As Bertie Wooster would say to Byron York, were he here, and were he reading this, rem acu tetigisti. You have touched the thing with a needle. Now that Pawlenty has dropped out on the basis of his third place finish in the Iowa straw poll, and Bachmann has won it, it is time to talk some more about the submission question.
To recap, York asked Michele Bachmann if we should consider her a submissive wife. She is running as a true conservative, one who has in the past embraced the traditional view of marriage. But on this occasion, in response to York’s question, and in the follow up interviews, she has retreated to some form of an egalitarian cloudification, in which one cloud of respect is joined to another one by an incandescent rainbow, making that two clouds of respect in all, making that mutual respect, and everybody’s happy.
Everybody but me, actually. The traditional marriage vow, the one I administer in the weddings I perform, includes a promise from the bride to love, cherish and obey. Paul tells wives that they are to be submissive to their own husbands in every thing (Eph. 5:22-24). Elsewhere he tells the older women to instruct the younger women how, among other things, to be obedient to their husbands (Tit. 2:5). So if Bachmann is representing the biblical view of marriage here, she needs to do a better job of it. She wasn’t asked about mutual respect, but rather about submission. Don’t get me wrong — I am all about mutual respect. Nancy and I do the mutual respect thing like crazy — but not as a distraction move when someone asks us if the Bible teaches wives to be submissive to their own husbands. If York had asked his question, and Bachmann had pointed to the ceiling and shouted, “Look! Halley’s Comet!” that move would have borne a similarity to what just happened. She changed the subject.
Now if someone says that the biblical view of these things cannot be shoehorned into a couple of minutes in the Sound-Byte-O-Rama that we call political debate these days, that’s true too. But that should be acknowledged without dodging the center of the issue. In such a case, she should have said something like, “Well, of course I want to be a submissive wife — that’s what the Bible teaches. But there are many misunderstandings about what that entails, so let my campaign get a book list to you.”
There is no need to be unproductively inflammatory. Of course not. But in these times there is every need to be productively inflammatory.
This is an interesting and complicated subject, which complementarians need to tackle carefully. If we don’t deal with this carefully, then our only choice will appear to be going either egalitarian or Ezekiel One Tooth patriarchal. Going egalitarian means that you realize resistance is futile, and you surrender to the soothing mantras of mutual respect, and the zeitgeist carries you away. The simplistic patriarchal view sees how complicated it all is, swallows the reductio, and says that yes, women really should be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.
The complementarian view, what I would call biblical patriarchy, really is more nuanced than that. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that nuanced means soft, or that nuanced means that everything about it nuanced. Wives really are to be obedient to their husbands. That nuanced enough for you? For those just joining us, the creation order doesn’t have an opt-out box to check.
So in what sense is it nuanced? Those who have followed this blog for any length of time, or who have read any of my marriage and family books, know that I believe absolutely everything the Bible teaches about headship and submission in marriage. Not only so, but readers should also know that I believe that women should be educated, that they may hold political office, that they can run businesses, etc. Okay, so how does that work? Does it work?
Let me describe a basic scenario, one in which a submissive wife is working outside the home in a role where she is the boss of others. Can that ever happen? Sure, it can happen. It happens all the time, and it happens all the time in our circles. Let me make up an example — and the principles involved are really no different than this situation with Michele Bachmann applying for the job of president.
A husband is a chemical engineer, bringing home a good salary, and his wife is a very competent homeschooling mother of five. Let us say that in the course of her homeschooling, she develops a geography course of study that she shares with some of her friends, a cry goes up throughout the land, and so they start a kitchen table curriculum company. What with one thing and another, she finds herself the head of a geography curriculum company with sales in seven figures, employing five men in a shipping warehouse across town. Now, when the sixth guy applies to work there, what should he take into account? He should take into account the fact that the day-to-day boss has a husband who, if the marriage is still in good shape, has final authority. In some respect, the job he is applying for is under the authority of a man he may never meet.
That husband may not know the ins and outs of the geography curriculum biz, focused as he is on chemical engineering. But he knows his wife, and he is still responsible for her and for the state of their family. He has the authority to say how much is too much, and whether or not he wants her to attend every homeschool convention that ever was. The demands of “the business” do not outrank him. If she thinks they do outrank him, then she should just get the divorce now and get it over with.
When JFK was elected president, the first Roman Catholic to hold that office, in the course of running, he had been obligated to assure us all that he was in no sense going to be answering to the Vatican. He was promising us, in effect, that he could only be a good American president by being a bad Catholic president. Now it would have been appropriate for him to say that he was not going to allow some bureaucrat in the Vatican to make his cabinet selections for him. Fine. But he was obligated to say that, as a practicing Catholic, he fully intended to follow the central moral teachings of his church — e.g. his obligation to be pro-life.
Bachmann is at a similar place, and they are trying to get a similar concession from her. Thus far they are succeeding admirably, just as they did with JFK. She can only assure the secularists that she could be a good American president if she agrees beforehand to be a bad wife. Now let us leave out of this discussion the fact that the true secularists will not ever agree that she could be a good American president, given what she is going to do to all their money. That would be fun to watch regardless of the state of the Bachmann marriage. We are limiting this discussion to the marriage dynamics.
So if a Christian married woman were to become president, and not wreck her marriage in the process, she would have to tell us that, at the end of the day, she was going to follow her husband in all things (Eph. 5:24). If he is the chemical engineer, and she has the curriculum company, he is not going to intrude in the minutiae of that business (which she understands and he doesn’t), but his wise, loose rein oversight remains what it is — authoritative. And this is why a vote for a Christian married woman should also be a vote of confidence in the competence, backbone, and masculinity of her husband.
I could therefore see myself voting for a woman to hold political office, including the office of president. But I would have every expectation that her husband should have much more influence than the first ladies have usually had. He should not just be a ceremonial “First Dude,” and his influence, if it is what it ought to be, will be authoritative. Go back to the curriculum company. Say that the wife is considering firing one of the warehouse workers for this or that, and she is going back and forth. She doesn’t know what to do. She brings the dilemma to her husband, they talk it through, and then he tells her what he would like her to do. A submissive wife would do it — whether it was a warehouse worker, or a cabinet member.
A word to the secularists — if this freaks you out, then I would advise that you not vote for anybody who thinks like this. While you are at it, you should chastize yourself for believing in the kind of government — participatory democracy — where this kind of thing might happen to you. Serves you right. Heh.
One final oddity — on this issue, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are like the two sons in the parable Jesus told. One said he would go work in the vineyard, and didn’t, and the other said he wouldn’t and did. Sarah Palin calls herself a feminist, and yet her two books reveal she has a husband she genuinely looks up to. Bachmann wouldn’t ever call herself a feminist, and yet the early returns indicate she is prepared to chuck what the Bible says about that subject. She is already talking like a seminary president who is worried about the donor base.
If Sarah Palin were to be elected president, I think most American men would still look up to Todd Palin, and wouldn’t mind him having the ear of Sarah. I don’t think the same thing is true of Marcus Bachmann. And from the way Michele Bachmann is talking these days, I don’t think it is true of her either.