I’ve been reading a lot of books about religion lately—not surprising when I write so much about it, particularly about the Religious Right. This time, most of the books were about women coming to terms with faith, and how it changed them. In two cases, women discovered feminism and began to ask the hard questions. I found myself wondering how women (and men) here at DailyKos had handled issues of faith and feminism.
Feminisms is a series of weekly feminist diaries. My fellow feminists and I decided to start our own for several purposes: we wanted a place to chat with each other, we felt it was important to both share our own stories and learn from others’, and we hoped to introduce to the community a better understanding of what feminism is about.
Needless to say, we expect disagreements to arise. We have all had different experiences in life, so while we share the same labels, we don’t necessarily share the same definitions. Hopefully, we can all be patient and civil with each other, and remember that, ultimately, we’re all on the same side.
One of the books I finished most recently was called The Sisterhood by Dorothy Allred Solomon (she’s been interviewed a lot recently because she grew up in a polygamous household but chose a monogamous marriage and abandoned fundamentalist Mormonism for the mainstream LDS church). It’s a fascinating read, contrasting the way women were treated in the early days of Joseph smith and Brigham Young with modern day Mormonism. Despite polygamy, women seemed to have had more freedom in the frontier days. They ran businesses, founded and were in charge of the Relief Society, attended the first gathering of women’s suffragists at Seneca Falls, and were sent back east to study medicine. Today, while women run the lower levels of Relief Society, they are carefully supervised by men who must agree to expenditures. And while early Mormons supported women’s suffrage, the current church opposed the ERA and excommunicated several women who publicly questioned that stance. Solomon has a lot of questions, but no answers, and appears to have made her peace with the way things are in her faith, while not entirely pleased by the conservativism.
The female authors of the other two books weren’t quite so compliant.
Fleeing Fundamentalism follows the voyage of discovery undertaken by the wife of a fundamentalist pastor after her marriage falls apart. After getting a job and encountering a world vastly different from the very religiously segregated one she has lived in, she begins taking classes at a local college, where she starts to look into the origins of Christianity and studies comparative religion. She questions everything she was ever taught and abandons religion completely for a time, before returning to renewed faith in a very different God than the one she was raised with. As a self-reliant feminist, she finds herself. The Dance of the Dissident Daughter was written by Sue Monk Kidd, a Southern Baptist pastor’s wife and a well-educated and successful Christian writer who, after one sermon too many on Paul’s Epistle to Timothy and the ban on women teaching men, asked, "God, how could you?" Tired of being a second class citizen in her church, she wonders why women were so left out of positions of authority, discovers feminism, and searches for the Divine Feminine. Along the way her relationship to her husband and children changes for the better, though she finds herself unable to fit into her old SBC mold and finds herself seeking a more flexible and creative form of worship.
What came across most strongly in all three books is the problems women have with faith once they discover feminism, the radical notion that women are people and thus entitled to the same rights as men. Their journeys seem to me representative of what most of us went through at some point in our lives, if we consider ourselves feminists. Each woman’s spiritual experience will be different, and it will be deeply personal. Some will have found they could live comfortably within the confines of their faith, while others will seek a different path. Still others will abandon faith completely. There are no easy or universally correct answers.
My own journey began around age 14 in the mid ‘60s. As an only child, my parents raised me to use my intelligence fully, to be competitive, and to try new things. I was told I could be anything I wanted to be, and I believed them. Then I began to realize that the Catholic Church in which I was raised didn’t entirely agree with them. Sure, you could go to college and train for a profession, but there were only two truly acceptable roles: lifelong virgins or wife and mother. Remaining a virgin by choice by entering a convent was the best and highest choice, but the next best was marrying and bearing and raising as many children as God chose to send you (and back then, Catholic families were large, since the only form of birth control permitted was Natural Family Planning aka Vatican Roulette). Working after marriage was only acceptable if utterly necessary (which confused me since my very devout Mom had always worked at least part time). Down at the bottom were those unfortunate women who didn’t choose virginity but had it thrust upon them. Poor ladies, no man asked them to marry, so they were stuck in barren lives as career women. It never occurred to the church that some women might not want to marry, preferring independent lives and jobs they found fulfilling. The truly radical idea that someone might want to marry and not have kids was flat-out unacceptable because it meant you were using forbidden methods of contraception—and, besides, it was somehow unnatural for a women not to want to be a mother—was just wrong and sinful.
I looked at my religion textbooks with their list of masculine and feminine qualities (pretty similar to the ones the APA had assembled) and concluded it was a crock of horse shite. I was a very girly young woman, yet I fit the masculine list far better than the feminine one—I hated housework and repetitive tasks, was intellectually aggressive, and wasn’t particularly good at keeping my mouth shut to stroke anyone’s ego ( I attended all girl schools from 7th through 12th grade; I never got into that habit). I started asking questions. Why did God want women perpetually pregnant? Why was motherhood better than being a pediatrician or a writer or a lawyer? Why was birth control forbidden? Why did every married woman have to have kids if she possibly could? Why was sex outside marriage so wrong? Why were women forbidden to be priests? What was so terrible about homosexuality? I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I got. In college, I made one last stab at being a Good Catholic Girl by joining a liberal (but still very Pauline on the role of women) Catholic commune. I left when I realized that writing isn’t really compatible with a group where the life of the group is more important than the individual’s need to create. And I never looked back.
Twelve years of catholic school had trained me to think critically, to research, and to analyze. I began to apply those skills to religion. Comparative religion had always been a passion. I’d looked into Wicca and paganism in high school (more for writing Dark Shadows fan fic than out of any deep-seated interest), and expanded my search to other forms of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. I also thought deeply about what I felt a Deity worthy of worship would be. First of all, S/he/It/They had to at least match the basic rules of decent human behavior, which eliminated the Old Testament God right off the bat—anyone who orders genoicide and human sacrifice that casually just didn’t cut it. While still fond of the New Testament Gospels and the teachings of Jesus, I didn’t much care for any of the Christian churches, all of which seemed determined to lock women into sex roles that were ancient two thousand years ago. I believed that a faith I could live with had to include the Sacred Feminine. Catholicism embodied that under the guise of Mary and the female saints—but they weren’t truly divine, just good humans. The Nag Hammadi scrolls, with their hint of a different sort of Christianity and equality for women, with Mary Magdalene as the Beloved Disciple, fascinated me but Gnosticism wasn’t exactly a flourishing religion, and it included the dualism that spirit was good and flesh, if not downright bad, was still something to escape from. That came close to the fundamentalist Christian notion that God created this world 6,000 years ago, but made it look like the earth was millions of years old as some nasty sort of test of faith—giving us bodies and then telling us we shouldn’t enjoy them was way too similar. I concluded that I couldn’t accept a deity who fucked with people just to fuck with them.,
One of the main problems I encountered was that most organized religions see themselves as having a monopoly on truth---if you didn’t play by their rules, you were damned. Surely Deity had to care more about what was in people’s hearts and how they lived their lives than in the name they prayed to—the demonizing of other faiths had always struck me as applying very human limitations to Infinite Love. And always I kept being drawn back to Wicca, which visualized Deity as male and female, both and neither, was pansexual, allowed women to be clergy and didn’t insist that those who followed a different path were doomed. I loved the Rede and the Charge of the Goddess, with their joyous celebration of the natural world, including sexuality, as beautiful and good and meant to be enjoyed. So at 24 I became a coven of one and began studying folklore and mythology because this was long before how-to books were available at Borders.
During a heated discussion of atheism and religion, one atheist Kossack called my religion an affectation because I didn’t just fall into it after some deeply emotional conversion experience. I freely acknowledge that my belief is just that: a belief, based on a personal and highly subjective experience that cannot be proven rationally. The one thing I never doubted was that Something much greater than myself existed. Sometimes, in the dark stillness of a church or in the quiet of twilight, I would touch that Presence and know it was real in a way that was non-rational but not irrational. I really have never attempted to define that Presence. I don’t know how personally involved It is in our lives; my suspicion is that to allow free will, It has boxed up many of its powers. I do sense a longing to be One with Its creations. Andrew Greeley calls Deity the Great Seducer so passionately in love with Creation that it pursues each member with the ardent determination of a lover; I’ve always liked that image. I also realize that what I sense is a tiny bit of a Whole that is beyond my finite mind. That’s fine by me. I have a strong mystical streak and dwell happily with Mystery. These days I look into my husband’s eyes and see the Stag King embodied there.
And if I am wrong and the fundamentalists (*every* religion seems to have them) are right and I picked the wrong way to envision Deity—well, then the old adage of "heaven for climate; hell for company" will be true and Lucifer will likely turn out to be hero of the story. And if there’s nothing, I won’t know or care. My ashes will fertilize a garden, and my physical remains will become part of the Universe again---because, as Carl Sagan, atheist scientist with a poetic streak, once said, "We are all star stuff." And that will be fine with me.
So that is how I ceased to be a Good Catholic Girl and ended up a Slightly Wicked Wiccan Woman, a pro-choice, kinky, bellydancing, civil libertarian, gay rights supporting witch who writes women-oriented erotica. I think I must have been Jerry Falwell’s nightmare incarnate!
How about you? What spiritual journeys have you undertaken because you were a feminist? What ended up as your faith choice? How hard was it to make that choice? What were the ramifications? Share your stories, please.