Role of Women within the Christian Church

And why we are seeing a precipitous decline in female church membership.

Churches have coffee hours, not cocktail hours. I'm pretty sure this is not biblical. In other words, common practices in churches, some of which may actually be defended with a degree of passion, are a reflection of the cultural milieu in which a religious organization operates.

Over the long history of the Christian Church social norms have changed and changed again. I suspect again and again church leaders have been tempted to seek a scriptural basis for or against what were fundamentally secular trends, reflecting new understandings of human possibility and the natural world. 

It requires the historical analysis of people like Professor John Boswell to show that what we now may perceive as the intolerance of religion toward emerging new cultural norms is simply the continuation of an interaction between a faith-based institution and changing cultures that have been with us for several thousand years.

That is to say, it would be judicious to regard religious faith as embodying throughout history opposition to cultural practices, or support of cultural practices, that have little to do with the historical origins of the religion or its best researched interpretations of biblical texts and the core theological conceptions of its overall tradition.

Today it is the role of women in society that is splitting churches and increasing the number of non-church-goers in America.  This, of course, is not peculiarly an American phenomenon--and not only a Christian dilemma.   It is a close as we get to a sociological “law” of human societies. 

The spiritual is always tangled with political, conceptual, scientific, and economic interests.

Today, however, I see a difference from the past.  Religious languages, the parlance of faith-speak, is especially archaic.  This is not much of an impediment to scholars.  One consequence of an advanced education is language fluency.  We sometimes see this as the ability to speak several State-based languages (French, Russian, etc.).  In fact, it is more the ability to translate between discourses in different intellectual disciplines and cultural frameworks. 

Language is, however, a stumbling block especially when translating between modes of abstract, often figurative, speech.

A discourse becomes unintelligible to many when its language departs too far from the common dialogs of everyday life. 

With respect to transcendent faiths, I fear, this means that when the institutions of religion become entangled with essentially cultural phenonmena, believers have a much harder time reconciling their life choices with their faith.

The result is (1) a decline in institutional memberships and (2) a spill over into political partisanship that makes a democratic polity more difficult to sustain.

---

I’ve related some different ideas in the above, but don’t let that keep you from replying. I’ll try to answer every comment. Remember, often what I say in my blogs are tentative and far from certain in my own mind.

I don’t know how I feel about this part of Substack’s services. I note that readership has stayed steady for quite some time at around 220 and there is some ego involved in hoping everything I say and think goes viral. Also, though, I know that others are writing very useful and important blogs and columns, and I would prefer people read those that fulfill their unique needs for intellectual encouragement.