The man said, “The woman you gave me, she gave me some fruit^[c] from the tree, and I ate.” Genesis 3:12 (CEB)

“Their words struck the apostles as nonsense, and they didn’t believe the women.”  Matthew 24:11 (CEB)

“We are effectively run in this country … by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too,” J.D. Vance (2021)

Over countless years, seemingly since the beginning of time, women have all too often been blamed, shamed and treated as something less than fully human. The Bible hasn’t helped very much, although it’s incredibly frustrating to see the more problematic views on women and about women held up as definitive notions regarding women and their worth. There are plenty of places in the Bible where women are fully human, not in any way deficient by reason of their anatomy.

Since the big news of the summer broke, that President Biden had decided to step aside from running for a second term and to endorse his vice president instead, the barrage of sexist and downright misogynistic slurs directed at Kamala Harris has not exactly been surprising. Still, it’s profoundly annoying and disheartening— and unsettling. How can it be that we are still dealing with such attitudes regarding women in this country?

Christians really have no good excuse to denigrate and dismiss the full humanity of women, or to assert that the full humanity of women is essentially connected to men, that the role of women is to “complement” men. Just take Mary of Magdala, “apostle to the apostles,” in her sharing of the Good News of Christ’s resurrection on that first Easter Sunday morning. As the Son of God, Jesus (presumably) could have shown himself to anyone. He chose Mary. And, Mary shared the news, even as Matthew reported that the news wasn’t welcomed or believed at first.

Although it has been recently revealed that an ancient manuscript (not authored by Dan Brown, of The Da Vinci Code fame) suggests that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married to each other and had children together, most of Christian history and most unquestioned texts related to Christian history and the Christian faith contain no such theory. Mary was, by the admittedly sparse resources available, never married and never had children.

Would Mary, then, fall into the category of “cat lady”? Was she, as J.D. Vance has suggested of unmarried, childless women, miserable at her life and the choices she made?

Enough is enough. Plenty of men manage to live lives untethered to a spouse or partner and, dare I say, lives that are content and unremarked upon by people who are running for office. There are plenty of unmarried, childless women who manage to live lives that are not only rewarding, but are connected deeply to community and country, seeking the common good beyond a nuclear family.

Christians must be willing to engage with and embrace the wide array of lessons and models presented in our holy book. The Gospels, especially, show a Savior who reached out to many, without regard to class, status, gender, marital status, etc. Jesus healed and taught, dined and ministered with, both men and women. It is well beyond the time when all Christians— conservative, liberal and everything in between— demand that women be treated with the full personhood that Jesus modeled during his earthly ministry.