The Politics of the Sacred: Women’s Rights at the Limits of Political Liberalism
January 21, 2026
[Editor’s note: this is the fourth of six posts commenting on Gila Stopler’s new book, Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion, and the Chimera of Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2025)].
Gila Stopler’s Women’s Rights in Liberal States: Patriarchy, Liberalism, Religion and the Chimera of Rights offers a powerful analysis of the relationship between patriarchy, religion, and political liberalism, and of the enduring harm this relationship has caused to women. The book shows how liberal states have failed women not despite, but often because of, the legal doctrines and normative assumptions that are meant to protect religious freedom.
At the heart of Stopler’s analysis lies a sustained critique of the public–private distinction. Liberal theory has long treated the private sphere as non-political, natural, and pre-social. This assumption, Stopler convincingly argues, has allowed illiberal doctrines to develop beyond the reach of constitutional scrutiny. Patriarchal subordination was normalized and shielded precisely because it took place in spaces labeled “private” and therefore insulated from political intervention.
Stopler’s central insight is that this separation has now reached a point of collapse. Illiberal doctrines that were cultivated in the private sphere have moved back into the public arena, supported by the growing influence of strong religions over lawmaking, education, welfare provision, and social services. The rise of right-wing populism marks the definitive erosion of the public–private divide and poses a direct challenge not only to women’s rights but also to liberal democracy itself. In this sense, the book is not only about gender equality; it is also a diagnosis of liberalism’s structural weakness. Stopler’s attention to the fragility of liberal democracy—its limited capacity to resist illiberalism even under well-designed constitutional frameworks—is particularly welcome, as it confronts a major obstacle to the reception of her proposal: the fact that positions of power remain overwhelmingly male-dominated, reflecting centuries of entrenched patriarchy.
The book is meticulously researched, theoretically grounded, and intellectually honest. It traces the history of the public–private distinction through historical, legal, and political thought, including the work of liberal theorists such as Rawls, whose defense of state neutrality toward competing conceptions of the good helped reinforce the idea that religious doctrine lies beyond the reach of public reason.
One of the book’s most valuable analytical contributions is its taxonomy of state approaches to religion, which distinguishes between privatization, authorization, and nationalization. Stopler’s proposal of “soft nationalization” of religion—where the state intervenes to protect vulnerable parties without imposing religious doctrine—is both careful and persuasive. Religion is not treated as a monolith: Stopler differentiates between “strong” or conservative forms of religion and more plural, progressive practices, leaving room for internal critique and reform. This approach aligns with post-structuralist accounts of religion as dynamic and internally diverse, while avoiding the tendency to demonize religion as such.
At a deeper level, the book shows how a strong intuition—one grounded in lived, bodily, and relational experience—can be translated into a rigorous legal analysis and a concrete normative proposal. Stopler’s legal training provides the backbone to articulate this intuition within law’s language and institutional limits. At the same time, the analysis insufficiently reveals that law itself is not a neutral source of truth, but a contested space that can be mobilized by opposing political projects. Seen in this light, debates about the “misappropriation” of human rights by right-wing populists appear less as conceptual distortions than as ordinary struggles over meaning within law. What matters, ultimately, is not which faction temporarily succeeds, but the direction in which legal reform is steered. Stopler’s own direction is guided by an intuition rooted in bodily knowledge, historical awareness, and women’s lived experience. The book’s greatest merit lies in its recognition, supported by extensive legal and historical evidence, that women have suffered profound harm from conservative religion, and above all from their exclusion from the sacred.
The book’s introduction identifies what I would describe as the original sin of Western patriarchy: spirituality got lost in translation into institutionalized religion. A certain religious discourse has repeatedly been used to project trauma and justify violence, as illustrated by contemporary judicial invocations of divine wrath to deny women access to abortion (see the Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court’s reference to the “wrath of a holy God” in Burdick v. Aysenne). Stopler’s account of the emergence of a singular male god and the displacement of earlier mother-goddess traditions exposes the deep symbolic foundations of women’s exclusion. It is increasingly clear that Western religions reflect a distorted form of spirituality, particularly evident in the systematic marginalization of the feminine.
What is ultimately at stake is women’s exclusion from meaning-making itself. Religion and culture are saturated with norms that regulate not only behavior but also emotions and desires (p. 24). By excluding women from the sacred, patriarchal religion removed them from the processes through which truth, value, and moral obligation are defined. This explains why intervention in the so-called private sphere is indispensable, and why attention must be paid to religious language, imagery, everyday practices, and the formation of meaning and feeling (p. 27), since these become self-limiting norms that foster control without our realizing we are being controlled.
From the abolition of pagan priesthoods under Theodosius in 391–392 CE, to Pauline and Augustinian prohibitions on women speaking in assemblies, to the persecution of women as witches, Christianity in the West systematically severed women’s access to the sacred. As recent scholarship has shown, including Ilenia Ruggio’s work on constitutional identity and women’s exclusion from the priesthood, this legacy has never been fully overcome and continues to shape contemporary constitutional orders.
Why does this matter today? Don’t we have more pressing problems, one could argue? Because doctrines grounded in the denial of bodily truth—especially the denial of women’s role in creating life, which is framed as a punishment for tempting Adam to sin—have severed women from one of the most important dimensions: that of the sacred. Today, the distancing from bodily experience that characterizes patriarchal religion interacts with other forms of alienation, disembodiment, and social fragmentation, a process intensified by technological developments that weaken embodied and relational knowledge. Together, these dynamics contribute to a “shrinking” of humanity, driven by separation from nature, from other human beings, and—most critically—from the wisdom carried in our own bodies. Stopler’s book helps clarify how religious patriarchy has served as both a driver and a justification for this ongoing process of bodily truth replacement, a problem that is doomed to become increasingly acute.
Walking through the ancient library of the University of Coimbra, a space once reserved exclusively for men, I could not help feeling the accumulated weight of this exclusion. Stopler’s work gives conceptual clarity to that historical experience and traces its legal afterlives. She shows how contemporary abortion rulings, restrictions on women’s access to religious authority, and laws that openly subordinate women in the name of religion are not anomalies, but predictable outcomes of a misplaced commitment to a fictive and porous public–private divide.
The private is political. And, as Stopler’s book compellingly demonstrates, the most intimate core of the private—the sacred—is political as well.