My daughter, Berea, has mice in her new apartment ~ and this morning she asked on her Facebook status: WHAT DO MICE WANT?
Answer: Peanut Butter! 
by Vyckie
I’ve lost track of how many times I have been told that the only reason wifely submission did not work out in my marriage was because I was married to a jerk.
Recently, “Karebear” commented: I hope that you two understand that the groups/husbands that you were with were not practicing a Godly lifestyle. The bible does call women to be submissive to their husbands but it also calls men to love their wives …. And, the bible defines love as, not self-seeking, protective, kind ext….
Another reader wrote:
Husbands are commanded to love their wives and this love of a husband is only of value if it is sacrificial, Christ is the example of sacrificial love (Servant King–NOT TYRANT).
Submission of a wife is only a beautiful gift if the context is respect as opposed to fear.
The impression I get (forgive me for speaking out of ignorance) is that your marriage was codependant and that your husband had a weakness for malignant narcissism/Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
So in other words ~ the failure was not in the teachings of Patriarchy ~ but in our practice of it ~ we were doing it wrong. These defenders of Patriarchy assume that I was submitting out of fear and they’re also convinced that Warren never sacrificed for me and the kids.
Let me state plainly that throughout our 18 year marriage ~ I never doubted for a minute that Warren loved me and the children more than himself and that he always put our welfare ahead of his own concerns.
Here’s the thing: Over the years, as we got more and more into the patriarchal mindset ~ our definition of what it means for a husband to “love” and to “sacrifice” morphed into some pretty twisted ideas!
The teachings we learned from leaders such as Jonathan Lindvall, Doug Phillips, etc. led us to believe that the husband loves and serves the Lord as “protector, provider, and priest” or sometimes stated, “prophet, priest, and king” of his family ~ all important aspects of his role as “head of the household.”
In every sermon, book, magazine article, radio interview, etc. which taught about a wife’s submission ~ there was *always* included the admonition to husbands that they “love their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her.” WE UNDERSTOOD THAT PART OF THE PLAN!!!
Truthfully~ “Husband’s love your wives” is the part that makes the whole Patriarchy deal seem so bloody attractive! What woman doesn’t want a husband and father for her children who willingly lays down his life and serves, protects, provides ~ a man who fulfills his leadership role with gentleness and competence?
That’s exactly what we all wanted.
But get into those teachings a little farther, and you’ll discover that “protector” means CONTROL ~ it means that a man, who is ultimately responsible for his family’s spiritual well-being and who must one day stand before his Maker and give an account ~ such a man believes he is entitled to know every detail of his wife’s and each child’s every move, every desire, every thought … How else will he be able to protect them from the Enemy who seeks to lead them astray and destroy them?
Kristen Rosser, aka “KR Wordgazer,” writes the FAQs for No Longer Quivering which address Quiverfull/Patriarchal teachings from a biblical standpoint. In “Does Patriarchy Glorify God?” Kristen makes the excellent point that the teachings and practice of Patriarchy actually belittle and diminsh both God and men ~ by putting God in a box and men in shoes which are much too big as they are expected to fulfill roles for which God alone is sufficient.
I am especially looking forward to KR’s upcoming FAQ: “The Bible and Male Headship.”
It’s been explained at NLQ before ~ in the comment section and also on the forum ~ but I think it needs to stated over and over again: If a husband is truly loving his wife self-sacrificially ~ then the issue of Patriarchy ~ of headship and submission ~ is a moot point. A husband who loves his wife has a relationship of mutuality which has nothing to do with the teachings we are addressing here at No Longer Quivering. Warren and I had that sort of love *before* we were introduced to the teachings of Patriarchy.
… but of course, he did have some quirky ways ~ he was insecure and had a tendency to micro-manage things…
What we’re talking about here ~ and what the QF/P teachers are telling married couples is that when husbands behave badly ~ their wives’ loving submission is the key to transforming the slackers and the abusers into bold men of God who will step up to the plate and lead their families to the glory of the Kingdom!
With sermon titles such as, “How a Wife Can Use Reverence to Build or Save Her Marriage” or “The 7-Fold Power of a Wife’s Submission” ~ these bible teachers are setting a trap ~ and “Husbands love your wives …” is the peanut butter they use ‘cuz they know that’s what women want ~ it gets us every time!!!
Sadly, the way it works out in this practice of Patriarchy ~ it is the wife who ends up doing all the Jesus-like self-sacrificing … to the point of self-abnegation and burn-out. And it is the children who end up (in extreme cases such as with my oldest daughter) in the psych ward ~ or else spending years playing catch-up in the process of discovering who they are, what they are like, what they desire, what they believe …
I think Coldplay says it best in their song ~ Viva La Vida:
Discuss this post on the NLQ forum! Comments are also open below.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~NLQ Recommends ...
'Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment' by Janet Heimlich
‘Quivering Daughters‘ by Hillary McFarland
‘Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement‘ by Kathryn Joyce
Michelle says, Never enough babies!
Vyckie, not trying to censor you or anything but could you please take down that picture of the poor dead mice? I’m not sure if it occurred to you, but some of your readers (like myself) might get upset at pictures of dead animals.
Valsa ~ how’s that? Didn’t mean to distress anyone with the dead mouse.
Thank you so much! I used to have pet rats so the previous picture just broke my heart.
Oooh ~ I found an even better graphic! We have the patriarchal dude mouse pointing the lady mouse towards the trap that’s set with peanut butter. Perfect, huh?
Great, now even the mice are getting in on the “protector husband” racket
Vyckie, not trying to censor the person who is not trying to censor you but could you please leave the picture up? It’s the perfect illustration to your article and most adults and children see this in real life when mice need to be trapped about the house. Anyway I’d rather see a picture of it than have to clean up these things as we must do each year,lol.
Oh I see you just changed it while I was typing! Oh well the cartoon is better for the reason you said.:)
Thanks for the sweet words, Vyckie!
You know, I just made a connection– these teachings are just another form of utopianism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, people thought they could create utopian societies where all of life’s problems would be solved and everyone would be blissfully happy. The only problem with making people happy was the people themselves. They needed to be fixed and changed and molded to fit the ideal, so the ideal society would actually work. But it never did, somehow. . .
The result? Complete subordination of individual autonomy and worth, to the utopian ideal. And nobody was happy.
Idealized, fantasized perfect happiness, somehow just doesn’t work. Apparently part of the reason is that in order to be perfectly “happy,” what you can’t be is free.
i was thinking the same thing!!!
when i was *much* younger [late teens] i was *obsessed* with a “radical notion”: put WOMEN in charge for a few hundred years. women PLAN, and they CARE about *PEOPLE*, ya know? we wouldn’t get into stupid wars over stupid things [like oil or drugs or religion] and men would finally learn A) that women are just as competent as they are, B) that women are BETTER than men, because we wouldn’t do to them what they did to us.
15+ years later…
i mean, no, we wouldn’t necessarily do the SAME things – we just aren’t as visually orientated – but we can do similar. and wars are wars are wars – they’re going to happen, however much i deplore them.
and ALL men who think women aren’t REAL PEOPLE would get is “and now the evil feminazis have done what they threatened and they’re going to come castrate me any day now!”
i was imagining a world where children were cared for by everyone, where differences were embraced and utilized or corrected, depending on the individual’s needs and wants. a world where a big hit movie does NOT require “fan service” of a “sexpot” woman getting nekkid, or wet, or whatever. where rape was treated as the travesty it is, but what one does to one’s OWN BODY [including drugs] doesn’t matter UNLESS it can be shown that it affects OTHERS [for instance - a person with kids doing heroin?! *shudder* a dying cancer patient? PLEASE! pain bad! a 19 year old smoking pot at home? no big. same kid smoking while driving is bad. because it might cause an accident... etc]
but, as you say, it was a “Utopian Ideal” and thus unrealizable and completely artificial.
i still believe that societies where women held power were better, OVER ALL, than societies that screwed women over and made them, at best, legal children for their entire lives or at worst less than property. equal power. we don’t even have THAT yet… sigh
Isn’t Sarah praised for calling Abraham “Lord”? You seem to not like anything the Bible says about women submitting to the husband as their head. This is concerning because you cannot love God and hate his word.
I am way late to the discussion, but I only recently discovered your website. You make two really good points in this post. First, that people think you were “just doing it wrong”, otherwise patriarchy would have worked. (I would have thought the same thing not too long ago,) Second, that the real problem comes in the redefinition of such words as “love” and “protect.”
I am discovering the same type of weirdness in the Christian parenting teaching that I adhered to for years. I consider myself to be currently in recovery from that type of Christian parenthood; I’m still trying to rediscover the genuine article. It was never that I didn’t love my children (and probably the same is true of the “experts” I was listening to.) It’s just that I was taught that if I REALLY loved my children, I would do certain things (many of those things I now would label as unkind, unmerciful and disrespectful – all, ironically, very un-Christian behaviors!) But I did them anyway because I had become convinced that to do less would endanger my children’s souls.
And the kicker was that when my children would act badly (no doubt because they were on the receiving end of unkind, unmerciful and disrespectful treatment), the verdict was always: you’re just not doing it right.
Charles said: “Isn’t Sarah praised for calling Abraham “Lord”? You seem to not like anything the Bible says about women submitting to the husband as their head. This is concerning because you cannot love God and hate his word.”
I’m not aware of anywhere in the Bible where Sarah is praised for calling Abraham lord. It is a fact that she does call him lord in Gen 18:12, which is a term of respect and wives certainly should respect their husbands. However, respect and obedience are two different things, and the Bible never commands women to obey their husbands. Sarah’s respect is a good example for us of how to respect our husbands. Abraham’s treatment of Sarah is a good example for men as well. When he asked her to say she is his sister, he didn’t TELL her and expect her to obey. The word used there is the Hebrew word “na’” and it means: “pray or please, used in entreaty or exhortation.” It is the same word used many other times of people praying to God, asking for help. He asked her, they came to an agreement and then they acted.
1 Peter 3:5-6 NIV: 5 For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to adorn themselves. They submitted themselves to their own husbands, 6 like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear.