictly linear world view over the last generation or so. I believe it started with a move away from authoritarian parenting after WWII, triggered by researchers finding a link between authoritarianism and bigotry. And the first generation to be raised after that shift were the ones who got involved in the second wave of feminism, the civil rights movement, environmentalism, etc. – movements that stressed the rights of people (and ecosystems) who traditionally did not have a voice because it conflicted with the powers that be.
But religion falls behind.
I’m going by what Clifford Anderson (1995) wrote in The Stages of Life (and my own unpublished research that uses his as a starting point). It takes longer to grow up these days (a phenomenon researchers have noted but not yet agreed upon) because people are developing internally more before settling into adult social roles. Anderson and I both believe this is because the internal development needed to grow beyond linear thinking takes time to figure out, especially without a road map. (Just as it takes many years of formal schooling to get comfortable with linear logic – there isn’t any in preliterate societies, including First Temple and older Jerusalem – that’s why there’s so much internal inconsistency in the oldest religious traditions.)
Anderson talks about a shift to organic thinking. I prefer to think of it as complex nonlinear logic (chaos, complexity, emergence). (Anderson is a Freudian, I’m a Piagetian.) You can also look at it in terms of Jung’s individuation. It’s all different ways of looking at the same thing, sort of. (I think you can individuate without developing the logic, but I don’t think you can develop the logic without individuating.) Either way, you can reach a point, if you keep going, where you are no longer theory-driven, you no longer need people to be a particular way (though obviously you don’t want them hurting you), you are no longer projecting your own shadow self onto other people, and you stop caring so much about finding “the right answer” and “the right way of doing things” because you know that theories are like words – they’re never exactly right but you pick the best ones to describe what you’re seeing and hope it makes sense to the people you’re talking to. I finished this transition (and integrating my fourth Jungian function) when I was 35. That doesn’t make me God, just an adult inside and out. Plus someone who had a lot of time on her hands as a young adult.
When religions reach the point where their leaders are fully individuated, completely comfortable with the fullness of human diversity, and comfortable with conflict being an important part of living systems that should be worked with, not suppressed, then they can stop clinging to theories and worrying about being right and start thinking about being useful to people. Instead of having preachers, we would have guides. I figure sometime in the next 50 years. In the meantime all we can do is develop ourselves and wait for the day when there are enough of us to shift the definition of normal and adult.
But we won’t get there if we try to throw out spirituality completely.
There is research that shows that a majority of people have mystical experiences at some time or other in their lives, and that most of these experiences are experienced as adaptive. I don’t think that will change, no matter how much we eradicate poverty and abuse. Lawrence Kohlberg, the researcher who demonstrated that there is a natural logic to morality, struggled with the meaning of life and ended up killing himself after he contracted a serious illness.
Besides, mystical experiences just plain feel nice. Even if we don’t need them, it sure is nice having them.
People need something bigger to tap into from time to time. That’s just human nature. Same as we need friends and families and causes to join.
Of course people interpret mystical experiences in the context of their cultures/beliefs: God, angels, saints, ghosts, telepathic aliens, humming planets. That part doesn’t matter. What matters is that there is something objective to spirituality that we *can* build on without getting all dogmatic.
Anemone(Quote) (Reply)
I’m a little confused about why there is so much more fundamentalism in the US than in other industrialized countries. 30-40% self-identify as fundamentalist in the US versus 8% in Canada versus half that in Europe (I think those numbers are from the 1990s). One Canadian in Washington suggested that it was a way of proving that USians weren’t godless Communists. I’m guessing that the US doesn’t have a Communist party? (Canada has two! Want one?)
Anemone(Quote) (Reply)
But he have texts. They’re just short inscriptions on stone or in clay, which can be put down to the deleterious effects of time on scrolls I mean, let’s face it, we don’t have a lot of long texts from long after we know they started writing said long texts. I’m not saying the documents were full accounts of Genesis, or anything, but the Torah may well be stitched together from a number of shorter recordings of oral tradition.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
Fear. The US is a country filled with people afraid of everything, and I think they need that super fuzzy fundamentalist blanket to wrap themselves up with at night.
sbg(Quote) (Reply)
Yes, and don’t forget history: Britain’s criminals went to Australia, but their fundamentalist types all came here, where they faced no opposition to their beliefs. Not many of them went to Canada in the first place. But if they’d gone to, you know, Iceland and faced no opposition for those beliefs, my guess is Iceland would be a hotbed of fundamentalism.
I suspect fundamentalism appeals to a certain personality type, and whatever circumstances created that personality type in that group (biology? culture? combination?) remains present in the population. It’ll self-perpetuate until some force of biology or culture stops it.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Yes, and it’s very, very easy for people in power to use this to their advantage, whether they themselves have fundamental beliefs or not.
sbg(Quote) (Reply)
Yep – and while there’s potential to manipulate people through ANY belief system they have (including secular ideals), it’s especially easy with fundamentalists because fundamentalism is so black and white, it really doesn’t allow for the sort of critical thinking that might enable them to recognize they’re being manipulated by someone who convincingly “talks the talk” of being one of them.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
hi, orthodox jew here
we get taught g-d has no body and no form of the body, neither male nor female. no head, no arms, no genitals.
this comes up in bible study class, where such phrases as ‘outstretched arms’ and ‘great wrath with smoke coming out of his nose’ are explained as common metaphor which helps humans understand things.
also, g-d’s name tends to be male, but the word for the divine presence is female. also there are places where ‘g-d tended to you’ as the nation came out of egypt uses the same word as ‘writhing on the birthing stool’ which tends not to be a common male activity…
zivya(Quote) (Reply)
Patrick,
I agree with your interpretation of the religious objection to gay marriages. Not only religious, but homophobic secularists fear the same thing. In addition, they fear that they might be latent homosexuals themselves – an intolerable idea to a macho-male. Something about protesting too much springs to mind.
Patrick McGraw,
Vinka(Quote) (Reply)
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