Inspirational Articles

Featured Articles

What Women Deserve
Christianity and Women
By Dr. Monte Wilson

One of the world’s most respected sociologists of religion, Rodney Stark (not a Christian), had this to say about Christian women in the first century.

"Christian women had tremendous advantages compared to the woman next door, who was like them in every way except that she was a pagan. First, when did you get married? Most pagan girls were married at 11, before the age of puberty, and they had nothing to say about it, and they got married to some 35-year old guy. Christian women had plenty of say in the matter and tended to marry around 18."

"Abortion was a huge killer of women in this period, but Christian women were spared that. And infanticideā€”pagans killed little girls left and right. We’ve unearthed sewers clogged with the bones of newborn girls. But Christians prohibited this. Consequently, the sex ratio changed and Christians didn’t have the enormous shortage of women that plagued the rest of the empire." (Interview in Touchstone Magazine, January-February 2000, pp. 44-47.)

And Christianity’s liberation of women continued century after century. Did you know, for example, that battered, abused and abandoned women fled from across Europe to Calvin’s Geneva?

On The Other Hand

None of this is to say, however, that their brothers have always and everywhere treated Christian women with the respect and dignity due them. Sadly, if Charlotte Bronte were a member of a fundamentalist or hardcore conservative church today, the odds are that she just may have to revert to a pseudonym.

Part of this, I think, is due to the overreaction of such Christians and churches to the radically feminist message that there are absolutely no differences between the sexes. Seeing the devastation this brought to the lives and families of women and men who fell for this weirdness, these Christians reacted in the extreme. Rather than simply holding to the biblical message regarding women, these well-meaning people took the position that if the Feminists are For It, then they were Against It. For example, when the feminist were asserting that women could and should enter the market place and compete on an equal footing with men, the fundamentalists and conservatives, with no biblical warrant for their position, said, No Way. This Is Evil. Women Must Stay Home.

It is appalling to see Christian men treat women as lower class citizens whose existence is defined solely in terms of marriage and family, denying that along with their brothers women too “must have action.” And what do you say about churches who relegate women to a handful of places where they can serve (nursery, kitchen, music and floral arrangements) other than, What Utter Nonsense?!?

Do women not have callings, brains, wisdom, talents, gifts, visions, dreams, and aspirations? Are they only to act as cheerleaders for the men in their lives? Are they not permitted independent thought or are they merely a conduit for the thoughts of their dads, brothers, or husbands? Can they differ with their brothers without being told they are in rebellion?

By the way, the next time you hear some husband refer to his spouse as The Wife or The Little Lady what you are more than likely hearing and seeing is a man who treats his wife as an object for his own personal use. Go ahead: smack him in the back of the head and tell him that slavery was outlawed years ago.

No human should ever be treated as an object: it is demeaning, undignified and a sin against a fellow creation of God.

Or so I believe.