— ABIGAIL ADAMS, in a letter to John Adams, 17763
Abigail Adams portrait, 1880, after a painting by Gilbert Stuart.
Judeo-Christian principles have had a devastating impact on women—half the country’s population—and the tenth commandment exemplifies the problem. The bible treats women like property, not people.
“Man enjoys the great advantage of having a God endorse the codes he writes; and since man exercises a sovereign authority over woman, it is especially fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the Supreme Being,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir. “For the Jews, Mohammedans, and the Christians, among others, man is master by divine right; the fear of God, therefore, will repress any impulse toward revolt in the downtrodden female.”4 The bible supports Beauvoir’s powerful words; reread the fourth commandment: “But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.”5 Wives are the only people not explicitly prohibited from working. Slaves, sons, daughters—all get a day off, but not wives.
Wives are to “submit” to their husbands,6 and to “learn in silence with full submission,”7 according to the New Testament. Mosaic law treats women as lesser, allowing an unsatisfied husband to divorce his wife on a whim, but not the reverse.8 God fashions woman as an afterthought from an unnecessary appendage of man.9 As we saw in the last chapter, the bible’s sexual rules, including the adultery commandment, favor men and beat down women.
The bible repeatedly subjugates women, but treating women as chattel was not simply a sign of the times. Other contemporaneous cultures in the region were often less misogynistic. Archaeologist and priest Roland de Vaux wrote, “The social and legal position of an Israelite wife was…inferior to the position a wife occupied in the great countries round about. In Egypt the wife was often the head of the family, with all the rights such a position entailed. In Babylon she could acquire property, take legal action, be a party to contracts.”10 But in Judeo-Christianity, the “degraded status of women,”11 to borrow a phrase from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was complete. According to de Vaux, the biblical verb “to marry a wife” has the root meaning “to become master.”12 Perhaps this is why, in Genesis, Rachel and Leah complain to their new husband/master Jacob that their father “sold us, and he has been using up the money given for us.”13 While the woman lived at home she was the property of her father, until he sold her or married her off, at which point she became the property of her husband.
God even forces women to bear children as a punishment, not as the gift of bringing forth life (since he claims credit for that too):
To the woman [the Lord God] said, “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.14
“Barren” women, not sterile men, are the problem for nearly every biblical couple that has trouble conceiving. Sarai (later Sarah), Rebekah, Rachel, Manoah’s unnamed wife, Hannah, and Elisabeth were “barren,” yet somehow mothered children.15 The bible claims that these births were miraculous. Manoah’s wife tells a story about getting pregnant with her son, Samson, immediately after “a man of God” whose “appearance was like that of an angel” visited her.16 Is it more likely that the husbands were sterile or inattentive lovers who treated their wives like property instead of partners and that the women sought solace elsewhere, or that the laws of nature were suspended? Either way, the bible refuses to credit women for bringing life into this world. And when a “barren” woman does conceive, Yahweh the patriarch gets the credit. Men get the credit; women get the blame. The biblical narrative itself reflects this. Manoah’s wife is one of many biblical women, like Jephthah’s daughter, Lot’s daughters, and the wives on Noah’s ark, whom we know of only by reference to her male relations.
Childbirth is not just viewed as god’s punishment—it is considered unclean. Women must be purified afterward.17 Women are unclean when they menstruate.18 Everything an unclean woman touches is unclean.19 In this childish understanding of the world, the bible essentially tells us that women have cooties. The menstruating woman must sacrifice two turtledoves or two pigeons to her god before he will cure this terrible affliction.
Although sons are “holy to the Lord,” daughters are not.20 This disparity is embodied in the morning blessings recited by many Orthodox Jews. Men and women begin with the same two verses:
Blessed are You, HASHEM, King of the Universe, for not having made me a gentile.
Blessed are You, HASHEM, King of the Universe, for not having made me a slave.
Then the prayers diverge. The women say: “Blessed are You, HASHEM, King of the Universe, for having made me according to His will.” The men, on the other hand say, “Blessed are You, HASHEM, King of the Universe, for not having made me a woman.”21
And let’s not forget: all the pain, evil, and suffering in this world is Eve’s fault. True, the biblical god actually created that pain, evil, and suffering, but Eve had the temerity to exercise the curiosity that god gave her, so she gets the blame.
The Catholic Church so feared women and has such warped senses of morality and sexuality that, to comply with Paul’s order for women to be silent in church,22 it castrated young boys. In 1589, Pope Sixtus V issued a papal bull, Cum pro nostro pastorali munere, which enrolled castrati in the choir of Saint Peter’s.23 Castrati, young boys whose testicles were removed or destroyed (by severing the testicles from the spermatic cord)24 were needed because women could not be a part of the liturgy. Since some songs in the liturgy required high voices and women were to remain silent, the religious solution was to castrate boys.
Most of American history reflects the religious subjugation of women. The founders did not, as Abigail Adams asked, “remember the ladies.” Under a legal doctrine known as coverture, American women had no legal existence separate from their husbands.25 Courts denied that married women were individuals capable of lives independent of their husbands. Marriage was a contract between one man and the man who previously owned his wife, usually her father. It was not a loving agreement between two equals to stand together against the world. It was ownership. A woman’s being given her husband’s name is a remnant of this practice. This vision of marriage closely resembles the bible’s, in that it is a biblically imposed burden. One noted Cambridge law professor traced coverture’s origins back through English law and found that “the notion of conjugal unity has a biblical origin. Genesis, 2:24, is explicit that husband and wife ‘shall be one flesh,’ and this is repeated in the New Testament (Matthew 19:5–6; Mark 10:8). There can be no doubt that it was this theological metaphor that produced the legal maxim.”26
The Judeo-Christian belief that women are a form of property significantly affected this country. Because the belief was religious, based on divine law and divine order, it provided an unquestionable justification for oppression. To question woman’s place was to question “God’s plan.” As with slavery, religion might not have been the root cause, but it provided an unassailable moral justification for diminishing half the population. For instance, when Myra Bradwell decided she wanted to practice law, the Illinois Supreme Court told her that, as a woman, she was unfit. This 1872 decision rested partly on the fact “that God designed the sexes to occupy different spheres of action, and that it belonged to men to make, apply, and execute the laws.” When it upheld the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision, the US Supreme Court quoted this “axiomatic truth.”27 Concurring in that decision, Justice Joseph Bradley added, “The family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance…is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband…. The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.”28 Notice the choice of language: “axiomatic truth,” “divine ordinance,” “paramount destiny,” and �
��law of the Creator.” What mortal can challenge this celestial order, even if it is nonsensical? Presiding over the case was Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, whom we will encounter again in chapter 24 because, earlier in his career when he was treasury secretary and the nation was in the midst of the Civil War, he etched a message of faith in his god onto American coins. Chase’s court was correct to point out that Judeo-Christianity makes women second-class citizens, but wrong to suggest that that station is right.
The bible has been a millstone around the neck of women for millennia. The women fighting for suffrage and equality had to challenge religion. The suffragists had to battle against bible verses, like those above, which subjugate women. Suffragist leaders, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, revised the bible to make it more accurate and fair. The Women’s Bible was born. In an article candidly titled “The Degraded Status of Women in the Bible,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote:
The Bible and the church, they have been the greatest block in the way of her development. The vantage ground woman holds to-day is due to all the forces of civilization, to science, discovery, invention, rationalism, the religion of humanity chanted in the golden rule round the globe centuries before the Christian religion was known. It is not to Bibles, prayer books, catechisms, liturgies, the canon law and church creeds and organizations, that woman owes one step in her progress, for all these alike have been hostile, and still are, to her freedom and development.29
Women gained ground in spite of religion, not because of it. Stanton “endeavored to dissipate these religious superstitions from the minds of women, and base their faith on science and reason, where I found for myself at last that peace and comfort I could never find in the Bible and the church.”30 She scoffed at the idea that Jesus’s New Testament was any better than the old: “No symbols or metaphors can twist honor or dignity out of such sentiments. Here [in the New Testament], in plain English, woman’s position is as degraded as in the Old Testament.”31
Other women’s rights advocates criticized Judeo-Christianity and its influence on law. The National Woman Suffrage Association, which Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized, declared: “We deny that dogma of the centuries, incorporated in the codes of all nations—that woman was made for man—her best interests, in all cases, to be sacrificed to his will.”32
The pair of men who entered the White House in 2017 cling to a benighted view of women, criticizing working wives and working mothers. In a 1994 interview, Donald Trump said he thought women should stay in the home because working is unattractive: “Putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing” because a woman’s “softness disappear[s]” and because “when I come home and dinner’s not ready, I go through the roof.”33 This is language the Christian nationalist no doubt appreciates and concurs with. For Mike Pence, his beliefs about the role of women surface in his oft-expressed defense of “traditional marriage” and his assertion that “marriage was ordained by God.”34 Pence once shamed working mothers who made their children “day-care kids” to fulfill the siren’s song of pop culture “that you can have it all, career, kids and a two-car garage.” Using daycare—which is to say leaving the home to work—would “stunt” the child’s emotional growth and make the child “less affectionate toward his mother,” according to Pence’s unsupported beliefs.35 Other lawmakers are more explicit. Representative Stevan Pearce of New Mexico cited the bible to argue that “the wife is to voluntarily submit” to her husband. This wasn’t an off the cuff remark—he actually wrote it in his 2013 memoir, Just Fly the Plane, Stupid, continuing, “The wife’s submission is…self-imposed as a matter of obedience to the Lord and of love for her husband.”36 Mike Huckabee, a Republican hanger-on, failed presidential candidate, and once governor of Arkansas, signed a statement of faith that a wife must “submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.”37 During the 2008 primary debates, Huckabee was asked about this statement of faith, which ran as a full-page ad in USA Today, and he reaffirmed his commitment to the subjugating principle: “I certainly am going to practice it unashamedly, whether I’m a president or whether I’m not a president.”38
The theory of female servitude is written into the Ten Commandments. Thousands of years of slow moral progress had done little to erode it, and any gain was not sufficient for the nation’s founders to treat women as equals. They did not take Abigail Adams’s sage advice to be more “generous and favorable” to the ladies. Judeo-Christianity was instrumental in this failure and continues to fuel battles against the civil and reproductive rights of American women to this day.
Thoughtcrime
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
— GEORGE ORWELL, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949 39
The nucleus of the tenth commandment is “shall not covet,” which prohibits specific thoughts. But the First Amendment protects—absolutely—the freedom of thought.40 The right to believe whatever one chooses is the only unlimited right under the Constitution.41 This Judeo-Christian principle does the opposite, seeking to stifle thought and enforce ideological uniformity.
Religion must maintain a closed information system to perpetuate itself.42 Religious dogma cannot withstand the facts, scrutiny, or doubt that come with exploration, discovery, and expanded horizons. Religion is often too inflexible to incorporate new information, like human evolution or a heliocentric solar system, so it demands that followers shut out reality. Judeo-Christianity’s attempt to keep the information loop closed is evident in the demands the biblical god makes in the Ten Commandments: no other gods before me, do not disrespect even my name, stop work for a full day to worship me, heed your parents because they will tell you to worship me, killing is acceptable if the victim is not someone who worships me, and finally, a decree to suppress certain thoughts. The very concept of the Judeo-Christian god encapsulates thoughtcrime. He is, as Christopher Hitchens so memorably phrased it, “an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thoughtcrime while you are asleep, who can subject you—who must, indeed, subject you—to a total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life…before you’re born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you’re dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate?”43
This commandment is but one of Judeo-Christianity’s attempts at outlawing thoughts. Paul himself wrote, “We take every thought captive to obey Christ,”44 and many sects, Christian or otherwise, have built-in safeguards to exclude new information and the outside world: persecuting outsiders, shunning doubters, encouraging intrafaith marriage and punishing interfaith marriages, punishing apostates (sometimes with death), homeschooling or religious schooling, gathering together to shout down the doubts on at least a weekly basis, approving some texts and burning others. The engines of this closed information system are what make religious dogma and its adherents inflexible and regressive—acting as a “taillight” instead of a “headlight,” as Martin Luther King Jr. put it on several occasions.45
Thoughtcrime is another device to close that information system. Catholic canon law governs the Catholic Church and mandates beliefs for Catholics worldwide. Arguably the most important precept for people claiming to be Catholic is also the most repellant. The law requires a total submission of the intellect: “A religious submission of the intellect and will must be given to a doctrine which the Supreme Pontiff or the college of bishops declares concerning faith or morals…Therefore, the Christian faithful are to take care to avoid those things which do not agree with it.”46 This is canon law: the law of the Church and, as far as Catholics are concerned, the law of their god.
John Adams considered canon law nothing short of mind control, finding it “the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy that ever was conceived by the mind of man.”47 The anti-human, totalitarian sentiment
in this canon lies at the heart of all religions, but one rarely sees it stated so baldly as here: “a religious submission of the intellect and will.”
The Catholic Church’s power players convened the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s to determine how to impose their will for the next few centuries. The Council analyzed the coveting commandment and declared that thoughtcrimes “are more dangerous, than those which are committed outwardly.”48 Failing to engage in groupthink was worse than committing murder. Banking on the perpetual guilt these crimes ensure, the Council required that “all mortal sins, even those of thought” be confessed to the priests.49
Criminalizing thought intensifies the power of the church, because laws against thought cannot possibly be followed. Jesus himself promulgated two rather devious thoughtcrimes, both of which humans have little hope of obeying. First, an impossible prohibition on sexual thoughts. Looking “at a woman with lust”50 is adultery. He forbids even the briefest sexual thought flitting across the mind. This criminalizes the most basic of all human impulses, the sexual impulse. Second, Jesus sermonized on the Mount, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.”51 Anger is a crime on par with murder.
Feeling randy? Angry? Then you’re guilty. With Jesus, humans are guilty for being human.
The noted twentieth-century American legal philosopher Lon Fuller explained that one way to write an ineffectual law is to have it ask the impossible, unless the goal is perpetual guilt: “On the face of it a law commanding the impossible seems such an absurdity that one is tempted to suppose no sane lawmaker, not even the most evil dictator, would have any reason to enact such a law…. Such a law can serve what [John] Lilburne called ‘a lawless unlimited power’ by its very absurdity; its brutal pointlessness may let the subject know that there is nothing that may not be demanded of him and that he should keep himself ready to jump in any direction.”52 Christopher Hitchens put it more simply when he observed, “The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.”53
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