Fatherhood Quote by Carol P. Christ

Religion isn’t framed here as a quaint tradition or a private hobby; it’s treated as a psychological infrastructure. Carol P. Christ’s move is strategic: she concedes religion’s power before she argues about its ownership. By calling its hold “compelling” and lodged in “deep psyches,” she’s acknowledging that belief doesn’t live only in doctrines and Sunday services. It lives in identity formation, moral reflexes, shame scripts, and the stories people use to explain suffering and desire. Feminism, in her view, can’t just critique that system from the outside and hope people will migrate to a secular utopia. If religion is where many people store their ultimate meanings, abandoning it is abandoning the battleground where meaning gets made.

The phrase “cannot afford” is bluntly political: leaving religion to “the fathers” isn’t merely an intellectual error, it’s a costly tactical surrender. “Fathers” works as shorthand for patriarchal authority (clergy, theologians, institutional gatekeepers) but also for a familial, intimate kind of power: the internalized voice that tells you what a “good” woman is. Christ’s subtext is that patriarchy doesn’t only police bodies through laws; it colonizes imagination through the sacred.

Context matters. Christ writes out of the second-wave/late-20th-century current that helped birth feminist theology and Goddess/spirituality movements, when many feminists were debating whether religion was inherently oppressive or salvageable. Her intent is to force a third option: don’t flee the sacred; contest it, rewrite it, redistribute who gets to name the divine.