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Malcolm Gladwell and Wendy Kaminer

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from: Wendy Kaminer

God's plan

Posted Wednesday, June 10, 1998, at 11:16 AM ET

At the risk of being as predictable as the Southern Baptist Convention's nostalgia for the time before feminism led women astray, I can't not comment on their latest declaration that a woman should "submit herself graciously" to her husband, recognizing his responsibility to "provide for, protect, and lead his family." She must "serve as his helper in managing their household and nurturing the next generation." The rightness of this mandate is beyond dispute; it is a matter of revealed truth. (So, day care is not just bad policy but a sin.) "The secular world may hear it as strange," R. Albert Mohler, president of a Southern Baptist seminary told the New York Times, "but it is, we believe God's pattern."

Actually, the secular world won't find this strange; it's as familiar as history. 150 years ago, women who dared to speak in public were condemned by preachers for defying God's will. (All things considered, maybe the Southern Baptists have progressed.) And, not just the diminutive secular world but a large segment of the religious world, which after all, is pretty much the world as we know it, will disagree that the Promise Keeper's model of family life represents the word of God.

Still, in demanding wifely submission, the Southern Baptists are probably on firmer ground than they were last year when they urged a boycott of Disney (it was Disney, wasn't it?), or the year before when they urged the conversion of the Jews. (Imagine what Groucho might have said to that.) I guess that some Baptist women will willingly follow their husbands, and their marriages are no business of mine.

But I can't help wondering about the notion of worship that underlies all this nonsense about family life. Women are supposed to adore and serve their husbands as men serve Christ. You don't have to be a radical feminist to recognize in this chain of worship men pretending to be gods. It's hard to respect much less serve people who need to be worshipped. But, then I've always felt that way about the gods--what vanity people impute to them. I realize that the notion of service that defines traditional family life is supposed to reflect men's service to God. But I've always suspected that it was man, not any deity, who found submission and worship divine.

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718
from: Wendy Kaminer

God's plan

Posted Wednesday, June 10, 1998, at 11:16 AM ET
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Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Wendy Kaminer is a fellow at Radcliffe College.
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