As a Nicaraguan-born girl growing up in Miami, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez remembers going to church five times a week. Her father was a pastor, and their fundamentalist evangelical faith taught that a woman’s role was to serve her husband.
At the same time, Mojica Rodríguez saw how essential women were in keeping the pews filled and the church running. Ultimately, dismayed by the subservient role of women and the church’s harsh restrictions on girls, she would leave her faith – and her husband – in her late 20s.
“Women are less inclined to be involved with churches that don’t want us speaking up, that don’t want us to be smart,” said Mojica Rodríguez, who went on to earn a master’s degree in divinity. “We’re like the mules of the church – that’s what it feels like.”
Though the Nashville-based author and activist is now 39, her experience reflects a growing and, for churches, a potentially worrisome trend of young women eschewing religion. Their pace of departure has overtaken men, recent studies show, reversing patterns of previous generations.
Family traditions, even ones that are actively harmful, are hard to break. This religion often seems more than an emotionally abusive relationship
1 Corinthians 14:33-35 (NIV). Comments are in superscript:
For God is not a God of disorder but of peace—as in all the congregations of the Lord’s people. (Gaslighting. Also, Jesus says that he’s here to fuck shit up (Luke 12:49-53.), so either Paul or Jesus is wrong/lying. This assumes that God is real, and that the Bible is an accurate representation of what Jesus said).
Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. (Shut-up and obey me woman)
If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. (nothing that you say has value to anyone who isn’t fucking you, and even then…)