Anti-Semitic speech has to do with race. We are discussing religion. Nothing I have said is anti-Semitic.
Um, what? There isn’t a Jewish race. Anti-Semitism has to do with heritage and it also has to do with religion. Now you’ve crossed the line.
By all means explain it to me. If I did, it was out of ignorance. These attacks are exhausting and hurtful and I’m just trying to defend myself and get the thread back on track.
I don’t think that anything you have said prior to this was a problem in any way. You just defined antisemitism completely incorrectly and I know it wasn’t intentional. There is a Jewish heritage and there is a religion associated with it. It’s not a race because to the extent that race exists, a member of any race can be Jewish.
The Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton was elected the first female Presiding Bishop of the ELCA in 2013 and served until 2025, being re-elected for a second term in 2019, leading the church for 12 years in late 2025.
Thank you acknowledging that. This has been really hurtful for me and I needed to hear someone say it more than I realized.
As has been noted, Christianity is by no means a monolithic religion. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of denominations and sects, with varying views on many aspects of the faith, as well as varying views on interpretation of the Bible, including on gender.
ISTM that a number of posters in this thread have pointed to certain passages in the Christian Bible, and certain policies of some denominations, and consider that all Christianity treats women as less than men due to this. They are absolutely entitled to their opinions, but it also seems to me that it’s related to a general disdain and distrust of Christianity, and all organized religions, on this board.
As others have also noted, there are some Christian denominations – particularly the more progressive, “Mainline” Protestant denominations – which have made great strides in working towards equality, particularly in accepting and even encouraging women as clergy and in leadership roles. It may be worth noting that those denominations typically also are, at least now, supportive of LGBT+ members and clergy, are supportive of social justice causes, etc. As @LSLGuy noted, much of that is relatively recent (i.e., within the last decades, or at least within the last century or so).
Please note: I do not claim that even progressive Christian denominations have perfect equality between men and women, but they are far better than they used to be in the not-too-distant past, and they are also far better than more conservative Christian denominations.
FWIW #1: The United Methodist Church parish of which I am a member has had two female lead pastors in the last 15 years, currently has an openly gay lead pastor, and now has a policy, approved by the parish’s lay church leadership, to no longer use the male pronoun “He/Him” in reference to God.
FWIW #2: several people have mentioned the Lutheran church as being one of the denominations with female leadership. It’s worth noting that, at least in the U.S., there are at least three different “Lutheran” denominations, and female clergy/leadership is not universal across them:
- The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) is liberal, and is likely the one which people are referring to; I have two female relatives (on my wife’s side) and a female friend who are ordained ELCA pastors.
- The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, on the other hand, is quite conservative, and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod is ultra-conservative; neither of those denominations have female pastors.
Now that’s progress! What are they using instead?
We specifically don’t use a pronoun when referencing God (so, no “They/Them,” either); we always use “God,” which, yes, does lead to some awkward sentence structure – one of my roles in the church is to do proofreading and copy editing on our e-newsletters, monthly pastoral letters, etc., and I’ve had to get more creative in how to help them structure phrasing.
We also no longer use “Father” in reference to God.
There are also Reform Jewish texts (in English) that use gender neutral language and have since at least the 90s. This was for making things not explicitly male so it uses Sovereign instead of Lord or King for example.
What you said, although you may not have personally believed it, was “supersessionist”. It implied that Christianity is somehow superior to Judaism, that the Christian covenant has “superseded” the Mosaic covenant and revoked the Jews’ status as the Chosen People. This is, by definition, profoundly anti-Semitic.
Indeed. And the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopalian Church 2006-2015 was Katharine Jefferts Shori.
Moderating:
It really is antisemitic. And it’s also something that many Christian sects espouse. There’s a reason Jews kept getting driven out of one Christian nation after another. That doesn’t mean that you are antisemitic. Any more than starting this topic makes you anti-feminist. But it’s feedback you should consider.
Nonetheless, this is going too far towards attacking the poster outside the pit. Please try to discuss the topic in a civil way, or report the poster of you don’t think that’s possible.
Another data point from a fellow Jewish poster here: I did not read @TruCelt’s post about the interpretation of “many Christian religions” that “the Old Testament is the description of what people believed when they lived in the darkness” as in any way endorsing such interpretations. She is quite correct that a lot of Christian doctrine historically did, and a large subset of it currently does, view the Jewish Torah and Jewish belief and practice as an incomplete revelation of true divinity, which was completed by the acts of sacrifice and redemption that Christians ascribe to Jesus.
@TruCelt is also correct that American Protestantism consciously identified with (their perception of) Old Testament scripture to an extent unusual for Christians at the time. (We see its effects in, for example, the early American predilection for “Old Testament” names like Hepzibah and Jedediah that seemed amusingly old-fashioned and parochial to contemporary European and “Europeanized American” Christians.)
Of course all this incomplete-revelation doctrine is fundamentally antisemitic, but I think you’re way out in left field when you claim that @TruCelt’s post appeared to endorse or affirm any antisemitic views whatsoever. Let’s not re-enact that old Borscht Belt joke about writing an essay on the elephant.
This is horrific.
A far better way to state the case. Thank you.
At the risk of beating a dead horse, I think I finally understand what Think.Fish has been so upset about. The link to “Supersessionism” made it clear. I can honestly say, having been raised Catholic, moved into the Presbyterian Church for a decade, and now having chosen the Quaker faith, I have never heard a any of those claim Christians as a new “chosen people.” It was always preached that anyone who loved their neighbor as themselves was saved, regardless of whether they had ever even seen a New Testament, or called themselves Christian. That’s an entirely new idea to me.
I don’t consider faith in Jesus to be anti-Semitic any more than I consider a Jewish persons belief in their group as the “Chosen People” to be anti-Christian. That’s just not how I think. It’s one of the reasons I chose the Quaker faith, because the equality of (and divinity within) all humans is a basic tenet.
You just keep inadvertently stepping in it.
Chosen People does not in any respect imply superiority. It’s kind of the opposite. It means that we are supposed to follow more rules and set an example. We explicitly do not consider ourselves to be better or more correct. Culturally we don’t care about or concern ourselves with what other people do. We mostly just want to be left the fuck alone.
I’m so sorry. I hope it’s clear that I really am sincerely trying to understand. Thank you for fighting my ignorance. In my Christian upbringing, it was certainly taught that Jesus’s teaching superseded the Old Testament rules. That’s not the same as teaching that we were superior in any way either. Though I certainly acknowledge that historically some very dangerous Christians have seen it this way.
It was disappointing, to say the least. But while there are some countries where women are explicitly forbidden to be monks, there are others where there are movements to change that. There have also been women not officially monks who were so popular they were just allowed to teach anyway.
In the US we have some big female teachers, for example Charlotte Joko Beck (late Zen teacher), Tara Brach (a Theravadan Buddhist and psychologist.) I think you’ll see more equality in the Theravadan tradition because it tends to focus on the laity more than monastic life. Even in the US Zen traditions there are some places where female teachers are discouraged. The abbot of my current Sangha left one such place both for its views on women and LGBTQ people.
Man if that guy had said that to me… I would have said, “Lemme get this straight. All things are marked by emptiness. No touch, no sight, neither taste nor sound. There is no Self, no enlightenment, no elimination, no path… But gender matters?”