Extract – Daphne Hampson rejects Christianity

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March 5, 2018
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Daphne Hampson (2002: xiv) rejects Christianity because she believes that feminism and Christianity are not compatible and that the Christian myth can no longer be accepted. Hampson clearly states that in no way can women be feminist and Christian without contradiction (Hampson 1990:1-3). Hampson blames Christianity for being, by its very nature, hopelessly patriarchal and harmful to human equality (Hampson 1997:4). In her opening plenary talk at a conference in the United Kingdom in 1997, Hampson describes her religious identity as follows:

I am a Western person, living in a post-Christian age, who has taken something with me from Christian thinkers, but who has rejected the Christian myth. Indeed I want to go a lot further than that. The myth is not neutral; it is highly dangerous. It is a brilliant, subtle, elaborate, male cultural projection, calculated to legitimize a patriarchal world and to enable men to find their way within it. We need to see it for what it is. But for myself I am a spiritual person, not an atheist. I am amazed at this “other dimension of reality” in which there is; which allows healing, extra-sensory perception, and things to all into place. I am quite clear there is an underlying goodness, beauty and order; that it is powerful, such that we can draw on it, while we are interrelated with it. I call that “God” (Hampson 1997:1)

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