Divine Courage
When we're brave enough to embrace the Divine Feminine, we heal ourselves and society
“Until women can visualize the sacred female they cannot be whole and society cannot be whole.” - Elinor Gadon
It’s no coincidence that men eager to subjugate and denigrate women justify their abusive and sexist behavior by citing religious beliefs. Or that they use masculine terms like “God,” “Father,” “Lord,” and “King” to refer to the Divine, along with exclusively male pronouns.
Even if you’ve never set foot in a church or been taught that women must submit to men, you’ve almost certainly absorbed misogynist messages from a patriarchal culture. Messages about how to be a “good” daughter, wife, and mother. Messages about which behaviors and careers are acceptable for women and which ones aren’t. Messages about why men are better leaders and women are better caregivers. Messages that there are only two genders and their distinct roles are by God’s design.
I used to think that I had overcome that religious and cultural programming. After all, I was a female pastor. I chose my engagement ring and kept my maiden name when I married. My dad walked me down the aisle but did not “give me away,” nor did my husband Steve ask him for permission to marry me. Steve and I never had children. We were (and are!) LGBTQ+ allies.
It would be decades later before I fully comprehended how much of patriarchal culture I had unconsciously accepted.
Until recently, my primary mental image of the Divine was still of a male. I always prayed to “God” or “Lord.” When someone mentioned meeting with their doctor or lawyer, I asked, “What did he say?” When I was asked, “When are you going to start a family?” I didn’t say, “We are a family,” or “We’ve decided not to have children.” Instead, I said something like, “Not for a few more years.”
I believed the doctrine of “original sin,” with Eve as the temptress who convinced Adam to eat the forbidden fruit. I accepted that as a female pastor I was expected to help in the kitchen at church events, but my male colleagues were not.
My Wake-Up Call
My awakening to the harmful consequences of religious teachings that God is exclusively male was gradual. At first, I thought the sole cause of things like sexual assaults, harassment, and discrimination was the pathological behavior of individual perpetrators. It wasn’t until the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements, civil lawsuits, and criminal investigations revealed the lengths to which some religious denominations had gone to cover up sexual abuse that I began to make the connection between bad theology and bad behavior.
I had previously been aware of the damage done by conservative Christian “purity culture.” I knew women who had been shamed for getting pregnant while unmarried or blamed for “tempting” or “leading on” a male who had sexually assaulted them.
However, I naïvely believed that “progressive” Christian denominations treated people of all genders as equally beloved and valued members created in God’s image. To be fair, most genuinely try to do that. But as long as the deity that is worshipped is portrayed as male (and the person that is blamed for humanity’s sin is female), the implicit assumption is that women are inferior to men. And the pay discrepancy between male and female pastors and higher percentage of male pastors who are senior pastors and/or serve larger congregations reflect that assumption.
Misogyny Masked as Morality
Girls and women in many U.S. states have lost the legal right to terminate an unwanted or unsafe pregnancy. Laws vary from state to state, but one state (Tennessee) is considering a bill that would classify abortion as “fetal homicide,” a crime for which a woman could be sentenced to death. The president of the Southern Baptist Convention has praised that bill.
I live in Texas, where at least two pregnant women have died because doctors refused to provide emergency medical care until the fetal heartbeat had stopped.
Some Christians are arguing that women should not be allowed to vote, including at least one woman. In a 2023 podcast, host Alan Jacoby called his wife the “biggest misogynist this side of the Mississippi” and added that she “literally thinks women should not vote.”
The “tradwife” movement is another example of women who have internalized patriarchal views and advocate submission. According to one research study,
Taking up a “traditional” life is presented as freedom by tradwives, even when their content extols the importance of “serving” a husband or children …. ‘Such claims paint submission to some male force, whether it be a boss or a husband, as inevitable,’ said [researcher Sara] Reinis. While tradwives ask that domestic labor be recognized as labor, many also describe it as a divine calling, a duty that women are destined to perform, paid or not, and blame feminism for “degrading motherhood,” the researchers note.
These oft-quoted Bible verses (Ephesians 5: 22-24) reinforce the idea that married women should do whatever their husbands tell them to, and explicitly compare the husband to Christ:
Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
The verse immediately following these is quoted far less often. It tells husbands how they should treat their wives: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”
Traditional wedding vows for grooms included a promise to “love, cherish, and worship” their wives; brides vowed to “love, cherish, and obey their husbands.
That obedience included sexual submission; rape laws in England and the United States had exceptions for marital rape. The first U.S. state to make marital rape a crime was South Dakota in 1975, and it was not until 1993 that all 50 states had changed their laws. Some other countries still do not recognize marital rape as a crime.
How The Divine Feminine Was Suppressed
The Bible does include some Divine Feminine images. A few examples:
Both male and female are said to be created in God’s image (Genesis 1:27)
In the book of Proverbs, Divine Wisdom is personified as a woman
God is “the Rock that bore you; the God who gave you birth” (Deuteronomy 32:18)
Jesus compares himself to a mother hen (Matthew 23:37 and Luke 13:34)
Jesus also is formed in and born from a female body. His first post-resurrection appearance is to a woman, Mary Magdalene, and he gives her a message to share with the male disciples. (John 20:11-17) Clearly, Jesus had no problem with women preaching to men!
So how did we end up with an exclusively male God who supposedly does not want women to preach? One reason may be that the male religious leaders who chose the books they deemed worthy of inclusion in the Bible left out gospels written by or featuring women in leadership roles. Another could be that Pope Gregory I discredited Mary Magdalene in 591 by claiming that she was a prostitute, a mischaracterization that was not officially corrected until 1969 and that many people continue to believe.
Add in the ways that Christianity has been combined with civil governments led by powerful men eager to stay in power and justify their actions as God’s will, and it’s not hard to understand why the Divine Feminine has been denied or diminished.
How To Reclaim The Divine Feminine
Meggan Watterson’s books, especially Mary Magdalene Revealed: The First Apostle, Her Feminist Gospel, and The Christianity We Haven’t Tried Yet and The Girl Who Baptized Herself: How a Lost Scripture About a Saint Named Thecla Reveals the Power of Knowing Our Worth are a great place to start learning more about the Divine Feminine, how we can recover and embrace it, and why we need to.
A New New Testament: A Bible for the Twenty-First Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts, edited by Hal Taussig, provides a wealth of information about early Christian communities that celebrated the Divine Wisdom within each person and refused to adopt the dominant culture’s patriarchal model. These “new” texts are as ancient as those in the original New Testament, but few people have heard about, much less read, them.
As the book’s Amazon listing explains:
Reading the traditional scriptures alongside these new texts—the Gospel of Luke with the Gospel of Mary, Paul’s letters with The Letter of Peter to Philip, The Revelation to John with The Secret Revelation to John—offers the exciting possibility of understanding both the new and the old better.
We need to do more than read these texts, however. We need to apply the wisdom they contain and rediscover the Divine Feminine within each of us (not just females; everyone has both Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine aspects). We need to allow that Divine Feminine energy to take its rightful place alongside the Divine Masculine and value both equally.
How Embracing the Divine Feminine Can Heal Us And Society
It’s not hard to see how individual women could benefit from seeing their bodies as sacred, trusting their intuition as Divine Wisdom, and understanding their worth as equal to men’s. My healing journey has been greatly enhanced by exploring the Divine Feminine, finding it within me, and being open to its guidance.
But the effects of rediscovering and fully embracing the Divine Feminine go far beyond helping individual women feel better about themselves, as important as that is.
As Sue Monk Kidd notes in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey From Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine, the Divine Feminine is “a consciousness of resacralized nature, one in which the earth is alive and divine. It is a consciousness of liberation, thrusting a woman into the struggle for value, dignity, and power for every human.”
Currently, there is an intense power struggle between those who worship an exclusively masculine God and want a church and government run exclusively by powerful white men and those who envision a future in which the wellbeing of all people and the planet matters more than our selfish desires for more wealth or influence.
When we understand that we are all one, all created in the image of, and all filled with the love and wisdom of both the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine, we will co-create a world in which we can all thrive.
This post is in honor of International Women’s Day. Thanks to Claire Venus ✨ Lauren Barber Laura Durban Laurita Gorman Lyndsay Kaldor and all who are, in Claire’s words, “flooding the ether with your beautiful words and creative thoughts and raising the vibration of visibility and women’s voices together.”
P.S. I’m creating a microcosm of that kind of world in my private community for paid subscribers. Our next live Zoom Gathering is tomorrow - Sunday, March 8 - at 1 PM Central Daylight Time (CDT - we “spring forward” an hour into Daylight Savings Time tomorrow). Upgrade to paid if you’d like to experience genuine community and talk about things that matter. Paid subscribers get the Zoom link via email; it’s also behind the paywall below.