What's Gender Got to Do with It? EVERYTHING!
At the top of every autocrat’s “to-do” list is to control religion and control women.
A speech given on International Women’s Day for the Parliament of World Religions.
I’m hopeful as I sit at this nexus of women, spirituality, and human rights. Historically, women have proven that there is nothing more powerful than women uniting in faith to organize against tyranny. Today, global democracy is threatened in unprecedented ways, and I expect we will rise to the occasion.
At the top of every autocrat’s “to-do” list is to control religion and control women.
An autocrat has to control religion because faith is what gives us moral courage to resist. Faith gives us hope that humans can live together without hierarchy and oppression.
Autocrats have to control women because a hierarchical family with tight social control over procreation and the education of children is critical to maintaining a political system based on dominance. This is always closely tied to racism and xenophobia because autocrats, who are always ethnonationalists, have to ensure racial, ethnic and caste purity.
To get women to buy into systems that oppress them, they grant them a bit of power over other minorities and threaten them when they don’t comply. They pit us against each other according to our religion, immigrant status, or race. And sometimes, we buy into it.
To control women’s bodies is to control the world.
Why I Started Faith in Democracy
Conversely, when women resist and build coalitions across race, religion, and class, autocrats are defeated, and democracies that honor the dignity of all thrive.
The Jewish story of Moses, foundational to Abrahamic faiths, is a story of women resisting. Exodus chapter one opens with three women paving the way for a liberationist movement. The Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah defy the King and refuse to commit Genocide. Miriam and her mother, no doubt alerted by the midwives, float their son to freedom on the Nile where the king's daughter rescues and raises a Hebrew child slated for death by her father. God sees their organizing, hears their groans, and acts in human history. Women at the beginning of God’s move into human history spark future movements to end oppression, including the Black struggle for freedom in the U.S.
This story inspires me today to found a new organization, Faith in Democracy, a global network of religious leaders working to restore democracy and human rights in the face of resurgent religious nationalism.
Democracy is in crisis. According to Freedom House, more than three-quarters of the world’s population lives in a country with some restrictions on freedom—the highest proportion in more than a quarter-century.
The same Christian Nationalists who undermined U.S. democracy have exported their ideology and their wedge issue tactics around the globe. Wealthy Americans and Russian oligarchs finance their movement to the tune of 280 million dollars across five continents.
You need a lot of money if you are going to try to convince people to do something that goes against their faith and their self-interest!
I warned the world of this coalition in 2006 with my book Born Again: The Christian Right Globalized. It includes groups like the World Congress of Families, Citizen Go, and the Alliance for Defending Freedom. Today, that coalition I documented in its infancy is now full-blown.
They are passing laws, winning elections, gutting constitutions, and advancing anti-feminist narratives. They stoke fears about gender to polarize, distract, and ultimately gut democracy. Their disinformation campaigns about gender are ways to hide what is a white supremacist, xenophobic, autocratic agenda. They claim to champion the family, but their policies harm families. They claim to be religious, but their beliefs are heretical.
Autocracy Begins with Gender Injustice
Let me give some examples of how they operate and what this looks like:
In 2013 Vladimir Putin turned on a spigot of hate against gender equality and LGBTQ people in Russia and across Eastern Europe. This softened the ground for him to pass a so called “policy framework to preserve traditional Russian moral and spiritual values” in 2022. This enabled him to criminalize what they called the “propaganda of non-traditional family.” Today, those fighting for women’s rights or LGBTQI individuals are considered a national security threat. That criminalization was soon expanded to all humanitarian and civil society groups.
This construct of women’s rights as a threat even extends to Russia’s colonial enterprise. In February 2022, Putin justified his war in Ukraine as an effort to fight the West’s attempt to destroy “traditional values.”
In Hungary, Victor Orbàn took a page from Putin’s playbook, using anti-LGBTQ policies not only as a wedge to consolidate a conservative base but also to compromise the judiciary, control the media and gut the constitution.
This is accelerating in the U.S. as an autocrat running for president borrows and inspires strategies used in Europe. Should Trump be elected this Fall, Republicans plan to implement an 800-page playbook called Project 2025 to implement measures similar to Orban and Putin.
American conservatives are now rallying behind Putin and Orban as heroes. We see it playing out in falling support for Ukraine among House Republicans, when Orbán gets standing ovations at the annual CPAC, or Conservative Political Action Convention, and in how former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson pandered to Putin when he recently became the first Western journalist in years to interview the autocrat.
In Brazil, populist homophobia and transphobia accompanied similar antidemocratic turns. Even before running for president, Jair Bolsonaro warned against the incursion of “gender ideologies” into schools, and he dismantled the professionalized bureaucracy in favor of “super ministries” overseen by his allies. He appointed conservative cabinet members who stripped LGBTQI+ protections from the Ministry of Family, Women, and Human Rights, and he issued executive orders to monitor and restrict the activities of human rights and environmental NGOs.
Bolsonaro, Trump, Putin, and Orban share affinities and mutual political consultants. Steve Bannon, the white supremacist who advised the Trump campaign, advised Bolsonaro to carry out a coup attempt that had all the same features as the U.S. January 6 Capitol Insurrection, including Christian nationalists at the frontlines.
Just a week ago in Ghana, the parliament passed a violent anti-LGBTQ law that now imposes a prison sentence of up to five years for the "wilful promotion, sponsorship, or support of LGBTQ+ activities." Gay sex was already criminalized with a three-year prison sentence, but now NGO leaders can be put in jail for speaking out. Next, they will seek to clamp down on all of civil society.
This is just a smattering of examples of the transnational effort to use anti-feminist narratives to consolidate power as well as undermine established democratic and human rights norms. It has spread to every continent.
This same nexus of bad actors is making inroads in the United Nations, the European Commission, and the Organization of American States. This year and next are super elections, and many democracies face dire threats from their far-right parties.
To counter this threat to human dignity and planetary flourishing, we must reclaim our faith for justice worldwide and build coalitions far and wide so that we cannot be divided.
Hear the Good News
In Mexico, millions of viewers have been drawn to a digital campaign created by Catholics for Choice. The campaign uses feminist theology and humor to build a faith-based case for women’s rights.
In Ghana, the Catholic and Anglican Bishops and even a Cardinal have spoken out against the anti-LGBTQ law;
In Poland, where the anti-democratic Law and Justice Party passed an abortion ban in 2020, millions of women shut down the streets. Although the police tried to quell that peaceful protest with violence and harassment, in 2023, the mass protests translated into a massive voter turnout that managed to unseat the Law and Justice Party despite voter suppression efforts by the government.
Religious leaders are risking arrest for freedom. Just days ago, the head of the Evangelical Church of Hungary was arrested b/c he refused to remain silent about Orban’s abuses.
People will need moral courage to face what is to come. They will need to understand the beauty of what their faith calls us to be, so that we are inoculated against the propaganda coming at us, the fascist attempt to smash truth and turn lies into the new reality.
Like Shiprah, Puah, Miriam, and Pharoah’s daughter, we must forge an international cross-race and religious alliance to resist tyranny. And we need to challenge our democracies to finally fulfill their vision of flourishing for all.
May we make it so.
A lot
Please 🙏 a lot