A wives-submit type explained to Kathryn Joyce.

“Man is ultimately responsible, when he stands up before God in heaven, for how he ran and managed his family. We women are responsible for how we were as helpmeets. We’re not supposed to be wearing the pants to the elbows, like a lot of women do. We’re equally intelligent and capable of doing the things theat men do, but that doesn’t mean we have to or that we should.” This is a common rejoinder of biblical womanhood advocates…they acknowledge women’s equal capacity, but they suggest that women lay their abilities aside with their pride as a living sacrifice fit for their Savior. [Quiverfull p 71]

But why? That’s what I want … Read the rest

Frank Schaeffer points out that Michele Bachmann is not telling the truth about whether or not she submits to her husband. He knows what he’s talking about, too: his father was one of the sources of the anti-feminist Dominionist movement.

Bachmann understands just how extreme her part of the evangelical movement is. She also understands that a certain amount of godly lying will be needed to mask that. She understood that the question she was asked the other day was about a biblical teaching that is misogynistic to the core and advocates total submission of a wife to a husband. It is teaching she’s signed on to long ago.

The people, churches and groups that shaped Bachmann’s thinking are far

And here is Ladies Against Feminism. Yes really.

It too says submission is misunderstood and a wonderful thing if only you know how.

This post makes no attempt to argue the case for servanthood with those of you outside the Christian faith. However, for modern women who consider themselves a part of the Christian faith, this all too common reaction should be alarming. Are we really so prideful that the very suggestion that we take a humble and serving attitude towards our husbands instantly unbridles our tongues and sets our anger blazing?

“Prideful” – is that what it is? But aren’t we always being told that it was Christianity that introduced the idea of human equality to a … Read the rest

Doug Phillips, the founder of Vision Forum and a big noise in the Christian patriarchy movement, told the audience at a convention about watching his wife counsel young women who are thinking about marriage. She always asks them “Are you willing to call your husband ‘Lord’?” The answer tends to be shocked silence followed by No. He goes on:

We’re not talking about Lord as in the Creator, but your earthly head. And one that you have to follow, even when he makes bad judgments. Are you ready to do the most vulnerable thing that a woman ever can do and submit yourself to a man, who you are going to have to follow in his faith, who is incredibly

So now I know. Like most people, I didn’t realize the people behind Rick Perry’s prayer party are weirder than other prayer police.

With tens, even hundreds of millions of followers worldwide, the NAR’s stress on Godlike prophetic and apostolic powers, its revisions of end-time prophecies, its methodology of “spiritual warfare,” and its agenda of theocratic dominion over all aspects of society are not just threatening to modern secular democracy and the religious pluralism it protects, they have been sharply criticized by other conservative Christians as unbiblical, deviant teachings, even a form of the very demonic practices they obsessively declare war against.

They’re not just messing around.

The new prophets and apostles believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to

Here’s another one, this time by a man, the pastor of a Reformed Baptist church in Aberystwyth, laying down the law for women.

So the sentiment of our text, that a wife is to submit to her husband, is found
throughout the Spirit-breathed New Testament. It is not a curious message found in just one place – like the phrase in the letter to the Corinthians of being baptized for the dead, whatever the correct meaning of that may be. So rejection of this word by those who claim to reverence the Lord Christ, is plain disobedience.

Except that it wasn’t the Lord Christ who is supposed to have said any of it, it was Paul; why does reverence … Read the rest