"Reading and Writing Scripture in New Religious Movements" by Eugene Gallagher serves to explain how New Religious Movements use and abuse the words of the Bible to convince readers that the Bible fits in to the grander scheme of their new religion. While reading the explanation that new religions tend to use the Bible with an interpretive strategy that acknowledges "that's what (you think) it says, but this is what is (really) means," I couldn't help but be reminded of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible. In her preface, Stanton acknowledges that her version of the Bible was constructed to revise the texts and chapters that directly referred to women and the ones where women are made prominent by exclusion. In doing so, Stanton and her team wanted to change how the canon and civil law, church and state, priests and legislators, all political parties and religious denominations view and teach women as being "made after man, of man, and for man, an inferior being, subject to man."
Though Stanton and her team claim Christian roots, I wonder if her reach for feminism in the Bible could be considered a new religious movement as explained by Gallagher. Because Stanton's Bible alters texts and reinterprets the roles of women in order to show powerful roles of women, I believe her Bible could be considered the beginning of a Feminist Religion. Lastly, Gallagher says "in he shared view of the biblical interpreters in these chapters any intelligent, aware, or open person who reads the Bible will potentially come to read it their (the new religion) way" which was quite literally the goal of the Woman's Bible.
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