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Tag: Virgin Mary

  • Born-Again Virginity?

    by Prof Helen King, Professor Emerita in Classical Studies at The Open University and member of General Synod

    The World Health Organisation’s 2018 statement on “Eliminating virginity testing” argued that “the term ‘virginity’ is a social, cultural and religious construct with neither medical nor scientific basis” and that virginity testing is a violation of human rights because “the appearance of a hymen is not a reliable indication of intercourse and there is no known examination that can prove a history of vaginal intercourse.”

    “A religious construct”… yes, indeed. And it was clear from speakers in the Living in Love and Faith debate at the February General Synod that virginity is back on the agenda, at least in some parts of the Church of England. This is part of the attempt to argue that lesbian and gay people must never have sexual relationships, which involves promoting alternatives: for life. What do women – and the word only tends to be used of women, men preferring “celibate” – mean when they claim the status?

    Those asserting their virginity seem to come from the evangelical tradition. If you want to start from the Bible, then the key passage is probably Deuteronomy 22.13-21 on what happens if a man fails to find “evidence of virginity” in his bride. The woman’s family are supposed to demonstrate this “evidence” to the elders of the city, and they “spread a cloak” out to show the blood of defloration. This is a deadly serious business. The woman can be stoned to death if no “evidence” is shown, this being a culture in which not only a man found with a betrothed virgin but also the woman herself can be killed if discovered; in her case, because she did not cry out for help.

    There’s a Catholic dimension too, of course: the Virgin Mary. Julia Kelto Lillis has pointed out that the Church Fathers operated with the full range of models of the female body that existed in the ancient Mediterranean; so, some believed in the hymen, others didn’t. Mary’s body could be regarded as “closed” without this having to mean an intact hymen. Even where the hymen was considered a real thing, its reliability was open to challenge. In the fifth century CE, in his City of God (1.18), St Augustine noted that checking for virginity could destroy the hymen:

    A midwife, suppose, has (whether maliciously or accidentally, or through unskilfulness) destroyed the virginity of some girl, while endeavouring to ascertain it: I suppose no one is so foolish as to believe that, by this destruction of the integrity of one organ, the virgin has lost anything even of her bodily sanctity.

    So what do statements today that someone is a ‘virgin’ actually mean? If it means “not having had sexual intercourse”, then what counts as ‘sex’? The CEEC ‘What to write to your bishop’ guidance states its objection to the same-sex relationships in which some of the bishops’ prayers are intended to be used, on the grounds that these “will often be sexually active”. As well as noting that this implies some won’t be – so are these somehow OK with CEEC? – I remain confused as to what “sexually active” means.

    Conservative evangelicals want to affirm sex as only between a man and a woman, married, in a lifelong relationship. Of course, that ‘lifelong’ has already bitten the dust after the acceptance that some people can be married in church despite a previous divorce. Somehow, being in a church where this could happen – if the conscience of the minister allowed them to do such a thing – was not enough to make conservatives feel that they would be damaged by their proximity to such behaviour. Yet the Prayers of Love and Faith are thought a step too far.

    To support this “only between a man and a woman”, Genesis is widely cited: the myth of Adam and Eve. If it’s all about being (potentially) fruitful and (potentially) multiplying, then as the only sex which is (potentially) procreative is penis-in-vagina sex – the WHO’s “vaginal intercourse” – where does that leave same-sex sex? Why is any sexual “activity” between two men or two women of any interest or relevance? In the traditional Christian morality with which many of us grew up, not “going all the way” didn’t really count as sex. That recalls that much-quoted line from the coming-of-age comedy Clueless (1995), “Dionne’s virginity went from technical to non-existent”. Is same-sex sex any different?

    Perhaps it’s not about hymens, or even bodies, at all. True virginity, as Basil of Ancyra argued and John Chrysostom underlined, was the virginity of the soul: “Virginity can be lost even by a thought” because there are those who are “virgins in the flesh, but not in the spirit”. The hymen did not guarantee spiritual virginity. Is this the virginity which those who announced their status at Synod had in mind?

    You can’t see spiritual virginity. As for physical virginity, there’s a long history of faking it. From the ancient Mediterranean onwards, medical texts describe constrictive ointments to tighten the vagina, the insertion of containers filled with fish blood, or even ways to create a new hymen. Today, virginity restoration surgery is advertised online. Hymen reconstruction, as well as vaginoplasty, is popular in Iran and in Korea, where in 2017 24% of the world’s plastic surgery was being carried out. Vaginoplasty is known as “princess surgery”; the claim is that your man will treat you like a princess. In Guatemala, where hymenoplasty is called “intimate surgery”, it thrives despite the opposition of both the state and the Catholic church.

    I want to be fair: there are real benefits to these surgeries, in that they allow women to survive within the insane structures in which they have to live. In cultures where virginity is the only way for a woman to be respected, “virginity restoration” can save not just reputations but lives, giving some women a second chance. Promoting virginity also has value; showing it’s fine to be a virgin can help prevent people feeling under pressure to enter relationships.

    But there are strange things happening in some churches today. The Christian idea of spiritual virginity is being revisited, to suggest that a woman who has survived sexual violence, or has admitted and been forgiven for sexual activity outside marriage, can still be a virgin in her soul. Vilma Conner published Born-Again Virgin: How to transform your life from promiscuity back into purity in 2009. As for physical virginity, in November 2022 April Ajoy, who co-hosts a podcast on American Evangelical Christianity, tweeted:

    During Purity Week at my Christian college, one preacher bragged about seeing God restore girls’ hymens to make them physical virgins again. Then they gave us purity pledge cards that included the following: I am a (circle one): A. Virgin B. Secondary Virgin. Fun times.

    She had in mind people like Kris Vallotton, a leader in Bethel Church, who in 2012 claimed that God can replace the hymen: “We OFTEN get testimonies from women sharing that God restored their virginity including restoring their hymen! I have heard 100s of these testimonies!!!”

    Virginity – a construct with “neither medical nor scientific basis” – is most definitely back on the agenda. Physical, or spiritual? More importantly: God, or idol?

  • Thirty Years On

    by Rev Martine Oborne, recently appointed Chair of WATCH (Women and the Church), a group that works for gender equality in the Church of England

    Thirty years ago, in 1992, I was appointed to the main board of an investment bank in the City called Rothschilds. I was 34 and the youngest woman to have been made a Director in the firm.

    At the same time, a battle was being fought in the Church of England to dismantle the legislation that blocked women from becoming priests. I was almost unaware of this at the time because I had largely given up going to church and would barely have called myself a Christian. Nonetheless, as I look back on 1992 today, I think how I might have been in the thick of that battle if I had stuck firm to the calling I had first received as a child – that God wanted me to be a vicar in his church.

    I didn’t come from a churchgoing family, but my parents sent me and my sister to Sunday School to get us out of the house so that they could have ‘a bit of time to themselves’ (whatever that meant!). And I became a very spiritual child, praying, reading my Bible, enjoying being in Church, watching my vicar Father Stephen and feeling that one day I might grow up and do the things he did. Lighting candles, reading from scripture, talking about God and chatting to old ladies.

    One day at school when I was about ten, my teacher started asking the class what we wanted to be when we grew up. One kid said an astronaut, another said Prime Minister, another said a film star and so on. But, when it got to me, I blurted out that I wanted to be a vicar. This was greeted with much laughter from my friends.  And then my teacher said, ‘Well, you can’t do that, Martine – they don’t have women vicars.’ And, at that, the whole class collapsed into fits of mirth while I just sat there feeling an idiot.

    I felt not only stupid but also confused.  It was the late 1960s and brave women were battling to breakdown discrimination in all areas of the public sphere.  And they were succeeding.  So why was it that I could not be a vicar, just because I had been born female?

    I began to wonder what my calling might be.  In my mid teens I had a time of worrying that I might be called to be a second Virgin Mary and I remember praying that God would send a dream to my mum, rather than to my boyfriend, to explain what was going on.

    But I guess, in all seriousness, this was the start of my giving up on my calling, setting aside the foolish things of my childhood and seeking other paths in life.  I got a place at Oxford, a job in the City and good things followed – a nice home, a family and a rewarding career where I was valued and treated as an equal alongside my mostly male colleagues.

    I started going back to church in my mid thirties to get the children into the local church primary school and I thought I could then drift away again after this mission had been accomplished.  But God took the opportunity to renew my faith and my calling and I discovered that, thanks to the persistence and sacrifice of brave women and men like those at MOW (The Movement for the Ordination of Women), women could become priests and vicars.

    That was, therefore, the beginning of a journey that finds me now happily serving as the vicar of a small parish in West London, doing all the things that Father Stephen had done many years ago.

    End of happy story, yes?  But also no.

    Because, although I am a vicar in the Church of England, I am not a vicar on the same terms as I would be if I were a man.  Although almost every Anglican in the land has wanted ministry in the Church to be equally open to men and women from the 1970s onwards, there have been certain small powerful groups within the Church that have resisted this vigorously and viciously.  This meant that legal provisions were made in the 1990s to allow parishes, if they wanted, to say no to women priests.  And then later, in 2014, when the barriers were removed that had prevented women priests from becoming bishops, new legislation enabled ‘flying bishops’ to be appointed so that parishes, if they wanted, could say no to women bishops.

    So I serve in a church where parishes can still advertise for a new vicar and ask for men only to apply, where bishops who are women are required to delegate their authority of oversight to male bishops for some of their parishes, where some of my colleagues espouse a theology that says God created men to lead and women to be led, and where some of my colleagues believe I am not actually a priest (that my ordination was invalid.)  And the official position of the Church is that we want these people, with the theologies that underpin their positions, to flourish.

    But hang on a second, I hear you say.  Isn’t this kind of discrimination illegal in the UK today under The Equality Act 2010?  And the answer is that yes it would be – except the Church of England has exemptions under that legislation which allow it to discriminate.

    OK, you might say.  But people like bishops who hold public office can’t be exempted under the Act.  And that’s true, which means that women bishops should operate on precisely the same terms as men bishops.  But in 2014 the Church got an amendment to the legislation saying that, for the purposes of the Act, bishops do not hold ‘public office.’  Which is somewhat extraordinary, since twenty six of them sit in the House of Lords.

    So what on earth is going on?  How can we be in 2022 and the national Church is still discriminating against women, who represent about two thirds of their congregations and half the population?

    The arguments boil down to largely two things: one, those who say we can’t have women priests because the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t allow them; two, those who say God created men, and only men, to be in charge and the Bible attests to this.

    I can’t get into the response to all this in this short post.  Suffice it to say that the arguments and theology have been hotly contested over the years and millions of words have been written.  But the Church’s legislative council, General Synod, came to the conclusion that there is no theological basis for women to be prohibited from being priests or bishops.  Which should have been an end to the matter, as the purpose of such councils is to resolve theological disputes and make decisions to bring unity and then allow the Church to move forward.  When the apostles Paul and Peter in the early Church debated whether Gentile Christians needed to be circumcised or not, they came to a conclusion and special provisions were not made for dissenters.  Nonetheless, two thousand years later, special provisions were made for those who continue to say no to women priests and bishops.  And, because of these provisions, the old discredited arguments and theologies not only continue, but are often seen on a par with the arguments and theology underpinning the validity of women’s ministry.

    My personal belief is that we are a separate Church from the Roman Catholic Church and can make our own decisions on women’s ministry, as we have on many other areas of doctrine such as allowing priests to be married.  And I believe that God created humankind in his image, in his image he created us, male and female – as we read in the first chapter of Genesis.  So that we do not reflect that image of God when men and women are not equal in the Church.

    The women and men behind the Movement for the Ordination of Women did great work back in the 1990s and earlier, and we have so much to thank them for.  But the work for equality for women in the Church is not done.  This is why I have accepted the role of Chair at WATCH (Women and the Church), which campaigned for women bishops and now seeks equality for all in our national Church.  I hope and pray that, in my lifetime, I will not only see the Church give up its exemptions from UK equalities legislation but also come to truly value women, both ordained and lay, and lament how it has treated us in the past.

    Please join WATCH here to help.