The feminine religion

We are hearing more about a "year of the woman" after last Tuesday, where abortion was on the ballots - and won. It won so overwhelmingly, it carried a lot of other policies along with it, including (in Ohio) the castration of minors without parental notice. Whilst it is true that Romney-McDaniel is an ineffective and divisive leader of the RNC, whilst it may be true that some pushback might have convinced some married mothers in suburbia to hold their fire; ultimately, unmarried women want what they want, and voted for that. This is not Susan B. Anthony's time.

On topic of Anthony and the (UK) Pankhursts and other early suffragistas, many of them were Christian, or even further Right than that. Mikhail Cernovich is commenting that Christianity is a feminine religion, or superset of such.

But but but most of our texts were written by men! ... this is true, and nonfeminists had got entrenched into Corinth (at least) by Paul's own time. John's Apocalypse is particularly sus here. Then there's the "gnostics", really a set of neoplatonic takes on the early Christian canon. But.

Sometimes one finds a pro-woman text in the NT - starting with Paul, lambasting the Corinsians. Luke's two volumes go still further. Even if Luke (who wrote as a man) was not secretly a second-century George Eliot, he'd dropped hints that he'd taken ahadith from women, notably in that story of Mary and Martha wherein Mary is taking Jesus' instruction - implicitly dictation. Contemporary with Luke, we hear of seers like Prisc?a and Maximilla - from no less than the nonfeminist Tertullian, who approved their New Prophecy despite himself. (One might scent the influence of the Didache.) Marcion is on his way as well, alongside the Bezae. And then we get the martyrdom of Perpetua. And "Paul and Thecla".

To this day Christianity in its more traditional strains, like mine own Catholicism, hosts a near-cult of Mary as the virgin mother of God Himself. OnePeterFive's rationale for retaining males in the priesthood is because they are entering the presence of the Tabernacle as if the region was, itself, feminine.

You may, as a Christian, reject Marcion, the "Montanists", the more-excitable saints' lives, the fan-fiction, and even the Bezae. Perhaps your "mileage" may vary (I hold some respect due to the saints and to the Bezae). Still: these voices were powerful in early Christendom. They couldn't exist unless Christendom already had a base of women and of such men as loved them.

We find in pagan authors like Celsus and Lucian copious sneering at early Christians precisely because they promoted women. I wouldn't say that classical paganism wholly lacked space for the feminine, but we do see some misogyny in the philosophy. That's what we can see in the gnostic texts as well.

Overall, though, Cerno is right again. Christianity is more feminine than not.

Note that the Didache, which assumes little of whether women could go so far as to run the Eucharist, is anti-abortion. If you read "2 Peter" as an endorsement of the Apocalypse of Peter (and you think "2 Peter" is legit), then so is the NT itself. If you are looking for a pro-choice movement in early Christianity, I believe you will end up... disappointed.