by Calulu 
Reading through the many different stories at NLQ of how we were enmeshed in the unhealthy lifestyle that is patriarchy, fundamentalism, quiverful, dominionism, evangelism, name your ism, has led me to wonder why we all so readily embraced that which was so clearly illogical and dangerous. There must be something in us that went off in that direction that’s significantly different than the average person that likes regular movies and beer plus other forbidden things in our old religious lives. This isn’t about those that were raised in the life. Growing up to emulate your parents is perfectly understandable, be your parent Charlie Manson or Billy Graham. I’m talking about those of us that willingly signed on as adults, who should have known better in the first place. I did notice during my own frustrating years toiling in fundigelical land that the truest bluest believers seem to have some quirk or oddness. It usually didn’t show at first but once you delved deeper you could discern some brokenness inside. Significant brokenness. Like they were using their extreme flavor of God to plug some holes filled with deep neediness. Like a drug.
Submission
Debunking the Fourteen Basic Needs of a Marriage: Introduction
by Incongruous Circumspection
I will be quoting Bill Gothard’s material in this text style and my response will be in the normal text:Bill Gothard has published a manual on how a wife should meet her husband’s seven basic needs, as well as how a husband should meet his wife’s. As you’ll see, the latter part, directed at the husband, is highly disingenuous because, according to Bill Gothard, a marriage relationship is skewed completely toward the man. The wife is only a cheerleading, supposedly willing, party.As Bill is notorious for, he takes anything he can find in the Bible to support any point he dreams up, disregarding the context, the era, even the writer’s style, etc., and sandwiches it in with his unique, sleight-of-hand, wording to numb your mind into believing he knows what he is talking about.
The unsuspecting reader may look at Bill’s words as a sort of optional guidebook that might work for some and not others. I will prove to you that this is not the case. Bill makes it very clear that, if a woman does not follow his directions to the letter, she is a fool. Worse yet, she is a horrible wife.
Finally, why are there not 8 basic needs? Or 16.5 of them? We’ll never know how Bill finds his “rhemas” as he calls them. We can only look at what he gives us and blow his theories out of the water. You will find that much of my commentary will be decidedly personal, but that’s just fine. Why? Because Bill makes the assumption that he is speaking for all men, and last I checked, I am a member of “all men”.Now, let’s begin with a look into Bill’s introduction to the Seven Basics Needs of a Husband and Wife.
Your spouse has many needs. Even if he or she is not consciously aware of all of these needs, when they are unmet, your spouse will exhibit sorrow, confusion, and frustration.
This is a setup. It is a very effective tactic to come out at the beginning of any “new truth” and state that the receiver of that truth may not even be aware of the need for it. By saying this, any person who wants to “debunk” the message, as I am doing, can be easily dismissed as ignorant, or even better, accused of willfully denying what is obvious truth – obvious because Bill Gothard says so. Thus, if I say that I don’t need my wife to meet my basic needs, as laid out by Bill, the author would state that I am simply unaware of my basic needs and, more importantly, the correct process or person to have those needs met.Then Bill polishes off this introduction by proving to the reader that spousal sorrow, confusion, and frustration are symptoms of not following his formulas that will come later. This isn’t new though. All “how-to” manuals begin this way. They sneakily position one or many common human emotions as being negative, and then hit you with the reason for that emotion – the reason being a common trait in society, as well. Bill is a master at this.
Justice is No Lady: Chapter 10 My Right to Be Heard
By Tess Willoughby
Nate got another partner almost immediately. He found her on a Christian dating site. Patty had money from her millionaire father and a big house paid for by the government salary of her estranged husband. Nate had told me that remarriage for me was unbiblical, but he found a loophole in Scripture and told the children that he and Patty were already married in God’s eyes. God having spoken, Nate moved into Patty’s house and put our marital home up for rent.
Nate wrote me a letter warning that if I did not “come to terms” (give him full custody of the children), he would hold a big yard sale and sell off everything in the house that belonged to me and the kids. He had the right to do this, having been awarded the entire contents of the house by the courts. The letter specifically mentioned a silver tray that my grandparents had given us as a wedding present. The toys, costly and old-fashioned and ordered from catalogs, had been my parents’ birthday and Christmas gifts to the children. The kids had left behind probably two thousand dollars’ worth of toys–$300 in large hand-carved wooden blocks alone. Nate sold them all, except for a few that he informed us he would keep at Patty’s house for “when the children come home.” Nate sold or gave to Goodwill the 150 books in my personal library and the children’s library.
Divorce as Salvation
By Sierra
Growing up fundamentalist, I heard endless tirades about the importance of having a set of heterosexual parents. My mother was to be my example of submission, selflessness and homemaking. My father was to be my protector, modeling the role of my future husband. I’ll say more about some of the problems with this model in a future post.
I was taught that children needed both a feminine and a masculine parental figure, that the traits of each would “balance” us somehow (even though I was expected to grow up 100% feminine). The worst possible sin against one’s children was to entertain the thought of divorcing one’s spouse.
When I was 13, my parents divorced. It was awesome.
I’m not kidding. You know why? Here’s what preceded the divorce: My father being absentee for the first few years of my life. He actually slept in the car to avoid my cries as a baby at night. Then, when I hit puberty, he decided to get involved. This meant a series of endless lectures about how boys were faithless lechers and would abandon me, pregnant, in the middle of a parking lot, if I so much as held their hands. He also began to point out anything I was wearing that made me look “busty” or “developed,” which made me want to crawl under a rock and saw off my breasts with a kitchen knife.
His demeanor was rigid and authoritarian, then excessively affectionate. This meant that I never knew whether confiding him would result in a cold rebuke or a hug. He once shoved me off his lap and said, “Go away, little girl, you’re bothering me.” I thought he was joking, so I climbed back up. He shoved me away, hard. I was eight years old. My father also modeled the selfishness and lechery he told me were inherent in all men. He ridiculed my mother for her small breasts and once mistakenly picked up one of my bras from the laundry pile and made fun of it, thinking it was hers. He leered at every woman in high heels who crossed our path in public. His office was plastered with pornography. He verbally abused my mother for refusing to cut her hair or wear makeup, telling her that it was her duty as a wife to be sexy for him when he wanted it. It turns out that he really wanted to be able to show her off to other men. He told my mother and me that he was humiliated to take us to the beach in our church garb (I was humiliated to wear the church garb, but shaming us only reinforced our convictions that we should). He grew jealous of my mother’s commitment to her church, and insisted that she have dinner on the table for him at 6:00 every night, which meant no going to evening church services. To save my mother the indignity of being commanded, “Coffee, woman,” I began filling the coffeepot and plugging it in before the meal started. My strategy only got “Coffee, daughter,” addressed to me. He would stand over me, micromanaging the dishes I washed, though he never himself scrubbed a dish at all, or even pushed in his chair.
Before the divorce, my father began gaslighting my mother, telling her that she was stupid and incompetent and that he was doing her a favor by staying with her. Broken down under the weight of her marriage, my mother began to frantically confess all of her sins – including an ancient sin she believed she’d committed against him in the early years of their marriage. She asked his forgiveness. He slapped her across the face. He blamed her for ruining her life. I heard this, and wanted to beg God to kill him already and spare us. But I knew that was wrong, so I didn’t. Instead, I wrote him one of fifteen angry letters disowning him as a parent, and then burned it in the bathroom sink.
Then, to spite her, he took a mistress. This mistress was literally a prostitute, with a daughter my age. He would stay up all night, using the computer in my bedroom to chat with her online. In frustration, I (then 12) emailed her the message “LEAVE MY DAD ALONE.” I was promptly punished and harangued for not “thinking about others’ feelings.” He moved in with her before the divorce went through, and promptly spent all his money buying things for her and her daughter that we had never had. I was glad to be rid of him, but he still showed up once a week to demand one-on-one time with me.
Then there were the little isolated incidents. Once, he told me that he had the right to inspect my naked body anytime to “observe my development.” I told him he had no such right without my permission, and he responded that, as his daughter, I belonged to him and he could do what he liked with me. Nothing further came of it, but I felt constantly insecure afterwards and began locking my door when I went to sleep.
And there was the temper. He could be reduced to screaming rage, object-breaking and vicious belittling without any provocation. I once had to literally beg him, sobbing on my knees, not to hit me after I disobeyed him. He only hit me once, but I knew his potential. He collected guns and knives, and I had a vivid imagination.
The divorce came from him. My mother didn’t accept it, since nothing could undo wedding vows once spoken. She did not, however, contest it legally. There was no property dispute, because by this time we had already had to sell everything to stay alive. His income was being poured into the pockets of his mistress. In short order, we lost our house and all the things in it. We had to give away our dog and move into the basement of my mother’s parents. My mother was devastated and shamed. I was weathered but grateful that at least we didn’t have to live with him anymore.
Both of us fell into a deep depression, having washed up where my mother began her life, isolated from our friends by a two-hour drive and bereft of an income (because my mother had stayed at home to homeschool me). I socialized exactly once a week, and worked the rest of it.
A few months after the dust settled, my pastor made the Second Stupidest Comment to Ever Be Made to Me. It was this:
“Sierra is depressed because she needs her father. She is vulnerable without the head of the household to ward off evil spirits. She has no one to protect her from ungodly boys. She won’t admit it, but deep down she misses him. You must pray that he will return to you.”
The 14 Basic Needs of Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar
by Hopewell
Recently on “19 Kids and Counting,” Michelle Duggar was seen giving women a handout on the “7 Basic Needs of a Husband,” a document produced and distributed by the Advanced Training Institute –the Duggar’s “homeschool group.” She also gave out the group’s “Character Qualities” chart, which I discussed in an earlier post, The 49 Character Qualities of the Duggars.
The 14 Basic Needs of Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar: How they meet each other’s 7 Basic Needs:
7 Basic Needs of a Husband:
- A man needs a wife who is loyal and supportive: Obviously, Jim-Bob picked the right wife! Michelle has been there with him, supportive to the max, thru years of small businesses, scrimping and buying used and saving the difference to achieve his (well, their) dream for their family. She’s put up with a two bedroom house on a car lot keeping 4 or 5 small children quiet while Daddy made a car sale. She’s sold cars herself with babies underfoot, gone out to tow cars on her own and kept all the family fed, clothed and healthy throughout it all. That was the early years.
Today Michelle is beside Jim-Bob at every possible moment—even on the Santorum Campaign trail when possible. While she has Grandma Duggar and the big girls to take up much of the day-to-day running of the family, caring for Jim-Bob is her responsibility and she obviously takes it seriously. Her rapt attention when he is speaking shows her love for him.
- A man needs a wife who honors his leadership: Michelle honors her husband by taking any opportunity to praise him as a father, speaking lovingly of love of family fun, of making a careful response to problems and of modeling the behavior he wants to see in his children. She openly admires his vision for the family and his business acumen. When he is speaking she is completely focused on him.
- A man needs a wife who develops inward and outward beauty Michelle has kept herself in very good shape considering all the years of pregnancy she’s endured. She honors her husband’s preference for long hair at an age when most wives have long since cut theirs for convenience. She maintains her composure in difficult situations and tries always to speak in a loving voice. She laughs easily and her smile at that time is lovely. She is a very outgoing lady.
- A man needs a wife who will make appeals, not demands. While we cannot know what goes on when the cameras are off, it does not appear that Michelle is a very demanding of her husband. She does not complain about him dragging home an antique harp or buying a new bus—she’s used to his whims and trusts his business sense. She knows him well and lives easily and happily with him.
Snipped! – Part 3: Marital Problems
by Incongruous Circumspection
When I was about 7 years old, my parents realized that they were having marital problems. My father knew there was a problem long before this, but he was now ready to do something about it. They began the process of looking for a marriage counselor. They found many. They went to many. But it was always the same song and dance.
The marriage counselor would begin by getting the story of their marriage from both parties and then begin speaking to my father about what he could do to improve himself. My dad, being a humble and loving gentleman, was more than happy to take sole ownership of the repairing of the marriage, but knew that doing this would only exacerbate the problem.
Let me explain…
My mother was abusive to Dad. I remember one day, I walked into the living room and Mama told Dad to turn around. Apparently he had done something naughty. He obliged and she commenced slapping him on the back. It seemed to go on forever. I don’t remember how it ended, but I do remember Dad just standing there, calmly, letting her blow off her steam.
She would regularly kick him out of the house and not allow him back until he apologized to her liking. One cold winter night, he decided that apologizing would be the wrong thing to do, being he had done nothing wrong. He walked two blocks away to a local bank and climbed up behind their lighted sign in the alcove of the bank’s entryway. The fluorescent lights kept him warm through the night. I don’t know if he came home and apologized but, from experience with Mama, she more than likely lost interest in the punishment and let him back in the door.:
Carefully Scripted Lives – The Real Reality of the Duggar Family “Blessings”
by Libby Anne
I can’t say how often I’ve heard ordinary Americans defend Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their popular TLC television show, 19 Kids and Counting. “I wouldn’t choose to have nineteen kids,” they say, “but if they can manage it, who am I to question their choice?” “The kids look happy and healthy,” they say, “look how polite and well mannered they are.” I hear these comments and I just have to sigh.
First of all, I want to pout out that I would have concerns about the Duggars even if they were your ordinary family plus seventeen extra children. For one thing, there is no way any two parents can give nineteen children the individual attention and time they need. It’s just not feasibly possible. The Duggars like to say that “love multiplies,” but the thing is, time doesn’t. And then, of course, there is the population issue.
But it’s not these things I’m going to discuss here. The fact is, the Duggars aren’t just your ordinary family plus seventeen extra children. There is a great deal of editing that goes into making TV, and one thing that gets edited out are the Duggars’ religious beliefs and their beliefs about child rearing. There is much, much more going on here than you see on TV.
I know this because I grew up in a family very much like the Duggars. We had a third fewer kids and we didn’t have a TV show, but otherwise it was about the same. Our beliefs were nearly identical to theirs, as was our way of living. When I look at the older Duggar girls, I see myself. I was them. With that in mind, I’m going to take a moment to outline nine specific concerns I have about the Duggars.
1. Isolation and Indoctrination
The Duggar childern are homeschooled in part in order to shelter them from bad influences, i.e. from other kids and teachers who hold different beliefs or live different sorts of lives. The Duggar kids don’t have friends who aren’t pre-approved by their parents. In fact, the Duggar kids aren’t even involved in church activities – their family participates in a “home church” where they and several other like-minded families get together on Sunday mornings and worship together.
Furthermore, even the older Duggar children are not allowed to go anywhere without having an “accountability partner,” i.e. another sibling, to keep tabs on them. When one of the older boys volunteered at the local fire department, one of his sisters always went with him to keep an eye on him and make sure he didn’t get in trouble.
Another reason the Duggar children are homeschooled is in order to teach them “God’s truth.” This means that they use religious textbooks, creationist science curriculum, etc. I understand that we have this thing called “freedom of religion” in our country, but I also believe that children have a right to an education, and teaching children one side of everything becomes indoctrination rather than education.
Not surprisingly, the Duggars’ computers have internet access limited to about seventy “approved” websites. To get unlimited internet access, the children – even the older ones – have to get a password from their mother and then have another sibling sitting by them watching the screen as they surf the web to make sure they stay out of trouble. The main reason for this is likely to keep the children from viewing internet pornography, but it also helps ensure that they don’t get subversive information or other viewpoints.
2. Children raising children
If you think Michelle is the one raising all of those kids, think again. Those older daughters, some of them already adults, are the ones who are actually doing the majority of the cooking, cleaning, and childcare. They are, in effect, raising their younger siblings.
Now I’m not saying Michelle sits back and watches soap operas while the kids work, but rather that with that many children there is simply too much for her to do on her own. She doesn’t have the time or energy to raise her children without her older daughters’ help. And fortunately, because the Duggars homeschool, those older daughters are available to help 24/7.
The Duggars have this thing called the “buddy system.” When each new child is born, that child is assigned to one of the older children. In this way, the older children are responsible for dressing, feeding, and even educating the younger children. Michelle hadthis to say about the buddy system:
This house would not work if we didn’t have the buddy system. The older children mentor the younger ones. They help them with their little phonics lessons and games during the day, help them practice their music lessons. They will play with them or help them pick out the color of their outfit that they want to wear that day, and just all of those types of things.
I’m all for siblings helping each other and playing together, but this goes way further than this. This is siblings raising each other. And as we’ll see, this means a lot of sacrifice for the older siblings doing the raising.
NLQ FAQ: Does Someone Always Have To Be In Charge? Part 2
NO LONGER QUIVERING FAQ: DOES SOMEONE ALWAYS HAVE TO BE IN CHARGE? PART 2: HIERARCHY – ORIGINS, THE TRINITY AND MARRIAGE
by Kristen Rosser ~ aka KRwordgazer
God has ordained authority structures in every area of life. In every enterprise someone has to be in charge– otherwise there will be anarchy and chaos. Even within the Godhead there is authority: God the Son submitted to the will of the Father. Doesn’t a solidly biblical worldview require a chain of command within the Christian family? A family is not a democracy, after all. In saying husbands should not be in charge of the home, aren’t you just attacking one aspect of God’s divine plan for authority?
In Part 1 we examined what the Bible actually teaches about authority, which we defined as “the power or right to command.” God in the Old Testament simply does not appear to be interested in setting up God-ordained human authority structures, but rather prefers to raise up individual, Spirit-led leaders who act in God’s authority, not as part of a top-down chain of command. And though the New Testament teaches submission to earthly institutions of human authority, its focus is on the new creation kingdom of God, in which hierarchies of human authority are eliminated in favor of equal brother-sister relationships. In fact, though it can’t be denied that some areas of human life here on earth need some form of authority structure, there is simply no biblical justification for the concept that authority structures are ordained of God to cover every area of life, or that God has determined that there will be chaos if there isn’t “someone in charge” of every sphere of human relationship.
So where did the idea come from, that God has ordained top-down chains of command, both in earthly and in spiritual relationships, with human authority structures in every area of life?
Plato (429-347 BC) was possibly the greatest of the Greek philosophers. He conceived of the nature of reality to consist first of ideal “Forms,” and then objects/beings which were types of each ideal. Plato conceived of the Form of Absolute Good as the ultimate, universal object of human desire, and this Idea of the Good became synonymous with God in the writings of his student, Aristotle. In order to be the ultimate Good, God would, in Absolute generosity, also give existence to every other possible good thing. Aristotle then arranged all creatures into a graded scale according to how closely they approached “perfection.” The Neo-Platonists, a group of Greek philosophers in the 3rd-5th centuries AD, who expanded Plato and Aristotle’s ideas, particularly in terms of religion and spirituality, developed this notion further. Macrobius, a Neo-Platonist writing in the early fifth century AD, wrote:
“[T]he attentive observer will discover a connection of parts, from the Supreme God down to the last dregs of things, mutually linked together and without a break. And this is Homer’s golden chain, which God, he says, bade hang down from heaven to earth.” Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, Harper & Brothers (1936) p. 63.
This idea of a graded, hierarchical creation came to be known as the “Great Chain of Being.” Alan Myatt, in his paper “On the Compatibility of Ontological Equality, Hierarchy and Functional Distinctions,” writes:
“As Greek philosophical notions were appropriated by early Christian apologists in their defense of the faith, it [the idea of the Great Chain of Being] eventually became entwined with the theology of the church and set the agenda for its theory of society. . . In the Middle Ages, this concept translated into the division of society into ‘Three Estates,’ each stratified according to the Chain of Being. The first estate consisted of church officials beginning with the pope. . . The second estate included the ruling classes of kings, nobility and knights, while the peasants and merchants made up the third estate. Any violation of the established authority within each estate was seen as a threat to the creation order, and subversive to the state and to the stability of Christian culture. Any attempt to leave one’s place in the chain was therefore an act of rebellion. It is critical to note that in the family, there was a hierarchical ordering of husband, wife, children and servants. Each was subordinate to the previous due to their immutable places in the Chain of Being.”
By Elizabethan times (1500s), the Chain of Being had become “one of those accepted commonplaces, more often hinted at or taken for granted than set forth.” (Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, Vintage Books, page 26.) The Elizabethan philosophers and theologians envisioned not just a hierarchical gradation of beings, but a “primacy” within each specific class of beings, such as “the dolphin among fishes, the eagle among birds, the lion among beasts, the emperor among men.” Ibid, p. 29-30. This conception of hierarchy among the animals is never hinted at in the biblical creation story— but it became part of Christian/Western thought through the infusion of pagan philosophy. Even now we still think of the lion as “the king of beasts.”
Another “commonplace” assumption of Elizabethan times was that “the order in the state duplicates the order of the macrocosm.” Ibid, p. 88. The Homily of Obedience written in 1547 stated,
“In the earth God has assigned kings, princes with other governors under them, all in good and necessary order. The water above is kept and raineth down in due time and season. The sun, moon, stars, rainbow, thunder, lightening, clouds, and all birds of the air do keep their order.” Ibid, p. 88.
Thus, building upon Greek pagan thought, the idea of a hierarchical order of authority in every strata of human relations, based upon the order of creation, became infused with Christianity to the point where no one even thought to question it. This legacy became part of our Western conception of the universe, which still exists today. Alan Myatt notes that a hierarchical understanding of the universe is the tendency in eastern systems of thought as well, “so universal in human society that it could be said to be the default mode of human existence.” He adds that in our churches today, “Traditional hierarchical biblical interpretation has been filtered through the lens of a cultural vision of human relations compromised by a pagan worldview [which] effectively blinded it to the egalitarian implications of the biblical text.” In other words, hierarchical thinking is so natural for humans, and so much a part of our Western mentality, that we have been reading it back into the biblical texts ever since the end of the Age of the Apostles.
Michelle says, Never enough babies!
