Islamist terrorists murdered two and wounded 11 in a late-morning attack July 28 at a midwife school for young women in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

It was an extreme manifestation of the same kind of religious bigotry that exists in my own country, the United States.

We forget that supernatural ideas that embed in cultures have consequences, and sometimes they are horrific. The Salem Witch Trials in 1600s Massachusetts Bay Colony is an American example. Based on fears of invisible evil beings in their midst, the townspeople orchestrated the executions of 19 innocent victims — mostly women — and jailed more 150 in that abhorrent incident.

No specific group claimed responsibility for the recent Afghan attack, The New York Times reported afterward, but:

“Although there was no immediate claim of responsibility, the attack bore the hallmarks of the Islamic State, whose local affiliate is especially active in Nangarhar and responsible for many suicide attacks there.”

A ruthless movement

Afghanistan’s Taliban organization, an ally of the Islamic State, unconvincingly denied involvement in the attack, although they have a history of being coy about their assaults. The Taliban, which refers to itself as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (EIA), is a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist political movement that has waged an insurgent civil war against the government for years. It ruthlessly and murderously imposed its rigid faith on the populace in areas it controlled, especially upon women.

Notably, the Taliban’s original founders mainly came from hyper-fundamentalist Islamic schools in the country called madrasas, which preached apocalyptic scenarios and divine command for the power of men and their subjugation of women.

The evocation of female inferiority to men is as prevalent in fundamentalist Christian as well as Muslim doctrines, which both derive at least in part from Judaic and Christian scripture. The proof of this is the Taliban’s misogynistic dogma and practices, and also the Christian ideology still prevalent in modern America that views women as mere helpmates to men, not persons with innate authority and equal value.

So, we see bizarre but tragic incidents such as one years ago in Saudi Arabia where “religious police” under the Ministry of Prevention of Vice and Propagation of Virtue blocked young girls from leaving a public school during a fire under the presumption that their chastity would be at risk in the real world outside its gates. Fifteen girls perished in the flames. Here’s a BBC account of that horror.

Or bloody Taliban attacks on girls’ schools under the presumption that girls’ education, virtually nonexistent at the time and considered unnecessary by Afghanis, was a Western plot to weaken the nation and destroy its culture. Here’s a British Daily Mail story on several related attacks. Here’s another article.

The roots of American misogyny

Today, American culture is awash in such presumptions of female inferiority and women’s scripturally designated, second-class roles in relation to men. And it’s been written on the wall for centuries, even millennia. If you think I exaggerate, read on.

A fascinating 2014 article in Salon is a compendium of misogynist historical quotations from faith leaders, notably including saints, throughout Christendom. It clearly shows the genesis of women’s unjust woes in Western civilization.

Valerie Tarico, the Salon article’s author, wrote:

“With diatribes about entertainers who invite rape and moms who are destroying America by supporting their families; with ignorant arguments about fetuses that masturbate, and females who might as well if they use contraception, it’s tempting to think Christian conservatives have reached some new pinnacle of hating women and sexuality. But the sad reality is that even the media’s most unabashed misogynists like Michele Bachmann, Michael Burgess, Lou Dobbs and Juan Williams are actually tame compared to their ideological ancestors, including some of the biggest names in Christian history.”

Tertullian, a very influential Catholic church father of antiquity who lived in the second and third centuries after Jesus’ death, wrote icily:

“In pain shall you bring forth children, woman, and you shall turn to your husband and he shall rule over you. And do you not know that you are Eve? God’s sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil’s gateway; you are she who first violated the forbidden tree and broke the law of God.”

Nothing had apparently changed in the Church’s opinion of women by the 13th century, when uber-influential Catholic theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinus, who was ultimately sainted, wrote:

“As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence.”

And Aquinus was among the first Christian thinkers who tried to claim a basis in classical rationalism (i.e., reason) to explain and defend Christian doctrine. He failed.

A couple of centuries later, Martin Luther (1483-1546), firebrand and igniter of the Protestant Reformation that ended monolithic Catholic power in Europe, revealed how little of a revolutionary he actually was. He wrote:

“The word and works of God is quite clear, that women were made either to be wives or prostitutes.”

Eventually these invented ideas immigrated to the New World and embedded in America. In America’s early years, the Puritan strain of Christianity held sway in the colonies under the doctrines of Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509-1564). Calvin was no feminist. He once wrote:

“Thus the woman, who had perversely exceeded her proper bounds, is forced back to her own position. She had, indeed, previously been subject to her husband, but that was a liberal and gentle subjection; now, however, she is cast into servitude.”

This gender bigotry continued with John Wesley (1703-1791), a British founder of the Methodist movement that became enormously influential in early America. In a 1774 letter to his wife, Wesley wrote with callous unconcern:

“Do not any longer contend for mastery, for power, money, or praise. Be content to be a private, insignificant person, known and loved by God and me. … of what importance is your character to mankind, if you was buried just now. Or if you had never lived, what loss would it be to the cause of God.”

Gaslighting the faithful

Then, in 1998, the U.S. Southern Baptist Convention released this official statement to its 15.7 million members:

“A wife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband, even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”

Arguably the best known Southern Baptist in America, the Rev. Pat Robertson, a fundamentalist failed U.S. presidential candidate, later doubled down on that conceptualization of women with this political statement:

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

Today we have a president who brags about grabbing women “by the pussy” without invitation, and Christian leaders who disrespect women and slavishly support their publicly misogynist president. And “misogynist” is not an unfair word in this context; the president’s behavior is a textbook reflection of the male-dominance attitude, and evangelical Christians who support him are complicit.

So, when religious zealots elsewhere who fear and loathe females murder them because of such appalling illogic, we shouldn’t feel too smug here in America.

We’re really not that far afield.

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