Patriarchy

Prisoner Of Patriarchal Presbyterian Pedagogy: Alia’s Story

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

CC image courtesy of Pixabay, Bilder_meines_Lebens.

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Alia” is a pseudonym.

I grew up in the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America. It was a small denomination, and I hope it’s getting smaller. In the RPCNA, only preachers and elders could be part of the governing body of the church: and preachers and elders, by church law, were always male. The patriarchy was so established that it wasn’t even questioned. I was disenfranchised by my two X chromosomes and barred even from speaking in a worship service or teaching Sunday School classes to a group of adults.

My parents homeschooled their children back when homeschooling was still fringe, and they took patriarchy even further than the RPCNA did. As if being second-class in the church wasn’t bad enough, I was second-class at home. I was not encouraged to go to college, and being in the workforce was considered morally questionable. I might be allowed to be a nurse’s aide or even a nurse, since that was “women’s work,” but becoming a doctor, a four-star-general, or the President was clearly unbiblical. I wasn’t supposed to be in a position where I was commanding and instructing men. Instead I was supposed to serve my (theoretical) husband at home by cooking, cleaning, and popping out babies.

I’m not saying that homeschooling is bad, or that all churches are evil, but the lack of alternate worldviews really messed with my head.

If I’d gone to public school, I might have realized earlier that the RPCNA was a weird little radical-right denomination instead of the faithful remnant. It was a bad combination of church and homeschooling that made me who I was.

I was good at schoolwork and raised by intelligent parents, but I was suffocating in a closed system that blocked my mind from true expansion. I was supposed to be learning to be a wife and mother, not entertaining dreams of a career. I was an avid reader and read many books that pushed the patriarchal vision: books from Vision Forum that hid poison in sugary words; racist and misogynistic blatherings from self-satisfied white men in Moscow, Idaho; arrogant screeds on Christian Reconstructionism that advocated stoning Sabbath-breakers and homosexuals. I fangirled over R. L. Dabney and idolized the Confederacy because I thought slavery was biblical and women should know their place.

Writing the above paragraph almost brought tears to my eyes.

I had no clue, and it breaks my heart that I didn’t know better. That I thought it was okay to be racist, okay to condemn women who worked outside the home, okay to mock and judge LGBTQ people. I believed what I was taught…it was all I knew.  Those beliefs were encouraged at home, and my church, instead of teaching me better, promoted the inequality of women and men. If I was second-class, of course I believed that other people could be second-class too. If I had to obey my father because I was a woman, maybe some people were supposed to be slaves because they were black.

I’ve heard all kinds of speeches trying to pretty up the inherent injustice of patriarchy. It’s been called “complementarianism,” referred to as “equal-but-different,” “the natural order,” and “God-ordained,” which is especially helpful when a church wants to lay the blame on God. “Hey, don’t look at us; God said it had to be this way!” A lot of believers in patriarchy will argue up and down that they don’t believe women are inferior to men. Women are just different, they say, and I cringe because I know what they mean, because I’ve heard all these things before. They mean women are weak, delicate, unable to cope with being in the workforce, prone to gossip, unable to think logically, easily deceived.

Anything I said or thought could be discounted because I was female. If I questioned a teaching, it was because I was using my emotions instead of being logical. If something in the bible seemed wrong, even cruel, it was because I was blinded by the world and unable to appreciate the true beauty of God’s plan. If I questioned the patriarchy, it was because of my rebellious desire to “usurp authority” over men.

I got a job in my late teens, despite many doubts from my stay-at-home, homeschooling mother. I loved it. I saved money and made big plans, bought a car, started studying at a local college, in spite of college being actively discouraged. I was told that women didn’t need to go to college, since they were expected to get married and stay at home raising babies. Besides, colleges were full of worldly teachings that might lead me astray.

But I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t go back to my stifling stay-at-home life. In fact, I stayed away from home as much as possible, unable to handle the constant tension when I walked in the door.

That tension got worse and worse.

I started seeing a licensed counselor in secret because I was so miserable, depressed, and anxious. I thought about suicide every day, but with hell looming on the other side of the curtain, I never attempted it. I was torn between my desire to be my own person, and the terrible fear that I was a sinner for wanting freedom.

I had been told so clearly that being my own person was Not Okay. I wasn’t supposed to be focused on myself, I was supposed to focus on God and other people. I remember being nervous about a musical recital that I was supposed to perform at. Instead of giving me the usual humorous advice about imagining the audience in their underwear, my mother told me that being nervous was sin—it meant I was focusing on myself and how I was performing, rather than trying to please the audience. Great. I couldn’t even be nervous without sinning. And doesn’t that just cut to the heart of being a woman in the patriarchy? You are there to please other people.

There’s a lot of danger in homeschooling. My mother worked hard to teach us. She loved us, but she was afraid. My siblings and I lived in an island of isolation containing our home and our church. We grew up being told that there was only one way to worship God, only one way to honor Him (of course God was male!) and that most of the world was going to hell. My mother’s worst fear, I think, was that her children would burn in eternal flames, and she wrapped us in a cocoon of anxiety and rule-following and strict roles to play in this life, hoping it would keep us on the straight and narrow. The anger that often blazed from her was fueled by fear.

But there was something inside me that fought this worldview, something that refused to accept my fate as an obedient female. My mind tried to detach itself from what was happening around me—I was frequently in a state of derealization, aware of myself but not really “in” myself. But I couldn’t turn back time, and with the help of counseling I began to realize that I didn’t have to live in a constant state of guilt over my perceived failure to be the perfect patriarchal daughter.

Slowly, so slowly, I began to accept that it was okay to be myself.

I began to take a stand, one decision at a time. I was met with resistance, screaming, shouting, threats of hell. But I hunkered down behind each decision I made like a soldier engaged in trench warfare, creeping across the battlefield. What clothes I wore. What college I went to. What career I chose. Then I moved out of my parents’ house, knowing with a glorious sense of peace that I would never move back in. It wasn’t the end of the war, but it was my Gettysburg, and I was Meade, not Lee.

They said the wrath of God would strike like lightning from the sky. But I stepped out from under the umbrella of patriarchy—and the sky was clear.

Get Them Married: Selling Virgin Daughters

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Image from Flickr, by Jeyheich.

By Darcy, Homeschoolers Anonymous Editorial Team

Update: The current advertised retreat had its venue cancelled today by the Salvation Army, owners of Camp Hiawatha in Wichita. The Ohlmans have also posted an update after the “flood of attention” and clarified that there are “no current plans” for future events. 

Update 2, editor’s note: The original age of Mrs. Ohlman at the time of her betrothal was written here as 16. According to a comment left on her blog on May 2nd, she states she was 19 at the time of the betrothal. This story has been edited to reflect her correct age. 

Arranged marriages, child brides, teenage grooms, patriarchs, and bride prices. These sound like stories from faraway lands. However, this story today comes from Wichita, Kansas, where one man and his followers are showing the world exactly what it looks like when Christian patriarchy, authoritarianism, and “Biblical marriage” are taken to an extreme.

Vauhn Ohlman, who runs a site called Let Them Marry, is facilitating a family camp in Wichita Kansas this November, titled “Get Them Married Retreat”. The purpose of the camp? As stated on their website, “The Get Them Married Retreat is a 3-day retreat designed to bring together like-minded families (and their unmarried young men and women) who are committed to young, fruitful marriage …our major focus and priority will be bringing together unmarried young people and their families so they can intentionally network together with a goal of arriving at God-glorifying marriages.”

So just how does Ohlman define “God-glorifying, young, fruitful marriage”?

Ohlman is a proponent of what has been termed “betrothal”. In his words:

The betrothal covenant is the covenant that makes a man and a woman into a husband and wife. It has no specific Biblical form; indeed it is expressed in Scripture in a whole variety of different ways, from fairly formal to purely physical…. The couple who are in the betrothal covenant, but have not yet come together physically, are said to be ‘betrothed’; and the time period where they are like that is called ‘betrothal’.

Ohlman goes on to further explain in detail his doctrine of betrothal:

We on our site use the word ‘betrothal’ to refer to the entire set of principles, which differ from those of courtship and dating, which are taught by Scriptures for the path to marriage and several related subjects. These include: 

A) The sufficiency of Scripture for the path to marriage
B) The authority of the father over the marriage of their virgin children
C) The continuing authority of the father after marriage
D) The importance of the betrothal covenant versus:
E) The problematic nature of the quasi-covenants of dating, courting, or engagement
F) The importance of young, fruitful marriages
G) That a ‘bad’ marriage is to be preferred over no marriage
H) That a couple is not supposed to ‘fall in love’ before they are in covenant; they are to be brothers and sisters to each other
I) That marriage is ordained for the prevention of fornication
J) That ‘unready’ people should marry
K) That early, fruitful marriage is normative
L) That the gift of being successfully celibate is very rare. [emphasis mine]

So according to Ohlman, the entire purpose of life is godly marriage. But not just godly marriage, young godly marriage. How young? Ohlman says that girls are ready for marriage when their bodies are developed enough to have children, when they start having interest in the opposite sex, thus increasing chances of fornication. Ohlman skirts around the question of when is too young, by quoting people like John Calvin who claim that twelve to twenty years of age is appropriate, and using phrases like “the flower of her age”.

But what does “flower of her age” mean to Ohlman? He goes on to further explain in detail how he determines readiness for marriage for girls:

The ‘youth’ ready for marriage has breasts. A woman who is to be married is one who has breasts; breasts which signal her readiness for marriage, and breasts who promise enjoyment for her husband. (We believe that ‘breasts’ here stand as a symbol for all forms of full secondary sexual characteristics.) 

“The ‘youth’ ready for marriage is ready to bear children. Unlike modern society Scripture sees the woman as a bearer, nurser, and raiser of children. The ‘young woman’ is the woman whose body is physically ready for these things, physically mature enough to handle them without damage.” 

“… the above points represent, not a certain exact age, but a level of physical and sexual maturity. Not ‘maturity’ as in ‘been there, done that’, nor even a ‘maturity’ as in ‘have been at this level for a long time’, but a point of arrival…. The woman who has arrived physically and sexually at a point where she is ‘ready’ for a husband, is ready for a husband, else we make God out to be a liar… Calvin and Gill, quoting the Jewish authorities in reference to the term Paul uses in I Cor 7:36, place the lower limit of this at twelve years old for girls. Again, not that every, or even very many, girls reach this milestone at that age.

So while he says that they do not “endorse” marriage of 12-yr-olds, he implies that should a 12-yr-old display all the physical and emotional signs of marriage, she would be thus ready and her father needs to be on the lookout for a husband for her.

But what about the consent of the parties to be married? Do they get a say in the matter? Ohlman says, no. They don’t get to consent, they only obey their authorities, that consent is a product of the evil world and not Biblical.

Scripture speaks of the father of the son “taking a wife” for his son, and the father of the bride “giving” her to her husband (Jeremiah 29: 6; Judges 21: 7; Ezra 9:12; Nehemiah 10: 30; 1 Corinthians 7:36-38). It gives example after example of young women being given to young men, without the young woman even being consulted, and often, in some of the most Godly marriages in Scripture, the young man is not consulted. 

First of all, Scripture never, ever mentions the idea of “consent” in regard to marriage. 

Some use the idea of “consent” to deny the very relevance of the action of their authorities to bind them in covenant, as if a covenant was of no effect whatsoever and all that matters is what the person themselves decide. 

In contrast, our study of Scripture has shown that the Word of God considers a covenant made by an authority to be meaningful and binding upon the those under his or her authority. Biblical consent is not the “consent” of dating or courtship. It is not a “veto” power. It does not presume to cast judgment over their father’s actions. And so, a lack of consent of the individual concerned is a choice of disobedience, a breach of a vow and of a relationship. God has designed the marriage relationship (in particular that of the virgin daughter marrying the virgin son) to be a relationship initiated by the parents, in particular the fathers, of the young couple.[emphasis mine]

Also on his website, is the story of his son and daughter-in-law, Joshua and Laura, and their betrothal. Ohlman and the father of a young girl (whom he had never met) decided their children should marry, so they arranged the entire “covenant” over long-distance. The children did not meet until 2 hours before their betrothal ceremony and were said to be too nervous to even speak to each other, thus letting their parents discuss details of the ceremony. The desires and the consent of the children did not matter, as Ohlman teaches they have to follow the authority of their fathers in this matter. In the words of Laura Ohlman:

Indeed, what really happened is that Joshua and I trusted our respective fathers to do the vetting for us… and to do a much better job than we could have done. Our dads weren’t dealing with raging hormones, crazy emotions, or an overwhelming desire to ignore important issues simply for the sake of getting married. My dad was able to take a serious look at Joshua’s character in a way I would have been unequipped (and unlikely) to do. 

Less than two hours later [after they met for the first time] we held a small ceremony in our back yard. My dad and Mr. Ohlman gave a short sermon/admonition, each to their respective children… and then my dad put my hand in Joshua’s, thereby giving me away to the man I henceforth have had the privilege of calling my husband! Barring family members, I had never held a man’s hand before.

With this background and story in mind, we go back to the planned retreat in November.

It is, quite explicitly, a place for families to get together to arrange non-consenting marriages between their teenage children.

Kansas laws regarding child marriage state that a 15-yr-old can get married with special consent from a judge, and that 16 is the age at which marriage is legal with parental consent. However, Ohlman and his cronies practice betrothal which is not legal marriage, and can be done as soon as they determine a girl has breasts and her period. So the implications are that families can come here to sell off their young daughters in marriage, some much earlier than 15 if the betrothal period is taken into account. All without the consent of the children being married. (It should be noted that teenage boys are in a vulnerable and trapped position here as well, since Ohlman teaches that boys are always under the authority of their fathers, even after marriage, and that the betrothed wife moves in with the groom’s family and takes her her new life with them, under the authority of her husband.)

Critics are calling this legal sex slavery. It’s not that extreme of a definition. Young girls sold off as sex slaves to please their husbands and bear them babies, without their consent, young boys are expected to have sex and bear children and raise a family, also without their consent, and all organized by men in positions of power. The definition fits. We often think of child brides as a travesty that happens in other countries and other religions, but in reality, it’s happening right here in America, often under the guise of Christianity.

No Longer Wanted: Natalie’s Story

HA Editorial Team20 Comments

My parents meant well. They wanted the best for me. They were excited to find the perfect formula to raise a perfect daughter.

And somewhere along the line they stopped wanting the best for me and started needing me to be what they decided was best.

And when I wasn’t that picture they no longer wanted me. That’s the best way I can describe it.

I think like many people raised in the world of homeschoolers, I’ve had the gut feeling that it’d be inappropriate to share my story. Our 11th commandment was to never speak ill of our family or lifestyle. There was always a push to hide what we were doing and never cast any negative light on the angelic conditions of homeschoolers and our perfect families. I’ve only told a few people what happened with our relationship.

 

When I was five we moved to acreage in the middle of nowhere. We listened to programs that told us music with a beat was scientifically proven to kill your brain cells. We didn’t have cable because all the shows would make us worldly. We stocked up for Y2K. We supported groups like HSLDA that told us the evil government would take away our children if we didn’t fight with them by paying membership fees. We obsessively absorbed the wisdom of the Pearl’s.

My experiences with the outside world were limited to church activities and the library, but even this was enough to make me question if my parents were really raising me correctly. My parents couldn’t keep up with all the books that I read. I’d borrow big piles and hide the ones that wouldn’t pass inspection in the middle.

My parents told me that people who didn’t homeschool their kids didn’t really love them. That people who dated didn’t value their future spouse and would get divorced.

Purity and gender roles were everything.

My mother obviously wouldn’t work outside the home, even when my dad lost his job multiple times and money was tight. Respect was the most important thing to my dad. We were all to submit to him without question, to the point that we couldn’t ask something that ended with a question mark. We had to direct conversation as respectful statements that he could choose to respond to if he wanted.

My mom couldn’t explain anything past simple math and my dad would get frustrated at me when I didn’t immediately understand it. I faked the majority of my math work past 2nd grade. Science was a similar story. My parents made it clear that I only needed it because the state required I learn it. It wasn’t vital for a woman’s education. What was vital was understanding that my goal in life was to be a wife and mother. I needed to sew, cook, clean, and learn to be the best wife and mother. All of my life was focused on that aim and that meant everything was focused on getting married.

I’m still sorting my education into the facts and what was just an elaborate attempt to shape my worldview. The “mistakes” that my parents made were probably the only way my brain developed in the shape that it did. They regret letting me have part time jobs, taking classes with other Christian homeschoolers, and not monitoring me close enough. My friends were all very intellectual. They pushed me to excel when my parents didn’t necessarily care. I started to question their mandates. I didn’t want to solely be a stay at home daughter. I wanted to figure out what I believed for myself. I wanted to understand my father’s beliefs. He wouldn’t explain them to me. He said my questions were disrespectful and I should just accept that he knew what was best. My role was to serve his family until I got married and then I would serve my husband’s family.

I wanted to go on a mission’s trip after I graduated. They grudgingly agreed, assuming I wouldn’t be able to raise the funds. I worked all summer and then my brother told them that it wasn’t appropriate to let me leave their guidance. They postponed my trip for 6 months. They canceled it again. Then my dad borrowed $2000 from my account without asking. When I sheepishly mentioned it he said he needed it to pay bills for our family and was offended I had brought it up. Months later I saw that he had paid it back. Eventually I convinced them that I should go on a mission’s trip for 3 months with our church. My reasoning was that I should serve others some before I got married.

College wasn’t ever a choice for me.

Going into debt was sinful. My parents couldn’t afford to send me even if they approved of the choice. I knew I wasn’t educated enough in math and science to get a scholarship.

My sister had the perfect long distance courtship. They only wrote letters for months. They didn’t hold hands till they were engaged. They didn’t kiss till they were married. My dad gave an hour long sermon at her wedding and he cried from happiness. She was everything they wanted in a daughter. Since it all worked out so well for them, my parents insisted that it was the perfect method. When I didn’t act like her I was a disappointment. They had been (untrained) marriage counselors for years. They’d insist on telling me all the intimate details of people’s marriages. Sometimes they were my friend’s parents. When I didn’t want to hear it I was disrespectful. When I didn’t want to read another book about submission I was rebellious. When I didn’t want to watch another marriage DVD series I was selfish and disobedient. All the scenarios ended with the wife realizing that if she just respected her husband more he would love her and things would be fine.

When I got tired of my life only being focused on marriage, I asked them if I could focus more on pursuing God.

They told me the only way I could pursue God was to pursue marriage.

Single people were selfish. Pursuing independence was sinful. Living outside the protection of my spiritual authority was unthinkable. My dad told me whatever I was doing, I should think of what he would want me to do and then do that. If I didn’t I was sinning against him and God.

When I got back from my missions trip I wanted to move out and for some reason they complied. A couple months later it was a different story. I had a full time job, and I wanted to buy a car. It was a battle. I wanted to pay for my own car insurance, and they finally lost it. They gave me an ultimatum: quit my job, move back home, stop pursuing my selfish independent lifestyle and I could remain their daughter. They couldn’t bear to see me living in sin any longer.

My father told me that God would always forgive him if he strayed, but he was a human so he couldn’t promise that he would always forgive me and take me back.

I couldn’t agree to their terms. They told me the choices I was making would make me a horrible wife and would ruin my marriage and children. My dad wouldn’t bless my marriage. My mom started crying and told me that she shouldn’t have had such high expectations for me. Maybe if she had lower expectations for me this wouldn’t be so hard. I was 18 and on my own. A couple months later I tried to reconcile with them, and my dad clarified that we didn’t have a relationship unless I could come back to the biblical model. I couldn’t.

Six months later my dad shared that he still felt the same however cutting off relationship meant he was giving us responsibility for me and he couldn’t do that as he was still responsible for all my sinful choices. He said he was sorry if I was hurt by the things he said, but they were true. He said we needed to have a relationship again so he could show me how to be better.

It’s been a couple years since then. Things are still rocky between us. It took me over a year to come out of the depression that our broken relationship caused. I was suicidal and cried continuously.

They were my entire world.

The hardest part is that I was close to my family. I didn’t think they were capable of disowning me. They were all I had ever known, and I was relatively happy with my brainwashed life. I didn’t know how to function without them. I had to learn to support myself on my own. I had to figure out who I was without my family. I had to deal with my parents turning my whole family against me.

Since then I’ve found out that members of my family helped and supported an elder that molested his adopted daughter for years. They protected him because he was the head of his household and knew best. Now when stories surface of incest and abuse I don’t question them.

Of course this happens, we were all taught to blindly obey.

I still have to fight the guilt when they say I ruined our relationship. I still hear that I should just be like my older sister and things would be better. I still hear that I’m not what they want. I still deal with them poisoning my relationships. Counseling and time helps. But it’s still complicated and it still hurts.

A Homeschooled Son’s Letter to His Father: Ethan’s Story

HA Editorial Team6 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Kevin Dooley.

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Ethan” is a pseudonym.

I grew up in a homeschooled Christian family, oldest of eight children. For the past several years, conversations with my mother indicated her weariness of homeschool education and a belief that public education was no longer the great evil she once considered it to be. Despite her view, her expression of this exhaustion to my father was limited to periodic bouts of frustration that were dismissed by my father as ‘evidence that Satan doesn’t want our family to keep homeschooling’. I was, to exaggerate by understatement, mildly angered by his cavalier dismissal. Given my financial dependence on my father throughout college, though, I wasn’t in a position to risk his anger by addressing the strain homeschooling was placing on Mom. Now that I am in my last semester with a six-figure job lined up after graduation, I elected to voice my thoughts (in a much cooler voice than would have been likely in person) to my father in an e-mail, included below.

Dad,

This is a long e-mail that was supposed to be a conversation in person, but I didn’t realize y’all were leaving for the wedding and timing just kind of didn’t work out.

I want to preface this with two notes. First, please understand that this is not written from some resentful / I-hate-my-childhood perspective, because it’s not. Second, I beg you to realize that my opinions are not automatically invalid because I haven’t procreated and raised offspring myself.

Section 1: On The Theory of Homeschooling
Homeschooling has highly variable outcomes – some families end up on prime-time news for abuse and incest, some families send all their children to Harvard / Princeton / Yale. I have no problem with homeschooling per se.

To the contrary, growing up in that community gives me a unique view on its pros and cons.

To the extent that Christian parents have a duty to guide the moral development of their children, parents may (ought, even) elect to control the influences, environments, and material available to a young child. Homeschooling in the religious right originated because of a belief that public schools were dangerous, anti-moral institutions that threatened the development of Christian beliefs, and that belief is not unfounded. Public schools are not religious, and are often anti-religious.

It’s important to understand, though, that any child will inevitably be exposed to these ‘great evils’. Homeschooling does not allow a child to enjoy life sans secular influences. In some cases, it delays exposure to said influences. In some cases, those secular influences reach a homeschooled child through different channels. In many cases, though, homeschooling simply creates a unique set of ‘secular’ problems.

Homeschooling doesn’t solve the sin nature – as ideal as that would be.

In a homeschooled environment, some sins will bubble to the surface. In a public school environment, some of the same sins will arise, but it’s likely a different set will be primary concerns. The point here is that homeschooling does not eliminate the need to address human failure, it just changes the topics being addressed.

In economics, there’s a concept of diminishing marginal returns (DMR). DMR basically says that doing something for a certain amount of time has high value for each incremental action, but beyond a certain threshold, very little value is added. I think this is models the homeschool environment quite well. In early years, there is immense value from a Christian environment to build a foundation for moral thinking and behavior, but as the age timeline and the ability for self-reasoning progresses, you [generic you] reap very little incremental value from environmental restrictions.

[As an aside, I always found the quiver and arrows argument about shooting children out into the world very interesting. It was used to justify homeschooling and protecting children from the outside world until adulthood, but the process of making arrows is very different. Arrows are made from greenwood, then allowed to “season” / “mature” in an outdoor environment (while still under care of the archer) until they are ready to be shot out. Protection is not always good].

With one exception, all my Christian friends at [university name] were public schooled from day 1, and it’s arguable that their faith is more sincere than mine. This is perhaps a criticism of my focus on things of God in recent months, but is stronger evidence that the method of education is not the determinant of faith. Morals, godliness, and Christian belief stem from a God-given desire to follow those things.

As a summary: homeschooling has value, but it is not an intrinsic good. Beyond a certain point, it may be detrimental to the rigor of one’s faith and one’s ability to thrive in the outside world.

Section 2: On Finances
This is a somewhat short section, but merely exists because I think it’s important to recall one thing: the thousands of dollars the family pays in taxes every year fund, in part, a school system recognized as one of the best in the nation. From a financial stewardship perspective, electing to not utilize public resources is an unmitigated waste of those dollars. Given that family finances are increasingly stressed, prudent management of available dollars seems important.

Section 3: On Patriarchy
I am attempting to word this section very carefully to avoid giving offense. I apologize in advance if I fail to achieve this goal.

Fathers are recognized generally as ‘head of household’ within Christian tradition. Unfortunately, this tradition systematically has taught that fathers are the only heads of the household, that their decisions are final, and they are endowed with a ‘divine right’ to teach and train members of their family as they see fit.

At a very basic level, this is extra-biblical at best and abusive at worst.

It is especially pernicious because Mothers have been taught to accept the aforementioned patriarchal role without question.

[As an aside, mom knows nothing about this e-mail and i have not solicited her feedback in composing it. Any anger you have should be directed at me, not at her]

Over the years, the concept of ‘[Family Surname] Team’ and ‘family vision’ [quotes are not used ironically, merely to indicate specific phrasing used] have come to be despised by at least [second born sibling], [third born sibling], and myself because they didn’t represent a family vision – they represented your vision, which was to be accepted without question or argument, unless we wanted to face the consequences. While this is as much the fault of our immaturity as any other factor, I think it’s problematically indicative of a family trend – anything that happens must have your seal of approval, regardless of how trivial it is. And any choices that ’the family’ makes are, ultimately, just choices that you have made for us.

You have made some stellar decisions, please don’t get me wrong. This is not a blanket critique of everything that has ever happened. But the family is driven by a centralized power, and it’s abundantly evident whenever a unit of the family attempts to make an autonomous decision that you will brook no autonomy.

The ATI ‘umbrella of authority’ is transformed all too often into a suffocating blanket of my-way-or-the-highway.

Why am I talking about this? In all fairness, it’s often true that attempts at autonomous decisions by children are misguided and in need of parental ‘editing’, but the same should not, and in the case of our family, cannot be said of Motherly autonomous decisions.

I’ve seen the quality of your marriage deteriorate meaningfully for the past few years, and while that may be due to other factors, I’m convinced the largest contributor is the choke-hold you have on Mom’s ability to say, do, allow, or think anything related to the family. [second born] / [third born] and I often comment on the legitimate fear we see in her eyes whenever she allows a younger child to do anything without running it by you first – frightened anticipation of your anger at her for not fulfilling your vision for how the family ought to be.

Any marriage will have differences of opinions, that’s life. But communication, grace, and willingness to not always get your way are how marriages survive. I may not be married, but it’s not rocket science to figure that much out.

Where am I going with all this? Homeschooling is your vision for the children. I may be wrong, but I’m confident Mom no longer has a desire to homeschool. She continues her days in the car, her nights up to 2am managing different children’s classes, her constant fights with children over turning in homework and proctoring exams, in some desperate attempt to fulfill a vision that you have required her to implement. This is not healthy.

As a summary: The power dynamic in the family is driven by your fear, fear that you will lose control. If you made a genuine effort to give Mom freedom to be an independent entity, I think you would discover your vision for family education is sub-optimal.

Section 4: On College, aka, Finances (Again), Choice, and Resources
This is about college. College is expensive, as we’ve all found out.

And homeschooling can [it doesn’t have to] severely limit leadership opportunities / transcript development relative to a public school.

This has a direct financial impact on scholarships, college acceptances [different colleges have very different aid packages], and, consequently, the affordability of higher education. Presuming that blue-collar work is not the optimal adult life track for all the children, doing all that is possible to minimize college tuition is important.

Every child is different. Homeschooling through high school was great for me and I’m sure if I went to public school I wouldn’t be where I am today. But that doesn’t mean homeschooling is optimal for everyone. At the very least, children should be given the option of going to public school for high school, so that they can best position themselves for college applications.

Additionally, public schools have offices designed to educate students on college options, administer standardized tests, prepare transcripts, guide students through the application process, etc. These are professionals, people we’re already paying [via tax dollars], in the richest county in America, to send students to optimal colleges for each family.

Section 5: Action Items and Everything That Didn’t Fit in Earlier Sections
Will public schools open up a new set of problems? Probably. Will continued homeschooling kill Mom? Probably.

Will continued homeschooling eliminate the conflicts that current exist at home? Probably not. Will continued homeschooling ensure that all children love Jesus forever and ever? Probably not. [That was a bit snarkily phrased, I apologize].

Maybe no one wants to go to public school. That’s entirely possible.

But I suspect there is an interest, and I more strongly believe that certain children would massively benefit from it.

[fourth born child], [fifth born child], and [sixth born child] are all IMMENSELY intelligent, and young enough that they have years ahead to shape their high school and college opportunities. If other children went to public school, that would likely allow finances for them to play travel soccer and develop advanced skills there. [fifth born] is fascinated by computer science – if that can be fostered, he would love [elite science / tech high school nearby] as an intense scientific high school. There’s immense potential here.

I 100% support continued homeschooling up to middle school, maybe even through middle school, or perhaps through high school [again depending on individual children’s preferences].

But please, have the humility and intellectual honesty to engage with Mom in a genuine conversation about what she wants, and then implement what she wants.

The world will not end and we will not all become heathens if public schools are opened up as an option.

Who knows, maybe the reduced financial stress and replacement of “mom & dad” with “professor x” as academic task-masters will improve family relations.

Above all, this is about creating a truly family driven vision and contributing to a healthy, high functioning, family unit.

Love,

[Oldest Child]

The “Real Men” of Evangelical Christianity

HA Editorial Team4 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Jeremy Brooks.

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog, Love, Joy, Feminism. It was originally published on November 18, 2015.

I’ve run across a number of memes about what “real men” do. The most frequent seems to be that real men “protect” women rather than abusing them. This meme has bugged me because I’d rather have a man’s respect than his protection. On a whim, I went to google, typed in “real men,” and started scrolling through images. I found quite a number of these “real men” memes that were Christian-themed (most were probably created by evangelicals), and found myself cringing on a variety of levels.

If you’re like me, your social media feeds are probably filled with discussions of ISIS and refugees and epic battles between conservative friends and progressive friends. So today, let me offer you a break, such as it is. Let’s look at some of the “real men” memes I found, and I’ll take this opportunity to discuss some of the problematic aspects in evangelicals’ approach to male-female relationships. Let’s get started!

And why do men need to lead women anywhere, pray tell? I think this is the biggest problem I have with Christian “real man” memes—they all focus on male leadership. They don’t treat women as people. Instead, women become objects to be protected, or cared for, or led here or there. What about “real men listen to women”? What about “real men respect women’s ability to make up their own minds”? I could have stopped at “real men respect women,” but in Christian meme world that actually means “real men don’t have sex with women before they marry them,” not “real men listen to women and accept their decisions about their bodies and lives.”

The problem with this meme is related to the problem with all of the memes about fathers and daughters. Men are supposed to be overly protective of their daughters, and controlling of their daughters, and possessive of their daughters—or so the memes suggest. It’s as though their daughters are objects to be locked up or put on a shelf for looking at only. When was the last time you saw a meme where a father said he wanted his daughter’s suiters to treat her with respect and let her make her own decisions and choices? That’s right, never.

And so here this meme is, suggesting that a “real man” should treat his wife or girlfriend the way he would would want another man to treat his daughter. Given the way we talk about fathers and daughters in our society, this is extremely infantilizing. Respect for women as people disappears, swallowed up by a respect for women that is defined by their relationship to men.

I appreciate the assertion that woman was created from man’s side “to be equal,” but nothing in the rest of the meme reflects this focus on equality. Instead there’s a focus on women’s tears, because we all know women are delicate flowers who cry at the drop of a hat. And then there is a focus on women being created under man’s arm, “to be protected.” Well guess what? A protector/protected relationship is not equality. Why not “a real man gives women the tools they need to protect themselves”? After all, if a woman must rely on a man for protection, who will protect her from that man?

Let’s talk about the stereotype of women crying easily for a moment. One thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes women cry when they want to be heard but aren’t being listened to. Sometimes women cry to get the attention of a man in their life because saying “this matters to me, please listen and take me seriously” isn’t enough. As a general rule, men don’t tend to take women as seriously as they do other men. But when tears come—then they listen. Then they realize shit, this is serious, she really means this!

I’m not saying that all women do this (they don’t) or that this is what is happening every time a woman cries (it isn’t). What I’m saying is that I’ve noticed a pattern where men refuse to pay attention to what a woman is saying until she cries, and then all of a sudden they realize it’s important. But no, this meme can’t be imposed upon to include any realization of this pattern. It’s all “be careful when you make a woman cry because God counts her tears” rather than “a real man listens to a woman and doesn’t drive her to tears by refusing to take her concerns seriously.”

Again with the protectors rhetoric—and again I say, why not equip women to protect themselves? If a woman must always have a protector, she is vulnerable to abuse by that protector. If a woman is equipped to protect herself, she will not have to depend on a fallible male to protect her. Seeing women as beings that need protection gets in the way of seeing women as equals. Instead we are weaker vessels that need male protection—and, presumably, male leadership, because we apparently aren’t capable of looking after ourselves.

Note too the use of the phrase “our women.” In this context, it denotes ownership.

Christian memes about “real men” often repeat traditional societal assumptions about male/female relationships, such as the assumption that a man will pay for a woman’s dinner on a date. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t recall seeing that in the Bible, so it’s worth noting that they’re pulling things from cultural norms that date back to the Victorian Era and treating them as a sort of gospel truth. Either way, the wording in this meme—”pay for you,” rather than the less confusing “pay for your food” or “provide for you”—is creepy.

While praying for a woman doesn’t have the same problematic aspects as the “protector” rhetoric, I’m curious about what rhetoric is to be engaged in these prayers. There’s a difference between “please help Wendy today as she undergoes her performance review at work” and “please help Wendy see that, as a woman, she needs to submit to my leadership” or “please make Wendy realize that she shouldn’t have stood up to me today.” There’s an assumption in these memes that prayer is always good, and a lack of understanding that there are certain sorts of prayer that can make a situation worse.

Here again we see the repetition of traditional patriarchal gender norms—men are supposed to open doors and pay for their dates’ food. Note also the last line, where men are presented as guides. Why does a woman need a guide, exactly? It is true that relationship partners influence each other—as do individuals in other relationships—but I’m uncomfortable with the one-way nature of the phrase as used here and the centering of the idea of guiding, which suspects that one party must lead and the other will naturally follow. Women aren’t treated as independent entities who chose their own direction in these memes.

I could go on, but the memes have started to become repetitive. The same focus on protection and opening doors marches from meme to meme. In each meme, a focus on respect—true respect, not simple sexual abstinence—is glaringly absent. And this isn’t only an evangelical thing—secular memes about “real men” also tend to focus on protection and lack any mention of respect. And that, quite frankly, is tragically sad.

But let’s not leave off on a downer! Let me leave you with this:

Note: This is all without even getting into what “real men” means. What’s the alternative, “fake men”? Speaking of “real men” also ties into ideas of masculinity. Why not focus on how “people” should treat each other—i.e. with compassion, respect, understanding—rater than what “real men” should or should not do? 

My Life as an Unmarried Woman Among Fundamentalists: Katia’s Story

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

Scripture talks about the great sower sowing the seed of the word of God.

When I look at my journey away from fundamentalism, I see that same sower preparing the soil of my heart in preparation for that “lightbulb” event that set me free from fundamentalism.

The great sower began preparing the soil of my heart before I was born.

On Mom’s side, I am descended from Anabaptists, Quakers, and other free thinkers. Mom grew up in a Grace Brethren church that encouraged its members to study the Bible, and when she became an adult, she did. The more she studied scripture, the less she wanted to go to church.

On Dad’s side, most of the fathers were either absent, sick, or died young. Both his maternal grandparents were illegitimate, a fact his mother concealed. Eight years after her death, I learned the truth, and it helped set me free from the purity culture.

How could I breathe fire on fornication when I would not have been born had it not been for fornication?

In addition, the story of how my paternal grandmother’s paternal grandmother basically died of a broken heart after the father of her baby paid a fine and fled seized my heart and has not let go.

Mom and Dad were engaged the day Jim Jones murdered* hundreds of his followers in Guyana. In processing the tragedy, Mom noticed how Jim Jones’ followers had blindly followed him and decided that it was dangerous to blindly follow religious authority. Partially as a result, I grew up knowing that it was okay to question religious authority.

As I grew up, I began dislike religious authority aside from the knowledge that it was okay to question them. The pastors I knew were heartless, arrogant, lazy, fake, and distant. They only seemed to care for us if they wanted something. Dad is a genius with his hands, and the only time any of the “men” in the churches he attended took any notice of him was to get him to do something.

Growing up, my family never fit in church and the homeschool community because Dad is not a leader and was not involved with my brothers and I spiritually or educationally. I desperately wanted to fit in, to belong. Besides, the outside world scared me.

According to everything I heard and saw from the religious community, the only way for a woman to do that was to be a wife and mother.

And being a wife and mother would protect me from that scary world.

The year I turned 18, my older brother left the GARBC Baptist church my family was part of, and I followed him to his new church. Then Mom left the GARBC Baptist church, and Dad refused to attend without her. Several weeks later, a series of circumstances forced older brother to work on Sundays. Without a driver’s license, I had no way to attend church.

Even when I did get my driver’s license nearly a year later, I refused to attend church because I did not think organized religion was Biblical and I was hurting from previous bad church experiences. For three years, I refused to attend church.

In those three years, without me realizing it, an amazing thing happened.

My walk with Christ became something I wanted to do, vs something I was expected to do. My faith grew far more in those three years than the 18 before them.

A desire to be part of a community drove me back to church.

In the years that followed, I had one bad church experience after another.

In addition, I was struggling to find a career and live the unexpected life of autism, singleness and childlessness. During that time, without me realizing it, God was releasing fundamentalism’s grip on me.

Finally, in 2010, I asked God in desperation to either give me a husband or make me content to be single.

God gave me contentment to be single and much more. Via J Lee Grady’s books 10 Lies the Church Tells Women and 25 Tough Questions About Women and the Church I was introduced to the egalitarian truth along with some blogs God put into my path. Because of God’s careful preparation of my heart, it was truth I joyfully received.

Yet I was not fully convinced.

Every year, I read through my one year Bible. At the beginning of 2011, I decided to write down every reference I could find regarding women to see what the Bible really said about women. On July 29, 2011, I read Rom 11:29: “For the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable”. The verse hit me like a rock between the eyes. I had seen how some women had the gifts of teaching and leadership while some men did not.

That verse showed me that God would never give a woman gifts and callings he did not expect her to use.

I felt like a bird set free.

I was every bit as valuable to God as a single, childless woman as a married with children woman!

I had a voice in the church and could be a church leader! It was okay to be assertive and independent!

Later in 2011 I said my final goodbye to organized religion. I could not find it in scripture and could not endure feeling like a freak and misfit in church because of being single, childless, and autistic.

Today Christ and women’s equality are my top passions in life. I still suffer from the scars of fundamentalism, but they are nothing compared to what family members and others are suffering from it.

Despite the struggles, I have much to be grateful for.

One of those blessings is being set free from fundamentalism.

*Contrary to popular belief, most of those who died at Jonestown were murdered and did not deliberately commit suicide.

When Siblings Become Swords: Trista’s Story

HA Editorial Team9 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Søren Niedziella. Image links to source.
CC image courtesy of Flickr, Søren Niedziella. Image links to source.

HA notes: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Trista” is a pseudonym.

I grew up in patriarchy. The seeds of powerlessness and fear were sown in me from my earliest years. Having a voice or power in my family was not easy, in fact, it was a constant struggle. However, this system and hierarchy created and maintained by my parents allowed the rivalry and teasing typical of siblings to grow into unhealthy imbalances of power.

There was a distinct hierarchy in my family. Masculinity and age determined your respect within the family unit. My position as a girl and the youngest member of 7 children meant I was the lowest of the low. My position was to toe the family line, get along and agree with those who were ‘above’ me.

There was one sibling I did get along with very well. She (Anne) was two years my senior, and we were joined at the hip since I can remember. In many ways she faced the same trials I did, however, her sweet and caring demeanor made her a more naturally lovable person.

I was told that I should ‘submissively endure suffering as Christ did.’

I was regularly told I was inept, stupid, crazy and extreme. When I was mercilessly teased or abused to the point of tears, my mother would reprimand me for not loving my brothers. She told me stories of how much she desired brothers. It “shocked” her that I could not “endure a little teasing.” She would have traded most anything to have brothers. Teasing was normal and I was “weak,” “like a little girl” to be offended by the rudeness of my siblings.

On several occasions my mother told me the story of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, saying he loved his enemies and died for Christ. She asked me how he could be so holy and I was complaining about teasing? “Isn’t that silly?”

Minor errors or failures on my part were magnified and viewed as my identity. Once, one of my sisters, roughly 10 years my senior, told me, “You are inept, and incompetent. I know a five year old who knows how to use a key. No wonder mom and dad don’t let you do anything.” This rant was delivered after I accidentally broke her key to the house by turning it the wrong direction in the keyhole. At the time, I was 13 years old I was already insecure. The verbal attacks against my character only made me more angry, hurt and hateful towards myself and those around me.

As a girl it was my duty to ‘support the men’

Although an imbalance of power existed between me and all of my siblings, this imbalance was larger when the sibling was male. As a child I was expected to serve my older brothers without question. If they requested something I was ‘unloving’ if I did not do as I was told. Anne and I were often required to make food for them, clean up after them and in other ways serve them. When they were in college, we were required to make food for guests they had come over and prepare for parties that they were hosting.

My brothers were also heavily involved in sports. My sister and I were told, “You need to support and love your brothers.” When we begged to be involved in activities, sports or anything social, we were told that such things would conflict with our brothers and we “need to love your brothers. Why do you not want to support them?”

Under the patriarchy, it was clear girls did not matter. Our development, desires and needs were entirely subservient to males, because men act, while women are acted upon.

These things caused more anger in my heart. I hated being told I was useless, what I wanted didn’t matter. I would cry out in anger to God, “Why did you make me a woman?? I can’t do anything because I’m a girl and girls are useless.”

I felt a need to punish myself for being crazy

As a child I did not know how to cope with the feelings of helplessness, uselessness, hate and anger. I turned to self-harm at the age of 12 as a means of coping with how horrible I felt about my identity. Being homeschooled posed problems to self-harm. I was constantly watched, and my parents openly mocked the idea of therapy and mental health. They portrayed mental illness as a weakness, something attention seeking individuals contrived to gain pity.

I would find creative ways of hurting myself. I would chew my nails and fingers until they bled. Often my fingers would be raw from excessive chewing and peeling layers of skin off. I would scratch myself, especially my stomach, until I bled. I would ‘cut myself while shaving,’ craving the release I felt when my legs bled. Hiding in my closet I would bang my hands against a pole until they became swollen. One time I even purposefully beat my head against a wall in an effort to give myself a head injury.

I craved affection. I wanted to experience love.

I sincerely believed no one in my family cared about me. Part of the self-harm narrative was an effort on my behalf to gain the love of my family. In my mind I would rationalize, “If I am hurt very badly they won’t be mean to you. They would want to help you, right? See, they really do love you. You need to try harder to really hurt yourself.”

Often I would ponder dark thoughts, sure no one would notice if I were dead. I thought perhaps people would be happy to have the ‘crazy’ girl gone. I wanted to die, but was not sure how. It was something I constantly thought about. I would day dream of being murdered, mutilated and beaten to death. These imaginations served as a mental outlet for my pain.

I was careful not to display my pain to others. Instead, I developed a dual identity. I hated my siblings, but I desperately craved their affection. They were the only people on the planet I interacted with. If they did not love me, I believed myself beyond the love of anyone. In my world, friends were not allowed. Thus, if my own family did not love me, who on God’s green earth would ever see anything lovable in me?

On the outside, I was confident, defiant, strongly defending myself, rebelling in any way I could, actively antagonizing others in an attempt to exact revenge. This was the way my anger reacted.

Other times, my desire for affection would win and I would berate myself and say, I matter and I’m going to earn their respect. When my efforts failed I would oscillate back to hating my siblings and the pain they caused in my life.

Today, I am in my early twenties, a senior in college and headed towards a successful career. Yet when I am around my siblings, I feel like that hopeless, unloved child again. I never felt loved by my siblings. It is hard to feel love from people who hurt me so badly for so long. I still acutely feel the pain inflicted from childhood. It is impossible to negate years of being dismissed as a silly, crazy little girl.

The patriarchy damages its victims in many ways. In my case, it removed the joy of having those I call family.

Voddie Baucham, Daughters, and “Virgin Brides”

HA Editorial Team4 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on January 12, 2015.

Last summer, Michael Farris denounced patriarchy. Or, so he claimed.

Among those who homeschool for religious reasons, there is a subculture sometimes called the “patriarchy movement.” Michael Farris, founder of the powerful Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) and probably the most well-known leader in the Christian homeschooling world, has for decades espoused the beliefs of this movement. But in the last year and a half, two of its leaders, Bill Gothard and Doug Phillips, lost their ministries in the midst of sexual abuse scandals.

Last summer Farris issued a white paper that allowed him to throw Gothard and Phillips under the bus and portray himself as reasonable—the good guy in all of this. But not only did Farris make it clear that he does not understand what the word patriarchy means, he also started making exceptions right away, first and foremost for his friend Voddie Baucham, another leader in this movement. Farris pointed out that Voddie had recently enrolled his adult daughter, Jasmine, in a Christian online college program, which apparently (for Farris) makes him not patriarchal.

Who is this Voddie Baucham and what does he stand for?

Well.

To give you an idea, let me offer a page from Baucham’s 2009 book “What He Must Be . . . If He Wants to Marry My Daughter“:

baucham1

And here it is in text:

The first line of protection for our daughters is protecting their purity. Quite simply, our job as fathers is to present our daughters to their husbands as virgin brides (Deuteronomy 22:13-21). I can hear the audible gasps as I write the Bible reference. More importantly, I understand the trepidation. Moses’ instructions in Deuteronomy 22 are downright horrifying. However, it is part of God’s revelation in the BIble and is thus worthy of our full attention.

But if the thing is true, that evidence of virginity was not found in the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done an outrageous thing in Israel by whoring in her father’s house. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. (Deuteronomy 22:20-21)

So Farris condemns patriarchy, but is willing to make cuddly with this guy.

At the moment, you’re probably simply on the edge of your seat, wondering what Baucham says next. I have that for you too:

baucham2

And here is the text:

Regardless of our revulsion at the idea of a woman being stoned for promiscuity, we cannot avoid the principle inherent in the text. The father is the one responsible for protecting his daughter’s virginity. This is evident for at least two reason. First, the father must provide evidence of his daughter’s virginity. Second, if there is no evidence, and the charges are true, the father must endure the shame and incomprehensible pain of the capital punishment of his daughter at his door!

Note that Baucham is primarily concerned with how hard it would be for the poor father to have his daughter stoned at the altar—not a thought is given to the daughter who is, you know, being stoned to death. Grrr.

Again, no one is arguing for the stoning of promiscuous young women whose lack of virginity is discovered on their wedding day. However, the timeless principle here is the responsibility of a father to present a virgin bride at the marriage altar.

This principle transcends the law/grace divide. This is true for all people in all places at all times. Nothing in the New Testament would remotely suggest that fathers are to stand down as the protectors of their daughters’ virginity. . . .

While the Deuteronomy passage deals with protecting virginity, Exodus 22 address the question of what a father is to do if his daughter loses her virginity.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with this idea, Baucham appears to be in the evangelical camp that believes the laws of the Old Testament are no longer binding, because we now live in the covenant of grace (rather than the covenant of the law), but that the Old Testament laws can still be instructive in understanding God’s character and desires. I was raised in this camp myself.

But you may now be wondering about the Exodus 22 passage Baucham mentioned.

baucham3

Here’s the text:

If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall give the bride-price for her and make her his wife. If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the bride-price for virgins. (Exodus 22:16-17)

Note that the father has the right of refusal in this matter. The text is unambiguous. The man who seduces the virgin must answer to her father. Moreover, he must do right by the young woman and marry her, unless the father “utterly refuses to give her to him.” Note that the daughter does not give herself to the man in marriage; the father gives her to the man he deems appropriate.

When I talk about the patriarchy? This is what I’m talking about. Men like Baucham believe their adult daughters are bound to obey them in word and deed, and that they possess their daughters’ virginity to hand off to another when they choose. I’m lucky that my father was fairly introverted and hands off, but I still had a hell of a time with it when my courtship when rogue (or, to put it more specifically, when I took the reigns to my own love life).

And while Baucham is against stoning unmarried daughters who are sexually active, one wonders what he thinks should be done with them. It can’t be pretty.

Finally, note that the section above is followed with this heading:

A Patriarch Must Arrange for His Daughter’s Marriage by Finding a Suitable Husband and Making Proper Arrangements 

That is what we’re talking about here.

And yet, to Michael Farris, Baucham isn’t patriarchal. Right.

Rethinking The “Proverbs 31 Woman”

HA Editorial Team4 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Chetan. Image links to source.
CC image courtesy of Flickr, Chetan. Image links to source.

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Darcy’s blog Darcy’s Heart-Stirrings. It was originally published on July 29, 2011.

There’s something troubling me about a teaching going around.

I’ll probably be preaching to the choir here but on the chance that someone reads this who has swallowed said teaching, I need to give them a dose of reality.

The teaching goes something like this: Girls need protection, physical and spiritual. That’s why they need to stay home under their father’s protection until they can be safely entrusted to their husband’s protection. The extent to which this is fleshed out is different from family to family, but that’s the jist of the teaching.

So what about it? This idea of women needing “protection” is being used to keep them from going to college, getting jobs, and going on missionary trips, among other things. They are told that they are gullible, weak-minded, easily led, and not to be trusted on their own because they are easily deceived and taken advantage of. They need a strong man to come between them and the world.

Besides the fact that I see absolutely no scriptural backing for this idea, I can’t help but think that whoever came up with it doesn’t live in the real world.

I’ve heard so many use this as an excuse for why a woman shouldn’t go off to college. Because then she’ll be “alone” and without protection. What if her car breaks down? What if she has to go shopping in a bad part of town? What if something goes wrong and Daddy isn’t there to rescue her? Or a shady mechanic tries to rip her off?

My husband’s a trucker. I’m “alone” from about Sunday afternoon to Friday afternoon every week during the summer. I have to fend for myself and three kids. I sleep alone, a gun nearby, knowing there may come a night I’ll have to use it (and trust me, I can use it better than most men I know). I have to make all the decisions on how to run my house alone. I have to be mature and interact with the world around me (including men and atheists *gasp*) alone. I have to be discerning all by myself, able to judge right and wrong, wise and foolish. If I break down on the side of the road, my husband isn’t there to “protect” or rescue me. I have to deal with it as if I were single. I have to be strong and capable and mature and independent every single day. My husband leaves every week depending on me to be all these things and more. If I had an emergency, it could be 12+ hours before my husband could get to me. He didn’t need a girl who needed to be coddled, needed someone to make decisions for her, needed to be “led” and guided in daily interactions like a child. He needed a mature woman who could handle an imperfect life. And it’s a darn good thing that I didn’t spend my growing up years thinking I needed a man to handle my life or come between me and the big bad world. I had to learn how to be a functioning part of society and take care of myself and others.

My family’s well-being depends on this. 

I know girls who weren’t allowed to go grocery shopping, in a safe small town, without their dad or big brother for “protection”. They weren’t allowed to go anywhere without a man, for that matter. Their view of the Big Bad Men in the world they needed to be protected from has grown into a paranoia. They’re scared of their own shadows. They think all men are out to rape them or take advantage of them. And they truly believe they are gullible, weak, and cannot handle life on their own, because that’s the line they’ve been fed all their lives. It’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As my friend, Christi, said in comment to this idea:

This is exactly what patriarchy wants us to believe, that women are weak-minded things incapable of avoiding dangerous situation. I lived alone …and I never found myself in a compromising position. And how would a predator know whether a woman lived at home with her parents, or with her husband, or lived “alone” (with roommates)? 

And while we’re talking about this, why don’t people realize that homemakers are some of the most “alone” and vulnerable women out there? You seem to not realize that married young women have to do the exact same things that young women who are away at college have to do, and more. I have to go out and do my shopping alone, just like a college girl would (though I imagine that college girls get to carpool together). What’s more, I’m even at home alone. I’m pretty sure that I’d really be better protected on a college campus since I’m alone during the day (and night, since my husband works until 11 PM) and have often had to interact with strange men, sometimes even inside my house, while my husband is at work. Apartment maintenance men, internet guy, phone guy, UPS man, door-to-door salesmen, etc. Oh, and it’s usually my job to take our car in for repairs and oil changes. Car repairmen are actually pretty nice, or maybe it depends on where you go (which again, is simply a matter of making an intelligence choice). 

I mean no disrespect to my husband when I say this but, he’s really not here a lot to protect me because he’s busy working a full-time job in addition to being a full-time student. My marriage license doesn’t really afford me any more physical protection than I had when I was single.

You see, it is complete folly to train up a person to be completely dependent on another person.

You have no idea what their life is going to be like.

No idea what skills they’re going to need to provide for themselves or the people they love. No idea if they will get married, then widowed. Or even if they will marry at all. To raise a girl with the belief that she is weak and needs a man to be her mediator in life is to cripple her for life. To render her ineffective to do anything for herself or for the God that she’s supposed to be “glorifying”.

I know girls my age who are single and still at home with their parents, being told that they need to be “protected” and watched over until they get married and all that jazz. But guess what? I’m married and I’m still on my own. Age and marital status aren’t the magic keys to a perfect life. They are just used as excuses for controlling the lives of these girls. Real life doesn’t look anything like what the Patriarchy crowd are trying to say it does. Their view is way too narrow. Ask a soldier’s wife. Or a trucker’s wife. Or any woman who is married or single and has to be a mature adult and deal with the world on her own. Whose husband and children and lives depend on it.

I love it when my husband is home and able to take care of things so I don’t have to. I love being cared for and knowing that I don’t have to do everything by myself. I love feeling loved and protected by my man, just as much as he loves me caring for him. I love sleeping peacefully at night, knowing he’s right there and I don’t have to be so alert. But I also love knowing that should he not be there, I can still take care of myself and my children.

One last thought. You know that popular verse in Proverbs 31 that says “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her worth is far above rubies.”? Go look up the Hebrew word translated “virtuous”. It’s most often used in the OT to describe might, strength, fighting men of valor, army men, efficiency, wealth, strength and force. It is translated all these ways: army 56 times, man of valour 37 times, host 29 times, forces 14 times, valiant 13 times, strength 12 times, power 9 times, substance 8 times, might 6 times, strong 5 times, and a few miscellaneous words.

Gives you a rather different picture of what a “Proverbs 31 woman” looks like, doesn’t it?

When A Stay-At-Home Daughter Rebels: Reumah’s Story, Part Three

HA Editorial Team8 Comments

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Pseudonym note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Reumah” is a pseudonym.

< Part Two

Part Three: Escape

This roller coaster I was one wouldn’t stop. Me, hesitatingly trying to make a step forward, my parents instantly pushing me back. I bought a little pallet of eye shadow one day – my parents told me I looked like a whore. I bought a skirt with a hemline just at the knee. My parents said I was pushing their standards. I desperately wanted a job. My father sat me down and told me how I was actually losing money by taking a job outside the home….and that my skills were better utilized under his roof.

I finally got the job I so coveted, at the age of almost 21.

I must have looked completely lost, walking into the store that first day in a long skirt, unsure of how to behave or what to say in this unfamiliar environment. Over the next six months, I would meet so many new people that would open my eyes to the oppression that I was living in. I made so much progress in that six months, but my parents could only see the negative influences that the “world” was having on me. I had to lie, sneak around, and pretend to be someone I wasn’t to keep the peace in my household.

One morning when I came down for breakfast wearing my favorite pair of jeans, my father told me that he was ashamed of my immodest clothing, and that I wasn’t allowed to wear those jeans ever again in his house. As a 21 year old woman who’d tasted just enough independence to understand what she was missing, I was livid. I started keeping the jeans at work, and changing into them as soon as I left my parent’s house. My days of quietly obeying my parent’s directives were quickly coming to an end.

I applied for, and miraculously received, a full ride scholarship to a distinguished university completely across the country from my parents. I remember my Dad, sitting on the couch in our living room, telling me he would never approve of one of his daughter’s leaving his home to attend college. That he would never allow it. Would never give his blessing.

I remember crying in the living room, desperate for an escape from my prison.

My friends at work told me I had to go. Those women at my first little retail job were instrumental in helping me ease into the real world, and open my eyes to the fact that I NEEDED to move on with my life. Yes, it would be hard. Yes it was scary, especially without any support from my family. But I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to spend 4 years across the country from my family, becoming my own person. Because after so many years living my parent’s beliefs and being told what was right and wrong, I didn’t know who I really was.

After an agonizing summer, I went.

My parents, insistent that they would move the family across the country so I could stay under their roof, drove me out to my new college with the promise that they would be there within a semester. I secretly hoped their plans to move would fall through. Thankfully, they did.

I fell in love with dorm life instantly, and loved the absolute freedom I had over my life. My future opened up before me. Endless opportunities and freedom met me at every turn. I met so many wonderful people who were kind, helpful, selfless, and genuine. I marveled when I met folks who weren’t devout fundamentalists and had never heard of patriarchy, and yet were still amazing people. These students – most of them had been to public school, had been raised in normal American culture; and yet they weren’t raging pagans, criminals, and devils in disguise. How could this be? Maybe my parents had been wrong.

Fast forward almost three years to the present day. It’s been a long road.

The first year of college life was incredibly difficult. I couldn’t keep up with any of the conversations my peers were having. Pop culture references went straight over my head. I hadn’t seen any of the movies people talked about; I didn’t get the jokes my friends made. People were shocked when they learned I’d never had a boyfriend and never been kissed; horrified when they learned I’d never gone to high school, played a sport or gone on a sleepover. I didn’t know who the Backstreet Boys were, had never listened to a Michael Jackson song, and didn’t know the Disney Channel even existed. Eventually, I started leaving those details of my life out of conversations. I created a completely new “me”, and many of my friends never even knew of my life before college.

My relationship with my family is rocky these days. I now stand for everything they’ve ever been opposed to….done everything they always wanted to protect me from. They’re convinced that college has corrupted me in a thousand ways. They don’t approve, support, or accept the person that I’ve become over the past 3 years since I left the movement. On the surface, they’re friendly. They feign interest in my activities, and we talk on a regular basis. But deep down, they can’t stand what I’ve become.

My siblings are still at home, lost in the life from which I’ve escaped. Fortunately, one of my brothers decided to leave too, and he’s now traveling around Europe making up for lost time.

I’m incredibly proud of how far I’ve come. But I have a lot left to go.

While I don’t dwell on my past, it does shape the person that I am today. I still find traces of my upbringing from time to time. My boyfriend is constantly dispelling my twisted views of life, family, relationships, and myself that are still left over from my dysfunctional upbringing.

And it’s overwhelmingly difficult to know that I don’t have the support of my family.

And yet,

“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow.”  ~ Thomas Paine

End of series.