Christianity – Feminism and Religion

Faithfully Dissident Daughters by Chelsea Kim Long

At 28 weeks pregnant with twins, on a gorgeous summer day, I looked in the mirror and marveled at the way my body had expanded to accommodate the two lives within. I was proud of my body, proud of myself. I put on a black, lacy bralette with matching underwear and threw a lightweight open front kaftan on top. I set my phone on a self timer and took some beautiful shots of myself. Sitting on the bed. Standing in front of a mirror. Next to the crib, looking down at my belly.

The lighting was perfect; I felt ethereal—like the definition of a glowing pregnant woman. Pregnancy is magical for about 2 seconds out of 9 months and I was basking in them. I thought about God as Mother and smiled at the way my body reflected the image of God. I uploaded a photo to Instagram. Positive comments started to come in right away.

A few minutes later, my husband Colby walked into the room asking, “Did you just post a picture of yourself wearing a bra? That’s really weird.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. He had policed my outfit choices before, and it wasn’t worth the conflict to bring it up. This time felt different. This time I was carrying a baby girl who would be a sister in a family with two brothers.

Congratulations to Comunidad: LGBTQ Catholic Ministry by Marie Cartier

Congratulations to Comunidad ministry for LGBTQ+ Catholics at Saint Mathews in Long Beach, CA, Saint Mathews Church – for forty years of service!!! I have been involved with them (and even on the board for over two terms) for two of those decades.

Cardinal Mahony presided at the Anniversary Mass. I cried while singing, with everyone, “And I will raise you up.” It is just so moving as a queer Catholic to be *recognized*. ☆○☆ To be seen. “Here I am , Lord.” To be seen.

And I am also an ordained priestess in the Temple of Isis, have practiced Buddhism and other spiritual traditions…but the faith tradition of my birth has a huge cultural pull. ♡ And was crucial to my work on my book Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars and Theology Pre-Stonewall. (Note: The book is coming out in 2027 as a completely revised 2^nd edition with a new subtitle: Baby, You Are My Religion: The Lesbian Bar as Sacred Space. )

PRESSLER’S PROGENY by Esther Nelson

David French, an Opinion Columnist for the New York Times, wrote an enlightening piece (05/14/2026) titled, “I Don’t Think You Can Even Call This Hypocrisy.” You can read the article here.

In his essay, French refers to a piece by Robert Downen, an investigative journalist, who wrote about Paul Pressler (d. 2024), an architect of the “so-called resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention,” the largest Protestant denomination in the USA. The MAGA movement, filled with loud and often uninformed, conservative Christians, is Pressler’s progeny.

From the early 1990s until 2006, the Southern Baptist Convention (as well as unaffiliated and independent Bible churches) experienced phenomenal growth. Many fundamentalist evangelicals viewed this growth as God’s blessing on the faithful. However, as journalist Downen dug around, he found “there was an overwhelming amount of evidence that Pressler was a morally corrupt and abusive man.” Not only was he a Confederate apologist, he purportedly sexually abused young men and boys and never lost his influence. Many Baptists believed that “…exposing Pressler’s misdeeds would ‘distort’ his public Christian credibility.”

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: JUSTICE AND PREJUDICE IN THE “PROPHETIC TRADITION”

This was originally posted July 14, 2014

Besides being advocates of social justice, the prophets of Israel were advocates of “exclusive monotheism,” exclusively “male monotheism,” “religious othering,” and “religious prejudice.”

Many progressive Jews and Christians find inspiration in prophets because of their insistence that their God cares about the poor and “the widow at the gate.” For progressive Christians, Jesus stands in the prophetic tradition, and the core of his message is “concern for the poor.” For progressive Jews the prophetic tradition is the root of their concern for human rights.

Those who locate their spirituality and concern for social justice in the prophets can point proudly to Martin Luther King and the many priests, ministers, and rabbis, as well as ordinary Christians and Jews who marched with him as exemplars of the prophetic tradition.

But the prophetic tradition also has a nasty underside.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Celibacy Is the Lynch-Pin of Male Dominance according to Matilda Joslyn Gage

This blog was originally posted on Dec 2, 2019

Matilda Joslyn Gage was an activist in the nineteenth century struggle for women’s rights equal to Susan B. Anthony, and a writer and theorist equal to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. That she is not remembered is due in large part to Susan B. Anthony’s efforts to write her out of history.

Matilda Joslyn Gage was also a scholar of women’s history unrivaled in her time. In Woman Church, and State, Gage argued that “the most grievous wrong ever inflicted upon women was in the Christian teaching that she was not created equal with man.” (page 1) From this it follows that feminists must never lose sight of the role Christian teachings have played and continue to play in the unequal treatment of women.

According to Gage, women’s position in church and state did not improve in the Christian era. To the contrary it declined! Gage proved this thesis in chapters titled: The Matriarchate, Celibacy, Canon Law, Marquette, Witchcraft, Wives, Polygamy, Woman and Work, and The Church of Today.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Love Divine, All Loves Excelling

This was first posted on 09/09/11 and then again on 5/23/22

A founding mother of the study of women and religion and feminist thealogy, Carol has been active in social justice, anti-war, feminist, anti-nuclear, and environmental causes for many years. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and the widely used anthologiesWomanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions.

In my last blog I wrote that the image of God as a dominating other who enforces his will through violence–found in the Bible and in the Christian tradition up to the present day–is one of the reasons I do not choose to work within the Christian tradition. To be fair, there is another image of God in Christian tradition that I continue to embrace. “Love divine, all loves excelling” is the opening line of a well-known hymn by Charles Wesley. Charles Hartshorne invoked these words and by implication the melody with which they are sung as expressing the feelings at the heart of the understanding of God that he wrote about in The Divine Relativity.

Love divine, all loves excelling also expresses my understanding of Goddess or as I sometimes write Goddess/God. Though I am no longer a Christian, but rather an earth-based Goddess feminist, I freely admit that I learned about the love of God while singing in Christian churches. Hartshorne wrote that he knew the love of God best through the love of his own mother, and I can say that this is true for me as well. My mother was not perfect, and she did not understand why I wanted to go to graduate school, my feminism, or my adult political views, but I never doubted her love or my grandmothers’ love for me. (I count myself lucky. I know others did not have this experience.) Like Hartshorne, I also learned about the love of God through the world that I always understood to be God’s body. Running in fields and hills, swimming in the sea, standing under redwood trees, and encountering peacocks in my grandmother’s garden, I felt connected to a power greater than myself. Continue reading “Legacy of Carol P. Christ: Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”

From the Archives: On My Invitation as a Jew to Participate in Advent and Christmas by Ivy Helman.

This was originally posted Dec. 8, 2019.

I attend Czech classes twice a week. This time of year the courses focus on Christmas. I’ve attended three different schools over the last five years, and all handle Christmas similarly. Even though the Czech Republic is only marginally Christian, for many Czechs being Czech and observing Christmas seem to go hand-in-hand. In fact, Czech customs around Christmas even figure into the citizenship exam.

In last Tuesday’s class, my teacher asked me how I celebrate Christmas here. She knows I’m Jewish. When I said that I don’t observe Christmas traditions in my home, she responded, “you don’t have to be a believer to do Advent-related and Christmasy things. Only 20% of Czechs are, and yet we all participate in Advent and Christmas.” It was part invitation, part assimilation request. However, the excited in-class discussion felt more like an attempt at conversion. Don’t you want to be a part of this amazingly joyful time? Continue reading “From the Archives: On My Invitation as a Jew to Participate in Advent and Christmas by Ivy Helman.”

Legacy of Carol Christ: Can You Kill the Spirit? What Happened to Female Imagery for God in Christian Worship? by Carol P. Christ

When I first began to think about female language and images for God I imagined that changing God-He to God-She and speaking of God as Mother some of the time would be a widespread practice in churches and synagogues by now. I was more worried about whether or not images of God as a dominating Other would remain intact. Would God-She be imaged as a Queen or a Woman of War who at Her whim or will could wreak havoc on Her own people?

Forty years later, very little progress has been made on the question of female imagery for God. I suspect that most people in the pews today have never even had to confront prayers to Sophia, God the Mother, or God-She. Most people consider the issue of female language in the churches to have been resolved with inclusive language liturgies and translations of the Bible that use gender neutral rather than female inclusive language.

In her new book, Women, Ritual, and Power: Placing Female Imagery of God in Christian Worship, Elizabeth Ursic states that one of the reasons that the issue of female language seems less pressing than it once did is because those for whom the issue was important have for the most part left the church. But the question is why.

THERE’S ONLY LOVE by Esther Nelson

Charlie Kirk embodied characteristics lauded by people I remember from my fundamentalist, Christian upbringing. Confident “believer” who knew the absolute “truth,” a willingness to proselytize (or better known in fundamentalist circles as spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ), and a pugnacious personality essential to fight Satan and his minions in this “ungodly” world.

In a New York Times article titled “We Need to Think Straight about God and Politics” (9/25/25), David Brooks writes: “As people eulogized Kirk, it was rarely clear if they were talking about the man who was trying to evangelize for Jesus or the one trying to elect Republicans.” A spokesperson at Turning Point USA said, “He [Kirk] confronted evil and proclaimed the truth and called us to repent and be saved.” Brooks asks, “Is that what Kirk was doing when arguing with college kids about tariffs?”

I want to focus here on some of the brilliantly choreographed, yet deceptively cruel imagery present at Kirk’s memorial service, showing how the MAGA movement uses a religious group’s theology to foment hatred—with the goal of gaining/retaining political power.

FAMISHED—ON FOOD, SEX, AND GROWING UP AS A GOOD GIRL by Anna Rollins: Book Review by Esther Nelson, part 2

Part 1 was posted yesterday.

MARRIAGE

“He looked at me without judgment. With him, I didn’t feel the need to perform.” Both her future husband (first year medical resident) and she (now studying applied linguistics) disliked fundamentalism’s legalism, but they were still committed to Christianity. Both were “devoted to [sexual] abstinence.” Sex did not even happen on their wedding night, but when it did, it hurt. For years, the pain continued. Vaginismus. “I didn’t know there was a name for it. I didn’t know that…it was twice as common for those who had grown up in religiously conservative households.” It took years to get through the pain. “It’s not until we can believe that our bodies are inherently good and worthy of pleasure and joy that we can begin to heal.”

A new pastor arrived at Rollins’ church armed with Christian nationalist ideas and fervor. It didn’t set right with her. She was moving toward progressive positions beginning with “my body, my choice.” She adds, “If there’s anything someone who’s struggled with an eating disorder understands, it’s the concept of bodily autonomy.” She began to research the Reformers beginning with Martin Luther who said this about women: “If women become tired, even die, it does not matter. Let them die in childbirth. That’s what they are there for.” Rollins’ husband pushes back, though, quoting Scripture—“there is no male or female…we are all unified in Christ.” Why then, Rollins wonders, does sexism run rampant in the church?