Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Jesus the feminist

Sorry that I keep coming back to this, Terry. But the questions implied have been on my mind. Is it right to read the Bible to find out what it says about one single issue (in this case, what it says about women)? And is it right to even focus at all on what Jesus said about women, when it is clear that his main message was not about the treatment of women, but about his belief that the kingdom of heaven was coming, and people needed to repent to be allowed inside?

My answers are yes, and yes. And the reason for that is, quite simply, that I am a woman. And I am also a non-religious person.

Consider, Terry. All religions that I am the least bit familiar with tell people that they have to live in a certain way, and obey certain rules, in order to be rewarded in the next life, the life that will come when this life is over.

But. What if there is no next life? What if there is nothing when this life is over?

That is what I believe. I don't know that there is no next life, of course. There is no way that I can know such a thing. Therefore I may certainly be wrong about my belief that there is nothing after death. But please take my word for it when I say that I have not arrived at this belief lightly.

So when I look at religions, they often look like a set of (sometimes harsh) rules that have to be followed so that those who follow the rules can get a reward afterwards - a reward that I don't think exists.

What exists, according to my belief, is this life. And I think that this life can be made miserable if all people, or some people, are forced to live according to some very harsh rules. If those rules come with religions, then religions can ruin the only life we get.

As a woman, I have noted that practically all religions seem to demand submissiveness of women. Women are not allowed to choose their lives themselves, but instead first their fathers and then their husbands are to choose it for them. And if they are technically allowed to choose their lives for themselves, then at least they are supposed to choose a life of submissiveness. And if you want to create a fertile soil for oppression, then it seems to me that you couldn't do better than decree that some people have to be submissive, for their own good, and because God demands it. How can such people protest when you oppress them?

In the 1980s, also before I read the Bible to find out about its views on women, I heard a documentary on Swedish radio. It was an interview a Norwegian woman, Helen, who was married to a fundamentalist Christian man, Mikael. Helen was interviewed by a woman named Eva Lundgren, who had come into contact with Helen and talked her into letting herself be interviewed to explain what it was like to live with a husband who, according to Norwegian law, beat her up. Helen agreed to the interview because she wanted to explain to everyone that, yes, Mikael beat her, but he did it only to save her soul. Yes, because she was such a sinner, and he had to drive all the demons out of her. Because if he didn't liberate her of her demons, her soul couldn't be saved.

Helen explained how she had grown up in a “normal” home, which was not particularly religious, and then she had met Mikael who had promised to give her salvation and a wonderful new life with God. She had married him and followed him up to a remote village in Norway, where he lived with his congregation. Soon after she became pregnant he started beating her. He said that she was disobedient. She was defiant. She was full of demons. So he started beating her, and afterwards he sat her down on the couch and read to her all the passages from the Bible which demanded that a woman must be submissive and obey her husband. He also showed her passages saying that a man must love his wife, but he explained to her that a man showed his love for his wife by disciplining her, just like God disciplines those that he loves. Therefore Mikael had to discipline Helen by beating her. I have to quote, from memory, a part from Eva Lundgren's interview with Helen:

“How does Mikael discipline you?”

“Well… I may be ironing some clothes, and then Mikael comes into the room… and then he can just feel right then and there that I'm full of demons… so he pushes me, hard, so I fall down, and then he throws the iron at me… well, that is a typical situation.”

I also remember what Helen said about her and Mikael's love life:

“Mikael wants to do it every night… and I must always thank God before we start. I have to kneel down by the bed and thank God, so that I'm properly submissive… and then Mikael starts doing it. I… I… sometimes can't stand it, and sometimes I throw up afterwards. That just proves how defiant I am, so I understand that Mikael must discipline me… so when I've thrown up he presses my face down into the vomit. Once I… I longed so much for… well, for some other kind of togetherness… as a husband and wife, I mean… so I tried to help myself a little. I thought Mikael was asleep, but he woke up and saw what I did… he went into the bathroom and filled the tub with water, and then he took me into the bathroom and put me in the tub and held my head under the water… I thought I would die.”

Some years later, I saw an advertisement that Eva Lundgren, who had made this interview with Helen, was coming to the university of Lund, close to where I live, to give a lecture there. I went there to listen, and after the lecture, I asked Eva Lundgren quite a lot of questions about Helen and Mikael. Eva Lundgren told me that when Helen got very unhappy in her marriage, Mikael had taken her to the United States, where they had had some marriage therapy given by someone who was affiliated with a religious university. Helen was told by the therapist that her unhappiness in her marriage was caused by the fact that she was too defiant. She had to learn submissiveness, otherwise she could never be happy. And Mikael had to help her become submissive by being even stricter with her.

Eva Lundgren also said that after the interview with Helen had been aired on Norwegian radio, she had been contacted by angry members of Helen and Mikael's congregation.

“I can imagine they were angry,” I told Eva Lundgren. “I take it they insisted that what Helen had said on the radio was all lies.”

“Oh no, they didn't say that,” Eva Lundgren replied. “They didn't deny anything that Helen had said. No, they were angry because I had not made the radio listeners understand that Helen really was so full of demons that Mikael just had to treat her the way he did."

I understand – believe me, I do – that Mikael and Helen's case is an extreme one. After all, I grew up around religious people, and I never saw any signs of wife battery or any other signs of abuse. On the contrary, most of the marriages of the religious people I met seemed to be very happy ones.

But if you make the submissiveness of women a cornerstone of what Christianity is supposed to be, then you lay the foundations for more cases like Helen and Mikael. I really think you do.

As I said, I don't believe that there is life after death. If you believe that there is, and if the submissiveness of women is what it takes to get people, both men and women, to enter into the kingdom of heaven and live there in complete happiness for eternity in the life that comes after this one, then the oppression of women is a small price to pay for such a glorious reward.

But if there is no reward after death, then the oppression of women happened for nothing. The women suffered for nothing.

And who is to say that the oppression of women, or even the submissiveness of women, is so important? Who says that the kingdom of heaven is open only to those men who rule over their women, and to those women who obey their husbands? Jesus didn't say that. Jesus never said that.

Some Christian people seem to think that “family values” is the pinnacle of good morality. The way I understand “family values”, they seem to mean that women should devote their lives entirely to their husbands and children, and they should think of themselves purely as wives, mothers and housewives. No, please, I don't have anything against women who do this because they want to. I object to the implied pressure. If “family values” is the highest morality of a society, and if family values primarily means that a woman should devote herself fully to her family, then she isn't a good woman if she doesn't do that. Now that's the idea and the pressure that I object to.

And Jesus never said that a woman's job and station in life is to be a wife. He never said that! Never! He never talked about family values in the sense that a woman's place is in the home. He never said it! Never! And he never said that women must obey! In fact, when you read the Bible, you can see that Jesus interacts with a lot of women, but none of them are described as somebody's wife. In fact, all these women that Jesus interacts with seem to be more or less unattached to a man. And Jesus never says that they ought to go home and get married and stay at home and do wifely things.

So I think I'm entitled to asking why it is so important that women should get married, stay at home and obey their husbands in the name of Jesus Christ, when Jesus never said that women should do anything like that in the first place.

Ann