The book is sometimes spoken of as though it’s ‘anti-christian,’ and since in the world of Gilead, Bible verses are used to justify their oppression it’s perhaps an easy step to take. But it’s a mis-step all the same. Attwood herself, in a foreword from 2019, denied this saying: ‘the book is not anti-religion. It is against the use of religion as a front for tyranny.’
This is the ‘tall tale’ that’s grown up around this book and is even suggested in the book by placing it within a society with ‘Christian’ reference points. It’s sad however that a lie like this has tarnished many women’s attitude to Christianity, and it’s like sowed seeds of fear and suspicion among women who are Christians already.
There’s a scene where the main character is read an excerpt from the Bible by ‘the Commander’ (her patriarchal head). It stood out to me. Attwood writes:
“[The Commander] crosses to the large leather chair reserved for him, takes the key out of his pocket, fumbles with the ornate brass-bound leather covered box that stands on the table beside the chair. He inserted the key, opens the box, lifts out the Bible, an ordinary copy, with a black cover and gold-edged pages. The Bibles is kept locked up, the way people once kept tea locked up, so the servants wouldn’t steal it,. It Is an incendiary device: who knows what we’d make of it, if we ever got our hands on it?”
The Bible is an incendiary device indeed, which is why totalitarian states have banned or burnt it. But let’s engage with that final statement:
‘Who knows what we’d make of it if we ever got our hands on it?’
Who knows indeed… except that, we do know. We know since that’s precisely what did in fact happen in history, and the result wasn’t oppression but freedom. Freedom and indeed the creation of the very categories of oppression that we hold so dear.
Jesus, you see, treated women well and he created a society that insisted on doing the same. Jesus treated women as the co-heirs to eternal life that they are, the image of God bearing, Holy Spirit indwelled, gifted and intelligent human beings that they are. And Jesus did this because the Jewish scriptures taught this, and then Jesus’ followers also did this. Their behaviour, and the growth of the Christian movement, then in turn, led to women being in the majority in churches, to being overrepresented in churches compared to their societies in general. Women were appointed as deaconesses in churches, women were known as evangelists, women were encouraged to learn and study, and husbands were even taught that mistreating their wives could cause their prayers to be hindered.
That is Christianity and that is why, following two thousand years of Christian history, we are outraged by the Gilead in Attwood’s book.
To suggest (or even sows seeds) that the world of Attwood’s dystopian America is a possible outgrowth of Christianity is not true, it is a lie. Don’t get me wrong, there have undoubtedly been corrupt aberrations of churches, and cases of darkness masquerading as light, but that only serves to reinforce the point. You know a counterfeit after all only if you have something authentic to compare it to.
Jesus gave his word, his way and his witness and it led to the establishing of communities that, quite literally, created the moral foundations upon which our liberal values depend; those same value by which we condemn female suppression.
Systematically oppressing women for the sake of a society’s greater needs (as in Gliead’s birth programme) is indeed a valid and possible way of behaving, unless of course there’s an objective standard, a higher standard, that calls for a different response to crisis, a standard against which al our behaviours will be judged.
Jesus has so utterly overturned the oppressive way of ruling that we now have an objective standard against which we judge the world. “Take heart,” he said “for I have overcome the world.” He did, and he has and that’s exactly why the opening quote about the Bible’s power works. It contains the Author of the human story entering that story in order that he might, in a plot twist few expected, identify with the downtrodden and oppressed.
Jesus identify’s with them, and caused a revolution of Copernican magnitude.
So, no this isn’t an anti-christian feminist tract, and those who think it is have clearly never read the Book that The Handmaid’s Tale is supposedly riffing off to create its dystopia. It owes more to the patriarchys associated with Islam and Andrew Tate, classical Rome or Greece than with Jesus. But then again, perhaps this is the nature of aggressive egalitarianism. Just as, to the man with a hammer everything's a nail, to a second-wave feminist, maybe every acknowledgement of difference is oppression. The Bible's picture of the sexes is one of mutual honour and beautiful difference, of representatives and roles and grander narratives, bound up not in the gifts we have but in the meanings we inhabit.
Heaven and earth, male and female, Christ and the church.
Every peasant, every underachiever, every bog standard powerless member of society and the human race is given a purpose to live by and a meaning to their lives not attached to their achievements or their gifts, but to their sex, to the roles they get to play and for the bits of heaven they get to embody in creation.
But that's a subject for another blog.