Today the Daily Mail website reported that a vicar in Sevenoaks, Kent, has been vilified by members of his congregation for instructing female members of the church to ‘be silent’ and ’submit to your husbands’. Such dogma was included in a pamphlet produced by the rector of St Nicholas Church entitled ‘The Role Of Women In The Local Church’, explaining that ‘wives are to submit to their husbands in everything in recognition of the fact that husbands are head of the family as Christ is head of the church.’
Reverend MacLeay and his curate Mark Oden (who delivered a sermon containing the same ideas), go on to say that female servility is ‘the way God has ordered’ human relationships to function, with the instruction: ‘wives, submit to your own husbands.’ In our increasingly secular culture, it is alarming to find such medieval ideology.
Comments on the story have overwhelmingly condemned the pair’s bigotry, with one church member ‘disgusted’ by their opinions. Furthermore, blog posts on the Daily Mail website have argued that the pastor’s are ‘laying themselves open to ridicule’ with ideas which ‘belong in the dark ages’. Such outrage displays how out-dated these views are, compounding the increasingly alienated position of the church, and the fact that it’s relevance to modern day life continues to wane.
Religion is often used to control, oppress and manipulate. This example displays the fact that misogyny and inequality remain central to Christianity’s ideology, despite today’s increasingly enlightened culture. This man has used his position of power to spout what are clearly narrow minded, archaic views, and compound further the fact that society does not require religion to guide it’s moral compass. We do not need god to be good. The process of natural selection means that ideas used to control and suppress are slowly becoming obsolete, when this small, insignificant individual finally ceases to exist, so will his moronic dogma.
