Introduction: setting the scene
The following 40 chapters in this volume are testimony to the enduring role of religion in shaping attitudes and behaviours with respect to gender roles, identities and relationships in ways that have an impact upon peopleâs ability to participate in the activities of their religious traditions fully and equally, as well as their opportunities and status within their local communities and wider societies. The chapters are also testimony to the enduring role of religion in peopleâs private lives, both freely chosen as well as imposed, in ways that help and hinder the navigation of the challenges they face, as they variously comply with and resist the gendered impact that religion has upon their self-identity and experience of the world. While religious traditions and the contexts within which they are lived and experienced are diverse and multifaceted, the chapters in this volume demonstrate common themes across traditions and regions in terms of how they impact upon women and men. Religious traditions typically include adherence to opinions and diktats about how men and women are expected to behave in their families and society at large, about their sexual behaviour and orientation, as well as their family arrangements, and is the case in the Global North as well as the Global South.1 Although this affects both men and women, religions have a strong tendency to normalise and naturalise womenâs inferior status compared to men, as well as their dependency upon them, and to link this to biological or sexual differences. While the profound impact that this has had and continues to have upon the lives of women across the globe is well known, following more than 50 years of women/gender and religion scholarship that have unpacked these dynamics, the importance of considering religion and gender together is often not reflected in social and political analysis that seeks to improve womenâs lives. Furthermore, it is often considered in ways that reinscribe sexist and colonialist views of women in the Global South as lacking agency and as victims of religious traditions from which they need to be rescued. Even where religion is not such an explicit social force, as Edwards shows with respect to her work on the image of the biblical Eve in advertising, such biblical imagery reinforces deep-seated cultural attitudes towards the dangerous allure of womenâs sexuality and their role as sexual temptresses, where âinstead of offering women new or alternative ways of viewing themselves, advertising rehashes old images and old stereotypesâ (2008: 81).
However, religions and their gendered impact is not only with respect to their apparent androcentrism but, as McIntosh writes in Chapter 2, they also tend to âdemarcate religious practice and observance along binary and heteronormative linesâ (p. 20), therefore also excluding and marginalising LGBTQI+ people. And indeed, progress along one axis of inclusivity does not secure it in another. As Megan Robertson shows in Chapter 13, the Methodist Church of South Africa proudly elected its first woman bishop in 2019, celebrating âit as a sign of ⌠progressive inclusivityâ (p. 193), yet has not extended this to queer people, both clergy and lay. Finally, it is also important to look at the ways in which religion shapes gender identities, roles and relationship for men, not only those who are LGBTQI+, but also those who are heterosexual. As Neal demonstrates in his powerful chapter, a combination of feminist responses to religion since the 1960s, coupled with the colonial/racist attitudes within Christianity, has played a large role in the demonisation of heterosexual black men in the USA, impacting upon their portrayal in the media and the arts and their treatment by law enforcement and the state, as well as the kinds of masculinity they perform (Chapter 29).
In order to accommodate this diversity of impacts that religion has upon peoplesâ adoption of masculine and feminine behaviour and expression of their sexuality, this volume engages a conceptual lens that is shaped by considerations of gender analysis and intersectionality. A focus on gender draws attention to the role that religion plays in contributing to the social construction of ideas about how men and women should behave in terms of their social roles and sexuality, as well as the role that it can play in challenging such powerful social structures in settings where religion is strong. A focus on intersectionality ensures that factors such as race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, age and religion are considered in combination, while, as McIntosh writes,
exposing gendered oppression or exclusion that is legitimized by religion as well as that which is occasioned by outward expressions of religious identity, while guarding against the temptation towards othering, especially universalizing the other and representing the other as homogenous victim rather than particular agent.
(Chapter 2, p. 21)
Despite predictions from within sociological studies from the 19th century about the decline and eventual disappearance of public, and eventually also private, religion as an inevitable mark of modernity, religious institutions and actors continue to exert influence and pass judgement upon the most personal and intimate âgenderedâ aspects of peopleâs lives. As Vincett et al. write, the fact that secularisation theory2 âhas largely been propounded by white, male Judeo-Christian (in culture and faith) academicsâ, typically writing about the European experience, has meant that it has âtended to be blind to the experiences of other groupsâ (2008: 3), including women, LGBTQI+ people and those not located in Europe. During the first wave of feminism, in the late 19th to early 20th century, while the founding fathers of sociology were predicting the decline of religion, women were continuing to battle against the impact of a sexist church that shaped their private and public lives in ways that went unnoticed and/or were deemed unimportant by male social theorists. For instance, as the feminist sociologist Skeggs writes, âwhen women appear in one of the founding fathers, Durkheimâs texts, they do so as a disruption to the central categories of his analysis, and thus are made to disappear in order for him to re-establish and maintain the internal consistency of his theoryâ (2008: 2; Lehmann 1994). Moreover, as Vincett et al. write, âexisting measures continue to find that womenâs religious involvement exceeds menâs across different nations, religions and types of societyâ suggesting a certain type of male bias to secularization theory (2008: 5).
Secularisation theory has also been criticised for its Eurocentrism, ignoring high levels of religiosity in the USA, a case of âreligious exceptionalismâ where church attendance remained high despite ostensibly secularising forces (Tiryakian 1993). So, too, with evidence from much of the Global South where religion has shown little sign of diminishing in both its private and its public manifestations, despite the efforts of many postcolonial states to implement âsecularismâ as the preferred approach to governance. Even in Western Europe, which saw a steady decline in church attendance during the 20th century and the lessening of the hold of religion on public institutions, by the 1990s sociologists had noticed a âresurgence of religionâ in the European public sphere as well as a higher level of religious observance of women compared to men (Casanova 1994; Trzebiatowska and Bruce 2012). While in Chapter 26 Nella van den Brandt questions the âfalse impressionâ that religion ever entirely disappeared from Western Europe, she also draws attention to dynamics in Europe which require renewed attention to the nexus between religion, gender and society. This includes the arrival since the postâWorld War II period of âguest workers and postcolonial migrants from North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and Indonesia, often, but not always, with Islamic backgroundsâ as well as the strengthening âconservative Christian backlash to womenâs equality and sexual diversityâ, sometimes aligning with nationalist and populist movements, particularly in Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe (p. 393). Even with these ânewâ dynamics in Europe, which push against liberalising trends, it is also the case that more liberal Christian churches, including sections of the Anglican Church, remain compromised over the tensions created by womenâs ordination and same-sex marriage (see, for example, Davie and Starkey 2019; Davie 2015; Clucas 2012; Shaw 2015).
The efforts to name and describe this apparent â(re)appearanceâ of religion in public life, in terms of the âdeprivatisation of religionâ (Casanova 1994), âdesecularisationâ (Berger 1999) or the emergence of the âpost-secularâ (Habermas 2008), are again manifest within sociological fields dominated by white males and we argue are largely unsatisfactory since they remain attempts to revise partial social theories about religion and social change that were already narrow and exclusivist. One impact of the dominance of secularisation theory has been the marginalisation of consideration of religion from social and political analysis in fields such as international development, foreign policy and peacebuilding (i.e. if religion is in decline or has in some instances disappeared then it is not a significant variable and can be ignored). The gender-biased and Eurocentric/colonialist imprint of secularisation theories on how religion has been researched in academia and approached by social reformers and policymakers is a theme taken up in a number of the chapters (e.g. Omer, Chapter 22; Bartelink, Chapter 24; Nogueira-Godsey, Chapter 25). For instance, as Stiebert writes in Chapter 23, âreligion must certainly be a significant part of any attempts to understand and account for sexual violenceâ and is âignored at our perilâ (p. 345). The dominance of theories of secularisation has had the effect of downplaying the role that religion has upon the gendered social and self-identities of women, non-heteronormative and gender-variant people (groups about whose behaviour and identity religious traditions have a great deal to say). Had such theorising also included the voices of women, LGBTQI+ people and those from the Global South, would secularisation theory have gained the currency it did in the form that it did? With this question in mind, one could be forgiven for viewing secularisation theory as normative and political rather than descriptive and interpretive, reflective of a European post-Enlightenment patriarchal worldview to serve âEuropean modernity and its secular projectâ (Carrasco MirĂł 2020: 95; Asad 2003). Rather than viewing this as a âresurgence of religionâ per se (cunningly confounding and outwitting earlier trajectories of secularisation), we suggest instead that global theories of secularisation have been progressively weakened as the avenues of sociological scholarship have widened to include a more diverse range of contributions. This includes contributions from and about women, who have higher levels of individual religiosity on the whole compared to men and upon whose lives public religion has a more invasive impact, and those seeking to challenge the âcoloniality of secularismâ (Carrasco MirĂł 2020: 93; Asad 2003). The challenge to secularisation theory is as much the result of a paradigm shift, brought about by the impact of increasing numbers of women and people of colour carrying out scholarship on their experiences of religion from a gendered and decolonial perspective, as it is a result of male social theorists themselves realising that their theories needed revising and âno longerâ fitted the evidence.
Just as scholarship about secularisation reflected the perspective of a narrow range of largely male actors, scholarship on religion did the same. As McIntosh writes in this volume in Chapter 2, âthe post-Enlightenment/academic study of religion was more concerned with its rationalizing approach than with that which it was omitting [ ⌠whereâŚ] the field of religious data explored assumed that the male experience accounted for the experience of all practitionersâ (p. 19). In fact, the androcentric, heteronormative and colonialist bias in the development of theories of secularisation as well as scholarship on religion at least up to the 1970s are two sides of the same coin, with those who sit outside this privileged vantage point ignored as either producers or subjects of knowledge. Where there was scholarship on non-Christian religions, this tended to be carried out via an orientalist/colonial approach by white men that took âChristianity to be the normâ and which sought âto civilize that which it defined as âotherâ and primitiveâ (p. 19). By the 1970s, marking what is often noted as the âsecond wave of feminismâ, âas universities started to offer courses in womenâs studies and the influence of feminism spread to scholars of religionâ (p. 19), feminist responses to patriarchal religion took off first in North America and then spread to Europe. While this feminist response was on the whole secular and viewed religion as problematic for womenâs rights and empowerment, âfeminist theologiesâ began to emerge by the late 1960s in the work of figures such as Mary Daly (1968) and Rosemary Radford Ruether (1983), who called for a revisioning of the way that religion is gendered and disadvantages women. Edited and single-authored volumes on topics concerned with âwomen and religionâ were published. Many of these sought to establish the feminist credentials of the founders of religions, which were argued to have later became corrupted by surrounding patriarchal cultures, the ways that women are oppressed by their religious traditions and the ways that they are resisting them, developing what have been called âreligious feminismsâ, which reinterpret religious traditions from within in the light of contemporary feminist thinking (e.g. see Longman, Chapter 3; Llewellyn, Chapter 12; Bartelink, Chapter 24 e.g. Barlas 2002; Holm and Bowker 2001; Franzman 1999; Klein, 1995; Gross 1993; Sharma 1994).
Although by the 1980s scholarship on feminist theology and alternative feminist spiritualities was thriving, it was criticised for failing to integrate the perspectives of women from the Global South whose commitment to their religious traditions had persisted, but also in many cases had experiences that were also overlaid by a history of European colonialism. There was a tendency within women and religion scholarship for women in the Global North to view those in the South as victims of their religious traditions, who needed âsavingâ by feminist religious discourse (Pui Lan 2002). With the development of postcolonial theory, which is often taken to be marked by the publication of Edward Saidâs 1978 Orientalism while there were also many women writing in this field, women in the South too began reflecting and writing on their gendered experiences of religion from a postcolonial perspective inspired by the scholarship of women such as Gayatri Spivak (1988) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1984). As the literature on âreligious feminismsâ became more numerous and diverse, coinciding with the âthird wave of feminismâ (1980sâ), we find studies not only seeking to challenge the âcoloniality of secularismâ but also of dominant approaches to women and religion that impose Western norms (Donaldson and Pui-Lan 2002). In probably the most cited text across all of the chapters in this volume is the Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by the late Saba Mahmood (2005), where she âexplores...
