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Sunday was International Women’s Day, which you’ll know because every company you’ve ever shopped with will have emailed you, taking this fine opportunity to suggest things women might like to buy. Plants, clothes, spices … all are particularly female-friendly at this time of year, or maybe I’m revealing nothing but my algorithms. Is any of it emancipating? Would you have to balance the freedom of the woman wearing the midi-dress against the servitude of the woman who had to sew it? I don’t really want to set myself up as the arbiter of the spirit of IWD, being unable to remember a time before it meant mass-marketing mail-out.
On Women’s Day Eve, though – yes, that is a thing – I was attending evensong at a university college, maybe for the first time ever, and it was definitely the first time I’d heard an IWD sermon. The Rev Marcus Green had set himself the challenge of feministly reading a book, the Bible, in which almost none of the women have a name. There are a bunch called Mary, but so few other names that “Mary” was basically Bible-speak for “Karen”. There’s one who is the mother of the sons of Zebedee, but even though she has actual lines and he has none, he still gets this cracking name, while you have to piece her identity together by triangulating other accounts, like an investigator at a crime scene.
The meat of the sermon was about a woman who wasn’t given a name. A Samaritan and the first female evangelist, she was the one with the five previous husbands whose relationship status, at the time of meeting Jesus, was “with some guy who wasn’t her husband”. It crescendoed with the son of God telling her that she is loved, to which she inexplicably does not reply: “Mate, I know that. Have you not seen how many husbands I’ve had?” As a feminist parable, it lacked something in the sense-making department, but, as a Christian message of the sheer contagiousness of love and acceptance, it was a useful interruption of the drum beat.
It was not just commercialised business as usual this International Women’s Day: the global backdrop was that misogyny, Christian nationalism and white supremacism have conjoined to create storyboards on the world stage that flash before your eyes, disappear and return in darker, weirder forms. One minute, the ultra-conservative Christian US secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, is retweeting a video of the pastor Doug Wilson arguing for “household voting”, in which married women would submit to their husbands; the next, the influencer Nick Fuentes is advocating “breeding gulags” for all women, who would be imprisoned first and released on a case-by-case basis.
Who’s to say what the through line is from Wilson to Fuentes? Is there a coherent reading of Christianity that takes you from the disenfranchisement of women to their (our) incarceration? Or is this an example of what some call the “libidinal assemblage” of fascist movement-building, where you bolt together bits of splenetic feeling until you have a working rage machine?
When the Reform candidate Matt Goodwin opines on the right age for women to have children, what is really animating him? Birthrate anxiety that is really great replacement theory by another name? Or the thrill of a Handmaid’s Tale future, in which any given electoral loser is invited to pontificate on the fertility of strangers? Is there any connection between these developments in the US and the bizarre global spectacle of gen Z men being twice as likely as boomers to think a wife should always obey her husband? That survey was conducted across the UK, the US, Brazil, Australia and India.
What Christianity has to say about gender relations never used to feel like an atheist’s business. It took a feminist sermon, of all things, to remember that this is now all our business, all the time.
One other observation on this church fandango: the choir was massive, at least as big as the congregation. They say you shouldn’t preach to the choir, but not to preach to them would be plain rude.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
