The Nicene Creed: Perpetuating patriarchal autocracy

I’m working on a long post relating the Party slogans in Orwell’s 1984 to practices and doctrine of Christianity, but in the meantime, I’m going to have a go at the Nicene Creed. I attended a Catholic mass for the first time in years yesterday, and the recitation of this creed really got me thinking.

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty
Right there in the first line. Father. Because the ultimate creative force in the universe not only has a human sex, it is also male and not female. The greatest thing in the universe is male, hereby declaring that men are innately superior because they are in and of themselves more like this fatherly god, created more directly in his image than that chattel we call woman.

Maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen
What we can’t explain by simple observation, attribute it to this male god and his professed understanding (through scripture) of “the unseen”. I have some serious problems with the concept of heaven as presented in the bible. One of the most “inspirational” concepts of heaven put forth in the New Testament (allegedly by Jesus) is that in heaven, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. In Matthew 20:1-16, Jesus begins, “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire men to work in his vineyard.” So in the kingdom of heaven, there are “haves” and “have nots”, the same class-based system we have on earth currently, where a few have control of resources and the rest labor on those resources. Perhaps I’m being too literal, but the final words in this passage read, “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.” Those who have undergone tremendous suffering and labor in this life will be eternally rewarded in heaven by being placed before others. The landowner in the story is of course male, as has been the case in all patriarchal capitalist-imperialist societies for millennia, and he hires workers (the assumed lesser class) to work his land. The consolation that those who work themselves to death in this life under oppression is nothing more than an attempt to justify subjugation of others by the predominantly male bourgeoisie and to keep these people, effectively slaves of the class system, from rising up against them. “Be thankful that you’re being oppressed, because in this heaven described by my one true god, you’ll be eternally rewarded for it.” Ah, the beauty of autocracy.

In my next post, I’ll approach the next couple of lines of the Catholic Nicene Creed.