3.1 Critical retrieval of experience

3.2 Critical retrieval of scripture

Feminist scriptural hermeneutics comprise a number of approaches, most of which feminist ethicists also apply to theological sources. They stem from the realization that, in the past, nearly all scriptural authors, redactors, transcribers, and interpreters have been men who privileged men’s stories and perspectives. The apparent exception is the female voice in the Song of Songs, which feminist theological ethicists like Patricia Beattie Jung (Sex on Earth as It Is in Heaven, 2017) cite as affirmation of the goodness of women’s sexual yearning and pleasure but which male theologians have traditionally interpreted as an allegory of God and the soul.

Feminist ethicists’ approaches to scripture are myriad; only a few approaches are highlighted here. First, female characters are unnamed, and still others who must have been essential to the narrative are completely absent from sagas dominated by male characters. Thus, as Mary Jo Weaver wrote, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her (1984) reappropriated scripture for feminist ethics by interpreting the New Testament in historical context ‘to reconstruct early Christian history as women’s history’ and by making biblical ‘women’s stories an integral part of the proclamation of the gospel, so as to rob the sacred text of its power to oppress women’ (Weaver 1984: 459). This strategy restores scriptural women to their prominent, precedent-setting place as leaders in early communities. In a different key, German theologian Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel rescued apparently unsalvageable patriarchal texts by reading them through biblical evidence of Jesus’ own feminism (1986). Overall, these approaches have justified early Christian women’s positions as theological authorities and as moral exemplars rather than as peripheral characters and even paradigms of immorality.

Feminist biblical scholars also test scripture by the criterion of female flourishing. As feminist biblical scholars like white US scholar Phyllis Trible, Austrian professor Irmtraud Fischer, and Black US scholar Renita Weems have written, Christians have often greeted biblical stories of violence against women with approbation or simply silence; by implication, they normalize anti-woman violence as good. Other feminist scholars have deployed the rabbinic tool of midrash, a speculative re-narration that fills in gaps in scriptural stories told primarily by, about, and for men. In Sexism and God-Talk (1983), Rosemary Radford Ruether’s midrash ‘The Kenosis of the Father’ reimagined scriptural accounts of salvation history from a feminist perspective. In Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (1993), Delores S. Williams drew on Hagar’s experience surviving surrogacy, enslavement, mistreatment, abandonment, and ejection to elaborate an ethic of ‘making a way out of no way’, empowered by divine accompaniment through an unforgiving desert wilderness. Wilda Gafney’s Womanist Midrash (2017) is a further example.

In addition, feminist ethicists cite God’s creation of men and women equally in God’s image (Gen 1), Paul’s eschatological eradication of the distinction between male and female (Gal 3:28), and Paul’s praise of and greetings to women leaders in his letters (Rom 16, for example) as evidence from revelation of women’s equal status with men before God. They tend to grant less authority to the deutero-Pauline letters (Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1–2 Timothy, and Titus). In particular, they use the lens of equality and historical criticism to undercut the authority of 1 Timothy, which forbids women to teach or have authority over men (2:12); they also use the equality texts to qualify even genuine Pauline texts like 1 Cor 14:34, which admonishes women to keep silent in church, and 1 Cor 11:3–16, which admonishes women to cover their heads while worshiping in community.

Just as second-wave white feminist interpreters of the inherited scriptural text have worked to counter their androcentric bias, and feminist interpreters of colour have worked to counter their narration by the ‘victors’ of biblical narrative, queer feminist theologians like Great Britain’s Elisabeth Stuart have laboured to overcome heteronormative interpretations, in two very different ways. First, like Schüssler Fiorenza, they reconstruct accounts of queer love and non-binary identity within and behind the narrative. Second, as Kristine Meneses (2015) explains, rather than narrowing scriptural meaning to one normative (feminist) interpretation, queer approaches to scripture unsettle customary interpretations without removing them. Just as queerness blurs gender boundaries when it multiplies gender, queer interpreters welcome a wealth of hermeneutic approaches, embracing diverse interpretations without choosing among them. By refusing to decide on a normative reading, and by troubling readers’ assumptions about the texts’ heroes and villains, they encourage open-ended critical and self-critical exploration. This approach gives feminist thinkers a pathway to new uses of scriptural texts: for example, as sources of divinely inspired theological and moral questions rather than of revealed theological and moral answers. Queer approaches also preserve mystery as the limit of biblical interpretation and theology.

3.3 Critical retrieval of theological ethics

Section 2 plotted feminist ethics on the map of ethical relativism, realism, and pluralism. It can also be plotted against mid-twentieth-century Christian distinctions among deontological ethics, teleological ethics, and virtue theory.

Deontological, or rule-based, ethics focuses Christian life on obedience to revealed commandments, which provide a framework that guides sinful people on a holy path. Biblically-based deontological ethics – mostly Protestant – often begin with the Ten Commandments, elements of Levitical and Deuteronomic law, and the apostle Paul’s directives. In practice, mid-twentieth-century Catholic moral theology also functioned as a deontological ethic.

For several reasons, Christian feminists almost universally reject rule-based ethics as antifeminist. First, most male theologians have interpreted the sources above to establish strongly gendered rules that subordinate women to men. Second, these rules tend to be impervious to Christian feminists’ central criteria of women’s experience and flourishing. Third, without attention to context, they are also historically uncritical. Finally, they can reduce conscience to a matter of casuistry – determining which of many rules applies in complex circumstances – rather than a matter of responding justly and lovingly to persons and situations.

Feminists’ interest in virtue ethics has grown as they have reflected on Christianity as a way of being in the world rather than a set of rules to follow or a list of tasks to accomplish. Thomas Aquinas describes virtue as a habit that makes people tend to behave according to their true goal: union with God. Classically, this has meant graced growth in the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity (or love), which in turn assist human beings in their efforts to be prudent, just, temperate, and courageous. White US scholar Shannon Dunn (2013) has critically reinterpreted these virtues with attention to the strong influence that our communities – for better or for worse – have over our habits of behaviour, and white US ethicist Kate Ward (2021) deploys philosopher Lisa Tessman’s theory of burdened virtue (Burdened Virtues, 2005) to argue that suffering injustice harms our moral and spiritual selves as well as our bodily and social flourishing. Conversely, Womanist thinkers like Katie Geneva Cannon (1988) and Emilie M. Townes (2006) have mined literary and other cultural sources to argue that many of the self- and other-protecting behaviours that people develop in situations of injustice are virtues in those contexts, even though they would be vices for the socially privileged. Likewise, white US ethicist Beverly Wildung Harrison (1981) argued that anger is an appropriate response to unjust treatment; more recently, white ethicist Sarah MacDonald and Black ethicist Nicole Symmonds (MacDonald and Symmonds 2018) suggested that rioting might be virtuous behaviour in some situations of persistent, violent structural racism.

The most common framework for Christian feminist ethics is teleological ethics, which is about pursuit and realization of a goal. In historical Christian ethics, teleology has two (often interdependent) dimensions: the hope of union with God after death, and holistic earthly survival or flourishing. Although Orthodox and some Catholic feminists stress Christianity’s spiritual harm to women as an impetus to correct unjust practices within the churches, most Western Christian feminist ethics has focused primarily on earthly flourishing. From the Roman Catholic side, feminists employ the social justice dimensions of the Roman Catholic natural law tradition (Irish scholar Linda Hogan’s influential work on human rights, for example) and/or liberation theology’s pursuit of the reign of God to connect faith to the pursuit of earthly justice for women. For Protestant thinkers, liberationism and love of neighbour fuel a teleological approach. Importantly, the emphasis on salvation by grace through God’s unilateral merciful action eliminates the pursuit of heaven as an aim of Protestant feminist ethics. Finally, Christian feminists point out that patriarchal dualism – which associates maleness with pure, eternal spirit and femaleness with impure, decaying materiality – oppresses women and the Earth alike; saving the Earth means undoing patriarchy. Scholars from the US like Rosemary Radford Ruether and Sallie McFague, and Dorothee Sölle in Germany, began to make this case in the 1970s.

3.4 Critical reason

Critical use of philosophy has always been a staple of theological ethics. Feminist theological ethics critically employs both philosophy and theories arising from disciplines like literary criticism. The following examples are only a sampling.

First- and second-wave north Atlantic feminists relied heavily on the philosophical liberalism that laid the groundwork for democratic states. John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and other Enlightenment philosophers argued that persons’ equal dignity lay primarily in their ability to reason dispassionately. Authors like Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill (The Subjection of Women 1869) argued explicitly that, as fully rational persons, women are capable moral reasoners and competent moral agents. These claims issue in liberal – not to be confused with left-wing or progressive – Christian feminism, in which women’s aim is to exercise the same rights that men already possess, in recognition of their equal dignity and share in the image of God. This approach, which assumes that the social playing field is otherwise relatively level, has especially influenced white British and American Christian feminist ethics.

The feminist epistemological privilege of the oppressed, discussed above, comes from Marxist thought by way of liberation theology. Although Christian theology shuns Marx’s historical materialism – the idea that human history and ideas are driven by irresistible material economic forces – liberation theologians agree with Marx that enormous asymmetries of political and economic power lead to the systematic subjugation of many, often a majority, of the human community, and that the subjugated can together analyse, criticize, and resist the resulting structures of oppression. Christian theology adds two further dimensions. First, oppressors and oppressed are members of the same spiritual community, and thus injustice and its redress have spiritual and ecclesial dimensions. Thus, second, liberationist feminism engages in critical social analysis with the communal spiritual and practical welfare of the whole Christian community in mind: for women, for their ethnic or racial communities, and for all persons in poverty. Ghanaian theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye and Kenyan theologian Teresia Mbari Hinga – both founding members of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians – are prominent examples.

Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have recently influenced Christian feminist visions of sex and sexuality, particularly in the Global North. Foucault’s view of human sex and sexuality as cultural inventions has been useful for arguing that historic Christian sexual mores have arisen partly in response to social configurations of gender and sexuality that may no longer be in force. Judith Butler’s treatment of gender as performance – a social language of sorts – creates similar critical distance from essentialist understandings of sexual difference. In general, queer theory’s insistence that ‘woman’ is a social rather than a ‘natural’ category permits Christian feminist ethicists to treat gender as a powerful social reality without essentializing it.

The ethical implications of power differences are also central to feminist theological ethics. Although two people may be existential and ontological equals thanks to their common creation in the image of God, their different social positions inevitably grant one power over the other. Foucault’s vision of power as a relative, often gendered, gradient between persons in different social positions has been indispensable to Christian feminist analysis of labour, abuse, and other issues. For instance, in a society with a gendered pay gap, most women in heterosexual marriages are not only smaller and physically weaker than their partners but have less economic power; Christian feminist ethics illuminates this gap not just to redress the wage differential but to suggest structural protections for the less powerful partner.

In addition, because postcolonial theory (found in literary studies as well as in philosophy) emphasizes the ongoing deforming pressure of colonization on the nexus of religion, politics, race, sexuality, and economy in all societies, it is an important critical and self-critical tool for Christian feminist ethics. Likewise, critical theorists like Hortense Spillers (‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe’, 1987) are important resources for Womanist and white feminist ethicists seeking to undo the racist and colonial connotations of Western Christian ideals of womanhood.

Finally, Christian feminist ethics argue that moral reason exceeds logical verbal argument. For instance, drawing on philosopher Martha Nussbaum and theological ethicist James Gustafson, Diana Fritz Cates argues that emotions can be forms of moral knowing (2009); Wildung Harrison, MacDonald, and Symmonds, cited above, also draw on this insight.

4.1 Reading outside the tradition

Feminists who seek moral guidance outside or alongside the Christian written moral tradition developed in the Global North still hold women’s dignity and welfare as central gospel norms, but they also argue that widely-read Christian sources and widely-adopted church practices undercut those norms so systematically that they are untrustworthy guides. For example, in many cases central Christian ethical texts and traditions explicitly oppress women – such as unconditional understandings of vows to love, honour, and obey a spouse, or common interpretations of Paul’s letter to Philemon, or Gal 3:28 (which says that Jesus erases the distinctions between slave and free, male and female in heaven but not in earthly life). These texts can oppress women implicitly as well. A good example of the latter is Valerie Saiving’s influential argument, mentioned above, that male theologians’ calls for Christic kenosis, or self-emptying, to overcome the sin of pride harms women who are already emptying themselves to the point of self-erasure; far from being too prideful, they instead need to assert themselves as moral agents (‘The Human Situation’, 1960). To make matters worse, these texts and traditions oppress along multiple axes simultaneously: for instance, gender, sexual orientation, migration status, race, class, and ability.

One feminist response that embraces the experiential, contextual, and plural dimensions of feminist theology is the construction of ethics from the writings and practices of women at particular intersections of oppression. Thus, as noted above, US Womanist theologian Katie Geneva Cannon (1988) turns first to Black women’s literary and musical traditions for virtues and practices that are life-giving for Black women living amid intersecting oppressions. Emilie M. Townes (2006) draws such virtues even from critical adoption of stereotypes promoted by anti-Black racist traditions. As noted already, Delores Williams (1993) correlates Black women’s contemporary experiences of injustice with those of the foreign slave woman Hagar, whom God accompanies through difficulty but does not fully liberate. Still others – like Ada María Isasi-Díaz (1993), who was inspired in part by Michel de Certeau – draw their theological ethic initially from lo cotidiano, Christian Latina women’s all-absorbing, creative, practical struggle to care daily for themselves and their families in oppressive circumstances. Musa Dube (2021) draws on the Zulu and Xhosa concept of ubuntu, or personhood-in-community. They all write from within Christian communities and for Christians, yet often with little or no reference to academic sources in Christian theological ethics from the Global North. In so doing, they authorize women’s real, contextual daily experience as an authentic source for theological ethics.

Second, post-, anti-, and decolonial feminist theologians point out that contemporary Christian practice and theology bear the inevitable imprint of six or more centuries of colonialism and conquest, which incorporated enslavement, rape, family dissolution, violence, displacement, forced conversion, cultural genocide, and other inhumanities both implicitly and explicitly into the normative moral tradition. These feminist ethicists are alert to the sometimes-faint traces of this reasoning in contemporary theology and ethics, particularly in Christian traditions around gender and sexuality. Theologians like Argentina’s Marcella Althaus-Reid (2000) have pointed out that even liberation theology – which inflects some of the feminist approaches below – often adopts a masculinist, oversimple saviour approach that purports to establish God’s ‘Kingdom’ on Earth.

This group of feminist ethicists tends to see their work as more critical than constructive; like forensic pathologists, they diagnose the oppressive, anti-feminist colonial ‘diseases’ that Christians uncritically and unwittingly inherit from their forebears. Like Hong Kong’s Kwok Pui-Lan, they typically aim to make others self-critically aware of the ways in which colonial thinking still inflects Christian ethics, and they may also bring post-colonial readings to scripture and other sources.

4.2 Reading with the tradition

Other Christian feminist ethicists resurrect liberative strands of the theological tradition that have been forgotten or deemphasized. Three approaches – outlined for systematic theology by American theologian Kathryn Tanner in 1997 and elaborated by Joy Ann McDougall in 2008 – engage confessional Christian theological texts directly in a constructive mode. All three approaches deploy their own confessional traditions’ authentic pro-feminist resources to redress their equally ingrained androcentrism. Although these approaches tend to characterize white feminist theology’s more singular focus on gender, they can be employed intersectionally.

First, some identify non-patriarchal precedents and traditions in scripture and early Christian history and build feminist theological ethics upon them. This method can entail arguing that there was a non-misogynist golden era before a ‘fall’ into patriarchal, Constantinian, institutional religion in the early fourth century, or at least that scripture and other early writings hold clues pointing to the existence of an early, non-misogynist Christian ethic. To some degree Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s work, mentioned above, takes this approach. From this point of view, Christian ethics deviated from these origins before the books that comprise the New Testament were redacted in canonical form, perhaps even before those books were written. Feminist theological ethics thus involves retrieval of these early elements for construction of an ethic more faithful to Christian origins.

Second, some embrace theological pluralism, arguing that two or more strands of theological and ethical reflection evolved in continuity with the early Christian community. In essence, there is more than one unbroken tradition. Thus, although the inherited misogynist strand can claim continuity and apostolicity, so can other strands that have since become more marginal. Feminist ethics can rediscover and redeploy these equally authentic, non-patriarchal, historic strands of theological and moral reflection. Thus, one might turn from ethics based in scholastic moral theology to seek insight in historic monastic biblical commentaries, art, sermons, or mystical poetry. Elizabeth Johnson’s (2002) retrieval of Sophia, or divine wisdom, is an example of this approach. Queer feminist theological ethics fits well here, seeking examples of queer holiness in the historical and theological record and multiplying strands and interpretations to emphasize the ongoing diversity and contextuality of theological ethics.

The third, and most common, approach is bringing new feminist readings to mainstays of patriarchal Christian ethics. For instance, in Womanist M. Shawn Copeland’s work (2018), the cross – often deployed to demand an unjust degree of self-sacrifice from women of colour in particular – becomes a symbol of God’s solidarity with humanity rather than of human oppression. In white US theologian Nancy Eiesland’s influential work The Disabled God (1994), Jesus’ wounded resurrection gives rise to a feminist theology and ethic of disability. US white feminist Lisa Sowle Cahill, British author Susan Frank Parsons, and US theologian and legal scholar M. Cathleen Kaveny have reinterpreted the Anglican and Roman Catholic natural law traditions along feminist lines.

Finally, a fourth approach sticks close to church prayer traditions, sometimes eschewing most formal writings in ethics and theology. For instance, Eastern Orthodox distaste for theological innovation discourages feminist ethicists from criticizing traditional theological sources. However, liturgical, iconographic, hagiographic, and devotional traditions are more deeply revered in Orthodoxy than in most strands of Western Christianity. As Ashley Purpura and Carrie Frederick Frost show, they are ripe for feminist reinterpretation that is both fresh and deeply rooted in tradition. And, because liturgical traditions are dynamic, feminist ethicists can encourage theologically and ethically significant feminist updates. For instance, the Orthodox Church in America’s prayers after miscarriage now focus on healing a woman’s suffering rather than asking forgiveness for her participation in manslaughter. Likewise, US Womanist ethicist Cheryl Kirk-Dugan and feminist ethicist Wendy Farley mine hymns for theological ethics, and US feminists Susan Ross and Teresa Berger propose liberative alternatives to antifeminist liturgical practice.

5.1 Sex and reproduction

Critique and reconstruction of Christian ethics of sexuality and reproduction has been a staple of Christian feminist ethics; German theologian Ute Ranke-Heinemann’s Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven (1990) touches on many of their objections. Classically, Christian sexual ethics in the Global North had three primary concerns: in what situations male orgasm is morally acceptable; the connection among heterosexual intercourse, conception, and childbearing; and the fierce temptation of sexual pleasure. In recent centuries, Christians mostly treated sex as a matter of personal virtue and intimate interpersonal relations. The postwar rise of psychology, development of contraception, and proliferation of reproductive technologies in the Global North contributed to Christian discussions of family planning, appreciation of sexual pleasure as strengthening bonds within marriage, and willingness to separate conception from the act of heterosexual intercourse. Most Christians have embraced both developments, although the Vatican and some Evangelicals condemn ‘artificial’ contraception and conception. In some Christian circles (Anglicanism and the United Church of Christ are good examples), appreciation of sexual pleasure as an element of joy and bonding has led to affirmation of committed same-sex partnerships or marriages.

Christian feminists contribute to the discussion by (1) highlighting women’s experiences of sex and reproduction; (2) focusing on women’s flourishing; and (3) insisting that sex is a social matter of justice, not merely a private matter of affection. Thus, Christian feminists have contributed to this changing Christian conversation in at least three ways: by incorporating women’s experience of sex into the ethics of sexual relating; by highlighting sexual trauma, sexual abuse, and rape culture, and other structural and cultural forms of sexual violence; and by addressing structural dimensions of the ethics of reproduction.

First, pointing out that heterosexual intercourse cannot occur without men’s sexual pleasure, white US authors such as Mary Pellauer, Patricia Beattie Jung, and Christine Gudorf have written on the corresponding moral and spiritual goodness of women’s sexual pleasure and of its difference from men’s sexual pleasure. Drawing in part on Audre Lorde, queer feminist ethicists including Argentinian Marcella Althaus-Reid, Britain’s Lisa Isherwood, and US Episcopal priest Carter Heyward have discussed the goodness of sexual pleasure in itself and as a source of energy for collaborative social transformation, alongside US scholar Mary Hunt, who reflects on lesbian relationships to develop a robust theological ethic of friendship. British ethicist Susannah Cornwall and others have discussed the implications of queer sexuality and bonding for Christian family structures, including polyamory. British scholar Sarah Coakley explores the implications of these new approaches for systematic theology. In counterpoint, Elizabeth Antus and others highlight the large percentage of women for whom intercourse is physically painful and for whom theological affirmation of ecstatic sexual union is not helpful. Trans and intersex ethics are new frontiers for Christian feminists; in part because of the importance specifically of women’s experience and flourishing to feminist ethics, it matters whom the category ‘women’ includes.

Second, power differentials – usually of men over women, of able-bodied adults over children and all people with disabilities, and of authority figures (like clergy) over their subordinates – often yield sexual harassment and abuse, violating and traumatizing the less powerful victims. US white feminist authors like Karen Lebacqz and Marie M. Fortune have led the way to developing professional ethics that condemn and discourage such sexual violence. White US authors Donna Freitas and Jennifer Beste and German feminist Hille Haker have described the insidious, subtle ways in which institutional practices can both mask and enable sexual abuse and harassment. White US scholar Shelley Rambo has transformed the field with her work on the ongoing shame and trauma that victims experience after sexual harassment or assault. African feminists like Botswanan Musa Dube decry the shame and social and economic exclusion that many HIV/AIDS widows and their children suffer. Margaret Farley makes justice rooted in love the main critical and constructive concept for her ethics of sexuality.

Rather than starting with the traditional Christian ideal of mutual, pair-bonded sex and working outward, others begin with structural issues. White US scholar Karen Peterson-Iyer and others reorganize the conversation on sex by beginning with the economic and power dimensions of complex, persistent phenomena like sex trafficking and prostitution. In contrast to these white authors, Black US scholars Tamura Lomax, Kelly Brown Douglas, and others address the ways in which loyalty to one’s oppressed racial community can obscure its sexually tinged misogyny and heterosexism.

Finally, Christian feminists have debated reproductive ethics. Christian feminist support for contraception as a means for women to care for themselves and their families dates back to white Episcopalian feminist and eugenicist Margaret Sanger in the 1910s. Building on Beverly Wildung Harrison’s groundbreaking 1983 reassessment of Christian theology and practice of abortion, white Protestant feminists Margaret Kamitsuka and Rebecca Todd Peters have argued that women’s conscience and bodily freedom should dictate whether they conceive and whether they carry a pregnancy to term once they have done so. Still, the movement Feminists for Life encompasses many Christians who consider abortion an anti-feminist excuse for society to ignore sexual coercion, paternal responsibility, and social respect for women and children. Like US feminist Maura Ryan, many have also promoted assisted reproductive technology so that women who are infertile for any reason (including singleness or same-sex relationships) may conceive and bear children; US feminist Grace Kao has argued in favour of surrogacy in some situations.

Black Christian feminists also tend to reject involuntary motherhood, but they point in addition to the problematic eugenic history of contraception and to systemic social and access barriers to safely conceiving, bearing, and raising the children they would like to have. In 1994, a group of Black women activists including Christian clergy coined the term ‘reproductive justice’ – now in broad circulation among feminist ethicists – to encompass both freedoms: from involuntary childbearing, and from involuntary childlessness. Still, some Christian feminists of colour, like Black feminist Shawnee Daniels-Sykes and Latina feminist M. T. Dávila, embrace the ‘pro-life’ moniker, joining reproductive justice advocates to counteract pregnant women of colour’s comparatively poor health, inadequate access to respectful medical care, high infertility rates, inadequate access to assisted reproductive technology, forced sterilization, income inadequacy, societal and governmental anti-Black violence, and other structural barriers.

5.2 Care ethics

Even if women also have substantial economic responsibilities, their experience usually includes primary or significant responsibility for care of household members. With the exception of intermittent evangelical interest in elite women’s role in raising virtuous children within the private household (including the early twentieth-century eugenic and temperance movements), traditional ‘malestream’ Christian ethics largely ignored the ethics of day in, day out unpaid care of vulnerable persons. Since the 1980s, however, feminists have moved care work to the centre of the ethical conversation, recognizing it as both indispensable to the flourishing of the cared-for and dangerous to the welfare of the unpaid or underpaid people doing the caring. Philosophers like Eva Feder Kittay – who has addressed care workers’ emotional challenges and potential for abusing their charges – and Susan Moller Okin and Joan Tronto – who have analysed care’s social and economic context – have influenced Christian feminist ethics of care. Among others, white US scholar Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar (2017) argues that love is a necessary but inadequate foundation for an ethic of care; as a matter of justice, society must respect and economically support the care work that is essential to human welfare, whether it is provided by an unpaid family member or a paid worker. Christian feminists who write about the ethics of labour and economy, like Gloria Albrecht (2002) and Christine Firer Hinze (2021), argue that just care for the vulnerable is among the most important moral measures of an economy. From another angle, British theologian Tina Beattie argues for a maternal ethic, but she applies it to men and women alike. Echoing Valerie Saiving’s 1960 insight on women’s kenosis, all agree that it is wrong for society to depend structurally on the unjust, self-destructively self-sacrificial labour of any group, even if that group is women who love their families.

5.3 Ecofeminism

If Christian feminism could be boiled down to one critical philosophical point, it would be rejection of the hierarchical dualism of Western theology and philosophy. Not only does classical Global North thought divide reality into opposed qualities of spirit and matter, reason and emotion, light and dark, and male and female, but it grants the first element of each pair higher value than the second; thus, men – spirit, reason, activity, and light – rule over women – matter, emotion, passivity, and darkness. Ecofeminists reject both oppositions and hierarchies, arguing that the logic of male oppression of women is the same as the logic of mistreating the inferior Earth and its non-human creatures for human benefit. Western culture has often described the physical, ‘Mother’ Earth as a woman who is to be raped, subdued, or fertilized. Thus, restoring women and creation to their rightful places entails undoing the same thought patterns and practices. For example, Ghanaian theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye (2016) decries environmental anthropocentrism, which places humans above ecosystems and other creatures; American theologian Sallie McFague (1993) uses metaphor to develop a doctrine of the world as God’s body; and Filipina ethicist Agnes Brazal (2021) has faulted even the recent Catholic environmentalist/liberationist encyclical Laudato Si’ for reproducing gendered hierarchies.

In addition, Christian feminists generally reject the radical individualism that accompanies Western capitalist philosophical liberalism as anti-ecological. Instead, Christian feminist thinkers point to the practical interdependence of people upon each other and of all creatures upon each other and upon the planet they inhabit. Climate change is confirming this insight. Prominent Christian ecofeminists in the Americas include Rosemary Radford Ruether, Carol Robb, Carol Adams, and Ivone Gebara, among others; prominent ecofeminists in Europe include Dutch theologian Catharina Halkes, among others; African ecofeminists include Sophie Chirongoma, Lilian Cheelo Siwila, and Eunice Kamaara, among others.

6.1 Difference and common humanity in tension

Christian feminists argue for the critical importance of both the distinctive, embodied, gendered experiences and social locations, that fuel much of feminist insight, and gender equality before God, which highlights common humanity over gender difference. Yet, in practice, these claims are in tension.

On the side of distinctiveness, all feminists take five facts with utter seriousness: most women are susceptible to pregnancy for much of their lives; women’s hormonal biology differs from men’s, which affects their emotional and spiritual lives; human reproduction necessarily involves women’s pregnancy and childbirth; young children need intimate and consistent nurture, so that mothering and care work of all kinds deserve social respect, support, and accommodation; and women’s historical identity and oppression has been tied to these embodied, sexed realities. The question is, what impact does this have on a doctrine of common humanity?

On one hand, radical separatists like Mary Daly as well as recent ‘new feminists’ like Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Janet E. Smith, Pia de Solenni, Enola Aird, and Karen Doyle have argued that gender is binary. Echoing the equal-yet-distinctive logic of many late nineteenth and early twentieth-century first-wave Christian feminism, many of the latter group draw upon Saint Pope John Paul II’s binary, complementary theology of the body, in which physical sex difference is evidence of deeper psychological and spiritual differences that dictate separate spiritual charisms and social roles for women and men.

Yet, in addition to the fact that gender characteristics vary across cultures, and the fact that a strict sex binary excludes trans, intersex, and other non-binary people, this position raises theological worries. Not only does strict gender essentialism have a weak basis in scripture, but it also implies either that (active) men reflect the image of an active, creating, saving God more perfectly than (receptive) women do, or that, because men and women are radically different, neither are fully made in God’s image.

From the perspective of common humanity, the alternative is to queer and replace a binary understanding of gender with endless possibilities for conceptualizing gender. This entails drawing on history, psychology, and sociology to justify tying gender difference more firmly to cultural custom than to physical sexual qualities. Far from devolving into impossible complexity, British theologian Elizabeth Stuart has argued, these multiple, contextual gender identities fade in the presence of Christians’ primary identity in baptism (2007). The result is a common theological identity of incorporation into the divine that does not rely on deciding questions of sex and gender at all.

Yet the prerequisites of true flourishing, as standpoint theory has already demonstrated, are never one-size-fits-all or neutral. A more fluid approach to gender risks obscuring the personal experiences and social locations of female-bodied people, which genuinely differ from the personal experience and social location of other people, and which society must support and accommodate if they are to flourish. Embodied gender must be at or near the top of the list of factors for which a just society must account.

For now, Christian feminist ethics inhabits a tension between a sexual binary on one hand (natural, cultural, or both) that yields feminist ethics based in women’s experience but risks essentialism and excludes many people, and on the other hand a queer, dynamic, contextual, and inclusive understanding of gender that risks diluting justice around almost universally female concerns, like pregnancy. Resolving this tension might mean reducing the theological mystery of sex and gender to a clear formula. Letting it remain may be the more honest, though uncomfortable, theological and moral choice.

6.2 Post-Christian feminism

Christian feminist ethics relies on the premise that authentic Christianity honours all genders’ experience and flourishing equally. Thus, women’s genuine, comprehensive liberation seems to be a test of the authenticity of any Christian community or system of thought. What happens when a Christian feminist theologian believes that the Christianity they know fails this test?

Some Christian feminist thinkers who take this position – echoing the Protestant refrain that the church, as a fallible human institution, needs unending reform – take on the role of permanent critic, sometimes with an implicit eschatological hope (the idea that perfect justice will arrive with the reign of God at the end of time). They continue to embrace the Christian hope of holistic salvation while pointing out ways in which Christianity perpetually falls short of its own promise. As noted above, Argentinian theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid embraced a queer ‘indecent’ theology that criticized the sexist and heterosexist framework of Christianity both past and present. Similarly, Hong Kong theologian Kwok Pui-lan critically rereads Christian theology and scripture, both Hebrew Bible and New Testament, from a postcolonial feminist perspective with reform in mind.

Post-Christian feminists draw the opposite conclusion. They argue that patriarchy and misogyny are so thoroughly ingrained in the Christian churches and Christian theology – and so profoundly harm women’s spiritual and social flourishing – that women must abandon both for the sake of their own welfare. In essence, their liberatory Christian belief in women’s earthly flourishing drives them out of the church. Among them are theologians (or, as some called themselves, thealogians, a feminine version of ‘theologians’) like Britain’s Daphne Hampson (1996), as well as US thinker Carol Christ. From Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) onward, white lesbian Catholic feminist theologian Daly argued that women could achieve comprehensive flourishing only in extra-ecclesial women’s spiritual community. However, such authors often continue to draw on elements of the Christian theological tradition.

6.3 Undoing versus surviving oppression

Christian feminists agree that salvation history concludes with a reign of peace and justice, but disagreement over Christians’ current place and role in that history affects the shapes that feminist ethics take. As noted above, white second-wave feminists have tended to treat oppressions based on race, ability, age, and other factors as ancillary to gender oppression. Cognizant of structural injustice, fuelled by confidence that they can initiate the reign of justice by pulling the single thread of misogyny, and accustomed to political power born of privilege, they tend to focus on large-scale change. They may develop an ethic of liberation or an ethic for post-liberation life.

Although they too anticipate a reign of equality, justice, and peace, and although they too struggle avidly for this goal, many Christian feminists of colour see the long endurance of racism and colonialism, despite robust efforts to reverse them, as evidence of the practical difficulty of uprooting the tangled mass of human oppressions that includes sexism. Relief that is slow in coming leaves unanswered the current needs of people who continue to suffer unjustly, including the women whose flourishing feminists particularly seek. So, for example, as mentioned above, many Womanist ethicists – like Delores Williams, Emilie Townes, and Katie Cannon – have turned significant energy towards analysing and systematizing the practices that women of colour have developed to flourish in the midst of the seemingly undefeatable double oppressions of sexism and racism. The question is, how to be Hagar? Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s focus on lo cotidiano – the daily – serves a similar purpose. Third wave white Christian feminists like Kate Ward and Kate Jackson Meyer have begun to take this approach as well.

In one sense this tension is analogous to the Christian opposition of justice, or structural change, to charity, or direct service, as if one excluded the other. One could say that this opposition too is false: it is possible to work for liberation while attempting to flourish as well as possible under oppression. In another sense, however, this tension spans a disagreement over the pervasiveness and intractability of structural sin, the likelihood of achieving a just society, and the otherwise ‘unchristian’ or even ‘unfeminist’ behaviour that flourishing under oppression may demand. Although many challenging topics in ethics – like structural poverty, the marginalizing effects of an increasingly digital and global culture, and climate change – beckon, this tension between liberative and survival ethics may be twenty-first century Christian feminism’s most pressing challenge.