Hi Greg,

These are great questions, and I think it’s important that I make a clarification regarding what a value is and how one can become “outdated”.

First of all, a value in this context is “a person’s principles or standards of behavior.” For Christian women, their standards of behavior are drawn from the Bible — that is where they get their values from. But throughout history, women have been treated as commodities and as subservient to men. In many Bible stories, women are traded and treated as objects rather than subjects. Now, in historical context, this is the way things were: men owned their wives, because the Bible told them that Eve was created subsequently, as Adam’s “helpmeet”. Back then, their principles told them that women were to be dependent on their husbands, that they were not to have premarital sex, that homosexuality was a sin, and women’s ultimate purpose was childbearing and raising.

Today, these principles are not only out of date (or no longer relevant because women have the vote, can own land, can have children outside of marriage and not lose their standing in society, can be homosexuals, etc), we understand that these principles were drawn from the Bible in the first place. The standards of behavior enforced on women throughout history were cast off when women reached a standing in society where they were treated more equally to men. They became outdated —because it has nothing to do with morality, but with standards of behavior enforced by the time period.

That takes it out of the context of being “good” and becoming “bad”, because today, some people still believe women should follow the principles of behavior outlined in the Bible. Those are their values. Some people, myself included, find those values repressive and outdated, and that they were harmful for women in the first place. But those people are convinced that the Biblical principles for women have something of merit, and their conviction is what can lead, ultimately, to fundamentalism.

Thanks again for your great questions,

Sarah