Sunday marked International Women’s Day, something that was hard to miss mostly because nearly every company you’ve ever bought something from probably sent an email celebrating it. Naturally, many of those messages also suggested products supposedly perfect for women. Plants, clothes, spices suddenly everything becomes especially “female-friendly” at this time of year. Perhaps that’s just my algorithm talking. But is any of this truly empowering? Can the freedom of a woman wearing a stylish midi-dress be separated from the reality of the woman who stitched it together? I hesitate to position myself as the judge of what the spirit of IWD should be, especially since it’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t tied to mass-marketing campaigns.
The evening before Women’s Day yes, apparently that’s a thing I attended evensong at a university college. It may have been my first time there, and it was certainly the first time I had heard a sermon dedicated to International Women’s Day. The Rev Marcus Green had taken on the challenge of reading the Bible through a feminist lens, a tricky task considering how few women in the text are even named. There are several called Mary, but beyond that the names are scarce so scarce that “Mary” feels almost like the Bible’s version of “Karen”. One woman, for example, is identified only as the mother of the sons of Zebedee. Despite the fact that she actually speaks while he does not, he still gets the memorable name, while her identity has to be pieced together from different passages like clues at a crime scene.
The heart of the sermon focused on another unnamed woman: a Samaritan who became the first female evangelist. She was the woman with five former husbands who, at the time she met Jesus, was living with a man who was not her husband. The story builds to a moment where the son of God tells her she is loved. Strangely, she doesn’t respond with something like: “Mate, I know that. Have you not seen how many husbands I’ve had?” As a feminist allegory, the story might leave some gaps in logic. Yet as a Christian message about the power and spread of love and acceptance, it offered a refreshing pause in the surrounding noise.
Still, this year’s International Women’s Day was not just about the usual commercial rituals. The global atmosphere has become increasingly unsettling, as misogyny, Christian nationalism and white supremacism appear to intersect in ways that play out on the world stage. One moment, 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 moment, the influencer Nick Fuentes is proposing “breeding gulags” for women suggesting they be imprisoned and released only on a case-by-case basis.
It is difficult to trace a clear ideological line between figures like Wilson and Fuentes. Is there a coherent interpretation of Christianity that leads from the idea of women losing political rights to the concept of imprisoning them? Or is it more like what some commentators describe as a “libidinal assemblage” within fascist movements an emotional machinery built by piecing together fragments of anger and resentment until it becomes a functioning engine of outrage?
Consider when Reform candidate Matt Goodwin speculates publicly about the ideal age for women to have children. What exactly drives such commentary? Is it concern about declining birthrates that echoes the rhetoric of “great replacement” theory? Or is it the allure of a dystopian future reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale, where any defeated political figure feels entitled to lecture strangers about fertility? And how does this relate to the curious global trend showing Gen Z men being twice as likely as baby boomers to believe a wife should always obey her husband? That particular survey covered countries including the UK, the US, Brazil, Australia and India.
Questions like these once felt distant from the concerns of people outside religious debates. What Christianity had to say about gender roles didn’t seem like something an atheist needed to worry about. Yet listening to a feminist sermon served as a reminder that the issue now reaches far beyond the church. It has become everyone’s concern, everywhere, all the time.
One final observation from the service: the choir was enormous at least as large as the congregation itself. There’s a saying that you shouldn’t preach to the choir. But ignoring them altogether would have felt just as impolite.
