by Africaturtle

Dear Debi,

It’s been a few years now since I read your book Created to be His Help Meet for the first time.

I am married to a Mr. Command Man, as per your book’s description. My mom gave me your book for Christmas the first year I was married (six years ago now). She told me it was the best book she had read on the subject, and after reading it I was convinced it was too. (I had already read many other Christian books and periodicals on godly womanhood, including those of Mary Pride, Nancy Campbell, and a few from Vision Forum.) As a new wife and soon-to-be mother (I was pregnant within the first month after our wedding) I soaked up all of your stories and advice, expecting wholeheartedly to put these lessons into action and experience the heavenly marriage I was destined for!

May I also note that I had been very careful in choosing a godly, Christian man. Someone who welcomed the idea of children as a “blessing”, that served God wholeheartedly (we were involved in campus ministry together) and who respected my ideas and encouraged me to be a “keeper at home”, as described in Titus 2. I was sure we were destined for something great and unique as a family, and that our lives would be a testimony of faith and God’s greatness in a place that was in dire need of the light of the Gospel (we were living in Europe, not the US).

I quite naturally shared this vision with my husband and shared with him the insights I was reading and discovering through your book. I even wondered if we could get this book translated so I could share its message more easily with those around me, as the church people I knew seemed to be the first to “need” its message. I felt sorry for all the men who had grumpy, pestering wives who never appreciated them. Wives who had obviously bought into the lies of feminism and insisted on pursuing ambitions of their own through career and temporal pursuits.

I am writing to you now because I have had some problems in experiencing the “fruit” promised in your teachings. For an entire year I really tried to apply joyful, unconditional submission. I spent a second year wondering “what am I doing wrong?” and so prayed a lot and read and re-read many parts of your book. By year three I was starting to wear down in my resolve, starting to question the workings of my relationship and by year four I began to turn to other sources for insight. I am now at the beginning of year six and after coming to a point of near break-down (as in “I’m going to go crazy, literally, if something doesn’t change”) I can tell you that there are some problems with some of the assumptions in your book.

I think that given you have a “mature” husband that treats you “well”, you might have a hard time understanding where I am coming from. I too, could never have imagined what this would be like without having lived it myself. I grew up in a stable home with loving parents, who, while maybe didn’t have as “heavenly” of a marriage as you claim to have, did treat each other with love and respect.

My husband does not (love/respect me). Of course he loves me. He wouldn’t have married me otherwise. But let me talk, for a minute, about a subject that you cover at length in your book: anger. You describe two types of anger. Typical “male” anger, where it is predictable and can be avoided if you (as the wife) learn his “triggers” and avoid setting him off. The second kind is “seething anger”. This is the kind of anger that makes him bitter and suspicious of others, and is often fueled by negative comments the wife makes about others.

Let me describe a third type of anger for you, that your book left out: Abusive anger.

This kind of anger has no “reason” other than maintaining an illusion of control. This kind of anger erupts for any and every reason at any time of day or night. This kind of anger is most often hidden from anyone else but the one who is closest and dearest to the abuser. This kind of anger is like a dark cloud that blows in unannounced and does not leave until it has rained down all of its evil torment and has nothing left to “dump” on you. This kind of anger is maddening, because no matter how hard you try you can NEVER find the “trigger” and avoid it. It always “hits” you when you least expect it. Just when you start to trust again, just when you’ve dried your tears, just when you’ve gained enough strength to raise your head up out of your hole and look around “BOOM” it strikes again. This kind of anger cannot be reasoned with. There is no answer that is ever “good enough”. You are required to answer questions to which there is no “right answer” and then commanded to shut up because your answers are making the questioner mad. In this reality EVERYTHING is your fault. In fact you only possess faults. You have never done anything good or useful really. Of course that is, until the cloud lifts. Until the anger has run its course. Then you are FREE! 

Free to smile. Free to laugh. Free to forgive. Free to carry-on as if nothing ever happened. In fact you MUST smile. You MUST forgive. You MUST carry-on. Because you don’t have a choice. If you don’t he “might” just get mad at you again. Mad that you cry too much, mad that you didn’t forgive quickly enough. Mad that you don’t trust him the way you ought to. Now according to your book I’m not sure that really crosses any “bright red line” (as your husband describes it, in discussing spheres of authority).

But I can assure you it crosses many lines. It DESTROYS your soul. It destroys your confidence. It steals your peace of mind. It physically drains your energy and makes you sick. (I have a cold nearly every-other month despite eating healthy organic food.) It takes away any hope of a happy home, the one place on earth that is to be your HAVEN!! It destroys your children as well. They develop nervous habits, nightmares, and anger issues themselves (and mine are still all under the age of 5!) Now granted, he has never actually “hit” me…so I guess I can’t really “prove” he has done anything “too” bad. At least not bad enough to call the police. I mean I definitely didn’t want to involve anyone else in our problems because your book made me keenly aware of how fragile men’s egos truly are, and how important it is to ONLY speak good of them to others. So actually your book has encouraged me to become a pretty good liar. Yes everyone always asks “How are you? How are things going?” and of course I can’t say “terrible” because that would require an explanation, which would reveal “bad things about my husband”, a man everyone thinks so highly of. And so I am stuck. Stuck in silence, in heartache, with unanswered prayers.

I don’t really hold you responsible as we are all responsible for what we do with the information we are given (and plus your book only re-iterated what the Bible says, so my problem is probably more directly with the Bible) I wish you could see the dilemma your teachings create for women in my situation (and there are many, as I have come to learn!) You see the more I shared with my husband on your teachings of a wife’s duty and the workings of a Christian family, the more my husband came to expect all of that from me. The more he rubbed it in my face when I fell short of his expectations (which are “perfection”, by the way) and the more he felt “entitled” to be waited on hand and foot. It didn’t matter that I had just given birth and that he had 2 wks vacation from work…since the house was my “domain” he was not touching it! He would gripe and complain about what I was not doing and then go play basketball with friends or read a book and then chew me out for being “lazy” and yell at me at night for “keeping him up” while I was up trying to nurse the baby. You see with men like this there is no “winning”. When you “submit” to a man like this you only “feed” the monster inside. It is like giving-in to a 2-year-old who is throwing a temper tantrum. He uses anger to intimidate everyone into doing things in a way that “suits” him (and sometimes even HE doesn’t know what that means!) and the more you cooperate the more he uses it. You have understood this principle quite well in your child-rearing books so I’m kind of wondering why you don’t see that it works the same way with adults too.

Now there is also the part of your book where you cover sex. For this part, my husband has not been abusive, as in forceful. And for the fact that I prefer not to talk about my sex life with strangers I will be as vague as possible. But I would just like to say that you should not assume that EVERY man functions like your man. It seems he has a HUGE appetite for sex and likes you to dress up for him, etc. Good for you! But this is not true for everyone and if you send all girls into marriage assuming the ONLY thing their husband cares about is “getting some” you might be setting them up for disappointment. If the only motivation a wife has in “putting out” is to keep her husband from straying?? Well, I don’t think that guarantees anything, and I think it is a pretty lousy assessment of what men, (honorable, thinking men) are capable of. I think actually, in many ways your book degrades men. You seem to think that stroking their ego and giving good sex is all that’s required for a happy man. I don’t think all men are this shallow. And if a woman “saves” her marriage in this way, I don’t see how she ever can truly respect the man she is married to. I think you even use the word “manipulate” once in describing the wife’s way of handling a situation. Manipulation doesn’t seem very Christian to me, come to think of it.

I know you are very busy so I do not want you to “lose” too much time on this letter, I know it is getting long. But I want you to be aware that your teachings can indeed create some dangerous situations for those of us out there that are gullible enough to try applying them to our own situations.

What has helped me the most is reading through some good (non-Christian) books on verbal abuse. One my husband is currently working through (yes, because he does recognize the destructiveness of his behavior, though he hasn’t been able to break his own destructive cycle) is “Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men” by Lundy Bancroft. Telling him that he doesn’t actually have the right to control me and that he needs to view me as an “equal” is one of the most-needed sermons he could have heard. (Unfortunately the church doesn’t really agree with that message, nor does your book.) But for the first time (in six years) I have the spark of hope that our marriage could indeed be something worth “saving”. Had I continued down the path your book laid out for me, I would most certainly be emotionally dead, slaving away from morning till night for an ever-increasingly ungrateful, dissatisfied husband.

As I write this letter I have still not found “peace” in my marriage but I am convinced that if it is possible it is far away from the path I once was following.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope it will help someone, and that maybe you and your husband will choose to take a much more official and militant stance against (all forms of) abuse, especially in “Christian” homes. Your book pretty much puts the happiness of the whole marriage on the shoulders of the woman, and this I do not think is a healthy burden (happily married or not) for any woman to bear.

Sincerely,

J.

Note from NLQ: The Lundy Bancroft book referenced in this article is a fantastic resource for women in abusive relationships seeking to understand their partner’s behavior however NLQ does not recommend it as a resource for the men in such relationships.

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

Read all posts by AfricaTurtle

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Please note: This post has been modified to clarify the point I want to make which is this:

I have no problem with making a buck ~ earning an honest living. In fact, that’s exactly what I’ve got in mind in running the NLQ website, writing a book, etc. ~ I do not apologize for these efforts to support myself and my children.

What makes me sick is that the “need” which the Quiverfull philosophy and lifestyle are being marketed to fill is manufactured and exaggerated in order to sell the product.

A friend recently put it this way: It’s like buying insurance to protect you from the boogeyman under the bed.

Exactly.

Selling books and materials which address an ACTUAL need is one thing ~ but creating fear and then capitalizing on those fears is better suited for the Mafia than for Christian entrepreneurs.

by Vyckie

I’ve had a sick feeling in my stomach lately.  It’s the feeling that comes along with a growing realization that the Quiverfull worldview and lifestyle which I felt that I had carefully considered and thoughtfully adopted is, in actuality, a product called “biblical family values” which is being aggressively marketed as an investment to safeguard our loved ones from becoming collateral damage in today’s war against the family.

That’s right ~ Quiverfull is a product and we bought it big-time.

What got me started thinking this way is a bit of information which I came across recently while doing market research for my book proposal (which, btw ~ is shaping up rather nicely ~ I’m feeling pretty good about what I have so far):

Created To Be His Help Meet by Debi Pearl currently has an Amazon sales rank of 1,891 in books ~ that’s up from a rank of 4,120 at the end of August (’09 ~ less than a month ago).

I should have figured this out much sooner

Seems that I should have been immune to the marketing strategies of those who ruthlessly engender fear and dissatisfaction so they can offer their products as the remedy for the very malady which they themselves created.  After all, one of the first “family values” books I read is All The Way Home: Power for Your Family to be Its Best ~ in which author, Mary Pride explains that happy, well-adjusted families are not very profitable.  In order to sell self-help books, couple’s retreats, therapy sessions, etc. ~ husbands and wives (mainly wives) need to be convinced that something’s wrong ~ something’s missing ~ they need help!

Exactly.  That’s why we didn’t watch television, read popular magazines or otherwise expose ourselves to the endless barrage of advertisements calculated to instill feelings of discontent in our hearts ~ sure saved ourselves a lot of money that way.

And I was vaguely aware of the same principle in operation during my years as publisher and editor of a “pro-life, pro-family” newspaper.  I kept current on all the latest skirmishes in America’s on-going Culture War.

“I’m sure these organizations have the best of intentions when they push legislation to remove the marriage penalty from the tax code, force cable companies to offer ‘a la carte’ subscriptions on premium channels, introduce competition into the education system by promoting school choice and vouchers, demand that merchants who profit from the commercialization of Christ’s birth acknowledge ‘Christmas’ in their promotional advertisements, etc.,” I wrote in a March 2006 editorial.

“But I can’t help but notice how out of touch some of these ‘pro-family’ organizations appear to be with real-life families in America.  A lot of money and manpower has been spent in the ‘battle for America’s families’ – yet little has changed and in fact, in the years since the launch of the ‘Moral Majority’ our families have gone from confusion to chaos to crisis.”

Back then, it was dawning on me that the whole idea of a “culture war” has been artificially manufactured to create fear and insecurity so that we will take out our checkbooks and purchase “protection” for our families.  Kind of similar to war in general ~ it’s a big money-making business and a lot of people have a vested interest in keeping it going.

As Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, points out, “All radical movements need a crisis or a prolonged period of instability to achieve power,” ~ and, I would add ~ make lots of money.

It was somewhat bewildering for me to realize that so much of our lives and our choices are really all about some other guy making obscene amounts of cash ~ and most of us only have a vague idea that we are being used in this way.

I well remember recognizing this principle in operation during my years as a staunch, pro-life advocate. (Please note: the purpose of my including this here is NOT to start up a “pro-life” vs “pro-choice” debate )

Check it out ~ I just happen to have a PBA graphic on hand in “My Pictures” ~ a left-over from my Religious Right newspaper publishing days ~ ugh ‹(ô¿ô)›

The first time I saw actual pictures of aborted babies ~ all bloody and dismembered with recognizable tiny little baby fingers amongst the horror ~ I had a strong physical reaction which cemented my determination to fight for the unborn. BUT … after a while, I could look at those same pictures and not be much affected. So then, the pro-lifers come out with the partial-birth abortion graphics ~ showing a fully-developed baby ~ delivered except for its head ~ with a pair of scissors stabbed into the base of its skull ~ a vacuum hose is inserted into the resulting hole and the baby’s brains are sucked out ~ the baby goes limp ~ OMG!! I totally freaked! I was SHOCKED out of my apathy and renewed my efforts on the behalf of the unborn. AND I SENT MONEY ~ plenty of it ~ to those pro-life organizations which were on the “front lines” of the battle to rescue the babies. BUT … it wasn’t long before the idea of partial-birth abortion didn’t stir me quite so violently … And a while later, I began to hear about the pain which unborn babies feel during an abortion ~ and there was a campaign to force abortion clinics to inform their clients of the pain their about-to-be-killed babies would suffer ~ and to offer the mother pain-medication for the baby prior to the procedure … As I read the pro-life medical professionals’ expert testimony regarding the evidence that aborted babies feel pain … Well, to tell the truth, by this point, I was beginning to catch on to the escalation-of-horror tactics used by these right-to-life organizations and it just made me mad to realize the manipulation.

I remember discussing this with Warren ~ and I told him that we were unlikely to get rich in our newspaper business simply because I was unwilling to print the most sensational news items which might scare our readers into sending more money. I would do everything I could do in good conscience to promote the pro-life cause ~ but I would not resort to terrorism ~ and that is exactly how I had come to view the more extreme fund raising tactics of these organizations.

Where there is an actual need ~ I’m all for enterprising people making and selling their products and solutions. Just don’t invent a need ~ and certainly DO NOT perpetuate a WAR ~ the Culture War ~ just to make a buck.

Oddly enough, though I understood this in regard to the “Christian Right” in general ~ I completely overlooked the profit-driven nature of the phenomenal growth I witnessed in the Quiverfull movement.  I would often remark that “this family vision is spreading like wildfire” ~ all the while, oblivious to the fact that, of course it’s growing ~ there’s big money to be had in selling family stability and security to desperate moms and dads who’ve come to Christianity as refugees from dysfunctional homes ~ parents who are confused and scared for the future and they’re looking for answers as they scramble to raise their children in a healthier environment than that which they had experienced as kids.

According to this Salon article by Lynn Harris, Michael and Debi Pearl are “part of the booming religious publishing and products market, which hit $7.3 billion in 2005 — a 28 percent increase since 2002. … Among Christian books, the ‘Christian Living’ subcategory, which includes parenting, is one of the most popular sub-segments; products for children are expanding as well. The Packaged Facts report, titled ‘The Religious Product Market in the U.S.,’ cites ‘the culture wars’ as being one reason for this overall growth. ”

Quiverfull is clearly a specialization of the “family values” niche market that has proven so lucrative for the Christian publishing industry in general. Truthfully~ it’s turning my stomach as I’m contemplating the fact that my family ~ and tens of thousands of Quiverfull families like ours ~ have been duped and exploited for profit.

Duped and exploited.  For profit.

I’m sure the Pearls and other merchants of QF/P are sincere in their belief that there really is a Big Bad Enemy “out there” who wants to devour the children of Believers ~ but I’m also discovering that there are plenty of “family values” peddlers with not-so-pure motives. Dogemperor has done a ton of insightful research on this subject: (read here ~ and that’s just for starters).

So yeah ~ it is all about money. And that wouldn’t be so much of a problem except that the practice of QF/P is actually a sort of circular predicament in which the proffered “cure” actually feeds and accelerates the disease.

By the time it was all over for us, I had amassed an unbelievably enormous library from the Pearls, Vision Forum, Grace & Truth Books, Inheritance Publications, and similar peddlers of the Quiverfull vision ~ bookshelf after bookshelf stuffed to overflowing with “how to have a happy family”-type books, audio tapes, CDs and DVDs.  I used to make jokes about the fact that the biggest category in our budget after food was BOOKS.  But I’m not laughing about it now.

“I’ve been thinking recently about a scene from the animated Disney classic, Bambi in which the forest animals are hiding ever-so-quietly as a group of hunters pass by.  No-one moves a muscle and they’re hardly breathing and tension builds as the background music escalates and the danger draws closer until one terrified duck can’t stand it another moment.  “I can’t take it!  I can’t take it!” she screams and frantically flies from her hiding place seeking an escape and a place of safety only to be shot dead in the next instant.

 

“The reason this poor, dead bird comes to mind just now is that the intensity and anticipation of that scene seems a vivid picture of life at our house lately.  It’s been tense and overwhelming because of the current trials we face and the perceived nearness of the enemy.”

And here’s the part that really makes me sick ~ “The Enemy” ~ the “World,” which for so many years I had feared and shunned, has turned out to be a paper tiger ~ and in most cases, not just harmless, but even benevolent and beneficial ~ same thing goes for just about everything which my fundamentalist/quiverfull beliefs led me to guard my family against: television (Spongebob!), secular music, public school, peer pressure, boy/girl relationships, fashionable clothing, feminist values, convenience foods, teen rebellion, social workers and professional counselors, youth groups … and even the really big spooks: homosexuals and atheists.

Soaring Arrows Christian HOME’s Cool ~ sharpening our arrows and shooting them straight into the heart of The Enemy

So I’ve spent over a quarter century fighting with all my might in this war that has mostly been all in my head.  We were on the front lines with our family newspaper ~ and in homeschooling we were preparing our children to enter the battle too.  The war may have been imaginary ~ but the wounds inflicted are all too real. Seeing the severity of my daughter’s suffering was the impetus which moved me to lay down my weapons of warfare and walk away from the fight.

It’s not my war anymore.  If there is a God, He’s going to have to fight His own battles ~ I’m done offering up my children as ammunition for His crusades.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forums!

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