Th
e Women’s March
Last Saturday saw the biggest ever protest worldwide, with millions of women taking to the streets to demand protection of our basic rights and freedoms, which seem to be under threat in various places at present. The immediate catalyst for the event was the beginning of Trump’s presidency, a man who boasts about assaulting women.
Women in Christianity
Many of my friends, women and men, in both the UK and USA marched. Most of them are Christians and see equal treatment and respect for women as central to their faith. This might surprise some people, since Christianity doesn’t always have a good reputation for supporting women’s equality. For centuries, and still in many churches, it was taught that women are subordinate, different and should not take leadership roles. This was based on selective readings of biblical texts, such as the story of Adam and Eve or commands about marriage in the New Testament Epistles, which failed to take into account the social context of biblical times (when women were considered property and slavery was an unquestioned part of the culture, for instance).
Woman-Positive Strands
Yet in recent years scholars have been demonstrating how there have been woman-positive strands in Christianity from the beginning. According to the Gospels, Jesus took women seriously and counted them among his friends. The devotion to Mary has not been without its problems for women, but at least puts a woman at the centre of the Christian narrative.
The Epistles also show that women such as Phoebe had important leadership roles in the early Church, and nunneries were for centuries places where women could think, study and gain positions of power. From the beginning Christianity’s emphasis on support for the poor and downtrodden has particularly appealed to women – pagan writers in the early centuries decried it as a religion for women and slaves, something the early Christians wore as a badge of honour, and even today churches contain more women than men as members. Christ’s way of holding power, quietly and without coercion, challenges the way power works in our world. And I think that is one reason why so many women always were, and are, still drawn to him.
Rebecca Lloyd
29 January 2017
