Why the Religious Right Fears Feminine Power
www.BrendaPetersonBooks.com
Why is America still fighting this war over a woman’s body, when equally religious countries, like Ireland and Mexico, have made peace? After the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the fifty-year “settled law” of Roe vs. Wade, will women rise in the 2024 election and vote to protect our right to choose?
The day after the 2016 Inauguration, 3.5 million women and men marched to protest the Trump administration’s vows to defund Planned Parenthood and revert abortion from a woman’s right to a crime. Now after this SCOTUS Dobbs’ decision, which zealously triggered many states’ similar anti-abortion agendas — the Religious Right is fulfilling this patriarchal promise — God as the all-powerful Father. But where is God the Mother in this divine right?
We must look deeper than political arguments to the spiritual roots of this struggle. In the abortion debate, the two sides do not speak the same language. How can a woman who carries a sign “Jesus Hears Their Tiny Screams” converse with another whose sign states: “Abortion: Every Woman’s Birthright!” It’s like a screaming match between two tribes who offend each other simply because they occupy the same territory—in this case, a woman’s body.
We must go back to pre-patriarchal history to discover a well-documented body of scholarship on the ancient cultures, whose spiritual life was centered in the rites of biological motherhood and the Earth as feminine Goddess–Gaia, as the Greeks named her. Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas calls this the “Goddess or Great Mother cultures” in prehistoric European civilizations. Gimbutas writes: “There are no depictions of arms (weapons used against other humans) in any Paleolithic cave paintings.”
Richard Leakey’s research also defines early humans as peaceful and cooperative. These cultures are noted for their flexibility, their egalitarianism, the strong bonds between mothers and children. This was our way of life until around 3000 B.C., when the advent of the Bronze Age and the warrior tribes produced weapons and a vengeance-seeking God the Father who denied and disappeared the divine power of the feminine. The masculine disinherited the feminine.
I well remember a hymn, “Power in the Blood,” from my patriarchal Southern Baptist childhood—a soundtrack to this warrior god’s war on women.
Would you be free from your burden of sin?
There’s power, power, wonder-working power
In the precious blood of the Lamb
The Lamb in this hymn is Christ bleeding on the cross. The power in these blood rites has to do with sacrifice of the divine son, not a fetus. Had Christ been a divine daughter, her bloodshed would have been a sacred ceremony, a law. Earlier cultures and religious traditions believed in the spiritual authority of women’s blood and sacrifice. They were synonymous in the Great Mother cultures with the blood of birth and fertility. The twin powers of birth and death belonged first to woman.
The first way we told time was by women’s cycles: twenty-eight days between menstruations, twenty-eight days of the Moon’s cycle. The Moon was said herself to be “menstruating” as she fulfilled her fertile course, from waxing fullness to waning death to rebirth. Everything was in relationship to the circle, the whole. In the center of this cycle were the Great Mother deities in reverence and sync with the Earth’s seasons.
In those days it was not Jehovah, but the Great Mother who “giveth and taketh away” and whose name was nevertheless blessed. The root meaning of the word ritu or ritual is “menstruation.” For our ancestors, crossing the threshold from girlhood to womanhood was dramatic and awe-inspiring. The wonder of it all: a body bleeds, cleanses, and is reborn. A body does not bleed for nine full moons and so gives birth to another body. How powerful and mysterious, then, this women’s blood. No wonder this blood was saved, used to fertilize crops, and precious drops offered in only the most sacred ceremonies.
The Old Testament lamb that was later ritually sacrificed was an imitation of these menstrual rites. Jehovah borrowed power from the feminine blood to make His own ceremonies. The blessing and power of those early Great Mother cultures’ blood became the feminine “curse” and was transmuted into the masculine warfare (blood-shedding) myths of the Old Testament. Whereas the New Testament Christ is more feminine—virginal, non-violent, and compassionate. But these elements in Jehovah’s son are unrecognized, just as any partnership between God the Father and God the Mother is denied.
Is it any coincidence, then, that this more feminine New Testament Christ is also missing from the pro-life crosses? When did bloody fetuses usurp Christ’s sacrifice? Do fetuses fulfill his role — to bring redemption and forgiveness? Do the anti-abortion women carry their own crosses because their roles as mothers is the only salvation a patriarchal god allows them? If these women really made themselves in Jehovah’s image, wouldn’t they be the first to understand sacrificing a child — because sacrificial death in the New Testament brings eternal life?
The anti-abortion movement is anchored in this Old Testament’s patriarchal denial of a woman’s power. It’s even in our language. The word hysteria has its root in the word womb; the word testament in the word testicle, or “male witness.” Hysteria is now used by psychology to describe feminine dysfunction; testament is considered a sacred covenant “between God and man.” Thus, the testicles can tell the truth; the womb lies. If a woman’s womb lies and she is hysterical, isn’t it then assumed that she can no more judge who lives and who dies, who has the spiritual power to “giveth and taketh away?” That power among Far Right religions now belongs to the patriarchy more than mothers.
A man’s body cannot create new life; that power belongs to the feminine. The masculine without the feminine is an empty vessel.
In the older, matrilineal cultures, the taking of an unborn child’s life was seen as a sacrifice, which in its original Latin means “to make sacred.” As French scholar, Ginette Paris observes in Pagan Meditations: “One aborts an impossible love, not a hatred.”
Some tribeswomen speak to the spirits of their unborn children before performing their ritual abortions. After the act, the woman is received by her tribal sisters and comforted in her grief, her loss, her somber choice.
Many of us who have been fighting for reproductive rights for generations feel grief and outrage over the Supreme Court’s reversal of a woman’s right to choose. Their regressive zeal for a white, male, Christian majority has caused such horrible suffering and death, especially to women of color. Or those too poor to travel to states where abortion is still legal. Since most of the Trump abortion bans are in the evangelical South, unfairly affecting women of color, these “forced births” ironically create more of the diversity the Far Right justices most fear.
A poignant “Call to Conscience to White, Christian Women,” by The Rev. Jennifer Butler, CEO of Faith in Public Life, reminds us that two-thirds of white evangelical women voted for Trump in 2016. They chose Trump, “despite his extensive record of overt bigotry. Meanwhile, 95 percent of black women and two-thirds of Latina women voted against him.” She pleads, “these discrepancies should cut us to the quick and cause us to examine our hearts and souls. Time and time again, why do white women disconnect from women of color?”
Will white women now choose Kamala Harris, a mother, both Black and Asian, a powerful woman? Or, will white women continue to perpetuate the patriarchy, now represented by juvenile tech bros like Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and Trump whose immature masculinity demeans both women and men. Trump obsesses about other men’s genitalia as if it is the only real power. But a man’s body cannot create new life; that power belongs to the feminine. The masculine without the feminine is an empty vessel.
This relentless drive to dominate women and steal their power is all in the guise of patriarchal “protection.” But as Tara Setmayer of the bipartisan Seneca Project notes, “Trump is not a protector, he is a predator.” He preys upon the feminine. Brute force, control, and dominion are not the balance our species needs to survive and procreate. We can restore the birthright of feminine power—putting a mother in the White House is a good start.
At last in the 2024 election, the religious vote is waning as many Christians opt not to vote for a man who, unlike Christ, chooses money, power, and fame over the virtues of sharing, compassion, and forgiveness. Some white evangelicals I know are voting Democrat for the first time in their lives.
“This spells trouble for Trump,” notes Reason.com. After years of Far Right mega-churches preaching that Jesus “would have cast his ballot for the ‘flawed’ Trump,” many true believers are appalled at Tump’s hawking Bibles in his own name, viciously attacking immigrants, his calls for Christian nationalism violence, his vulgarity, and racism.
I do believe we are enduring the last gasp of unbalanced patriarchy—God the Father without God the Mother. The Supreme Court ruling is the turning point: We can act together to resist the attempt to steal away our physical, political, and yes, spiritual authority. In this the election the feminine will finally balance the patriarchy and give birth to the future.
Put a mother in the White House.
Brenda Peterson is a novelist, nature writer, and memoirist, author of over 20 books, including Your Life is a Book, selected by Oprah.com and the memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth, an Indie Next, “Great Read” chosen by independent bookstores and a “Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year” by Christian Science Monitor. Her work has appeared on NPR, in The New York Times, Orion, Tikkun, and Oprah magazine. This essay is updated from Peterson’s essay collection, Nature and Other Mothers: Personal Stories of Women and the Body of Earth, reprinted in the Black Earth Institute journal as “Power in the Blood: The Religious War Over Abortion.”
For more: www.BrendaPetersonBooks.com
