Red Cloud Project 🩸☁️

Ricebox Studio: Within Christianity, how is menstruation written about?

Rev.d. Jonathan MacNeaney: There’s very little in the New Testament texts, but it’s been a non-issue in the Christian Church throughout history. There’s some debate in the early Church Fathers (ancient religious Christian theologians), because there’s lots in the Old Testament about menstruation, but Christians don’t tend to abide by most of the purity laws, so there’s some debate in the early Church in the first 500 years about whether we should continue with the purity laws that are about menstruation. And the answer is no.

But it is retained in Orthodox Christianity – Greek, Russian, and Coptic Orthodox Christians, don’t allow women to receive communion when they’re menstruating. So through their tradition, it’s been kept alive. But for the churches of the West, it’s just a non-issue. That’s the official church line. Although in many places it’s kept alive through folk religion and through the received culture. These deeply ingrained patterns of cultural living often live alongside Christian faith. They often hold stigma and taboo around menstruation in a way that the official teaching of the Church doesn’t.

RS: Is menstrual blood viewed as unclean within Christianity?

Rev.d. JM: In the Hebrew Scriptures blood is seen as the real unclean thing – but it is blood from anywhere and everywhere. So the worst kind of food law you can break is the drinking of animal blood, as it’s seen as being sacred, divine and where the life force of things comes from. It is both the most pure and holy thing because it’s what gives birth to life, but it’s also the most impure thing to spill, to be covered with or to ingest. Menstrual blood is not seen as different from any other blood. And nor are there any rules about cleaning yourself of it or washing or regaining holiness.

RS: Why do you feel that menstrual blood is seen differently within the Old Testament?

Rev.d. JM: It’s to do with its life giving properties. The understanding of reproduction in the first century are quite an agrarian one. Women were seen as fertile fields in which little humans were sown. That’s why there are all these rules about masturbation. There’s a character called Onan, an Old English word for “masturbating” (hence the sin of Onan), and he spills his ‘seed’ upon the ground. This is seen as a bad thing to do because rather than making use of it for its proper purpose of creating humans, he has wasted this gift. I guess that’s the reason menstrual blood is seen as being sacred because it is a place for the birth of new life. As it’s sacred in that way, it also falls on the other side of being particularly polluting when it’s not being fertilised.

RS: Why do you think that menstruation is seen as a taboo topic to speak about when almost half the population will experience it at some point in their life?

Rev.d. JM: It doesn’t carry taboo within Christianity, but it probably does within the cultures in which Christianity exists. My perspective is that the holiness code is an attempt to live in healthy ways. People may have recognised that those who spend a lot of time touching blood, tending to the wounded or people with leprosy, got leprosy themselves. So if you wanted to protect your community from disease, one way of doing that was to keep all of the diseased people away from you. So I suppose it’s probably a correlation and incorrect assumption that because sometimes touching blood leads to bad consequences, then always touching blood is going to lead to that consequence.

RS: What would you say to those who shame their daughters and women about their periods and the name of culture and religion?

Rev.d. JM: “Stop it!” It would be hurtful, to me as a Christian, for other people to be justifying that kind of shaming in the name of Christ. Shame is believing that there’s something wrong with you. Guilt is believing that you’ve done something wrong. In that, shame is a much more insidious issue than guilt, because guilt you can be forgiven for. It says that you, who are God’s beloved creatures, have not only done something wrong but that you are something wrong, and that’s not right.

Those who do shame others probably don’t know the significance of the damage they are doing in terms of hours of lost schooling and education, lost earnings, etc. due to menstruation. I suppose that upon learning that, they might feel quite ashamed about what they’ve been doing. So I guess I’m calling them to repentance, to seek forgiveness for this thing (shaming) that they’ve been doing wrong and to amend their lives.

RS: Are there any interpretations of menstruation within the Bible that are represented in a positive way?

Rev.d. JM: No, but I would suspect that in folk religion and the times that Christ lived in, rejoiced and held ritual acts of transition from personhood surrounding menstruation. But it doesn’t appear as narratives in the scriptures themselves. Given that there was so much positivity about pregnancy and the bringing forth of children, and given that menstruation is required to recognise the “way of women”, then presumably there was also joy around menstruation because it is indicative of the fact that this person could have children.

RS: What do you think about the fact that half the population experience menstruation, that on average it lasts about eight years of a woman’s life, and yet there isn’t much writing about it within the Bible?

Rev.d. JM: I don’t find it massively surprising because all of these are scriptures were written by men who have kept themselves away from women. So Paul is writing most of the New Testament letters – he’s single and doesn’t have a wife. Throughout Christian history, the people who are literate are often monks and holy men and often on their own, so it’s not surprising that they’re not writing about women and particularly about things that women were keeping or forced to keep hidden from them.

RS: What would you say to women who feel impure spiritually during their period?

Rev.d. JM: For Christians, I would say that there is no reason for them to think that they are physically or spiritually impure within the Christian tradition. This is a part of who they are, created lovingly as a creature of God. They are welcome to take full part in acts of Christian worship and in communal life.

When I’m in church preaching to people in their eighties and nineties, I think of the person who was preaching to them when they were children telling them “Do not allow women to speak in church, menstruation is impure, etc., which is the exact opposite of what I’m saying to them now, and I realised that it’s unreasonable for me to think that they are suddenly going to change. They’re in that difficult position of hearing both of those contradictory voices and trying to decide whom to follow. If they decide ‘I’ll do what Jonathan says’, then a part of them is feeling like they’re betraying what they were told as a child. They’re trying to be faithful to what was passed on to them and the swing side of that is the cost that it continues to have. We have to find a path between those two things.

There’s a significant amount of sensitivity that we have to around telling people what they ought to think about menstruation, just like other issues, even when it feels so clear-cut to us, especially as a white Western man, I suppose.

RS: What would you say to women who feel ashamed of menstrual leakage in religious settings?

Rev.d. JM: Being embarrassed about something like that is fine, just in the same way that if any other bodily function that I normally keep private, but not secret, was suddenly made public. If I let out a massive fart as I was in front of the altar, I might feel embarrassed, but I wouldn’t feel ashamed as if “gosh, there’s something wrong with me”. Menstruation is part of what bodies do. So I would hope that they wouldn’t feel ashamed that there was something wrong with them, but hope that they could laugh off the potential embarrassment of it.

RS: Does the hymen hold any significance within Christianity and if so, why?

Rev.d. JM: Nope, not in the scriptures, not in the history of the Church. So what holds significance is virginity. The rules of the church are still that “sexual relationships are exclusively for marriage”, but very few people in this nation are still practising that. Again, I’m sure they’d be part of the cultures and the folk religion in nations where Christianity exists, but never at the behest of the Church.

RS: Within Christianity, is there any insertion or hymen taboo before marriage or if the woman is a virgin?

Rev.d. JM: No, but I can completely imagine that there are Christians and even Christian leaders who would say that within cultures and contexts. The responsibility there, in the Church, is to do some work of demythologisation, which it hasn’t done. Either way, I would imagine that it is to do with men wanting control over women’s bodies.

RS: Do you feel it’s your role to educate others when it comes to subjects such as menstruation?

Rev.d. JM: So yes, the Church does a lot of educating of children by way of its schools, about sex education, but it’s just such a non-issue for most of the people in my churches. It’s not something I’ve preached about, I’ve talked about other related issues like female genitial mutilation in public service. So I haven’t spoken about it explicitly, but there would be no reason not to.

RS: Do you think there is a responsibility to teach children about menstruation within Christianity?

Rev.d. JM: There’s not a scriptural warrant to do it but obviously we want our children to be well adjusted, happy, healthy adults, and want them to know about issues of justice. There is responsibility to talk about any issues of justice and to teach our kids about it.