Religion is often sold as a source of comfort, morality, and guidance. Yet for women, it has been a source of control. Across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, women are written into holy texts not as equals but as subordinates. These scriptures were composed by men, for men, and their authority has been used for centuries to justify inequality.
The record is not mixed. It is overwhelmingly clear. Faith has failed women.
Genesis of Inequality: The Old Testament
The Hebrew Bible, which underpins both Christianity and Islam, begins with a hierarchy. Woman is fashioned from man, not alongside him. Genesis 3:16 delivers the first divine decree: “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
That one line sets the template for millennia of male authority. Leviticus 12 declares that a woman who gives birth is “unclean” for twice as long if the child is a daughter instead of a son. Deuteronomy 22 goes further, placing a monetary value on a woman’s violation: fifty shekels of silver, payable to her father. In this schema, a woman is not a person in her own right. She is a possession.
The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir captured the consequence: “Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female. Whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.” Religion did not challenge this division. It enshrined it.
Christianity: The Apostle of Silence
Christians often claim that the arrival of Jesus transformed the status of women. The gospels show compassion, but the early Church shows restriction. Paul’s letters, which form much of the New Testament, are explicit.
1 Timothy 2:12: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.”
1 Corinthians 11:3: “The head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man.”
Paul is the architect of a religion where silence becomes virtue and obedience becomes holiness. His words echo in church hierarchies to this day. Women are denied priesthood in Catholicism, denied bishops in many Anglican provinces, and often excluded from leadership in evangelical movements.
Virginia Woolf, reflecting on women’s erasure from history, wrote: “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” Christianity institutionalised this anonymity, keeping women out of pulpits and leadership positions for centuries.
Islam: Codifying Obedience
Islam inherits the framework of the Torah and the Bible and intensifies it. The Quran makes its vision clear in Surah 4:34: “Men are in charge of women… As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in bed, and strike them.”
Here, violence is not an aberration. It is sanctioned. A woman is not an equal partner but a subject to be disciplined.
Inheritance law confirms her diminished value: “Allah commands you regarding your children: for the male, what is equal to the share of two females” (Quran 4:11). Court testimony reveals the same imbalance: “And call to witness two witnesses from among your men. And if there are not two men, then a man and two women, so that if one of them errs the other can remind her” (Quran 2:282).
Christopher Hitchens wrote: “Islamic doctrine makes the assumption that half the human race is essentially inferior and is the property of the other half.” These are not fringe interpretations. They are the core texts.
The Cost of Holy Inequality
The effect is measurable. Where religion dominates law, women’s rights are weakest. In countries where blasphemy laws and Sharia are enforced, girls are denied education, women face barriers to employment, and violence against them is routine.
The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index consistently shows the widest gaps in countries where religion and state are entwined. Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia rank at the bottom. This is not coincidence. It is correlation born of theology.
Mary Wollstonecraft, writing in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, said: “I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.” Religion has consistently denied this wish, insisting that autonomy is rebellion against divine order.
Scripture as a Tool of Control
Why does this persist? Because these texts were never divine. They were political. Written in patriarchal cultures, they encoded the biases of their authors. By claiming divine authority, these men ensured that their prejudices became law.
The Quran, the Bible, and the Torah were not revelations. They were constitutions for male supremacy. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leading suffragist, put it: “The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women’s emancipation.”
The Secular Alternative
When religion recedes, freedom advances. Secular societies, from Scandinavia to Japan, consistently show higher female literacy, greater participation in the workforce, lower maternal mortality, and stronger representation in politics. None of these achievements were delivered by scripture. All were won by rejecting it.
Atheism does not offer new holy books or unquestionable dogmas. It offers the chance to build ethics on reason, empathy, and equality. To treat men and women not as hierarchies ordained by heaven but as humans equal in dignity and rights.
Carl Sagan once said: “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” That is the true wonder of existence. It requires no God and no scripture. It requires only that we recognise each other as equals.
Conclusion: Liberation Demands Rejection
Faith has failed women. It has treated them as property, silenced them in churches, segregated them in mosques, and bound them to obedience in law. Its texts are not sacred guides to justice. They are monuments to inequality.
To defend faith is to defend this record. To reject it is to open the possibility of genuine equality. Atheism is not simply a disbelief in gods. It is a belief in freedom, in autonomy, and in the dignity of every person.
The liberation of women is inseparable from the liberation from religion.