Halloween at The Cottage - Scary Witch Edition
Halloween at The Cottage - Scary Witch Edition
On Jezebel, leading good wives astray, and gendercide
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Yesterday, at a rally in Wisconsin, Donald Trump once again vowed to “protect women.” This time, however, he added an ominous and threatening clause: “whether the women like it or not.”
Trump has never said anything remotely positive about women. Never. But this particular remark sent chills down my spine — for a historical reason.
On August 27, 1645, in the English town of Bury St. Edmunds, eighteen people, sixteen of whom were women, were publicly executed by hanging for the crime of witchcraft.
As it happens, I’m descended from one John Morris who was born in Bury St Edmunds (ca. 1635) and migrated to Maryland about 1655. He was nine or ten at the time of these executions, and, as was customary, mostly likely witnessed the killing spectacle in the public square.
On that August day, one of the first three women dragged to the scaffold was named Rebecca Morris.
Yes. Morris. Like John Morris. If you lived in the same small village and bore the same last name, there’s no doubt that you were related, part of the same family. Was Rebecca Morris his grandmother? His aunt? A cousin, a sister? Or even his mother? The records are sketchy. I don’t know for sure.
That means as a 9-year-old boy, John Morris watched a member of his own family, perhaps an intimate and beloved one, murdered by the state on trumped up charges by some Puritan “witchfinder” as a sorceress.
My family. My ancestor was a victim of a state gendercide. My family was at ground zero — the very first day — for the largest and most extensive witch hunt in English history, a purge that left scores (mostly women) dead and hundreds of families terrorized. These events eventually led Sir Matthew Hale, a well-known Puritan jurist, to craft a legal theory supporting witchcraft prosecutions, a theory most recently cited by U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito to overturn Roe v. Wade.
This is the kind of thing that Donald Trump means when he says that he will protect women. He envisions protecting “good” women from “bad” ones, saving decent families from demonic influences. Like ridding the community of witches — as was carried out by both state and church at Bury St. Edmunds in the 1640s.
And that’s exactly how Kamala Harris is being portrayed by Trump’s evangelical supporters — as Jezebel, a wicked biblical queen, a temptress, a prostitute, and a witch. (If you want to see what evangelicals think of both witches and Jezebel, watch this 2020 clip from CBN with an anchor worried about witches casting spells on Donald Trump.)
It isn’t funny. It is a serious accusation, one with devastating and brutal consequences in western history. Witchcraft is often a justification for gendercide.
* * * * * *
In the last two days, you may have noticed a strange uptick in right-wing commentators talking about Harris’s “attack” on the “sanctity of marriage.” There’s been a bit of a buzz about conservative white women voting for Harris secretly — breaking with their faith communities and perhaps even their husbands to cast a vote against Donald Trump.
Some friends of mine can certainly take some credit for ginning up the current panic. The folks over at Vote Common Good (an organization I’ve long supported) put out an ad featuring a man telling his wife, “Your turn, honey” at the polls. “Did you make the right choice?” he asks after she votes for Harris. She smiles saying, “Sure did, honey.”
FOX News has been losing their collective minds over the ad — accusing Harris of encouraging women to lie to their spouses and equating the wives who vote for Harris with those who commit adultery.
This MAGA freak out is related to the witch/Jezebel narrative. After all, what does Jezebel do? She lies — and those lies will deceive good women, divide families, and recruit the unsuspecting into pagan religions. Jezebel will always lead good wives astray — tempting them to ridicule, undermine, and emasculate their husbands. Indeed, in one of the worst of the Old Testament stories about her, she demeans and belittles her husband, King Ahab, to the point of undermining his political power and leading him into idolatry.
Jezebel is a pagan witch who seized the throne. She disregarded the “sanctity of her marriage,” usurped her weak husband, and nearly destroyed Israel. And she tempted others to do the same. That’s Jezebel. That’s what evangelicals think of Kamala Harris. And their scary Harris is going to do that to Christian families — and is a threat to both church and nation.
This is about more than disagreeing with a husband regarding a vote. They believe that the nice blond lady in the ad has been deceived by the spirit of Jezebel.
When it comes to biblical archetypes like Jezebel, women who think for themselves and exercise their power without interference and in secret are a threat to both political order and biblical manhood.
And, of course, this is exactly why a number of Christian nationalist influencers and pastors are no longer shy about one of their core goals: repealing the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote. They want to replace women voting with “household” voting — where each household gets one vote — and only male-headed households can register to vote (single mothers, LGBTQ households, and other kinds of families would be barred from voting access).
That’s the “Jezebel spirit” this Halloween. Evangelical Trump supporters — and apparently FOX News hosts — think a witch is running for president and she’s already at work leading good American women astray.
The ad is proof. And this is, accordingly, spiritual warfare.
I’ve seen this before. It isn’t a joke. My ancestors lived this story — and were traumatized into exile and generations of shame when the state murdered “witches.”
Comparing Kamala Harris to Jezebel is dangerous and theologically deranged. Accusing women of witchcraft has always been Christian patriarchy’s strategy to demonize powerful women. It is a form of ecclesiastical terrorism.
And Mr. Trump, American women don’t need the kind of protection you are offering. We know how this story ends.
FOR OUR DAUGHTERS
My friend and sister-historian, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, has created a new documentary highlighting how a culture of submission and sexual abuse in the evangelical church ties directly to the Christian nationalist quest to use the outcome of the 2024 election to deprive all American women of basic democratic rights. FOR OUR DAUGHTERS speaks to all women of faith, encouraging them to use their voices and their votes to ensure that their daughters will have the rights to health and happiness guaranteed to all Americans.
You can watch the film for FREE here at any time. You only need to sign-in by registering and then refresh your page. No ticket is necessary.
The film is 30-minutes long and well worth your time. We’ll have Kristin on The Cottage in a few weeks to talk about the documentary — and whatever happens in the upcoming election. The future for American women is surely hanging in the balance.
In the meanwhile, please share the film with your friends.
INSPIRATION
Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man — there never has been such another.
A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!"; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unself-conscious.
There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.”
―Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? (1938)
Speaking as a man who was a young and unmarried but adult man when Roe v Wade was decided, I wonder about Alito and others. I say this because I was a senior in college in 1973 and (growing up in house of mostly boys) knew little of girls and women. I had never dated, since I was a typical academic grind - scholarship kid. So the notion that men could demand sex of their wives was something that could easily sound true to young inexperienced man given the culture of the time (so women were more restricted in their activities.)
But decades later, and Alito a long married man , it is hard to imagine that he could look at a backward way of thinking about women and think - yes, this is the man whose ideas make sense to me.
Of course even more troubling is the failure to cite the real presence of abortion in the US - mostly via herbs and controlled by midwives.
I am reading this a couple of days late - but the message is extremely timely and WELL STATED! Thank you so much.