Shiny Happy Peole - Part 1 of my story: a collision course with Gothardism & Christian patriarchy fundamentalism

 

Some years ago, J. Lee Grady, who was the editor of a prominent Christian mag called 'Charisma" wrote a book called, "10 Lies the Church Tells Women - How the Bible has been mis-used to keep women in spiritual bondage." (You can read an article-length summary of the book here It begins with these words: "For centuries, a patriarchal system of control has kept women in spiritual captivity through distortion of the scriptures. It's time to debunk the myths"). 

This “male-headship” doctrine is prevalent. Pulpits, marriage seminars, marriage books, missionary organizations, Bible schools – everywhere you turn for help, you get it. This doctrine is like poison, it poisons your mind and your thinking and your emotions – and even when you know it is wrong, it takes years to work the effects of the poison out of your system. There's various rebuttal books such as "10 Lies Women Believe" (notice the baddies are, again, women and their norty behaviours and attitudes - what a contrast with Grady putting the institution of the church on the dock for a change).

But why did so many women react against this book? Grady was trying to do them a favour! What a blessing that a strong man has risen up to state the obvious in such a no-compromise way. If it had been a woman, I wonder if she would have been dismissed as a contentious, bitter feminist? Why did so many women are freak out instead of raising a shout of jubilee?

Why would Christian wives so obediently and compliantly swallow poison? As a girl raised in hard-core legalistic, modern mega-church “ churchianity,” I can offer a clue. It’s what I call, “Good Girl-ism.”

From early childhood, you get socialized to be a good girl and a people-pleaser. Then you get steadily brain-washed so that you doubt and second-guess the voice of the feminine within you – your intuition, your instinct, the voice of your own human spirit, your own conscience and eventually, even the Holy Spirit’s gentle voice. Eventually, you are wired so that the only Voice you recognize as coming from God is the Masculine voice - the strident voice that is asserted, valued, validated and listened to in the church. Even your own conscience gets warped to the point that it starts working against you. Even the faintest niggle of doubt or resistance within you, you immediately squelch as "rebellion."

(Note: this is not to imply that the masculine voice is necessarily bad or wrong – it is just that it has been over-emphasized in the church while the voice of the feminine has been muzzled. We need a balance of both, neither independent of the other).

Then a warm glow of familiar Good Girl righteousness suffuses your entire being as you bask in pride that you successfully quenched another fire of rebellion within your untrustworthy, deceitful and easily-deceived feminine soul.

Fear is what keeps these women dutifully swallowing the poison. Fear of shame and condemnation, that tool of the devil that works so effectively on Good-Girl-People-Pleasers. Fear of being labeled "rebellious" (which, as every fundyland girl knows, is as the sin of "witchcraft"); fear of being labeled a "Jezebel"; fear of reproach; of being disapproved of; of being considered “out of order”; of being rejected, shunned, and ostracized. Fear of being considered a Bad Girl. Fear of the internal shame of feeling like a Bad Girl. Fear of having happen to you what happened to this or that woman when she spoke up or stepped out of her place. Put out of fellowship. Considered "not in good standing" with the church. All subtle variations on being excommunicated and shunned.

It’s fear of the modern day version of being burnt at the stake. Bad things do happen to bad girls. Then and now. Perhaps when the Christian church repents of the persecution of those women who actually were innocent, we may see something break in the spiritual realm that might loosen the strangle hold of the dynamics of this controlling fear in Christian women.

 

 

When I was 17, I sat in church struggling within myself trying to decide if I should answer the altar call for that Sunday’s sermon. (This was a pentecostal church influenced by BILL GOTHARD, with a fair bit of ABOVE RUBIES floating around as well. Sadly, American fundamentalism was exported to NZ and Australia and a lot of churches just accepted it unquestioningly.) The pastor called all the girls and women who knew that they were doing a form of witchcraft in their homes by exerting too much influence over their brothers to come forward to repent and be ‘delivered’. Nearly all my peers were already up there. I remember the line of young women stretching across the front of the church. I was the only sister of three brothers and I had the keenest sense of responsibility in my family, as well as being the one who had leadership qualities. I was an obvious candidate. I searched my soul, trying to test whether I had been “too” influential or persuasive. Part of me felt I should go up – just to cover my bases. But another part of me sensed that it was part of a subtle misogynistic attitude in the doctrine and the church. My internal justice barometer said, “This is wrong. Don’t go forward.” My sense of shame said, “You need to go forward. You’re in rebellion of you don’t.”

During my experience of life in the modern Christian church, I have observed that few women are willing to come join me out on this very shaky doctrinal limb. My conscience, my innate sense of justice, and most of all, my heart understanding of who God is and what He is really like is what coaxed me out onto this lonely, fragile limb. But most women would not want to be put through what I have gone through to earn the right to cling tenaciously to my twig.

Women collaborate with their oppressors – it seems to be an essential survival strategy for women, a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. The fact that most women are physically weaker; and sexually vulnerable, means that women are more vulnerable to abuse and oppression. But I keep seeing women acting like if they just be “more good”; they can mitigate to some extent how much they will be hurt. I see women intensely loyal to the men, the leaders, the pastors and the doctrines that are destroying them. 

I’ve noticed that the more legalistic a denomination is, the more stridently the women in it will speak out to tell other women they must submit. The most extreme unilateral submission books I’ve read have been written by women – Helen Andelin (Fascinating Womanhood); Elizabeth Rice Handford (Me? Obey Him?); Mary Pride; Elisabeth Elliot. On a personal level, I have experienced that the more oppressed and indoctrinated a woman is, the more she is likely to use a very strident, authoritative and shaming voice is rebuking me and telling me how I should behave in my marriage – even if she is suffering terribly herself. It startles me that such women who write books on How to Be a Proper Christian Woman use the rigid, list-making, categorizing, comparing, laying-down-the-law, bringing correction, hard-sell style masculine voice when they tell other women how they should act and how they should be.

That’s the stick – but there’s a carrot, too. The poison of this doctrine is the self-righteousness that makes it so seductive. If all you’ve ever had is shame, then there is a lot of appeal to following a formula that can guarantee that you will be securely within the ranks of the Righteous, the Included, the Acceptable (that is, those least at risk of being burnt at the stake!) What you do is “submit;” keep "sweet;" be perpetually either pregnant or breast-feeding for a decade or two; home-birth; home school; do all the domestic work; make sure you never give instructions or directions to your husband in public or ask him directly to do anything; look pretty, competent, capable, serene and “blessed” on Sundays (when the all-important Appearance Management is MOST crucial!) – and you’ve got it made: you will feel like a good girl. You will feel righteous and you will even feel holy. 

I see that many of us women have this weakness (and it grieves me that this weakness is socialized and even indoctrinated into us) that makes us so susceptible to fear and insecurity. That fear and insecurity can be a breeding ground for legalism and a kind of counterfeit holiness that comes through works instead of only by the cross of Jesus. And women starving for approval and security eat it up.

Women are stuck between a rock and a hard place. In much of the Christian church, women have actually been instructed, in the name of pleasing God and obeying scripture, to do dysfunctional co-dependency and relational idolatry.

The more a people group are controlled and oppressed under an over-bearing authority hierarchy, the more they resort to manipulation instead of direct confrontation and open conflict resolution – which is unacceptable (it’s not “submissive”). It’s either that or die off completely on the inside. But if they do any kind of “manipulation” (looking unhappy; letting a tear or two slip out; being quiet or subdued - which amazingly is construed as the wife giving the husband the cold shoulder rather than the husband freezing out the wife); hinting, pleading or begging; any form of deliberate or subconscious passive-aggression; “buttering up” behavior) then they get into trouble for being ‘manipulative’. So her inner self dies off more and more as the woman ricochets back and forth between trying hard to submit and trying to be true to herself. She struggles to truly, really submit more and not do any more of that terrible manipulation stuff (“I just struggle so hard with control!” one wife wailed to me). But their deep instinct stubbornly, frantically clings to life. God has not designed the human spirit to be suffocated to death as easily as all that. As they cling like a drowning person to some remaining shred of personhood, all that is needed to snuff them out entirely is a good dose of Above Rubies or Debi Pearl or some such teaching, telling them that the struggle they feel on the inside is really their carnal, sinful, selfish nature resisting Dying To Self and to just trust God more and keep a quiet heart.

How awful that the door to the redeeming, restoring, healing blessing of real dying to self, real surrender, real submission and real being led by the Holy Spirit should be shut or hidden to people blinded or blinkered by this hellish doctrine! Real submission has nothing to do with control, authority, power, order, structure and correct gender roles – it is to do with what I believe is truly the Biblical model and God’s true “order” for us: peace, security, joy, love, unity and intimacy, with God and with each other.

To be continued ...