Re:Gallup: U.S. church membership dips below 50% for first time
by AuthorizedCust on Monday March 29, 2021 @12:09PM
(#26623945)
> treatment of women in New Testament is pretty old-school patriarchal
It reflects the mores of the times, which were different than ours. People 2000 years from now will certainly look at us and be aghast at some of our norms.
My denomination has had woman pastors since the mid 1800s.
It's interesting to observe the ways various Christian groups try to navigate their way around gender roles in their communities. You have a full spectrum here. From some fundamentalist US churches that will take everything super-literally, through groups like Jehovah's Witnesses[1] who sort-of take this literally, but make reasonable exceptions[2], through Catholics in Western countries, where most believers probably haven't even heard or thought about these passages, and any semblance of adhering to them is likely seen as more traditional than religious - all the way to lenient Christian groups that allow women priests.
In my experience, all Christianity is like this. Every group in every location[3] has their own specific understanding of which words are to be taken literally, which ones figuratively (and to what degree), and which ones to be completely ignored.
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[0] - E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Timothy_2:12, https://www.openbible.info/topics/head_coverings and related references - literally, women should not teach, not usurp authority of a man, should wear head covering when performing the subset of religious functions they're allowed to, etc.
[1] - If I seem to focus on JWs too much in this thread, that's because I spent 20 years being one.
[2] - E.g. over at Jehovah's Witnesses, there's a lot that would technically qualify as "praying or prophesising" where women are't required to cover their heads, and men are not required to uncover theirs. Also definition of "cover" is "with a hat or similar", probably not what the authors had in mind.
[3] - As I understand it, Catholics in the West and in Africa are essentially two different religions. The former, having lived with it for centuries, ignore or pay lip service to all the rules that the latter obey to the letter.