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Two days in West Texas means not much keeping up with the blogs and news. (Though I have been talking lots of campaign stuff with the sole other Democrat in my family, my first cousin. He and his girlfriend have been working for the Clinton campaign around the country, so we had some interesting discussions. But not so much news-driven.) Which means more time to ponder the bigger themes in life. I found this story interesting--organized religion is in the decline in Canada, and some are laying the responsibility at the door of feminism.
I've written plenty before about how my feminism and atheism are closely entwined. Realizing that religion is used as a cheap excuse to oppress women leads to questioning the value of religion leads to realizing that the god stuff is a big fairy tale that has stayed alive because it's convenient for the powers that be to have it. Interestingly, though, this has little to do with women going through the big questions, and everything to do with the smaller details of what it takes to keep organized religion alive.
Women -- the traditional mainstays of institutional religion -- in huge numbers abruptly rejected the church's patriarchal exemplar of them as chaste, submissive "angels in the house" with all of the social and moral responsibility for community and family but none of the authority.
Unable to find acceptable religious role models or religious ideals that were not painful or oppressive, they reconstructed their identities as secular and sexual beings.
As they progressed into university graduate and professional schools and entered the work force, their horizons broadened and they discovered ways of serving that were more valuable than doing dishes and running church picnics.
One of the conundrums of fighting for reproductive justice is that so many women are anti-choice. Now, anyone who looks into the issues realizes that female misogyny is nothing to sneeze at--there's a real "hate the bitches so no one calls me a bitch" thing going on that has a lot of power--but just on its surface it makes no sense that women are anti-choice in the same numbers men are. Until you look at the churches. Women are the mainstay of churches, the support system, and they have to buy into the B.S. in order to run the picnics and the bake sales and the anti-choice protests. But what happens when women have other options for fulfillment other than contributing unpaid, underthanked labor to religious organizations? They apparently start dropping out and those religions lose their power.
It's an interesting example of how ideology is intertwined with systems to create oppression.
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