How Women Are Reconciling Feminism With Faith

“It’s a very, very overt patriarchy,” Amy Allebest said as she fought to maintain her composure. “The leadership is all men in suits.”

Raised in Colorado in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon church, Allebest was 21 years old before the sexism of her community—a community she loved—hit home. “You absorb the messaging that men are in charge in every area of your life,” she said. The teachings were so patriarchal, mandating the subordination of wives to their husbands, that she underwent a crisis of faith. It took another two decades for her to leave the church. By then, she was introducing other Mormon women to feminism.

“To a large extent we really do grow up in a bubble,” Allebest explained. “A lot of Mormon women haven’t heard of Betty Friedan; they haven’t heard of Simone de Beauvoir.”

What happens in the Mormon church is not just a matter for its members. Religious affiliation in the United States and Europe may have declined over the last decade, according to the Pew Research Center, but religious institutions play an outsized role on issues such as abortion and gay rights. Officially, the Mormon church is politically neutral, but when a ban on same-sex marriage was put to a public ballot in California in 2008, the leadership expected members to vote, canvas, and raise money in support of it.

“They’ll recruit political involvement from their members,” Allebest said.

This doesn’t mean that everyone in the church shares its views. Allebest added that her Mormon friends include those who vote Democrat and are pro-choice. But their voices are rarely heard. “Talking to those women is essential,” she said.

Especially now. A national poll conducted by Politico in 2022 found that 61 percent of Republican supporters were in favour of declaring the United States a Christian country. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court, Catholics Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, were seen to reflect Trump’s support for evangelical conservatives and their anti-abortion agenda. Across the globe, in Brazil, Indonesia, Israel, and Russia, religion is gaining political ground, mostly on the conservative right—raising the question of how these countries can reconcile patriarchal religious teachings with demands for gender equality.

The answer may lie among religious women themselves.

According to Jamie Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, a Washington, D.C.-based group founded in 1973, progressives need to pay more attention to those who are challenging religious institutions from the inside. Manson, raised in an Italian American Catholic family, felt called to the priesthood at age 14 but quickly realized that this wasn’t seen as an option for girls, she said. Since then, she has spoken in defence of gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and abortion access.

“The polls tell us that there’s massive support for abortion rights among Catholics in the United States,” Manson said. “But this is a predominantly silent majority.” Catholics for Choice has been trying to make that majority heard. In the run-up to a ballot this November to establish a constitutional right to abortion in Ohio, it ran a campaign targeting Catholic voters, investing in a full-time field organizer who lived in the state. “We hit all of the Catholic cities,” Manson said. Despite a $1.7 million counter-campaign by Catholic bishops, the vote passed.

“The opposition to abortion is not secular,” Manson said. “It is faith-based. It is primarily Catholic. And so, the only way to win is to fund faith-based organizing.” When asked how she can square her religious beliefs with her politics, she responded with theology. Catholicism expects followers to act on their consciences first, she argued. “We speak the language of faith and that’s Kryptonite to these guys.”

The Vatican has meanwhile tended to tilt against feminism. In 2016, Pope Francis set up the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life, an office that seeks to prevent women from having abortions, promotes traditional marriage, and defends traditional gender roles.

“We’re fighting theological ideals and an overreach by religious leaders,” Manson said. “Ultimately, they want a theocracy. You see it in Hungary, you see it in Poland, you see it in the United States.”

Prominent women in European politics have entered the fray. At a meeting of Catholic reform groups this year, Cherie Blair, barrister and wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said that teachings on birth control “do not always serve women well.” Former Irish President Mary McAleese was more straightforward, accusing those upholding church teachings of an “old, entitled culture of autocratic control,” using “unscholarly, sexist humbug masquerading as threadbare theology” to keep women out of the priesthood.

Their words sit in the tradition of the 19th-century authors of The Woman’s Bible, who were American suffragists who reinterpreted Christianity to make it compatible with women’s rights. There have always been utopian, radical threads within the major religions. It is these threads that progressives are trying to weave back into debate.

In Muslim communities, women are similarly pushing back against the claim that their faith preaches subordination to men. Daisy Khan, the former wife of an imam who now runs the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality (WISE) in New York, uses scripture to argue that Islam need not be at odds with secularism and human rights. As the Moroccan sociologist Fatema Mernissi wrote thirty years ago in her book The Veil and the Male Elite, it was the promise of equality and dignity that led women to flee tribal Mecca in the seventh century and flock to Islam. If modern Muslim men had a problem with women’s rights, Mernissi argued, it was “simply because those rights conflict with the interests of a male elite.”

This is especially true in Afghanistan under the Taliban, where girls have been banned from attending high school since 2021. “The entire framework of the country is a religious framework,” Khan said. “The Taliban will always tell you, ‘This is our culture,’ and then say that ‘our culture is Islamic.’ Well, it doesn’t have anything to do with Islam theologically; it has more to do with the custom that they want to hold onto, which bars women from any public activity.”

Before the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, WISE had trained around 6,000 imams in Afghanistan on women’s rights under Islam, Khan said. “The imams came around really quickly because the sources we were showing them were so authoritative,” she explained. “These are the very imams that are the biggest asset that can be deployed against the Taliban.”

According to Khan, who has also worked in the Gambia, Egypt, and Pakistan, religion is too often overlooked as a foreign-policy issue, when in fact it can be central to people’s values and their capacity for social change. “When you come with secular arguments to Muslim-majority states, a lot of it falls on deaf ears,” she said. “If we ignore religion, we’re unable to create longstanding, transformative change.”

That lesson is already hitting home. In her address at a major conference on women in Islam in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, this November, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed chose to cite Islamic history rather than focusing on secular arguments for gender equality. “From the start, Islam recognized women’s right to participate in political decision-making, to inherit, to own property and businesses,” she told Muslim leaders at the conference. Her tactic was clear: Theocracies can change, but you must speak their language.

In some places, the pushback against the religious right is working. In the United States, abortion has proven itself to be a decider in state elections, favouring the Democrats. In Poland, where Catholicism boomed after the collapse of the Soviet Union and abortion was swiftly outlawed, the conservative Law and Justice party lost its majority in October elections. In secular India, the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP has found itself treading a fine line between elevating religion in public life while attempting to paint Hinduism as less patriarchal than other faiths (this isn’t easy when Hindu tradition shows an obvious preference for sons over daughters and treats menstruation as taboo).

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s most notable accommodation to women’s rights came in September, when the Indian legislature passed a bill requiring a third of seats in the lower house of parliament be set aside for women. Critics, though, note that this measure is unlikely to take effect before 2029. The male elite may be listening, but their feet still drag.