Part I – The Invention of Holy Obedience
Every civilisation begins by explaining its own power. The earliest priests and kings did not invent gods because they understood divinity. They invented gods because they understood obedience. A voice from heaven is harder to argue with than a man on a throne. Religion became the first political technology: invisible, eternal, and unquestionable.
From the moment the sacred was declared, hierarchy followed. Men reached for the sky to validate their rule over the earth, and women became the first to feel the weight of revelation. What began as mythology hardened into law. The female body, capable of birth and renewal, was declared impure, mysterious, dangerous. Control of it became a measure of virtue.
Philosopher Michel Foucault once observed that power’s genius lies not in repression but in definition. To define the sacred is to define the sinner. In every ancient story of beginnings, woman appears as both essential and suspect: Eve, Pandora, the temptress who opens the forbidden box, the curious mind punished for curiosity itself. These are not random tales; they are political allegories disguised as theology.
The first division
Long before the written Bible, clay tablets from Mesopotamia told of Inanna and Ishtar, goddesses of love and war whose autonomy frightened male priests. Their myths were steadily rewritten. The goddesses who once ruled heaven were reduced to consorts or cautionary figures. By the time the Hebrew tribes recorded Genesis, the shift was complete: man in God’s image, woman as a derivative afterthought.
Genesis 3:16 gives history its template. “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” Within that sentence lies the architecture of patriarchy: desire re-cast as dependence, equality rewritten as obedience. Religion absorbed the anxieties of men and elevated them to cosmic principle.
Simone de Beauvoir described this inheritance with clarity: “Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female. Whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.” The earliest scriptures did more than echo that bias; they sanctified it. By calling subordination holy, they made rebellion a sin.
Purity and property
Across cultures the female body became a ledger of male status. The Hebrew purity codes in Leviticus and Deuteronomy measure virtue by ownership and contamination. A woman who bleeds, gives birth, or speaks out of turn becomes unclean; a man who controls her becomes righteous. The same pattern appears in Hindu and Greek law, in Roman domestic codes, and later in Christian canon. The details differ, the logic does not.
Mary Wollstonecraft would later write that women were taught from infancy that “the very constitution of their bodies marked them out for subjection.” In antiquity that subjection was economic as well as moral. Marriage contracts listed dowries, virginity was treated as currency, and female adultery was punished as theft. What men called virtue was simply ownership made divine.
The transformation of property into piety produced one of the most enduring myths of civilisation: that women are moral because they obey. To disobey, even in thought, is to fall like Eve. Theologians still echo the sentiment in subtler language: faith as submission, chastity as dignity, motherhood as duty. Each virtue contains its own cage.
The silence of scripture
When words became sacred text, silence became a virtue. Literacy itself was gendered. In temple schools and early monasteries, men wrote and interpreted while women listened. To speak was to transgress hierarchy; to question was to risk blasphemy. Virginia Woolf noted centuries later that “for most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” The anonymity began here.
Texts that might have offered balance were edited out. Gnostic writings that placed women as apostles or partners in divinity were branded heretical. The council and the creed replaced the conversation. By the time Paul wrote his letters, the pattern was sealed: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” What began as cultural assumption was now scripture.
Theology of the womb
Control of women’s bodies became theology’s most persistent obsession. Menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and sexuality were surrounded by ritual and rule, each turning biology into morality. Anthropologist Gerda Lerner called this the “first class system” — male power over reproduction itself. Religion offered metaphors of purity that made the control appear noble.
In ancient Israel the high priest entered the Holy of Holies once a year; a menstruating woman was barred from the temple entirely. In Greece, priestesses served gods but rarely governed rites. Early Christian fathers extended the logic: Tertullian told women they were “the devil’s gateway,” the reason death entered the world. Augustine, wrestling with his own guilt, declared that woman was the “occasion of sin.” Such men believed they were safeguarding virtue; in reality they were codifying fear.
The moral economy of sin
Once sin became gendered, salvation did too. Religion taught women that suffering ennobles and taught men that authority redeems. The virgin and the mother became twin idols of ideal womanhood, excluding every other life. Sexuality outside these roles was condemned; sexuality within them was regulated. The model endures in pulpits today: purity culture, modesty doctrine, sermons that call female autonomy “pride.”
Christopher Hitchens noted that religion “comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species.” Nowhere is that infancy more visible than in its treatment of women. Fear of female power — reproductive, sexual, intellectual — still animates the sermons that warn against feminism or the priests who deny contraception.
Resistance in the margins
Yet even in the margins of scripture there are hints of rebellion. The unnamed women who defy kings, the prophets who speak when forbidden, the mystics later condemned as heretics. Religion’s record is not a smooth wall of obedience but a palimpsest of argument, much of it erased. The historian Elaine Pagels reminded us that early Christianity once included women as leaders until orthodoxy closed the canon and sealed their voices out.
These lost threads matter because they show that the divine was never singular; it was contested. The subordination of women was not fate, it was policy. By treating male interpretation as revelation, organised religion transformed human prejudice into divine decree.
From altar to household
As the ancient world gave way to empire, theology moved into the home. The Roman Church absorbed the patriarchal law of the Republic: the father as head, the wife as dependent. The domestic sphere became the altar of obedience. Every prayer, every confession reinforced the chain from God to priest to husband.
In Islam the pattern would take a parallel form. The Quran’s call for modesty, its inheritance codes and witness laws, formalised what older cultures implied. “Men are in charge of women,” declares Surah 4:34. The same verse authorises correction, even violence, against disobedience. Muslim feminists have long argued that these verses reflect seventh-century patriarchy, not eternal truth, but orthodoxy remains reluctant to yield.
The philosopher Amina Wadud once wrote that to read the Quran without patriarchy is to risk social exile. That risk defines every woman who has ever questioned faith’s authority. Whether in a church council, a madrassa, or a marriage court, the response is identical: silence her in the name of piety.
The cost of holiness
What began as myth became law; what began as fear became doctrine. The result is measurable across centuries. Where religion rules, women read less, earn less, and die younger. The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index places the most devout theocracies at the bottom: Afghanistan, Yemen, Iran, Saudi Arabia. Correlation becomes history’s confession.
The claim that faith uplifts women is contradicted by its own scriptures and statistics. Faith uplifts only those who obey. When women demand equality, religion answers with metaphor: Eve must repent, Mary must submit, modesty must suffice. But equality cannot be negotiated with metaphor.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that “the good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” Religion, by contrast, has inspired fear and guided ignorance regarding women’s humanity. It did not merely misunderstand equality; it forbade it.
Toward reason
To recognise this is not to erase the past but to see it clearly. The moral progress of humankind begins wherever divine authority ends. Each step towards women’s autonomy — education, contraception, suffrage — has been resisted first by the pulpit. Yet each was won, eventually, by reason.
When secular law replaces scripture, women step out from ownership into citizenship. The transformation is not spiritual but empirical: literacy rises, maternal mortality falls, economies grow. No miracle has ever equalled that progress.
Carl Sagan said that science is “a candle in the dark.” In the history of women, secular reason has been that candle. It burns not with revelation but with recognition: that half of humanity was never meant to kneel before the other half.
Part II – The Church, the Mosque, and the State
When faith matured into institution, power found permanence. Cathedrals and mosques rose as monuments to male authority carved in stone. The walls were built to touch heaven, yet within them the rules of earth prevailed. To understand how religion continued to shape the female condition, we must trace how the spiritual became political and how politics hid behind the mask of salvation.
The church and its daughters
Christianity inherited both the tenderness of the Gospels and the tyranny of Paul. The contradiction has never been resolved. The figure of Mary, serene and obedient, became the model of ideal womanhood. Her silence was exalted, her sexuality erased, her motherhood sanctified because it required no pleasure. She was, as Hitchens once put it, “a long cry of pain” mistaken for virtue.
Medieval theologians extended this vision into law. The canon lawyers of the twelfth century codified marriage as sacrament, binding woman’s body to the church and her obedience to her husband. Divorce was forbidden, contraception condemned, and female desire treated as sin. Aquinas argued that woman was “a defective male.” Such declarations were not eccentricities of thought; they became policy in pulpits and parliaments for centuries.
While monasteries educated men, convents trained women in silence. A nun’s vow of chastity was less about holiness than about containment. The church discovered that controlling women’s reproduction meant controlling inheritance, property, and power itself. The body of a woman became the hinge of civilisation, and so every sermon, every confession, every saintly tale reminded her that to obey was divine and to choose was dangerous.
The theology of pain
Suffering became a feminine sacrament. In the art of the Middle Ages, women kneel beneath crosses, bear wounds, or hold dead sons. Their virtue lies in endurance, not rebellion. This spiritualisation of suffering persists today in sermons that tell women to forgive abusers, to stay in broken marriages, to find meaning in submission.
Mary Daly, one of the earliest radical theologians, called Christianity “a necrophilic religion,” obsessed with suffering and death rather than life and growth. She was expelled from her own seminary for saying so, which only proved her point.
The Reformation and the same old cage
When Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door, he broke papal authority but not patriarchy. Protestantism traded saints for scripture, yet the result for women was the same: obedience sanctified in new language. The Bible was translated into the vernacular, but interpretation remained male. Luther praised marriage but called women “weak vessels.” Calvin forbade them from speaking in church. The Enlightenment that followed praised reason but still relegated women to its margins.
Mary Astell, writing in 1700, asked the obvious question: “If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?” No bishop could answer her without admitting that divine law had always been a cover for male privilege.
The mosque and the law
Islamic civilisation, for all its contributions to art and science, carried the same patriarchal scripture forward. The Quranic verses on inheritance, testimony, and obedience became the blueprint for legal codes across the Middle East. Clerics insist that these rules protect women; yet protection is the vocabulary of ownership. A protected person is not a free one.
A woman’s right to education, marriage, and divorce still depends in many Islamic states on male guardianship. Some scholars reinterpret the texts, arguing that early Islam offered women unprecedented rights for its time. Perhaps it did, but progress that halts in the seventh century cannot be called equality. Amina Wadud led a mixed-gender prayer in New York in 2005 and was denounced across the Muslim world. The mere act of leading worship as a woman was treated as an attack on God.
The feminist writer Fatema Mernissi described the irony with precision: “When a Muslim woman dares to look beyond the walls built around her, she is accused of leaving Islam.” Yet it is those walls, not the woman, that betray the spirit of faith.
The invention of modesty
Across Christianity and Islam the obsession with women’s appearance masks a deeper fear. Modesty laws, veiling, and dress codes are presented as virtues, yet they rest on the assumption that a woman’s body is dangerous to men and must therefore be hidden. This is not morality; it is projection.
In the Victorian era, Christian modesty took the form of corsets and covered ankles. In many Islamic countries it takes the form of hijab or niqab. The garments differ, but the logic is the same: responsibility for male desire is placed on the female body. Theologians called this honour; sociologists call it control.
Nawal El Saadawi, the Egyptian physician and writer, spent her life documenting the psychological cost. She wrote that veiling “kills the spirit long before it kills the body.” For telling the truth, she was imprisoned.
Law in God’s image
As empires gave way to nation states, religious morality seeped into secular law. Western Europe and its colonies carried Christian doctrines into their legal codes: the presumption of male headship, the sanctity of marriage, the criminalisation of abortion and homosexuality. Even after the Enlightenment declared reason supreme, parliaments continued to legislate faith by stealth.
Britain did not grant married women the right to own property until 1882. France banned contraception until 1967. In Ireland, church influence kept abortion illegal until 2018. Across the Atlantic, the United States now wrestles with its own theocratic nostalgia after the reversal of Roe v Wade. Each of these milestones reveals the same pattern: religion receding only when women insist on governing themselves.
Hitchens once remarked that “religion poisons everything.” In law, it does so quietly. The Ten Commandments become the penal code; the pulpit becomes the parliament. And at the centre of this contamination lies the belief that morality flows from control of the female body.
The politics of reproduction
The church’s war on contraception and abortion has always been less about life than about jurisdiction. To decide when life begins is to claim authority over women’s most private decisions. In Catholic doctrine, the womb is not hers but God’s. This theology of possession finds secular allies in politicians who speak of “family values” while stripping families of choice.
Yet the moral arithmetic collapses under scrutiny. The same institutions that forbid abortion often oppose sex education and contraception, ensuring the very outcomes they condemn. Their compassion ends at conception.
Philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous thought experiment — the violinist attached to your body — illustrates the absurdity of compulsory pregnancy. No moral code can demand that one human be forced to sustain another at the cost of autonomy. The religious argument replies not with reason but with decree. Life, they say, belongs to God; therefore the woman belongs to God’s agents.
The burden of virtue
Even when religion loses political power, its vocabulary lingers. Words like chastity, purity, and family honour continue to police behaviour. The result is psychological colonisation: women judge themselves by standards written by men who feared them. In many cultures, a woman who rejects those standards is still called immoral, while a man who enforces them is called faithful.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that autonomy is the foundation of human dignity. To deny it in the name of holiness is to confuse control with care. Yet this confusion remains the moral currency of countless sermons and laws.
The double standard of salvation
Religion offers men forgiveness and women redemption through obedience. A man may sin and repent; a woman who transgresses sexually is ruined. The Virgin–Whore dichotomy survives in both theology and popular culture, each feeding the other. The pornographer and the priest share a myth: that women exist for male desire or male salvation, never for themselves.
In Islamic jurisprudence, adultery by a woman can still carry the penalty of death. In parts of the Christian world, the same act is met with ostracism disguised as compassion. Both are instruments of the same ancient fear — that a woman who claims ownership of her body threatens the entire moral order.
The cost of defiance
History remembers its heretics too late. Hypatia of Alexandria, a philosopher and mathematician, was torn apart by Christian mobs in 415 CE because her learning challenged the clergy. Giordano Bruno burned for cosmology; Hypatia bled for reason. Centuries later, women who demand the right to preach, to drive, to learn, or to terminate a pregnancy face exile and death threats. The method changes, the motive does not.
Salman Rushdie once wrote that freedom to offend is the very essence of freedom. For women under religious regimes, the offence is existence itself.
The modern mask
Today’s religious establishments speak the language of equality while defending inequality in practice. Popes apologise for historical misogyny but retain male-only priesthoods. Islamic scholars endorse education for girls but deny them equal inheritance. Evangelicals preach love while funding campaigns to curtail reproductive rights. The rhetoric evolves; the structure endures.
Feminist theologian Karen Armstrong, once a Catholic nun, observed that religions reform only under pressure from outside. That pressure is secularism. Without it, every concession to equality would be temporary, every right conditional.
When faith enters the state
The merger of religion and politics is not ancient history. In Iran the morality police patrol the streets. In parts of the United States, legislators quote scripture to justify bans on abortion and contraception. In India, Hindu nationalism resurrects its own version of sacred patriarchy. The pattern is global and recognisable: when religion gains political ground, women lose it.
The claim that morality requires faith collapses under evidence. Secular democracies such as Sweden, Denmark, and New Zealand consistently score highest on gender equality and lowest on religiosity. They prove that compassion, responsibility, and justice thrive without theology.
The psychology of control
What binds all these systems is not belief in God but belief in hierarchy. Faith functions as the emotional lubricant of authority. To obey God is to practise obedience itself, making submission seem moral and dissent seem corrupt. For women, this conditioning begins early. The obedient girl becomes the modest woman; the modest woman becomes the faithful wife; the faithful wife becomes the silent believer.
Friedrich Nietzsche warned that morality born of fear produces slaves, not saints. Religion’s fear of female autonomy has produced millennia of moral slaves. Liberation begins when fear is named and rejected.
Part III – The Modern Womb and the Secular Horizon
The persistence of the sacred body
The most enduring superstition is not the belief in gods but the belief that the female body belongs to something other than the woman who lives in it. Even in countries where scripture has retreated from the statute book, its shadow lingers in cultural instinct. A woman’s choices over sex, pregnancy, and appearance remain everyone’s business except hers. Politicians still quote holy texts to explain policies that deny autonomy. Journalists still describe reproductive rights as a “moral issue”, as if morality were a monopoly of faith.
The philosopher John Stuart Mill warned in On Liberty that “the tyranny of the majority is more formidable than many kinds of political oppression.” In the modern world that majority often wears the mask of religion. Churches that once controlled states now control consciences, maintaining influence through shame rather than law.
Abortion and the illusion of moral monopoly
The debate around abortion exposes religion’s deepest fear: the unmediated relationship between a woman and her own body. To terminate a pregnancy is to act without divine permission, to assert that ethics can exist without theology. That is why every pulpit frames the decision as murder rather than autonomy. It is not the foetus that terrifies religion, it is the independence of the mother.
Moderate believers argue that life is sacred, but the question is whose life and under whose authority. When clerics oppose abortion, contraception, and comprehensive sex education, they reveal that their concern is not with life but with control. As the ethicist Margaret Sanger observed a century ago, “No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.”
Secular ethics begins where dogma ends. It weighs compassion and consequence rather than decree. In medical reality, the decision to end a pregnancy may save a woman’s life, protect her health, or spare a child from suffering. Religion, uninterested in circumstance, calls this sin. Reason calls it moral responsibility.
The cost of obedience
The practical effects of faith-based restriction are visible across continents. In countries where abortion is banned, women die from unsafe procedures. In nations where contraception is stigmatised, poverty deepens and education declines. The same leaders who preach the sanctity of life ignore the deaths their policies cause. Hypocrisy becomes doctrine: suffering is holy if it preserves authority.
When Ireland finally repealed its constitutional ban in 2018, it did so not because theology evolved but because reality became undeniable. Women had died while hospitals hesitated under religious law. Their names turned into evidence. No sermon could erase the facts of blood and delay.
The culture of guilt
Even where legal rights exist, religion continues to police emotion. A woman who ends a pregnancy is told to feel remorse, a mother who does not conform to domestic ideals is told to feel shame, a girl who embraces sexuality is told to feel fear. These are not moral intuitions but trained reflexes. Theologians call them conscience; psychologists call them conditioning.
Virginia Woolf once remarked that “we think back through our mothers if we are women.” For centuries those mothers were taught to think through priests. The generational transmission of guilt has done more to sustain religion than any miracle.
The secular counter-reformation
Secularism is not the enemy of morality; it is its emancipation. In societies that separate church and state, compassion becomes practical rather than ceremonial. Welfare replaces charity, education replaces sermon, consent replaces chastity.
Scandinavian nations, often mocked by fundamentalists as godless, record the world’s highest measures of female safety and happiness. Japan, a largely non-theistic culture, shows similar trends. None of these societies required revelation to value women. They required literacy, equality before the law, and a rejection of sacred hierarchy.
The evidence dismantles the claim that faith provides moral order. If morality were born of religion, the most devout nations would be the most just. They are not. Where scripture governs, women suffer; where reason governs, women thrive.
Beyond belief: building secular ethics
Atheism is often described as a vacuum, as if rejecting gods leaves humanity adrift. In truth, it clears space for conscience. The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that “we can build a new morality on the firm foundation of human happiness.” That foundation demands evidence, empathy, and freedom.
Secular ethics begins with the recognition that suffering is real and that the prevention of suffering is good. It does not ask permission from invisible powers. It asks only whether an action increases or diminishes human dignity. By that measure, every religious law restricting women’s bodies fails the moral test.
Education as heresy
The most effective challenge to religious control has always been knowledge. Each expansion of female education has weakened the pulpit. Literacy allows scripture to be questioned; science allows biology to be understood without myth. That is why, even today, extremist movements attack girls’ schools first. Malala Yousafzai’s story is not an exception but a symbol: one girl with a book terrifies an ideology built on obedience.
Education also erodes the division between sacred and profane. When women read history, they discover that their oppression was written, not decreed. When they study philosophy, they find that virtue can exist without revelation. When they learn science, they see that life’s complexity requires no designer. Knowledge is the quiet revolution that faith cannot contain.
The persistence of patriarchy in disguise
Modern religion has learned to mimic equality while keeping its hierarchies intact. Churches ordain a handful of women and call it reform. Mosques allow female prayer spaces and call it progress. Politicians invoke “family values” while cutting funding for childcare and healthcare. Each gesture offers the appearance of inclusion without the substance of freedom.
This mimicry works because many believers wish to reconcile faith with modernity. Yet reconciliation often means compromise at women’s expense. As long as sacred texts are treated as moral authority, equality will remain conditional.
Love without ownership
One of religion’s most seductive ideas is that love requires authority. Marriage vows derived from scripture still speak of headship and submission. The secular re-imagining of love replaces authority with respect. Partnership replaces hierarchy. The ethical principle is simple: if an institution needs obedience to survive, it deserves neither.
The philosopher Erich Fromm described mature love as “two beings preserving one another’s integrity.” Faith-based morality, by contrast, demands that one integrity dissolve into another’s command. The result is dependence disguised as devotion.
Toward a new enlightenment
The liberation of women from religious control is not a cultural luxury; it is a moral necessity. Every advance in science, art, and human rights has required doubt. To question is not arrogance; it is responsibility. The Enlightenment did not abolish faith overnight, but it replaced divine permission with human reason. That transition remains incomplete until women everywhere are free from laws written in the language of heaven.
The task of the secular age is not to mock belief but to expose its consequences. When doctrine harms, it must be named. When faith obstructs compassion, it must yield. The philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that evil often appears as thoughtlessness. Theologies that deny women autonomy are precisely that: inherited ideas repeated without reflection.
The moral horizon
In a world where technology reaches the stars while millions of girls are denied schooling, morality cannot remain bound to Bronze Age texts. The universe is vast, cold, and indifferent, yet within it consciousness has emerged capable of kindness. That is miracle enough.
Carl Sagan wrote that “for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.” The love he meant was not paternal or divine but empathetic, the recognition of shared existence. From that recognition comes a new moral horizon: equality not as doctrine but as fact.
Conclusion: Liberation as the final heresy
Faith has commanded women to be silent, modest, obedient, and grateful for subordination. It has called control protection and dependence virtue. Yet each century has produced women who refused to kneel. From Hypatia to Wollstonecraft, from Stanton to Yousafzai, they have written the secular gospel of equality.
To reject divine hierarchy is not to reject meaning; it is to reclaim it. The measure of a civilisation is not the piety of its prayers but the freedom of its women. Where women can think, choose, and govern their own bodies, morality becomes human again.
Religion promised salvation in exchange for obedience. Secular humanism offers dignity in exchange for thought. Between the two lies the oldest struggle in history: the right to be free.
The liberation of women is the liberation of humanity from its oldest superstition — that virtue requires a master. The day we abandon that idea, faith’s long chain finally breaks.