The "Purpose-Driven" Wife....from Mother Jones upcoming edition. [View All]

[madfloridian]

Just like we used to hear in the Southern Baptist churches back in the 50s and 60s....the religious right is defining again the role of submission women should play in the home. Familiar names in this article are Rick Warren and Rev. Al Mohler among others.

The Purpose-Driven Wife: Teaching women to submit to their husbands, for the love of Christ.

The author is speaking of the works of Martha Peace, an older woman who helps young wives learn their role of submission to their husbands.

Peace is here to help. Over the past two decades, the 62-year-old Georgia native and former nurse has written five books on biblical womanhood, conservative Christianity's answer to the women's movement. Among them are The Excellent Wife, now a classic in this burgeoning niche, and Damsels in Distress, a set of biblical solutions to female problems ranging from pms to depression to "feminist tendencies." It's common for a young Christian wife to rebel against home life as her primary ministry, Peace writes in Becoming a Titus 2 Woman, which lays out the principles of her ministry model. It's the role of older women to help her understand her priorities.

These "priorities" are defined further.

Those priorities may include rising early to feed the family, being available anytime to satisfy a husband's desires (barring a few "ungodly" or "homosexual" acts), seeking his approval regarding work, appearance, and leisure, and accepting that he has the "burden" of final say in arguments. After a wife has respectfully appealed her spouse's decision—a privilege she should not abuse—she must accept his final answer as "God's will for her at that time," Peace advises. The godly wife must also suppress selfish desires (for romance, a career, an equitable marriage), practice addressing her spouse in soothing tones, and maintain a private log of bitter thoughts to guide her repentance. "If you disobey your husband," Peace admonishes in The Excellent Wife, "you are indirectly shaking your fist at God."

I had never heard of the "mentoring" tradition.

The mentoring tradition, carried out largely by thousands of lay churchwomen, fell into neglect starting in the 1960s—its leaders blame feminism—but has since enjoyed a strong resurgence in congregations ranging from the millions-strong Southern Baptist Convention to the constellation of independent Reformed evangelical churches. (Saddleback megachurch pastor Rick Warren, Obama's controversial pick for the inaugural invocation, also preaches wifely submission. The church website cites Ephesians: "So you wives must willingly obey your husbands in everything, just as the Church obeys Christ.")

..."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.)

Mohler, mentioned above, seems to be among those further seeking to further subjugate women by denying them even the right to birth control

He is the head of the Southern Baptist Seminary, charged with teaching a new generation of pastors.

"..."First, we must start with a rejection of the contraceptive mentality that sees pregnancy and children as impositions to be avoided rather than as gifts to be received, loved, and nurtured. This contraceptive mentality is an insidious attack upon God's glory in creation, and the Creator's gift of procreation to the married couple."

The Mother Jones article sums up the Titus 2 mentoring method, saying "The Lord's system is righteous, ungrateful feelings are sins to be surmounted, and feminist rebellion is a cultural scourge to be eradicated. The radical leap taken by Titus 2 women is unconditional surrender—an army of Phyllis Schlaflys, fighting for their own subordination based on the promise that the meek shall inherit the Earth."