Patriarchy in Society and Religion. Debunking the Father of the Postmodern Evil Demon

1. Introduction

Recently, my colleague from the Department of Civic Education asked me for a guest lecture on patriarchy in society and religion. I was feeling quite pleased with my lecture in which I used the term villain in reference to patriarchy. Nearly everything that was wrong in society and religion I laid at the altar of patriarchy. But the glow of self-satisfaction after puncturing patriarchy did not last long. That same evening, I came across what the American media refers to as an op-ed¹ by Cardinal Wilfrid Napier of South Africa for the Southern Cross entitled “Patriarchy is not the source of all evil” and immediately I became upset. Whatever the Prince of the Church intended by his op-ed, it could easily be misconstrued as letting patriarchy off the hook. This article aims at removing any such possible rehabilitation of patriarchy. I had met Cardinal Wilfrid Napier in the mid-1980s, just after my ordination to the Catholic priesthood in 1983. The venue was Lusaka at St Dominic’s Major Seminary in Lusaka. After lunch, the then Secretary-General of the South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, Smangaliso Mkhatshwa introduced the South African bishops to the small group of seminary staff where I was also a visitor. Cardinal Wilfrid Napier stood out, head and shoulders above the other bishops. He was then bishop of Kokstad, long before he received the red hat from Pope John Paul II. He was suave, debonair and highly articulate. I think he was heading a delegation of South African bishops to Zambia to meet the leadership in exile of the African National Congress to facilitate its un-banning, ultimately leading to the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.

My dictionary defines the verb “to debunk” as “to expose the falseness or hollowness of (an idea or belief)” or “to reduce the inflated reputation of (someone).” I am using the verb primarily in the first sense. This article seeks “to expose the falseness or hollowness” of a millennia-old ideology. I intend to critique what I am describing as the father of the postmodern evil Demon known as patriarchy. I explore its origins going back to about four millennia ago and show that patriarchy in both religion and society is the source of the post-modern evils of domination, colonisation, and othering others, suppressing and dehumanising them, especially if these others are women. This has been the case since at least four millennia ago if not earlier. Patriarchy is not limited to domination of women. In fact, it began at the time of the shift from being hunter-gatherers to sedentary agriculturalists when gender roles begun to be defined. Men specialised in being warriors and bread winners while women focused on child rearing. They needed something to nail down their newly discovered power to dominate. They turned to patriarchy and today their invention is so steeped in religion and society that men are unlikely to relinquish it any time soon because it is in the interests of the menfolk to perpetuate it. Soon after the elf-like President Frederick Chiluba of Zambia came into power in a landslide election victory in 1991, he was heard to remark to close aides, one of whom I know, “Power is sweet.”² I have employed two lenses to examine the evil of patriarchy: critical theory and ideology. I take cognizance of the phenomenon of patriarchy being so pernicious and widely accepted, even revered ideology that it needs to be critiqued and debunked. And so, where do I start?

2. And so, where do I start apropos the evil Demon patriarchy?

I start by introducing my two lenses: critical theory and ideology (because patriarchy is a pernicious, albeit widely accepted, even revered ideology that needs to be critiqued). I am convinced that the key to changing our patriarchal civilisation lies in debunking patriarchy and its overwhelming control over who we are, how we act, and how we think as a human race. Critical theory helps to undress and debunk the influence of patriarchy on our modern world where it has installed itself as an immoveable fixture.

First, my ideological lens. Patriarchy is the most pernicious ideology ever invented by men — I dare say it is humanity’s original sin, pace Cardinal Wilfrid Napier — yet it is so widely accepted and revered as a male-gendered ideology that it is rarely open to challenge. My argument in this regard is that, it must be unmasked as a clear economic, cultural, political or religious ideology and not as a set of normalised relationships between the sexes and in families given to humanity by the gods. At the geopolitical and historical level, patriarchy has been the dominant driver of the values of the oppressor, the coloniser, the dominant, the victorious, and the powerful who have been, surprise, surprise, for the most part, men who prey on vulnerability.

Patriarchy as an ideology has had a pernicious effect, wreaking havoc at least over more than half of the population of the planet but as an ideology it is not always harmful, at least within a non-authoritarian society where it can prove to be democratic and positive. In fact, democracy is an ideology that most of us treasure while the values of dictatorship are almost universally reviled. We rightly loathe ideologies which suppress human freedom and patriarchy is up there with the best of them in the suppression of human rights’ stakes. Suppression and dominance are almost always the values of patriarchy and yet ironically, most modern democracies are also patriarchal as the Americans learned from Donald Trump at great cost. Usually, ideology is covertly oppressive even in modern Western democracies by convincing us that education was invented to liberate our minds but in fact it was invented to colonise our minds so that we could enter the labour market for tax purposes. Unfortunately, most people idolise and fetishize democracy with no critical reflection on whether that ideal benefits their lives. Wherever it is found, and it is ubiquitous, ideology places value on rigid belief over rational thought and as soon as belief dominates an ideology, it becomes an infallible dogma that gets detached from reality and becomes repressive. Most major religions fall into this category. Even though people willingly subordinate themselves to mythical religious figures and beliefs, these values demand unbending adherence from their advocates often to the point of extremism, literally unto death. Rational logic ceases to become a mediator. That has already happened with the ideology of patriarchy. This is very well illustrated in the Catholic Church in the female ordination/non-ordination debate that has been raging literally for millennia and yet is showing no signs of abating. The official and magisterial reasons all defy all logic. It would probably be easier to accept the “logic” that women cannot be ordained in the Catholic Church because they cannot pee while standing. It’s that ridiculous.

Second, my critical theory lens. As Stephen Brookfield (2005) says “Critical theory views ideology as the broadly accepted set of values, beliefs, myths, explanations, and justifications that appears self-evidently true, empirically accurate, personally relevant, and morally desirable to a majority of the populace. The function of this ideology is to maintain an unjust social and political order. Ideology does this by convincing people that existing social arrangements are naturally ordained and obviously work for the good of all” (Brookfield 2005: 40‒41). If patriarchy was not such a widely “accepted set of values, beliefs, myths, explanations, and justifications that appears self-evidently true, empirically accurate, personally relevant, and morally desirable to a majority of the populace,” my female colleague who accepted to convert from Catholicism to Pentecostalism would not have accepted to change her faith-community to her husband’s because he was the head of the house and that he had married her. After all, he had paid lobola (dowry or bride-price). The women who disagree with my colleague’s sudden Road-to-Damascus experience — converting from Catholicism to Pentecostalism — are quick to admit that there is nothing that they can do about it. Satirically, the real reason she acquiesced to her husband’s faith-community was that unlike her husband, she could not pee while standing and had no balls.

Patriarchy may be only partially biological in the sense that in the shift from being hunter-gatherers to sedentary agriculturalists, men took advantage of gender-based division of labour where men were the bread-winners and women reared children, to dominate over women. But the domination may have begun elsewhere in a militaristic context where men needed to dominate other men, enslave them and demand tribute. In times of war, even homosexual rape of the enemy was a common form of feminising and dominating the enemy. As Miranda Alison points out “Rape (even … rape of men) serves to reassert heteromasculinity” (Alison 2007: 77). In this sense domination of women through patriarchy was a win-win for men.

3. Enters a Cardinal’s Anti-Patriarchy Rant

Cardinal Wilfrid Napier’s “Patriarchy is not the source of all evil,” which I mentioned in my introduction begins with what feels like a defence of patriarchy tinged with sarcasm. “Just look at what man is being subjected to today. At every turn he is being told he is responsible for everything that is wrong in society, from exclusive language to male domination to the oppression of woman by giving her too many children to forcing her to stay at home to look after his brood to denying her the opportunity to lead the family and indeed society to keeping her out of key decision-making processes affecting the nation and country, and so on. At every turn, he is being told he is nothing but trouble. Of course, this is not the fault of every single man, but of manhood as such, because they and they alone invented patriarchy and have forced it on woman from day one! It’s no wonder that modern man is but a pale shadow of the magnificent creature, who after his creation by God together with woman was approved of and admired in the words: “And God saw all that he had created and indeed it was very good” (cf. Gen 1.31).³ I hate to break it to the Cardinal, yes, “At every turn [male homo sapiens ] is responsible for everything that is wrong in society, from exclusive language to male domination to the oppression of woman by giving her too many children to forcing her to stay at home to look after his brood to denying her the opportunity to lead the family and indeed society to keeping her out of key decision-making processes affecting the nation and country, and so on.” This has been achieved at the individual, institutional and cultural levels. Cardinal Wilfrid Napier just took the words right out of my mouth.

After some expected pious platitudes on original sin, which I suspect he understands ontologically, Cardinal Wilfrid Napier then comes out all guns blazing. “But when it comes to male-female relations, the current predominant form of blaming is patriarchy. This nebulous, ill-defined concept is used to paint man as utterly soulless, heartless, all out to dominate, to brutalise and to exploit woman, at every opportunity and in every possible way. It is assumed to be true, and to be man’s evil design to make life as easy and carefree for himself as possible. All responsibility has been shifted over to woman, while he enjoys the life of Riley! Something has to be done to restore the order of things. So, patriarchy has to be eradicated once and for all. A woman must be equal to man in everything and in every way possible! That’s the bottom line!”⁴ There is nothing “ill-defined” about patriarchy except on his world. Yes, it is “man’s evil design to make life as easy and carefree for himself as possible.” Once again, he just snatched the words right out of my mouth.

Of course, Cardinal Wilfrid Napier does not believe for one minute that “patriarchy has to be eradicated once and for all.” He does not believe, as I do, that patriarchy is the villain or the root of all evil, if not Satan incarnate. His take is that it is all down to original sin. “The truth revealed by God is that although man and woman were created in his image and likeness, that image and likeness was tarnished and even destroyed by their original sin of disobedience, which they committed by eating of the forbidden fruit. That act of disobedience destroyed not only their relationship of friendship and familiarity with God, but also the harmony and peace of their life together. From that moment forward everything between man and woman was, and continues to be, fraught with misunderstanding, mistrust, tension and conflict.”⁵ I think that is simplistic, if not naïve. It sounds as if this well-educated clergyman understands that whole eating of the forbidden malarkey literary. It is a metaphor your eminence.

4. Meet the Father of the Postmodern Evil Demon: What’s Patriarchy?

I got so carried away with Cardinal Wilfrid Napier’s letting patriarchy off the hook that I forgot to define what we were talking about. First, let’s meet postmodernism before we meet its evil demon. “Postmodernism” is a fluid term. It is so frequently used yet so little understood that its very lack of stability and fixity could be said to warrant the notion of a condition we find ourselves in known by the catch-all postmodern. In his book, The Postmodern Condition (1979), Jean-François Lyotard suggests the following definition of the word. Postmodernism “designates the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts” (Lyotard 1979: xxiii). I know, not exactly crystal clear. Part of the transformation was a shift from ontological epistemology to constructivist epistemology.

Second, let’s meet the evil or Satan. Patriarchy is a socio-economic, political, cultural and religious hydra in which men hold power and predominate in roles of social, economic and cultural leadership. This form of abuse spills into claiming moral authority, social privilege and control of property where they have no warrant. Some patriarchal societies are also patrilineal, meaning that property and title are inherited by the male lineage. As a young boy growing up just after the independence of Zambia, I often wondered what the significance of the nomenclature of most post-colonial companies such as Thatcher & Sons, the first company to run a public bus service, later giving us the vernacular word for a bus, Sacha (a corruption of Thatcher). It’s the “sons” that got me thinking whether the poor sod who owned the company had no daughters. The answer was simple, patriarchy. Patriarchy was associated with a set of ideas, a patriarchal ideology that acted to explain and justify dominance as if this how things were right from the beginning of creation. In fact, in the evolution of homo sapiens, patriarchy is a late arrival into our civilisation. It was not ever thus. Patriarchy may be as young as four thousand years — at least according to Gerda Lerner’s 1986 history classic, The Creation of Patriarchy — and yet we act as if it was always written on tablets of stone since the foundation of the world. Sociologists hold varied opinions on whether patriarchy is a social product or an outcome of innate differences between the sexes. Historically, patriarchy has manifested itself in the social, legal, political, religious, and economic organization of a range of different cultures. Even if not explicitly defined to be such by most constitutions and laws, most contemporary societies are, in practice, patriarchal. If that is not humanity’s original sin, the I don’t know what is. In an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove on “Thinking Aloud,” Gerda Lerner described her work on the subject of patriarchy as follows.

Other groups that were subordinated in history — peasants, slaves, colonials, any kind of group, ethnic minorities — all of those groups knew very quickly that they were subordinated, and they developed theories about their liberation, about their rights as human beings, about what kind of struggle to conduct in order to emancipate themselves. But women did not, and so that was the question that I really wanted to explore. And in order to understand it I had to understand really whether patriarchy was, as most of us have been taught, a natural, almost God-given condition, or whether it was a human invention coming out of a specific historic period. Well, in The Creation of Patriarchy I think I show that it was indeed a human invention; it was created by human beings, it was created by men and women, at a certain given point in the historical development of the human race. It was probably appropriate as a solution for the problems of that time, which was the Bronze Age, but it’s no longer appropriate, all right? And the reason we find it so hard, and we have found it so hard, to understand it and to combat it, is that it was institutionalised before Western civilisation really, as we know it, was, so to speak, invented, and the process of creating patriarchy was really well completed by the time that the idea systems of Western civilisation were formed.⁶

Robert Bahlieda is therefore able to conclude that “patriarchy is the primary and oldest group-think ideology of humankind upon which all other ideologies are premised and from which all other ideologies arise. It is interwoven with culture, gender, economics, religion, education, leadership, and power. These elements are the lifeblood of all our global social institutions. Patriarchy simultaneously coexists within these bodies while also creating their complexity. It has not taken control of society overnight but through a glacially slow evolution throughout human history in which generation after generation has been socialized into its ideologically restrictive belief system and relationships” (Bahlieda 2015: 22).

5. What’s in a Name?

I dare not cite the famous quote from Romeo and Juliet in full, lest I give the evil demon known as patriarchy a positive spin it does not deserve. Etymologically, the word patriarchy literally means “the rule of the father” and comes from the Greek word πατριάρχης (patriarkhēs), father or chief of a race” which is a compound of πατριά (patria), “lineage, descent” (from πατήρ patēr, meaning, father) and ἀρχή (arkhē), “domination, authority, sovereignty.” Historically, the term patriarchy has been used to refer to autocratic rule by the male head of a family, what the Romans referred to as the Paterfamilias. However, since the late 20th century it has also been used to refer to social, cultural, economic and political systems in which power is primarily held by adult men and sometimes not so adult such as boy-kings like Tutankhamun who took the throne at eight or nine years of age under the unprecedented viziership of his eventual successor. This concept of patriarchy is particularly beloved by writers associated with second-wave feminism such as Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics (1970 2016). These writers seek to use an understanding of patriarchal social relations to liberate women from male domination, pace once more Cardinal Wilfrid Napier. This concept of patriarchy was developed to explain male dominance as a social, rather than biological, phenomenon as most men would have us believe, captured by my satirical metaphor of men peeing while standing hypothesis (Mukuka 2021). Yet the link with biology refuses to go away completely. This biological link may be as silly as, men are stronger and more powerful than women because men can pee while standing and have balls, as I have satirised elsewhere (Mukuka 2021)⁷ while women can only pee seating down.

6. But Where does the Father of the Postmodern Evil Demon come from?

There are two simple answers to this which are mutually exclusive. The first answer, preferred by men is that patriarchy is biological given to us by nature, by god or the gods and if you are such a male and you happen to be of a conservative Christian ilk you add a reason from the Bible or divine revelation. You add, erroneously, if I might remind you, that the male was created first to accentuate your primacy over the woman. The woman was surgically engineered from the rib of a man and therefore she is your inferior by-product. The woman was then passed on to you, the man as a helper or a maid. Should some ignoramus object that this is from the Old Testament, you are happy to throw the letter to the Ephesians (Eph 5.21‒33) in his face to the effect that St Paul tells the woman to be submissive to the man because the man is the head of the house. Sadly, this too is an abuse of the text as I have argued in “The Man as Head of the House: The Peeing while Standing Hypothesis” (Mukuka 2021). There I argue that the source of the misconception that the man is the head of the house is based on a misunderstanding of the use of analogy or metaphor in the Bible. Most patriarchal Neanderthal readers will be shocked to learn that Eph 5. 21‒24 does not even say that the man is the head of the house. The head of the house is Jesus Christ because the Christian family is a domestic Church, the bride of Jesus Christ, the bride. By claiming to be the head of the house, the man is usurping powers that do not belong to him. Ettore Ferrari refers to this male despotism as “an idolatry of maleness,”⁸ Although referring to the absurdity of the exclusion of women from Holy Orders in the Catholic Church, what Ettore Ferrari says is equally applicable to the claim of the man to be head of the house. “Maleness, in other words, is given a significant weighting over all other social and cultural differences, including femaleness. In this sense, this belief represents an idolatry of maleness — an exalting of male over female, despite the inclusive impetus of baptism and despite the fact that, in creation, women as well as men are made equally in God’s image.”⁹ This is what the text says, “²¹ Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. ²² Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. ²³ For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the Church, the body of which he is the Saviour. ²⁴ Just as the Church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands” (NRSV). I argue that the man is described as kephalē of the woman, whether understood as head or source of the wife, not to tell us who is boss but to use the human experience of spousal love as an analogy for the love between Jesus Christ (the husband) and the Church (the wife). Once the analogy is understood, it is no longer about husband and wife but about the Church’s relationship with her spouse Jesus Christ. This point is made clear at the conclusion of the chapter where St Paul spells it out in black and white, “³² This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the Church. ³³ Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband” (Eph 5. 5. 32‒33 NRSV).

[...]

¹ An op-ed, short for “opposite the editorial page” is a written prose piece typically published by a newspaper or magazine which expresses the opinion of an author usually not affiliated with the publication’s editorial board.

² BBC News (4 May 2007), “Chiluba’s legacy to Zambia,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1715419.stm (Accessed on 03.01.2021)

³ Wilfrid Napier (6 October 2017), “Patriarchy is not the source of all evil,” The Southern Cross, https://www.scross.co.za/2012/09/patriarchy-is-not-the-source-of-all-evil/ (Accessed on 02.01.2021)

⁴ Ibid

⁵ Ibid

⁶ Linda Napikoski (24 January 2020), “Patriarchal Society According to Feminism,” ThoughtCo, https://www.thoughtco.com/patriarchal-society-feminism-definition-3528978 (Accessed on 02.01.2021)

⁷ Tarcisius Mukuka (2021), The Man as Head of the House: The Peeing while Standing Hypothesis, Munich: GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/983317

⁸ Ettore Ferrari (10 June 2019), “Women priests could help the Catholic Church restore its integrity. It’s time to embrace them,” The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/women-priests-could-help-the-catholic-church-restore-its-integrity-its-time-to-embrace-them-118115 (Accessed on 21.12.2020)

⁹ Ibid