Feminism and Religion: Tyranny and Fallacy

Religion can be a tool for achieving the type of empowerment Western feminists desire so badly, and it can be a weapon for their subordination. It exists as both. Sometimes feminist discourse gets it wrong.

Religion and women have a complicated and nuanced history, yet this is not the narrative one might hear from a liberal feminist. From their purview, religion is and has always been a dangerous weapon used by patriarchy to keep women below men on the hierarchy of humanity. And perhaps, in some very specific contexts, they’re right. But liberal (white secular) feminism does not make space for women who have and do find religion to be empowering. Women who identify with religion; who name it as a force of good rather than evil. Liberal feminists would rather universalize their ideas of self, autonomy, and freedom, all narrowly defined, and impose those ideas on female-identified people outside of the Western world. Ironically, in doing this, they reinforce the heteropatriarchy by projecting rather than asking those people outside of the secular West to define those terms for themselves. Women are not a monolith. Religion is not a monolith. Religion can be oppressive and empowering all at once. But it’s not up to a very culturally specific group of women to decide whether religion is empowering or disempowering for all the women who have ever existed and ever will exist throughout history; unfortunately, they have. The result has been generations of “feminists” who believe wholeheartedly in the idea that religion is entirely oppressive without exception; most of these feminists are white.

The loudest voices in recent feminist history are white women. Often white women with great socioeconomic privilege who identify as (or can be labeled as) liberal feminists. This is neither accidental nor inconsequential. Liberal, white, (and mostly secular) feminists are digestible. They challenge not the efficacy of structures that exist in our society, but merely the way in which women engage with them. Add women here, and stir; oppression will solve itself. A form of feminism that is acceptable to men, in ways that intersectional, postcolonial, transnational feminism is not. So, it’s no surprise really that liberal feminists align themselves ideologically with masculine, enlightenment ideas of secularity that champion reason over religion.

Joan Scott articulates the problem with this alignment poignantly in her first chapter of Sex and Secularism by providing a genealogical history of the word secularism and how it has evolved in different historical contexts. She describes how the notion that religion belongs in the private sphere is a modern conceptualization that evolved alongside the rise of secularism, which has actually enabled the reification of the gender binary. Troublingly, while modern secularism places blame for sexism on religion, secularism itself actually relies heavily on the gender binary that it has created. Scotts demonstrates that the devalorization of religion in the contemporary Western imagination is accompanied by the feminization of religion; both are a product of secularism rather than inherent qualities of every religion that’s ever existed.

The reality is that many women in the West today want to (and are told to) believe that religion as a monolith is disempowering and tyrannical for women. This means that resistance to religious influence is seen as equivalent to resisting heteropatriarchy, which is a fallacy. And absurdly the very force that put that idea in their heads is secularism: a defining ideology of the heteropatriarchy. Scott illustrates that secularism has trained the West to understand women and their relationship with religion rather than Western women defining this relationship for themselves. Again, this means that aversion to religion, particularly Islam (which is viewed as the most oppressive of them all because of the way it contradicts liberal feminism) is a product of women’s oppression rather than a demonstration of their resistance against it.

Scott gives secular feminism–which regularly utilizes a deficit model when it views women outside of white, Western circles and automatically concludes that identification with religion is a form of disempowerment–a profound reality check:

“Women’s subordination in postcolonial nations is regularly attributed to unchanging, ‘traditional’ religious practice–these days Islam is the primary culprit…The ‘us’ versus ‘them’ contrast provides evidence for the triumph of Western freedom over the ever lagging ‘Orient.’ But in the twenty-first century, as in the nineteenth, the identification of women with/as religion is not the product of timeless religious teaching; it is, rather, an effect of the way the discourse of secularism has organized our vision of the world” (Scott 59).

She names a problem: that women have been manipulated by secularism into believing that religion disempowers them. From her analysis, it’s possible to conclude that it’s actually secularism that is generating new forms of oppression for female-identified individuals in the West.

Saba Mahmood takes Scott's work a step further by inviting us to challenge the narrow feminist conceptualizations of agency that are defined as active, visible resistance to subordination and understood to be universal across time and place. “What may appear to be a case of deplorable passivity and docility from a progressivist point of view, may actually be a form of agency–but one that can be understood only from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment” (Mahmood 15). A white upper-class woman in New York can’t decide what resistance to oppression and subordination looks like for her and then universalize it for all women for all of history. This is a colonialist impulse in my interpretation. “Agency cannot be fixed in advance…We cannot treat as natural and imitable only those desires that ensure the emergence of feminist politics” (Mahmood 14-15). Yet in an effort to escape from and resist the universalization of male desires, notions of freedom, security, and agency, liberal (white secular) feminists have actually just replicated them in a new and different format with a feminist stamp on it. Anything that doesn’t look like their idea of resistance is oppression. One of the largest examples of this is white liberal feminists’ rejection of women who choose to wear hijab. They cannot comprehend that Muslim women choosing to veil are being influenced from the inside out, rather than the outside in, because in the Western world empowerment is often defined as the freedom to undress. Liberal feminists fail to realize that “what one wants” is socially constructed. I see their analysis of veiling as evidence of the pervasiveness of the gender binary and the way that it works to disempower and rob women of their own agency, even in supposedly “empowered” contexts.

What it really comes down to is this: religion can be a tool for achieving the type of empowerment Western feminists desire so badly, and it can be a weapon for their subordination. It exists as both. No one understands this better than non-Western women, who have one foot planted firmly outside of Western imagination, and one foot planted inside the West (through social media or geographic location). The women at the Peace Grove Institute, the only all Girls' School in Lumbini, Nepal, are an incredible example of this. If not for Buddhism and Buddhism principles, they would not be receiving an education. And if not for religion, they would not have access to (liberal) feminist discourse. Prior to its founding,

“Metteyya and Guruma Bodhi Sakyadhita…became concerned that certain academically talented and promising girls attending his schools were not able to finish their education once betrothed. These were girls who, if educated, could make a difference in their community. The nunnery solves this problem for a few fortunate local girls (and it has a long wait list) by providing a semi-monastic, socially safe space under the protection of which the girls can continue to pursue education” (Langenberg 16).

In this context, religion is a weapon of empowerment. And it’s even given its students the capacity to bring some principles of Western feminism into their world and apply them to their lived experience. It’s a place that illustrates the complementary nature of women’s empowerment and religion. The two do not have to exist in isolation, they are not mutually exclusive. The world will not transcend into darkness if liberal feminists acknowledge that religion affects female-identified individuals differently across time, place, and culture. The Peace Grove institute is just one small example of this.

It’s notable here to acknowledge that I haven’t specifically brought attention to race in an explicit way in this essay. But race is ever-present, from the white women critiquing Muslims of color to the Nepalese women of color currently living at Peace Grove. I could write a hundred more pages on the way Black women in America found empowerment through the bible band movement, on figures like Alice Walker and bell hooks. This is to say that there is entirely more to the story than I’ve been able to explore here. But I’ll leave you with this: it is perhaps more apt to say that white women, liberal feminists, secularly-identified activists do not have a problem with religion. They have a problem with the way that Christianity has been infused with patriarchy in such a way that it disempowers a small and specific portion of women who practice it. Which is valid and necessary to examine. However, projecting that frustration onto Islam, Buddhism, or even the way that Black women practice Christianity is not only misguided, but it’s also a colonialist project that prevents any real progress forward in the liberal feminist movement. Religion empowers, religion disempowers. It’s 100% contextual. And it’s absolutely not for white women to decide which and where it is doing one or the other.

References
  • Langenberg, Amy. “An Imperfect Alliance: Feminism and Contemporary Female Buddhist Monasticisms.” Religions, vol. 9, no. 6, 2018, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9060190.

  • Mahmood, Saba. “The Subject of Freedom.” Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 1–17.

  • Scott, Joan Wallach. “Women and Religion.” Sex and Secularism, Princeton University Press, 2017, pp. 30–59.

This was written in the context of a course called Gender, Activism, and Religion, and has been adapted for publication here.