Margaret Daphne Hampson (born 1944) is an English theologian. Educated at Oxford and at Harvard, she held a personal Chair in "Post-Christian Thought" at the University of St Andrews. Hampson's distinctive theological position has both gained her notoriety and been widely influential. Holding that Christianity is neither true nor moral (in not being gender inclusive), she believes the overcoming of patriarchal religion to be fundamental to human emancipation. As a theologian Hampson has always held to a "realist" position, in which the understanding of "that which is God" is based in human religious experience. Biography Hampson was born on 15 June 1944 in Croydon, England. Her background was in politics and modern history. Her Oxford doctorate on The British Response to the German Church Struggle, 1933–1939 was not without its impact on her: she was later to write that a Church which discriminated against women was no more to be considered 'Christian' than one that discriminated against non-Aryans. From her early teens she had herself envisaged ordination. Following a year teaching British history, she went to Harvard as a Knox scholar (the second woman ever to enter the advanced degree programme in systematic theology). In 1974 she took up a post at the University of Stirling; from 1977 in theology at the University of St Andrews. Asking for baptism, she was also confirmed in the Anglican Church without being consulted. Now an insider, she took a lead in arguing in fundamental theological terms for the ordination of persons without respect to sex, writing the statement circulated to members of the Synod of the Church of England before the vote in 1979. With a growing feminist consciousness, in 1980 she left the church and, shortly after, Christianity, behind her as incompatible with human equality. It did not however occur to her that she should thereby cease to believe in God: indeed she comments that the move took her back to what essentially had been her formation at home and at her school. A frequent lecturer and occasional broadcaster, from the 1980s Hampson became known to a wider public. Many in the burgeoning women's movement in the church were challenged, or encouraged, by her thought. She was the first 'iconoclast' in the BBC Radio 4 series of that name. In 1986 she held a major debate with Rosemary Ruether on the compatibility of Christianity with feminism in Westminster Cathedral hall. At St