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At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the term ‘Protestant’ is used to designate any group of Christians that does not acknowledge direct loyalty and connection either to the Roman Catholic hierarchy, or to the many catholic churches rooted in Euro-Asian cultures known collectively as Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In contemporary discourse the term ‘Protestant’ has come to apply to a broad range of spiritual communities. While this discussion of Protestantism and gender focuses on older Protestant ‘denominations,’ it should be remembered that by the late nineteenth century, Protestantism had expanded and changed greatly. By then, the majority of Protestants were chiefly in movements whose historical development occurred outside of Europe, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere of the so-called ‘New World.’ Beginning in the nineteenth century, new forms spontaneously generated indigenous Christianities emerged in the Western Hemisphere, and by the early twentieth century, on the continents of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The newer indigenous movements, identifiable as Christian by their emphasis on personal conversion, by the centrality of Jesus to their doctrine and practice, and by their fidelity to those texts broadly recognized as Christian scriptures (often called ‘The Bible’), nevertheless bear little resemblance to the movements and cultures of Protestantism that had their roots in European history. Such Protestants now constitute the fastest growing edge of Christianity. It is too early to describe how such faith-communities will affect the future of gender relations, or reshape the historical directions of the original Protestantisms described here. And as will become clear, all Protestantisms, including these newer forms, are racked with conflict over gender issues, including the roles of women in churches and the nature of Christian attitudes toward sexuality. Today, strong forces within Christianity seek to reverse the clear directions toward gender equality and greater parity between men and women that have slowly shaped most Protestant belief and practice.
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The origins of Protestantism are much debated. Deep resistance to the existing western Catholic sacramental system, loosely organized through the leadership of the bishops of Rome, appeared in late medieval Christianity. Much of this resistance presaged issues raised in the Protestant Reformation. However, Protestant beginnings are usually dated from the work of the German Reformer, Martin Luther, early in the sixteenth century. The four main trajectories that shaped the social formations of early Protestantism became differentiated and broadly identifiable ‘traditions’ of Protestant Christian belief and practice. The earliest, emerging under Luther’s leadership, prospered chiefly in regions of Central Europe and quickly moved northward into Scandinavia. Almost simultaneously, a second major tradition emerged from Swiss Reform movements led by Zwingli, and was quickly joined by French-speaking groups under the leadership of John Calvin. These churches came to be known as ‘Reformed.’
A third Continental stream of Protestantism emerged from the even more ardent and diverse dissenters within agrarian and peasant communities. These reforming groups were known in the first eras of Protestantism as Anabaptists. They were antihierarchical and egalitarian, and would eventually profoundly shape Protestant culture. However, initially the Anabaptist movements and communities generated hostility both from Lutheran and Reformed groups and from the Roman Catholic Church. The tensions generated by religious conflict on the Continent also reached the UK and also sparked a prolonged English Reformation struggle. The fourth Protestant tradition emerged from the settlement that created the Church of England and Anglicanism, which claimed to be a ‘bridge’ between Catholic and Protestant spirituality. It needs to be remembered that for three centuries Europe experienced a prolonged period of political, economic, and cultural turmoil as Christianity changed dramatically. This period is sometimes referred to as ‘the Wars of Religion.’
By the late eighteenth century these realignments and newly-reordered ecclesial communities stabilized into clear cut ‘denominations’ with differences in doctrine and ritual practice that became matters of ongoing public dispute in cultures where Christianity predominated. Importantly, doctrinal differences were paralleled to differing normative views of how reforming Christian ecclesiastical culture and institutions should be related to political order and state power. Such differences are important to the topic of gender because Protestantist groups that were opposed to religious establishment and church support of state power would also become more egalitarian about issues of gender. But where the new Protestantisms became aligned with state power, they joined in suppressing dissent from their doctrine and practice as Roman Catholics frequently did during the Counter Reformation. As a result Anabaptist and Reformed Protestants migrated to seek refuge in any area of Europe or the New World of the Americas where they could find toleration or freedom from persecution.
Through these historical dynamics, Protestant reform seeded and reseeded itself, both in Europe and by the eighteenth century in North America. Migrations of many language groups also created hybrid Protestant churches that were Lutheran and Reformed. Lutheranism came to speak all the northern European languages, and ‘Reformed Churches’ from Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands dramatically flourished in the UK where the Church of England, or Anglicanism, had many rivals. Early European settlements in the Western Hemisphere often also brought multiple ‘denominations’ of the same Reformation traditions to North America. Dutch Reformed groups and Scottish and British Reformed communities created several separate denominations. Later European colonialism carried the four European-generated forms of Protestantism to areas of Africa, Asia and to parts of the sections of the Western Hemisphere previously colonized by Roman Catholic nations.
Reformed and ‘Anabaptists,’ sometimes called leftwing Protestants, in particular migrated in search of religious freedom and to escape state religious coercion. These traditions especially prospered in North America. Their emphasis on ‘believers’ communal equality’ in the task of overseeing church life, in doctrinal discernment, and in scriptural interpretation, fit well with the democratizing tendencies of immigrant life. As a result, North American Protestantism took on a dynamic life of its own that quickly produced new ‘schisms of reform’ that rebounded back to Europe. For example, Episcopalians, Anglicans in the USA, quickly generated a major division led by John Wesley that became known as ‘Methodism.’ Anabaptist or ‘free church’ movements that especially emphasized the priesthood of all believers and local autonomy of believing congregations came forth in great profusion, often spontaneously. Protestant denominationalism came to have indescribable diversity. Many such groups came to be known as Baptists. Baptists included forms of ‘slave Christianity’ that enabled African-Americans in slavery to generate a religious culture independent of the slave owners’ ‘white Christianity’ imposed on them and designed to keep them in their place. Methodism and white Baptist practice spread in rural and frontier communities throughout the northern hemisphere. Even in the twenty-first century, the two largest Protestant churches in North America are Black and white Baptist denominations. Cultural historians now recognize that gender was never a theorized social reality until the modern period of western cultural history. This means that an accurate assessment of Protestantism’s impact on gender cannot be uncovered through exercises in intellectual history alone. More recent methods of historical-material historiography enable us to see that the major impacts on gender relations within Protestantism were actually the result of changes in the religious practice initiated by the new Protestant churches. Slowly these changes produced concrete redirections in gender relations and, more slowly, reshaped how Protestants theorized gender.
Not surprisingly, early Protestantism continued what may be called ‘traditionalist’ Christian notions of gender. After the high Middle Ages, Catholic (now Roman Catholic) Christianity had made the moral theology of Thomas Aquinas its formal moral-theological standard. Thomistic thinking formalized Catholic moral teaching so that it came to presume two normative sources of moral knowledge: revelation and reason. Though what was meant by either revelation or reason differed in specific theological accounts, western Christians came to assume that both of these sources contributed to a proper knowledge of gender. What the resulting ‘traditionalist Christian’ view of gender presumed, roughly following Aristotelian biology, was that males and females differed by nature (science or reason) and divine will (revelation). Such thinking supported notions widely held in popular culture that made deep challenges to traditional gender relations difficult. Throughout Christian history women’s roles varied and were frequently changed by resistance to existing traditionisms. Well before the modern advent of women’s organized efforts at political change, forms of what today are called Christian feminism existed and should be read as expressions by women of refusal of domination. Contemporary critical historiography confirms these continuous challenges but given the strength of patriarchal control, the point of visible institutional strain was never reached.
Even so, the full relevance of the Reformation to gender change is frequently missed because only formal teaching on gender is noted. The alternatives in communal form, ritual, and teaching in the Protestant traditions under discussion here were simultaneously shifts both in ecclesial social forms and in Christian communal life. It was these new social formations and forms of ritualized communal practice that slowly changed gender relations in churches and in the broader culture.
The closing of the clergy and monastic-centered penitential systems, including the break with clerical celibacy brought the Christian parish, or in left-wing parlance, the Christian congregation, into the center of Protestant Christian faith practice. As a result, the primary units of Protestant spirituality soon became the local community (parish or congregation) and especially the family. In particular the patterns used to socialize persons as Protestant Christians dramatically altered gender relations. The Protestant family was theorized as an arena where both men and women, albeit initially in varied ways, were called to be agents of the formation of Christian communal life. Men were chiefly responsible for the public and the most authoritative ecclesial roles, but men and women alike were teachers of the faith, leaders of prayer, and witnesses to divine presence.
Protestantism particularly flourished in tandem with the invention of the printing press, which made Luther’s, Calvin’s and the Anabaptists’ formal emphasis on scripture as the central theological source for Christians an actualizable reality. In all Protestant communities the locus of prayer, ritual practice, and theoretical (i.e. theological) formation shifted to the congregation and the family. None of the new Christian duties articulated by the Reformers were considered more important than that of transmitting the new ‘knowledge of faith,’ whether as scriptural literacy, or as newer catechism (doctrine). While none of this resulted in immediate transformations in female social roles because of the deeply gendered nature of the sex role systems, the new practices increased women’s direct participation in matters of faith discernment. They also situated women within the central sacral systems of Protestant life. Prior to the Reformation, in spite of women’s creativity and resistance, a lack of formal clerical power and women’s remoteness from male-monopolized institutionalized hierarchies of ecclesial power prevailed. Prereformation Christian women certainly had created powerful gender alternatives, in particular monastic institutions for women. These enabled some women (‘nuns’) to live in an alternative social space where intellectual, artistic, and spiritual gifts could be cultivated. The impact of such efforts was severely marginalized structurally, however, and could be easily manipulated by male hierarchies. Historians have also recognized that some initial Reformational changes had negative impacts on women’s roles and status. For example, Luther’s closing of nunneries and his and Calvin’s insistence on clerical marriage, especially when gender dislocations led to arranged marriages between priests and nuns, robbed women of crucial existing social space. However, the need for alternatives also led the Protestant movements to create new gendered sub-cultures for women, usually in the form of Deaconess Orders or catechetical offices that enabled women to work with women and children in initiating them into ‘the fullness of faith.’
The trajectory of changes in gender practice and, with the rise of modernity, gender theory, within these Protestant movements cannot be traced in detail. However, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when gender began to become a contested political issue and calls for gender justice emerged widely in public discourse, calls for justice for women were voiced in all but the most ‘traditionalist’ Protestant Christian communities. It is erroneous, as some ‘secular’ historians as well as conservative Christians have done, to imagine that demands for change in gender roles occurred primarily outside of, and apart from, the life and practice of Protestant communities. Christian feminisms fed public political feminism and Christian anti-feminist resistance testifies to the militant presence of feminist agitation within Protestantism throughout the modern period. Feminism is perceived as secular in origins only because contemporary historians tend to discount the role of religion in positive social change and because feminist discourse within Protestantism was initially less confrontative than later feminist political rhetoric. But in Protestant cultures by the late nineteenth century, women’s energies were powerful within the churches and pressure for change escalated simultaneously with the rising public efforts of women for political change. It is not too much to say that by the end of the nineteenth century Protestant churches were thoroughly feminized and women had gained considerable financial and organizational power. Within Christianity, antifeminism should be read as a symptom of increased pressure for change from women. A review of historical gains for women make clear that change came fastest in nations where Protestantism was strong but where the churches did not aspire to state enforced establishment.
Even as many male church leaders reasserted Christian gender traditionalism against the claims of Christian feminisms, gender parity slowly increased in Protestant communities, and on-going feminist contentions did not disappear. On the contrary, by the twentieth century, contentions over gender exploded into nearly all Christian communities. Because feminist pressures were more muted in Anglican and Lutheran traditions until well into the century, and because controversies over ordination when they did erupt were especially strident there, public awareness of church gender debates became widespread only at that historical moment. However, nearly all nations where Protestantism has had a clear religio-cultural role were the first to adopt explicit legal and moral norms of equality between men and women both within churches and in the wider society. Furthermore, because the congregation and the family have remained the cultic center of Protestant life and practice, active patriarchical misogyny is rarely overtly expressed within it. Protestant pastoral practice is invariably more egalitarian than official theologies would suggest so women are more likely to be pedestilized than criticized in Protestant rhetoric.
The ways in which clergy-lay ritual practice and power were realigned and the patterns by which Protestants groups related to state political power are also crucial to the pace of gender change. Where Protestant denominations replicated Roman Catholic efforts at church-state establishment as in the Church of England, in sectors of Lutheranism and in some Reformed churches such as those in early New England, USA, or predemocratic South Africa, Protestant leaders sought to reassure Christian rulers that the churches would officially conform to ‘traditional values’ and to the stability of social order. Efforts in support of keeping the Christian family ‘traditional’ were frequent among male leaders, though much more common in established churches than elsewhere. Gender change came much more rapidly where Reformed churches broke with theories of the divine right of kings and endorsed democratic political theory and where the ‘free churches,’ actively refusing religious establishment, sought to actualize a theology of universal priesthood. In fact, it was these free-church Protestants who demanded, on theological grounds, that religious toleration become the public stance of the just state. Left-wing Protestants militantly insisted that church-state separation is a matter of constitutional or political ‘right’ and in the USA they were successful.
Today it is often these Protestant movements, the first to ordain women and the strongest critics of identification with state power, who have become the most conservative on gender. This is because in the late twentieth century the locus of Protestant traditionalism in relation to gender change shifted dramatically. Until recently, theological progressivism had slowly carried the day in the older Protestantisms under discussion here. Over time, newer forms of knowledge prevailed and the historical-critical or hermeneutic sciences prevailed. The main dynamic of Protestant theological development was towards recognition that the ‘two’ sources of religious and moral knowledge—revelation and reason—supported the central Protestant historical theological emphasis on ‘continuing reformation.’ Such ‘theological liberalism,’ as conservatives called it, was comprehended by most Protestants as the heart of their faith-claims. Even when Protestant theological polemics included charges that gender justice was ‘heresy’ the trend was toward equality. In recent debates, however, the peculiar Protestant theological reaction of Biblicism has begun to alter older historical directions that embraced historical-critical readings of scripture.
In the late nineteenth century Protestant reaction to change began to take the form of what is called, somewhat misleadingly, ‘biblical literalism.’ So-called literalists do not seek to replicate ancient sex role patterns, but they project current traditionalist views to suggest that the Bible does not support gender justice. Such change, they contend, is impious because women’s ‘place’ is forever set by what ‘the Bible’ teaches. This refusal of all truth except that found in ‘the Bible’ produced what in modern parlance is known as ‘Fundamentalism.’ Fundamentalism is a reactionary historical dynamic intrinsic to Protestantism as a text-based religion. Today many claim that other major religious movements are also becoming ‘fundamentalist,’ but such charges should be approached cautiously. Fundamentalism was generated by the particularities of Protestant inter-religious conflict. The refusal of gender justice within Protestant Christianity has parallels in other contemporary religions that accounts for the glib extension of the term. However, such usage is seriously misleading as to what is occurring within other religion. Even when reactionary Protestants and the Papacy attempt to enlist conservatives within Judaism, Islam, and even the great Asian religions against gender justice movements, Christian fundamentalist justifications for resisting such justice are not readily generalizable to other groups. Political and economic dynamics profoundly different than those occurring in older Protestant cultures are taking place elsewhere. For example, many former progressive left-wing Protestants in North America, are today for the first time, strongly aligned with global capitalist political power, whereas Islamic religious reaction is often aligned with anti-colonialism and resistance to capitalist ‘modernizing’ dynamics. Failure to notice such disparities may pit justice-seeking activists within the religions against each other.
In spite of the rising tide of fundamentalist antifeminist attack within Protestant cultures and communities the struggles for justice continue in all of them. However, today even some moderate Protestants portray debates on gender justice as ‘trivial.’ Arguments about women’s ordination, Christian sexual ethics, including Christian positions on gay, lesbian and transsexual lifestyles, and debates about reproductive choice and abortion are not understood, as earlier Protestant thought understood them, as aspects of the Protestant theological struggle towards genuine moral discernment and responsibility in a complex world. Most Protestants continue to espouse ‘continuous and on-going reformation,’ as the proper theological norm of Christian ecclesial and communal life but the new fundamentalism has been chillingly successful in obscuring the connection between progressive Protestant theological principles and these particular issues. This is why in spite of the historical directions outlined here the question of whether continued movement toward equality in male and female relations among Protestants remain salient. Progressive moral change is always difficult to sustain both within religious communities and in the wider society. The fundamentalism now aligned with conservative political and economic power enjoys considerable success in part because of better political mobilization on the right. Even reputable media spokespersons and scholars, who surely should know better, occasionally mislead in their interpretation of these contemporary controversies. For example, until the last decades of the twentieth century most Protestant churches from the traditions discussed here, emphatically embraced family planning and took no role in efforts to criminalize abortion. In ongoing debates legal abortion came to be embraced on various theological and moral grounds by major Protestant churches. However, the Christian Right has now succeeded in efforts to construct an ‘unbroken’ Christian anti-abortion tradition out of a pastiche of traditionalist Biblical pronatalism, Roman Catholic teaching, and post-sonogram technical imagery. To be sure, a few Protestant moral-theologians have been strongly anti-abortion on Biblicist grounds, but until recent efforts to ‘reconstruct’ Protestant history, it is not accurate to portray Protestants as anything other than committed to family planning and as moderately supportive of safe and legal abortion. Today, no reputable theological spokesperson would criticize family planning or embrace Roman papal doctrines that sex is chiefly for procreation, but fewer and fewer Protestant leaders recall the active debates that led to the embrace of reproductive choice for women in their communities. As a result the slow but dramatic march of Protestantism toward inclusion of women in ‘the priesthood of all believers’ may be reversed and the historical vocation of protestant theological reform rendered unrecognizable.
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