“The women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says.” — 1 Corinthians 14:34, from the New American Standard Bible
Early in my Christian faith, I decided that I had a particular right to question the Bible. I readily accept some elements, of course — specifically those words that are printed in red. But the verse above is one of many that doesn’t sit well with me. Especially after spending the past year as a pianist at a small, country Southern church ministered by — you guessed it — a woman, I now question 1 Corinthians 14:34 more than I ever did in the past.
One of the building blocks of the Christian faith is that “all good things come from God.” So if men and women, both good creations, come from God then I don’t understand how Paul, to whom the above quote is attributed, could believe that only one of those characteristics should be present in the church.
Perhaps in part his reasoning stems from the fact that for most of history only men were allowed to be educated. When Paul wrote that women were completely uneducated and even considered the property of men. The women of today’s society, thanks to the tireless efforts of strong women’s fight for equality over time, largely have equal access to education. For example, women are now steadily starting to surpass the number of male students on many college campuses in this country. And while inequality in education absolutely persists on a global level, women have made great strides in proving that barring women from education is not logical or based on fact but sexist.
I have always struggled with the Biblical construct of church as an accepting and loving place because that has not always been an accurate description of my personal experiences there as well as my observations of it as an institution. The fact that verses like this are still taken literally by some members of the Church is just one example of this. I look at my own preacher, who spent three years in a residential seminary program after earning an undergraduate degree, and find it ridiculous that some people with the same religious identification would consider her unqualified just because of her gender.
I think that it’s time the church accept women as equal to anybody and everybody else. The backwards beliefs that women are not capable of being as educated as men, are not capable of holding the same positions and careers as men, and that women’s words aren’t valid are not just offensive but are just blatantly untrue and impossible to substantiate with evidence. I can’t see any reason why the church shouldn’t accept contributions from female members (or even female preachers) as being equally valid to the contributions of men, and it’s high time they revise this idea.