Christianity, Reformation to Modern

views updated

Christianity, Reformation to Modern

Christianity originated in Palestine in the Middle East and spread within the first century east as far as Persia, into Egypt and North Africa, and across the northern Mediterranean to Spain. During the next three centuries Christianity moved into northern Europe to Britain and Ireland, as well as eastward as far as China. Christianity also progressed north into Central Europe and became the primary religion of the Slavic and Russian peoples. The rise of Islam in the seventh century caused the gradual retreat of Christianity into small enclaves in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa, when many Christians became Muslims. In India and the Far East, Hindu and Buddhist societies limited the spread of Christianity.

The new wave of European expansion and colonization of the world in the sixteenth century brought Christianity, mostly Roman Catholic, to Latin America. Protestants from Britain and Western Europe came to North America, along with Catholic and Orthodox groups from Ireland and southern and eastern Europe. Missionary work, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, spread Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa beginning in the nineteenth century. In the early-twenty-first century there are 2.38 billion Christians throughout the world, a third of the people on earth. The 569 million Christians in Europe are often more nominal than practicing. In Latin America, the 500 million Christians are mostly Roman Catholic, but many practice a folk Catholicism based on pilgrimages and devotion to saints. Evangelical Protestantism is growing in that region. Christianity is expanding fastest in Africa with 377 million adherents in Roman Catholic, Protestant, and indigenous churches. In Asia, there are 322 million Christians but they constitute less than 10 percent of the population. Only the Philippines, colonized by Spain, has a Christian majority. North America has 262.7 million Christians of diverse denominations, 87 percent of the population.

CHRISTIANITY AND SEX AND GENDER ISSUES IN PATRIARCHAL SOCIETIES

Christianity was born into patriarchal societies, both Jewish and Greco-Roman, in which a woman was seen as wife and mother, preferably one who produced male children, but was excluded from political leadership and participation in higher culture. Christianity's main modification of this tradition was the adoption of celibacy as the ideal Christian lifestyle for men and women. Christians were urged to eschew marriage and reproduction to prepare themselves for heaven where they would "neither marry or be given in marriage" (Luke 20:35). This preference for the celibate life, in which men lived in male communities and women in female communities, had an ambivalent effect on the image and aspirations of women. For many celibate women, it meant liberation from enforced patriarchal marriage and serial pregnancies. Female communities also offered the possibility of travel (pilgrimage), the opportunity to study religious texts, and the ability to live a life of religious self-transformation.

Male elites soon dominated the Christian hierarchy, even though women preached and held leadership positions in the in the earliest churches. Celibacy was joined to priesthood for men, while women were excluded from ordained ministry. Male priests and monks looked at all women as dangerously sexual, to be strictly confined to the cloister, for nuns, or to the home. Influential bishops and theologians, such as St. Augustine (354–430), believed that celibacy was the ideal Christian life for men and women. Sex was allowed only within marriage and only for the purpose of reproduction. Any sex for pleasure, even within marriage, was sinful and equivalent to fornication.

Augustine believed that women were created by God to be under male dominion. Women had subverted that dominion in the Garden of Eden by tempting the male to disobey God. Women were the cause of the fall of humanity and entrance of sin into the world. Thus women should be punished by the coercive imposition of male rule in the family and in the church, and should interiorize this subjugation. Only after death would the hierarchy of male over female disappear, and sex roles would be no more. These became the dominant views of the Catholic Church regarding woman and sexuality through the Middle Ages; they continue into the early twenty-first century among traditionalist Christians.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE REFORMATION

These views on women, gender roles, and sexuality were not greatly changed in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. The main contribution of the Reformation was the abolition of celibacy for both men and women. But the rejection of women's preaching and ordination continued. Married men could now be ordained, but women lost their roles as abbesses, scholars, and teachers within female monastic communities. Protestants continued to believe that women were dangerous temptresses who were responsible for the fall of humanity and must be strictly controlled. Sex was primarily for reproduction, and birth control was not allowed, although there came to be more acceptance of sexual pleasure in marriage. Some Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries allowed the possibility of divorce for limited reasons, such as desertion and adultery (but not for wife beating).

The late medieval and Reformation periods also saw the outbreak of witch-hunting, in which hundreds of thousands were killed, mostly women. The persecution of women as witches was fueled by misogynist views of women as irrational, sexually insatiable, and hence prone to consort with the Devil.

In seventeenth century England, Quakers (the Society of Friends) believed that all humans were created equal in the beginning and that Jesus restored this equality. Women were the first witnesses to Jesus' resurrection and were commissioned to announce this good news to the male disciples. Thus only by accepting women's preaching and missionary roles do men also receive the good news. Quakers made women public friends or missionaries, as well as leaders in their own women's meetings.

These Quaker views of women's equality became more widespread in nineteenth-century United States. Several early Christian feminists were Quakers, including Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony. These Quaker feminists believed that women had been created by God to be man's equal partner, not his subordinate, and that sin and evil came about, not through female temptation, but through men seizing power over others to create systems of unjust domination, such as sexism and slavery. Church and society should be reformed to give women equal rights in society. This included higher education, entrance into professions, property rights, the vote, and legal status as equal citizens. These demands were carried forward by the women's movement into the twentieth century.

CHRISTIAN VIEWS INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Such views of women's equality, their rights to education, professions, and the vote also spread in Britain, across Europe and into Latin America, Asia, and Africa during the twentieth century. Secular liberalism, rather than progressive Christianity, became the primary vehicle for spreading ideas of women's rights. Many churches resisted equality for woman as contrary to church teaching. Modernization was identified with worldliness and an erosion of traditional religious values. Conservative Christians stereotyped feminism as secular and anti-God.

The nineteenth century was a century of greatly expanded missionary work for Protestant and Catholic churches. Missionaries were sent in large numbers to Africa and Asia to convert pagans to Christianity, while Protestants went to Latin America and the Philippines to make Catholics into Protestants. Catholic women mis-sionaries were mostly members of religious orders. Protestants also used women as missionaries, most often as missionary wives, but also in their own right.

European and North American women missionaries were seen as necessary to reach other women since many Asian and African cultures did not allow men access to local women. The work of conversion, education, and health initiatives for women had to be carried out by female missionaries. European and North American women missionaries played an ambivalent role in relation to women converts in many Asian and African societies. They were often bearers of Victorian ideas of the role of women. They sought to domesticate women as wives and housekeepers, and restrict the roles that women sometimes played in other societies as farmers, artisans, and merchants. Yet women missionaries also founded hospitals and schools for girls, from primary to college levels. Many Asian and African women converts got their first opportunities for education and entrance into professions in teaching and health care through these missionary-founded schools and hospitals.

Feminist theology represents the major effort within Christianity to reinterpret its traditions to overcome teachings that promote subordination and misogyny. Quaker feminists, such as Sarah Grimké and Lucretia Mott in the nineteenth century, represent a first wave of feminist theology. Such egalitarian views of Christianity were silenced in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, but the late 1960s saw a new birth of feminist theologies.

In the early-twenty-first century, feminist theologies spread to diverse groups within North American, African American, Hispanic, and Asian Christian groups, and also to Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. These feminist theologies seek to contextualize their ideas in their distinct cultural and historical contexts, but all believe that women are equal to men in the image of God and that God can be imaged as a female as well as a male. They suggest the true message of Christianity is the liberation of women, and all people, from systems and ideologies of oppression.

Feminist theology has gone hand in hand with the spreading of women's ordination. A few women were ordained in the nineteenth century in liberal denominations, such as the Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Universalists. In the late 1950s to 1970s there was a new surge of women's ordination among Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Anglicans in the United States and Europe. In the early-twenty-first century most Protestants ordain women, except for very conservative groups, such as Missouri Synod Lutherans and some Southern Baptists. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians continue to reject women's ordination, although the issue is being debated in both churches.

Reproductive rights are a contentious issue in most Christian churches throughout the world. Birth control and abortion have been rejected by Christianity since its inception. In the 1950s liberal Protestants gradually accepted the use of artificial contraception. In the 1970s some liberal Protestants allowed the possibility of abortion in the early months of gestation in conflict situations where women would experience hardship, economic, psychological, or physical in bearing a child. The Roman Catholic hierarchy continues to strongly reject both abortion and birth control (although the rhythm method of natural family planning is allowed).

Abortion has become a central issue in the culture wars in the United States and many other countries, with traditionalist Christians rejecting abortion and some also forbidding artificial contraception, while liberals seek to defend legal access to these rights. Many feminists, secular and religious, see the main issue not as a general valuation of life, but as the desire to control women's sexuality and women's lives. Because there is little cultural or legal interest in supporting lives of children after birth, any extreme emphasis on the absolute value to life in the early stages of insemination, even stem cells, seems largely a question of power and control.

Christianity is not solely misogynist, only teaching women's inferiority and subordination; nor is it primarily liberating to women. Rather, like most religions, it contains a mixture of traditions that can be interpreted in either way. This dichotomy leads to deep conflicts over the definition of women's sexuality and social roles and divides Christians, often in the same churches.

see also Catholicism.