Patriarchy

NLQ Open Thread: Dear Woman

April 13, 2011
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The recently-released video, “Dear Woman,” is based on the “Manifesto for Conscious Men,” a collectively-written document from a number of men who feel that a new definition of masculinity can help redress the imbalances of patriarchy and welcome a new era of loving appreciation between men and women. A group of these men speak from the heart and offer a collective apology, on behalf of their gender, for past abuses of men against women.

Justice is No Lady: Chapter 6 ~ In Which Nate Takes Up Racquetball

April 12, 2011
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Warning: This story series contains descriptions of physical abuse.

by Defendant Rising

I tried to conceal my misery, fatigue, and desperation from the members of our new church. We had not been there very long when people began to notice how spaced-out and jumpy Tess Willoughby was. Our pastor, Mike, and our assistant pastor, Randy, both expressed concern about me.

I was pregnant for the seventh time, and I dreaded another pregnancy, birth, and recovery. The clandestine feedings of Matt had delayed this pregnancy—this baby would be two whole years younger than Matt, a personal record. Matt’s birth in 1998 had been in the hospital—my first hospital delivery—because Nate had health insurance through the law office and hospital birth was cheapest. The bright lights and fetal monitor frightened me, and the labor, though not long, was excruciating. I hemorrhaged following the birth and recovery was slow. Two years’ spacing of babies was not enough after so many babies so close together, and I knew it. I was not healed. This pregnancy would be a rough go.

By the third month carrying Abigail, I was sexually sidelined again. Nate complained and quoted Scripture at first, then mercifully seemed to lose interest—not that he ever had much interest in sex where I was concerned. I might hemorrhage after the birth, but at least I was sexually off the hook and wouldn’t be hit with those lightning-bolt cramps.

At about five months’ gestation with Abi, Nate made friends with one of his clients, whose name was Trey. Trey was into racquetball, and Nate announced that he was going to start playing racquetball with Trey a couple of nights a week. I was pleased that Nate had a hobby other than web-surfing, and the five children and I accompanied Nate to the sporting goods store to pick out racquetball equipment.

Nate had his new sport. Bored stiff with home-schooling and unable to sing for an audience, I also itched to take up a hobby of some kind, so I laid out a small garden in the back yard. Nate announced one day that I had ruined his nice lawn with my “ugly weeds” and fired up his lawn mower. As I watched my peas, beans, and flowers fly out the back of the mower and hit the fence, something inside me died. I could not get over it. There was no Bible verse for this. There was no Scripture in this. There were no devils in my garden that needed mowing down. This was bald, capricious cruelty. And it was unprovoked. I had done or said nothing. I could not point to any guilt or failing on my part that caused Nate to kill something of mine.

That was the day I began to stop loving Nate, and began to stop blaming myself for his rottenness. It didn’t happen all at once; Nate killed my love by degrees. Throughout 1999 and 2000, my husband grew more callous than ever. There were fewer endearments coming my way—fewer “honeys” and “sweethearts.” Instead, there were insults. Besides Nate’s old standby, “frigid,” I was “Ditz,” “Klutz,” “Teeny Tits,” and “The Official Willoughby Family Buttwipe.” (Nate did not change diapers, you see.) Thankfully, Nate was not around much to hurl invective at his pregnant wife. He was on the computer more, played more racquetball, had a lot more court dates.

Family Man, Family Leader: Created to be His Help Meet – Help I’ve Created a Monster. Part 1

April 3, 2011
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by LivingForEternity

My husband and I met at work. We were both recovering from failed marriages, and were friends for a long time before we started dating. After having a failed marriage we were both determined not to let another one fail.

We had two kids within nineteen months. That was fine as we wanted several children. He worked a lot of hours so I was a very capable manager of our home. I could feed babies and fix water leaks. I did not find it necessary to ask him about every single thing I did. If something needed fixing or doing I took care of it if he wasn’t able to. We were partners. However, as the children began to approach school age I began to question whether I wanted them to go away every day. I had quit work by this time, and really loved my kids.

It was decided that I would home educate them. Both of us are college educated, and we felt confident that this would be possible. I was not into a whole bunch of character stuff. I just liked my kids and wanted to be with them. As I began to get involved in a local home school group I was introduced to some ideas I had never heard of before. I met a lot of women who were very different from me. They seemed to be so calm with their many children. They had never worked and many were not college educated.

As I said before I was very independent. I was in no way co-dependent on my husband. I was a very capable person who could take care of most anything I had to. My new “friends” saw this and sought to “help” me. One of those helps was Created to Be His Help Meet.

When Promises Become Dreams: Doing Marriage God’s Way

March 27, 2011
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by AfricaTurtle

The title of Sierra’s Post “When Dreams Become Promises” stirred thoughts in me of another Dream, of other Promises that have brought their own dose of pain and disappointment and reality into my life: Dreams of an enduring, godly marriage and the Promises I made to God and myself in order to lay hold of that dream.

I made my first promise at the age of 14. “I promise to never date a non-christian”. It was the call to action given by a speaker at the summer church camp I attended that year. I knew it was right, I knew it was what God expected of me. How can “light fellowship with darkness”? Why would I build a life with someone I couldn’t hope to spend eternity in heaven with? What a heartache that would be! What a burden to bear, to be “unequally yoked”! I knew that God wanted what was best for me. I knew I could trust him. I knew I would never “compromise” my walk with God by dating a non-Christian.

The second promise came only a few, short years later, at the age of 16. “True Love Waits” was the name of the campaign. It was pretty popular that year in various area youth groups and on a national level. I still have the card that I taped to the inside cover of my Bible that year: ““Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate, and my future children to a lifetime of purity including sexual abstinence from this day until the day I enter a biblical marriage relationship.” Signed and dated. For my 16th birthday I even asked my dad to buy me a “purity ring”, a ring I would someday give to my husband to show him how I had saved myself for him, and him alone.

Then as I went through high school and built friendships with other “like-minded” and “strong” Christians, we started talking about “casual dating”, why it wasn’t good, the emotional repercussions and so on. We really believed it was important to only consider dating someone who we believed we could actually marry. By this time I knew I had a call to foreign missions so this drastically reduced any dating “options” for me. Not too many guys I knew were interested in heading off to live in the jungles of Africa!

I believe it was also around this time that Josh Haris’ book “I Kissed Dating Good-bye” started to appear in Christian circles. I had pretty much already concluded that casual dating was not for the “mature” Christian. My father had no interest in “choosing” my spouse for me. (Not that he was unconcerned, he just always said “you’re the one that has to live with him, not me! ) So while I never committed to courtship, in the purest sense, I was, nonetheless, convinced God would lead me to the “right man” at the “right time”. This was something I was leaving in his hands. I didn’t “trust” myself with a decision this weighty, I definitely knew I needed God’s guidance, direction, and seal of approval.

Justice is No Lady: Chapter 5 ~ In Pursuit of Biblical Theology

March 25, 2011
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Warning: This story series contains descriptions of physical abuse.

by Defendant Rising

Hannah was born at home in spring of 1996. By this time, Nate had a better job at a personal injury law firm and we were able to get a three-bedroom house.

Satan must have followed us, because now there were lesbians having sex in the mailbox and Nate had no idea how the pervert porn peddlers got his name and address again.

I was still in a stupor, still worshipping my cult leader. The lights were on in my brain but no one was home. I think, however, that my brain’s doorbell started ringing in 1996, and Tess’s Good Sense began its three years of patiently knocking, waiting to be invited back in. Doubts, in huge bold type, slipped under the door and were increasingly hard to shove back out onto the doormat of my mind. Even a Branch Davidian or a card-carrying member of the Manson Family would begin to get suspicious when the porno people guessed their leader’s name and address twice.

Nate’s theology had more twists and turns than a ‘coaster at Busch Gardens. I could not keep up, and the numbers of True Christians with whom we could associate grew smaller and smaller.

By degrees, Nate became:

1. A Reformed Baptist—a Calvinist who holds that only “the elect” are predestined to be saved and he’s one of the “elect,” only Nate was the Baptist brand of God’s chosen few, as opposed to the more common Presbyterian variety.

2. A Reformed Baptist Theonomist—all of the above plus embracing Old Testament Law. Nate forbade me to serve bacon, ham, or shellfish. We wore only 100% cotton or other natural fibers.

3. A Reformed Baptist Reconstructionist—all of the above plus a belief that the Old Testament Law as given to Moses should be the one and only law of the United States. This would reconstruct America. In Mosaic Law We Trust.

4. A Reformed Baptist Reconstructionist Polygamist—ditto, with the possibility of the reconstructionist taking multiple wives, the better (and faster) to reconstruct America, my dear.

This was a bit much.

However, Nate was quick to assure me that while God would have no problem with Nate “using his freedom” to take one or more mistresses and call them wives, and while Nate had no problem with polygamy per se—he was actually pretty comfortable with the concept—I, Tess, was so loved by Nate that my husband would set aside his liberty in Christ to sleep with other women out of his great love for me.

Nate did not understand why I was not bowled over with love and gratitude. After all, “God’s Law says . . .” Look at Abraham, Isaac, David, Solomon.

NLQ FAQ: Why Do You Call Quiverfull Legalistic?

January 17, 2011
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by Kristen Rosser ~ aka: KR Wordgazer

People keep saying Quiverfull is “legalistic.” But it’s not! We don’t live the Quiverfull lifestyle as a way to win God’s favor or to earn our salvation. We do it because we love Jesus, and Jesus said that if we love Him we will keep His commandments. So long as your reason for doing what you are doing is not to earn God’s love but rather as a grateful response to His love for you ~ then it’s not legalism. Aren’t people who call us “legalistic” just being negative?

It’s true that legalism is often defined by Christians strictly in terms of whether a person is doing “works” to attain salvation or win God’s favor. As Paul said in Galatians 2:21, “I do not frustrate the grace of God, for if righteousness comes by the law, then Christ is dead in vain.” But Paul, and Jesus Himself, had more to say about legalism than this. Legalism means more than seeking to be justified by works of the law. You can love Jesus with all your heart, and you can believe that you are doing everything you do out of love for Jesus, and still be walking in legalism. In fact, a person’s very zeal to go the extra mile for God can make them especially vulnerable to legalistic practice. It’s very easy, when you want to serve God with your whole life, to listen to the myriad of voices in Christianity that say, “If you really love God with all your heart, you will do A, and B, and C. Those who don’t do these things aren’t really on fire for God.”

I know this from personal experience. When I was in college I was in a campus ministry group that became well-known for its coercive religious teachings. Our hearts were right, but many of our practices amounted to what Jesus called “binding heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and laying them on men’s shoulders.” (Matthew 23:5.)

For example, this group forbid all music, television, movies or books that did not meet its high standards of spirituality, based largely upon verses like Psalms 101:3 – “I will set nothing wicked before my eyes.” Many of us went even further and threw our television sets away or burned our books and recordings. But does “I will set nothing wicked before my eyes” actually mean, “throw out your TV”? Or was the Psalmist describing how he expressed his devotion to God, in terms of where he put his focus? In fact, the Bible itself is full of all kinds of things that, if you applied the Psalm as we did, we shouldn’t have been reading about at all! Murders and rapes and warfare and adultery are all things that come “before our eyes” when we read the Scriptures. So is just reading about these things, or watching The Ten Commandments on TV, “setting” wickedness before our eyes?

In fact, my group was going way beyond what the Bible texts actually said, to impose on ourselves all kinds of restrictions and “oughts” and “shoulds” that weren’t really there. And then patting ourselves on the back and looking down on others for not measuring up to our standards.

Steadfast Daughters in a Quivering World ~ Part 5: Confessions of a Quiverfull Hero

December 14, 2010
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[Note: this series is dedicated to Quivering Daughters by the former-Quiverfull moms at No Longer Quivering.]
by Daisy

I was only 19 when I arrived at Christianity’s door, bruised and highly impressionable and, because of my family situation, determined to do a better job of sorting out my life than my parents had done. Victims of abuse in their own homes, my parents had learned very early to dissociate from their emotions. Our home was an emotionally sterile one and, although I know now that this is not true, as as child I believed my parents did not love me. I decided that when *I* had kids, if they grew up knowing nothing else, they would know for sure that I loved them more than breathing.

I became the kind of Christian mother other Christian mothers looked up to in awe. My numerous children were admired wherever they went: smart, lively, godly and absolutely obedient. Women used to call on me and ask advice, yearning to be able to produce the kind of wonderful ‘fruit’ I was enjoying in abundance in my children. I would explain the difference between violent abuse and the loving application of ‘the rod’ which turned children’s little hearts away from sin and toward God. I would explain that I spanked sparingly and always in the context of a warm, loving expansive relationship, as part of a ritual that included healthy confession, repentance, and loving forgiveness. Anyone who knew my kids could see that following these biblical parenting principles was paying off big time.

As committed as I was to following the principles I’d come to believe would help me to raise wonderful and godly children, and as invested as I was in the outcome, I was blind to the true state of my children’s hearts. Forbidding certain, and indeed numerous, beliefs and practices which I now see were absolutely benign didn’t make my children lose their taste for them as I thought it would – it just drove them underground. In order to indulge perfectly normal, harmless preferences and cling to some semblance of separate identity, my children were forced to construct a secret inner life to which I had no access and which, of course, added considerably to their guilt burden.

Despite many, many lessons about the love and forgiveness of a generous heavenly Father, I realize now that my children were not able to reconcile the horrors of personal guilt and the fear of punishment against abstract concepts such as Christian integrity and the grace of God. In an effort to explain the kindness and extent of a grace so great it could save even sinners like us, I inadvertently buried my older children in the shallow grave of shame, self-loathing, and later, deep, deep rage. They came to be appalled at the lurking sin monster that evidently resided in their hearts, and endured an abiding self-disgust that their natural bents seemed often to be precisely what God deemed evil.

My older girls were damaged in particularly sad ways. QF standards of modesty caused them to wonder just what was so disgusting or dangerous about their bodies that they needed to keep them so carefully under wraps. Witnessing my unreasonably energetic efforts to submit to their father, my girls learned that even when a man is stupid, petty and a bully, God wants Christian women and their children to bear it with a smile and a prayer. I taught them that heroic hypocrisy was more important than honest misery. Their determination not to repeat my marital nightmare ultimately caused them to question their sexual orientation. Frustrated in the belief that the whole world was conspiring to strip them of their sense of self and squeeze them into a mold for which they were not fitted, my daughters generated lakefuls of underground anger which eventually exploded into terrifying geysers of self-destructive energy.

But I was oblivious to this at the time. I adored my children, poured my life out for them, and simply could not imagine that my best and most sincere efforts at applying what was, after all, God’s methodology might be harming them in anyway.

But it was.

Steadfast Daughters in a Quivering World ~ Part 4: Acknowledgement & Apologies

December 12, 2010
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[Note: this series is dedicated to Quivering Daughters by the former-Quiverfull moms at No Longer Quivering.]
In this part of our series, the ex-QF moms of NLQ are speaking directly to our own Quivering Daughters ~ though we’ve already said our apologies in person, we want to acknowledge the abuse we inflicted on our children publicly for their sake, though we’re doing it anonymously out of respect for their privacy.

Trigger warning: As painful it has been for us to write these confessions down ~ it may be even tougher for the Quivering Daughters who were on the receiving end of our neglect and abuse to read.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

My children were everything to me. I remember the feelings I had when I gave birth to my first child, emotions that surprised me with their ferocity. I’d spent my entire life focusing on me, more than anyone else, and yet now, after a few hours of the most horrible pain I’d ever experienced in my entire life (so much for the pain-free birthing books I’d read and committed to memory), this bloody squalling thing suddenly became the Most Important Thing On Earth.

I looked in shock at my husband, holding that baby that, up until then, I’d never even seen with my physical eyes, and, my gaze wide with amazement at the power of the raw protective urge coursing through my body, said, “I’d do anything for her. I don’t care if it is a Mack Truck on the highway—I’d willingly let it run over me if it would save her life.”

I was absolutely, totally and emphatically in love.

So when a woman from church gave me an innocent looking white book with an Amish-style family on the front cover, telling me it was the best book on raising children she’d ever read, I was interested. Two pages into it, I was hooked. Here was a man telling me that there was a sure-fire way that I could raise my child and guarantee that she would grow up to love and serve the Lord. As a devout evangelical conservative Christian, there was nothing more important to me than that. As bad as a Mack Truck accident might be, there was no “accident” or situation worse than the thought of my child not growing up to follow Christ—because that would mean an entire eternity of Hell. A Mack Truck can’t begin to compare.

So with my mother-love highly aroused and my fears fully engaged, I read, page by page, all about the way to ensure that your children are properly trained so that they will grow up to love and serve God.

If I could sum up the message that this book spoke to a young mother who deeply loved her baby, it was this:

“Momma, your baby is a sinner. He/she will try to manipulate you. Things like a child not liking a diaper change and squirming to be free are an example of a sinful will attempting to dominate you. You may think this is a little thing, but it’s huge. Why? Because if you let the child dominate you, the child will win. If the child wins, the child will learn that rebellion pays. The child will then grow up to probably reject God and go to Hell, because a rebellious heart will not want to follow God. So, Momma, never ever let your child win. Your child’s exertion of will [which includes anything you deem unacceptable---grumpiness, for example] is an act of war, and parenting is about the parent winning any and all battles of wills.”

I loved my baby. How grateful, absolutely grateful I felt, that someone was there to show me the way. Now, at last, there was hope! My baby would get the joy of growing up in a home where things were done right. She wouldn’t have to go through the things I went through! No, she was going to have a godly home where she would be trained properly, and she would grow up happy and obedient and full of love towards God. It was so exciting.

So exciting that I bought ten of those books and passed them out to my friends so that they could all join in the delight of knowing we could raise our children in a way that would ensure both their happiness now and their eternal future in Heaven.

I didn’t know. If I could go back now and re-do the way I parented that little baby, I would. Out of all the things in my life that I deeply regret, that is the most painful, the most difficult, the most horrific set of memories to revisit. Because the thing is, I love my children no less now than I did then. It’s still a ferocious mother-bear kind of love. It’s still so powerful it is palpable.

But seeing your children as enemies in a war creates a fundamental crack in the parent-child relationship. Even if there is the most powerful love in the universe on the other side of the crack, the divide is still there…including the distortion of communication it causes. I entered into a performance-based parenting model out of love for my child. But that model does not feed love, or nurture love, or engage love.