Christianity, Misogyny, and the Role of Christian Nationalism

From Christianity’s founding origin story, throughout biblical scripture, to today’s Christian doctrines, the god of Christianity has always been male: God’s pronouns are he, him and his. His psychological profile, demeanor, and behavior are stereotypically masculine. Likewise, regardless of the Abrahamic tradition of not making “graven” images, Christians have created a ton of depictions, and they are all masculine.

Misogyny is written right into holy scripture and church doctrine. Almost every Euro-American, colonial, & post-colonial child, everyone under the Christian umbrella – even many such as myself, fortuitously spared the child abuse of religious indoctrination – is familiar with the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the of Eden. Right away, in the opening pages of Christianity’s holy scripture, it is immediately established that the woman is inferior. 

Adam comes first. Made in God’s image. He is the first human, the prototype. She is almost an after-thought, made from a mere rib. Literally a spare part of the man. Her entire existence is conditional, provisional. He is the person, while she was brought into existence as little more than his companion, his comfort, his plaything.

The first woman is portrayed as weak, easily deceived, and morally responsible for bringing sin and suffering into the world. Her desire for knowledge, and to give her husband some delicious fruit, disobeying the master’s orders, caused her own suffering as well. 

I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Genesis 3:16

So, she deserves what she gets. She brought it on herself. She was asking for it. 

Throughout the Bible, the subordination and unjust treatment of women and girls is normalized and justified. Scripture, tradition, doctrine, institutional authorities – every aspect of the long-dominant Christian religion reinforces systematic misogyny. Even though many recognize that religion is really only mythology, or allegory, it has still acted as a huge rubber stamp, justifying this patriarchal sexism for two thousand years. The notion of women as property, as male possessions, as mere “things,” has been normalized to such a degree that many believe this status to be not only morally justified, but an innate, integral aspect of human nature as well.

The Bible, a 2000-year-old book of mythology, indoctrinates into billions of innocent female (and male) minds, generation after generation, the second-class status of females. This essential order is written right into the Ten Commandments themselves:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.

Exodus 20:17

The female was but a mere thing or possession, right along with the ox or donkey, the family pet, or even household appliances such as a cart for carrying kindling or a machine for washing the clothes. When a woman was raped, the offense was interpreted primarily as an offense to the dominant male in her life, such as the father or husband. 

If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver.

Deuteronomy 22:28-29

As for the victim, her penance is that the man must subsequently marry her. The man who raped her. 

The continued importance of the Bible ensures that the reinforcement and perpetuation of deeply outmoded disrespect for women and girls continues to characterize much of human society. 

In the Middle Ages, Christian men, borrowing from the Ancient Greeks, represented this hierarchy with a model called The Great Chain of Being. In its earlier iterations, The Great Chain of Being depicted life in a hierarchic manner: fish below amphibians, amphibians below reptiles, then up to mammals, with us at the top of the natural order, straddling the all-important dividing line between the earthly and the divine. We were the “crown of creation,” and sat atop this ranked understanding of the cosmos, the only natural being with one foot each in the natural, and one in the supernatural, i.e., divine. Above us were the angels, and above that the pyramid or ladder ended ultimately with the monotheistic biblical God at the very top. 

But The Great Chain of Being was subsequently employed to justify social and political hierarchy – Kings above knights, knights above serfs, et cetera. Unsurprisingly, in 100% of the dominant, mainstream historical iterations of these hierarchic models, women were conceptually and structurally placed below men. These pseudo-scientific, antiquated modes of understanding still dominate much of human thought in our time, particularly among the devout and pious. 

The Great Chain of Being is just another example of the conservative, traditional, backwards-facing nature of the Christian religion, and, consequently, how it served, and still serves, to orient human society towards ancient times in which chauvinism was normalized and generally accepted as the natural and unavoidable state of things. 

Even into our times, religious opponents of equal rights and justice for women continue to find justification for the silencing and disempowering of women throughout Biblical scripture. For example, arguing that God ordained male headship and female submission, Christians still cite such scriptural passages as 1 Corinthians 14:34–35:

The women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. And if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church.

This ongoing misogyny continues to be reinforced even at the level of the family unit. The disempowerment and silencing of females begins at home. Even before a child is born and subjected to the abuse of religious indoctrination, introduced to Adam & Eve in the garden of Eden whilst still in her nappies and crib, the Christian home is characterized by a patriarchal union in the form of traditionally hierarchic marriage. In marriage, the male is the head of the family, while the woman is expected to be obedient.

 

In just one of many Euro-American rites of passage long under the dominion of the church, upon the event of the marriage ceremony, women are expected to subordinate themselves by literally erasing their birth and family names from the world. Even in our time, from the moment the woman says “I do,” she is formally known as the property of her husband, forever under the title Mrs. [Place-Male-Name-Here]. 

One reason change has been significantly hampered is the fact that men have always held the overwhelming majority of positions of authority. Men have been the leaders, not merely in law, politics, and business, but in the church itself, throughout the centuries. Numbers help tell the story of injustice. Even today, authority within the Christian church skews considerably male at 85%, while a mere 15% of religious authorities are female. Priest and popes, missionaries and cardinals—dominance of males throughout the history of the church has been undeniable, obvious, and intensely impactful on society. 

The population of the USA was approximately 95% Christian in the ninetieth and early twentieth century. It was during this time that the women’s suffrage movement fought for the right to vote. Suffrage, from the Latin suffragium, means “voting tablet, ballot, or vote of support.” Anti-suffrage propaganda, strongly encouraged and supported by the faithful, argued that the women’s place was exclusively in the home. The philosophy of “kitchen, children, and church,” like the earlier German “Kinder, Küche, Kirche,” accurately described what these anti-suffrage Christians, including a high percentage of women, believed God had made females for, this was their role, their purpose.

U.S. American women were eventually granted the right to vote in 1920, well after a number of other nations. It was also a full half-century after the recently emancipated black male slaves did, despite the fact that the US was then, as now, among the most racist nations in the world. This tells us a great deal about the status of women in U.S. America’s highly Christian society. 

Contemporary ultra-conservatives and Christian Nationalists today have revived such arguments against female suffrage. Joel Webbon, the leader of Right Response Ministries, recently said –

It has to be that men – virtuous, ambitious, masculine men – have to climb the ladder of power and forcefully take away from the people that which is to their detriment. . . .

Pastor Webbon is explicitly calling for men to take voting rights away, openly and actively promoting biblical submission of the female, to both the husband and domestic responsibilities, as the ideal, fulfilling, and godly way of life. 

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of women’s autonomy, the right to control their own bodies, to make their own decisions regarding family planning and the reproductive process. There was significant public outcry against this ruling, largely from the church, and from the devout and pious. The Catholic church at first, later including Evangelicals motivated by the likes of Reverend Jerry Falwell and his so-called Moral Majority, vehemently opposed the Supreme Court’s ruling. But all of this religious opposition to abortion was based upon what was nothing more than antiquated pseudo-science and mythology, indoctrinating Christians in the fictitious belief that human individuals were in fact eternal “souls.”

In 2022, theists finally got their wish. In a glaringly atavistic move, the United States Supreme Court rescinded the Roe V Wade compromise, which had successfully protected a woman’s right to choose for nearly a half century. This would have been unlikely in a context wherein the justices were acting in accordance with the First Amendment to the US Constitution and its guaranteed separation of church and state: an enlightenment principle widely recognized to be both historically unprecedented and sagely progressive. 

Unfortunately, however, the United States Supreme Court had just recently been stocked with conservative Christian justices by a president beholden to this religious base, stocked with justices disturbingly unconcerned with defending the United States Constitution when it ran contrary to their religious convictions. 

Certainly, the ability to question legislation and the law can be to the good of society. Laws are enacted which are clearly immoral in a rational or secular sense, or become dated as society progresses. But the sense the faithful have, of being above human law, the laws of human society, this is a horse of another color, and a highly problematic one, to boot. 

The position that a woman should have the right to control what happens to her own body is a fairly straightforward matter of basic human autonomy, which is a fundamental moral concern. Bodily autonomy should not be the concern of religious authorities. Particularly in light of the fact that it is based not on contemporary science, but on the pseudo-science of antiquity, and particularly in light of the fact that the religious authorities in question happen to be primarily, if not entirely, Christian males. 

The USA should be neither patriarchy nor theocracy. Religious convictions should have no bearing on the law. The repeal of Roe v Wade is clearly one more example of religion as a conservative force, thwarting genuine progress, hindering genuine democracy, disempowering women, and immorally limiting both their personal autonomy and fundamental rights.

In spite of the First Amendment, the makeup of the government of the United States reflects this history of significant religious and sexist intrusion. The US congress was exclusively, entirely male from its inception through to the twentieth century, when Jeanette Rankin was elected to the US house of representatives in 1916, a full 140 years after becoming an independent, self-governing nation. Perhaps it goes without saying that it was also overwhelmingly Christian, and still is to this day. Things have slowly progressed to the point that today, over a century later, women constitute around 28 percent of the US congress. The good news is that this is the highest it has ever been historically. Unfortunately, this is also the bad news: it is still only around half of what would be considered a fair and just representation of 50/50. 

At this point it should come as no surprise that the less religious states, those with the higher percentage of secular, atheist and “non-affiliated” voters, tend to elect higher rates of women to Congress. But some of the highly religious states, experiencing a rising wave of religious activism closely associated with the contemporary rise of Christian Nationalism and the administration of President Donald Trump, have more recently begun to elect women into the seats of power. But, important caveat—fundamentalist Christian women, to be exact.

The goals, of both these voters and those they elect, include bringing the Bible into public schools; overriding the constitutionally guaranteed separation of church and state; and banning books that run contrary to what they deem ‘Christian’ morals. These Christian women essentially support moving the United States backwards in time, closer to Christian theocracies which would be functionally more akin to those conservative, contemporary theocratic Islamic regimes which so very many U.S. Americans are all too happy to hypocritically deride and regard with contempt.

As I scribble these thoughts, it is 2026. Women and girls have been making considerable progress towards genuine justice in the USA. We are closer to equality than at any time in US history in a number of respects. But the rise of Christian Nationalism and the Trump administration are so head-spinning as to make things feel entirely surreal at times. Millions of religious people are so zealously regressive that they are advocating for the eventual repeal of the Nineteenth Amendment. Disturbingly, such extreme deterioration is now par for the course, with fundamentalist, literalist, conservative versions of the world-conquering religions of Christianity and Islam insinuating their antediluvian, archaic values, including significant doses of biblical misogyny, into the lives of the rest of us.

Patriarchal beliefs are codified into misogynistic and disempowering business practices, government, laws and legislation, our courtrooms, our homes, schools, and daily life, reinforced generation upon generation by the church, the clergy, the traditions, the Christian community, literal propaganda, and the child abuse of religious indoctrination from birth. 

Christianity ruled Europe for two thousand years, century after century, during much of which it was as dominating and stringent and invasive as the worst of today’s Muslim theocracies. 

And so it bears a lion’s share of culpability when it comes to misogyny today: inveigling itself into political and legislative arenas; concocting doctrinal justifications for intruding into our bedrooms, our bathrooms, our bodies; intrusively seeking to control everything from birth to death; subtly obfuscating the line between fiction and fact; emphasizing pseudo-science towards immorally coercive ends—religion intrusively infects every aspect of our lives like an all-invasive viral infection.

As the late, great Christopher Hitchens so famously said, “religion poisons everything.” Religions like Christianity and Islam bore into every recess and cavity of our minds, into our “souls,” ‘souls’, if you will. Even atheists like myself sometimes find vestiges of religious belief and thought, buried deep within, when we are ruthlessly honest with ourselves. After all, not only does the church piggy-back on some prehistoric cognitive hardware (nature)—Homo sapiens instinctive predilections towards supernatural thought and belief—but it has had centuries to perfect this poisoning process (nurture). It’s good at coercion. It was, and in far too many places still is, an all-determining force which intrudes into every corner, impacts and shapes every aspect of our lives, invading, infecting, and infesting, just as fungal mycelia permeate the soil, worming deep into every crevice, crack, and dank cranny.

The sin, the evil, the blatant immorality of all this is greatly amplified by the fact that Christianity claims the moral high ground. Believers regularly contend that without God, without religion, all is lost. They truly believe that it is the source of all morality, that without God and religion, civilization will break down into a morass of hedonism, nihilism, anarchy, chaos and sin. Again, not real. Not gonna happen. Another lie. Coercive propaganda. But in presenting themselves as the safe space, the trustworthy place for the downtrodden, for those in need to turn, the culpability, the fault, the sin, is all that much worse.

Every movement for social justice, for equity and worldly fairness, runs afoul of a preacher, pastor, or devout Christian, whipping up an angry protesting mob, proclaiming themselves to represent the moral majority. The truth of history is that the Christian religion is at the forefront of the opposition, siding with the status quo, working to put hard brakes to the wheels of moral progress. 

Christianity hinders our moral development and maturation, both individually and collectively. It is only after secular forces have pushed the issue beyond a definitive flash point, that the mainstream faithful start showing up on the other side, shining heroically in an a-posteriori rewrite of the historical narrative. Christianity says it reveres women, but this just makes it all the worse when we eventually figure out what really happened, what’s really happening.

So, it’s a lie that Christianity reveres women. Christianity, as a rule, bears a high level of responsibility for the deep, pervasive cultural misogyny and sexism which has so long permeated US American society. Certainly, there are exceptions to the rule. I have known progressive, feminist, foresighted, and woke members of the church. But they are the exception to the rule, relatively freethinking individuals who must regularly do battle with the status quo and the powers that be within their church, sect, denomination, or community. The truth is that the change which has come has been largely a result of secular forces, imposing change from outside of the church, with a little help from such rare and exceptional believers on the fringe. Change is happening, but it is happening in spite of religion, and not because of it.