How Patriarchal Religions Use Fear to Strip Women of Spiritual Sovereignty
I, your inner Witch, have called you to the hearth to share some words of wisdom with you. It’s time to tune out the world and tune in to yourself. Come, sit by the fire with me.
On your journey to restoring your feminine connection to the divine, you’ll need to break more than a few spells. But perhaps the most important, and toughest one to break, is the belief that you are either disconnected from the divine or worse, that you are wicked for being connected to it. All patriarchal religions seek to sever women from this divine connection, and so today I’d like to call your attention to one of the biggest manipulations used by these systems to make you doubt yourself: fear.
Organized religions have built empires upon humanity’s fear of the unknown. They promise certainty where none exists, then ask for your obedience, your money, and your trust in exchange for the peace of mind that after you die, you’ll go to a better place. When in actuality, these organizations actively cause more fear, so that you’ll look to them for peace and no where else. Because there is money to be made when people are afraid.
So let’s talk fear tactics. How exactly did these religions get you to not only surrender your spiritual sovereignty but also doubt your own divine connection? I will condense these tactics into five basic lies:
Lie 1: Someone Is Always Watching You, So Don’t Deviate From the Path
What a notion! Not only have humans decided that if there is an all-powerful, all-knowing entity that it is a human, but they have given this omnipotent being nothing better to do than spy on each and every one of us. Not just spying but actively keeping a tally of our actions. This is an incredibly clever lie to keep people obedient, shame-filled, and, let’s face it, fake.
Does this threat that someone is watching and judging really keep people good? No. It merely keeps them performing good while emboldening them to judge others for not being, in their eyes, “good.”
It has caused neighbors to cast aspersions on their neighbors, parents to judge their children’s choices, and local laws to be heavily influenced by religious beliefs. It leads to groups harassing, assaulting, and killing anyone who goes against their religious beliefs, namely homosexuals, liberated women, and differing races, cultures & religions.
The idea that there is a Sky Daddy watching everything you do has not encouraged moral behavior, it has simply resulted in performative good & peer monitoring. So that you not only fear God’s eyes, but everyone’s. What’s worse, you are made to feel that your prayers are being ignored, that God doesn’t care about your pain or justice, which leaves you feeling inadequate and insecure at all times. You just know you must conform, not draw attention to yourself, and follow the rules that others tell you to.
This is a special challenge for women as these religions sought to control women, body and spirit. Women don’t only need to be decent humans, they must be eternally sacrificing to the men in their lives, they must be obedient and submissive. It comes with a much larger set of rules and an even stricter outline, resulting in even more chances to accidently veer from the course, yet all the more reasons to wish to. In the end, it leaves women fearing even the idea of experimenting with new, empowering ways of living, of loving, and of finding spiritual fulfillment.
You are judged harshly for every choice, ensuring you’re always thinking about what others want, keeping you firmly within the black lines.
Lie 2: Sinners Go to Hell & You’re Sinful by Nature
Oh my sage. Hell. The biggest scare tactic of them all. An idea meant to scare people into behaving morally, just as Santa Clause is used to get children to eat their vegetables. Except this one is so much worse. Fire and brimstone, a devil with a pitchfork, endless torment. All for not following God’s rules.
But it’s not simply “be good and avoid hell” because these religions tell you that you’re born a sinner. So avoiding hell is not the same as ensuring heaven. The bar is low for hell and high for heaven. For every “good point” there are ten ways to get “bad points.” Resulting in the average religious person never feeling good enough for heaven, therefore always fearing hell.
From not saying specific prayers a specific number of times, to having sex before marriage, to drinking alcohol or eating meat, to not paying enough in tithes, and beyond. And for women there are far more ways to be seen as sinful than for a man, meaning her efforts to avoid hell must be tenfold what his are. Her hair is sinful, his isn’t. Her body shameful, his is not. Her virgin status holy, his less so. Her obedience to all men demanded, while he is given authority over her. Even their religious text pin the fall of all humankind on the first woman. Her sinful curiosity and thirst for knowledge cursed all women with labor pain. What an idea!
The road to hell is all but designed for women. Leaving you eternally self-monitoring, your self-worth non-existent, thinking it is your nature to be sinful, so you best follow religion’s orders as faithfully as possible.
Lie 3: The Divine Can Only Be Reached Through Men, or After You Die
Equally appalling as the threat of Hell is the counter promise of Heaven if humans are good enough. Rather than influence people to naturally be good people, it has them tallying their points and turning on each other as though Heaven has limited space. They threaten each other with “You’re not getting into heaven!” like it’s some elite club, without realizing that this hateful and judgmental energy is the opposite of an Heaven-occupying angel would sound like.
Yet for women in these religions, Heaven is their only possibility of truly connecting with the Divine, so it’s no wonder they would cling to it. For they’ve been told that they must look to the men in their lives for God’s wisdom, compassion, and guidance. The same men who beat them, rape them, silence them, and control them speak for God. She is forbidden from seeking her own path to the Divine so if she wants any spiritual nourishment, she is forced to either look to a man, or do all she can to get into Heaven upon her death.
She is held spiritually hostage. Truly cruel. Especially when, as a woman, she is closer to the Beyond than any man, yet is kept intentionally ignorant of this fact.
The cost of clinging to these promised places is far too high. It has you sacrificing your actual guaranteed life on earth for an “eternity” that has yet to be proven. What if instead of entertaining the notion of “heaven” as a reward that must be earned upon death, all you needed was to restore your relationship with the earth? What if all it took to be in heaven, with The Divine, was to realize that you, a woman, and the earth, both creators and sustainers of life, were The Divine?
Lie 4: To Challenge Their Book Is To Challenge God
(Sigh) This one is the one that confuses me most. Humanity went so long without this book and then once it was written, generations of humans seemed to have lost their innate ability to determine right from wrong. So that even now, when part of humanity says something is cruel/sexist/racist/etc. an even larger part holds up their ancient text as a reason to disagree. The book is infallible, unquestionable, and is leading humanity as a whole astray. The book I speak of, is of course, the Bible/Torah/Quran.
But these texts, as claimed to be written by prophets of God, are beyond harmful. Condoning war and slavery, ensuring women are oppressed and seen as vessels rather than human beings, and viewing the world not as our life-giver but as a thing that we can endlessly consume and dominate. These books tell you what to wear, to eat, to drink, to do. They tell you how to treat others, how to view your body, how to use the earth. They tell you what injustices to accept, what to do for forgiveness, and how to judge your fellow man. A book nicknamed “the good book,” which condones people being stoned, beaten, raped, and more.
And because questioning these texts is treated as questioning God himself, generations have been taught to silence their own conscience whenever it disagrees with the page.
As a result, these texts, written centuries ago by sexist, racist, envious men whose worldview demanded that women relinquish any form of personal authority, have extensively delayed humanity’s moral and spiritual evolution. They have taken away your use of logic, of science, of your very conscience. They have taken away your ability to think for yourself and judge for yourself what is right and wrong. And for women in particular, this text has ensured you ignore your intuition which knows better. It gave you stories which only sought to silence your wisdom and ensure your servitude to the men in your life.
They gave you a book which only serves men and harms you, and told you it was blasphemous to question it. So you didn’t.
Lie 5: A Woman With A Spiritual Connection is a Wicked Witch
And of course, the final blow to ensure women such as yourself never pursue your own spiritual path, they uprooted and slandered your female ancestors who had such a connection. They sold you the lie that you are most separated from Source because of your womanhood, when, in actuality, you are a portal directly to Source because of your womanhood. Diabolical.
They created their idea of a “witch” with crooked nose, warty chin, and a soul-shuddering cackle who eats children and curses princesses. When in actuality, these women were benefactors to their communities. She was the Seer, the Healer, the Medicine Woman, the Midwife, the Wise Women. She healed, where others couldn’t. She ushered new life into this world and saw spirits off from this mortal coil. She was in touch with her feminine gifts, her intuition, the movement of the planets. She oftentimes lived alone, without children or husband, on land of her own, content. And all of this made her a threat to these Patriarchal religion’s claim that God only worked through men.
Once men decided to put God in the sky and no longer look to the earth or to women, everything changed. From then on, any woman connected with her intuition and ancestral wisdom, to nature, to the cosmos, was a threat to their male prophets and priests, then later their western doctors. The witch challenged Patriarchy, Religion, and Capitalism all at once. So they burned her, drowned her, tortured her. And women have been feeling their way back to their magic and independence ever since. But usually behind closed doors, usually with trepidation, and usually with a defense of innocence, claiming they are just “playing around.”
A woman is, in fact, a portal to consciousness, to the great beyond. She holds this portal between her legs. And this is the source of Patriarchy’s envy and resulting theft of our magic. They shamed us into silence. Stole our land. Condemned our intuition and wisdom. Said our work was of the devil. They scared us into abandoning our connection to Source so that they could claim their male prophets were seen as the only link to it. Imitators only.
What has religion gifted humanity? It has severed us from the only real things in this life. Severed us from nature, from our bodies, from our wisdom, from our conscience. Severed us from each other. And for women, it has severed us from our unique connection to all that is divine, misunderstanding our gifts, shaming our bodies, ignoring our intuition, silencing our voices. It has forced you to be subservient to men while giving men unearned yet unquestionable authority.
And so, my child, as you reclaim your spiritual sovereignty and divine connection it is imperative that you challenge these despicable lies which you know in your heart are tactics to keep you fearful and obedient. Fearful of not just what comes after death, not just how you live your life on earth, but fearful of your own power. They have been gatekeeping your magic. And it is time you jump the fence.
See through the scare tactics, my little witch. And reclaim your connection to the divine. For the good of the earth, for the good of your sisters, and for the good of yourself.
With a cackle,
