Why “Religion” Doesn’t Work for Feminists
I read an article the other day by Celeste Davis, entitled Why Religious Tools Don’t Work for Women, based on the work of Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love).
Their premise is this:
All religious frameworks are designed for men; making the degraded man more divine by helping him remove the ego and become more forgiving, compassionate, kind, charitable, merciful, etc. However, the degraded woman is already all these things by nature, so religious systems do not serve her needs. In order to become divine, she needs to learn to build herself up by being the protector, speaking up, claiming her voice, standing for injustice, taking space, setting boundaries, making more time for her, putting herself first for once, etc.
Now, while I do appreciate the acknowledgement of fundamental differences between men and women and there is definitely a layer of truth in the premise — men and women have thousands upon thousands of genes that express differently between the sexes, we’re made to serve different societal functions, and we do have different needs and underlying motivations — it’s far from a universal truth, and Celeste herself admitted that it was “overly simplistic”.
My primary reason for writing this response is my concern that many women might take this idea and run with it right off the proverbial cliff, and that it may actually cause more damage than good.
I do think there is validity in the idea that many women have been led by religious frameworks to put themselves last to their own detriment, however, I do think the bigger picture is being missed here.
High-demand religions encourage EVERYONE to put themselves last to their own detriment, not just women.
Here’s some added perspective.
1. You divide and conquer your slaves.
Like Celeste, I grew up in LDS Mormonism.
As a man I was taught by the church to elevate women; that men were part of the priesthood in order to serve women who were God’s ultimate and greatest creation and are closest to Him because they can create life. I was taught to believe that because whoever leads is the servant of all, that men led to serve women and to alleviate those responsibilities and burdens from women.
However, the women in the LDS church would most likely tell you that they are likewise taught to put themselves down and elevate the men as priesthood authority figures above them.
In reality, this is an old divide-and-conquer technique that has been employed during slavery across the world for thousands of years. You have house slaves and field slaves, and you give them different privileges, different status, and you convince them that that means something. This keeps them distracted competing against each other instead of uniting against you.
It’s a lose-lose situation. Unless you’re the master, that is.
2. Everyone’s a loser in global communism.
One of the fundamental, underlying ideas in LDS Mormonism is that an ideal Christian society would be perfectly communistic. Everyone would have everything in common with each other, having given up all personal possessions for the greater good, owning nothing and being happy.
That’s how the early Christian church lived. That’s how the early church of Joseph Smith tried to live and failed miserably because they were so darn selfish. And that’s how we’ll all live again when Jesus comes back to rule the world for a thousand years of peace. This is we as good global citizens must support the UN’s agenda 2030.
I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what the church teaches.
However, what this globalist-communist idea essentially does is remove all personal boundaries and borders. It forces you to treat everyone like you would your family — whom you would naturally share everything with — thereby eliminating the fundamental differences or boundaries between family, community and nation.
In other words, philosophically, this mindset forces you to treat millions of people that you don’t know like family. This inevitably destroys your family relationships, because family no longer actually means anything.
And then because you have no boundaries, you actually reduce the self — yourself — to just another meaningless face in the crowd, whom you love no more than anyone else.
But because you actually can’t comprehend the number of people in the crowd, in your mind there is only the collective that has any meaning, and you yourself are worth less than nothing.
This, coupled with the idea that love is conditional, creates emotionally broken and spiritually downtrodden disciples who are incapable of actual loving relationships, and whom rely upon the religious institution to play the authority figure offering them hope and mercy and grace.
In reality, in order to even love your neighbor (or anyone) as yourself, you need to actually love yourself first. And then loving yourself, you are now in a position to love your neighbor as well.
(I wrote more about the healthy Bible-based boundaries we employ when loving different groups of people in a recent article: Some Love Lessons from “Love Your Neighbor As Yourself”.)
3. Feminism, the religion?
If you look at definitions for religion above, you’ll notice that only 2(a) mentions God.
In fact, if you had to look at all of them and summarize the word into a single simple definition, you might say that religion is:
an institution or system of beliefs, attitudes, practices and behaviors to which one conforms/subscribes.
By this definition, many cultural things are religious in nature.
For some, it’s Monday night football. For some it’s Hollywood. For some, it’s “the Science”. For some, it’s their politics. For some, it’s veganism. For some, it’s whatever the mainstream news media tells them to believe.
You can be religious about almost anything. Even atheism!
And on that note, many books and articles have been written about Feminism being its own religion.
Feminism places women on a pedestal. It has associated virtues and vices, its own definitions of good and evil. It divides its adherents between 1st-wave, 2nd-wave and 3rd-wave Feminism. And it enshrines “patriarchy” as the embodiment of the fallen angel that they need to overcome tempting them away from their own inner power and virtue.
The biggest reason why these women are buying into the idea that all the major “religions” are only made for men, is because Feminism is its own religious counter-movement, whose beliefs are not consistent or fully compatible with most other large religious systems.
Yes, there are high-demand religions that are widely damaging and emotionally abusive, and many even call themselves Christian, however, the core Biblical ethic that God alone is on the pedestal and we’re all on level ground underneath him is fundamentally non-Feminist, because men and women have the same standing under God.
Feminism relies upon the premise that men/the patriarchy oppresses women. Without that underlying belief, it couldn’t be virtuous for a woman to raise yourself up on a pedestal.
And so while it’s valid that oppressive religious systems do fuel feminists away from their institutions, it’s definitely not because they’re made to benefit all men at the expense of women.
Oppressive religions are made to benefit the few men (and women) at the top who profit exorbitantly from the masses.
4. Religion is an institution. The gospel is an individual journey.
LDS Mormonism claims that a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.
In fact, one of the higher covenants you make with “GOD” in the LDS temples is called the Law of Consecration in which you promise all your time, talents, possessions and any future possessions to the church corporation.
However, not only does this create an impossible standard you’ll never reach, meaning you’re setting yourself up to fail, but it’s also antithetical to the simple gospel of Jesus:
God IS love (John 14:8). All who are faithful unto him (John 3:16) by loving God (Matt. 22:37) and loving your neighbor as yourself (Luke 18) or, in other words, keeping the “ten commandments” (Matt. 19:17–18), and who are “born again” of water and the Holy Spirit (John 3:5) shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).
Jesus never started his own religion. In fact, he came to free us from the legalistic religion that had developed in the kingdom of Israel.
He came as Israel’s prophesied Messiah to be our sole teacher and rabbi; to flesh out the principles underlying the Law and Covenant that God made with Israel, so that we might be “perfect” (complete, consistent, mature), men and women of integrity, with the law of God written upon our hearts.
He also ended the need for the religious aspects of animal sacrifice under the law by being the ultimate sacrifice for all of us.
And his message was quite clear about the religious institutions of the day: We aren’t to trust in the arm of flesh. We’re supposed to trust God, not man. We should be wary of false prophets, false pastors, false teachers; religious middle-managers, hypocrites. He even told his disciples not to claim any ranks or titles or prestige. That everyone was to be a brother or sister, equal under God.
The gospel made the spiritual walk an individual one. It’s between you and God. And your church is just meant to be a local fellowship group of like-minded believers.
So in terms of that earlier Mormon quote, I think it would be more accurate to say that religion…never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation. Period.
So while you can be religious about following Jesus or the gospel, you don’t need religion to do so.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a religious institution; it’s simply an inspired pattern designed to point us in the right direction in our individual spiritual walk with God.
