FairPhyllis expressed this brilliantly:
"I don't appreciate people who don't seem to have a good knowledge of the text of the Gospels telling me that they say xyz and support a misogynistic world view when that view seems to be based on misrememberings of the Gospel. Having this discourse going on from non-Christians is incredibly damaging to what we are trying to do within the church to make it a less sucky place for women. It hands more power to misogynists within the church to represent themselves as the authentic face of Christianity."
this is really important and I think this plays into the disaster with the recent vote over woman bishops in the C of E.
As you remember, the failure to get there was not because there were too many people with voting rights on the matter who sincerely thought women should not be bishops. The issue was that those who did think that women should be bishops had too much respect for and sensitivity to the (OBVIOUSLY WRONG) beliefs of the misogynists who thought otherwise.
They felt that it would be unkind, somehow, to them to to vote it through; that it would be asking too much of them to live with the outcome that women could be bishops.* I really believe that this insane sensitivity to HATEY MISTAKENNESS is related to dominant secular and religious cultures of women as second class particularly within religion - a sort of ascribing of authenticity, originality, basicness to this view within religion that is heavily promoted by secular cultures in order to attempt to positively distinguish secular culture from the religious (distracting from the horrifically misogynistic culture that we are inflicting on young women, particularly, through pop culture for youth, at this time).
As I have said elsewhere on mumsnet recently, not on this thread, all the enlightenment beliefs that we take as self evident and mainstream in our popular discourse of human rights, equality, and respect for all people, come to us straight out of Christianity. It is not the only religion that promotes these values, and indeed it is not only religious people who can. But to us, in the Western world, or Christendom as it was once called, that is where they came from and their automatic truth and relevance is not automatic at all - they have been heavily promoted by Christians at great personal cost.
curlew, I would be interested to know what culture you are from and which church you relate to when seeing the whole thing as misogynist. I think traditional Irish culture and its agricultural priorities inflected through its values with respect to the family is a huge part of Catholic culture as it came to me through my Irish background.
I once thought any woman who had anything to do with a Christian church was letting the side down by collaborating with the enemy. I have changed with respect to this because I now have more experience of less blatantly hatey institutions (though none are perfect); but also because I have reached an accommodation with my own spiritual needs, much in the way I have a job and own a house although I think capitalism is evil. To some extent it is a fudge and a compromise I am not proud of; but I can?t go through life denying my needs, and denying my value to others, - to be who I need to be for my family and community I need to be whole and functional. So to these ends I work with capitalism in order to have a home for me and and my family and the resources to feed and educate my children and allow them to take their place in the community; and to be whole as a person for them and my whole community I need the blessings which come from being part of a church. It isn?t perfect but it is better than sitting around empty and desperate because the pope hates us.
*However, I have no doubt that the C of E will get there, in my lifetime. The Catholic church? Forget it.