“Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.” 1 Corinthians 14:32 KJV
When I was nine years old I had just finished my First Holy Communion and was very into the idea of belonging to the Catholic Church. Every Sunday our family had dinner sitting around my grandmother’s wooden table which now sits in my own dining room. It is not a large table and we all had to squish but the food was always delicious and the laughter was always genuine. On this Sunday I was helping my grandmother roll out bread for that evening’s dinner and we chatted away about a little of everything. It was in my childhood naivete I told my grandmother that I was going to grow up to be a priest. She smiled at me and said “Honey you have to be a nun. Girls can’t be priests.” I asked her why and I became very annoyed at this. In the end my grandmother, probably from her own frustration at the rule than anything else, told me to ask my teacher at school which ended up getting me detention. It was around this time that I began to put together in my head that gender really was an issue in the church. Yes, my future breasts somehow meant more to the church than a man’s genitals.
On March 2, 2016, the Pew Research Center released their findings on women’s leadership in the religious community. They took several religious organizations and looked at how many women have held leadership positions. It is no surprise that their 
findings were that women are vastly under represented in these areas. They took a view at the Amercian Baptist Churches USA, Episcopal Church, Evangelical Luthern Church in America, Union for Reform Judaism, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Presbyterian Church (U.s.A.), Unitarian Universalist Association, United Church of Christ, and United Methodist Church.
They found that out of all these churches, Currently the American Baptist Churches USA and Evangelical Luthern Church in America are the only groups with women in their top leadership positions. The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism does not directly forbid women from holding their top leadership position but they have never had a woman as its CEO. It is important to also remember that some of the largest denomiations in the United States, including the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Southern Baptist Convention, do not allow women to hold leadership positions or to be ordained.
There have been concerted efforts to get these congregations to lift their ban on women holding these positions. The most noted is the push for the Roman Catholic church to revoke the ban on women being ordained. However, there are some churches that are not so convinced this is a good idea. “While roughly six-in-ten American Catholics (59%) in a 2015 Pew Research Center survey said they support ordaining women in their church, 87% of Mormons (including 90% of Mormon women) in a 2011 Pew Research Center survey said they do not support allowing women to enter the LDS priesthood.”(Source)
Other religions are also experiencing a rise in the call fore women to hold more of a leadership position within the religion. Islam is not immune to this. It is technically permissable for a woman to be an authority and leader however they cannot be prayer leader or supreme commander of the armed forces. Many Muslim scholars use the statement found within the Qu’ran to justify the prohibition of women in leadership positions.
A people will not succeed who are commanded by a woman. Source: Sahih Bukhari 4163, Grade: Sahih
Many scholars have used this very general statement to mean that women cannot hold any public position of authority. This was especially true when it came to commanding 
the armed forces. In this culture they believe that few women would have the qualifications to command a military and yet we see all over the planet today women not only commanding militaries but succeeding quite nicely. It is just another reminder that religion, in many respects, remains antiquated and out of touch with modern society.
The misogynistic view of religion does seem to be quite a contemporary view of women’s roles as religious leaders. Often these women were called many names including priestess, shaman, medicine woman, diviner, spirit-medium, oracle, sibyl and wisewoman. Women, due in large part to their ability to create life, were often seen as more closely attached to the spirit world than men. This afforded them an equal and sometimes even superior position in ancient cultures. “Holy women are more visible historically, and more likely to be accorded honor and power in their own right than most women in patriarchal societies. Their authority tends to transcend division of society into religious and political spheres. We can observe this pattern over large ranges of time and place, and in very different kinds of societies, whether they are early Sumerian priestesses or female shamans acting as village chieftains in 19th century Siberia.” (Source)
“Barring women from ritual leadership and religious authority has been a key focus in the drive to undermine female power. Scriptures of the”major” religions often ban priestesses and female religious authority, either explicitly or through stories demonizing their power. Over centuries, male authorities carefully selected and edited the religious canon so as to erase traditions of female leadership (such as the Gnostic scriptures naming Mary Magdalene as the foremost Christian disciple). They also expunged female images of the Divine. This happened with an early saying of Muhammad that embraced the three great goddesses of Arabia as “daughters of Allah.” The original version of this hadith was denounced as “the Satanic verses,” and was revised in the written Quran.” (Source)
It is the view of women within religion and the lack of strong female leadership that often leads to an overall submissiveness of women within their daily lives and within their families. A mother is often called the center of their family and we often refer to our celestial home as Mother Earth. Mother is home. Mother is comfort. She is the creator of life and the firm hand of stability. The time has come for the Abrahamic religions to realize that they have cut themselves off at the foot in order to be patriarchal. It’s only through the empowerment of women by putting them in leadership positions that religion will become far more accepted in today’s world. Religion, through its very dogma, refuses to change as times move forward and this will be their death. The next and last post in The Dirty F Word series will be on how this submissiveness is further entrenched in the females minds when it comes to child bearing.
Find more information on the history of female religious leadership here.
Rantings of the Infidel Queen 