Creepy Christian Patriarchy Movement Shackles Daughters to Their Fathers
and Homes
By Gina McGalliard, Bitch Magazine
Posted on November 29, 2010, Printed on November 30, 2010
Source
“Daughters aren’t to be independent.
They’re not to
act outside the scope of their father. As long as they’re
under the authority of their fathers, fathers have the ability to
nullify or
not the oaths and the vows. Daughters can’t just go out independently
and say, ‘I’m going to marry whoever I want.’ No.
The father has the ability to say, ‘No, I’m sorry, that
has to be approved by me.’”
There’s a lot of talk in American mainstream
media lately about the diminishing role of men -- fathers, in particular.
Have feminism
and reproductive technology made them obsolete? Are breadwinning
wives
and career-oriented mothers emasculating them?
No such uncertainty exists in the mind of Doug Phillips,
the man quoted above. The San Antonio minister is the founder of Vision Forum, a beachhead
for what’s known as the Christian Patriarchy Movement, a branch
of evangelical Christianity that takes beliefs about men as leaders and
women as homemakers to anachronistic extremes. Vision Forum Ministries
is, according to its Statements of Doctrine, “committed to affirming
the historic faith of Biblical Christianity,” with special attention
to the historical faith found in the book of Genesis, when God created
Eve as a “helper” to Adam. According to Christian Patriarchy,
marriage bonds man (the symbol of Christ) to woman (the symbol of the
Church). It’s a model that situates husbands and fathers in a position
of absolute power: If a woman disobeys her “master,” whether
father or husband, she’s defying God. Thus, women in the Christian
Patriarchy Movement aren’t just stay-at-home mothers -- they’re
stay-at-home daughters as well. And many of them wouldn’t have
?it any other way.
The stay-at-home-daughters movement, which is promoted
by Vision Forum, encourages young girls and single women to forgo college
and outside
employment in favor of training as “keepers at home” until
they marry. Young women pursuing their own ambitions and goals are viewed
as selfish and antifamily; marriage is not a choice or one piece of a
larger life plan, but the ultimate goal. Stay-at-home daughters spend
their days learning “advanced homemaking” skills, such as
cooking and sewing, and other skills that at one time were a necessity
-- knitting, crocheting, soap- and candle-making. A father is considered
his daughter’s authority until he transfers control to her husband.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that
the CPM shares much of its philosophy with the Quiverfull movement
[See “Multiply and
Conquer,” Bitch no. 37], which holds that good Christians must
eschew birth control--even natural family planning -- in order to
implement biblical principles and, in the process, outbreed unbelievers.
Although
the CPM has been around for the past several decades, with its roots
in the founding of the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood,
and the teachings of religious leaders like Bill Gothard and Rousas
J. Rushdoony,
the stay-at-home-daughters movement seems to have gained traction
in the last decade. Kathryn Joyce, author of the 2009 book Quiverfull:
Inside
the Christian Patriarchy Movement, estimates the CPM population to
be in the low tens of thousands, but the rise of evangelical and
fundamentalist
Christianity over the past several decades makes it difficult to
predict how large the CPM following could eventually become.
Vision Forum, for its part, is fully dedicated to turning
back the clock on gender equality. Its website offers a cornucopia
of sex-segregated
books and products designed to conform children to rigid gender ?stereotypes
starting from an early age. The All-American Boy’s Adventure Catalog
shills an extensive selection of toy weapons (bow-and-arrow sets, guns,
swords, and tomahawks), survival gear, and books and DVDs on war, the
outdoors, and science. The Beautiful Girlhood Collection features dolls,
cooking and sewing play sets, and costumes. There’s no room for
doubt about the intended roles these girls will play later on in life.
Indeed, the Vision Forum catalog brims with yearning for a simpler, supposedly
more secure, and presumably more pious time, with a number of items relating
to Western frontier living, a “Grandfather’s Classic Toys” collection,
manuals on medieval chivalry, and centuries-old titles about manners
and modesty.
Integral to Vision Forum’s belief about female submission is making
sure women are not independent at any point in their lives, regardless
of age; hence the organization’s enthusiasm for stay-at-home daughterhood.
The most visible proponents of this belief are Anna Sofia and Elizabeth
Botkin, sisters and authors of the book So Much More: The Remarkable
Influence of Visionary Daughters on the Kingdom of God (published by
Vision Forum), and creators of the documentary film Return of the Daughters,
which follows several young women staying home until marriage, and details
how they spend their time serving their fathers. One woman, Melissa Keen,
25, helps put on Vision Forum’s annual Father-Daughter Retreat,
an event that’s described on Vision Forum’s website in terms
that are, in a word, discomfiting. (“He leads her, woos her, and
wins her with a tenderness and affection unique to the bonds of father
and daughter.”) Another, 23-year-old Katie Valenti, enthuses that
her father “is the greatest man in my life. I believe that helping
my father in his business is a better use of my youth and is helping
prepare me to be a better helpmeet for my future husband, rather than
indulging in selfishness and pursuing my own success and selfish ambitions.” (A
video of Valenti’s 2009 wedding to Phillip Bradrick shows her father
announcing into a microphone that he is “transferring my authority
to you, Phillip.”)
In So Much More, the Botkin sisters claim women were
much happier before being legally considered men’s equals, although, unsurprisingly,
they reference no studies, scholarship, or evidence for this. They do,
however, quote extensively from girls described as “21st-century
heroines of the faith,” or “the young heroines of the underground
feminist resistance ?movement,” who claim following submission
teachings changed their lives. A stay-at-home daughter named Sarah, for
instance, aspired to be an attorney before realizing that her career
ambitions displeased God; Fiona left home for college at 18, only to
return five years later having experienced much “grief and depression.”
Many of the Botkins’ fellow believers have taken to the web to
extoll the virtues of the stay-at-home- daughter life, spreading their
archaic views via the most modern technology. On stayathomedaughters.com,
which recently ceased operating, Courtney, one of the authors of the
website’s blog, describes herself as “learning to run and
care for a home while under the training of my dear parents.” The
section “What We Believe” states that “Stay-at-home
daughters are defying cultural standards by purposing to fulfill their
role at home, with their family, and under their father’s roof
and authority until marriage. We are anti-feminism, and we are counter-cultural.”
Another blog, Ah the Life, is written by “Miss Kelly and Miss
Andrea,” who list among their interests “homemaking, theology,
hospitality, and femininity.” Their favorite movies include Return
of the Daughters and The Monstrous Regiment of Women, the latter a film
that inveighs against feminism via soundbites from, among others, Phyllis
Schlafly. (On Hillary Clinton: “She’s angry about a lot of
things.”) And the blog Joyfully at Home was until recently maintained
by Jasmine Baucham, daughter of preacher Voddie Baucham, whose 2009 patriarchy
primer, What He Must Be If He Wants to Marry My Daughter, has chapters
titled “He Must Be Prepared to Lead” and “Don’t
Send a Woman Out to Do a Man’s Job.” Jasmine, who was featured
in Return of the Daughters, wrote on her blog that she “chose to
forgo the typical college experience so that I could live under the discipleship
of my parents until marriage,” but her bio nevertheless notes that
she is completing a degree in English literature.
The number of these blogs and their followers may be
surprising to mainstream women, who would likely find the tenets the
bloggers live by disturbingly
retrograde, if not just plain disturbing. For instance, stay-at-home
daughterhood means, among other things, subsuming one’s own identity
into the family unit. The Botkin sisters write in So Much More that loving
your parents means agreeing with all their opinions. “When your
parents have your heart you will truly ‘delight in their ways,’” write
the sisters in one blog post. “You will love what they love, hate
what they hate, and desire their approval and company and even ‘think
thoughts after them.’”
The Botkin sisters aim to validate living a life of
confinement with staunch, if unfounded, opinions and beliefs regarding
college. “College
campuses have become dangerous places of anxiety, wasted years, mental
defilement and moral derangement,” they write. Although neither
of the sisters has attended college, they also claim universities are
hotbeds of Marxism that forbid a free exchange of ideas and seek to indoctrinate
students in leftist thinking. Elsewhere, they quote a document from the
pro-patriarchy website Fathers for Life that states that the “prime
purposes of feminism are to establish a lesbian-socialist republic and
to dismantle the family unit,” echoing Pat Robertson’s notorious
statement that feminism is a “socialist, anti-family political
movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children,
practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”
Learning critical thinking and immersion in a diversity
of viewpoints and opinions -- a chief goal of the college experience
-- seems to be
what the Botkin sisters truly fear. Well, that and Satan -- the sisters
use the age-old image of women as helpless to resist temptation as another
argument against a college education: “Recall that Satan targeted
a woman first, too. God’s enemies have recognized that women are
not only the weaker vessels, and consequently more easily led, but they
are incredibly influential over their husbands (think of Eve again) and
children, and they make excellent and loyal helpers,” claim the
sisters [italics theirs]. The story of one misled college attendee, the
providentially named Evangeline, is instructive. A homeschool graduate
attending a Christian college away from home, Evangeline recalls, “I
will never forget the night I sat on my bed reading [So Much More] until
4 in the morning, weeping over it.” She continues, “My heart
had ached for a protected mission, a biblically sound mission, an ancient
mission. And here it was! What joy! What relief! I was not designed to
be an independent woman, but rather a part of a man’s life, a helper.”
But not all stay-at-home daughters accept their lot
so unquestioningly. A young New Zealander named Genevieve, profiled
on the Botkin sisters’ blog,
decided to live at home until marriage after trading in her dreams of
becoming her country’s first female prime minister for ambitions
to become a Christian homeschooling wife and mother. Now the author of
the Isaacharican Daughters newsletter, Genevieve exemplifies how young
women in this lifestyle are encouraged to subsume their own thoughts
and identities into those of whichever male figure in their lives currently
acts as the authority. In writing about the process of swapping her father’s “vision” for
her new husband’s, she notes that a woman having independent thoughts
is evidence of Satan gumming up the works.
My loyalties have had to undergo a change. I was used
to thinking Dad knew best. Now I needed to learn to think that Pete
knows best. I used
to do things and invest my time in projects according to what I knew
Dad would want me to do. Now I needed to be guided by what Pete wanted
me to do. When faced with a problem or option I couldn’t think “What
would Dad have done in this situation?” Now I had to think “What
would Pete do in this situation?” These were exciting times and
difficult as during this state of flux -- learning to replace one man’s
vision with another -- the devil would come around and say, “But
what about what you want? What about what you think?” ?[Italics
hers.]
Genevieve’s words are worth noting because most stay-at-home daughters
can’t truly be said to have chosen this lifestyle -- they are often
brought up in homes where feminism, college, and a woman’s independent
choices are vilified, and they rarely interact with those who think differently.
One has to wonder if Genevieve, with her childhood dreams of national
politics, bought into the myth that feminism is antimotherhood and antifamily,
and thus feels she must choose between having a family and her own personhood,
something most would consider a false choice.
Although submitting to either your father’s or your husband’s
authority may seem like perpetual childhood -- or indentured servitude
-- to modern, first-world women who value their ability to do things
like vote, go on dates, and determine the course of their lives, the
Botkin sisters have a different take. “The sign of our maturity
and our adulthood is when we willingly submit ourselves to God-given
authority and therefore to God Himself,” they write in one blog
post. “This is a struggle, and it requires strength, wisdom, responsibility
and spiritual maturity.” And though one presumes these women’s
enthusiasm for submission means they come from safe, loving, and abuse-free
homes, there are potentially chilling consequences to the spread of their
beliefs to those who may not be ?so lucky.
Furthermore, the stay-at-home-daughter movement holds
that girls are only ready to marry when they’ve completely tamed individualistic
traits -- when, as the Botkins put it, they’ve learned to “submit
to an imperfect man’s ‘whims’ as well as his heavy
requirements. To order our lives around another person. To esteem and
reverence [sic] and adore a man whose faults we can see clearly every
day.” Fathers are never to be criticized or even teased: “When
you speak of him to others, you shouldn’t talk about his mistakes,
but of the good things he’s done. When you speak of him,? instead
of criticizing and nagging him for his faults, you should tell him how
much you admire his strengths,” say the Botkins. Stay-at-home daughter
Ruth says she honors her father by finding out his favorite colors and
wearing them; Kelly says she finds that her father’s convictions “are
becoming my convictions, his passions my passions.” Although it’s
likely that many women would find such an existence frustrating and unhappy,
if not completely infantilizing, within the context of the Christian
Patriarchy Movement it’s not difficult to see the appeal. After
all, women raised in the CPM are brought up to believe that the world
outside their community is sin-filled, godless, and dangerous; opting
for stay-at-home daughterhood represents a lifetime of safety.
Still, they’re not safe from everything. Although the Botkins
and their stay-at-home sisterhood believe that women have a duty to be
obedient, if men fail in their endeavors -- their work, their marriages,
their faith -- guess who’s responsible? “If our men aren’t
successful, it largely means that their women have not made them successful.
They need our help,” the Botkins write. Wives, claim the Botkin
sisters, have the ability to “win” over their husbands with
respectful and submissive behavior, for when the husbands observe this,
they will become “ashamed and repentant.” (The sisters are
strangely silent on what to do if this isn’t effective.) And daughters
have the same responsibility: “Before you can accuse your father
of being unprotective, ask yourself: ‘Do you make it clear to him
that you are a woman of virtue, worthy of his special protection? If
your behavior was more gentle, feminine, respectful and lovely would
he be more inclined to be protective of you?’” Relationships
with mothers, by contrast, get little consideration within the literature
and blogs of the stay-at-home-daughters movement. Mother-daughter dynamics
are mentioned in the Botkins’ book and film only in the context
of readers becoming future mothers.
The stay-at-home-daughters movement has inevitably inspired
controversy and dissent, much of it among dedicated Christians who
consider the movement
to be a dire misconstruction of their religion. According to Cindy Kunsman,
a survivor of what she terms “spiritual abuse” and the author
of the blog Under Much Grace, stay-at-home daughters who have exited
the lifestyle are -- despite what the rest of us might presume -- usually
well prepared academically, but lack certain key skills for success in
life. “Those young women who received excellent training have an
easier time acquiring job skills when pursuing college and healthcare
training, as many of them have done quite successfully,” said Kunsman
in an interview. “However, because [these young women] were required
to abdicate all significant problem-solving to another agent while in
their families of origin, they lack skill and practice in critical thinking
and planning... They must work to build integrity, self-reliance, autonomy,
and trust in themselves, which they were taught to derive from the identity
of the family.”
One of the most outspoken counter-CPM blogs is Quivering
Daughters -- the name a play on the phrase “Quiverfull” -- authored by
Hillary McFarland. “Increasing numbers of women in their late twenties
and thirties remain ‘safely’ at home, patiently waiting for
husbands to find them,” writes McFarland in her book Quivering
Daughters: Hope and Healing for the Daughters of Patriarchy. “As
unmarried adult daughters continue to perfect the art of homemaking,
help to mother and school young siblings, and learn to be a godly helpmeet,
many through spiritual discipline strain to cauterize wounds made tender
with disappointment.”
Despite the assertion of stay-at-home daughters that
they are “protected” (albeit
in a country where they have every legal right to walk away from their
families and churches), it’s difficult not to view them as being
extremely vulnerable. After all, men who grow up ?believing that women
were created to serve their whims are generally the ones who are just
as likely to abuse the women they see as “theirs” as to protect
them from others.
Such sexist views of women’s roles are certainly
not limited to the Christian Patriarchy Movement. But unlike other
extremely conservative
religious groups such as the Amish or fundamentalist Mormon polygamists,
which are typically closed off from the rest of society, the stay-at-home-daughters
movement and the CPM might be capable of seeping into the already-booming
populations of evangelical and fundamentalist churches and Christian
homeschoolers, which already advocate a less-rigorous version of female
?submission. In this sense, stay-at-home daughters might feel that they
are the most pure, and most righteous, of Christians.
In a complex world where women have more choices than ever, perhaps
the appeal of this lifestyle for both men and women is perpetual female
childhood. Men make all decisions and are never told they are wrong,
always getting their way, while women are free of any decision-making:
a markedly different, albeit less complicated relationship than one between
two equals. Only time will tell how far this new movement will spread.
In the meantime, those of us who were lucky enough to have fathers who
delighted in our accomplishments and growth as individuals -- rather
than believing our existence was to serve their own needs -- should count
our blessings.
Gina McGalliard is a San Diego–based freelance writer whose work
has appeared in @UCSD, Sport Diver, Conscious Dancer, Dance Studio Life,
San Diego City Beat, San Diego Family Magazine, and the San Diego Union
Tribune. She would like to give a shout-out to her feisty Italian grandmother,
who spent the 1970s and ’80s breaking down barriers for women,
for raising her to be a good feminist, and introducing her at a young
age to the writings of Gloria Steinem.
© 2010 Bitch Magazine All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149022/
