, he lets Jephthah sacrifice his virgin daughter to God in exchange for Jephthah’s victory over the Ammonites. The New Testament is hardly better with the admonition that women are to submit to their husbands, are not allowed to teach and must stay silent in the church. Like St. Augustine, other early church leaders only expanded this view of woman as something inferior. Tertullian, often called the father of Latin Christianity, stated that women are the “devil’s gateway.” Martin Luther, one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, goes even further. He eliminates any veneration of women, including the Virgin Mary and any female saint by breaking with the Catholic Church. He states that if women die in childbirth, that is fine because “that is what they are there for.”
Marlene Winnell in her book, “Leaving the Faith,” discusses at length the pervasive feelings of shame, guilt, and inadequacy that are drilled into children raised in a Fundamentalist Christian home. Obedience to the father is paramount with the mother often standing by while the child is physically punished. She states “In the fundamentalist system, the self must be rejected because it is essentially bad and cannot be trusted.” How can any woman raised in this type of setting have the autonomy to go against everything she is taught and told to believe? Can a woman who prays every night to one of the male members of the trinity and hears every week a male pastor, priest, or rabbi expounding on the Bible be expected to walk into the voting booth and say, “Yes, I’m voting for a woman leader.” Yes, some did. But they had to overcome the constant barrage of religion’s teachings that woman is the lesser of man.
Currently, there is no psychological study that has been conducted that would prove this thesis. But wouldn’t it be interesting if one were undertaken? Select women from the following: a variety of Christian and Jewish faiths, unaffiliated but still religious, agnostics, and atheists. Ask each of them if they would support a woman as president at the outset, perhaps even in a group setting. Then seek their private responses to choices between women and men in a variety of settings of leadership to see which gender they would choose more often. I would venture to guess that there would be a large gap between the responses from the first and last groups mentioned and a wide difference between the response to the first question and the others in the study from the religious group. Religious women may be able to articulate their support for a woman president, but their psychological bias may prevent them from actually voting for one
The United States may indeed elect a woman president in the upcoming decades. But if it does it will be in spite of the pervasive role that religion plays in the lives of its adherents that promote that women are simply not the equal of men.
Karen L. Garst
The Faithless Feminist