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Why feminists are less religious - Guardian News

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In reply to JanforGore:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/mar/29/why-feminists-less-re...

"In our survey of British feminists, more than half said they were either atheist or had no religion. Here's why that might be.

Feminism, said evangelist and Republican broadcaster Pat Robertson in 1992, "is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians". The feminist retort: "Sorry I missed church. I was busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian," has since made its way on to T-shirts, fridge magnets and bumper stickers.

Where religion's concerned, maybe Robertson was right. Maybe feminism does lead women to reject traditional religion.

For our book about the resurgence of feminism in 21st-century Britain, Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement, Catherine Redfern and I surveyed nearly 1,300 British feminists. We wanted to find out who the new feminists were, what inspired their engagement with feminism, which gender issues they were concerned about, and so forth.

One of our questions was: "Please describe your religious or spiritual views (including none/atheist/agnostic)" (the wording is worth mentioning, since how you ask questions affects the results, as debates on the religion question in the census reveal).

The results show that, when compared with the general female population, feminists are much less likely to be religious, but a little more likely to be interested in alternative or non-institutional kinds of spirituality.

When the 2001 census asked "What is your religion?", more than three quarters of women said they belonged to a major world religion. In the smaller 2007 British Social Attitudes survey (which asked the question more openly), 60% of women said they regarded themselves as belonging to a religion.

But in our project, only one in 10 identified with a major world religion (mostly Christianity). Just over half the feminists said they were either atheist or had no religion. One in six was agnostic. One in 12 considered themselves spiritual but not conventionally religious and the rest answered in other ways (there were a couple of pagan atheists and Buddhist Christians, for instance).

It seems, then, that feminism does inspire women to reject religion.

Robertson was worried that feminism was challenging traditional Christian values – at least, values he considered Christian. Many liberals and feminists, concerned about the rise of fundamentalism and its erosion of women's rights, conclude similarly that feminism and religion have little in common. As Cath Elliott put it:

"Whether it's one of the world's major faiths or an off-the-wall cult, religion means one thing and one thing only for those women unfortunate enough to get caught up in it: oppression. It's the patriarchy made manifest, male-dominated, set up by men to protect and perpetuate their power."
Sidestepping the arguments about whether or not religion is irredeemably oppressive to women (Christina Odone has refuted Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom's recent claim that it is), it's important to ask why feminists think like this. Is it that they have all undertaken a rational examination of the claims of different religions and found them wanting?
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The proportion of feminists in our survey who were not heterosexual is high (40%). Given the tendency of many religious organisations to condemn homosexuality, it's unlikely that these gay or bisexual feminists would feel at home in them.
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Feminists' lack of interest in religion is joined by a somewhat increased attraction to alternative or holistic forms of spirituality, from yoga, Reiki and Zen meditation to Paganism and Wicca. These forms of spirituality set themselves up as gender-equal, and this is probably why feminists like them.

In contrast to the perceived devaluation of women's bodies in traditional religion, holistic spiritual practitioners have created female images of divinity, developed positive rituals around menstruation and childbirth and given women positions of spiritual authority.

We need to know far more than a survey can tell us about how religious attitudes are formed to tell whether these hypotheses are accurate.

In the 21st century, religion has become visible again. Around the world, state approaches to religion and secularism have significant repercussions for religious women's wellbeing, so it's vital that feminists consider carefully their approaches to religion – for other women's sakes, if not for their own.


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