Isn’t Christianity Bad for Women?

The short answer: Some people who called themselves Christians have treated women badly, and that is wrong. But Jesus treated women in ways that astonished the people around Him, and the Bible’s teaching that women bear God’s image just as fully as men has lifted the lives of women across history.

You may have heard that Christianity keeps women down, that the Bible treats them as second-class and that the church has always been run by men for men. (Book 1 looked at the separate question of whether women can be pastors.) Here the bigger question is whether the faith itself is good or bad for women. The best place to start is with Jesus.

Jesus and women

In first-century Judaism, a respectable teacher didn’t chat with women in public, and a woman’s word often counted for little in court. Watch what Jesus does.

He sat at a well and talked theology with a Samaritan woman who’d had five husbands, and when His disciples came back they “were surprised that He was speaking with a woman” (John 4:27). He let Mary of Bethany sit “at the Lord’s feet listening to His message” (Luke 10:39), the place of a student learning from a rabbi, and when her sister complained, He defended her: “Mary has chosen the good portion, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:42).

He called a woman who had been ill for twelve years, whom the law treated as unclean, “Daughter” (Luke 8:48). He healed a woman bent double for eighteen years and called her “this daughter of Abraham” (Luke 13:16), a title almost never used of women. When a religious man looked down on a woman with a bad reputation, Jesus turned to him and said, “Do you see this woman?” (Luke 7:44). Groups of women travelled with Him and supported Him. And the first person He appeared to after rising from the dead was a woman. He spoke her name, “Mary” (John 20:16), and sent her to tell the men.

Nobody inventing a religion to keep women in their place would have written those stories.

What the Bible says about women

It starts at the beginning, where women and men are made in God’s image together. The woman is called a “helper” (Genesis 2:18), but the same Hebrew word is used of God Himself helping Israel, so it means strength, not inferiority. Peter tells husbands to treat their wives “with honor as fellow heirs of the gracious gift of life” (1 Peter 3:7), and Paul tells them, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). That is a call to lay down your life, not to boss someone around.

Christians differ on some questions about roles in marriage and church. But no faithful reading of the Bible allows a husband to bully, control or hurt his wife. If anyone uses the Bible to excuse hurting a woman or a girl, that’s abuse, and it should be told to a trusted adult.

What happened in history

In the Roman world, unwanted babies were often left outside to die, and girls more often than boys. Christians rescued abandoned babies and refused to do it themselves. Christian widows were cared for rather than left destitute (Acts 6:1). Women hosted some of the earliest house churches, like Lydia in Philippi.

Much later, in India, the missionary William Carey campaigned against the burning of widows on their husbands’ funeral fires, and Pandita Ramabai, an Indian Christian, opened homes and schools for child-widows that the rest of society had thrown away. In China, missionaries joined the fight against binding girls’ feet.

Christians weren’t the only people who fought for women, and some Christians failed women badly, sometimes in church. That should make us sorry, not defensive. But the failures happened when Christians ignored Jesus, not when they followed Him.

So if you’re a girl, hear this clearly: God doesn’t see you as an afterthought. He made you on purpose, in His image, and Jesus treats you as someone worth listening to.

Think about it: Which of Jesus’ encounters with women surprises you most, and what does it tell you about how He sees people?

Go deeper: Pandita Ramabai (For Teens) — in London, Ramabai saw Christians caring for women everyone else despised, asked why, and was read John 4, the story of Jesus and the woman at the well; it convinced her that Christ alone could lift up “the downtrodden womanhood” of India. Start with chapter 6, “The Woman at the Well”.