06/01/2026
Why and How Christian Women Got Thrown Under the Bus
By Rev. David Justin Lynch
The Edict of Milan in 313 AD transformed Christianity from a persecuted minority sect into the official religion of the Roman Empire through a combination of political patronage, cultural assimilation, and institutional growth.
Constantine actively funded the church and building major basilicas. Clergy received tax exemptions, while churches were granted the right to inherit property, sparking rapid institutional wealth. Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD, making Nicene Christianity the sole authorized state religion and banning pagan practices.
The Church strategically adopted existing Roman administrative structures and adapted popular pagan holidays and traditions to ease the population's transition. A highly organized network of bishops and dioceses allowed the Church to maintain unity and efficiently govern across vast imperial territories. Christian apologists and theologians used Greek philosophy to frame Christian doctrines, making the faith intellectually appealing to the Roman elite.
The "Romanizing" of Christianity legitimized the exclusion of women from Holy Orders by replacing the early movement's private house-church structure with public, state-aligned Roman patriarchal systems. As the Church adopted Roman law, civic geometry, and Greek philosophy, it absorbed ancient gender biases into its official theology. Scholars trace this shift across several distinct cultural and structural transformations:
The House-Church Era: In the 1st and 2nd centuries, Christianity operated largely out of private residences. Because the home (oikos) was traditionally a domain where Roman women held management and economic authority, women frequently served as patrons, leaders, and ministers. Following Constantine’s legalization of Christianity in 313 AD, worship transitioned into massive public buildings modeled after Roman basilicas. In Roman society, the public sphere (polis) was strictly reserved for men. Allowing women to lead in public basilicas was seen as a violation of civic decency and Roman social order.
As the Church aligned with the empire, bishops and priests were reinvented as civic magistrates and imperial administrators. Under Roman law, women were barred from holding official public magistracies, acting as judges, or exercising legal authority (imperium) over men. By matching ecclesiastical titles directly to Roman political offices, the Church inherited the legal assumption that public leadership was a fundamentally male prerogative.
Imperial Authority: Roman society was anchored by the paterfamilias—the absolute, legal authority of the male head of the household. As the Church grew into a state institution, it adopted this top-down authoritarian model. The bishop became the paterfamilias of his diocese. This made the concept of a woman holding spiritual authority over men structurally incompatible with the deeply ingrained patriarchal hierarchy of the late Roman Empire.
To appeal to the Roman upper classes, Church fathers blended theology with classical philosophy. They absorbed Aristotelian biology and metaphysics, which viewed women as "incomplete men" or naturally deficient in rationality and leadership. Prominent theologians used these philosophical concepts to argue that the male-female hierarchy was an immutable part of the natural order. Consequently, they claimed women lacked the inherent capacity for spiritual governance required for Holy Orders.
Once backed by the state, Church councils began passing formal canon laws to enforce uniformity. Canon 11 of The Council of Laodicea (c. 363) explicitly forbade the ordination of women as elders or presbyters. This codified Roman cultural gender segregation into binding ecclesiastical law, effectively wiping out the remnants of female leadership from earlier centuries.
The result was a church with an all-male clergy. That has changed among Old Catholics and Anglicans. I challenge the Romans and the Eastern Orthodox to change their despicable sexist traditions.
