Kathryn M. Riss wrote:
“…Patriarchy is the nearly universal social system by which men dominate women and other men. Unfortunately, combined with the fallen, sinful nature of humanity, a misogynist attitude toward women, and the aggressive nature of males, it has produced many evils.
In pagan societies, this mixture produced rape, the kidnapping and enslavement of wives, the exposure of female infants, and the human sacrifice of virgin girls. Jewish patriarchy practiced polygamy and the disenfranchisement of Jewish women. Christian patriarchy produced a 500-year witch-burning craze which resulted in the torture and murder of as many as 1,000,000 women and girls.
Although the rights of women have improved over the centuries, the excesses of patriarchy have not ended. Modern Hindu societies still practice wife-murder in order to maximize financial gain from dowries and the burning alive of wives on their husband’s funeral pyres. Moslem societies enforce the seclusion of women, denial of their rights, and the mutilation of young girls, often leading to their death, under the religious euphemism of “female circumcision.” Throughout the world, but especially in China, where population control is strict, millions of female fetuses have been aborted due to the preference of parents for a son. And in all societies, rape, pornography, prostitution and the sometimes violent subjugation of women continue to multiply the evils and injustices of unfettered patriarchy….”
A woman must only minster to other women, and then only with a man’s approval. According to the ‘Godly’ woman scenario, women aren’t good enough to talk to men. They can only talk to women. If a woman wishes to go into a ministry, teach a class, write a book, or generally express herself as a Christian, she must do so, only with the permission of some man.
“…Sensitive to charges that her busy career might contradict her message, Peace reassures audiences that she ministers only to women, and only under her pastor’s supervision. Indeed, the Titus 2 movement finds its most prominent voices in the Kentucky-based Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and a roster of conservative male theologians that includes John Piper, founder of Desiring God Ministries; John MacArthur, megachurch pastor of Grace Community Church; Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; and Bruce Ware, president of the Evangelical Theological Society, who caused a public stir last June when he told a Texas audience that domestic violence often stems from women’s lack of submission. (Mohler irked fellow hardliners last fall when he and others reached for loopholes to justify Sarah Palin’s candidacy as biblically permissible. “Palin represents the feminist lie that a woman can do it all,” countered one critic at fundamentalist website VisionForum.com.)…”
One of the problems with Christian Reconstructionism is that it has created a generation of men who are ill-educated bust-heads. They are told to start home businesses, in order to avoid having to submit to a woman who might be a boss or over them in authority. So, they have all these strange businesses, keeping their families on the brink of poverty.
“...voices such as Patriarch magazine promote “home education, home business, home church, home birth, family ministry, family health, family worship…courtship and betrothal, family-based welfare.” This view of the family may also include rejection of organized sports, church youth and singles’ groups, and neighborhood playmates.
Proponents portray this view as “balanced”3 and acknowledge that the home is under the authority of the church. In this paradigm, however, the church is a “home church” made up of like-minded families who isolate themselves from non-family-focused activities and from other Christians who do not share their particular view of family life and child-rearing values.
From within this structure, church leaders who let their wives work outside the home, use credit, limit family size, send their children to public schools, and so on, are viewed in a negative light. Concerning such leaders, Patriarch asks, “Can I remain under the authority of someone who so denies the Bible by his life? Can my family continue to maintain fellowship in a church whose leaders so disregard the clear teachings of God’s Word?”4 Patriarch further suggests that youth groups and Sunday school programs demonstrate a “failure of the church to teach the principles of parental responsibility for child training and to reinforce it in the church’s programs,” and that the use of these programs in a church “may well be a reason to leave.”Isolationist Jonathan Lindvall of Bold Christian Living tried to answer his critics by affirming: “Yes, I am sheltering my children! I am convinced this is what God calls me to do.”6 Most Christians would probably agree that children need a certain amount of sheltering. The concept of sheltering is not the issue, however; the extent of sheltering is the real issue. Sheltering is a legitimate concept, but isolationists’ rationale for sheltering often does not convey the idea of the extent or limitations to the practice….”
Is the far right, libertarian, submissive, Christian Reconstruction movement fueling the anti-woman, revenge movement?
According to Debi Pearl
“…When you smile at him as he enters the room…your smile is an honor to God. If you are married to a worthless lump of selfish so and so, your smile may be a sacrifice but that makes it all the more a service to God. Your calling in life is to learn to listen with all joy to him; talk of his projects, plans, ideas, and hopes instead of directing the conversation to your interests and needs and visions. Your life should be dedicated to helping him realize his full potential, or limited potential, as it may be….A help meet is not first a cook, cleaner, or even a mother. A help meet’s first ministry is to her husband, how she may PLEASE her man. If cooking healthy, being a super-neat housewife, or even being involved in a ministry (even if it is where people are REALLY getting saved) interferes in ANY way with your first, and foremost ministry of pleasing your man, then you are not pleasing God….”
The abuse is secretive, but could be more wide-spread than we think with even leaders of the movement abusing their wives.
“…One of these known abuses going on in some Christian Patriarchal circles is wife spanking. The real label is domestic violence which of course is illegal. If the wife does not agree to spanking, it is not Biblical. Husbands do not own their wives and do not have the right to abuse them. Adding the adjective “Biblical” in front of a word like “discipline” does not make it in fact Biblical. Furthermore, when do husbands have the right to discipline their wives?…We must understand that Christian Patriarchy can easily set up a man to have a free license to abuse his wife. I am very concerned about pastors who teach men that they need to get their wives under control. I overheard my own former pastor say this. How he would propose doing this, I do not know, but the idea of a man using his authority to control could easily be taken to the extreme of wife spanking….Mel, I can confirm Lindt’s comments about RC Sproul Jr and the wife spanking. We were members there years ago and witnessed it in his home. We were there in the early years of St. Peter Presbyterian Church. RC would sometimes invite families to his home for a meal, not so much for the regular folks, but if you were big donors to the church and Highlands Study Center like we were….”
Her child beating husband wrote:
“…But here is the clincher: If a wife begins her “help meet” journey as an experiment to change her husband, it will always fail, for he will detect her “religious” façade and not become vulnerable to it, and she will not have the moral earnestness to endure the setbacks that will undoubtedly come. There can be only one reason for a wife to begin doing her sacrificial part—to honor her God and obey his commandments. When a woman makes a lifetime commitment to be all that God desires her to become, regardless of how her grumpy husband responds, only then does she begin to mature and develop as a person. If he never responds positively, in the end she has become a saint of historical proportions—Christlike in every way. Dear lady, only when your goal is Christlikeness will you start the process of building your marriage into something glorious….”
The problem with Christian Patriarchy is that women are to blame for everything going wrong. If a man gets caught, sinning, the way Doug Phillips did, well, his wife was doing something wrong. If homeschooling children fail to be educated properly, well, Geoff Botkin blames the mother, for not being tough enough on them. If a man’s business fails, well, his wife wasn’t supporting him. If he hits her, she made him do it. It has empowered the far right’s war on women, allowing abject jerks like Erick Erickson to spout their hatred of women, and venues like FOX News to promote it.
“...When you look at biology, look at the natural world, the roles of a male and female in society, and the other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complementary role. We as people in a smart society have lost the ability to have complimentary relationships in nuclear families, and it’s tearing us apart. [Fox Business, Lou Dobbs Tonight, 5/29/13, via Media Matters]…”
Not only that, but a woman’s menstrual cycle should be on the family calendar.
“…[Michael Pearl] recently advised young husbands to track their wives’ cycles so they would know in advance when their wives were going to go all hormonal and ballistic on them—when it was their time of the month. Most of those who commented responded in horror to Michael’s suggestion, and I was horrified too—but in my case I was also struck by the familiarity….”
Once again, it’s the creep factor. Not only that, but their daughters were to be tracked, primarily so the man of the house knows when his harem of submissive women might get all emotional on him. It’s a terribly misogynistic system, promoted by men who are terrified of women who have achieved various and sundry things in life.
“…First, women serve as useful scapegoats for men. Christian Patriarchy men may not want to accept responsibility for mistakes, and so they blame women. In doing so, Christian Patriarchy men preserve their collective self-image as (supposedly) responsible leaders over the home and church. Christian Patriarchy women, having been taught to devalue themselves, internalize this self-blame and scapegoat other women in turn….”
There’s not much different in the world the far right Christian Reconstructionist envisions and the way women are being treated in various third world societies. One of the problems is the fact that, thanks to the movement, people are increasingly ignorant of the Bible. As Kathryn Riss wrote, it is not Biblical. The cult that Rushdoony created is not Biblical. That hasn’t stopped him from completely corrupting Christianity in America.
