66. Did God Do That or Did Men? Part 1

Over the last week, you've heard me talk about on Instagram as well as here, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest denomination in the United States with approximately 13 million members gathering in Florida to vote for the fourth consecutive year on whether to formally write into their constitution that women cannot hold pastoral positions of any kind. At the same time, the turning point USA Women's Leadership Summit was also in session somewhere else in this country. So featuring career women, women who are paid tens of thousands to millions of dollars to speak, to advocate online, to be an influencer, to write books, to give opinions. They build their careers, their platforms, speaking circuits and public profiles, telling other women not to do that exact same thing because, well, God told them. These two events happened at the same time and I want you to understand that I'm not surprised by this because I have been studying this playbook for years. I grew up in this playbook. It does not shock me at all that while the Southern Baptist Convention meets to push women out of leadership, the summit for women's leadership from turning point USA gets together to pay women the hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell other women to submit, be quiet and don't usurp headship. The audacity is also making me want to throw my microphone a little bit. Welcome to flipping tables. I'm Monty. You've heard me talk about this before. I'm going to do a little bit of a deep dive. We're going to talk about history, biography, religious deconstruction, the ugly truth about power. But we're also going to talk specifically today about the Christian nationalist lie about what the US is, who we are and why it is always opposed to women's rights today on flipping tables. Well, hello, everyone. Welcome back or welcome for the first time. If you're here, thank you so much for the recent shares and reviews that have been coming in on the show. I really appreciate it. Every time you share this show, it really helps me keep everything moving and growing in a really meaningful way. And I appreciate that. A couple of updates. So I've been doing yesterday's news, my kind of 15 to 20 minute news recaps on Patreon. I added that as a perk for them. But it's also free on Substack. It's my way of trying to help people stay informed without feeling overwhelmed or get the opportunity to take a break from their phone or from social media, working a lot on Substack as far as I will be doing a lot more writing, long form writing, kind of giving a little more nuance to certain topics, deep diving into decisions and news that's running around. But also talking a lot more about my story and the hope I have moving forward. And as always, I'm teaching two Bible studies a month. You can go to Crowdcast and find my page. It's just under Montemater and you can see the classes that are upcoming. We're doing a long series on how we got the Bible going through every book of the Bible and addressing its origin, its authorship, its moment in history, translation issues, contradictions. It's a very, very fun thing. And as of today, today is June 23rd that I'm recording this. I will be speaking at the National Organization of Women's Conference on the 26th. And then I will be leading a live chat at Stonewall in New York with Ted Sturmur for his upcoming book, The Resistance History of the US. Just a shameless plug for him here. He doesn't know that I'm going to say this phenomenal book, but it addresses specifically the resistances in American history that actually worked. And they didn't work by following the rules. And it's a really, really interesting read. I'm actually going through it my second time now to prepare for that event and then have quite a bit of travel in July. So before we dive into the real meat of the episode, I want to distinguish two different things. And that's Christianity versus Christian nationalism because these are two entirely different things. In fact, I'm of the opinion that you cannot be a Christian nationalist and a Christian. So Christianity, of course, is a religion. It is a faith tradition with Scripture theology practice in almost 2,000 years of documented history. Christian nationalism is a political ideology. It uses the language, symbols, and identity of Christianity to advance a program of ethnic exclusion, authoritarian control, and patriarchal hierarchy. We'll get into the weeds of that here in a minute. It's not a more conservative version of Christianity. It is a different thing entirely operating under the same brand name. Conflating them is exactly what Christian nationalists want us to do. They want to be able to behave and act in a way that pushes their power and their ideologies. And then when you oppose them or hold them accountable, they want to be able to say, oh, you're attacking Christians. No, I'm not. I'm actually not at all. I'm actually defending Christians because you're using their name incorrectly. Christianity adds its documented source. So if we strip down all the institutional accumulation, all the political manipulation or imperial rebranding, Christianity is a set of teachings attributed to a man named Yeshua of Nazareth, Jesus, a man who, for the record, was born poor and occupied territory to a teenage mother in a stable in a region that is now the West Bank of Palestine. A refugee before he could walk his family fled to Egypt to escape the Jedi's side. Old King, according to the Gospels, he grew up in Galilee, which was rural and looks down upon Jerusalem's religious establishment. One of the first things said about him in the Gospels is, can anything good come from Nazareth? Ehh, he's from Nazareth. So that's the reality of who Jesus is and where Christianity comes from. This man, when he began his public ministry, spent it touching lepers, people who were ritually impure. You were not supposed to touch them or be anywhere near them. They were literally an untouchable class in his society. He ate dinner with tax collectors and sex workers, the most reviled people in the community. Zacchaeus, the tax collector, climbed a tree to see him and Jesus looked up and invited himself to Zacchaeus's house for dinner. While the crowd muttered that he had gone to the guest, gone to be the guest of a sinner, Jesus did not care. He healed on the Sabbath. He got in trouble with the religious establishment because his biggest opponents were the religious establishment. It was the same Jesus that told a wealthy young ruler to sell everything he owned and give it to the poor who threw the money changers out of the temple, not the foreigners, not the sinners, not the lepers, the money changers, the religious establishment, profiting off of religious access. The ones monetizing worship or benefiting from it, lining their pockets under the guise of religious sanctity. He made a whip out of course. He churned over their tables that is literally what this podcast is named after. He drove them out and the ones he was furious at were the religious and financially powerful who were exploiting the institution of faith. So whoever you personally believe he was, divine, prophetic teacher, apocalyptic rabbi, historical figure, that is what the source material says. That is Christ and that is Christianity. Christian nationalism is not that. Christian nationalism is a political movement that uses, again, Christian imagery, language and identity to argue that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, that it must be governed according to Christian principles as interpreted by a very specific subset of white Protestant Americans and that anyone who objects is not just politically wrong, they're opposing God. It wraps political ambition in the language of the sacred because when your policy is God's will, opposition becomes heresy and your enemies are no longer just your enemies. They're enemies of God himself. And that's the trick. That's the whole trick and it has worked across centuries of Western history and it's very effective. But I wanted to give you eight markers of Christian nationalism so you know it when you see it. So you know the distinction and as we get deeper into this conversation, you have a lot more clarity on what is or isn't Christian nationalism. So the first thing, Christian, well, actually before I get into this list and the reason this is so important to me is because actual Christians are some of the most beautiful people you will ever meet who are very mindful, very caring. They build up their communities. They care for the poor. Of helping the world of like because Christianity in its original, its original kind of form is for the world. It's not for one nation. It's not for domination. It was always about invitation in the least of these. So the reason I make this distinction is because actual Christians are really incredible people and unfortunately America has a Christian nationalism epidemic. So the first distinguishing characteristic of Christian nationalism is that national identity is sacred and fused with the faith. Country often comes before God or it is inextricably linked and tied to God. In Christian nationalism, America is divinely chosen nation with a covenant relationship with God like the Old Testament Israelites. Christianity has no such doctrine. The Bible was not written with America in mind. They didn't know we were coming. It wasn't written in English. There is no special call to America. The kingdom of Jesus described was explicitly not of this world. He said that to pilot directly in the Gospel of John. When the crowd tried to make him king by force in John 6, he withdrew from them. It was diametrically opposed to empire. Christian nationalism, the first dead giveaway is their faith is conflated with American supremacy. Number two, ethnic and cultural gatekeeping. A, quote, real Christian are white, Protestant, European descendant. This is again, not a biblical position, especially since I mean, Jesus was a. Palestinian Jew. The scriptures of Christianity are aggressively universalist. Galatians 3.28 eliminates every social category. Revelation 7.9 describes a crowd before God of every nation in tribe and people in language. The Great Commission in Matthew 28 sent disciples to all nations and it was always invitation. It was never by force. In fact, Jesus condemned the sword. In the early church, Acts was explicitly a multi-ethnic beginning. Philip converts an Ethiopian unit in Acts 8. Peter has a vision commanding him to eat Gentile food and stop calling things unclean in Acts 10. Paul is the apostle to the Gentiles and the whole movement was designed to break ethnic and national boundaries. Christian nationalism reconstructs those boundaries that Christianity set out to destroy. Number three, political power is the explicit goal. This is why. And many of you, if you grew up in evangelicalism or maybe if you, you know, you're either you're a Christian yourself or you're not religious, but you're like, wait, I thought you guys believed in something and you watch Christians support somebody like Donald Trump, who's a serial adulterer. He's been known for fraud. He said multiple cases being racist his whole life. He's dishonest. He's a con man. He's all these things, the porn stars, the campaign finance violations. And you're like, wait a minute. How do, how are Christians supporting this guy? Didn't they say like, Bill Clinton got a blow job and they were like, hey, we need morality in the Oval Office, which I agree. Bill Clinton's a dirt bag. But if you've been looking and you're confused about that, it's because Christian nationalism doesn't actually care about the mission of Christ. It cares about political power and whoever can get them that is the person they're going to go with. We see this right now with James Talleriko's race against Ken Paxton. James Talleriko is the most kindly articulate, smart, real Christian man that we've seen in a long time going against Ken Paxton, who is a serial adulterer, who just parted a, pardoned a confessed child abuser like this man admitted to raping the child and Ken Paxton forgave him. He has misuse campaign funds to hide his affair with his mistress. He got a donor to hire his mistress so she could be nearby. All these things, they're still supporting Ken Paxton. The worst thing that they can say about Talleriko is they're accusing him of being vegan, right? It's the best they've got and they're making AI-generated photos of him claiming he's trans. If that doesn't tell you everything about the trans argument too, but that's why we see this kind of dichotomy of how could you support this person? It's because political power is the goal. Number four, the Bible becomes a political document in Christian nationalism. Scripture has read primarily to justify policy positions like immigration, restriction, gender hierarchy, and racial order, mainstream Christian theology across Catholic, Orthodox, and most Protestant traditions read the Bible as a guide for personal and communal spiritual formation as a narrative of God's relationship with humanity, as literature, poetry, prophecy, history, theology. They use it primarily as a policy manual requiring extracting specific verses from their historical and textural context using them as proof texts. So meaning the Christian nationalists reach into the Bible, they'll cherry pick a few verses and then say, "Well, because we're a Christian nation, this is why we should have this policy. We're going to get into some of those in a minute." Number five, political opponents are spiritual enemies. I have been called a witch, a Jezebel, a demon on my social media, more times than I can count. When I tell a Christian nationalist that Paul didn't write first Timothy, I'm not disagreed with. I'm declared a tool of Satan. And that is one of the best tricks that Christian nationalism and religious nationalism in any religion can have is because again, you make your, your enemies become spiritual enemies of God. And I'm using Christian nationalism specifically because that's the issue we're having in the United States. Any fundamentalist, nationalist religion can replicate these things. Number six, might signals righteousness, wealth, dominance, and political victory are read as signs of God's favor unless they don't like you. And then it's a sign that you are in league with Satan who is of this world. And that's why you're successful on this earth. Just a little, little fun cognitive dissonance there. But for the most part, all of those things are God's favor. This is prosperity gospel applied to nations. Jesus said explicitly that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. He said, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are the persecuted. So he's interesting. They really love the 10 commandments, but not the Beatitudes for a very specific reason. The sermon on the Mount is a systematic inversion of every power dynamic. Jesus' culture recognized. So it's not about hierarchy and dominance. Number seven, grievances, the engine. This is one, ooh, this was driven home hard for me when I was growing up. Christian nationalism runs on the story that Christians are under attack and must fight back. Reality check. There is no group in the history of the United States that has had more institutional power, cultural dominance, or political access, or favorable legislation, or legal protection, or representation in the government than white Protestant Christians. There is no one who has had more privilege and representation and protection than white Protestant Christians. The persecution narrative is the fuel that keeps the machine running though, and it's alive. Because how do you raise? I remember growing up as a kid, and they would raise us that like, you know, you've got to be ready to be persecuted, and they're going to come after you for your faith, and everybody in this country hates you because you're a Christian. And so you come out like on the defense because you assume you're going to be attacked. And then when people hold you accountable, when you do something messed up, you immediately assume they're attacking your faith because that's what you've been told they're going to do. And number eight, it's always about compliance over conversion. The goal is a society governed by their rules, regardless of what the individual believes. Christian nationalism does not believe in religious plurality. They do not believe in free will. They do not believe in you being able to choose who you love, how you dress, how you show up in the world. They don't actually believe in small government. They believe in very big government that controls every facet of your life because they don't care if you believe it or not. They care that you comply. They care that you obey. They value order more than they value justice or good or free will Christianity, real Christianity's entire project is voluntary faith and transformed hearts. You cannot coerce belief. The moment you start using state power to compel religious behavior, you have stopped doing Christianity and started doing something else. Christian nationalism is about force. They don't care if you believe they don't care what your choices are. As long as you comply with their specific rules. Now that we have that separation, let's dive into some of the recent topics. Let's go back to the SBC vote. Let's talk about Albert Moeller, who is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He's one of the most powerful figures in American evangelical Christianity right now. His truth and unity amendment would write into the SBC's constitution that any church allowing a woman, any pastoral title at all will be automatically expelled. That means she could have the title of children's pastor if she has that title. The church gets expelled. So here's the thing. Let's talk about 1 Timothy 212 and 1 Corinthians 1434 because those are the two passages. This entire movement rests its theological case on. If you ever see a man get mad that a woman is preaching or talking about the Bible, these are the two verses. They'll throw out. I just responded to a guy that did these the other day. So first of all, 1 Timothy Paul didn't write it. Also, the second one Paul didn't write that either that was added by a scribe after the fact. So before I get to that, I promise we're getting there with full receipts. I need you to understand what we know Jesus did and what we know the documented Paul actually wrote because you might be surprised some of the books Paul didn't actually write or were very unsure if he wrote them or not because that contrast compared to what's happening in Orlando is very, very stark. And for, again, a group, my big issue is people claiming to be Christians to further injustice and inequality and cruelty. That makes me mad because I think Jesus' mission was pretty freaking awesome to be honest with you. I think what he taught was pretty great and I hate it being misused. So let's actually talk about how Jesus treated women, what Paul actually wrote and then get into these clobber verses. So the Gospel of John chapter 4 verses 1 through 42. Jesus is traveling through Samaria. He stops at a well, the woman comes to draw water and Jesus asks her for a drink. If you grew up in church, you know this story. The disciples aren't there. They've gone to buy food in the town. Jesus and this woman have a conversation and it's quite a long one. It's the illogical. She asked them about the proper place to worship because in Samaria, they believed that the place of worship was not in Jerusalem and that was one of the key things they disagreed with the Jewish community on. He tells her he is the Messiah and the Samaritan that the Samaritan has been waiting for and she goes back to her town and tells everyone about him. The Gospel says many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony. So there's a lot of things happening in that story that if we don't read it in its actual context, we miss. It's a breach of multiple social protocols simultaneously. Jews and Samaritans had a four-century long ethnic and religious hostility between them. They shared ancestry but it split over the question of proper place of worship, Jerusalem for the Jews, Mount Gharism for the Samaritans. The hostility was very real, very documented and mutual. The Jewish religious law did not generally favor socializing with Samaritans at all. The Jewish men, particularly religious teachers, did not initiate any kind of theological conversation with women in public, Jewish or Samaritan, certainly not at Wells, which in the ancient world were social gathering spaces where the fact of who was talking to who would be noted and discussed. They didn't do any of those things. That's also why the good Samaritan parable is also so powerful because of this enmity and hostility that exists between Jews and Samaritans. The Samaritan woman is even more so because many Jewish leaders wouldn't speak to a woman in public. That wasn't their wife. When the disciples returned and found Jesus talking to this woman, the gospel of John says they are surprised. The text says they didn't say anything to him about it. They didn't ask why are you talking to her, but the surprise is recorded. This woman who is from the wrong ethnicity, who has had five husbands, who is living with the man she isn't married to, she is the first person in the gospel of John to whom Jesus explicitly reveals that he is the Messiah. Not to the 12th, not to the religious leaders in Jerusalem, not to his family, but to this woman. She becomes the first evangelist in the gospel of John. She goes to her town and tells them and they believe because of her testimony, Jesus chose her. Luke 1038-42, Jesus visits the home of Mary and Martha, two sisters. Martha is doing what women were expected to do. She's managing the house. She's serving. She's hosting. She's making sure everyone's comfortable. Mary is sitting at Jesus' feet in the formal posture of a disciple receiving instruction from a rabbi, which women were not allowed to do. So sitting at the feet of is a technical term. It meant that you are a student, a formal learner, someone who is receiving rabbinic instruction who will come to you. carry on that tradition. That is a very, very striking and important image that they're teaching here that a woman was able to take the position of a formal student with the expectation that you would carry those teachings on and teach others. In the book of Acts Paul was says he was educated at the feet of Gameliel. That's what this phrase means. Paul's teacher was Gameliel. He would take this sitting position position at the feet of Gameliel, which is how he was instructed. It means discipleship. Women did not do this. They were not permitted culturally. It was not done. Female students of rabbis were not a category that existed. Mary is doing something that is in this context very radical. When Martha objects reasonably by her culture standards, she wants Jesus to tell Mary to help her to put her back in the role women are supposed to occupy. Jesus refuses. He says Mary has chosen what is better and it will not be taken from her. Not Mary needs to go help Martha when we're done. Not I'll finish the lesson, but she should help in serving after he defended a woman's right to theological education publicly, explicitly in a culture that denied it to her. He refused to enforce the gender role. He refused to tell Mary, "Hey, you need to get back in the kitchen." Luke 813 tells us that women traveled around with Jesus and the 12 throughout his ministry and they were helping support him out of their own means. They were bankrolling his ministry. Joanna, the wife of Chusa, who was Herod's household manager, Mary Magdalene's and Susanna and others. They're named alongside the 12. They traveled with the ministry. They bankrolled it. These are female disciples that Jesus had, that he's teaching. Female students. They're essential in his movement. And then let's talk about Martha's confession of faith. In John chapter 11, after Lazarus died, Mary comes to meet Jesus before he enters Bethany and in the conversation that follows, Jesus says to her, "I am the resurrection in the life. The one who believes in me will live even though they die. And whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?" And Mary says, "Yes, Lord. I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world." In the Gospel of Matthew, Peter's declaration that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God in chapter 16, is treated as a foundational moment of faith. Jesus calls it a revelation from God and declares he will build his church on this rock. Martha's declaration in John 11 is the same declaration. So that means it is the same content. It carries the same weight. A woman makes the central confession of Christian faith in the Gospel of John. And it's almost never discussed because the tradition has been so thoroughly trained to center the stories of men. And then we're going to talk about the resurrection. In all four Gospels, Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20, the accounts differ in significant ways. The number of angels that were there, whether it was one woman or two women at the tomb, whether disciples believe the women when they report what Jesus says when he appears, all four accounts have very big differences that you would expect from four different independent testimonies that were not eyewitness accounts. They were written much later. Biblical scholars have noted these differences for centuries, but there is one element that all four agree on it. The first witness is always Mary Magdalene. In a first century Jewish legal context where women's testimony was not admissible in court, where women were not considered reliable witnesses. Jesus chose a woman to be the first person to see him risen. The first person who would preach the Gospel of the resurrection was a woman. And in the Gospel of John, he gives her the direct commission, go and tell my brothers. Those are Apostolistic words. He says go and tell is exactly what he says to the disciples when he sends them out later. She receives an explicit mission from the risen Christ to go preach his resurrection. The early church recognized this. They gave her the title Apostola Apostolorum, which means Apostle to the Apostles. She was the one who told them. She was the one who launched the post-resurrection ministry. She delivered the most important message in Christian history. But when we go all the way up to 591 CE, Pope Gregory I declares Mary Magdalene a prostitute. No, she wasn't. She was not a prostitute ever. She was not the woman who came and wept at Jesus' feet. He conflated her with an unnamed sinful woman who watched Jesus' feet with her hair in Luke 7, a completely different person with no textual basis for that identification. He also conflated her with Mary of Bethany, Martha's sister, also a different person. The composite sinful Mary Magdalene that Gregory invented has absolutely no basis in the Gospel text. She is described in the Gospels as a woman whom Jesus had cast out seven demons, which in that context means she had been significantly unwell, not that she had a particular occupation. She was ill. She is a woman of means who traveled with the ministry as a disciple supported it financially. She is the first witness to the resurrection. This is what the text actually says. She was the first apostle. But in order to write out her ministry, they called her a whore. How familiar does that sound? The Catholic Church did not officially correct this until 1969, was when they were like, "Hey, my bad." Mary Magdalene, not a prostitute. We actually made that up. We absolutely made that up. 1378 years, they let the lie stand. It worked because it erased her credibility and erased her apostolic commission, which is only now starting to revive in the last 20 years. If she was a prostitute, maybe the church didn't need to take the first witness to the resurrection quite so seriously. And maybe just maybe they could write women out of authority entirely. All right, let's jump to Paul really quick. So Romans 16, we know Paul wrote the book of Romans. Romans 16 is one of the most important chapters in the New Testament for understanding women in the early church and is one of the most systematically ignored chapters in conservative Christian context. Paul closes his letter to the Romans, the most theologically comprehensive letter he ever wrote with a list of greetings. Let's walk through the list versus one and two. He says, "I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Centuria. I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you for she has been a benefactor of many people, including me." The Greek word Paul uses here for Phoebe is Diaconos. It is the exact word that appears throughout the New Testament for male church leaders. In Philippians 1, 1 Paul addresses overseers and deacons using Diaconos for the men of the church. And first Timothy 3, 8 through 13. Again, Paul didn't write this letter. The qualifications for Diaconos are laid out in this letter that Paul didn't write. Everywhere else in the New Testament, that word appears. It is translated as deacons, a formal church office. For Phoebe, English translators translated it as servant, just for her. Because I mean, we can't have female deacons. The Bible says they can be deacons. No, no, just change it really quick so we can tell the women of the church they can't lead. The same word deliberately rendered differently to downgrade her role from an office to a task that involved service. This has been documented and corrected in most contemporary scholarship. But again, the damage has already been done for centuries. Phoebe was a deacon. She was not a servant. Also, she was commissioned by Paul. Paul sent her to Rome. He says she has been a benefactor of many people, including me. The Greek word here is prostratus, which is in the ancient context means a patron, a sponsor. Someone of means and social standing who provides support. Phoebe is not a helper. She is a deacon with resources who has been sent by Paul to deliver the most important letter. She delivers the letter to the Romans. The most important letter in Christian theological history to the church in Rome. You do not trust your most significant correspondence to someone who you consider subordinate and unreliable. You give it to someone you trust completely. In verses three and four of chapter 16, it says, "Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my co-workers in Christ Jesus, they risk their lives for me, not only I, but all the churches of the Gentiles are grateful to them. Priscilla's name comes before her husband Aquila's." Now, for us, we're like, "Okay, that doesn't mean very much to us, but it does in an ancient context. In four of the six places Priscilla appears in the New Testament, her name is listed first. In the conventions of ancient Greco-Roman world, the person named first held the greater prominence in social standing. Paul is signaling Priscilla's preeminence in that relationship. In Acts 1824 through 26, when the preacher of Paulus arrived in Ephesus with a thorough knowledge of the scriptures, but an incomplete understanding of the faith, it was Priscilla, who took him aside and explained to him the way of God more adequately. A woman and her husband together corrected and completed the theology of a male preacher. She was an active teacher correcting Apollo's the teacher. Verse 6, "Greet Mary, who worked very hard for you. The verb Paul uses "copy-a-o" is the same word he uses throughout his letters to describe the labor of a "possilistic ministry." It's not, "Oh, she helped me out of time or two. It's hard a "possil work." Apostolic work. Verse 7, "Greet Andronicus and Junior, my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me, they are outstanding among the apostles and they were in Christ before I was. "Junia is a woman's name. It was a common Latin woman's name in the first century. It was understood as a woman's name by virtually every commentator from the first century through the medieval period. The influential fourth century bishop John Chrysostom, who in other writings said things about women that are actually truly horrific. I'm not giving him any credit here, but he even wrote about this passage. "Oh, how great the devotion of this woman that she should be counted worthy of the appellation of Apostle. He saw a woman apostle because that's what the text says. But it was not until medieval scribes uncomfortable with the existence of a female apostle began changing the name "Junia" to the masculine "Junias" that she disappeared from the record. "Junias" is a name that does not appear in any ancient Greek or Latin records outside of these manuscripts that were intentionally offered to create a system where women couldn't be apostles. It was apparently invented specifically to erase junior. And if you want to, do you want to get to the next one? We're going to have to go to the next one. to read about that change in documentation. Elden J. Ep wrote a "Junia, the first woman apostle, has the full manuscript history of how the name was changed when, in which manuscript traditions it really breaks it down." But Junia was there all along. This was not corrected in most English translations until the 80s and 90s. Yeah, the 1980s and 90s. In verse 12, it says, "Greet Trefina and Trefosa, whose those women who work hard in the Lord greet my dear friend, Pursus, another woman who has worked very hard in the Lord, three more women, all doing a post-illistic labor." Again, this is not, oh, they were helping out at the potluck. These are apostles doing a post-illistic work. When he's saying, "Who worked hard in the Lord," he means, "they share in my work." They're doing the same work I am. He's using the same verb he uses for missionary work. The proportion of women in this chapter is extraordinary. There's nine women doing significant ministry work in close greetings in the closing greetings of Paul's most important letter. Our women, the church, forgot really quickly. In verse 40, Paul arrives in Philippi, the first city on the European continent where he preaches. He goes to a riverside place of prayer and begins speaking to the women gathered there. One of them is Lydia, a dealer in Purple Cloth from the city of Thiaatira. Purple Cloth was luxury goods. She is a luxury dealer. Purple die in the ancient world came from mollus and was extremely expensive. It was the color of royalty and the very wealthy. Lydia is a business woman of means operating an international trade market. She hears Paul believes is baptized and immediately invites Paul and his companions to stay in her house. That house becomes the first Christian community in Philippi, the first church on European soil. Lydia is the church planter. She provided the space, the resources, the hospitality, the community gathering point for the establishment of European Christianity. Without her house, there is no Philippian church. Without the Philippian church, there's no letter to the Philippians and her name does not appear in most discussions of the founding of European Christianity. Philippians is another of the books that were sure Paul wrote. So the ones that are confirmed Pauline are Romans, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, 1st Thessalonians, Galatians, Philippians, and Philemon. Those are the only ones that were like, we know that Paul wrote these. We know now 1st and 2nd Timothy and Titus, the pastoral epistles were absolutely not written by Paul, but he also very likely did not write 2nd Thessalonians Ephesians or Colossians. A few more verses here of women that the Southern Baptist Convention apparently doesn't read about because why would they bother reading the book? They claim they follow. Acts 21 and 9. Philippi evangelist had four daughters who prophesied. Proposying in the New Testament context is not simply predicting the future. It's proclaiming the word of God, speaking with spiritual authority to community. It is functionally preaching. Philippi's four daughters were preachers. Their name is documented. It's in the Bible. Colossians 415, Paul greets Nympha of the church in her house. Nympha, a woman, is hosting a house church. She is a community leader in her location. Her name was also changed to the masculine Nymphas in some manuscripts to write her out. They kept doing this. They kept finding women in authority and masculinizing their names to write them out. And again, Colossians and Ephesians were very likely written by students of Paul or some kind of Pauline school where people that followed. You can think of that like kind of a denominations. They followed the Pauline Christianity and likely was written by students of his. But that's also why they believe that Colossians was written first and Ephesians was actually a copy, which is why Colossians and Ephesians almost read like exactly the same book. First Corinthians 111, Paul writes that some from Chloe's household have informed me about the quarrels among you. Chloe's household has become the communication channel to Paul. Her name is the authority in that sentence. Her people are reporting to him about the state of the Corinthian community. Verse 2 17 through 18, "Penocost the founding moment of the church, the Holy Spirit comes down." Peter stands up and quotes the prophet Joel. In the last days, God says, "I will pour my out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days and they will prophesy." The promise of the spirit at the founding moment of the church was explicitly gender-inclusive. There's women both all. This is the basis for which the church was launched. Women received the spirit, women prophesied. This was a founding charter. And then of course, and Galatians is one of the books. We know Paul wrote this to me, "Beyond Paul's nomination of Phoebe and his praise of women in ministry." Paul wrote in his own voice, one of the seven with no scholarly disputes. There is neither Juno Greek, no slave nor free. There is neither male and female for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Christianity in its first form was radically egalitarian. Elaine Pagels has called this one of the most socially radical statements in the ancient world. The categories that organized every social relationship in culture, ethnicity, legal status, gender, Paul said they were obliterated in Christ. That is the documented Paul in his own handwriting effectively. That Paul, named Women as Deacons, Apostles, Teachers, Church Planners, and Prophets, traveled with women, credited women with funding the ministry, received intelligence from women's household, and said there was no male or female in Christ. And we are told that this same Paul wrote that women must be silent in the churches. No, he did not. And before I dive into that, I'm going to take my first of two mid-show sponsor breaks. If you would like to have these episodes ad-free or just support my work to continue in this work, you can sign up at patreon.com/manti-mater. And as I go further, I want to be very clear that this is not like some, it's not progressive reinterpretations of scripture to fit modern changes, right? And we do have things in our modern society that disagree with the Bible. The Old Testament allows for slavery. We now understand collectively, most of us, that that's incredibly wrong. That's the evil thing to do. Unfortunately, I do hear like far-right people talking about bringing that back. But what I'm talking about is established consensus of New Testament scholarship, including many conservative scholars. This is when we look at all the data that we can get and then we answer the question, honestly, and we try to make the best decision possible. This is what is taught in divinity programs, including evangelical ones. Biblical scholarship has been making these arguments for a while now. The only people who need you not to know this are the people who need the specific text to support their specific agenda. So they're going to keep first Timothy and first Corinthians, right? Those two verses because they need those to justify what they already want to do. But that's not what the text actually says. So again, the seven undisputed letters, texts that virtually all scholars across all ideologies and denominations agree Paul wrote himself, again, Romans, first and second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, first Thessalonians, and Philemon. These are what we know Paul actually wrote. When you want to know what Paul actually believed, you start in these letters. Then there's the Dutero-Pauline letters. Text that were scholarly opinion is genuinely divided. We significant evidence pointing to different authorship. The language is different. He contradicts himself. There are things mentioned that would have happened after Paul's death. So these are possibly by Paul's students or communities writing in his tradition. So they're trying to align themselves for the most part with him, but the language is different. There's a lot of evidence that he didn't write it. This is Ephesians, Colossians, and second Thessalonians. So the wives submit to your husband's passage in Ephesians 5.22 is from a Dutero-Pauline letter. The wives submit passage in Colossians also from a Dutero-Pauline letter. The actual Paul who wrote Galatians 3.28 that there is no male or female didn't write these. Then the pastoral epistles, first and second Timothy and Titus, are considered pseudo-pigrafal by the majority of critical Bible scholars. This is not a minority position. Things are mentioned that only occurred in the second century. Turns of phrase that were only used in the second century or used long after Paul died. So hard to write new letters when you're already dead. So how do we know that these were not written by him after they were written after his death? The first is the vocabulary problem. The pastoral epistles contain approximately 848 distinct terms. About 306 of those words do not appear anywhere in Paul's seven confirmed letters. That's more than a third of the vocabulary. So to put that in context, if you were writing a sentence that had ten words, you would have to use three words you've never used before, every ten words to match the vocabulary difference of this. That's huge. And you would have to intentionally do that to be able to incorporate so 30% new language into what you're saying. Furthermore, about 175 of those unique words appear in second century Christian writings, suggesting they were written in the second century after Paul's death. This is a measurable and very large difference. The second is the theological problem. The authentic Paul, what we know that he taught, is obsessed with specific theological concerns. He's very obsessed with grace versus the works of the law, radical equality of the new covenant community, the immanence of Christ returns. Like he's like, "Guys, Christ is coming back. We got to get ready. Don't get married if you can hack it because Jesus is coming back." He's obsessed with the spiritual transformation of believers. His language is very urgent. It's very personal. It's very volatile in an emotional sense. You can feel him arguing in real time with real opponents. The pastorals are focused on completely different concerns, maintaining proper church hierarchy, regulating who can hold what office, conforming to the social expectations of Roman society, ensuring that the church appears respectable to outsiders, totally different theological register. Then there's the historical problem. The timeline of events referenced in the pastoral epistles does not fit the known timeline of Paul's life as documented in acts in his confirmed letters. The pastorals seem to assume a later period in the church's development than Paul's letters. Then there's the structural problem. The authentic Paul's vision of the church community is radically egalitarian, right? He names female deacons and apostles. He tells Philemon to receive Onisimus as a brother rather than a slave. He says there's neither Juno Greek. It's this very egalitarian. very radical for its time teaching, the pastoral's vision of the church is hierarchical, ordered, tied to Roman household management structures, and gender hierarchy. The vision of the community is totally, totally different. If you'd like to read more about this and the scholarship around this, my favorite book about this issue is Bart Irman's Forged from 2011. It's really, really good. He's also a great blog to follow if you're just curious about these kind of things. So why were the pastoral epistles kept in canon? Specifically when they're not even due to opalene texts. They're not even written by his students. They're written by some guy claiming to be Paul. Well, they were kept because they were useful even at that time. By the time the church was deciding which letters to were authoritative, the second and third centuries when Christianity was becoming institutionalized and was beginning the process of becoming the imperial religion, the pastoral epistle served as the institutional need for hierarchy order, and you guessed it, regulating women's roles and bodies. The letters that authorize male authority over women were too convenient to exclude, and there were multiple early church theologians that knew even at that time that they were false. They were in circulation attributed to Paul and they got away with it. So that addresses 1 Timothy 212. We know that Paul didn't write it. There's a lot of evidence to show that. And we also know that the people who were building Christianity into an empiric religion knew that Paul didn't write it, but it was just too convenient to be able to control women and solidify men's power in spirituality and for men to control access to God in the faith. Let's talk about 1 Corinthians 1434. So 1 Corinthians is one of Paul's seven confirmed letters. There is absolutely no serious debate about that. But the verses women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission as the law says. If they want to inquire about something they should ask their own husbands at home for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in church. As 1 Corinthians 1434 and 35, we're not in the original letter. Here's the textual evidence that we have of this. The verses appear in different places in different manuscript traditions. In most manuscripts, they appear where they are in modern Bibles after verse 33, but a significant group of manuscripts, including Western text tradition represented by important manuscripts like the Codex Bazae, an early significant Greek Latin New Testament. The verse appears after verse 40 when a passage appears in different locations in different manuscript traditions. The standard text critical conclusion is that it was originally a marginal annotation, right? A scribes note in the margin that got incorporated into the body text at different points by different scribes. This little note from a scribe became scripture. Gordon Fee makes this interpolation argument in detail in the first epistle to the Corinthians from 1987. Fee is a conservative Pentecostal theologian. He's not writing from a progressive agenda. And this is 1987 as well. He's following the textual evidence that says, Hey, this doesn't belong here. It also breaks up what Paul is in the middle of talking about. And it kind of throws this verse in there. And you're like, Wait, why did you just that's a weird pivot? It's all indicative that that verse was never there originally. There's also an internal contradiction with 1 Corinthians itself. Three chapters earlier in 1 Corinthians 11. Five, Paul says, but every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors or head. So he's discussing women praying and prophesying in the assembly. He's giving instructions about how to do it with respect. And this is more a traditional thing than it is a spiritual doctrine that we would carry now. But he's he's telling them, this is how if you're going to prophesy in the church, this is how you should do it in a way that is honoring and respectful. He doesn't tell him to stop praying and prophesying in the assembly. He assumes that they're doing it. If Paul had written in chapter 14 that women must be completely silent in the church, then chapter 11 makes absolutely no sense. And chapter 11 doesn't have any questions about whether it was in the original manuscript. You do not discuss the proper manner of doing something three chapters before saying they shouldn't talk at all. The interpolation argument resolves the contradiction cleanly. Someone added the silencing verses later to make sure that women couldn't have authority or speak in the church using Paul's letter as a vehicle to bring his position in line with the agenda. The pastoral epistles didn't write. The SBC is building a constitutional barrier using the verse Paul didn't write that was inserted into a letter of his to overrule what he had said earlier in that same letter. So let's move from cross to empire. So how women are written out of Christianity. And I talk about all this now because obviously what's going on with the SBC, the challenges of faith, the Christian nationalist position that is directly opposed to feminism to women's rights, but also this increase in funding from places like turning point USA and these conservative movements that are paying people five to six figures, these conservative influencers, five to six figures, a video and a talk to rattle off these talking points to convince young girls specifically in their teens to get married to have babies young to not focus on education or career, and it's going to get those girls trapped. That is why I am so passionate about it. For women and young girls, if you really want you want to get married and you want to have kids, you want to be a same, that's awesome. That is awesome, awesome, awesome. And I hope that you get all of that. But know that you have to be able to have the resources and the education to take care of yourself if something happens. You could meet the best man in the world and he could pass away. And you may have three, four kids and you need to be able to take care of them. And the reality is you can meet who you think is the best person ever and that person cannot be who you thought they were. They can lie, they can cheat, they can leave and you need to be able to take care of yourself. The one person that you have to have complete faith in that you are for sure going to be stuck with your whole life is yourself. That's why I talk about these things because they are targeting young women to get them to make these emotionally charged decisions claiming it's about faith, it's not, it's about them getting you to comply with their hierarchy. That's why I talk about it so much because I want people to make free decisions and smart decisions. So the elimination of women from Christian leadership did not happen in one dramatic moment. Obviously it happens gradually. We see, we already talked about many of these changes of names, writing women out of the narrative. And if we want to understand Christian nationalism, we have to understand why it operates the way it does. We need to understand the transformation because Christian nationalism is empire Christianity. It's what happens when the cross and the sword became one instrument. And we talked about this in the Holy War episode. In the earliest decades of the church, the community Paul describes in his confirmed letters is astonishingly egalitarian. Women host house churches. They're named as apostles. They prophesy. They travel with the apostles. They plant churches in their homes. They fund the ministry. The movement is decentralized, diverse and draws heavily from the margins of Roman society. In slave people, women, foreigners, the poor, the wealthier there too, like Lydia Phoebe, Chloe Priscilla, but the power in this movement does not come from wealth or gender. It comes from the spirit. But watch what happens as the church institutionalizes and eventually becomes the state religion. Let's talk about the mountainist controversy. In the late second century, a movement arose in Fregia, which is modern day Turkey called mountainism, founded by a man named mountainus, alongside two women prophets Priscilla and Maximilla. The mountainist claimed ongoing prophetic revelation, intense spiritual experiences and direct guidance from the Holy Spirit. They were ecstatic and charismatic. They had female prophets, women who spoke with spiritual authority. The emerging Orthodox church condemned mountainism as heretical and the presence of female prophets was explicitly part of the objection. Trutullian of Carthage, who we will get to, initially sympathized with the manoteness and then became one. The mainstream church's condemnation of mountainism and the late second and early third century was partly a condemnation of women's prophetic authority. When you eliminate the spirit as an equalizer, you can enforce institutional hierarchy. The mountainist believed the spirit was speaking through women. The emerging institutional church says they cannot be the spirit. They are demons. Let's talk about Trutullian. I have a beef with Trutullian. Trutullian of Carthage is one of the most important theologians of the early church. He coined the word Trinity. So that's where we get that from. That would have came late second century, early third century was when that first appears. Early Christians did not believe in the Trinity. He wrote extensively and quite brilliantly on Christian theology. He was a very smart, very educated man. He also wrote that they call to feminarum, the on the apparel of women, which he addresses women directly. Oh boy, this is just, it's a gem. And this is a founding father of the institutional church, by the way. He says, do you not know that you are each and Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age. The guilt must of necessity live to you are the devil's gateway. You are the unsealer of that forbidden tree. You are the first deserter of divine law. You are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image man on account of your desert that is death. Even the Son of God had to die. Eek. So not only is he, is he using the doctrine of Eve here to, you know, beat women down and say, you're the source of all evil. First of all, the Bible says that the sin is passed down through the Father, just really quickly. But he also says, essentially, he said, you destroyed so easily God's image man. What's your tooling is implying here is that women are not made in the image of God. You are the devil's gateway. He's addressing all women, all women are the devil's gateway, all women are responsible for the fall for death for the necessity of Christ. It's your fault. You killed Jesus. This theology, the idea that women are inherently corrupting, spiritually dangerous, responsible for sin that their autonomy is dangerous is not a fringe position in early Christian history around this time. It becomes structural in the second and third century. It was not the position at all for first century Christians living closest to the time of Christ. But people liked your Tulean and we're gonna get to origin and Augustine. They were like, "Ah, you know, I just didn't really don't like women being in positions of power." So I'm just gonna, you know what women are evil. Women are evil. They have the devil in them and we can't, we can't let them lead. We can't do that. Let's go to origin of Alexandria. Probably the most prolific theologian in the early church, he would have lived from 185 to 253 CE. He wrote thousands of biblical commentary and theological treatise. He was brilliant. He also stated flatly that women should not speak and assemblies and should not teach men. Again, these doctrinal positions did not come from Jesus or Paul. They came from men later who were uncomfortable with women in power. And this was not from a position of ignorance for origin. Origin was one of the most sophisticated Bible scholars in history. He chose that position in spite of textual evidence. Otherwise. In the council of Leo Decia from 363 to 364 CE, can an 11 of that council states, "Presbyteresses," which is essentially female priests, are not to be ordained in the church. Some translations say, "Women shall not be appointed presbyters or presidents." That means priests or like president of the governing body. The exact Greek is disputed. But the intent is clear, obviously, women's formal ordination is being prohibited at a regional council. And the fact that this canon needed to be written tells you that women were being ordained before it was written. They are creating a new law that totally contradicts the early church and what the early church stood for. You don't prohibit something that isn't happening. So we know that women were in fact leading in being ordained. This was the beginning, the really early third century, all the way into the fourth century was the churches moved to push women out. It took them over 100 years to get them out of the church and basically condemned in church leadership. But they did get it done. Let's talk about Constantine, the Odysseus, and the Church of Empire. Again, we mentioned this in the Holy War episode. I'm just going to briefly visit it. In 313 CE, the Emperor Constantine issues the edict of Milan legalizing Christianity across the Roman Empire and ending the persecutions of Christians. In 380 CE, Emperor Theodocius makes Christianity, the official state religion of Rome, in less than a century Christianity goes from being a persecuted minority movement to being the instrument of imperial power and the persecutor. And as Christianity becomes empire, watch what happens. The radical egalitarianism of the early movement becomes an institutional liability. Because listen, you want to know who's going to hold men in leadership accountable? Women. So if a church is being used by empire to get more money, take over these lands, conquer these people, rape these folks, genocide these people, they can't have women in leadership because women will confront that. So the state religion needs a hierarchy. Gotta protect the dudes. You gotta protect the men. You gotta protect that wealth. You gotta protect your sword and say that God sanctifies the wars and all the things you're doing. It needs order. It needs to be compatible with the structure of Roman society, which meant the structures of Roman household management, the Roman system of social rank and the Roman understanding of gender roles. The early Christians were a threat to that order. And when Christianity became the imperial religion, it was no longer a threat, right? Because it wasn't challenging the hierarchy anymore. I tell you, humans throughout the years have done a lot to fight for hierarchy. The Council of Carthage in 390 CE restricts women's baptismal authority. The Council of Orange in 441 CE prohibits the ordination of deaconesses. Again, the practice still exists. It's part of the church. Now they're banning it, which again tells you that women were serving in this role before this prohibition. Progressive restrictions across the fourth and fifth century systematically eliminate the roles that women held in the early church. It's like effectively crushing the egalitarian message of both Jesus and Paul. And let's get to Augustine of Hippo from 354 to 430 CE. He is the most influential theologian in Western Christianity. He is thinking shaped Catholic doctrine through Calvin and Luther and most of Protestant theology. His understanding of original sin, grace, predestination and sacrament theology are the foundations of Western Christian thought. He also in his degeneracy ad-literum, the literal meaning of Genesis, argued that women was made as helper to man specifically in the domain of reproduction because for any other kind of help, another man would have been a better companion. This is where we get a lot of the help, meet doctrine, complementarianism. You're supposed to be his help, meet and make his dreams come true and reproduce for him. That's your role. Thanks, Augustine. Women's rationality is subordinate to men's. Women's spiritual capacity exists, but it's structurally dependent on men. Women can be in the image of God only in their spirit, not in their social and institutional role. You know, for a religion built around a guy who elevated women, they sure do a lot of the exact opposite. Augustine's theology of women's subordination was not incidental. It was built into his anthropology, his understanding of what human beings are and has been part of the anthropological foundation of male authority in the Western church ever since. Augustine, by the way, at age 17, entered a devoted relationship with a woman that he never married. They lived together for about 14 years and had a son, a deodatist. Augustine eventually would just send her away so that he could arrange a marriage with a socially advantaged aress. So Augustine was a deadbeat dead who just sent this woman that he's been with for 14 years away and refused to take care of her and his son so that he could marry a rich lady. So real strong on the Christian virtue there. Cyril of Alexandria and the murder of a Peshia. We've also talked about this briefly. Peshia of Alexandria was born around 355 CE, the daughter of Theon, a mathematician and last known intellectual figure associated with the great library of Alexandria. Her father was educated and he educated her as a scholar and she surpassed him. By the time she reached adulthood, she was headed the Neoplatonis School in Alexandria, which was one of the most prestigious intellectual positions in the ancient world. She wrote commentaries on diophanthus, arithmetica, and appolonus conics and foundational mathematical text. She is credited with co-authoring with her father a revised edition of Euclid's elements that has become a standard version used for centuries. She constructed astrolabs, excuse me astrolabs and hydrometers, scientific instruments. She taught her students how to use them. This girl was smart smart. She's smart smart. She lectured publicly. People traveled from across the Mediterranean to hear her speak and learned from her one of her students, Sennacea of Cyrene, later became a Christian bishop. His letters to Hepesia survive. And one he writes, "I regard you as the best gift destiny has given me." She had Christian students, Christian friends, operated freely in a city that was rapidly Christianizing. She herself was not a Christian. She also advised arrestists, a Roman prefect of Alexandria, with genuine wisdom without political agenda. There's no indication she was ever trying to make money or capitalize on power. She simply gave good advice. Serol became bishop of Alexandria in 412 CE and almost immediately began consolidating power in ways that alarmed the local authorities. He expelled Alexandria's Jewish community in direct violation of Roman law. This is the bishop, mind you. He weaponized a paramilitary organization of Christian monks called the Parabalanne, who were supposed to be caring for the sick and used them as his personal enforcement arm to terrorize opponents, attack pagan temples and suppress dissent. He literally had a troop of Gestapo monks. History rhymes so often. It's almost boring if it wasn't so sad. Religious leaders with private armies of monks to suppress political opposition. The Parabalanne nearly killed arrestists that Roman prefect and arrestists reported Serol's conduct to the emperor. Serol demanded arrestists submit to his Episcopalian authority. Arrestists refused in part because Appescia counseled him that he should not capitulate. She says, "Hey, Serol's a wild man, dude. Don't give in to him. Report this shit. Stand up to him." So Serol organizes a slander campaign. He called her a witch because of course he did. And every lady that you're driving in your car and you're on your way to work and you just groaned, right? Because every time we stand up to someone, every time we get too loud, every time we won't comply, they call you witch, bitch, or whore. It's one of the three or a slut, Jezebel. Maybe there's five. He said that she was using sorcery to prevent arrestists from reconciling with the church. He said she was an obstacle to God or dain't Christian order. That's why they don't want women in leadership. They hold them accountable. He told his followers that she was the enemy. So in the spring of 415 CE during Lent, a mob organized by church reader named Peter ambushed Appescia on her way home. They dragged her out of her carriage into a church, stripped her naked, flayed her with broken pottery shards, roof tiles, and ripped her flesh from her bones. They then dismembered her body and burned what remained at a place called Cynoram. Christian men did this to her because a Christian bishop said, "This woman has too much authority. I don't like it. She's advising men to stand up to me in my corruption. She needs to die. She's the enemy of God. She's disrupting God or dain't order." The historian Socrates Scholasticus, a Christian writing about his own era, documented this in his Historia Eclas ecclesiastica and called it a shame and disgraced a Cyril into the Alexandrian church. The Neoplatanus philosopher Damascus named Cyril as directly responsible for her death and all the knowledge we lost because of her death. How many women could have come through with so many scientific breakthroughs, cures, knowledge we needed and they were killed because they were smart or educated or powerful. Appescia's crime was being a woman with influence in a city whose bishop had decided women were not entitled to influence. Cyril of Alexandria was canonized as Saint 29 years later because of course he was. Men like this, they not not only are just so blatantly corrupt and they stamp it with Christianity, Cyril. as an example of Christian nationalism, right? It was about empire. It was about political power. I had nothing to do with Christ. Whenever when a woman got in his way, he orchestrated to have her killed. And he was saint. He was given sainthood 29 years later in 444 CE. He was declared a doctor of the church, one of only 37 people in 2000 years to receive that honor in 1882. The man who created the conditions for the murder of a woman for the crime of having intellectual authority was made a saint and a doctor of the church. This is what the church of empire looks like. This is what Christian nationalism looks like when it has institutional power. And before I get into the next segment of watching this systematic Christian nationalist ideology, this religion of empire and how it takes shape with the witch trials, we're going to take our second of two mid-show sponsor breaks. The systematic persecution of women is witches across medieval and early modern periods was not random. It was not superstition run amuck. It was a theological infrastructure. The Malias Malifakaram, the hammer of witches, was published in 1487 by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Springer, two Dominican inquisitors. It became the primary manual for witch hunters across Europe for more than two centuries. It was printed more times than the Bible in the 15th and 16th centuries when the witch trials really picked up. It was written about a hundred years before it would eventually or published about a hundred years before it would be used for those trials. It had sections of the Bible in it and was presented as theological scholarship. Something to note about this, when Heinrich Kramer, if you listen to my talk with Dr. Barr around the Turning Point USA convention conference, she talks about how this was originally rejected by the church. They were like, what is this? Like this is nonsense. It has no basis whatsoever. They denied him publishing it. So he forged a papal bowl and published it anyway. Like all of the men who have created these doctrines in Christian nationalism specifically, because Christian nationalism has the same title no matter what country it's in. Literally, we're just a bunch of lying dickheads, liars, cheats, hungry for power, cruel, and they just wanted to use the Bible to do it. This is not new. The Malleus argued that women were inherently more susceptible to demonic influence than men for several reasons, were weaker in body and mind. I mean, obviously, we're more carnal. It's so funny to me because in all these old texts are like women sex drives or insatiable. I'm like, are you are you projecting your lust a little bit, buddy? Maybe announce the reverse that like women don't like sex that much. I'm like, well, maybe around you. They were more credulous. They said that because they were formed from a bent rib, they were metophysically bent. The text specifically says all which craft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. Women sexuality, women's bodies, women's alleged irrationality all of them were the sources of their particular vulnerability to demons. I mean, of course, sounds totally scientifically correct. So who was targeted? Women who lived alone, women who owned property, women who practiced herbal medicine or midwives, women with community healing knowledge or authority, women who argued with neighbors or with church authorities, women who had enemies willing to accuse them, women who were impoverished and didn't have anyone to protect them, women at the margins of communities who could be targeted without any interference and women in communities who were resisting the consolidating power of the church authority. The cathars of southern France are one of the most powerful examples. The cathars were a Christian sect who believed in dualist theology that the material world was created by a lesser evil force while the true God was purely spiritual. And they held that women had total spiritual autonomy and authority. Women in cathar communities could achieve the status of the perfect day, which means spiritually perfected. And in that role, they would preach, teach, lead their communities and administer sacraments. Women were full spiritual equals in catharism. Pope Innocent III did not like this and launched the Al-Bajizian Crusade in 1209, the first crusade in Christian history directed against fellow Christians specifically to eliminate the cathars. The crusade was brutal. The Inquisition followed. The church gave cathars a choice, convert to Catholic hierarchy, except that women have no spiritual authority or die. And the cathar perfect day, these, you know, spiritually perfected people, these women who had built communities of faith who were preachers and baptized people and led the community, literally walked into the fire to be burned alive, singing rather than surrender their spiritual authority. So again, if submission were natural to women, they would have done it already. Violence required to enforce it is evidence that it is not, in fact, natural. Even the most restrictive periods of medieval Catholicism, women found ways to exercise spiritual authority. The tradition of women's mysticism, direct personal experience of God that didn't require male mediation was a space where women could speak with authority and the church could not entirely control it. Hill DeGarde of Binden, 1098 to 1179, was a Benedictine Abyss who wrote theology, composed music, practice medicine, preached in public, traveling to monasteries and towns to preach, which was extraordinary for a woman of that era. She was careful to frame her authority as coming from direct divine revelation, which gave her kind of an immunity to the institutional church because how do, like, if she's getting it directly from God, how does the church step in and say, no, you didn't. So she cut, she was smart enough to back them into a corner a little bit. She was in correspondence with popes, emperors, the Bernard of Clare Vaux. She was brilliant. She survived by never directly claiming authority. She always said she was merely just the vessel through which God spoke, which was really smart on her part. So she walked the tightrope. Julian of Norwich, 1342 to 1416, wrote revelations of divine love. The first book in the English language written by a woman, she described God in maternal imagery, God is mother, which is not common in mainstream theology before or since. She survived as an anchoress, a woman who enclosed, enclosed in a small room attached to a church, which was the only sanctioned form of radical religious life for women that she could have at that time. And I love this idea of God as a mother that resonates so much with me because, you know, if you believe that all are made in the image of God, then life giving birth, giving life creation is such a foundational part of that story. Of course, it's in the image of God. Teresa of Avila from 1515 to 1582 founded 17 convents, wrote mystical theology that became foundational to Catholic spirituality, reformed the Carmelite order, and spent significant portions of her life under investigation by the Inquisition for her mystical claims and her audacity to have authority. She was ultimately canonized and named a doctor of the church. She's one of the other few people that have gotten that honor. So it's her. And then we got Cyril of Alexandria, the super corrupt dude. This woman has to be perfect and found 17 convents and write theology and survive. You know, this, and he just has to just be a dude with a, like a stop oh of monks. Joan of Arc, 1412 to 1431. I'll say think one thing about Joan, she claimed divine authority, voice's direct mission from God. She led army, she won battle, she was captured, tried for heresy and burned at the stake. She was burned in large part for wearing men's clothing. They're refusing to perform femininity in the manner required that they thought femininity should show up in. The theological charge against her was that she claimed authority that had to pass through male mediation. And she refused. The English burned her, the church that had burned her canonized her 500 years later in 1920. That's the other thing. So they canonized her later. It's also something to note that the church doesn't always get it right. So whenever someone claims, well, this is how it's always been. Look up a belief and be like, is it? This new ideology around pre-millennial dispensation and the rapture and that America is in a covenant with God the way that Israel is and we're in the last, we're in the end times. That was not popular belief until it was written into the Scofield Bible in the early 20th century. That wasn't held by the early church at all. Abortion. Oh, you know, Christians have always opposed to know they haven't. For the overwhelming history of the church, abortion wasn't even a question unless it happened after the quickening, which was about 24 weeks. And no woman is going for 24 weeks for six months and then being like, "Had just kidding." That's not happening. So no, it's not. So whenever someone says, "Oh, it's always been like this. This is in the Bible." Look and see if it's in the Bible first. And then say, "Hmm, is that what the church always believes?" Because the church first believed that women could lead and teach and preach. Then men came in and said, "Nope, we want all the authority for ourselves." And then they would kill women along the way and then realize, "Oh, we fucked up." That person actually was of God and then they would saint them after they had already killed them. Let's talk about the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther emphasized the priesthood of all believers. The idea that every Christian had direct access to God without clerical mediation. So he's cutting out the priest in this regard. This was radical in the Catholic context. Some early Reformation communities following this logic allowed women to preach and teach. Not what Martin Luther wanted. He was also a raging misogynist. But they did a Catherine Zell, for instance, preached openly in Strasbourg. She wrote letters of pastoral care and that were published. She defended the right of women to preach from scripture. Argu Levant Grombach wrote public theological pamphlets defending Luther in faith, challenging the faculty of the university of Ingol Slot to a public debate using scripture to argue her case. She was amazing. The radical Reformation, the Anabaptus, explicitly had women preachers in the 1520s. The early Quaker movement founded by George Fox in the 1650s explicitly held that women had the spirit and could speak in meetings. Elizabeth Fry was a Quaker minister and social reformer, Catherine Booth, co-founded the Salvation Army in 1865, which had women in equal ministry leadership from its founding. John Wesley in the 18th century authorized women preachers in the Methodist movement, beginning with Sarah Crosby, whom he authorized in 1761 as the first official woman preacher in Methodism. Phoebe Palmer, a 19th century Methodist preacher, wrote the promise of the father in 1859, a sustained scriptural argument for women's right to preach. So the pattern is every time the movement starts fresh, emphasizing spirit over institution, right? Every time it kind of gets reborn as a true faith and not a religion of empire, women get authority. We get egalitarianism. Every time the institution consolidates women's authority, consolidates with empire or with the state or with the country leadership, women's authority gets constrained or eliminated. The methodist had women preachers, they formed institutional structures, the women were excluded from ordination, then women were excluded from ordination, and then the pattern repeats over and over and over. The Southern Baptist Convention ordained its first woman as a deacon in 1964. By the 1980s and the wake of a conservative takeover, the movement began to eliminate women in ministry across the board. The 2000 Baptist Faith and Message Revised Statement on the family says that the husband is the servant leader of the household that's fucking garbage. He's a nice way of saying you're going to submit to him and he has all the authority, but we're going to make it sound better. He's a servant leader. I mean, yeah, you don't get to make any decisions, but he's really, truly giving you a service by having all the authority for himself. That's just word-salid garbage to make it sound better. It's not that, also that language isn't anywhere in the Bible. And now here we are in 2026 voting for the fourth time to formally ban women from any pastoral role. So I want to talk about American history now specifically. We've kind of given this time capsule of how Christianity, when it becomes Christian nationalism and we see it become this, this, this emissary for political power, how women's rights are the first on the chopping block. And I'm using that because it's one of the foundational defining characteristics of fundamentalist religion. You can insert any fundamentalist religion here and it will have the same results. And so now let's really focus in on American history. Every time a woman, women gain significant rights, resources, education or autonomy, there is a corresponding organized rise in fundamentalist religion that specifically seeks to reverse those gains. And we hear it in their language. They are so afraid of feminism. They are so worried about women in power. They are so women about women, worried about women's autonomy. We see this every time. Every time women get a landmark increase in rights, freedom, autonomy, there is a corresponding fundamentalist uprising. And we're going to go through that. So, Santa Cofalls and the clergy's response in 1848. The first women's rights convention was held in Santa Cofalls, New York on July 19th and 20th, 1848. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. I think it's Lucretia. Lucretia? Lucretia, I think. My brain is just questioning that all of a sudden. The Declaration of Sentiments model deliberately on the Declaration of Independence stated that all men and women are created equal. It called for women's suffrage, property rights, the right to education and full legal equality. Listen. The right to vote, I'm not paying taxes. No taxation without representation. I don't get to vote. I'm not paying taxes. The clergy response was immediate, organized and explicitly biblical. The Universalist minister Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who would go on to become the first woman ordained in a mainstream American denomination ordained by the Congregationalist Church in 1853, observed in her own writings how other clergymen used first Timothy and first Corinthians to argue that women seeking equality were in defiance of God's divine order. They used the same versus against the women who were saying, "Hey, we feel like we should be able to vote and have civil equality in the country." Those men whipped out those verses so fast they're doing the same shit today. They need to get a new trick. Same passage is same method. This was not a new argument in 1948 or in 1948. 1848. It's been used since the church became the church of empire. It's been used continuously ever since and it is in my comment sections literally every day. Elizabeth Katie state and watched this for decades and understood exactly what was happening. She understood that you could not win the political fight for women's equality without addressing the theological justification being used to obstruct it because men and clergy were arguing that the Bible justified denying women the right to vote. They were using the Bible to defend this the same way they used the Bible to defend slavery. In 1895 and 1898, she published the woman's Bible, a feminist commentary on spiritual passages used to oppress women written with a committee of scholars. The text systematically addressed the Genesis narrative, the Pauline passages and the theological arguments used to keep women subordinate. The suffrage movement's mainstream leadership, including Susan B. Anthony, distanced itself from the woman's Bible because they feared it would cost them the vote from religious Americans but it was really important work. The National American Women's Suffrage Association voted formally to dissociate from the work. Stanton's own organization rejected her but she was right. The Bible was being weaponized against women equality. It is now. When you need to address it directly, I really appreciate her writing that and we need to probably get a new published like a republish of it. They told her to be quiet because the truth was politically inconvenient. She was 100 years ahead of her time. They silenced her on behalf of the movement for women's rights to keep religious men comfortable enough to vote on suffrage. Of course, because it's always about the dudes being comfy because if they're uncomfortable we've got a male lonely in this epidemic. Everybody's lonely dude. Just some people are making it everyone else's problem and some people aren't. Francis Willard from 1839 to 1898 took a different approach. Willard was the president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the largest women's organization in the 19th century America. She used Christian language and moral authority to advance feminist causes including women's suffrage, labor rights and access to education. She wrote woman in the pulpit in 1888, making full scriptural argument for women's right to preach in minister. She understood that Christianity could be wielded for liberation rather than against that liberation. The WCTU under her leadership was one of the most politically radical organizations of its era. The 19th Amendment gets ratified on August 18th, 1920. Women fought and died to make that happen. By the way, I hate the rhetoric online of men gave you the right to vote bitch. No, they didn't. Women died on the campaign trail. Women were beaten, force fed, arrested, imprisoned, ran over. Come on now. Anyways, women can now vote 19th Amendment. This is the one that conservatives are chasing after now and we've got, again, internet influencers like Savannah Stone getting paid boo-koo dollars to come online and say, "I'm okay with giving up my rights to vote if liberal women can't vote." Shut up. Just don't vote if you just let your husband vote for you if that's what you believe. Sorry. Rouse me up a bit. Listen, this is your internet on tea. Don't believe any of this nonsense. So American women had finally gained a fundamental right of citizenship after 72 years of organized advocacy. Within a decade, American fundamentalism had organized itself into a coherent movement that would shape the next century of American political and religious life. The fundamentals, the 90SA published 1910 to 1915 and financed by oil money because of course it was corporations and rich dudes also profit off of hierarchy and control and they need access to the faith community to do it. They laid the theological groundwork here. The fundamentalist modernist controversy of the 1920s in which fundamentalists fought to control mainline Protestant denominations and expel those who accepted higher biblical criticism, evolution or liberal theology, define the movement's combative character and they're using that today. Church is split over this. Everywhere that institutional Christianity existed, a faction organized around the idea that modern entity, including women's equality, was a threat to divine order. So literally including a woman's right to vote. The other, just a little historical Easter egg here, the rise of calorie counting happened in the wake of women winning their right to vote. The other thing we see correspond with a growth in women's rights or an advancement is we see a restriction on body, a restriction on weight, this kind of internal policing becomes possible. So it was fueled by a cultural shift where controlling the body became intertwined with new female autonomy. As women gained political power in the 1920s, the restrictive hourglass corset fell out of fashion and was replaced by the flapper dress. Calorie counting also kind of rose with those rights. So you also look at, you know, even the skinny coming back now in the wake of the fight against women's rights. It's interesting how dieting, calorie counting, figure control also is always historically intertwined with all of this. The 1920s KKK, I'll say more about this in the history section because it belongs there. Explicitly positioned itself as a defender of Protestant Christian values. Remember, they're a Christian or they're a conservative Christian organization. And those values included very specific notion of what proper womanhood looked like. White Protestant domestic morally pure because the men are going to sleep around with everybody, but the women can't, which begs the question, who are they sleeping with and subordinate to white Protestant men. The protection of white Protestant womanhood was central to clan rhetoric. It was excuse they used to kill black men for the smallest of alleged offenses. But that protection also meant controlling women. So World War II pulled women into the American workforce and numbers that would have been unthinkable decades earlier. By 1944, women made up 37% of civilian workforce. They built planes, they welded ships, they ran hospitals, they managed families alone while keeping the economy functioning. They demonstrated concretely and publicly that biological and intellectual limitations used to restrict their participation in public life were not biological or intellectual limitations at all. They were structural and they were alive. When the men came home, the cultural machinery went immediately back to work to put women back in the home. The baby boom and the suburban ideal of the 1950s were not organic social developments. They were deliberately constructed, culturally, economically and religiously. Women were pushed out of industrial jobs that paid well into domestic roles. The GI Bill subsidized suburban home ownership in ways that structured women's dependence, isolated them. And the churches were deeply invested in the back-to-home narrative, framing domesticity as divine design. B.S., I say. B.S., Betty Frieden would describe what happened to these women in the feminine mystique in 1963. The mass depression, the sense of meaninglessness. The problem that had no name, the experience of educated women who had been told that the suburban housewife ideal was their highest aspiration. The book sold three million copies in three years. Something was wrong and the women knew it and they started naming it. And this is also something to point out that women have always worked. Women have always worked and they have always worked outside the home. When it didn't fight to work, they fought to get paid. They fought to get paid fairly. They fought to be able to have work protections. Many of the reasons you have protections at your job, like workers comp or you have an HR department is because women fought for those things. Women were already working. They've always been working outside the home. Well, poor women. The only people that could stay home were wealthy, white women. Second way feminism produces a series of changes that fundamentalism recognized as an existential threat. The birth control pill was approved by the FDA on June 23rd, 1916. For the first time in human history, women could separate sex from reproduction with reliable effectiveness. Oh no, whatever shall we do? They could plan their families. They could complete education and build careers without being derailed by an unplanned pregnancy. Reproductive autonomy directly enabled economic independence. This is why conservative Christians want to get rid of it. Birth control enables economic independence. And if they want women to be dependent and trapped, they have to take away birth control. The equal pay act was signed in 1963. Title seven of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex. The national organization for women was founded in 1966. Roe versus Wade was decided on January 22nd, 1973. The equal rights amendment passes both houses of Congress on March of 1972 and was sent to the states for ratification. And then the machine mobilized to stop that ratification from ever happening. Enter Phyllis Schlafly. Yeah, it's standard. She died in 2016. She was devote Catholic, a lawyer with a graduate degree in political science from Redcliffe, a prolific author, and a nationally prominent public speaker. She built a career, a very lucrative prominent decades long career, making so much money as a political operative and public intellectual. She used that career to tell other women that careers were a threat to divine order. Here we have again. So she's the she's the Erica Kirk of her era, right? She's making bank. She's making money. She's speaking. She's writing books. She is caked up. She can fend for herself. She can take care of herself. She has security and she's telling other women, oh, no, don't have a career. That's that it's going to upset God's divine order. Lying hypocrites. Schlafly was not a housewife telling women to stay home. She was a career woman telling women to not have careers from a career platform making career money while simultaneously running a national political organization debating on television writing books, traveling the country to speak. She was the philish laughly brand. She ran for Congress multiple times. She built an organization called the Eagle Forum that is lobbied on women's issues for 50 years. In 1972, this bitch, I'm sorry, I'm going to call her that. I don't care. Do not rest in peace. Launch the stop the ERA campaign. Stop stood for stop taking our privileges. Her argument was that the ERA would eliminate the legal protections women had as wives and mothers, exemption from the military draft, the requirement that husbands support their wives financially, and the right to be housewives. The right to be housewives is like saying the right to be a lawyer. It's insane. It's actually insane. She argued that the ERA would require unisex bathrooms, the bathroom debate, and would lead to the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage. She was really unhappy when we're all passed. The legal arguments were for the most part just absolute nonsense. Obviously, legal scholars on both sides of the issue were like, what is she talking about? What? What? But Schlafly was not making a legal argument. She was making a cultural and theological argument that women's equality contradicted God's design for the family and that the family was the basic unit of Christian civilization. Where have we heard these talking points before? Over and over recycled rebranded. She mobilized evangelical and Catholic women with unprecedented effectiveness. The ERA deadline passed without ratification in 1982. Again, I say that bitch. Anita Bryant, who was born in 1940, ran the Save Our Children campaign in Dade County, Florida in 1977. Successfully repealing a gay rights ordinance. Bryant was a Southern Baptist, a former beauty queen, a spokesperson for Florida Orange Juice. Her campaign framed the inclusion of gay people and civil rights protections as a direct attack on Christian children and families. It doesn't hurt you at all. You could just mind your business. She connected opposition to gay rights directly to Christian family values and the proper roles of men and women. And listen, women will buy into this movement. There are some women who will take money and their own success and their own security and they will literally burn all other women to get it. And that is your foolish laughlies and your Anita Bryant and your Savannah stones and your Erica Kirk. Sorry, not sorry. Not sorry at all. The campaign was overwhelmingly successful locally and became a template for nationwide mobilization of Christian nationalism around gender and sexuality that would follow. The pattern is visible and consistent. We see it over and over. Seneca Falls triggers organized religious opposition. Women's suffrage triggers the 1920s fundamentalist wave. Second wave feminism triggers the moral majority and the religious right. The R.A. fight, the abortion debate, the marriage equality fight, every advance in women's rights and LGBTQ rights triggers a corresponding organized religious counteroffensive that frames the advance as an attack on God and the family. Keep in mind the same people that are like, yes, family values and they're on their third marriage with a mistress on the side. So this is the machine defending its territory. And in the next episode, we're really going to get into how rapture doctrine plays into this. And again, I address all of this because I want people to understand the story of this rebrand of this constant use of religion for political gain, political power to push people down. And why it's so effective, which is why we're doing such a comprehensive list. I had I had fooled myself quite frankly that I was actually going to get this done in one episode. I am halfway through my manuscript. So we're going to do part one and part two. And as always, if you have questions or you want to cover a topic or a person, please feel free to email those recommendations to [email protected]. I would love to hear from you. I would love to hear what you have to say. Also, for those on Patreon, we're going to be doing a poll soon to be able to pick a topic. You will starting in July, this month, as of this release, you will be able to start picking a topic per month. So I will see you for part two where we talk about the rapture industrial complex and how it has been used to further using Christianity and the faith for political power on flipping tables next week. I will see you there. As always, thank you for the reviews. Thank you for sharing the show. It always always helps. I will see you next time.