Flipping Tables

In last week's episode, I had a LOT of questions around "How did we even get here?" "How did women get written into this system that way?" "Why are women buying into this movement?" "WHY WOULD WOMEN AGREE TO GIVE UP THEIR RIGHT TO VOTE?"
Quick note: take the repeal of the 19th Amendment seriously. It serves two purposes: 1. To normalize it so when they come for it, it doesn't sound as crazy as it used to. 2. By shifting the Overton window, when they propose other parts of their agenda, it sounds less crazy and sets off fewer alarm bells.
So I wanted to do a two-part series about how women were written out of authority and a few rungs down the ladder of hierarchy in the church and in Christian Nationalism but also the history of how propaganda was weaponized against faith communities to build the power system we see happening. We have to know it and name it to fight back. And if you are a person of faith you have to be vocal about reclaiming it.

In this episode, we go through the invention of virginity, the need to control reproduction to control wealth. The history of female leadership in the church, how it was intentionally translated out of the Bible in order to justify removing women from leadership and subjugating them. And the 20th century push of the weaponization of wedge issues against feminism, abortion, and gay rights to help people defend racism and school segregation. I hope that you enjoy! Full source list on patreon.com/montemader

Sources:
Primary Documents and Legal Records 
• Treaty of Tripoli (1797), Article 11. Ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate, June 7, 1797. Full text, Avalon Project, Yale Law School.  
• Jefferson, Thomas. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (the Jefferson Bible), c. 1820. Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Primary source.  
• Public Law 84-274, "Under God" added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Signed June 14, 1954.  • Public Law 84-851, "In God We Trust" established as national motto. Signed July 30, 1956.  • Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983). Supreme Court ruling.  
• Reagan, Ronald. "Evil Empire" speech, March 8, 1983, National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, FL. Reagan Presidential Library.  
• Southern Baptist Convention resolutions on abortion, 1971, 1974, 1976. Available through SBC Historical Commission archives.  
Patristic and Early Church Sources 
• Socrates Scholasticus. Historia Ecclesiastica (Church History), Book VII, Chapter 15, c. 439 CE. English translation, NPNF (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers) Series.  
• Damascius. Life of Isidore (fragments), c. early 6th century CE. Names Cyril in connection with Hypatia's death.  
• John of Nikiu. Chronicle, Chapter 84, c. 690 CE. Pro-Cyril secondary source.  • Tertullian. De Cultu Feminarum (On the Apparel of Women), c. 204 CE.  
• Chrysostom, John. Homilies on Romans, Homily 31 (on Romans 16:1-4).  
• Augustine of Hippo. De Genesi ad Litteram (The Literal Meaning of Genesis), c. 401-415 CE.  • Council of Laodicea (363-364 CE), Canon 11.  
• Pope Gregory I. Homily 33 on the Gospels, 591 CE. The sermon conflating Mary Magdalene with the sinful woman of Luke 7.  
On Biblical Scholarship and the Pastoral Epistles 
• Ehrman, Bart D. Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We — 37 —
Flipping Tables — “Divine Protection… For Men” 
Think They Are. HarperOne, 2011.  
• Brown, Raymond E. An Introduction to the New Testament. Doubleday, 1997.  • Johnson, Luke Timothy. The First and Second Letters to Timothy. Anchor Yale Bible, 2001.  
• Fee, Gordon D. The First Epistle to the Corinthians. NICNT, Eerdmans, 1987. (Interpolation argument for 1 Corinthians 14:34-35.)  
• Epp, Eldon Jay. Junia: The First Woman Apostle. Fortress Press, 2005.  
On Women in the Early Church 
• Gupta, Nijay K. Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church. InterVarsity Press, 2023.

Turning Point USA led a womens leadership conference in June which brought women of all ages together to tell them... not to lead.
They lied about things like the witch trials saying that it was the trials that were first wave feminism and they were killing those women because of abortions and that feminist historians recorded the accounts of the slaugher we know. NONE of that is true. For all their chatter about faith they have no issue lying.
We saw career women waiting to have children telling girls to have "more children than you can afford, before you're ready". White children specifically mind you.
I thought Dr. Barr would be the best resource to help me respond to these statements.
Beth Allison Barr is an American historian who is currently the James Vardaman Endowed Professor of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Her specialities include European women, Medieval & Early Modern England, and church history. She is also the author of "The Making of Biblical Womanhood" and "Becoming the Pastors Wife"

Thank you to the patrons who make this possible! patreon.com/montemader
When everything feels impossible (and lately at times it has) when power concentrates, institutions bend, and the news is a daily gut-punch, we're told that joy is irresponsible. That real resistance has to be grim all the time or you aren't doing it right. Thats not true.
Joy. Art. Music. Song. Are all integral components of resistances that change the course of history.
In this (almost) two-hour episode, lets traces ten stories across 2,000 years of human history where people under siege, during empire collapse, fascist occupation, genocide, and authoritarian rule, chose joy anyway. Not as escape but as the most radical act available to them.
From enslaved gladiators who built a free community on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, to early Christians throwing communal dinner parties in Roman catacombs, to Parisian workers running a utopian government for 72 days before being massacred, to Jewish fighters holding a Passover Seder the night before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began (and more): this episode is a historical time traveling journey in how joy functions as survival, identity, and resistance network. I hope it encourages me the way it encourages you.
It's only when we remember the joy of living that we find the courage to resist.

Recommended Books for further reading if these stories inspired you:
Spartacus Barry Strauss, The Spartacus War (Simon & Schuster, 2009) Aldo Schiavone, Spartacus (2013)
Early Christians & the Catacombs Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (Harper & Row, 1987) The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, trans. Maureen Tilley (Fortress Press)
Paris Commune John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871 (Basic Books, 2014) Louise Michel, The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, ed. Bullitt Lowry & Elizabeth Ellington Gunter (1981)
Harlem Renaissance David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (Knopf, 1981) Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940) Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925)
Danish Rescue of the Jews Bo Lidegaard, Countrymen (Knopf, 2013) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Viking Press, 1963)
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? (Indiana University Press, 2007) Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Houghton Mifflin, 1994) Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto (McGraw-Hill, 1958)
Víctor Jara & Nueva Canción Joan Jara, Victor: An Unfinished Song (Jonathan Cape, 1983) Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File (The New Press, 2003)
The Singing Revolution Mart Laar, The Power of Freedom (2010) The Singing Revolution, documentary (2006, dir. James & Maureen Castle Tusty)
The Velvet Revolution Michael Žantovský, Havel: A Life (Grove Press, 2014) Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern (Random House, 1990) Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless (1978)
Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Marguerite Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood (Scholarly Resources, 1994) Rita Arditti, Searching for Life (University of California Press, 1999) CONADEP, Nunca Más (Eudeba, 1984) Horacio Verbitsky, The Flight (The New Press, 1996)
Sources list available on Patreon: patreon.com/montemader

A couple years ago I learned that there is a reason that the 'L' comes first in LGBTQ+ and I want to share that with you.Through much of the 20th century, "gay" served as an umbrella term, and early activist groupings often led with gay men, producing orderings like "GLB." The shift to placing "L" first took hold in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the United States, and it was a deliberate gesture of respect.
The most cited reason is the AIDS crisis. As the epidemic devastated gay male communities in the 1980s, lesbians showed up in enormous numbers as caregivers, nurses, blood donors, fundraisers, and organizers. Lesbians like those in the Blood Sisters of San Diego organized blood drives when gay and bisexual men were barred from donating. This solidarity reshaped the movement, and foregrounding the "L" became a way of acknowledging that labor and centering women who had frequently been rendered invisible within both gay male spaces and the broader feminist movement.
Lesbians were central to progress long before the acronym existed. The Daughters of Bilitis, founded in San Francisco in 1955, was the first lesbian civil and political rights organization in the U.S. Figures such as Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon spent decades organizing. Lesbians were present at the 1969 Stonewall uprising and in the Gay Liberation Front that followed. Within 1970s feminism, lesbians pushed a frequently resistant women's movement to take their concerns seriously, even as Betty Friedan infamously dismissed them as the "lavender menace", a slur activists reclaimed in a celebrated protest.
Lesbians also did foundational work that benefited everyone: building community institutions, bookstores, health collectives, and mutual-aid networks; advancing lesbian feminist theory; and fighting for custody rights, anti-discrimination protections, and visibility at a time when being out could cost a woman her job and children.
References
Armstrong, E. A. (2002). Forging gay identities: Organizing sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–1994. University of Chicago Press.
Bernstein, M. (1997). Celebration and suppression: The strategic uses of identity by the lesbian and gay movement. American Journal of Sociology, 103(3), 531–565.
Brier, J. (2009). Infectious ideas: U.S. political responses to the AIDS crisis. University of North Carolina Press.
Cohen, C. J. (1997). Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer politics. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 3(4), 437–465.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.
Faderman, L. (1991). Odd girls and twilight lovers: A history of lesbian life in twentieth century America. Columbia University Press.
Faderman, L. (2015). The gay revolution: The story of the struggle. Simon & Schuster.
Gallo, M. M. (2006). Different daughters: A history of the Daughters of Bilitis. Carroll & Graf.
Gould, D. B. (2002). Life during wartime: Emotions and the development of ACT UP. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 7(2), 177–200.
hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center. South End Press.
Hutchinson, B. (2015). Lesbian blood drives as community building activism in the 1980s. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 19(1), 115–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2015.959876
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press.
Schulman, S. (2021). Let the record show: A political history of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Shilts, R. (1987). And the band played on: Politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic. St. Martin’s Press.
Vaid, U. (1995). Virtual equality: The mainstreaming of gay and lesbian liberation. Anchor Books.
Zimmerman, B. (1981). What has never been: An overview of lesbian feminist criticism. Feminist Studies, 7(3), 451–475.

In March 2026, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stood before a Pentagon worship service and prayed for "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy", calling for the eternal damnation of America's enemies. Military commanders across every branch have been reported, in over 200 formal complaints, telling troops the Iran war is "God's plan" and that Trump was "anointed by Jesus" to trigger Armageddon. Benjamin Netanyahu has quoted 1 Samuel 15:3, the command to destroy the Amalekites, sparing "neither man nor woman, infant nor ox" to justify Israeli military operations.
This is what happens when political leaders weaponize faith to sanctify violence. And it has been happening for 1,700 years.
From Constantine's battlefield vision in 312 CE and the subsequent murder of philosopher Hypatia by a Christian mob, through Augustine's just war doctrine that gave state violence a Christian vocabulary, to Charlemagne's massacre of 4,500 Saxon prisoners at Verden for refusing baptism. We cover the First Crusade's Rhineland pogroms, where Jewish mothers drowned their children rather than see them forcibly baptized, and the Jerusalem massacre of 1099, where chroniclers described blood reaching horses' knees. We examine the Albigensian Crusade's destruction of Béziers, where the papal legate reportedly said "Kill them all, God will know his own," and the witch trials that followed, killing up to 60,000 people (80% of them women) using Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum as theological cover.
We also cover what this history did specifically to women, a thread that runs unbroken from Tertullian calling women "the devil's gateway" in 200 CE, through the rape of nuns during the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople, to the sexual violence documented in California's Spanish mission system, to the girls in Native American boarding schools whose hair was cut, languages stolen, and bodies abused under church-run federal contracts.
The only thing more dangerous than a tyrant, is one who believes God gave them permission.
SOURCES
Augustine, The City of God, c. 413–426 CE

Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, c. 200 CE

Socrates Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica, c. 439 CE (murder of Hypatia)

Annales Regni Francorum (Charlemagne / Verden massacre)

Barbero, Alessandro — Charlemagne: Father of a Continent, UC Press, 2004

Chazan, Robert — European Jewry and the First Crusade, UC Press, 1987

Mainz Anonymous and Solomon bar Simson Chronicle (Rhineland massacres, 1096)

Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum (Jerusalem, 1099)

Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, c. 1220 (Béziers)

Nicetas Choniates, Historia, c. 1206 (Fourth Crusade / Constantinople)

Brenon, Anne — Le vrai visage du catharisme, Loubatières, 1988

Kramer, Heinrich — Malleus Maleficarum, 1487 (ed. Mackay, Cambridge UP, 2006)

Levack, Brian — The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, 4th ed., 2016

Cuneo, Michele de — Letter of October 28, 1495, trans. Samuel Eliot Morison

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal — True History of the Conquest of New Spain, c. 1568

Hassig, Ross — Mexico and the Spanish Conquest, U of Oklahoma Press, 2006

Pedro Pizarro — Relation of the Discovery and Conquest of Peru, c. 1571

Stannard, David — American Holocaust, Oxford UP, 1992

Kamen, Henry — The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision, Yale UP, 1997

Jouanna, Arlette — La Saint-Barthélemy, Gallimard, 2007

Parker, Geoffrey — The Thirty Years' War, Routledge, 1997

Regan, Donald — For the Record, Harcourt Brace, 1988

Maurice, Jean-Claude — Si vous le répétez, je démentirai (Bush / Gog and Magog)

NPR — "Netanyahu's references to violent biblical passages raise alarm," Nov. 7, 2023

U.S. Dept. of the Interior — Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada — Final Report, 2015

Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543, U.S. Supreme Court, 1823

Vatican Statement repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery, March 30, 2023