#christian history

[religious-extremist]

Westerners often accuse the Orthodox Church of losing the essence of Christianity, because the Orthodox lands were subjugated by Islamic powers: the Eastern Roman Empire fell to the Ottomans, the conquest of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria.

The funny thing with Islam is that, when it conquers a foreign land, their leaders demand a tax, the jizya, from those who do not convert to Islam. The more Christians converted to Islam, the less jizya they were able to collect; so they didn’t want too many of the Christians to convert to Islam, because then they would have less money.

But then Westerners say, God must have despised the disobedience of the Eastern Romans, of the Christians who called themselves Orthodox! They say that’s why God punished the Greeks; He used the Turks to destroy the Greek people and oppress their religion and scatter them and their congregation.

St. Kosmas the Aetolian spoke well when he said that God indeed showed His mercy upon the Greek people when, instead of letting them fall into the hands of the Venetians, the Papists, God preserved the Greeks by allowing the Muslims to take Constantinople instead. The Fall of Constantinople, this great tragedy which was indeed caused by the apostasy of the Greek people’s hearts, was also a great blessing.

Had the Venetians taken over, subjugated the Orthodox under the Papist yoke, we would have lost the Orthodox faith, forced to conversion. The Muslims at least had some incentive to preserve Orthodox Christianity amongst the Eastern Romans: that is, to collect taxes from them.

So those who had no faith in Christ our God had apostatized and became Muslims, and the ones who remained became saints, of faithfulness stronger than diamonds and brilliance more resplendent than the sun. The purest of gold can only be tried by fire, after all. Even the Old Testament spoke of “the righteous remnant.” And so, until today, the Orthodox faith remains unadulterated, preserved by these souls, the bulwark of Orthodoxy.

[creature-wizard]

The more you actually learn about the history of Christianity from credible academic sources, the more you learn that Christianity's origins are very easy to explain without either accepting the Gospels as historical fact or believing in some cockamamie "Jesus never existed, he was invented by the Catholic Church who based him on Horus" conspiracy theory.

The more you learn about the actual history of Christianity, the more it becomes obvious that it was a simple product of its time and place, largely unremarkable aside from the fact that Rome eventually assimilated it and made their imperialized version a dominant religious force. Christianity originated from an environment where weird mystical salvific religions and messianic movements were just what people did.

In my opinion it's genuinely fascinating to learn about, because the deeper you go the more obvious it is that it was a very organic, very human sociological phenomenon, and there's no reason to single it out as uniquely compelling to join, or uniquely sinister in origin. It's just... a thing. A plain ol' regular thing started by plain ol' regular people, just like you and me.

[eternal-echoes]

It really is a huge disservice to equate colonization with missionary work because the priests who chose to do missionary work had to strip themselves of their wealth, cultural roots, and comfortable lifestyle in order to minister to the salvation of the indigenous people of the new country they moved to, while colonizers went to those countries in order to exploit them for their resources. It’s the extreme contrast of selflessness and selfishness. And often times, missionary priests had to stand against the colonizers in order to protect the human rights of the indigenous people much to the detriment of their own lives.

To associate missionary work with colonization is to dismiss their self-sacrificial work for the sake of the Heavenly kingdom hereafter while colonizers worshipped their earthly kingdom at the expense of their own salvation.

[campgender]

from God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission by R. Marie Griffith (1997)

evangelical subculture was less a bulwark against than a variant of the therapeutic culture.

As evangelicals gradually ceased denouncing psychology outright, they shifted the battle lines, accepting the psychologists’ diagnosis of modern dilemmas while asserting that the cure for emotional sickness was religious faith rather than secular therapies. Popular evangelical writers increasingly began to discuss problems in terms of “anxiety” and “inferiority complexes” and advisedreaders on heightening “self-esteem” and fulfilling emotional “needs,” however, and the boundary between religious and secular prescriptions steadily blurred. Religious writers quoted enthusiastically from psychotherapists and other “positive thinkers” such as Dale Carnegie and Joshua Loth Liebman.

Continuing to denounce liberal Protestants for accommodating and selling out to “secular humanism,” evangelical authors devised an updated theology of their own, in which sin was often reconceptualized as sickness and concerns over salvation were replaced by concerns for earthly happiness, comfort, and health. Those who packaged their message most successfully, such as the well-known Christian pediatrician and psychologist James Dobson, tended to address a largely female audience and directed their concerns to marriage and family life, sex, and depression.

The historian Donald Meyer, whose 1965 study of “religion as pop psychology” was published just prior to The Triumph of the Therapeutic, shared Rieff’s argument and gave it a historical frame of reference, looking back to Mary Baker Eddy and the theology of mind cure for precedents of current therapeutic religion. Having failed to recognize evangelicals as participants in the phenomenon he described, fifteen years later Meyer added a chapter attributing the recent upsurge of conservative evangelicalism to that group’s appropriation of positive thinking and practices of healing therapy.

Tracing the career of Oral Roberts, who ceased his tent meeting healing services in favor of building a colossal modern hospital, Meyer noted the urge among evangelicals to make healing “obtainable as a predictable and rational expectation.” Not only in the Christian counseling centers and medical centers but also in the charismatics’ and other evangelicals’ continuing emphasis on divine healing, the mixing of the therapeutic with popular religion became highly visible. It seemed irrefutable that a deep cultural shift “from salvation to self-realization” had taken place; as two historians independently noted not long after Meyer’s postscript.

[whereserpentswalk]

The idea that the Christians were some sort of persecuted minority in the Roman empire is so commonly taught in history, but when you look at actual early Christian beliefs things seem a lot diffrent.

Like, Christians were a highly reactionary and militant religious group that wanted to force a relatively diverse society to follow its extremely strict and conservative moral values. They were known to engage in destructive praxis, and had a strong cult of martyrdom that's an undercurrent of every facist movment. They were a religious minority, but they weren't one that just wanted to practice on their own, they were a rapidly spreading reactionary movement with incredibly conservative values they wanted to push on society.

So don't view Roman citizens trying to keep Christianity out of their society as the ignorant and hateful mob you're often taught about them being, think of them a bit more like we view people trying to keep nazis out of their communities today.

As for the Roman government attack Christians I view it with the same skepticism I view any government trying to attack reactionaries. It's never a good path for a state to go down, even when the ideas they're attacking are awful. And like most governments that start attacking reactionaries, they eventually embrace and enforce those reactionary ideas.

[nickysfacts]

Turns out historically, life hasn’t been easy for those who lived foolishly as foolish fools!

🎊🃏🎊

[gemsofgreece]

My God Netflix... take a fucking hint maybe. Let it rest, honestly, such projects are apparently not for you, it's okay.

Also, can I just add some screenshots from the Hercules thing because

Okay, who watches this unironically and then unironically gives it a 3/5... come forth! I can't stop laughing it looks like bad porn

I will give Tarak and Saphirra the benefit of the doubt as apparently the movie has little to do with accuracy to mythology anyway. There are some scarce myths that Heracles had visited India with Dionysus but that’s nowhere in the plot. And I also doubt this is how the names were in Sanskrit but I don't know much about that.

Lucius is a Latin name, hope they din't give it to a Greek that was "contemporary" of Heracles, also hope they don't gave it to a Roman because there weren't Romans at the time of Heracles. But as I see in the wikipedia page that someone chose to make for this film, apparently, Heracles was sold to a gladiator slave promoter, who was Lucius, so I guess indeed according to Netflix Heracles / Hercules lived with Romans and more so at the time of their peak.

BUT all this is fine compared to SOTIRIS. Sotiris, a pal of Heracles. Sotiris is a Greek name all right and it has an ancient Greek origin indeed.... Soter or Sotir in the modern pronunciation is an epithet meaning "Saviour" and it was a way several gods were called i.e Zeus Soter. Then also some Hellenistic kings used it as an epithet, i.e Ptolemy I Soter. And finally, Jesus. The famous early crypto-Christian fish, if you know. Early Christians who did not want to be discovered and persecuted by pagan Romans and Greeks used as their secret symbol the fish, which in Greek is ΙΧΘΥΣ, and served as an acronym for Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ (Iēsûs Chrīstós, Theû Huiós, Sōtḗr - Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Saviour).

The problem is that from Soter the adjective Soterios was derived, meaning the same thing, and soon enough Sotirios (because the pronunciation was already half-modern at the time) was popularised after Jesus and Chirstianity as a first name for normal people that were getting baptised. Nowadays, girls are baptised as "Sotiria" (salvation, the noun, for them) and boys are baptised as "Sotirios" (the adjective) and almost always go with "Sotiris" for shorter.

In other words, they really went for "Hercules and Jack" or something.

This is the Thanos thing happening all over again.

[official-neue-bundeslaender]

@ catholic side of tumblr: why does st mary (?) have a wand here o.o

[the-orphic-youth]

Magic amulet in a form of engraved heliotrope gem, XIth c., Byzantium, 52 x 47mm.

The National Museum of the Przemyśl Land.

[many-sparrows]

Martin Luther and Paul the Apostle would have either gotten along like a house fire or they wouldn't have been able to stand in the same room. It's about the self loathing.

[hiding1ntheforest]

Neoplatonic Influence on Early Christianity: The Cappadocians, Mysticism and Orthodoxy

A particularly fascinating aspect of Christianity is its Neoplatonic characteristics which shaped it during the beginning of its development. Neoplatonism is a philosophy that emerged during the 3rd century with Plotinus, a follower of Plato. It is characterized by monist thought, asserting that all things such as our material reality are emanations of the One, an omnipotent yet obscure force. Although I am not a Christian myself, I would consider myself a Neoplatonist. After all, Neoplatonism has its origins in the philosophy of Hellenic polytheists. However, not all Neoplatonists are polytheists, leading us to today’s exploration of Early Christianity and its philosophy as well as key figures. Neoplatonism may not be as prominent in Christianity as it once was due to the rise of protestantism but we can still see remnants of it in Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Like all religions, Christianity was heavily shaped by the cultures that it interacted with. Despite it being birthed from Second Temple Judaism, numerous great European thinkers of classical antiquity contributed to its theological growth.

The Nature of God

Of course, the belief in God is at the forefront of any religion. The Neoplatonists and many early Christians are in agreement on several aspects of the nature of God, such as God’s qualities (or lack thereof) and relationship with man. Gregory of Nyssa, a key figure in the creation of Christian mysticism and a saint recognized within Eastern Orthodoxy heavily advanced the notion of God being an unknowable force. The human mind simply cannot begin to understand God while his existence surpassing all earthly characteristics makes him impossible to define. This sentiment is shared by Augustine of Hippo, a Christian theologian that is continually discussed today. I generally don’t share direct quotes in my posts in order to prevent them from being too long, but this excerpt from Augustine’s “On the Nature of Good” is too beautiful to pass up: “For He (God) is so omnipotent, that even out of nothing, that is out of what is absolutely non-existent, He is able to make good things both great and small, both celestial and terrestrial, both spiritual and corporeal.” This description is spot on with the Neoplatonic conception of God with Plotinus arguing that God’s rather simple nature allows him to be the cause and creator of all things. This can be traced back to Plato’s view of God as being eternal and inspiring all life forms through archetypes in the physical realm. To both the Neoplatonists and theologians of Early Christianity, God is inherently good and beautiful yet completely beyond our comprehension. Despite God being seemingly unknowable, we learn a lot about pursuing union with God, or theosis, from a variety of Christian allegorical readings. Pseudo-Dionysius, arguably one of the most famous figures in Christian esotericism, makes an allegory of Moses’s journey to mount Sinai in order to obtain the ten commandments. His journey is interpreted by Pseudo-Dionysius as an internal contemplative one which allows him to level with God. I have briefly discussed such a contemplative journey in my post about theurgy. Specifically, Porphyry advocated for deep contemplation and intellectualization which would purify the individual and allow him to reach communion with God. Gregory of Nyssa claimed that the journey to unify with God is an endless one as God himself is limitless.

Hesychasm

Within Eastern Orthodoxy is the movement of hesychasm, a contemplative mystical practice which can be traced back to the monks of Mount Athos during the 14th century. It is also one of the most overtly Neoplatonic traditions within Christianity. Hesychasm stems from the Greek word ‘hesychia,’ meaning “tranquil” or “still.” As the translations indicate, it is characterized by not only physical stillness but mental stillness as well. Saint Thalassio of Libya argued that Hesychasm allows for the Nous to become free from any impurities which may hinder it from becoming one with the divine. The Nous may be referred to as the intellect and according to Plotinus, it is the cosmological mind as well as existence. It is the reflection of the One. An aspect of physical hesychia is adopting certain positions during prayer or meditation and these positions may further assist in purifying the Nous. It may also refer to avoiding all that is corporeal as well as abstaining from temptations, paralleling Porphyry’s ascetic contemplation. Additionally, the foundation for Hesychasm is developing virtues by way of the commandments. This ties into Pseudo-Dionysius’s allegory in which Moses receiving the ten commandments is more of an introspective quest. This idea is also expounded by Saint Symeon the New Theologian who stated that to acquire the ten commandments is to acquire God.

The Trinity

When I first began reading about Orthodoxy after learning about Neoplatonism, I immediately compared the triad of the two: surely, the Father must correspond to the One, the Son corresponding to the Nous, and the Holy Spirit must correlate to the Soul. Initially, this makes sense when we think of the Father as the origin of all things, the Son being a reflection of the Father (in the way that the Nous may reflect the One) and the Holy Spirit being the essence of the world. However, we must consider the nature of the Trinity. It is important to note that God is worshipped as the Unified Trinity, meaning God is one, but is also distinguishable by various beings. The Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son. God is equally one as he is three. This disrupts the emanationism of Neoplatonic thought. However, another overlooked similarity may be considered: in the Enneads, Plotinus said to even name the One would draw distinctions upon it. Orthodoxy and Neoplatonism are both characterized by apophatic theology in this way. The Early Christians also borrowed several terms from Neoplatonism and incorporated it into trinitarian writings.

The Cappadocian Fathers

The Cappadocian Fathers were church fathers in Cappadocia, Turkey who furthered the development of Orthodox and trinitarian theology, as well as mysticism. They include Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus. Firstly, Gregory of Nyssa served as the bishop of Cappadocia until his death at the very end of the 4th century. He was especially notable for his writings on God’s unknowable nature and the mystic ascent towards unification. Additionally, some believe that he studied in Athens where Neoplatonism had began to flourish due to Plutarch reestablishing Plato’s Academy. Basil of Caesarea was Gregory of Nyssa’s older brother and was also a bishop during the 4th century. It is recorded that he studied in Athens and went on to produce a number of works on monasticism. Basil also compiled the writings of Origen of Alexandria, a follower of Platonism. Finally, Gregory of Nazianzus was an archbishop and theologian. He contributed heavily to the Orthodox formulation of the trinity. Gregory also studied in Athens where he crossed paths with Julian the Apostate, a Neoplatonist who would later become the emperor and attempt to reestablish paganism. Gregory published “Invectives Against Julian” after the emperor’s rise to power. Macrina the Younger, the sister of both Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea, is a saint recognized within Orthodoxy who is known for her ascetic lifestyle.

Conclusion

Much of the theology and developments in Christianity, especially that of Orthodoxy, is heavily rooted in Neoplatonic philosophy as a result of interactions with the Hellenic world. Figures such as Plotinus and Origen certainly guided the thinking of numerous theologians and church authorities. The influence is especially prominent in the conception of God and the trinity while inspiring the practice of mysticism. Finally, The Cappadocian Fathers heavily built upon many of these aspects.

[girlactionfigure]

History lesson on Temple mount to the UN

Naveed Anjum

[totheidiot]

that new testament john x jesus post of mine is doing so good i might have to start cooking up another new testament related post. can't complain religious history when it comes to christianity and islam is of my most favorite things and i love to talk about it. if you want my thoughts on something concerning specifically the life of jesus and anything regarding islam before the sunni-shia split, shoot me an ask. i will come to you with an extremely long analysis post, trust.

[mask131]

While I'm at it, because I just had a little beef with a fanatical Christian who couldn't believe I was born in a Christian setting because I had a pentagram as an icon (you see the kind of person)... [Edit: For more details they were a clearly antisemitic Orthodox person who, after refusing to believe I was anything else than Jew, atheist or a devil-worshiper, starting lashing out at me when I said I had a Catholic upbringing saying I was the cause of the crusades and the reason Hitler was alive, yada yada, you know the kind of crazy religious person]

So I decided to have a brief Christianity talk. Not much but just this:

If you ask me, yes, there is a Christian mythology, even though people do not like this term - because there is a bunch of Christian legends and Christian myths that form a Christian folklore and a set of Christian tales with distant, weak or inexistant links to ACTUAL Christian teachings, rites and the actual Christian religion.

And I do believe that folk-Christianity is a fascinating thing that deserves to exist alongside official, actual Christianity. Santa Muerte, and the local saint celebrations, and strange Christmas and Epiphany beliefs, and this story about God and Saint Peter getting drunk at a farmer's house, and the fairytale about Jesus and the Virgin Mary throwing the devil and his wife in an oven to save the girls they wanted to eat... Anyway, no matter how much one can try to destroy folk-Christianity it will always survive because it was centuries and centuries of rites and beliefs spread across several continents, and you can't destroy that easily.

The thing that many people do not get is that a lot of what is Christianity today was completely made up. There's not a lot of Christianity today that was originally in the Bible. There's a lot of Christianity as practiced by the first Christians that was lost. The dates and meanings of celebrations like Easter, All Hallows Day or Christmas kept changing all year long. Lots of saints were completely invented. Don't even get me started on the apocryphal Gospels!

This is why studying and understanding the history and evolution of a religion always allow one to be more understanding of what the religion currently is and what is actually an "option" in it. Religions never stayed the same thanks to times changing, scholarly debates, schisms dividing it into various branches, political and economical forces being at play, translations from one country to the next - and that's not just true for Christianity, but also for all other religions. Islam, Judaism, Buddhism... They all had their own evolution, they all are today very different from what they started as, and to better understand them one needs to learn of their past, what they were, what they still are, what they're not anymore. Heck, today there are talks in India of kicking out and banishing all Buddhists when the religion started there! But now, Buddhism's main nations are China and Japan, and its Indian roots almost entirely forgotten...

Fanatics usually fail to do this study of their own religion's history and evolution, because they imagine that the past was just always a carbon-copy of the present, and that their beliefs stayed unmovable monolith coming straight from God (or whatever principle they follow) instead of something that went through centuries of men and women and governments.

Just look at why and how Protestantism came to be. People realized the Church had added a lot of stuff that wasn't there when Christians first appeared, and decided to return to the "original" Christianity, rejecting all the added, invented stuff. Like the celibacy of priests: Christians priests married and had children in the first centuries following the Christ's death. And the only reason Catholic priests took a vow of celibacy and virginity was because of economic concerns with inheritance matters. Jesus never asked those that followed him to never have children or never marry or never have sex.

Or take the existence of Purgatory! Completely invented by the Church around the Middle-Ages, never spoke about by the Christ or part of the original Christian religion, then quickly removed a few centuries later as a non-existent, borderline heretical superstition, and that yet survived in folk-Christianity, and then in popular culture.

In conclusion, I would have to say that there is one book that made me realize a lot of things about religion as a whole, and that convinced me to go from Catholic-Christian to simply deist. Terry Pratchett's book "Small Gods", which exactly put into words my feelings about the world: there is a difference between religion and organized religion. There is a difference between belief and the organizations built around this belief, between faith and the hierarchy created around this faith. The Church is like a shell that was built around the turtle that is the faith/belief/god - and sometimes, when the shell becomes too big and too heavy or too unfit for the creature it hosts, it smothers, hurts and kills the faith/belief/god, until there is only the shell. And people stop referring to the turtle, and only speak and interact with the shell.

This is the perfect explanation of how Jesus only preached peace and love and friendship and forgiveness, and its priests later invented the Inquisition and caused the witch-hunts.

[campgender]

“The S Word” – on the performance of Christian patriarchy & the word no one says

from The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities by Kate Bowler (2019)

transcript under the cut

The apportionment of power between husband and wife was not simply a private matter, either. In the 1970s and 1980s, submission had become something akin to dogma as conservative Christianity reacted to economic and social challenges that had pulled many wives out of the house and into paid employment. Over half of the readership of Today’s Christian Woman, to take a sample of an evangelical readership, had entered the workforce. In this new dispensation, it had become increasingly difficult to assume what women’s work was—she might work longer hours or earn more than he did. He may have heeded the call to assume more of the housework.

Those church leaders uneasy about such a situation began to emphasize that there was a natural order to things—in families, in churches, and in nations—and that God had ordained the superiority of men and a life of submission for women. Defenses of the Christian patriarchy were everywhere, from bestsellers like Larry Christenson’s The Christian Family, seminars like Bill Gothard’s, parachurch ministries like Focus on the Family, and entire movements, like the Shepherding controversy (see Chapter One).

The ambiguity around what constituted modern women’s work created great shows of deference from conservative Christian women who were beginning to be offered other choices. Books like Being #1 at Being #2 encouraged women to accept their husbands’ place as number one (“Do you find yourself in the role of supporting cast rather than the star?”). However, submission was as much a performance as it was a teaching, something to be seen and believed.

A 1968 how-to manual for Christian wifedom offers clues about how such submission was meant to be performed. Submission, the author contended, was like a divine drama with God playing the part of producer, husband playing the part of Jesus, and wife playing the part of the church. A wife’s “script” is submission, but it is not treated as an established fact but an ongoing series of gestures. She puts out the nice china for him with a little comment about how “I’ve been asking the Lord to help me be a better wife.” Her “hearty and joyous” lovemaking demonstrates “the quality of her submission” in the most powerful manner. The wife is even given a script and props for his enthronement as she “voluntarily dethrones her will to make him her lord,” a coronation ceremony that requires that she cut out a paper crown for him.

The most vocal defenders of submission understood that subservience must be enacted. Dorothy Patterson regularly made mention of the fact that, despite her own onerous teaching and speaking schedule, she was Paige’s enthusiastic helpmeet. “I enjoy teaching, I enjoy traveling, I enjoy speaking to women, but I don’t enjoy anything as much as being the wife of Paige Patterson,” she happily told one reporter, while also mentioning her willingness to iron their pillowcases and sixteen of Paige’s shirts before turning to her own work. “I had an appointment at 10 a.m. and a speaking engagement that night, so I started at 6:30 a.m.,” she said. “I just couldn’t go another day without having all those shirts in order.”

Though both had doctoral degrees in theology, he takes his rightful place and she takes hers. Likewise, the cover of the evangelical women’s book A Woman’s Privilege shows a housewife with a cape draped over her apron using a scepter as a scrub brush. The message is clear: she is still royalty at the kitchen sink.

Submission was always much easier to see than to defend. A photograph series in Upon This Rock, a tribute to Anne and John Gimenez’s Virginia megachurch, shows its entirely unremarkable body language. The caption reads: “Pat Robertson interviewing the Gimenezes.” The illustration shows a sunny day and Pat Robertson and John Gimenez are turned toward each other, chatting into their respective microphones. A step behind her husband, Anne clasps her empty hands in front of her, smiling though no one is looking at her.

Talking about submission was a complicated act, for it was difficult for men to discuss without reinforcing their reputations as dominating and primary beneficiaries of this teaching. So, for the most part, submission was played out with the lightest touch. The most popular defenders of the doctrine of submission were usually women, who could put audiences’ minds at ease that their husbands exercise benevolent leadership rather than a cold dictatorship. “Woman is the feminine of man. We are not only created to be man’s helper, but also his complement,” wrote cowgirl Dale Evans Rogers of her co-star and husband.

In fact, the stronger the public teaching against women in ministry, the stronger the woman on the stage had to be. Take, for instance, the opening of the Art of Homemaking conference, where President Paige Patterson’s quip comparing his wife’s obedience to a dog. Audiences would have flinched if Dorothy Patterson were not a steel magnolia herself, who, in closing that evening, flatly told her husband to sit down so someone else—someone who knows what they are doing—could make the announcements.

Her books were careful studies in how to submit to your husband but, in public, they seemed to relish their parts in this Punch and Judy show. The famous couple was almost expected to fight or tease or put each other in their place in a culture preoccupied so much with talk of power, dominance, and submission.

If a famous pastor was married to a shrinking violet, the pageantry of respect around her only increased. Take, for instance, the bombastic Jerry Falwell, primary architect of the Religious Right, whose rhetorical fireballs were lobbed at almost every target—single parenthood, homosexuality, divorce, abortion, drugs, public schools, secular politicians, and even fellow televangelists. His wife, Macel, was rarely seen on stage, preferring the privacy of family life, and so much had to be said about her as a formidable woman.

“My wife and I have been married twenty-eight years. . . . And I want to tell you in twenty-eight years we’ve had some knock-down and drag-outs. [Laughter] I’ve lost every one of them. [Laughter] I tell you, men, the best thing you can do is quickly raise your hands and unconditionally surrender because you’re gonna lose.”

It was a hard doctrine disguised as a joke, a playful show of weakness by men and strength by women. The role reversal—his submission, her dominance—was meant to calm fears about men lording their power over their wives. It was a twinkle in the eye that told the audience, it’s okay.

When asked in a rare interview whether she was “the power behind the Jerry Falwell throne,” she demurred, “a lot of people say that I do fit that role.” In truth, legitimating the inequality between men and women—while allowing both parties to be heroes—was the most difficult aspect of these public partnerships. Ministries longed to strike that note celebrated in the tagline of one California megachurch’s women’s ministry: “Confident heart. Surrendered soul.”

Over time, the doctrine of submission took two different paths as megaministry proliferated and diversified. White evangelicalism, for the most part, softened in its public stance on the subject. David Platt, a young star of the Southern Baptist denomination and president of their mission board, was the embodiment of the undemanding patriarch with his boy-next-door image, calling female audiences “sisters” in a soft, imploring tone and making goofy jokes about how ineptly he courted his wife.

Evangelicalism was still a standard image bearer of Christian families but submission was less discussed than occasionally alluded to. When Beth Moore, the most famous Southern Baptist evangelist, spoke to ten thousand women in Norfolk, Virginia, in 2016, she devoted only a minute to the denomination’s teachings on the matter by saying: “Some women think they can do anything in the church,” a sentiment that was initially met by cheers until the audiences collectively realized that she was beginning a critique and fell silent. “I’m not looking to take a man’s place . . . I’m just looking for my place,” she continued, and audiences warmed the silence with applause.

“Women don’t talk a lot about the s-word anymore,” another megachurch wife told me.

“What’s the s-word?” I asked.

“It’s the word no one says. Submission.”

Black churches, on the other hand, largely adhered to a rich pageantry of submission, particularly when it came to the First Lady. The most deference in women’s biographies in the four hundred largest churches in the countries fell to African American women of almost all theological persuasions (ranging from historic black denominations to non-denominational and pentecostal churches).

A First Lady was not simply a woman but an icon in three respects. She was dutiful wife, first and foremost. Second, she was the church’s paragon of womanhood. And, lastly, she was an ambassador to the community. In this last respect, the role departed significantly from white women of similar denominational stripes. White women would not be called on to serve on the board of a city council’s literacy initiative, for instance, but, rather, she might write a book called The Princess Within. As we shall see throughout the book, black women had to be both a public symbol of the church and the family with a stronger performance of submission.

The presentation of all wives, however, could be so deeply respectful that it masked the intensity of the massive family-run industries that surrounded them and of which they were often a part.

[maya-chirps]

Simbang Gabi: The 9 Days Before Christmas

An image of a red parol from Peakpx.com

The Philippines is well-known for its extremely long Christmas celebration that a lot of foreigners often look at with confusion. Traditionally, Filipinos may start putting up their trees, playing festive songs, and counting down to the 25th as early as September in a season that's colloquially called the "ber months" or the "ber months season" (Petrelli, 2021). This period often lasts up until January or February where some houses may still keep their trees and decor pushing as far as March.

Even with this technicality, however, you'd be hard-pressed to find Filipinos truly celebrating from the very beginning of September genuinely ending it by the end of February. Most often, actual celebrations start after Undas, a period encompassing All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day on the 1st and 2nd of November respectively to commemorate the dead, similar but a lot more subtle than other Catholic countries own Day of the Dead like in Mexico's Dia de Los Muertos and Italy's Giorno dei Morti. This time period is often the start of people doing more Christmas-y things such as Kris Kringle activities leading up to the main Christmas party.

The main markers of the true start in itself is the Advent season, which starts on the Sunday nearest to the 30th in Western Churches like Roman Catholicism and leads up to Christmas ("Advent", n.d.). This is where Catholics would go to Church every Sunday leading up to Christmas to light the Advent Wreath until the final candle on its center on Christmas day on the 25th. As the Philippines is heavily influenced by Roman Catholicism, Filipinos follow the Western start of Advent and most celebrations often fall in the middle of this time period. Even the middle of Advent, however, Filipinos have a waiting period to count down before Christmas - Simbang Gabi.

What is Simbang Gabi?

Simbang Gabi (en. night mass; going to mass at night) is a Philippine Christmas tradition wherein Roman Catholic Filipinos would attend mass nine days every single morning or night before the actual Christmas celebration. Traditionally, the masses were held every morning at 4:00 AM from the 16th to the 24th which would then be capped off by Christmas Eve Mass at night or Christmas Mass on the 25th with its early schedule earning it the name Misa de Gallo (en. mass of the rooster) (Lazaro, 2020). In most dioceses, however, they often have an anticipated mass schedule that start a night earlier than the morning masses (Hermoso, 2022).

Besides being called Misa de Gallo, I had also heard the celebration being called Misa de Aguinaldo (en. mass of gifts) in some places. This shares the same name as the similar Puerto Rican tradition Misa de Aguinaldo which is also a nine-day mass held in the morning, typically at 5:00 AM which is also deeply-rooted in Puerto Rican Christmas traditions (Álvarez, 2018).

History

A vintage greeting card posted by the Facebook group Vintage Philippine Islands 1920-1959 (2020)

Being a Christmas tradition, it is not surprising that Simbang Gabi could trace itself back to the Spanish colonial period.

A common misconception of its origins states that the practice first started in Mexico. Hermoso (2018) states that it started on the year 1587 by Friar Diego de Soria of the Convent of San Agustin Acolman when he requested the Vatican to allow church service to be held outdoors because of an overflow of attendees during the Christmas time. Pope Sixtus V later approved of this request and even decreed that these kinds of masses be held in the Philippines at the dawn of the 16th of December. What this doesn't account for was that the practice of going to church for the Eve of Christmas dates back to even earlier than the 16th century.

The cover for an English translation and compilation of Etheria's writings by M.L. McClure and C.L. Feltoe, D.D. (1919)

The first recorded instance of Christians celebrating Christmas by going to early mass leading up to the actual date was first written by Egeria (also called Egeriae, Etheria, or Aetheria), a Christian Galician woman who first recorded it during her travels to the Levant where she notes the early morning masses and festivities from the time of the Epiphany to the Nativity. She writes in her letters later called the Itinerarium Egeriae (en. The Travel Guide of Egeria; The Pilgrimage of Etheria).

"Octave of the Festival. On the second day also they proceed in like manner to the church in Golgotha, and also on the third day; thus the feast is celebrated with all this joyfulness for three days up to the sixth hour in the church built by Constantine (...) And in Bethlehem also throughout the entire eight days the feast is celebrated with similar festal array and joyfulness daily by the priests and by all the clergy there, and by the monks who are appointed in that place (...) and immense crowds, not of monks only, but also of the laity, both men and women, flock together to Jerusalem from every quarter for the solemn and joyous observance of that day." - Egeria, 381-384; The Pilgrimage of Etheria (trans. McClure & Feltoe, 1919):

The practice of attending early morning masses up until the main festivities of the Nativity was later adopted by more Western Christian communties during the time of Pope Sixtus III when he celebrated what is widely considered the first Midnight Mass at the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome, not only stemming from the popularity of the Christians from Jerusalem but also the popular belief that Jesus was born at midnight (The Pillar, 2021).

The prayer spoken within the midnight vigil was then called the "mox ut gallus cantaverit" which translates to "when the rooster crows", aptly named because of the early hours the vigil tended to last which then coincided with the crowing of roosters ("Misa del Gallo: origen, historia y por qué se celebra en la madrugada del 25 de diciembre", 2022). The practice was continued by the Spanish with the name Misa de Gallo (also called Misa de Aguinaldo)which later spread throughout the Spanish Empire and could now be seen practiced in countries like Bolivia, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and of course the Philippines.

There seem to be two variations of this: the nine-day series of masses before Christmas (found in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela) and the single early morning mass before Christmas day (found in Spain and Bolivia). It isn't clear if Spain and Bolivia simply dropped the nine-day tradition or if the nine-day tradition was restarted in these other colonies, however.

In the Present Day

An image of crowds outside a church during Simbang Gabi uploaded to Wikimedia by Erwin Malicdem

Today, the Simbang Gabi continues to be a popular tradtion for most Filipino Roman Catholics, even those who aren't typically as religious most parts of the year. This is given the fact that a popular belief is that when a person completes all of the nine days, they may receive a wish to whatever they desire. This is such a common belief that Bishop Broderick Pabillo, a Manila auxiliary bishop, had to remind people that the point of the tradition is to remember Jesus and his nativity (Punay, 2016). Besides this, it is also a common challenge among Filipinos to try to complete it as is or see how many days out of the nine could they actually attend.

It is not uncommon for churches these days to hold an "anticipated" mass the night before the actual date starting instead on the 15th and ending on the 24th with a Christmas mass, instead of starting on the 16th and ending on the 25th. This newer tradition had come from the reign of Filipino dictator President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. during the Martial Law years in the 70s, when Filipinos were not allowed to go out after a curfew until 4 in the morning (Macairan, 2023). This allowed more people and especially those who may not be able to start their day early or those who may have other obligations in the morning to attend masses at night time, typically at around 6 PM - 8 PM.

The only large controversy that I could remember about Simbang Gabi was back in 2011 when the event was banned from being conducted within the Philippine Center in New York City. The ban came about because of it supposedly violated Canon Law which prohibits religious worship in unconsecrated ground or in other words places that aren't seen as places of worship. In an article by Adarlo & Pastor (2014), Rev. Dr. Joseph G. Marabe, the at-the-time head of the Chapel of San Lorenzo Ruiz and a priest-in-residence at St. Patrick's Cathedral where the ban took place, explains in an interview with news site The FilAm:

"It’s not allowed by law to have Holy Mass in an unconsecrated place. Worship should take place in a sacred place. That was an explanation but not a decision. The Archdiocese decides." - Rev. Dr. Joseph G. Marabe, head of the Chapel of San Lorenzo Ruiz in Chinatown, New York (2011)

The ban was later lifted on 2014 after community leader Loida Nicolas Lewis wrote a letter to the diocese to reconsider the ban which led to the return of the almost 30-year-old tradition that year (Balitang America, ABS-CBN North America Bureau, 2014).

Besides being a huge part of current traditions, a lot of Filipinos, and especially Filipino youth, use the event as an excuse to go out during the night to hang out with friends and even go on dates with their partners. It is not an uncommon sight to see a group of teenagers, often wearing maybe less than typical church clothes, by the edge of the Church seemingly attending mass. Whether or not they're actually being attentive is hard to decipher. Either way, this has led to an explosion of memes almost every year just mocking these kinds of people or making fun of their own.

A screenshot of the "Simbang gabi starter pack" posted by user rhapido on 9Gag.com (2022)

Earlier versions of this meme could be seen posted throughout Filipino social media during the early 2010s

A meme posted by the Facebook page FEU Memes (2012)

The barkada (en. friend group) going to Simbang Gabi had been an older tradition that has found a lot more popularity in the contemporary era because of social media. My mother had told me that she used to use it as an excuse herself back in the 80s to hang out with her friends at night time. This may be a continued past time for especially younger people for years to come.

There's also many street foods associated with Simbang Gabi that may not be unique to the event itself but are nevertheless heavily associated with the event due to their widespread sale during this time period. Foods like bibingka, puto bumbong, kutsinta, and other popular rice cakes dominate the scene which definitely satisfy the hungry parishioners who had, most likely, not eaten breakfast or dinner before going to church. With their strong associations with Simbang Gabii and Filipino Christmas as a whole, I might discuss these on a later date.

Simbang Gabi, from my experience

Growing up and living in the Philippines and especially being raised Catholic within a Catholic town named after a Catholic saint and going to a Catholic school named after another Catholic saint, it probably won't shock you that I, myself, had tried to complete the nine days of Simbang Gabi myself. I had attempted it several times with only maybe trying seriously by myself once in my life. It was quite the experience to just try to dedicate yourself into completing a goal to do something for nine consecutive days straight.

My first attempt was when I was in Junior High and it was with my sister and two people who worked for my parents and had helped watch over us. It was something that I always wanted to try doing and especially since I was gaining a lot more independence at the time so what better to try it out without the rest of the family? With adult supervision, of course.

Since we lived quite away from the actual church, the place was already packed even an hour before the actual mass started. There was barely any seats left and even less standing room leading to a huge overflow of people stuck outdoors, only hearing mass from the outdated speaker system that they had erected in place of the old bell tower.

The mass in our church was often done in the dark during the night out of an deliberate and probably aesthetic choice with only the alter being illuminated by the lights. The rest was lit up by the scattered about Christmas decor throughout the church and the church patio. It always felt like going to some liminal space that other nights at church just doesn't give.

Once the mass has been concluded, people rush out of the doors in thick crowds to find their way into the footpaths leading on to the main town streets. Some opt to stay behind to enjoy the food stalls that had pop-up for the night to eat bibingka, puto, sapin-sapin, and palitaw among other things. Some of the teens had decided to raid the nearby small park and playground as a hang-out spot to talk the night away before they rush home for their curfews. Meanwhile others were just rushing to get home as soon as they can, with people lining up to go to the rudimentary parking space that the church created while the others who didn't own their own vehicles forced to compete for the very few commuter vehicles still riding through the night, hunting for passengers.

This was before we had our own car, so we were with the latter crowds of people, trying to peer through the dark streets only illuminated by the scant Christmas lights that still refused to turn off as the night progressed. Every so often, two headlights excite the crowd and a swarm of them start running in anticipation with not care or tact if they would crush children or separate families all to take a seat on the night jeepneys, some the few commutes left after 9.

My sister was an expert in finding her way through it, reaching out to the doors to form a barricade for herself and the rest of us to prevent others from taking our seats before letting herself in. I still think I would've been left behind if it weren't for her doing that out of sheer competitiveness with the crowds.

We settled into our seats and squeezed in tightly to allow other passengers in so we could all go home as soon as we can. It was a tight but otherwise uneventful commute every night with nothing but tired people waiting for their stops and slowly emptying the once packed vehicle. Since we live in the outskirts of the town, we were often the last few and at times, the drivers would transfer us to other jeeps just so they can go home themselves. This had sometimes instead left us to walk the remainder of the way there through unpaved highway sidewalks.

After a few nights of it, I became more and more reluctant to continue because of the frenzy that it had almost every single night and it was extremely inconvenient for my time and the time of those with me. I didn't complete it then and I hadn't seriously tried until 9th Grade, which honestly was more uneventful.

That attempt was mostly my siblings and I staying in Makati City and Taguig City and going to easily traveled to churches that we could walk to by foot, and high-end malls that have annual Simbang Gabi masses for their shoppers, facilitated by the local diocese and the local fancy church. I was able to complete those easily because I was often dragged either by my siblings or my grandmother who used to never miss a day of church when she was still more active.

It was less about the challenge at that point and more of an obligation which isn't a bad thing and honestly is probably closer to how it should be celebrated.

I hadn't gone to Simbang Gabi since 2019 and I don't have any plans to try this year either. Not really because I don't want to necessarily, but specifically because I physically can't. I still think its pretty fun to do and honestly maybe a good excuse to meet with my friends that I haven't seen in a while. Sadly, I just simply cannot do it now nor in the near future.

Maybe one day I could once again go out at those cold December night to meet my friends and maybe eat some bibingka on my way home but I guess I'll just leave every one else to it.

Sources

Introduction

Advent. (n.d.). In Britannica. Retrieved on 13 December 2023, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Advent

In The Philippines Christmas Eve Includes A Late Night Street Food Feast, Filipino Christmas, HD wallpaper [image]. (n.d.). Peakpx. Retrieved on 15 December 2023, from https://www.peakpx.com/en/hd-wallpaper-desktop-wxdle

Petrelli, M. (2021, December 20). The country that celebrates Christmas for more than 4 months a year. CNBC. Retrieved on 13 December 2023, from https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/21/philippines-the-longest-christmas-celebrations-in-the-world-.html

What is Simbang Gabi?

Álvarez, F. (2018, November 22). Una tradición matutina la Misa de Aguinaldo. Primera Hora. Retrieved on 13 December 2023, from https://www.primerahora.com/noticias/puerto-rico/notas/una-tradicion-matutina-la-misa-de-aguinaldo/

Hermoso, C. (2022, December 15). 9-day ‘Simbang Gabi’ begins on Dec. 16; anticipated masses to begin tonight. Manila Bulletin. Retrieved on 13 December 2023, from https://mb.com.ph/2022/12/15/9-day-simbang-gabi-begins-on-dec-16-anticipated-masses-to-begin-tonight/

Lazaro, J. (2020, December 11). The Christmas tradition of Simbang Gabi: After five centuries, this Filipino Christmas tradition lives on. U.S. Catholic. Retrieved on 13 December 2023, from https://uscatholic.org/articles/202012/the-christmas-tradition-of-simbang-gabi/

History

Hermoso, C. (2018, December 15). ‘Simbang Gabi’ a manifestation of the Filipinos’ strong faith in God, says bishop. Manila Bulletin. Retrieved on 13 December 2023, from https://mb.com.ph/2018/12/15/simbang-gabi-a-manifestation-of-the-filipinos-strong-faith-in-god-says-bishop/

Etheria (1919). The Pilgrimage of Etheria (McClure, M., & Feltoe, C. Ed. & Trans.). Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Retrieved on 13 December 2023, from https://www.ccel.org/m/mcclure/etheria/etheria.htm (Original work published 384 C.E.)

McClure, M., & Feltoe, C. (1919). [An image of the book cover of "The Pilgrimage of Etheria"]. Retrieved on 15 December 2023, from https://www.ccel.org/m/mcclure/etheria/etheria.htm

The Pillar. (2021, December 21). What time is Midnight Mass?. The Pillar. Retrieved on 15 December 2023, from https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/what-time-is-midnight-mass

Misa del Gallo: origen, historia y por qué se celebra en la madrugada del 25 de diciembre. (2022, December 24). Marca. Retrieved on 15 December 2023, from https://www.marca.com/tiramillas/actualidad/2022/12/24/63a6c106268e3e7c468b45e8.html

Vintage Philippine Islands 1920-1959. (2020, December 25). A Vintage Greeting Card showing Philippine Christmas… Maligayang Pasko from Vintage Philippine Islands 1920-1959 [image]. Facebook. Retrieved 15 December 2023, from https://www.facebook.com/510513375695362/photos/a.1701322009947820/3595821097164559/?type=3

In the Present Day

Adarlo, S., & Pastor, C. (2014, November 3). Fr. Joseph Marabe breaks silence over Simbang Gabi ban (Part 2). The FilAm: A Magazine for Filipino Americans in New York. Retrieved on 15 December 2023, from https://thefilam.net/archives/16127

Balitang America, ABS-CBN North America Bureau. (2014, September 19). Simbang Gabi returns to NYC after a brief ban. ABS-CBN News. Retrieved on 15 December 2023 from https://news.abs-cbn.com/global-filipino/09/19/14/simbang-gabi-returns-nyc-after-brief-ban

FEU Memes. (2012, December 15). eto yung mga madalas ko makita sa gilid ng simbahan e [image]. Retrieved on 15 December 2023 from https://www.facebook.com/PIYUMEMES/photos/a.210778985704527/317211885061236/?type=3

Macaira, E. (2023, December 15). Simbang Gabi: It’s the mass, not the time. Philippine Star. Retrieved on 15 December 2023, from https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2023/12/15/2318980/simbang-gabi-its-mass-not-time

Malicdem, E. (n.d.) The Bamboo Organ Church or the St. Joseph Parish Church of Las Piñas City in the Philippines during "Simbang Gabi" or Night Mass on Christmas eve. Photo was part of Schadow1 Expeditions coverage of Las Piñas during Christmas season. [image]. Retrieved on 15 December 2023 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simbang_Gabi#/media/File:Las_Pinas_Church_during_Simbang_Gabi.jpg

Punay, E. (2016, December 19). ‘Simbang Gabi’ won’t grant wishes – Bishop. Philippine Star Global. Retrieved on 15 December 2023, from https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2016/12/19/1654920/simbang-gabi-wont-grant-wishes-bishop

rhapido. (2022, November 30). Simbang gabi starter pack [Screenshot]. 9Gag. Retrieved 15 December 2023, from https://9gag.com/gag/a5Xnzgr