The Father, the Illusion, and the Feminist: Rethinking Religion through Freud and Ruether

Crack open any holy book, and it becomes obvious that women rarely get the lead role. They are cast as someone's wife, someone's mother, someone's daughter, or, a personal favorite, a whore. Nonetheless, it seems as if women only exist in these stories as a supporting cast to an all-male divine universe. However, anyone paying attention knows that is not the whole story. Hidden between men discussing how they should cut their genealogies are women who refuse to stay quiet, refuse to behave, and frankly disrupt the entire patriarchal plotline. 

So why don't we hear more about these women? As Rosemary Radford Ruether points out, "The exclusion of women from leadership and theological education results in the elimination of women as shapers of the official theological culture" (Ruether 92). She argues that theology has not only forgotten women, but has also actively resisted them, constructing a symbolic world "where holiness looks male and authority sounds male" (Ruether 92). Of course, stories that show women thinking, leading, challenging divine orders, or saving nations quietly disappear behind the sermon notes. If we actually taught those stories with the same intensity as we teach the great men of God, women might start seeing themselves as equals. And nothing threatens patriarchy more than a woman who knows she is equal to a man. 

This essay focuses on Rosemary Radford Ruether's idea that patriarchal theology has historically used religious mythmaking to exclude women from spiritual authority, and her belief that, through a feminist lens, we can recover an earlier, egalitarian vision of faith that grants women the justice of equality and shared spiritual agency. It will also use Ruether's feminist theology to expose the patriarchal foundations of religion and how Freud's theory of religion as "The Father-Image" (Freud 41) repeats the male-centered assumptions it claims to critique.

For every person who is analyzing the patriarchy that is riddled in holy scripture, there is another studying Freud who claims God exists only because we cannot let go of the fantasy of a flawless father. Sigmund Freud believed that religion was not divinely inspired but psychologically constructed as a collective coping mechanism born from humanity's fear and helplessness. Freud believed that humans invented a cosmic parent to keep watch over them. A "Father" who offered order, moral comfort, and the illusion of protection. In "Religion Is an Illusion Produced by Psychological Projection,"Freud explains that people "exalt the image of the father into a deity and make it into something contemporary and real"(Freud 41), suggesting that the belief in God begins as a child's attempt to hold on to the comfort of a parent's protection. Religion, then, functions as a "wish-fulfillment".(Freud 41) It promises understanding, safety, ethical guidance, and eternal life. For Freud, this belief system is not the truth but an illusion. The "childhood neurosis of humanity" (Freud 44), a stage he believed humans must outgrow in order to face reality without the comfort of an imagined father.

According to that theory, the Bible is not holy writ so much as the world's longest case study in daddy issues. Apparently, millennia of prophets, poets, and philosophers were not guided by faith or community, but by an unprocessed desire for a celestial authority figure to ground us until the end of time. Ruether might argue that Freud's theory of religion grew out of the very patriarchy he tried to diagnose. It points out that even when Freud tries to free humanity from religious illusion, he does so by repeating the same gendered logic. Freud's whole foundation of his theory is built on the idea that religion originates from a child's longing for the father. Not the mother, not community, not nature, not moral intuition, but for a perfect male image. He writes that God is "nothing other than an exalted father" (Freud 41). By saying faith is just a fantasy based on our dependence on fathers, Freud assumes that the dad figure is the deepest model for how people think and behave. That means he accepts the same male-centered logic that patriarchal theology used to define God in the first place. So, even as Freud mocks believers by telling them to grow up and face reality, he still keeps "the Father" enthroned, calling religion a delusion while preserving the very image he claims to reject. However, "the Father" is now a psychological construct rather than a divine being. This is a prime example of how the patriarchy is a mindset so deeply ingrained in us that it shapes major intellectual systems, even the ones that claim to be objective.

Yet what Freud dismissed as a psychological illusion, Ruether would expose it as a cultural system. Her brilliance lies in her insistence that true theology must begin where patriarchy ends. Once the fantasy of the divine father took root in the human brain, men institutionalized it. They built churches, seminaries, and hierarchies around that single projection until it stopped being psychology and began to become theology. The problem is not that humans imagined God as a father figure, but rather that they did not. It was the patriarchy that decided to create the image of God as man, and then it decided to keep "him" on the throne.

Ruether's ideology that theology has been defined by men, not just in the absence of women, but against them, exposes how Freud's "Father-image" did not remain a theory about the mind, but became a structure of power. What Ruether helps us see is that this projection of God as Father did not stay a private belief; it became a theory. What began as a metaphor for divine protection hardened into a hierarchy that justified male authority and female submission. Rather than directing humanity toward collective morality, religion devolved into self-reverence and became an idea where men mistook their own reflection for the image of God.

Yet Reuther does not believe religion is beyond saving. Even though centuries of patriarchy have twisted it into a tool of control, which they repeatedly use to cut women out, Reuther believes that there is a core truth that predates that corruption. One that saw humanity, male and female, as equal bearers of the divine image. Her work invites us to scrape away the patriarchal varnish and rediscover the radical inclusivity buried beneath. 

She begins by explaining how male-centered theology has become the default setting of faith. It was built from the ground up using male experience, male authority, and male symbolism as its foundation. This shows that the exclusion of women was not accidental but fundamental to the formation of religious thought. Nevertheless, men did not just leave women out of the story. They ensured that the story was structured so that women could only exist in relation to men, either as a mother, a daughter, or a wife. This exclusion extends beyond Christianity and Judaism. It dates back to Aristotle's biology and Aquinas's theology, where, even then, women were defined as defective versions of men, being called "misbegotten males" (Ruether 93), and denied spiritual authority under the guise of divine order. Over centuries, these ideas were plastered and hardened onto the walls of the symbolic universe where God is imagined as Father, Christ as bridegroom, and the Church as a submissive bride. The result, as Ruether shows, is a theology that mirrors the power structures of the world rather than the equality of creation. "This bias is not marginal or accidental... but runs through the whole tradition, and it shaped in conscious and unconscious ways the symbolic universe of Jewish and Christian theology" (Ruether 93). 

Ruether is persuasive where she demonstrates that patriarchal theology is not simply biased but structurally dependent on male dominance. However, her project also raises difficult questions. If patriarchy is not just a flaw in religion but the very thing it was built on, can it really be changed from the inside? Still, Ruether’s belief that faith should be measured by ethics, not tradition is a lasting idea. "The equality of women," she insists, "is one of the touchstones for understanding our faithfulness to the vision" (Ruether 97). By asserting that patriarchal passages "lose authority" and must be judged as moral failures (Ruether 96), Ruether redefines faith as moral integrity, not obedience. 

Both Freud and Ruether examine religion as a response to human fear and longing, but they reach very different conclusions. Freud sees religion as an emotional crutch one uses to help walk through an uncertain world. There is little to doubt about his claim that faith offers security and order, but his theory assumes a universal male experience, overlooking the moral and communal aspects of belief. Ruether, by contrast, believes religion can be redeemed. She argues that patriarchy reshapes theology and the image of God into a male-centered system by using religion to claim that only men have the authority to define and interpret the divine.

While her approach risks rebuilding faith on flawed foundations, combining Freud’s psychological insight with Ruether’s feminist ethic could offer a new way forward. In the end, they both show that, for all its flaws, religion and the critique of it is really just people trying to make sense of life and find meaning. 

Work cited 

Freud, Sigmund. “Religion Is an Illusion Produced by Psychological Projection.” Enduring Issues in Religion, edited by John Laden, Greenhouse Press, 1995, pp. 38–44.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. “The Feminist Critique in Religious Studies.” Religious Issues and Interreligious Dialogue, edited by Charles Wei-hsun Fu and Gerhard E. Spiegler, Greenwood Press, 1988, pp 91-97