The-God-Of-The-Bible’s Women-Management Plan Is Focused On Bodily Fluids. To Put It Mildly HE Has An Uneasy Relationship With Women! So Does Wheaton College

Slave Crawling to her master A Wheaton professor asking for the pill?

To put it mildly the so-called God-Of-The-Bible has an uneasy relationship with women. The other day I was trying to figure out why Wheaton College (an evangelical school) wanted to claim a “religious liberty” right to deprive women of insurance coverage for contraception. The school even went to the Supreme Court to claim that right.

How to explain this?

I’d just published my new book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace, where when writing about my journey to a deeper faith the subject of Jesus’ feminism is a main theme. So I’ve been thinking about women, the Bible, God and all that.

But even I was stumped as to just why Wheaton would want to go down in history as women-hating. I mean that odd ruling making misogyny legal for people who say they love Jesus is all Wheaton will be remembered for in the history books.

Again– Why?

And then I remembered:

These people believe in the Bible!

Sexual health warnings

Women and me and bleeding and God go way back! Let me explain…

I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. In 1962 all I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet where I grew up in the evangelical mission of L’Abri in Switzerland, filled with softball-sized, tightly wound wads of toilet paper.

These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them.

This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing—about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read Leviticus 15:19 in a Bible study:

“When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.”

So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. When I was about ten, I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.”

I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnut-shaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a handy glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited the example that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if the theory of menstrual synchrony (based on sensitivity to pheromones through smell) will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides.

Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the female helpers (i.e., the cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help), who lived in our chalet for several years at a time, as well as setting the clock for the students who stayed with us for six to ten months or so.

The nubile, yet tortuously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor chalet bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: Women.

The God-Of-The-Bible is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts” (Isaiah 3:16–17).

It seems The-God-Of-The-Bible regretted the female human He created—as an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story: “Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air.<el>But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man” (Genesis 2:22).

I’m using this The-God-Of-The-Bible “handle” as a way to differentiate between whatever actual deity might be out there and the biblical version and caricature of that Person, Force, or Persons that seems to have broken the brains of the people who run Wheaton and other evangelical anti-women schools.

That said, when The-God-Of-The-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing design. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-Of-The-Bible’s Mind.

Sexual health posters from the Forties

Women’s brimming bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of both wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-Of-The-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret.

So The-God-Of-The-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-Of-The-Bible issued countless factory recalls and complex revised owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-Of-The-Bible’s many Women-Managing Rules.

Slave Auction

The-God-Of-The-Bible’s Women-Management Plan is particularly focused on controlling bodily fluids. The-God-Of-The-Bible hates wetness! I can’t imagine The-God-Of-The-Bible volunteering to feed a baby, let alone doing what mothers (and some fathers and grandfathers) do when they use a spoon to scrape dribbled food off a baby’s chin and then absentmindedly lick off the spoon.

I wonder if The-God-Of-The-Bible would use His Divine Spit (the way Jesus did to heal a blind man) to clean off dirt from a baby’s face. However The-God-Of-The-Bible would behave as a babysitter, I imagine He’d be squeamish if He had to take care of a young woman afflicted with her monthly cycle of menstrual impurity, or for that matter a young man afflicted with wet dreams.

I wonder how a woman is to be righteous in the eyes of The-God-Of-The-Bible when her own reproductive organs, by His Own design, defile her body and how a man is to live “correctly” when his own body’s arousal is his biggest Sin?

According to orthodox Jewish rabbinical law, a woman becomes impure when she is aware that blood has come from her womb. Even if menstruation started before she sees evidence of blood, the rabbinical regulations say she’s not impure until she notices. But as soon as she notices the least stain, she becomes unclean. However, if she finds a stain after say, cutting her finger, she does not become impure since the blood is not from her womb. But if there is a bloodstain of uncertain origin, a woman is told to ask the assistance of her male rabbi to “help her” determine what to “do” about her “female uncleanness.”

There’s a lot in the Bible about menstruation, and it’s all bad. Blood isn’t the problem; just womb blood is bad!

Blood squirting from countless sheep and cows dying while being slaughtered as sacrifices to The-God-Of-The-Bible is just fine. So is male mutilation: circumcision. Even better for Christians is the blood pouring from Jesus’ hands and feet.

The Christian believer is encouraged to drink it, get to Heaven through it, and “claim” it! “Have you been to Jesus for the cleansing power?” ask the words of the old camp meeting hymn. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Are you fully trusting in His grace this hour? Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?”

And women bleeding to death after an abortion because she was deprived of contraceptives is apparently okay too… at least in some “Christian” Bronze Age “colleges.” That’s too bad. There is a better way: the radical feminism of Jesus for which I make a strong case in my new book: WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD. I’ll give a free copy to any Wheaton student who asks, male or female…

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. H is latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace