Perhaps the idea of women having an ESSENTIAL and largely UNCREDITED role in the growth and spread of
Christianity throughout history is a lump you cannot swallow.
How can you?
Jehovah's Witnesses treat women like domestic servants and pat them on the head with affection reserved
for a fine hunting dog that has retrieved a shotgunned quail.
Mainstream Christianity likes their women sitting at home baking cookies and cleaning dustbunnies out from under the
couch and laundering their Elder husband/head's skid-marked BVD's.
Christian women, as a whole, are charged with many thankless duties that come as a package-deal which includes
(in some cases) homeschooling so that radical ideas such as Science won't intrude on their proprietary belief system.
But, having a major role in the very existence of the Christian church going back a millennia and a half---well, that's just
GOING TOO FAR!
The first step to gaining the complicity of a slave is to establish DOMINANCE.
If you want to conquer any human being you must overcome their natural reluctance to be SUBJECT to your will.
If you must physically dominate them but not persuade them mentally to accept your domination and headship
THEY WILL UNDERMINE you (so strong is the will to be free.)
But...once you reach their emotional center and dominate their independance with a MYTH of INFERIORITY and
DIVINE WILL the co-operation and acceptance of a lesser role becomes a commonplace.
The Africans were stolen from their villages or sold and convinced their skin was turned black as a curse upon an imaginary ancestor.
They were cursed by God himself. The white man was APPOINTED their superior.
Slaves were viewed as savages and taught christianity as a means of subjugating them mentally.
The early American black christian church was filled with IDENTIFICATION of blacks with the oppressed chosen people: THE JEWS.
How else could they make sense of their role and their burden?
Why am I injecting this into a discussion about women spreading Christianity?
Because the same process applies to MISINFORMING women throughout the world about their own role and identity.
Have you ever heard the following expression (I apologize in advance) "Woman is the nigger of the world." ??
The phrase was originally coined by Yoko Ono during a magazine interview in 1969. Lennon later said during his Live in New York City album that it took him until 1970 to "dig it." He was hoping to show how women had been and still were being treated. The song describes women's subservience to men across all cultures. It was banned from radio airplay because of the word 'nigger', though it was played on WHRW-FM. Many prominent black people, including comedian Dick Gregory, spoke out in defense of the song. Another supporter, CongressmanRon Dellums, stated, "If you define 'nigger' as someone whose lifestyle is defined by others, whose opportunities are defined by others, whose role in society is defined by others, the good news is that you don't have to be black to be a nigger in this society. Most of the people in America are niggers." [1]
In a 1972 interview on the Dick Cavett Show, John Lennon stated that Irish revolutionary James Connolly was an inspiration for the song. Lennon quoted Connolly's 'the female is the slave of the slave' in explaining the pro-feminist inspiration behind the song. [2]
(Wikipedia.org)
