The interaction between religion and culture is extensive: religion influences culture while culture in turn influences religion. Most religious believers are eager to acknowledge and emphasize the former, but they don't seem to recognize the extent to which the latter occurs. This is unfortunate as it prevents them from seeing how extensively the religion they follow is culturally conditioned.

In Who Shall Lead Them? The Future of Ministry in America, Larry A. Witham writes:

From a historical vantage, both secular and ecclesiastical forces have determined the various fates of women in ministry. After the Civil War, Protestant denominations began to allow lay female leadership and inevitably some kind of ordination, a process that happened earlier and more quickly in congregation-based denominations than in hierarchical. When women gained decision-making status in clerical bodies, policies changed. With the modern quest of ecumenism, or Christian unity, women’s ordination was singled out, and by the mid-1960s ecumenical talks and the attitudes in many seminaries had torn down remaining theological barriers.

So, there were developments over the course of a century in which women gained greater power and influence in American churches. Did this have an impact on the wider American culture? There is little evidence of this. On the contrary, American churches fought hard against efforts to expand women’s liberties — including the right to vote. If American Christians had learned anything about the ability of women, they proved unable to apply those lessons to American politics and society.

On the other hand, America’s secular culture proved able to influence American churches and push them even further towards equality for women:

And what of the secular forces? The manifesto of modem feminism, Betty Freidan’s “Feminine Mystique,” hit bookstores in 1963, and four years later the National Organization for Women set up its “ecumenical” task force to engage churches. Even before, however, the tides of democracy, liberalism, and equal rights had buffeted Protestantism, prompting votes for women’s ordination in the 1950s.

After surveying those early dates in U.S. churches, sociologist Mark Chaves concluded that outside pressure was greater than inside theologies or parish experiences: “Formal rules about women’s ordination are, in large part, generated by external pressure on denominations.” Economics made theology as well. Industry and world wars pushed women into the workplace, banishing the “cult of domesticity.” When churches grew on the wealth of the 1920s and 1950s, women were summoned to fill empty pulpits.

The social roles of women isn’t the first situation where Christian churches have been forced to change because of pressures from the broader culture — and it won’t be the last. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that very many Christians would be willing to acknowledge this influence, unless it’s to complain about it and lament the changes in American Christianity.

Why don’t religious believers acknowledge the extent to which their religions are influenced and affected by the culture around them? To acknowledge such thing would mean acknowledging that religion itself is a cultural product — some aspects are produced by the current culture while other aspects are remnants from earlier cultures in which that religion existed. If this is the case, though, then it would be hard to maintain the illusion that religion has a divine origin, rather than mundane and human origins.

 

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