Essay Series 3.4: Women’s leadership in major religions has been ignored, minimized, dismissed, or erased.

Major religions often erase or minimize women’s religious leadership and restrict their lives. This became apparent when I researched eight major religions, including Christianity, several years ago. All had prominent roles for at least a few women. However, their contributions were minimized.¹⁷¹

This essay focuses on Christianity because the evangelical version¹⁷² of it is the religion of my youth. Also, a twisted form of evangelical Christianity is bent on restricting everyone’s freedoms in the United States, with a focus on confining women to domesticity and limiting their voting rights.

Growing up, I learned about obedience to a stern version of God, women being subject to men, and condemnation of non-Christians to hell after death. I left this version of Christianity because I couldn’t blindly obey men and I didn’t believe a loving god would condemn anyone to hell. I’m not the only one who took the journey away from evangelism. Other women have written memoirs, which document their own, similar journeys.¹⁷³ The most compelling read for me was Sarah McCammon’s book The Exvangelicals. McCammon is about 30 years younger than I am. However, the reasons she left evangelism are similar to mine.

Many of Christianity’s rules, including subordination of women, didn’t come from Jesus himself. Rather, Church leaders created rules that kept men in power and squeezed women out. This started within a few centuries after Jesus taught his radical theology in present-day Israel and Palestine.

Christian denominations have varying roles for women in the church. In Roman Catholicism, women can’t be priests, bishops, or popes. Likewise, the Southern Baptist Convention doesn’t allow women to be pastors.¹⁷⁴ In contrast, the Episcopal Church in the United States has had women bishops since 1989¹⁷⁵ and the Presiding Bishop from 2006-2015 was a woman.¹⁷⁶ The Church of England’s Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman for the first time in 1400 years. The man who held the post before her resigned due to his handling of allegations of sexual abuse in the Church.¹⁷⁷

This essay describes how Jesus interacted with women and women’s important leadership in the very early Christian church.

Jesus and Women

The historical Jesus interacted with women and appreciated them, based on biblical accounts of his teachings and life. I’ve read and analyzed the traditional Christian New Testament’s accounts of Jesus’ words and actions. My conclusions about Jesus’ teachings are correct and bolstered by many biblical scholars. However, these conclusions aren’t consistent with some of the Apostle Paul’s writings or current conservative churches’ teachings.

Jesus did not:

1. Denigrate women.

1. Say they had to confine themselves to child-rearing and domestic activities.

1. Prohibit them from being teachers or leaders in the Church.

1. Tell them they had to obey their husbands.

Jesus did:

1. Heal women as readily as he healed men.

1. Forgive women who had sinned as he forgave men.

1. Have important women followers and supporters.

1. Have an important apostle in Mary of Magdala (Mary Magdalene).

The Christian Church and Women

Early Christianity had two approaches to women’s roles in the church. The first recognized Jesus’ revolutionary and egalitarian attitude toward women. Evidence is that women preached and taught during early Christianity. However, by the year 200, most Christian communities followed the Apostle Paul’s teaching against women having a leadership role in the church.¹⁷⁸

There is evidence from the Bible and Roman writers about the important role of women in the early Christian Church.¹⁷⁹ The Gospel of Mark states that women were part of the group that surrounded Jesus in life and death and after his resurrection.¹⁸⁰

The Gospel of Luke mentions many women who followed Jesus and supported him using their own resources. One of them was Mary of Magdala. She is the woman mentioned most often in the gospels, and the gospels list her as one of the small group of women who went to Jesus’ tomb after his death. Mary of Magdala and Salome are portrayed as among Jesus’s most important disciples in at least one gospel, The Gospel of Mary, which didn’t make it into the traditional New Testament.¹⁸¹

The Apostle Paul’s New Testament letter to the Christians living in ancient Rome mentions 29 people whom he knows and who are important to the church at the time. Eleven of them are women. Paul identifies Phoebe as a deaconess and a benefactor of many, indicating that she had an important role in the church and the financial resources to help others. Paul said that Junia, a woman, was an apostle and a follower of Jesus before Paul was.¹⁸²

Early Christian Sects with Women Leaders

Early Christianity was a diverse religion with Christians meeting together on an equal basis—women, men, children, enslaved, and free in the privacy of people’s homes.¹⁸³ Many sects had women leaders, and women were deacons in the church and ministered to the needs of church members.¹⁸⁴

Additional evidence of women’s leadership is that outside observers in Rome criticized early Christians because of the number of important women leaders the movement had.¹⁸⁵ Paul’s restrictions on women as leaders in the Church may have been a reaction to these criticisms.

Over time, early religious leaders settled on one set of scriptures for the Christian church. In the process, church leaders eliminated some of the books that were written around the same time as the New Testament.¹⁸⁶ To me, the most notable omissions are the ones that address women’s roles in the Church, including the Gospel of Mary.

Mary of Magdala

The Gospel of Mary presents Mary of Magdala as Jesus’ primary apostle.¹⁸⁷ According to this gospel, she was the first to know of Jesus’ resurrection. She was also a missionary for Jesus, who preached openly and converted people to the Christian movement. This gospel also portrays Mary of Magdala as the disciple who understood Jesus and his message best. He appeared to her and other women first after his resurrection and asked Mary to teach his other disciples.¹⁸⁸

About 600 years after Jesus and Mary of Magdala lived, a Catholic pope declared that she was a prostitute. There is no evidence of this in the New Testament. Rather, the church leaders, all men, chose to diminish the role of Mary of Magdala. It wasn’t until 1969 that another pope declared that she wasn’t a prostitute.¹⁸⁹ The early Catholic Church succeeded in diminishing Mary of Magdala’s role in Jesus’ life.

God’s Androgyny

The traditional New Testament and the recently discovered Christian texts at Nag Hammadi¹⁹⁰ refer to a god of indeterminate sex.¹⁹¹ Many Christian authorities argue that God has no gender. And the traditional New Testament has references to there being “neither male nor female” among those who follow Jesus.¹⁹² The gospels and psalms that church authorities excluded from the traditional New Testament contain multiple references to God as mother and father and to God having female and male characteristics.^{193, 194}

Reflections

Jesus was a radical, progressive, and liberal religious leader who valued women. His early followers valued women too because they were leaders, and Jesus acknowledged them as such.

Over time, the Catholic Church eliminated some early gospels, which point to Mary of Magdala as Jesus’ leading disciple. The Catholic Church disparaged her for centuries, likely because she was a leading authority in the very early church, and the men wouldn’t have it. In addition, some modern history books about the Christian Church minimize women’s roles in the early church.¹⁹⁵

Jesus’ messages about love and his interactions with women and men provide a model for kindness and love instead of anger and division. The Christian traditions that lift up everyone, including women, are the ones that follow Jesus’ original teachings.

Conservative Christianity, as practiced now, doesn’t follow Jesus. It focuses on anger and division and men’s dominance of women. Conservative Christianity advocates bringing the United States back to the Victorian era, where White men controlled women and society. The conservative version of Christianity is not the only religion that restricts women’s leadership, appearance, sexuality, independence, health care, and other aspects of their lives.

What have been your experiences, if any, with religion and women’s role in it?