LITERATURE REVIEW
For ages long, it has been adjudged that men have been perceived as the sole bearers and disseminators of divine messages. Patriarchal religious structures and practices have been used to socialize women to passively accept religious teachings and dogmas as served by men with every sense of subservience and submission. These andocentric and patriarchal interpretations have defined, shaped and reshaped the socio-cultural, political, economic and otherwise contexts of women in many parts of the world which often culminates in their disempowerment and second class status. Kong (2010) views religion as a negotiated reality with each individual or society defining its own understanding, tenets and applicability within the space of time and circumstance. There is therefore the need for such fluidity, pores and nuances to be located at the epicenter of any religious discuss- whether academic or pedestal.
Schnabel (2015) was of a similar opinion when he presented that the emergence and institutionalization of different religious movements with rigid beliefs and sermons however presents a fissure between the original episteme and the way they are practiced in actuality. The chronic and historical challenge is to maintain and preserve the voices of prophetic dissent and propagate the freedom (for both men and women) necessary to institute change in the contemporary world. Pertinently, women have the larger stakes in this cycle as they are the ones suppressed and oppressed by the dogmas of submission, subservience and docility of traditional religions as it were.
Researchers such as Reitz et al (2015) have shown that religion is associated with traditional gender attitudes and actions, and because beliefs can materialize in effects (Seguino, 2011), it is expected that a major chunk of non-religious people in a country will be acclimatized more with material gender equality. It is in the same vein suspected and expected that the major world religions differ in their effects from one another, but that the largest differences will be between the religious and the non-religious, rather than between particular religious groups (Charrad, 2011). There is the conscious twist of religion to monopolize power through homogenization and ritualization (Kong, 2010), therefore, any agenda for change must pluralize religious practices to capture the original thrust of the episteme which is rooted in egalitarianism. Thus spaces must be created and reserved in our sub-consciousness and social faculty to earnestly yearn for and accommodate not just a recovery of the past but also an innovation of new liberating symbols, language and imagery that challenge authorized patriarchal canons that had held sway in the practice of religion.
With the effective utilization of these spaces, women globally ought to stake their claim visibly, vehemently and powerfully for not just their rights but also for their perspectives, ministrations and interpretations to be accepted as part of the core religious canons, for without this the antique and current guardians of existing religious and social structures will not be pushed to a critical consciousness of their oppressive nature.
Similarly, Fernandes (2016) opined that men and masculinity have always been the measure and determinant of the dialogue between the holy and profane which has often culminated in the male folk monopolizing the space of worship, prescribing that offerings can be made only by men. Most importantly, there is the somewhat growing religious consensus that women are impure because of their biological menstruation cycle (Fernandes, 2016). Owing to this, women are considered defiled and thus cannot enter the holy of holies (Jewish tabernacle), forbidden from performing Puja (Hindu offering), and cannot lead the Namaz (Salat, or Islamic prayer). This has rhetorically questioned the physique and anatomy of women (UN Women, 2018). The protruding question now remains that blood- the very ingredient that keeps one alive, has it now become a fountain of impurity?
Most amazingly, cross-sectional differences in support for or against gender equality vis-à-vis religion vary even between societies at different levels and stages of development, and depend upon the magnitude of religiosity and the type of religious values expressed and promoted by such society. It was the conclusion of Inglehart and Norris (2003) that religion matters, not only for cultural attitudes but for the opportunities as well as constraints it places on the lives of women where it exists, these could manifest in the ratio of females to males in educational enrolment, the female adult literacy rate, the application of contraception in family life and opportunities granted women in the paid workforce and in parliamentary representation.
Despite the many forms of marginalization perpetrated through religion globally as seen above, there are instances of women who had soared on the roughened and wrecked back of religion to the highest echelon of fame hence, this work.