Tag: fundamentalism

Snipped! – Part 3: Marital Problems

February 28, 2012

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.:

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Contradictions: Who’s the Visual-est of Them All?

February 27, 2012

by Sierra

Fundamentalists argue that women should dress conservatively because men are visual. This is supposedly something women can’t possibly understand, because women are emotional, not visual. Women become attracted to men through flirtation and flattery; indeed, male visuality is like a foreign language to them. Men are not obliged to cover up for women for this reason.

However, Libby Anne has brought up the following argument that a fundamentalist father made against women’s right to vote:

The first impact of women voters was really felt after the televised Nixon / Kennedy debates.  Nixon, the superior statesman without question, looked “old” and “sweaty”.  But Kennedy?  He was “cute”! The same thing was true for Clinton.

Incidentally, this guy didn’t make this up himself. He may not realize it, but he’s part of a tradition. William Branham made the exact same argument in 1960:

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How the Doctrine of Hell Justifies Quiverfull Authoritarian Parenting

February 27, 2012

by Libby Anne

From my experience, I would argue that hell is the worst Christian doctrine of all. I’m not even going to get into how there is no justice in punishing finite transgressions with eternal torture, or into all the other problems with the theological ins and outs of hell. Instead, I’m referring to the practical implications of the doctrine.

I am a mother. I look at my beautiful young daughter, so full of life and joy and excitement and curiosity, and I feel my love for her bubbling up in my heart. If I believed that there were any possibility that this sweet little thing could end up tortured in a lake of fire for eternity, I would leave no stone unturned in desperately working to keep her from this fate.

In my quest to keep my daughter from unimaginable pain, I would probably be highly susceptible to religious leaders offering various methods for raising good Christian children, and easily taken in by their promises to keep my daughter’s soul from destruction. I would do anything I had to do, buy any book, try any method, risk any hurt. What parent wouldn’t?

Fundamentalist preacher and author Michael Pearl promises parents that if they discipline their children just so, including an emphasis on absolute obedience and the use of hitting to back it up, they will not stray from God’s path, and if he warns that if children are allowed to grow up without such discipline, they will be set on the path to hell. Is it any wonder that so many parents follow Pearl’s highly problematic parenting methods?

Leading Christian patriarchy organization Vision Forum promises that if you raise your children according to their teachings, homeschooling in order to “shelter” from “evil influences” and “teach God’s truth” and emphasizing the hierarchical teachings of Christian patriarchy, your child will not stray from Christ’s side like all those willful pagan children in the public schools. Is it any surprise Vision Forum has such a draw?

Bill Gothard’s Institute for Basic Life Principles also promises a perfect godly family, with highly problematic consequences. Mercy Ministries and Hephzibah House promise to restore your rebellious teenage daughter’s faith, though both have been linked to abuse.Exodus International promises to “cure” your gay son or daughter, though actual science is nowhere on their side. And on and on and on it goes.

If I believed there was any chance my small daughter could go to hell, I would turn to any method I could to keep her from this unimaginably horrible fate.

Attend church three times a week? Check. Homeschool using only religious textbooks? Check. Control her every interaction with others to keep her away from “bad influences”? Check. Follow strict child training methods that involve enforced obedience and hitting her if she so much as has a bad attitude? Check. Employ emotional manipulation or even threaten to cut her off if she grows up to make wrong choices, hoping that tough love will bring her back? Check.

Simply put, I would do anything I had to to keep my daughter from eternal torture. I suspect any parent would, really.

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Carefully Scripted Lives – The Real Reality of the Duggar Family “Blessings”

February 26, 2012

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.

Atlantic Wire:’19 Kids and Counting’ Gets Stranger, Sadder

February 15, 2012

General public not impressed by Duggar family “witness”

by Vyckie Garrison
During my Quiverfull days, I honestly believed that Michelle Duggar’s TLC show – which began as “14 Children and Pregnant Again!” and is currently titled, “19 Kids & Counting” – was an awesome witness to “the world.” I was in awe of the Duggar family, and it thrilled me that such a wholesome, godly family was given a national stage on which to exemplify for America what a truly biblical family looks like.

I’m sure every detail of the Duggars’ television show, numerous talk show interviews and guest appearances at political rallies is calculated to paint their “traditional family” and their “pro-life values” in the best possible light. However, as a former Quiverfull believer-turned-outsider-looking-in, it now seems plain that non-fundamentalist Americans are not particularly impressed by this mega-family, nor is the general public overwhelmed with the conviction that all families ought to live similarly.

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How the Modesty Doctrine Hurts Men, Too

February 14, 2012

by Sierra

I’ve written a few times about how the modesty doctrine hurts women. Now it’s time to switch lenses. The modesty doctrine also wreaks havoc on the minds of young men in the Christian patriarchy movement. Here’s how:

  1. It teaches men to be afraid of women because their sexual power is too great to be resisted.
  2. It teaches men to despise women and hampers their relationships.
  3. It teaches men to be afraid of their own bodies.
  4. It teaches men to control and criticize women in order to protect themselves.
  5. It teaches men to be paranoid about their sexual orientation.
  6. It teaches gay men that they don’t exist.
(There are probably more consequences of which I’m not aware, so my male readers will have to help me fill in the blanks!)

Before we go any further, a definition. The “modesty doctrine” is the belief that women need to cover their bodies to prevent men from being attracted to them, because sexual attraction leads to sin and death for both.  The modesty doctrine is not the same as wearing conservative clothing. You can do the latter without believing the former. It is the belief, themindset of the modesty doctrine that is so harmful. Not the clothes.

1. The modesty doctrine teaches men that they are constantly under assault. Advertising images of sexy women in skimpy clothing feel like clouds of fiery missiles  hurtling into their brains. They have to avert their eyes everywhere they go just to avoid the images, and on top of that there are actual women wearing skimpy outfits. They feel like they can’t get away from sexual stimuli. When you’re taught that merely seeing something can defile you, guarding your eyes from “evil” becomes your eternal chore.

For boys going through puberty, this is especially painful. They can’t participate in mainstream culture (if they’re allowed to in the first place) because the music, television and movie industries bombard them with sexual images.  The solution, according to fundamentalist preachers, is to “change the culture” by telling women to cover up. But this is disingenuous. Once you’ve planted the idea that feeling attracted to a woman is sinful lust, you can’t walk away that easily. Women who already do dress “modestly” are the next targets. Are they drawing attention to themselves with fashionable jewelry or luxurious hair? They should cover up and wear plainer clothing. Young men at Message youth camps would complain if a girl had on sandals or nail polish because her feet and hands were too attractive. Were they just trying to be mean? Some might have been, but not others. Many of them were just hypersensitive to the opposite sex (you know, like almost all teenagers) and very, very afraid of falling prey to lust.

Men who are raised with the modesty doctrine learn that everything women wear is directed at them. When an “immodest” woman walks by, it feels like both a test and an assault. My best friend from church got a job at Wal-Mart when he was 17, and he complained to me endlessly about how women at his workplace would tease and flirt with him. I was treated to a detailed account of how one of the women (also a teenager) stood behind him and ran her fingers across his lower back. He went stiff as a board and tried to brush her off as politely as he could. Perplexed, she asked whether he might be gay. He related this story in helpless frustration. He couldn’t figure out how to avoid female attention without acting like a jerk, and his co-workers couldn’t understand how a heterosexual man could want to avoid female attention. He felt like he was hemmed in by demons and armed with a toothpick.

2. Young men can react to this pressure by learning to despise women. Even as they are being taught not to look at women’s bodies, they are being taught to look at women as bodies.They are encouraged to speak hatefully about the scantily-clad models on magazine covers and billboards. Pastors scream about filthy harlots from the pulpit. The specter of Jezebel is raised and crucified once again. In Message circles, young men grow up hearing Branham’s crackling voice crying that “immoral women” are lower than dogs and livestock. This translates easily to hating girls who just happen to wander into their sight “immodestly” dressed. My male friends used to vent their frustrations by mocking “fat” girls who wore shorts, because “no one wants to see that.” It didn’t occur to them that it would be hurtful to me, a thin girl, to see them dehumanize other girls. Now, as I look back, it strikes me that they really believed that women only wore skimpy clothing to attract them. Everything women wore was directed at them, personally, because they were men.

Walking down the street for them must have been like fending off endless trays of hors d’oeuvres at a party. Only the hors d’oeuvres were poisoned, so it was urgent that they turn down each offer, graciously if they could, but most of all firmly. Every woman who walked by was offering, inviting, enticing them to sin. If their bodies responded, they were in peril for their lives. The “fat” girls were easy targets for these boys. Although they were still “offering” (by not dressing “modestly”), they were like sardines on a platter: lacking allure, they were easy to turn down and laugh about afterwards. Finally, the idea of being friends with such a girl or listening to what she had to say became ludicrous.  She had already said everything she could possibly want to say to a guy when she put on a pair of shorts.

(I won’t go into detail about the horrible ramifications of teaching young men that women are constantly offering themselves for sex just by being visible. But I’m sure you can imagine what I might say about that.)

3. The modesty doctrine teaches men that the worst possible danger lies between their own legs. They are taught to fear their bodies and natural urges. There is no such thing as an innocent sexual thought for an unmarried Christian man. There is most definitely no masturbation. When a guy actually courts a girl, he must walk the impossible line of learning to love her without wanting to kiss or touch her at all. Courtships and engagements can be blindingly short for this reason, but what happens afterwards? A man who has been taught to avoid feeling attracted to all women, including his fiancée, now suddenly has to be passionately attracted to his wife and able to perform. This sounds like a recipe for a lot of false starts, fears and failures of communication.

4. The modesty doctrine does not give men any tools to deal with unwanted sexual attraction. It only tells them not to feel something they can’t help, and then tells them that they could go to hell for it. They do not learn to take a beat and let it pass, to move on and forget about it, to live their lives with the security of knowing that they are in charge of what they do. They literally believe that they can be moved to animalistic rape by the curve of a woman’s knee.

Evangelical Christian culture teaches men that being faithful to their wives is an incredible challenge. Evil women are lurking everywhere, waiting to pounce and drag them into their dens of sin. Women’s sexual power is so overwhelming that, at any moment, they could topple into the devil’s pit. Worse yet, there’s nothing they can do to prevent it other than pray and avert their eyes. No wonder they feel helpless. No wonder they’re afraid.

It is this perpetual peril that drives evangelical men to ridiculous lengths to rid their world of sexual stimuli. The only way to prevent the inevitable (adultery or fornication) is to keep women under wraps (literally). Men become micromanagers of their wives’ and daughters’ clothing. My pastor once chastised his 11 year old daughter for wearing her sweatshirt off her shoulders (with a t-shirt underneath). “Either take that off or put it on,” he ordered sternly, warning her that boys might see the sweatshirt and think about her taking all her clothes off. I was mystified that this had even entered his mind. Because the Christian patriarchy movement invests men with such significant power, their fears take precedence as the laws of the home. Because it’s impossible for a man to fully protect himself, the job falls to all the women around him to make sure he doesn’t turn into a sex-crazed werewolf.

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A Brief Comment on Divorce and the Bible

February 13, 2012

by Sierra

Therefore take heed to your spirit,
and let none deal treacherously against the wife of his youth.
For the LORD, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away.
(Malachi 2:15-16)

When was the last time you looked at this verse? It’s used all the time, in the Message and in evangelical culture, to justify opposition to no-fault divorce and the rising trend of multiple marriages. “God hates divorce” is the mantra of many Christian conservatives. But have you ever thought about what this verse actually means?

How did a verse that so obviously tells men to be kind to their wives and not to leave them destitute become a verse that tells women they have no right to leave an abusive marriage? (Isn’t promising to love, protect and provide for someone and then throwing them out on the curb the very definition of “dealing treacherously”? Divorced women were in dire straits in that era.) Branham taught that men could divorce women for adultery, but women could never divorce their husbands, under any circumstances. Branham taught that wives could win their husbands to Christ and change them from abusers to saints by living the example of the Holy Spirit before them. That is not what this verse is about. This verse, if anything, looks like it’s about God caring for the afflictions of spurned women andcommanding men to treat their wives better.

The “stay until he changes” dogma is a fiction created by cobbling together piles of fractured Scriptures into a Frankenstein that bears no resemblance to the words above. God hates divorce, indeed, but not because it ends a marriage. He hates it because it hurts women.

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The Myth of the Weaker Vessel

February 7, 2012

by Eric Pazdziora

In response to a popular pastor’s perplexing pronouncement that “God has given Christianity a masculine feel,” Rachel Held Evans asked Christian men to write a blog post “that celebrates the importance of women in the Church.” Here’s mine.

Lately, both from online creepers and respectable preachers, I’ve seen several comments that come back to one idea: Of course we give lip service to the idea that women are equal to men, but actually they’re inferior, because the Bible says that a woman is a “weaker vessel.” Here’s a composite portrait, based very closely on wording I’ve seen in various places:

There is a difference between men and women, regardless of what you would like to believe. The Bible makes this clear: 1 Peter 3:7– “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the weaker vessel.” Either this passage is true and women are “weaker vessels,” or it’s not. If it’s not, why believe any of the Bible? God says that because women are weaker, they are more vulnerable to deception and temptation. There are lots of things they don’t know or can’t deal with. That’s why God has raised up men to be the godly authorities they need to guard their hearts and spirits…..

I find that rather unsettling. Continually dwelling on how someone is weak and vulnerable and in need of help is disturbingly similar to what’s called “learned helplessness” (or sometimes “gaslighting” after the Ingrid Bergman film). In its worst forms, it’s a technique of psychological abuse. It works with a chilling simplicity: the more a feeling of helplessness is reinforced on you, the more likely you are to believe it. If every time you go to pick up a bag I say, “Let me get that for you; you’re too weak,” eventually you’ll start to say, “You’ll have to get that for me; I’m too weak.” Even if you’re not.

So it’s no surprise that this Bible verse about the “weaker vessel” is a favorite weapon in the arsenal of religious people who want to dominate and control women (see The Bondage of Betrothal.) Even when people don’t intend to put women down, though, it can have much the same effect. If you say “Women are inferior” with the very best of intentions and disclaimers, you’re still saying it. Learned helplessness works in either case. Some of the most belittling statements in the example above were taken straight from a blog post written by a young woman. It’s bad enough when misogynists belittle women; it’s distressing when women do it for them.

Belittling someone is not a good way to celebrate them. The way it’s presented there, though, it looks like we have to embrace some form of sexism or else throw out the entire Bible. As a Christian, I don’t especially like either option. So here’s the question: Does the Bible really say that all women are “weaker vessels”?

Well… it does use the phrase “weaker vessels.” But to quote the philosopher Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

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