(First published in Stuff regional papers and on Stuff.co.nz., October 17.)
Power and control. In the
final analysis, that’s what most organised religion comes down to.
To those three words you can
add two more: power and control by men.
This is the defining characteristic of virtually all hierarchical religions.
It's strikingly at odds with a society in which women have rightly demanded, and often obtained, equality in other spheres. But it has ever been thus. You
don’t need a PhD in religious studies to understand that organised
religion depends heavily on the ability of a small, male elite – a priesthood,
in other words – to exercise control over its followers.
I have been more than usually
aware of this in recent weeks, partly because of a couple of challenging films.
In the 2017 drama Disobedience, two women from an Orthodox
Jewish community in London risk ostracism by rekindling an illicit
relationship. It’s a film whose claustrophobic settings powerfully convey the
stifling atmosphere of an insular society in which the rules are dictated by
men for the benefit of men.
Even more unsettling, because
it’s factual, is the Netflix documentary One
of Us, which follows three people who face isolation and harassment after
leaving an oppressive Hasidic Jewish community in New York.
By coincidence, I recently
interviewed a man named Imtiaz Shams, co-founder of Faith to Faithless, a
British-based organisation that supports people trying to break free from
repressive religions.
Shams himself was raised as a
Muslim, but Faith to Faithless welcomes defectors from all faiths. In Britain,
former Jehovah’s Witnesses and Orthodox Jews as well as ex-Muslims have turned
to it for help.
Many keep their apostasy
secret out of fear, because “coming out” as non-believers often has serious
consequences, not the least of which is estrangement from their families. The
male leaders of these religions understand only too well the power of family ties,
and how they can be exploited to deter prospective dissenters.
In One of Us, a Jewish mother is tormented by the prospect of being
cut off from her children because she has exercised her right to leave the
faith. In New Zealand, the Exclusive Brethren sect and the Gloriavale religious
community follow a similar practice of shunning anyone who leaves.
This is a particularly cruel
and effective tool of control. When someone has been immersed since birth in a
tightly knit community that deliberately isolates itself from wider society, it
takes an act of massive courage – or desperation – to walk away and start
afresh in an unfamiliar and intimidating world.
Shams described this experience
as like entering a black void. Islam so totally defined his existence that it
took him a long time to realise he could leave. And when he finally quit, he thought
he must have been first person ever to do it.
Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, the
conservative strands of Islam and nominally Christian sects such as Gloriavale
and the Exclusive Brethren all operate at the extreme end of the religious
control spectrum.
The men who run these
religions – and they are always men – impose their will by prescribing
elaborate and often arcane rules that govern the way their followers must live
their daily lives: the clothes they wear, who they should marry, the way they
style their hair, the food they eat (right down to the ingredients and how it’s
prepared) and, in the case of sects like Gloriavale, the names they go by.
There is little rationale for
these oppressive rules other than that they provide a means of control and
domination.
At the other end of the
spectrum there are religions which seem to avoid male-dominated hierarchical
structures and allow a reasonable amount of room for followers to act according
to their conscience. The Baha’i Faith strikes me as one example; Quakers
another.
In between these extremes
there are Churches that we generally think of as liberal, such as the Church of
England. But even here, there has been a marked reluctance by men to relinquish
power. In British Anglicanism, the male establishment fought a determined
rearguard action against the ordination of women.
Yet the Bible indicates that
Jesus Christ respected and valued women. Would he have approved of religions in
which women were expected to be subordinate to self-important men with a
fondness for dressing in peculiar costumes? I don’t believe so.
As for Catholicism, you can
only sigh. On the rare occasions when determined women such as New Zealand’s
own Suzanne Aubert have achieved positions of influence in the Catholic Church,
it has often been in the face of resistance and disapproval from the male
hierarchy.
For now at least, men
remain firmly in control of Catholicism. But they have made such a grotesque
and scandalous mess of things that you have to wonder how long it will be
before the long-suffering Catholic laity, male and female, demand that the
whole rotten structure be torn down and rebuilt.
2 comments:
Dear oh dear. Such determined wrongness A couple of facts. Any raising of the status of women comes from religion and more specifically the Christian religion Anything secularism has done has been built on the Christian foundation.
This comes from Jesus treatment of women and the presence of the Holy Spirit in women since the day of Pentecost.
But these charges against religion are completely wrong headed
I would say that secularism has built wrongly on the Christian foundation by asserting that men and women are the same when palpably they are not The male and female thing is part of the created order.
Masculinity is associated with leadership and competitiveness while feminity is associated with support, cooperation and agreeableness So men and women are different throughout history and throughout the bible.
The created order of male and female is a real thing and a good thing.
So Jesus loved women but he appointed 12 men in a row to leadership positions. The church is guided by the example of Jesus and not by radical egalitarian theories that originate in the writings of Karl Marx
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