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by Calulu

(Editorial note: What follows below is my own personal thoughts on this, no one elses, I’m not speaking for the group, just me. I cannot stay silent to this. If you’re offended or triggered I’m so sorry. Warning if you are triggered by scriptures or the like.)

This morning several of us at NLQ were directed to look at “Women’s Prayer Group Praying That the Women at MRFF All Get Incurable Breast Cancer”  posting on  Free Thought Blogs.

Apparently there is a group of ladies calling themselves Christians who’ve decided to make praying for the death of anyone connected with the Military Religious Freedom Foundation their number one priority. And why is that? Perhaps because the MRFF is a watchdog organization that keeps the the Dominionist evangelical Christians in the military from discriminating, harassing or intimidating people that believe or don’t believe differently than them. Yes, the MRFF protects the religious FREEDOM our country was founded upon. Oh how very evil!

When I first read through it my immediate response was what the hell? What. The. Hell. Is. This … well you know the word. I felt like going all nasty dung-throwing rantiness on it. But I get the sense that’s sort of what they’re looking for so that this group can justify their own nastiness with a ‘See, see how EVIL they are!!!’. I wanted to throw up my hands and shout “WTF!”

I have to laugh and agree with both Chris Rodda on Free Thought Blogs and Leah Burton of POLITICUSUSA about how completely UNChristian these women are. I also want to know if in the eyes of the Lord does spelling count when issuing imprecatory death prayers. They’ve been sending around an email spelling out the names of people they are praying to be stricken with breast cancer along with some very, um, interesting spelling. Below is the email:

“Mickey Wienstien, we called you on the weekend to advice you that our womens prayer circle at our church will be ending your wickedness against Christ Jesus and his anointed of the USA in our military. In America which is Jesus’ country we can pray all we want for anything we want. you hung up on us and were rude to our leader. but will that stop us or Christ Jesus? No it will not and never could have, wicked Mickey. Our prayer circle has never failed to acheive our hosts granting of the scripture we pray. for direct intervention against you as you are a true demon to America. Luke 9:1 We will not stop our prayers until you stop the evil you do with Lucifer on a daly basis. Luke 9:1 But not against you Mickey. We know by your internet site and your book who it is to be. Now for our prayer, we pray that the women who work in your MFRR and the women in your family will befall fast moving breast cancer which can not everbe cured. We pray this for Leah Bruton, and Becki Miller, Patricia Corigan, Chris Rodda, Edie Disler, Vicky Garrison, Kristin Leslie, Melinda Moeton and Joan Slish. And you evil clan too, we pray this for Bonnie Wiensten and Amanda and Amber Wienstein and the woman lawyers Cariline Mitchel and Katherin Ritchy and all women of all who work at with for Military Freedom Against Religon Foundation. know that we pray and pray hard all the days until you stop your destruction of our American army and accept Christ Jesus as Lord and join His army.”

Guess none of them ever read Luke 6:27 through 36 or they’d know that you’re supposed to bless your enemies, pray for them and do good to them. Or are they just ignoring that part of Luke because it doesn’t line up with their personal agenda? You cannot have it both ways, either you love the Lord and seek to keep His word or you aren’t really Christians because you don’t even follow what you say you believe.

Also, Luke 9:1 that they cite in their email has nothing to do with Lucifer or their prayer circle or America. What is says “When Jesus had called the Twelve together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases,” I seriously doubt any of them are part of the Twelve. Driving out demons and curing diseases is also very diametrically opposed to praying for disease to kill someone. It’s emotional murder, harboring the spirit of murder as surely as pointing a gun and pulling the trigger. The desire is there.

Actually the only real thing that their email does expose is the condition of their hearts, that they don’t have love in their hearts, that they’ve chosen curses instead of blessings. Chose today, blessings or curses. Pretty easy to see what they’ve chosen. I’d be curious to see what the outcome in their own lives will be in six months or a year as a result of their choice to curse. One of the things I’ve learned in my years as believer and before that, be very careful what you wish on other people because the universal law of reciprocity tends to bring that thing you’re wishing on others straight back to you. When you pray for judgement on others or bad things then you’re telling the universe or God that it’s alright with you to release the same thing on you. It never ends well. Better to forgive, forget and live in peace, move on. Or you might find yourself eating a rubber biscuit. The kind you throw at someone else to hurt them, it bounces off the wall and lands right in your big old trap to poison you.

Karma can be a big old nasty bitch. I’m almost afraid for these ladies because what they’ve released in the spiritual realm can’t be a good thing. Look what happened when someone cursed King David in the Psalms 109:28 “Let them curse, but You bless; When they arise, let them be ashamed, But let Your servant rejoice” David knew enough of who he was and who the Lord is that he asked God to bless him and to outdo the curse and then turned the curse back on those that uttered it.

I remember back when I was working for a big computer company in the Virginia Technology Corridor I came to work one day just in time to see people huddled fearfully in groups here and there in the parking lot. Spray painted on the side of the building were upside down crosses, 666 and the words “Satin Rules”! Someone had thoughtfully placed a big black Hefty bag filled with dead chickens on the main door step, right smack dab on the welcome mat. Several of my coworkers were shaken up by all of this because dead chickens left on the steps of a building are a curse of death on the occupants in black arts and voodoo. One lady started crying, refusing to enter the building, thinking she was going to die. I had to point out to her that it was likely it was just one of our loonier disgruntled former coworkers that did this and that they couldn’t be much of a Satan worshiper if they couldn’t even be bothered to spell their master’s name right. It was strictly a tactic to make people fearful and fall into a self-fulfilling prophesy.

This is just more of that I think. Silly ecclesiastical posturing in an attempt to sow fear.

To those praying for death I have only to say chose carefully, blessings or curses this day. I would hope you’d chose blessings.

PS. Reminds me of this song

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

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For those readers who are interested in hearing an explanation of the Quiverfull philosophy and lifestyle, “Children Are a Blessing” by Moore Family Films is available free online through April 30th.

Children are a Blessing from Moore Family Films on Vimeo.

Children are a Blessing from Moore Family Films on Vimeo.

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by Millipede

(Editor’s Note: Millipede has been recounting her history of how she came to join a patriarchal lifestyle on our forum starting about six months ago. She’s graciously agreed to allow her writing to be reposted here. We thank her for that!)

To tell it in a nutshell; my husband and I became part of a reactionary milieu, joining a “movement” which addressed various issues such as gun rights, survival ism and so on. I still hold my beliefs pertaining to these issues and so this is not an indictment of “right wing extremism”. In fact those early years were wonderful and I would gladly join such a group.

I was not new to such views. Years before I even met my husband, I had been active in various causes. In the intervening years I had become inactive and so when my when my husband and I started exploring various issues I felt joy at becoming politically active again.

I am giving background, not getting up on a soap box.

Anyway, the road to patriarchy was at first slow. Even in right wing “extremist” circles there is quite a diversity of beliefs concerning patriarchy. Also, there are some who may on the surface appear to endorse patriarchal belief systems, but are actually pretty mild if not “enlightened” in their views and treatment of women. There are even some who could be called feminists. Again certain causes attract all sorts of people. It was sort of our version of the “popular front” so to speak.

In years past I had rubbed shoulders with the ultra patriarchal crowd from time to time. However I was always turned off by their views and always kept them at arms length, preferring instead to associate with those who were not so hung up about women. There were plenty of channels to travel that did not lead to the patriarchal camp.
Becoming active again several things were different. Ironically, this was a milder crowd, not near as “out there” on certain views. More importantly, I was no longer single, but was involved as the wife of a spouse who was in the course of searching out his views. This should have been something great, but little did I know.

My husband and I became involved in what one might call a patriot group. During that time I met a lot of wonderful people, many of whom I still call friends this day. It was an exciting time, I was so happy that my husband who at first was reluctant to become active was involved alongside me.

During the next few years we saw factions split off, people go different ways, new people join. Such was the life in such a group. In the later years, not long before the group dissolved, we started a close friendship with a particular member. This gentleman came from a conservative Christian background. Intelligent and kind he was not only exploring political issues, but was on a theological journey. At the time my husband was not religious. In fact, he had not been in church since he as a teenager, having rebelled against a conservative religious upbringing.
In the group my husband heard much about restoring America as a Christian nation even if it was in a loose and undefined sense. To most Patriots, it was more about the acknowledgment of America being a Christian nation coupled with the idea that Christians should be allowed to worship and serve God without government interference. It often went no further than that.

As the friendship grew we became friends with a circle of Christians that we met through this man. Most had not been involved with the Patriot movement, but were friends of his who were dissatisfied with the churches of their childhood and were searching for answers. They were decent and kind people and we “clicked” as a group. My husband’s interest in the Bible was rekindled and he rediscovered his Faith. I was overjoyed at first. What better a way them for husband and wife to make a journey side by side.

The Patriot group imploded in time, while most members formed small groups, we slowly drifted away, seeing less of them. A few did hang on the periphery of this circle, also interested in studying the Bible. By that time we had started to regard most Patriot types as somewhat hypocritical; always talking about American being a Christian nation and yet not bothering to go to church or really trying to live by God’s Laws. We thought this more and more as we studied the Bible, discussed various passages and their meanings. We weren’t just mouthing empty platitudes, but were actually trying to live by the Word.

At first our group was a “home church”, meeting at various members’ houses. Our friend dreamed of having a real church building where we could worship together. In time the opportunity for this to happen materialized.
As I stated before These were exciting times, while the Patriot group had been a great start, it was only that-a start. Now, we were concerned with more important things.

It was at this time that other things were becoming apparent, at the time they were only minor disturbances. However, in hindsight, they were a great importance.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

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by Sierra

I have already written about the ways that growing up in fundamentalist-evangelical culture made me especially vulnerable to covert incest from my father. There is a flip side to the father-daughter craze in Christian patriarchy, though. I am here to bring you two stories: and one of them isn’t about me!

In what would have been my high school years, a miracle happened. Sven, my best friend from my early childhood, came back to my church. We were fourteen. We had been estranged for about three years while his family lived in another state. But we quickly reconnected (not least due to my idealistic hopes that we could pick up where we left off, and some aggressive book-lending). But the stakes were so much higher now.

Sven’s mother had all but declared me a slut at seven years old, a fact I’ve alluded to several times as it was formative for my conception of myself (in a quite negative way that required overcoming later). But now that we actually had secondary sex characteristics, my apparent sluttitude was all the more threatening. Who knew what debaucheries my round, pimpled face might concoct? Meanwhile, I dreamed that Sven would take me away somewhere to live in childless bliss in the mountains. In retrospect, Sven could hardly have taken me across his driveway without asking his mother’s permission. But who is better at sustaining ill-fated wishes than a lonely fourteen-year-old?

Now, my church’s strict courting rules forbade such hedonistic abandon as dating, driving with the opposite sex, touching in any context other than saving one another from a burning building (and even then you’d better pray for deliverance first!), talking in private or being together at night for any reason other than church (the full moon is the devil’s spaceship). What does this lurid constellation of imagined sexual depravities create when mingled with the fitful urges of the pubescent body?

Fear, frustration and fury.

Fear because sex lurks everywhere, waiting to drag you underground and eat you alive like the slavering sin-monster in Frank Peretti’s novels.
Frustration because of the “besetting sins” (crushes on the attractive sex) that waylay you constantly despite your best efforts to think about the Word all the time.
Fury because it’s the fault of all those demons and worldly people with their voodoo music that you have to fight so hard to stay pure.

Now, I am about to admit something I never admitted to Sven, his mother, or anyone until long after I’d left fundamentalism.

I loved Sven.

Loving people was bad. Loving people was SERIOUS. Our courtship rules stated that you should never say the L-word to someone outside your family until you were ready to put a ring on it. Oh, and a girl should never say it first.

I didn’t say it. I thought it really hard. I whispered his name off the back porch of a church family’s ranch, where nobody could see or hear me. Ladies and gentlemen, I did this with my eyes wide open. I dared to love Sven. I abandoned a tiny bit of my faith in that moment, so desperate was I to love Sven. I knew that I was defiling my heart. I didn’t care. I thought it better to be a stained and damaged prize than to live dishonestly, denying that what I felt was love. God could see right through me, couldn’t he? How ridiculous was it to pretend that I was unattached? I challenged God that night on the porch. I was fifteen years old, and I loved Sven. God could either give him to me as a husband or strike either of us dead.

Yeah, I was fifteen.

None of that happened, of course. Sven and I had our short and sweet moments. I remember looking into his eyes and feeling like I was crashing over a waterfall. I remember the day that he sought me out after church multiple times, leaning over one of the tables to smile at me. I remember slipping away experimentally and being overjoyed when he pursued me. I remember him telling me that I was one of his best friends. I treasured the times he confided in me.

I may have been fifteen, but I did love that boy with all sincerity. I cherished his quirks and strove to support him in his goals. I encouraged him to go to college. I bought him expensive presents, exactly to his taste. I worried when he was depressed, bolstered his faith when it was faltering, and above all made myself the helpmeet to him that I hoped to be later. Sven was my safe place. He never gave me orders, always listened, never barked or dismissed me without a fair hearing. I thought that if I had to marry somebody, at least I’d never have to work at submitting to him since he obviously didn’t care. And I did this all while declaring myself his friend, hoping that some day he would ask the question that would lift us out of limbo and make me, like Boaz did Ruth, an honest woman.

What on earth does this tiny, invisible rebellion have to do with emotional incest?

Well, everything.

I am not married to Sven today. I am not part of my church. I am not in contact with Sven or his family. The end was sudden and decisive, brought about by a vortex of causes that spun endlessly around one problem: I was the other woman.

In the last years of my fundamentalist sojourn, as I was about to turn eighteen and exert what independence I could, a thought occurred to me.

Women in Christian patriarchy frequently transmute their desires for equal partnership and respect from their husbands into an emotionally incestuous relationship with their sons.

Of course, the thought wasn’t quite so well developed then. It was also punctuated with pangs of why won’t she like me, I buy her flowers and clean her house and watch her kids and if she dies he might be able to marry me but now I have to spend the next three days in repentance for entertaining that thought. But I had noticed a dynamic that wasn’t specific to Sven and his mother. It existed with every mother and son I knew. Even that early, I had figured out that when you reduce the marital relationship into a master-subordinate equation, the affection, respect and mutual enjoyment get pushed out somewhere else.

Sven’s mother had a laid-back husband. He was a lot like his son: didn’t order her around (much), mostly minded his own business, and only asked that the home be kept clean (a task to which he contributed, as well). This placed Sven’s mother, a dominant personality with cartloads of energy, in a dilemma. How could she demonstrate that she was fulfilling her role as a submissive wife if her husband never asked her to do anything?

Sven’s mother went out of her way to invent ways to submit. She insisted on being home at a certain time every day, no matter what her activities, to have dinner ready for her husband. She asked his permission to make field trips with the children. She sought her husband’s authorization for every insignificant activity of her life. And in doing so, she transformed him from her partner to her regional manager. She punched in her time cards and he wrote her paycheck.

Now, a type-A personality like hers naturally doesn’t compartmentalize itself into mere work and routine. She was a dynamic personality with strong passions and a thirst for adventure. Was she going to find adventure, romance and companionship with her regional manager? No. That’s what sons are for!

The great thing about sons, in fundamentalist culture, is that you don’t have to obey them. My church retained the parental right to rule over the patriarchal one, so grown men could be compelled to “honor” their mothers by mostly doing what they asked. So when Sven’s mother wanted someone to share her interests – to watch movies with her, to go on trips, to have lighthearted discussions – she turned to her son.

And so, as America wobbled and steadied itself after the shock of 9/11, another aftershock hit her with a more immediate force. She had turned to Sven, but Sven was starting to turn to me.

I was not blind, nor was I particularly bashful or even tactful. “Your mom hates me,” I told Sven. “She likes Jennifer. She wants to get rid of me so you can be with Jennifer.”
“She doesn’t hate you,” he responded reluctantly. “I’m not attracted to Jennifer like I am to you. She’s afraid something might happen.”

It was the frankest thing he’d ever said.

I have no idea what happened to the conversation after that point. My ears were ringing. He admitted he felt something for me! Even if it was a dangerous something. I felt a rush of validation and vowed to protect the chastity of both of us by upping my efforts to be the perfect pre-helpmeet.

Jennifer was, in many ways, like me. She was outspoken and energetic and loved playing practical jokes. She had stepped in to take my place while Sven lived away, playing in the woods and joining him for video-gaming sessions. What I did not realize was that I was in the midst of a dynastic arrangement. Sven’s mother and Jennifer’s mother were the best of friends. My fantasies about flight into the wilderness and a tiny cabin filled with cats and eccentricities and Sven was obviously not going to help either of them achieve their fantasies of blood connection. And so, a campaign was launched to pry my hands off Sven (as if we had ever touched!) and drop Jennifer solidly into his lap.

Sven and I couldn’t drive together. Sven and Jennifer could.
Sven and I couldn’t talk alone. Sven and Jennifer could.
Sven and I couldn’t see each other without an excuse. Sven and Jennifer could.

What was going on here?
I think that things transpired the way they did because Sven admitted his attraction to me. I was opinionated. I was dangerous. I had an unbelieving father and was prepared to yank my own uterus through my bellybutton to avoid being a stay-at-home mother. I possessed something that Jennifer did not: a lure strong enough to threaten the bond between Sven and his mother. I had openly challenged her micromanagement of his life. Jennifer accepted it as normal.

The great irony of American Christianity is that the fundamentalist-evangelical idolization of marriage produces a lifestyle that strips marriages of all their rewards. All the spontaneity, affection, teasing, playing, adventuring, learning, growing, deepening, overcoming conflict, admiring of one another’s wisdom and maturity – all this stuff dies in the headship-submission model of marriage. What you’re left with is a boss and his employee, who hopefully like each other but are fixed in their relations to one another. Their relationship cannot grow because growth would shatter the mould.

And so fathers turn to daughters for admiration and affection, for the sense of validation they no longer get from their wives – and I would argue that they can’t get the same admiration or affection from their wives in this paradigm, because the wives are already commanded to do those things. Wives are compelled to love their husbands; husbands, therefore, have nothing to work for. Nothing to earn. Ironically, once fundamentalist-evangelical culture fully enshrines the stay-at-home daughter ideal, the same luster will probably fade away. Whenever you try to mandate love and respect, you create the conditions that prevent you from ever genuinely receiving those things.

Mothers turn to their sons for a partner they can share things with, an individual who can be influenced, who can change and evolve without threatening anarchy. A woman can take her son to a place she wants to go without checking in with him to see if he’d prefer someplace else. She can set the agenda for what they do and when they leave. She can ask her son’s opinion and not be compelled to agree with him. She can, in short, have a surrogate husband she doesn’t have to obey.

I fell afoul of emotional incest on two fronts: my father’s efforts to make me “his little girl,” and my star-crossed would-be lover whose mother could not accept “another woman” in his life without vetting her first. Emotional incest is endemic to Christian patriarchy because that is the place where marriages go to die. In Christian patriarchy, the family is a little state with an executive head of government and a harried chief-of-staff. The husband’s elevation makes him lonely; the wife’s subjection makes her lonely, too. Patriarchal marriages are so tightly ordered, so constricting that the emotion, the life, the love and the spontaneity – the building blocks of romance – all ooze out the cracks and seep into the relationships of parents and children. If your husband is your boss, your son is your husband. If your wife is your servant, your daughter is your wife.

Somebody, please, break the cycle.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Sierra is a PhD student living in the Midwest. She was raised in a “Message of the Hour” congregation that followed the ministry of William Branham. She left the Message in 2006 and is the author of the blog  the phoenix and the olive branch

We would love to feature your personal story on No Longer Quivering. Please submit what you have to say via our submissions form.

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by Libby Anne

After discussing the definition of Emotional Incest in Part 1, I am now going to address the way the teachings of leading Christian Patriarchy organization Vision Forum and its close affiliates, the Botkins, essentially mandate emotional incest.

Vision Forum teaches that adult daughters are to stay at home until they marry. More than that, it teaches that they are under their father’s authority just as they will after marriage be under their husband’s authority, and that well they remain at home it is their duty to adopt their father’s “vision” in place of their own and serve as “helpmeets in training” to their father in preparation for serving as “helpmeets” to their future husbands.

The possibilities for emotional incest become obvious. In fact, like I said, emotional incest is practically mandated. Adult daughters are to subsume their identities in loving, adoring, and serving their father, and they are to make his vision, his hopes, and his dreams their vision, their hopes, and their dreams. The father in turn is to guide his adoring daughter to maturity in preparation for handing her off to an approved suitor.

These ideas are promoted especially through Geoff Botkin and his daughters, Anna Sophia and Elizabeth. Anna Sophia and Elizabeth run a website called Visionary Daughters, and at ages 17 and 19 they wrote a book called So Much More in which they urged daughters to forgo college (which they argue is hedonistic, atheistic, and against the Bible). They have also produced a documentary called The Return of the Daughters. The Botkin sisters are today in their mid-twenties, still unmarried, and still living at home under their father’s authority and sharing in his “vision.”

I’m going to pause for a moment to offer several quotes – all Botkin related – to illustrate just what is involved in the whole “serving as a helpmeet to your father” thing:

Firstly, you must love and honor and cultivate respect for your father. Second, you must seek your father’s heart and vision. Third, you must be able to come up with ways to use your gifts to make your father’s vision a reality, without him telling you what to do. (Visionary Daughters)

I realize that it is most likely God’s will for me to be married someday, and I desire and have the responsibility to be prepared, as much as possible, for this role as God sees fit. I want to be a true helpmeet to my husband, and what an excellent opportunity I have to practice this with my own father! (So Much More)

And finally, a passage from House Proud, an article in Bitch magazine:

A young New Zealander named Genevieve, profiled on the Botkin sisters’ blog, decided to live at home until marriage after trading in her dreams of becoming her country’s first female prime minister for ambitions to become a Christian homeschooling wife and mother. Now the author of the Isaacharican Daughters newsletter, Genevieve exemplifies how young women in this lifestyle are encouraged to subsume their own thoughts and identities into those of whichever male figure in their lives currently acts as the authority. In writing about the process of swapping her father’s “vision” for her new husband’s, she notes that a woman having independent thoughts is evidence of Satan gumming up the works.

“My loyalties have had to undergo a change. I was used to thinking Dad knew best. Now I needed to learn to think that Pete knows best. I used to do things and invest my time in projects according to what I knew Dad would want me to do. Now I needed to be guided by what Pete wanted me to do. When faced with a problem or option I couldn’t think ‘What would Dad have done in this situation?’ Now I had to think ‘What would Pete do in this situation?’ These were exciting times and difficult as during this state of flux—learning to replace one man’s vision with another—the devil would come around and say, ‘But what about what you want? What about what you think?’”

The more I read of the Botkins and of Vision Forum’s teachings regarding the role of adult daughters, the more it strikes me that adult daughters are expected to serve as (traditional, submissive) wives to their fathers in every way but physical. Adult daughters are expected to completely lose themselves in their father, and to literally not have a desire outside of what he wants for them. His vision is to be their vision, his thoughts their thoughts, his desires their desires, his passions their passions.

Strangely, mothers are left out of the picture almost entirely. You would think that if an adult daughter is staying home to learn to be a homemaker, she should be serving primarily as her mother’s right arm – learning to cook, to run a household, and to care for children. Yet in everything the Botkin sisters have written – in their books, their blog, and even their documentary – mothers are completely missing. Indeed, every chapter of So Much More begins with the phrase “Fathers, Daughters, and…” and in the case of three of the four adult daughters profiled in their documentary, The Return of the Daughters, the mother never even appears on screen.

When you realize how male-centered Christian Patriarchy is, this starts to make sense. After all, the father is the head of the family, the leader of the family, the center of the family. The mother serves the father and is to make his vision and his desires her vision and her desires. Within this rubric, the daughters must be oriented to serve the father, to adopt his vision and his outlook on life, rather than oriented toward learning from their mother. The patriarchal household is one where every member, from oldest to youngest, wife and children, must be oriented towards the father.

Given all this, it would appear that the teachings of Vision Forum and the Botkins essentially mandate father/daughter emotional incest. The passage where Genevieve discusses transferring her loyalties from her father to her new husband is particularly illustrative of this, and particularly damning. A daughter of Christian Patriarchy is to first serve as “wife in training” to her father, and then as wife to her husband.

I’m really not surprised the Botkin sisters aren’t married, given that their ideology almost seems to place more importance on men’s adult daughters than it does on men’s wives. As soon as the Botkin sisters marry and produce daughters, the usurpation of their roles will have begun.

Next, in Part 3, I will turn to how easily emotional incest can occur even in ordinary families (the “daddy’s girl” effect), and in Part 4 I will discuss my own experiences and the pain emotional incest brings with it.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.
Libby Anne grew up in a large evangelical homeschool family highly involved in the religious right. College turned her world upside down, and she is today an atheist, a feminist, and a progressive. She blogs about leaving fundamentalist and evangelical religion, her experience with the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements, the problems with the “purity culture,” the intricacies of conservative and religious right politics, and the importance of feminism. Her blog is Love, Joy, Feminism

We would love to feature your personal story on No Longer Quivering. Please submit what you have to say via our submissions form.

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[Editors' note: At the time of writing, Libby Anne and Sierra were unaware of the controversy surrounding Hugo Schwyzer. The discussion of his critique of emotional incest is not an endorsement of Schwyzer by NLQ.]
by Sierra

Libby Anne has begun a series on Emotional Incest at Love, Joy, Feminism. In her latest post, she also links Hugo Schwyzer’s striking analysis of the problems with the “Daddy’s Girl” myth and princess culture. The following is my attempt to confirm and add more perspectives to the issue they are bringing to light.

As a child of a believer and a nonbeliever, I walked a confusing and sometimes torturous line between the prescriptions of my church and the realities of a divided household. Additionally, I was the only child, and female. For the first couple of years after my mother joined our fundamentalist church (while my age was still in the single digits), we basked in fellowship and preoccupied ourselves with the joys of home. Fundamentalist culture is extremely good at fostering an environment that feels like shelter, with clearly-defined expectations and an emphasis on the “simple life” – about which I’ll write more later. So for the early years, I happily did my homeschool lessons, read books, played outside, and ran to the door yelling “Dad’s home!” whenever his pickup truck began the descent of our long rural driveway.

Then puberty hit like a bombshell.

At nine, I developed breasts and wrapped them in sports bras to keep them hidden. At eleven, menstruation, which was impossible to hide. I was the youngest girl I knew to cross the threshold into womanhood, and the least willing. Although certain parents in my church had already singled me out by age seven as a sexual threat to their sons, the outpouring of messages about my sexuality was suddenly deafening as I crouched under the table in our church’s reception hall, clutching my abdomen and crying from the senseless pain.

The church had more answers for me than I had questions. Over the next few years, I was set adrift in a sea of advice. I was instructed in the rigors of courtship, plied with the sweet, romantic story of a married couple who first held hands at the wedding altar. Purity pledges became common in my peer group; I bought a key necklace with a cross in the center to demonstrate that I was “taken” by Christ. I even wore a fake engagement ring in public to ward off interested parties. I was warned against talking to boys, the same boys who had grown up my friends. I discovered, to my mortification, that I could no longer give a boy a birthday gift without his interpreting it as a sexual advance. I experienced my first stalker at age 16 – a member of our church a decade my senior. I was taught to look for a Christian boy who would ask my father’s permission to court me, who would show no interest in my physical form, who would be a model of a godly leader and provider. I was taught to expect to obey him and bear him children. I was taught that my father could veto any unsuitable boy; I was his responsibility and he was my head.

I was terrified.
But more than that, I was a special case. My father wasn’t a godly leader. He couldn’t judge the character of my potential suitors, since he didn’t have the Holy Ghost. He didn’t believe in the orthodoxy he was expected to enforce. What was going to happen to me?

My “specialness” in this regard was the subject of great angst between my mother, the pastor, and our friends. My mother asserted that God Himself would be my “head” and send me the right boy. My pastor cautioned that I still needed to be obedient to my father. Our friends told me that I ought to treat him as if he were already godly and he would follow suit as God worked in his heart. I was exhausted with the commentary. What if I just didn’t get married? I tried to ask. Paul had favored celibacy. I could be a missionary! I could run a soup kitchen! I could follow the Lord perfectly fine without courting anybody, ever.

Yeah right, they said.

Now, all of this angst presumed that my father would approach my adolescence completely differently. They presumed that he would encourage me to be immodest and promiscuous, to be a cutthroat career vixen, to abandon submission and childbearing, to have a string of boyfriends and marry only for money. They presumed that he would let me drink and smoke and go to places no decent girl had ever heard of.

They were full of crap. My father was a fundamentalist of his own kind.

My father responded to my changing body with a mixture of terror and possessiveness. He oscillated from warnings to lectures to assertions of power. He claimed the right to see my body naked to inspect my “development,” then warned me that boys my age were only interested in one thing. He lectured me about the weaknesses of men, telling me that they were helpless victims of their urges and that a high-heeled shoe could destroy a relationship. He taught me that men would cheat whenever possible (“it’s in their nature”) and that I should protect myself by withholding my body from them. He told me that boys would do anything to get me into bed. He said that I shouldn’t even trust the ones who seemed genuinely interested in my ideas and my life, because it was all just a mask hiding their real intentions. When we were out shopping, he pointed out boys in the crowd and told me that they had been staring at me, and if they got any closer he would have to kill them. I rolled my eyes and told him I could defend myself, thanks.

My father expected a lot of his rules to be broken. He expected me to get a boyfriend and to be physically involved with him, but demanded the right to grouse about it and treat the boy with suspicion and contempt. My father expected me to dress to attract boys; he wanted me to be immodest so that he would have the satisfaction of telling me to go upstairs and change. He wanted to have “a talk” with my hypothetical boyfriend, to warn him of his impending demise if he “laid a finger” on me. But despite all these expectations, my father nonetheless told me all the same things the church did about men. And ultimately, his actions added up to covert incest: the emotional substitution of a daughter for a spouse. He openly told me that my mother was asexual but I was hot, that she had abandoned him but I would not, could not, because I was his daughter.

From both my father and the church, the combined messages were:

1. Men are primarily motivated by sex and are hopelessly weak against feminine wiles
2. Women do not want sex, but use it to get power and money by leveraging it for marriage.
3. The father’s job is to protect his daughter from would-be suitors, with physical violence if necessary.
4. “Boyfriend” is a dirty word that means “drunk sex addict who beats up girls for fun.”
5. A daughter should adore her father and measure all suitors against him.
6. Fathers should “date” their daughters to prevent them from seeking admiration outside the family.
7. Daughters should practice their wifely skills on their fathers.

At the core, the church and my father saw adolescence through the same lens: as a dangerous time in which pair bonds between peers must be warded off and substituted with father-daughter relationships lest the gates of hell pop open and spill out clouds of heroin and gonorrhea. I suspect that fundamentalist-evangelical culture’s enshrinement of emotional incest as “good practice” for marriage reflects a paranoia unique to patriarchs. Men are made to compete with their daughters’ suitors for their hearts and minds. Marriage is only acceptable if the “other man” is nonthreatening to the father’s centrality in the daughter’s emotional world. “Daddy’s Girl” is a life sentence. Marriages might end, but daddy is forever.

This identical lens was the source of serious damage for me as an adolescent. Here’s how:

1. When my father asserted that he owned my body and could “inspect” it to see that I was “developing” properly, my church told me that I didn’t need to obey my father if he asked me to sin. They didn’t elaborate on whether his demand was sinful.
2. When my father painted boys my age as sexual predators, the church agreed.
3. When my father made allusions to our shopping trips and lunches out as “dates,” the church agreed.
4. When my father told me that other people on the street would probably mistake us for a couple, the church was silent.
5. When my father told me not to put on clear lipgloss because someone might think I was his prostitute, the church only sighed and shook its head.
6. When my father told me he planned to drive off any suitors or do them physical harm, the church agreed that this was a sign of his protection.
7. When my father told me that I was looking “busty” or sexually alluring, my church told me that he ought to say those things to exhort me to deeper modesty.
8. When my father talked about our “special bond,” the church agreed. Voddie Baucham and the Botkin Sisters had made this “special bond” a God-given benefits package for fathers.
9. My church told me that I should practice being a wife on my father. I should care for him emotionally. I should do domestic tasks for him. I should always be meek, submissive and adoring. My father’s gruff demand for coffee and his critical eye as I washed dishes were evidence of his “care” and “involvement” in my life.

When I chafed against my father’s invasions of my privacy, against his sexual crudeness, against his erratic moods and his sense of dependence on me for validation and emotional balance, my church told me to be longsuffering and to obey him as much as I could.
When my father ultimately left, the church mourned as if I had become a ship without a rudder. When I told them I was glad to escape his neediness and critical oversight, they told me that I was really acting out because I missed him.

My church enabled my father to practice emotional incest. It gave me no defense against him. Even though he lived outside their jurisdiction, they validated his desires for emotional possession of me and told me that I should accept them as normal. They mourned that he was not there to be my “head,” to take me to purity balls, to “guard” my virginity. They did not mourn that he placed me in the impossible position between doll and wife, the mediator for himself and my mother but also the replacement for her.

I am now engaged to my partner of five years. We have been through hell and heaven together. We are ever more committed to each other as the time wears on. But there’s a problem, you see, for my father and my church. My partner is a “boyfriend” – that inherently evil entity that disrupts the father’s “special bond” with his daughter and deprives him of his junior wives. Hence, within the first six months of our relationship, my father took me out to brunch for the express purpose of telling me that my boyfriend would dump me in the first month of graduate school the moment a “warm body” made itself available.

According to evangelical-fundamentalist culture, he was right to do so.

But he was so, so wrong.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Sierra is a PhD student living in the Midwest. She was raised in a “Message of the Hour” congregation that followed the ministry of William Branham. She left the Message in 2006 and is the author of the blog  the phoenix and the olive branch

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by Vyckie Garrison

Mega-family parents, Jim Bob & Michelle Duggar of TLC’s “19 & Counting” fame announced on TODAY they are expecting baby #20 – due in April 2012.

Despite a difficult pregnancy and premature delivery of now-23-month-old, Josie, Michelle told TLC viewers she is willing to “lay down her life” for another baby.

“We do not take for granted the wonderful blessings of life that God has bestowed upon us!” writes Michelle on The Duggar Family website. “Many years ago, Jim Bob & I gave this area of our lives to God, allowing Him to grant life as He saw fit.”

The flip side of the Quiverfull ideal of “trusting the Lord with our family planning” which Jim Bob & Michelle embrace and promote through their TV Reality show, website, and numerous books, is that Michelle also accepts the possibility of her own or her baby’s deaths, should such tragedy occur, as God’s will.

In her book, The Way Home, Beyond Feminism and Back To Reality, Quiverfull proponent, Mary Pride explains that mothers who risk their lives for the sake of building the Kingdom of God are to be honored the same as missionaries:

“Routinely we send missionaries off to work in unsavory climates, knowing full well that they will probably come down with amoebic dysentery, be overheated (or frozen), receive inadequate medical care in second-rate hospitals, and on the average live ten years less than other people. But we don’t tell people not to be missionaries. Instead, we commend missionaries for their courage. 

“Missionaries go to foreign countries to beget new Christians; mothers get pregnant to be beget new Christians. Even if maternal missionary work has some hazards (and what missionary work doesn’t?), the noble way is to face them with courage. Likewise, we really ought to honor women with medical problems … diabetes, asthma, quadriplegia, arthritis, heart problems … who are willing to serve God with their bodies as mothers.  These are the unsung heroines of the modern church.  (p. 57 emphasis in original)”

To further understand Michelle’s willingness to risk her life, consider that Quiverfull leaders routinely downplay the health risks when questioned regarding the prudence of prolific motherhood.  Again, Mary Pride, citing page after page of examples of supposedly bogus health risks and throwing in as an added bonus, the “medical dangers of not having children,” encourages women to trust the Lord in the face of suffering:

“Devotees of evil will sacrifice all they have — money, health, reputation — to maintain their lifestyle.  If the actual threat of venereal disease or AIDS does not deter the wicked from their pursuits, why should the mostly phantom threat of “medical problems” deter us from ours?  God will stand by His daughters who are willing to serve Him.”

I explain this idealism which led me to repeatedly endure high-risk pregnancies and life-threatening deliveries in greater detail at No Longer Quivering: here and here.

Quiverfull moms are nothing if not consistent in their submission to the will of God – for better or worse.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

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A review of “Me? Obey Him?” by Elizabeth Rice Handford. Trigger warning for former Quiverfull believers who actually read this book and tried to live according to the principles … this post is a disturbing trip down memory lane.

by Vyckie Garrison

Those fortunate enough to have never actually read “Me? Obey Him?” may be shocked and appalled by the teachings in support of “biblical patriarchy.”  This review is simply quotations of Handford’s own words (in italics), followed by comments from my personal experience as a former Quiverfull Believer.

God’s Perfect Creation Required Order

Jesus, the Creator of Heaven and earth, submitted Himself to God the Father.  He took His place in the chain of command. … It is no shame, no dishonor,  for a woman to be under authority, if the Lord Jesus — very God Himself — submitted to the authority of the Father. (p. 14)

The submission of the Lord Jesus is our example.  He submitted not just to the tender ministrations of the Father.  He submitted to revilings and curses, persecution and suffering.  He was our example, not just to obey a gentle and kind husband but a harsh and mean husband as well.

You may find that your obedience to your husband and your obedience to God are all tied together.  You may not want to obey your husband because you are in rebellion against God. (p. 51)

By intimately linking Christ’s willing subjection to God the Father with a woman’s submission to her husband in “the chain of command,” the teachings of patriarchy create such an intricate tangle of enmeshment that it’s nearly impossible for an abused woman to extricate herself from the bondage of her husband’s tyranny without also throwing off her spiritual bond with Christ.

Kristen Rosser, who writes the FAQs for No Longer Quivering, is currently working on an article which will address the popular Christian teachings on the absolute necessity of hierarchy – coming soon …

Woman’s Nature Requires Obedience

We’ve had the impression that women as a class are more spiritually minded than men, with sensibilities more refined, and purer thoughts. Scriptures say the opposite is true!  Women are more often led into spiritual error than men.  Perhaps it is caused by her intuitive, emotional thinking.  (Intuitive thinking is God’s gift, not to be despised, but it needs the balance of a man’s reason.)  I should add too, that a woman does not have to be led into error.  That is the reason God commanded her not to usurp authority over the man, so she can be protected from false doctrine. (p. 17)

Sexist generalizations are never useful in understanding human relationships.

In reality, I am no less rational than my (ex)husband.  He also is gifted with a strong intuition and emotional intelligence.  Convinced as we were that I was more susceptible to Satanic deception, our family was deprived of my reasonable input in decision making.  My intelligence was squelched, my intuition was distrusted and my feelings were denied.  My husband developed an artificially inflated sense of his own powers of logic.  I can’t count how many times he said to me, “What you are saying sounds reasonable, but how do I know that Satan is not using you to deceive me?”  I had no good defense.  According to the Scriptures, we had every reason to believe that I was indeed being used to lead my husband astray.

His authority and my obedience did not protect us from tragic deception which ripped apart our family.

What Do the Scriptures Say About a Wife’s Obedience?

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the Scriptures say a woman ought to obey her husband! …  [Note, these ellipses represent page after page of scriptural support given by Handford to bolster her argument that God commands wives to obey their husbands.] If you are intellectually honest, you will have to admit that it is impossible to find a single loophole, a single exception, an “if” or “unless.”  The Scriptures say, without qualification, to the openminded reader, that a woman ought to obey her husband. (pp. 24, 25)

1) She Is to Obey Regardless of His Spiritual Condition

The wife who obeys her husband may win him by her meek and quiet spirit, her loving behavior. (p. 25)

2) She Need Not Fear Conflicting Authority

There is no hint that a woman may have to choose between conflicting authority. …  If it is needed in order to fulfill both obligations, God will do a miracle to make it possible. … It is safe to conclude that when God told a woman to obey her husband, He intended for her to be able to do it without risk of offending other authorities. (pp. 25, 28)

3) She Obeys Without Reference to Her Feelings About the Will of God

The Scriptures say a woman must ignore her “feelings” about the will of God, and do what her husband says.  She is to obey her husband as if he were God Himself.  She can be as certain of God’s will, when her husband speaks, as if God had spoken audibly from Heaven! (p. 28 – emphasis added)

When a concerned friend reported our family to Child Protective Services, my ex-husband lost custody of the children due to his abuse.  The social worker told me that I was guilty of “failure to protect.”  The only thing that prevented me from having my parental rights terminated and my children placed in foster care was my willingness to submit to a full psychological evaluation, undergo individual and family counseling, and cooperate with random unannounced home visits by Social Services.

My older children rightfully blame me for not protecting them against their father’s abuse.  Even though they know that I was influenced by books such as “Me? Obey Him?” to believe that it was God’s will to submit to the abuse, my children cannot be fooled into thinking that I was not really responsible for their suffering.  I have apologized for my neglect.  Most of my children have forgiven me — still, the damage is done and some things can’t (and shouldn’t) be forgotten.

What If a Husband Expressly Commands Something Explicitly Wrong?

When women ask me this question, I counter with two of my own:

1) “Have you been living in daily obedience to your husband as part of your wholehearted, loving submission to God?”

(This is an essential part of the problem. If a woman has not been submissive, God has no responsibility for her situation and cannot be blamed if her husband requires something wrong.)

2) “Has your husband ever actually commanded you to do something wrong?”

In the hundreds of times I have asked these questions, not once, if my memory is right, has a woman answered, “Yes, I am always obedient, and yet my husband has required me to break one of God’s laws.”

Never! Why?

Because, when a woman takes God at His word, submits to her husband without reservation, fears God and loves Him, then God takes upon Himself the responsibility to see that a woman does not have to sin! (pp. 37, 38)

Many non-Christians can at least appreciate Jesus as a good moral teacher, but I have come to think of my 25+ year walk with God as the perfect example of a codependent relationship.  To me, having “the mind of Christ” means thinking like a battered woman:  It’s really all my fault that He treats me so poorly.  If only I were a better person, He wouldn’t have to make me suffer.  He only does it when I disobey — to test my love for Him or to teach me a much-needed lesson. I don’t deserve His love.  I am so thankful that He puts up with me! Without Him, I am nothing.

Even if a woman can honestly claim to have been perfectly submissive, if her husband nevertheless commands her to do wrong, God still gets off the hook.  But, “Me? Obey Him?” gives the godly woman a promise so that she is not without hope: perhaps the Lord will kill her evil husband!!

A man always has the choice of saying yes or no to God.  He can reject the pleadings of the Spirit, the pleas of his loving wife.  If he does, and he goes on his wicked way, then I have seen God reach down and take that man’s life, rather than make his wife choose between two wrongs. (p. 40)

The Lord did not rescue us from abuse by killing my husband — even though, I’m embarrassed and ashamed now to say, I did pray He would do so after reading this passage in Handford’s book.  No — it was up to me to put a stop to the abuse.  My only regret in seeking divorce is that I didn’t do it sooner.

Don’t I Have Any Rights?

Can you find a Kleenex somewhere and mop up the tears, just for a minute, long enough to talk to me about what your rights really are?

You don’t have any rights, no rights at all.  You lost them on the day you rebelled against God.  You lost them, not because you are a woman, but because you are a sinner, just as I am.  (p. 49)

Handford goes on to argue that, having been purchased by Christ’s blood, we become His bondservants (slaves) who ought to be glad to do anything He tells us to do.  This teaching that I was a slave to Christ translated into me also being a slave to my husband.  I had no right to expect decent treatment for myself and our children.  My husband owned me and was perfectly within his rights to demand that I comply with his every whim.  If his desires seemed selfish, petty, or abusive, who was I to protest?  If I would have rebelled against his wishes, then I would be guilty of witchcraft (1 Samuel 15:23) and subject to demonic control.  I was told that either God was in control of my life (in the guise of my husband), or else Satan was in control of my life.  The only power I had was to choose which one would control me.

You Have the Freedom From the Consequences of Decisions

When you give back to your husband the responsibility for the direction of the home and the making of the decisions, you also give him the responsibility for the consequences of his decisions. … Fortunately, that’s the way a man likes it.  God made a man to be aggressive, to respond to challenge, to glory in his manhood, to rejoice in draining his strength, to risk great hazards for the one he loves.  It is his very aggressiveness that a woman sometimes finds frightening, simply because she is a woman.  She doesn’t have confidence in her physical strength, in her ability to cope with danger, in her decision-making ability.  It is a privilege, a gift unearned, for a woman to have a man take upon himself her welfare. (p 56)

What Handford fails to mention here is that the wife and children have to live with the consequences of the husband’s decisions.  Reality persists.  In actual fact, if a woman turns over all authority to her husband, and he blows it, she is nevertheless responsible by abdication for the resultant predicament in which the family finds itself.  Perhaps God will not hold the submissive woman responsible for her husband’s squandering of the household funds, but her children’s hollow eyes will haunt her all the same.

The male aggressiveness which I feared was, in fact, strengthened when I catered to my husband — much as a bully becomes increasingly malevolent until his targeted prey dares to stand up to him.  My insecurities regarding decision-making and my ability to cope worsened as I was never permitted an opportunity to prove to myself that I could deal with challenging situations.

God has a wonderful way of working it out for the comfort of the whole family when a woman leaves the decision making to her husband. (p. 57)

Wishful thinking much?

Don’t I Ever Get to Express an Opinion?

When you are talking over a problem, if it isn’t asking too much, try to think reasonably. … Men think women talk too much about how they feel, rather than considering facts.  Sure it’s important how you feel.  Can you tell him why you feel that way? (p. 61)

There is a word for this contemptuous insult: Misogyny.  It means, hatred of women.  Anyone who thinks so little of women should be afforded zero credibility when it comes to handing out marital advice.

Why Do I Have to Make All the Concessions?

Why doesn’t the husband have to do his part first? Why?  Because you are the one burdened for a Christian home.  Having a home where Christ is the head is cheap enough at whatever price you have to pay!  Think how long the rewards of a good Christian home will last.  Then ask yourself if it is worth the trifling mortifications of obedience.  Of course it is!  All valuable things cost something.  Certainly you will have to pay a price. (p. 69)

A relationship in which one party must make all the concessions has nothing to do with love and everything to do with power and control.  It is unhealthy, dysfunctional, unsustainable, and perverse. It is not good for the wife and it is not good for the husband either.

The “mortifications of obedience” in my marriage were not trifling.  I was not the only one who had to pay the price.  Patriarchy took a terrible toll on my children: physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.  We are still paying the price to this day.  Sadly, the promised rewards of a good Christian home never actually materialized for us.

But What If His Influence on the Children Is Bad?

Then make sure your influence on the children is good.  Let them see a mother who loves God and keeps His commandments by obeying her husband!  Your influence, by God’s grace, can counteract the bad influences a father can have.  … Obey God. Obey your husband.  God will see to it that bad influences on the children are countered. (pp. 72, 74)

My children will tell you that this simply is not true.  Day after day, week after week, year after year, my husband’s anger and control wore the children down.  They learned his bad habits.  His hatred and criticism destroyed their enthusiasm for life.

• I submitted, he dominated.  The children learned that in all relationships there is an imbalance of power — better to be the person in power.

Over and over, I prayed for the Lord to help me counteract my husband’s negative influence.  Despite my desperate pleadings, the reality was that he had way more energy, he could lecture for hours and hours without a break, he spent more time with the children while I was on continual bedrest either pregnant or recovering from pregnancies/deliveries.  Plus, he had all the power — so which of us would the children want to emulate?  Certainly not me and my martyrdom.

I Want to Do Right, But I Can’t Help How I Feel

Have you noticed how many Scriptures there are that command a wife to obey her husband, and how few Scriptures there are that command her to love her husband?  There is only one Scripture, to my knowledge, that tells a wife to love him, and that is Titus 2:4.  Why?  Because, I think, in a marvelous, supernatural way, submission brings love.  If you obey him, you will love him, love him more than you ever dreamed possible.  (p. 75)

The principle which Handford is describing here actually has a name.  It’s called Stockholm syndrome.  As defined by Wikipedia, Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors that appear irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims, essentially mistaking a lack of abuse from their captors as an act of kindness.

I learned this coping mechanism well in my own abusive marriage.  Whenever I felt the natural repulsion and lack of love engendered by my husband’s poor treatment of me and the children, I forced myself to become even more submissive to him.  I was following Jesus’ admonition to turn the other cheek and to repay evil with good.  Guess what?  It worked!!  In no time, the good, positive feelings returned and I was once again feeling incredible love for my husband.

But this trick of my mind was not a good thing as it enabled me to endure the abuse — to rationalize and justify my husband’s behavior even when the children and I were clearly suffering harm.

Does It Work? Does It Really Work?

God has made a promise to the woman who will obey her husband.  He keeps His promises.  He will not honor disobedience, no matter what excuse is given for it.  A woman wins her husband, draws him to a higher spiritual plane, by a submissive, quiet spirit.  … Yes, it really works.  God will bless your home if you are obedient. (p. 77)

It really works! … Unless it doesn’t work, in which case, it’s all the woman’s fault.  This guaranteed recipe for success cannot be proven false because the “no liability” clause is inseparable from the key ingredient: perfect obedience.  Not blessed?  Not His/his fault.  The woman is solely responsible for every failure.

For the Sake of the Children, Submit

In any unresolved conflict between husband and wife, there is always great danger to the marriage, however trivial its beginning.  Children instinctively know the sanctity of the home itself is endangered when there is conflict over who is boss. Not only will children suffer from fear, they will also learn from a rebellious mother her rebellion against authority. … The children will learn rebellion and rebel against you and your husband.  Then they will resent all authority: the school, the boss, the policeman, the structure of life itself. (p. 86)

Conflict in marriage is normal.  The absence of conflict is a sign that one (or both) of the partners has been demoralized and dehumanized.  Holding an opinion and caring about it is a big part of what it means to be alive.  Working through conflict, listening to each others’ differing perspectives and learning to compromise is the way mature couples learn and grow. Marriage does not have to be a power struggle.  Nobody has to be “the boss.”  Mutuality makes a happy, satisfying relationship for both husband and wife.

Children who witness healthy parents dealing constructively with the inevitable disagreements of daily life are learning valuable conflict resolution skills.

I thought that I was providing much-needed security for my children when I continually assured them that their father and I would never divorce.  They told me later that to them, my unwavering committment sounded like a death sentence.

It was not until I began standing up for myself and the children against their father’s unreasonable demands that he quit acting like a two-year-old and began to take responsibility for his own actions.  Witnessing me challenge their father’s authority did not turn my children into rebels — it was living with a bully which made them revolt.  When I took a stand, the children learned healthy boundaries: both to insist on their own boundaries and to respect the boundaries of others.

For Your Husband’s Sake, Obey

Imagine how quickly a man would turn his steps homeward in the evening, after a day of grappling with the world, if the woman who waited for him met him with words of tenderness on her lips instead of a set of ultimatums. … If it matters at all to you about the man you have promised to love until parted by death, for his well-being and joy, for his usefulness to God, obey him! (pp. 87, 88)

When I indiscriminately submitted to my husband’s every whim, I was not treating him like a grown-up man. I was treating him like a spoiled child.  Taking on the responsibility for his “well-being and joy” stripped him of self-respect and enabled him to avoid the consequences of his own poor choices.  Filing for divorce was, in fact, the first time I showed true respect to my husband since before we learned about and accepted the teachings of patriarchy.  Finally I was saying to him, “You are an intelligent, sane adult and therefore, you must live with the consequences of your behavior.”

A man whose wife is a spineless doormat is actually more likely to stray from home as he seeks a companion who challenges and engages him on an adult level.

For Your Own Welfare and Happiness, Yield

There’s a strange paradox in Scripture, echoed in many places: If you would live, you must die (John 12:24).  If you would keep your life, you must lose it (Matt. 10:39).  If you would be free, you must submit yourself a slave to Christ (Rom. 6:18).  And there is one more paradox which must be taken by faith as well: if you would know true freedom, you must submit to your husband’s authority.  Obedience certainly has its great and final reward in Heaven, but it also has the present tangible reward. … Obedience brings happiness! (p. 88)

Again, wifely submission is intimately linked to one of the central messages of Christianity.

What Elizabeth Rice Handford doesn’t want you to know is that this same argument, these same verses, in fact, were used by Christian slaveholders to justify their ownership of fellow human beings.

Stop for a moment and actually read the following verses:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but like slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men, because you know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does, whether he is slave or free. (Eph. 6:5-8 — the same section of Ephesians in which Paul commands wives to submit to their husbands.)

To sweeten the deal, proponents of biblical slavery would remind slaves that serving the Lord meant serving their masters – but this is not burdensome because the Bible also commands masters to treat their slaves kindly:

And masters, treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him. (Eph. 6:9 — with such a Christ-like master, why wouldn’t a slave willingly submit?)

Sound familiar?  Teachers of wifely submission are always quick to point out that while God insists that women obey their husbands, we must remember that husbands are likewise instructed to love their wives as Christ loved the church.  So that makes the subjection and subordination of women okay … just like slavery, right?  After all, the bible commands both women and slaves to submit and obey.

Virtually no Christians today advocate slavery.  The verses commanding slaves to obey their masters have not been removed from the bible or discredited, yet we have laws against people owning people. Ask Christians why they believe that slavery is evil when the bible does not condemn slave owners and, in fact, commands slaves to obey their masters, and you will receive a myriad of responses: You have to consider the context and the culture; God was not condoning slavery, only acknowledging its common practice and providing guidelines to make it more humane, etc.  What you will not hear — ever — is a Christian who replies, “The bible commands slaves to obey their masters.  Therefore, slavery is God’s will and faithful Christians must practice slavery to be in the will of God. Obedient slaves are happy slaves.”

Think about it.  Why don’t we still practice slavery?  Why?

Slavery is wrong.  It is dehumanizing, unjust,  inequitable, immoral and inconsistent with the Golden Rule.  It does not matter that the bible commands slaves to obey their masters – we all know that slavery is wrong, wrong, wrong.

How do we know that slavery is wrong when the bible does not tell us so?  Answer that question and you will also understand that it doesn’t matter how many times the bible commands women to obey and submit to their husbands – we know instinctively that the subordination of women is just plain wrong. For the same reasons that we dismiss and ignore the bible commands for slaves to obey their masters, we should also feel free to disregard the bible commands for wives to obey their husbands.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum.  Comments are also open below.

Read all posts by Vyckie Garrison.

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by Vyckie Garrison

“Does God Hate Women?” author, Ophelia Benson recently shared a note which was posted on Reddit written by a young patriarch describing his “biblical marriage.”

 As Bible-believing Baptists who hold to reformed theology, X and I believe that God is sovereign in choosing who will or will not believe in him, having chosen his people before the foundation of the world (see Ephesians 1), and that his selection is unbreakable and irresistible. If marriage is to mirror this principle, we believe that a woman has no right to select a husband for herself, but that she is to be chosen by a man and marriage is to be an unbreakable arrangement between the man and her father. Based on this reasoning, we have shunned a standard proposal and wedding ceremony, because if I had asked her to marry me (which I did not) then I would have given her the decision to marry me rather than selecting her and taking her myself. Furthermore, if we had exchanged conventional marriage vows, our union would have been based on X’s will and consent, which are not Biblical factors for marriage or salvation. Instead, I asked X’s father for his blessing in taking her hand in marriage. When he gave his blessing, X and I considered ourselves to be unbreakably betrothed in the sight of God. While we had initially intended to consummate our marriage after today’s symbolic ceremony, we instead did so secretly after private scripture reading, prayer, and mutual foot-washing.

PZ Meyers commented on Pharyngula, “It made my skin crawl.”  Yeah – mine too.

As Quiverfull Believers dig ever-deeper into their Bibles in search of the truly “biblical model” for godly marriage, ideas about courtship and “betrothal” are becoming increasingly savage and brutish.  It would seem unlikely that Courtship standards could get even more oppressive considering that Christian notions of “biblical match-making” have already been taken to outrageous extremes.

Josh Harris started a back-to-bible-living revolution among Christian young people when he advocated the courtship model in his book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. What – no dating for teens? Now that’s a radical concept! As “bible believers” jumped on the bandwagon of father-led pairing of qualified young men and women in serious pursuit of marriage, popular Quiverfull patriarchs took biblical courtship to a new level of paternal domination as they pointed to Old Testament examples of “betrothal” as the very best way to ensure the future success of Christian marriage.

Jonathan Lindvall, teaching “God’s Design for Youthful Romance,” cited the betrothal of Matthew and Maranatha Chapman as an ideal example of a “true romantic betrothal.”  Lindvall describes the crazy-making process by which Maranatha’s father, Stan Owen, orchestrated a year-long betrothal which was to be a “demonstration of Christ’s coming for His bride” based on the parable of the Ten Virgins.

Mr. Owen still faithfully directed both Matthew and Maranatha to avoid physical affection until their wedding. He particularly cautioned them to guard against impatience. Especially since Maranatha was rather young, their wedding might be quite a long way off yet. Though they hoped that the time would be soon, they nevertheless resigned themselves to the real possibility that the wedding could be a matter of years down the road, much like Jacob’s seven year betrothal to Rachel (Gen. 29:18-20). Yet they were both naturally quite motivated and energetically prepared in every way they could, as quickly as they could, just in case the wedding should suddenly be announced.

Not to be outdone in the “biblical examples of courtship and marriage” department, Michael Pearl counseled his daughter, Shoshanna, to forego a state-issued marriage license:

None of my daughters or their husbands asked the state of Tennessee for permission to marry. They did not yoke themselves to government. It was a personal, private covenant, binding them together forever—until death. So when the sodomites have come to share in the state marriage licenses, which will eventually be the law, James and Shoshanna will not be in league with those perverts. And, while I am on the subject, there will come a time when faithful Christians will either revoke their state marriage licenses and establish an exclusively one man-one woman covenant of marriage, or, they will forfeit the sanctity of their covenant by being unequally yoked together with perverts. The sooner there is such a movement, the sooner we will have a voice in government. Some of you attorneys and statesmen reading this should get together and come up with an approach that will have credibility and help to impact the political process.

Yeah … that’s “bible-believing” extremism for you – and it’s not enough to practice these ideals for themselves and their children, “biblical family values” must become the law of the land.

As a former Quiverfull believer, I used to get excited at the prospect of searching the Word and discovering greater “truths” and biblical principles – the implementation of which would bring my family increasingly closer to a truly God-honoring model of marriage and Christian home life.  At the same time, I secretly dreaded what the Lord might reveal to me next through Lindvall’s Bold Christian Living, Pearl’s No Greater Joy, and other “biblical family living” ministries.  Already I was obediently and faithfully having baby after baby to the obvious detriment of my health, submitting to my abusive husband, homeschooling, homebirthing, home churching, foregoing all government assistance including potentially life-saving health insurance and food stamps, cutting off all outside relationships with family and friends who were not like-minded Quiverfull Believers …. honestly, the regimentation and isolation made for a harsh and demanding life.

“What’s next?” I frequently wondered to myself … ‘cuz my practice of Quiverfull was not “peculiar” enough already, I guess.

I am so grateful that I got out before I had a chance to “discover” the biblical principle of a man selecting and taking a wife for himself.  I am afraid, since the idea comes straight from scripture, I very well may have gone along with my daughters’ father coming to an “unbreakable arrangement” for a “godly” young man to “take them” in marriage.

Ugh.  It is a trap – a life-sucking quagmire – to attempt to order one’s family life according to a worldview which teaches that whatever is in the bible is necessarily “biblical” and normative for all times and all cultures.  I dread the thought that today’s Quiverfull daughters are now being taught that a young Christian woman “has no right to select a husband for herself, but that she is to be chosen by a man” and given no decision in the convenant agreement between her father and the man who will be taking her.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

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On fundamentalist counterculture & juvenile black market adoption fantasies …

by Vyckie Garrison @ No Longer Quivering

Do you remember when it first dawned on you that your relatives are all a bunch of crackpots and weirdos?  Seems like I was around 8 or 9 — my mother worked all night in the casinos and slept most of the day, leaving me alone to protect my naïve older sister from the depraved advances of Mom’s alcoholic boyfriends and worry about my big brother’s drug addiction. I couldn’t count on my grandparents to help — they were too preoccupied with their own divorce, dating, and remarriage dramas.

“Holy sugar,” I thought to myself, “these people are seriously messed up!”

That’s about the time the fantasies began.  My home, I imagined, was a three-ring circus — and my relatives were the freaks and the clowns.  In my daydreams, I was not really one of them.  No — surely, I was of aristocratic origin.  My REAL family were royalty in a faraway Kingdom and I was born a beloved Princess in a fancy castle with many servants and my own Fairy Godmother.  Somehow, I’d been separated from my blood kin as an infant — I was captured by gypsies and sold in a black market adoption — that’s how I ended up being raised by this group of crazies!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ABC’s Primetime Nightline recently aired a segment featuring the Gil & Kelly Bates family — a conservative, Evangelical mega-family of twenty.  The Bates, who are close friends of JimBob & Michelle Duggar of TLC’s “19 and Counting” fame, hold to the extreme fundamentalist ideals of the growing “Quiverfull movement.”

During the one-hour special, Gil, Kelly, and their children explained the family’s lifestyle which, to all modern appearances, represents a throw back to the imaginary 60′s-style “Leave It to Beaver” family combined with strict, Victorian Era sexual mores and the atavistic gender roles of ancient goat-herders. The Bates eschew all forms of birth control and adhere to the marriage model of the biblical Patriarchs — with Gil as family leader and Kelly as submissive “help meet.”  Kelly and the girls adorn themselves in modest, hand-sewn dresses, while Gil and his clean-cut sons teach bible study and participate in local Tea Party politics.

Aren’t they lovely?  Don’tcha wanna be just like them?

I sure did!  I left home at 15 and embarked on a quest to recreate my long-lost perfect, happy family — my REAL courtly family, where I truly belonged.  After a false start involving marriage at 16, a baby at 19, and divorce after seven years of abuse rivaling the most astonishing freak show acts Mom’s circus family had ever performed — I remarried, found a “bible-believing” church, and worked hard within the Quiverfull counterculture to implement the best of the best biblical family values into our home life.  I had six more children. I homebirthed, homeschooled, and home-churched. I submitted to my husband and joyfully sacrificed my time, energy and talents to build him up and help him to succeed.  I published a “pro-life, pro-family” Christian family newspaper to inform and encourage other Christians to defend “Traditional Family Values.”

In 2003, we were honored as Family of the Year at the Nebraska Family Council’s “Salt & Light” awards. I’d finally made it! I had built my own Magic Kingdom where my husband reigned as King and I was his Queen, the children were our loyal subjects and we could all live happily ever after …

Like the Bates family, we were the perfect picture of the “biblical family values” fantasy — an idealistic vision of big, happy families: devoted husband and wife surrounded by a passel of respectful, obedient children — we were all sweetness and smiles.  It is this mesmerizing dream world which energizes and motivates Tea Party Republicans like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann to work tirelessly to implement the “pro-family” theocratic agenda into every aspect of American society: not only in politics, but religion, family, media, education, business and entertainment.

Fundamentalist Christians are convinced that contemporary American society is the World’s Most Spectacular Display of hideously mutated, diseased and anomalous freaks.  ”Step right up folks!” the preacher yells, “and witness a grotesque parade of ho-mo-sex-uals, lesbians, Wiccans, radical feminists, godless liberals, secular humanists, and …” (congregation gasps!) “Muslim extremists!!”

Simultaneously fascinated and horrified, respectable religious parents scramble to shield their innocent children’s eyes and ears from the depravity and corruption of “The World.”  They homeschool and form special Chastity and Creation Science clubs designed to insulate and isolate their vulnerable young from the miscreants and most depraved elements of popular culture.

It’s completely understandable and normal for preteens to create imaginary worlds — their own private, safe hideout where they can dream of nobility, of rising above and doing so much better than the clowns running the Big Top’s Museum of Mutantstrosities.  The grown-ups watch in silent, knowing amusement as kids disavow their relatives as “psychos” and “bozos.”

But when otherwise responsible, Christian adults in recent years set out on a mission to create a radically distinct way of life based on “biblical family values,” the resultant countercultural movement known as “Quiverfull” has become an all-too-real Hall of Mirrors horror show.

In my own life, perpetual pregnancies destroyed my health, and my indiscriminate acquiescence to my husband’s every whim transformed him from a loving father into a tantrum-throwing tyrant. Burnout and disillusionment led to abuse, neglect, family disintegration and a particularly nasty divorce.

When the dust settled, I took a good look at myself in the mirror.  I could no longer deny the strong family resemblance — I saw my mother in my own face staring back at me.  After all those years of fighting and denial, I had to finally accept the fact that I really am one of them — I belong to these crazy people.  I, too, am a conspicuous oddity — a bizarre spectacle and an embarrassment to my own noble children.

Funny thing is … these days, I don’t mind so much being associated with my misfit clan of circus freaks.  Life experience has given me perspective and a deep appreciation for the inevitable realities and desperate circumstances which deformed and mutated Mom and the rest of us into shocking and extraordinary creatures worthy of society’s disquietude and awe.

Black market adoption fantasies and youthful idealism are important wayposts on the journey to adulthood.  Rebellion against blatant injustice, hypocrisy, moral compromise and the myriad of other common grown-up failure is a healthy manifestation of a kid’s personal power and strong moral agency.  Arrogant and annoying, yes — but in moments of truth we have to admit, the kid’s got a point.

Society sucks.  Bigotry, racism, inequity, corruption, greed, depravity, malevolence, and all manner of evil abound. Let’s just face the fact that in many ways, the contemporary American social and political scene has devolved to become the World’s Greatest Freak Show.

No wonder Tea Party Patriot families like the Bates and the Duggars escape into their own personal fantasyland.

Ironically, with maturity comes humility — along with a profound sense of connection and belonging to that wacky bunch of buffoons who share our DNA.  We see our people with new eyes.  Sure, Grandma’s got a beard and Uncle Stan is a charlatan — Aunt Betty’s such a lunatic, she may as well have two heads.  But in the end, they’re all we’ve got.  That perfect, royal family whom we imagined searched frantically for us for years and never gave up hope that one day we would return to our true home?  They’re not real.  Cousin Roger is real — never mind that he doesn’t have a lick of sense and the only thing he’s good for is shoveling elephant shit — he’s the one who truly understands you, knows all about you, and loves you anyway.

Tea Party family values are the fundamentalists’ desperate attempt to deny their own imperfections, vulnerability, and their inescapable mortality.  Sure it hurts that they look down on us regular folk — those of us who make no pretense of actually having our acts together — they avoid being seen out in public with us, they disown us, and they shrink away in fear of catching our cooties.

But take heart — perhaps they’ll grow up.

I did.  Not saying I don’t still sometimes get all starry-eyed and visionary over the possibility of influencing our society for the better — I’ve got a bit of spunk left in me and I’m doing what I can to stick it to The Man.  But I no longer think of myself as qualitatively different or “other” than all the rest of my fellow human beings — my family.  My freakish, crazy, wonderfully imperfect people.

I don’t believe in God anymore, but I still have faith.  I have hope and I trust that collectively, we’re all gonna make it — we are learning from our mistakes and growing more compassionate.  Our shared experiences make us wiser and I have confidence that better times are just ahead.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum! Comments are also open below.

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