Ten Commitments Of A Feminist Theologian

I was sitting opposite one of my PhD supervisors, having just attempted to dismiss the entire genre of feminist theology as not relevant to my project when my radicalisation began. I had grown up in a particular kind of evangelical church with a theology of complementarity that had impressed up on me that of course I was equal to my husband, but that my role was distinctly different from his. The kind of church where husbands were considered to be the leaders of their wives (and, of course, their children) and where only men could be elders of the church or preach in a service. Whilst I had started to shake much of that thinking, looking back now I can see how much misogyny I had internalised. I had just come out of an MA programme in which a (now very) senior female theologian had told me, as I brewed a cup of tea in the postgrad kitchen, that if I wanted to be taken seriously as a theologian, I need to leave all the ‘woman stuff’ alone. 

Needless to say, my supervisor was having none of it and rightly pointed out that I hadn’t read enough (or really any!) feminist theology to be able to dismiss it so easily. She was, of course, quite right. I went away and started with the classics – Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mary Grey – then I discovered womanist thinkers like Delores Williams and Kelly Brown Douglas. I was hooked and I went from there – Marcella, Serene, bell, Catherine, Lisa – these writers became my best book friends. Here was the theology I cared about. The theology that spoke to my soul. It was theology that I knew was doing me good—both academically and spiritually—in the work I was engaging in as a PhD student and a newly divorced woman, working out who I was going to be in this new world of theology. It was a period of gentle radicalisation, one book, one conversation, one encounter at a time. 

I have been lucky firstly to have a fully funded PhD studentship that meant I could both focus entirely on my research and had the time and money to go to conferences, and secondly to have built up a group of friends and peers within theology that are interested in similar themes and theologies as me (primarily from being able to attend conferences and events). As I have started to supervise my own PhD students, I realised that my way of embedding and educating myself in feminist theology wasn’t going to be open to everyone. 

I was lying on a sun lounger in Lanzarote. Early September, the heat of the sun still felt intense on my pale English skin, but the warmth was doing good things for my body. It was the second week of our two-week holiday and I had finally gotten to the point where I was calm and relaxed. I had a cool Spanish beer on the table next to me and was contemplating a dip in the pool. It was blissful. And there was no reason at all to be thinking back to a conversation I had with one of my PhD students a few weeks earlier. No reason at all. But when I finally relax is the time in which I can imagine and think about what’s next. 

Barbara was in her sixties and one year into a part time PhD with me. Ostensibly her work was focused on Evelyn Underhill, I was only part of the supervisory team to bring some contemporary feminist theology into dialogue with her work (knowing only the basics about Underhill). But it was the feminist theology that was capturing Barbara’s attention (no offence to Evelyn!). Barbara asked me which conference she should go to or group she should become part of to learn more about feminist theology and meet more people who were working in this area. I was stumped. I went annually to the largest UK theology conference held by the Society for the Study of Theology (SST) and had met and been impacted by a good number of feminist theologians there over the years, but you would be hard pressed (at that time at least) to call SST a conference with a strong feminist theology strand. I didn’t have anything to recommend to Barbara. 

“I’ll start something,” I thought. It was immediately crystal clear to me that I needed to do this. And so, lying on my sun lounger, on a Spanish island off the west coast of Africa, with only my phone, I started the Feminist Theology Network. It started with a tweet. Was anyone interested? If so, let me know and I’ll put your name on the list. Within two days, the list was getting long, and I needed to move to a google form to get folks to sign up. I emailed a friend who was one of the few people I knew whose job title was actually ‘Professor of Feminist Theology’ and asked if she would be up for speaking at an online gathering a month later. I got an immediate yes and so the ball started rolling. 

Two years later, the Feminist Theology Network (FTN) has almost 1000 members across the world. I have received countless emails from women who are so grateful for the work and community of the FTN. Women who tell me how lonely they felt in their own contexts without other feminist Christian friends around them. Women who were the only person in their faculty working on feminist theology projects. Women who were the only female clergy person in their area and were working out how to resist the patriarchy one church service at a time. I love to hear these stories. The FTN brings people together around the world and we are greater than the sum of our parts. It has given me life and enabled me to thrive, even as I exist in an academic world that often devalues my work because it is feminist-oriented. I couldn’t have told you this before the last couple of years, but I discovered something of my vocation on that sun lounger. It is to bring people together. To help people feel less lonely. To facilitate learning and development that is grounded in feminist theology. Perhaps, if it’s not too grand, to do a little shaping of the discipline of feminist theology for the next generation of women. 

As I have been leading the Feminist Theology Network, teaching more and more students the basics of feminist theology, and supervising more and more PhD students who are working in the field, I have had to establish within myself some of the things to which I am committed as a feminist theologian. There are no Articles of Faith for the FTN. If you’re interested in Feminist and Womanist theologies then you’re welcome. It’s an inclusive and open space. Therefore reading the following list of my commitments does not necessarily translate into the commitments for the FTN. Indeed, I decided to write this article from a personal perspective precisely because I hesitate to speak for all the members of the FTN. So read these as my commitments that I hope are helpful to share with others who are working in, thinking about, and living out feminist and womanist theologies. They’re in no particular order.

1. Trans women are women and must be part of any theology that claims to be feminist. 

Sometimes in Feminist Theology, we are speaking about the biological experience of being female. There’s increasing research on menstruation and menopause, for example. But even these foci do not preclude the inclusion of trans women. In fact, ensuring trans women are included in feminist theology ensures that feminist theologians retain the distinction between sex and gender helpfully and that feminist theologians resist the urge to generalise. Not all women menstruate, for example, and trans women are just one part of this group. It feels like a no-brainer to be committed to this often most vulnerable group of women and ensure that feminist theologies are doing them good too. 

2. Feminist theology must be nuanced, inclusive, and intersectional. 

This commitment follows on from the first. Feminist Theology has been rightly critiqued for being too white, too middle class, too western, too able-bodied, too privileged, too straight and too universalising. Feminist Theology must attend seriously to the significant differences in women’s experiences and must ensure that there is room for all kinds of voices in the discipline. 

3. Feminist theology must be an active theology. It is insufficient to just talk about feminist theology, we have to do it. 

It’s no coincidence that Feminist Theology has always had a fascination with liturgy. This is just one avenue in which the things we talk about in the discipline become active and take on flesh. This is not just a cerebral mental exercise but an holistic, all-encompassing way of being that flows out of our reading into our doing and being. Feminist theorist Sara Ahmed recently published The Feminist Killjoy Handbook and No is not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining. Both books move her feminist work from the theoretical to the practical – how do we do these things, she asks. I think this is an essential characteristic of all feminist work. 

4. Feminist theology must continue to actively challenge and dismantle the (Christian) patriarchy in all its guises. 

The older I get, the more of Christianity I experience, the more of academia I experience, the more I am weary of the power of patriarchy which continues to pervade both overtly and insidiously in these spaces. Feminist Theology must remember that the work of dismantling the patriarchy is not done, it’s not God’s ‘good plan’ for the world. It’s a systemic sin that needs to be resisting, challenged, and redeemed. 

5. Fuck being nice. 

Like so many women, I’m so tired of being nice in the face of misogyny and patriarchy. Being nice can be too easy to ignore. And being nice can make it too easy to fall into the trap of doing nothing. So fuck being nice. Feminist Theology needs to reclaim its power.

6. Feminist theology is good for everyone. 

I say this over and over again in my classrooms. Feminist Theology can be good for everyone not just those who identify as women. It highlights gaps, absences, and omissions that brings powerful new research to light. It challenges us to take new perspectives and approaches to old texts and traditions. It reveals the totalising work of patriarchy under which everyone except the elite man suffers. Patriarchy is bad for everyone. 

7. Feminist theology is a liberative work. If it is not facilitating and enabling liberation from oppression then is it even feminist, let alone theology? 

This is a deep commitment born out of my own experience. Feminist theology was incredibly liberative for me and I want the kind of Feminist Theology I do to be liberative for those who read, hear, and encounter it. I want it to highlight the ongoing power of patriarchy and provide resources for resisting and dismantling it. I’m reminded of the prophet Isaiah’s words in Isaiah 61.1 “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners…” I find some of the hope of Feminist theology in those words. 

8. Feminist theology is body-positive and sex-positive. 

The ways in which women’s bodies have been devalued and even dehumanised over the centuries is well known. Messy, leaky, unboundaried, emotional – women’s bodies are contrasted with the ideal male body of patriarchy which is none of these things. Feminist theology resists this nonsense and reclaims women’s bodies as powerful sites of theological discourse. And if we’re body-positive then we’re also sex-positive. Sex is not in opposition to sacredness but rather deeply entwined with it. Feminist theology needs more theologies of good sex.

9. Feminist theology must be formed and shaped by the struggles of all women, not just the pretty problems of privilege. 

See items 1 and 2 on this list. There is no feminist theology in the singular, only feminist theologies in the plural. The discipline must make sure there is room for not only the voices of all women but their concerns as well. That we take our sister’s struggles seriously and allow our own work, our thinking, our praying to be shaped by them. 

10. Theology is better when feminist theology is taken seriously. Our God-Talk does better when its shaped, formed, and nuanced by feminist theology. 

God-talk always fails because it will never be able to capture God in human language. But we do better at failing in this endeavour when Feminist Theology engaged with and taken seriously not just by those who call themselves Feminist Theologians but by all those who engage in theological discourse both professionally and personally. It should not be an optional extra but an essential component of our God-talk.

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© Karen O’Donnell, 2026. This article is a part of a series in collaboration with the FTN (Feminist Theology Network). FTN social media: https://www.instagram.com/feministtheologynetwork/ and @feministtheology.bsky.social

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Cover Image: “Woman in Blue and White Plaid Dress Shirt Sitting on Chair”The Future is Feminist”, by James McNellis on Wikicommons (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic).