Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 106—108

This chapter is called “The Nature of Man and Woman.” Last week, in the first section of this chapter, we learned that it is in men’s nature to beat their chests and roar at each other while women by nature sit back, admire, and wait to be conquered. This next section is called “The Woman Was Deceived.” I think you can guess the topic. Debi starts by telling the story of the fallen angel Lucifer and God’s creation of Adam.

Debi explains that Adam was lonely and that Satan could have taken that time to tempt him, taking advantage of his loneliness. But instead Satan “waited for the creation of the weaker vessel.” See, “Satan knew that the man could not be deceived, but the woman could.”

Lucifer is a male being (Isaiah 14:12—20). He understands the natural resistance of the male. He knows males say “no” just to prove they are in command. But Lucifer could see that this soft, sweet female was vulnerable. God had made her by nature to be responsive, and she was trusting and naive.

This is why Satan approached Eve rather than Adam, and this is why his temptation was successful. Eve ate the forbidden fruit at Satan’s urging because she was the weaker vessel, not as strong as Adam. She would listen to Satan ready to be convinced while Adam would have listened with skepticism. The interesting thing is that the Bible doesn’t actually back up what Debi is saying here. Nowhere does the Bible say the snake approached Eve because she was female, and nowhere does the Bible say that Adam would never have succumbed to temptation. Debi is just making this stuff up.

Regardless, Debi is playing into some stereotypes here—namely, the idea that men are guided by logic and thought while women are guided by feelings and emotions. This idea is in no sense unique to Debi; rather, it pervades our culture today. And explaining everything that is wrong with it would take several blog posts. For one thing, lots of people don’t fit these stereotypes. Second, women are socialized to be more concerned with people’s feelings while men are socialized to be more interested in try argument. Third, this logic/emotion male/female dichotomy results in positioning feelings as inferior and pure unaffected “reason” as superior, which has all sorts of negative effects when it comes to things like classism and imperialism. The thing is, Debi takes these stereotypes, treats them as universal, and covers them with a religious gloss.

In my mind, I picture the man being created heavily armored. His armor is helpful both spiritually and physically. God loaded him down with resistances, giving him a nature that is doubting, skeptical, forceful, and pushy. God knew that in order for man to survive, and even prosper, he would need a natural armor that would drive him to keep pushing against the odds, while enjoying the challenge. God knew that Satan was a liar and the master of deceit, so he created man to question first and believe later. Man’s objectivity and lack of intuitiveness make him appear less spiritual than the sensitive, believing female. As a general rule, man is ruled more by his mind than the female, who is governed more by her sensibilities.

Picture God as deliberately creating the woman without this armor, because he intended for her to stand behind her husband’s armor. He was to be her covering her shield, and her protector. Satan was able to deceive her when she left Adam’s side and was confronted by the Devil’s logic alone. She didn’t have the armor to ward off his fiery darts of deceit.

Oh, so much to say here.

It’s worth noting Debi is simply pulling all this out of her magic hat (which is of course simply a nicer way to say that she’s pulling it out of her ass). This is true for both the idea that women are more easily deceived and the suggestion that men are more cerebral. For one thing, the Bible doesn’t say that women are more easily deceived. Sure, it says some things you can fairly easily twist into meaning that, but people like the Pearls claim that they are merely taking the Bible at face value. The Bible also doesn’t say that men are more cerebral or that women are more intuitive. Seriously, look for it. It’s not there. This stuff comes not from the Bible but rather from culture. Basically, when it comes to these points Debi is basing her theology on both medieval (women are easily deceived) and Victorian (men are cerebral and women are intuitive) gender stereotypes. (Yes, misogyny in the church goes back much further than that, but I am completely unconvinced that Debi’s actually pulling on figures from church history rather than more present cultural factors like the remnants of medieval and Victorian ideas about gender.)

This bit about men being created with armor and men without is likewise a product of Debi’s magic hat. It’s not in the Bible, anywhere, and it also doesn’t fit into actual lived experience. The problem with what Debi is doing is that being told over and over that you are weak and cannot do things yourself or safely make your own decisions may result in you actually starting to believe it. In other words, it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy. But I want to return to the Bible for a second, because it occurs to me that Debi is ignoring the most explicit place in the Bible that having armor is discussed: Ephesians 6:10-17.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

The book of Ephesians was written to both male and female Christians in Ephesus and there is nothing in this passage that indicates that Paul only intended to address the men in his audience with this passage. Rather, this passage appears to suggest that both men and women can put on the armor of God and “stand against the devil’s schemes.” Both men and women can take up the sword of the spirit and the breastplate of righteousness and the shield of faith and the belt of truth. What Debi is saying is that this is wrong, that God made men with armor and left women defenseless.

Speaking of which, how in the world does that make any sense, right? If you were creating two turtles, would you intentionally leave one defenseless, bereft of a shell? Seriously, the turtle without a shell is just supposed to stand behind the turtle that does have a shell? Why not just create both turtles with shells? And beside that, we’re supposed to believe that women should never leave the side of their male protector? Really? What if a woman needs to do some shopping, is she supposed to take her husband with her, always? I’m guessing Debi would say no, but isn’t that what Debi suggests Eve’s mistake was—that she stepped away from Adam for a moment?

As for why women would be created without armor:

God designed the woman to be sensitive and vulnerable for the sake of the little ones whom she must nurture. The soul of a mother had to be vulnerable, the outer shell thin. She must be quick to feel, to hurt, to love, to have compassion, to take in the broken, and to believe the best. Vulnerability is a woman’s greatest natural asset and the point of her greatest weakness.

You can see how a reader predisposed to believe Debi’s words would be nodding along here. Debi is putting together something that appears to make some internal sense. But when I read these sentences, I can’t help but think of a mama bear. Would someone seriously suggest that a mama bear’s “vulnerability” is her greatest natural asset? Would someone seriously suggest that a mama bear needs to be “vulnerable” in order to nurture her cubs? I’d rather think the opposite. Being a mother does not require being vulnerable or having a thin outer shell. Sure, being a parent means you open yourself up to hurt, but if you go into it being exposed and think-skinned, you’re going to find yourself in a heap of trouble. Motherhood—parenthood—requires inner strength, tenacity, and grit. It is not for the weak at heart.

Having given this reason for women’s lack of armor, Debi next explains that a woman can become like a man—can attempt to fashion armor for herself, if you like. But the results, according to Debi, aren’t pretty.

A woman can become tough and hard, skeptical and cautious in relationships, just like a man. She can become guarded and cynical, but in so doing, she is no longer feminine, no longer attractive to a man, and she will even begin to not like herself. Unprotected by the covering of her husband, she will grow miserable fighting her own battles and trying to survive on an equal footing with men. Just look at the faces and mannerisms of outspoken feminists and lesbians. In their attempt to shed their vulnerability and express their independence, feminists begin to exhibit traits and behaviors completely outside of their created feminine nature. They lose their beauty and charm and become very poor excuses of men.

Feminists and lesbians seem to be the perennial punching bag of female readers who write books for conservative Christian audiences. I’m not the second, but I’m definitely the first, and let me st your mind at easy: My husband still finds plenty of beauty and charm in me. Also, I promise that I don’t actually hate myself.

One line from this very typical paragraph especially stuck out to me: “In their attempt to shed their vulnerability and express their independence . . . ” In Debi’s world, women are to be vulnerable and men are to be independent. While ordinary people generally see an individual’s attempt to shed vulnerability and embrace independence as a positive thing, Debi only sees it as a positive thing if it’s a man who is doing it. Men are to be bold independent leaders; women are to be vulnerable submissive followers. Independence in the hand of a man is invigorating and attractive while independence in the hand of a woman is ugly and unfeminine.

In the end, this entire section is in some sense simply Debi’s attempt to justify the “weaker vessel” rhetoric. Women are more vulnerable and sensitive because they must be suited to raising children; Men are stronger and more independent because they must protect and provide for the women and children under their care. The idea that both men and women might be able to cooperatively find a balance between the two, each with aspects of vulnerability and aspects of independence, eludes Debi completely, as does the increasing obviousness that her stereotypes about gender come not from the Bible or nature but rather from Victorian social norms.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 109-10

Women, in general, give the appearance of being more spiritual than men. They like to dabble in soulish thoughts. There are many ways of expressing spirituality, but most of them have nothing to do with the Spirit of Jesus Christ. We ladies are more inclined to trust in our feelings and intuition than are men, which makes us more subject to deception, just like sister Eve. Feelings and intuition are ever-changing. The Word of God is objective and dogmatic—unchanging. It is to religion what hard facts are to science.

Feelings/intuition = bad, untrustworthy

Bible = objective, dogmatic, unchanging

As an evangelical, I believed in two sources for inspiration: The Bible, and the Holy Spirit. I could read the Bible, and I might feel the spirit moving me. Debi appears to be arguing against this second mode of hearing from God.

Of course, Debi is ignoring that the Bible is something that has to be interpreted, and that there are numerous different interpretations, and that interpretations have changed over time. The Bible isn’t quite so objective, dogmatic, or unchanging as she seems to think it is, and she doesn’t realize that what she’s really endorsing here isn’t the Bible itself but rather her interpretation of it. You’re supposed to interpret the Bible like Debi, period and full stop.

You rarely hear a man say, “God told me to do this,” or, “God led me to go down there.” The few men I have known who talked that way did not demonstrate that they were any more led by the Spirit than other Christian men. I know that when God does speak to my husband and leads him in a supernatural way, he will not speak of it in public. He doesn’t feel the need to promote himself in that manner, and furthermore, he believes that if he has truly heard from heaven, God doesn’t need his publicity. God will vindicate himself. But many Christian women habitually attribute nearly every event to divine guidance. Experience proves that women are prone to claim God as their authority, when God had nothing at all to do with their “leading.” It really is quite appalling to see this shameful behavior still in action today.

Wait. Wait. Since when does Michael get a free pass on hearing directly from God while women who say they are hearing directly from God, or being moved by the spirit, are just listening to their “feelings” and “intuitions” and not actually hearing from God?! Suddenly being “led by the Spirit” is okay? But if you read on to the end of the above paragraph, it appears that being led by the spirit is only okay for men.

Note also that Debi never explains how to tell the difference between being led by God and mis-attributing things to God. This is a huge problem I saw growing up evangelical, actually. People talked quite frequently about being led by the spirit, but sometimes they contradicted each other. Because of this, I could understand if Debi were to write off all hearing from the spirit and say you can only use the Bible (though that still leaves the differing interpretations problem), but that’s not what Debi is doing. She’s saying being moved by the spirit is fine, so long as it’s a man who is being moved by the spirit. Women who think they’re moved by the spirit, she says, are just being silly and mistaking feelings for God. Double standard much?

God seems to be gracious to us “dimwits”—and that is what we are when we lightly use God’s name (a form of blasphemy) to give authority to our intuitive decisions. The bottom line is that women “enjoy” their own self-effusing spirituality. It is a feminine trait that few men share or understand. Men can, however, become totally absorbed in their own personal ambitions and, in the process, neglect their “spiritual” side altogether. Women often see this “carnality” in men and assume that women, being more “spiritually” minded, are closer to God—a completely false assumption.

And now I’m totally confused about what “spirituality” is and what being “close to God” is. Are women more spiritual, or do they just appear so? What exactly does “spiritual” mean as Debi is using it? If men who are become totally abosrbed in their own personal ambitions while their wives pray and read the Bible and listen to the spirit are no less close to God than are their wives, what in the world does “close to God” mean? I mean, I was taught that if you read the Bible, pray, etc., you draw closer to God, but if you don’t do those things you can drift away. But in Debi’s world, apparently men can do whatever they want and still be just as close to God as their more “spiritual” wives, whatever the heck “spiritual” actually means. Seriously, Debi needs to define her terms! And actually, strike that, Debi’s making it clear that women who think they’re close to God are just deluding themselves and confusing their feelings for the real deal.

The message here appears to be that men are close to God whether they are absorbed in their own ambitions or deep in God’s Word, but women who think they’re close to God or try to become “spiritual” or listen to God are actually confusing their feelings and intuitions for God’s leading. So basically: Men can’t lose, and women can’t win. Lovely.

Nearly all spiritualits, past and present, are women. Women are the palm readers, crystal ball gazers, fortune-tellers, and tarot card readers. Witches’ covens are headed by women. Mot mediums (those contacting the dead) are women, as was the witch of Endor whom King Saul consulted concerning the long-dead Samuel. When Jesus spoke a parable about the kingdom becoming corrupted with false doctrine, he illustrated it with a woman bringing in the corruption (Matt. 13:33). In the book of Revelation, it is a woman, typically called Jezebel, who deceives the church. We are told she did it through her teaching. Jon wrote to the church of Thyatira and warned them against allowing that a woman Jezebel to teach (Rev. 2:20). Women are either directly or indirectly responsible for most of the past and present cults in Christianity.

You know who was male? Jim Jones. Joseph Smith. Charles Manson. Claude Vorilhon. Sun Myung Moon. You really don’t have to be female to think you’re hearing from God and start your own group. In fact, I call bullshit on that last sentence—there is no way women were directly or indirectly responsible for most of the past and present religious movements within Christianity when it’s men who have by and large been the leaders and founders of Christian denominations and churches. I also call a double standard once again. When men feel themselves moved by God to plant churches and lead movements, that’s seen as a good thing in Debi’s view, but when women do it it’s wrong. Because, they’re women, duh.

The Bible makes a point of revealing the inherent nature of woman when it gives a reason why women should not teach men: “And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression” (1 Tim. 2:14).

That a man is less sensitive than a woman does not make him inferior to her, nor does her being more subject to deception than her husband make her inferior to him—just different natures. It is in recognizing that difference that wives should fear God and distrust their natural tendencies. Things that are not the same have different capacities and different offices.

Remember last week Debi talked about how women are tender and without armor while men are tough and have armor? That’s the whole sensitive and easily deceived v. not sensitive and not easily deceived thing going on here.

But here’s the key—this idea that wives should “distrust their natural tendencies.” Debi didn’t spend this time explaining to women how to tell the difference between their feelings and the movement of the spirit. Instead she basically told them that they can’t be moved by the spirit and that when they think they are it’s just their feelings and they have to ignore those. But the real problem is this idea that women are to distrust their intuition. Presumably, they’re instead to listen to their husbands, because their husbands can be moved by the spirit and hear directly from God. And personally, that sounds like a very dangerous idea.

The biggest theme of this entire section appears to be that women should give up this idea that they can be close to God or moved by the spirit, and instead realize that that’s just something only men can do. Women might appear to be more “spiritual,” Debi explains, but that is only a mirage and a deception. And to me, this just cements the extent to which Debi is working to erode and sabotage women’s trust in their own feelings, abilities, and thoughts.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 110-111

Debi has previously said that God creates men with armor and women without, so that mean can use their reason to stand against Satan’s temptations and make sound decisions while women use their feelings to tenderly care for their children and keep the home. Women, Debi says, are to stand behind the armor of their men, and thus be protected. The reason Eve at the apple, Debi says, is that she stepped out from Adam’s armor and was thus vulnerable. Some of you readers raised a question: If this is so, why did Adam also eat the apple? Why didn’t his armor protect him and keep him from doing so? In this section, Debi answers that question.

God had instructed Adam, and Adam had instructed Eve. Adam clearly understood that Satan’s promise of spiritual enlightenment was a diabolical lie against God. The natural armor God had given Adam granted him enough understanding to doubt the Devil and resist his lies. But Adam’s armor had one small weak spot.

I bet you all know what’s coming next.

He was not ruled by his feelings except where it concerned his woman.

Yep. We get to blame Adam’s sin on eve. Surprise surprise.

Adam’s soul was exposed and vulnerable to the woman he loved. He wanted her happy, even if it meant disobeying God and going against his natural understanding of truth. He was willing to set aside reason for his woman. Even’s influence over Adam changed the course of history.

All the evil in the world is a result of women’s innate influence over men, apparently. As I read this, I kept asking myself where I’d heard this before. And then I realized. The idea that when men are around women, their natural reason disappears—the idea that women need to cover up and not show skin because otherwise men won’t be able to restrain themselves. This idea that women are men’s downfall is pervasive in this subculture. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if the patriarchal insistence on controlling women stems from some sort of deep fear of women’s supposed power over men.

We need to be aware of the power we have to seduce our husbands into following us into disregarding the clear, objective works of God. Adam, the first man, Samson, the strongest man, Solomon, the wisest man, and even David, the man listed as being after God’s own heart, were all brought down by the woman they loved. When a man loves a woman and wants to make her happy, he will often acquiesce in spiritual matters because of the affection he holds for her in his heart. Your husband may set aside reason and good judgement if you pressure him and let him feel your displeasure and unhappiness.

Wait. Wait. Adam ate the fruit after Eve simply offered it to him, no seduction involved. Delilah was indeed a seductress and did indeed portray Samson, but that was central to her character as a person, not something that stemmed from her identity as a woman. Solomon married 700 wives and took 300 concubine, cementing alliances right and left. This is women’s fault how? Solomon choose to marry those women, they didn’t come dance naked in front of him demanding a marriage certificate. I’m seriously not seeing this as an example of women seducing their husbands. Finally, all Bathsheba did was take a bath on her roof. David is the one who was looking at her and he is the one who summoned her and he is the one who had Uriah killed. Apparently women seduce men by, like, existing—which ties pretty well into my previous paragraph.

Do you know what I’m seeing here? I’m seeing an inability to assign any form of personal responsibility to men. And once again, I was wondering where I’d seen this before and then I remembered. There’s this idea within fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism that if a man cheats on his wife, it’s probably partially or even totally his wife’s fault. In fact, sometimes this is so extreme that everything—and I do mean everything—is blamed on the wife. The husband is failing in business? His wife must not be supporting him. The husband isn’t being a good spiritual leader? His wife must be tearing him down at home. The husband leaves his wife and children? His wife must have been a nag. And this isn’t done the other way around. If a wife is a nag, no one says her husband must be so slow to do household repairs that her only recourse is to nag him. When are held personally responsible; men get off the hook.

In a man’s heart, the place a woman holds will lead him into great strength or great weakness, depending on the woman and the man. It is there that men rise to great glory with their women, or they are dragged into shame and disgrace by them, or worse yet, are left unused by God.

Here we go again.

Remember the crazy lady who drove her family to financial ruin because she felt led of God to move and change her husband’s business? Her husband KNEW it would not work, but he could not stand against her constant pleading and her spiritual intensity.

So the husband knew that the financial plan the wife was urging him to follow would end up being an utter failure, but he followed it anyway and it’s all his wife’s fault because he couldn’t help it? I mean, really?

Let’s imagine for a moment that there are two investment bankers, partners in business. Their names are Judy and Bob. Judy pushes for a daring business plan that Bob knows for certain—and it’s not just a hunch—can only end in failure, utter ruin, and the lost of all of their clients funds. But Judy just keeps pushing, so Bob finally just gives in and all of the money is lost. Who would we blame for losing the clients’ funds? I’m thinking that we would put the blame on both of them, but perhaps especially Bob since Bob knew that the actions he took would result in losing all of his clients funds while Judy honestly thought it would work out. But Debi doesn’t see things that way. In Debi’s world, Bob would be absolved of all blame because Judy had boobs, which clearly made it so that Bob couldn’t do anything but give in. A man cannot, apparently, stand up under a woman’s constant nagging. Because, boobs. Or something.

Look, if a wife is advising her husband to follow an unwise financial plan and won’t listen to the facts or look at the data or consider that she might be wrong about it, that’s obviously wrong. But that does not absolve her husband from any responsibility for choosing, of his own volition, to heed her urging and follow her bad financial plan. We are all responsible for our own actions, including men, yes, even when women are present and involved. Once again I’m hearkening back to the idea that women need to dress modestly because men just can’t help themselves.

Men are still allowing women to take the spiritual lead, and women are confidently leading just as Eve did. They believe they are doing what is good for the family. It is not an act of carnal lust. It is a religious act driven by rebellion. Women are simply deceived.

This whole time Debi has been granting women agency while removing it from men, but now she appears to take that agency away from women too—women are simply deceived when they step out as spiritual leaders, but they honestly think that what they are doing is right and good. So, apparently, it goes like this: Satan deceives woman, woman is weak spot in man’s armor, bringing man down as well. This sounds to me like a colossally bad setup. Why would you, if you were God, create women without armor and thus fully susceptible to temptation and deception, and create men such that anything concerning women is a weak spot in their armor? Who thought that was a good idea?

This is why God has so carefully taught us ladies to observe and maintain our roles as help meets. It is why we must implicitly trust God’s judgement as to our duties, regardless of how we “feel.”

Note, once again, the gaslighting and poisoning of the well going on here. Debi is telling women, for the millionth time, that they must not pay any mind to how they “feel.” Instead, they have to just trust what God has said in his Word (aka what Debi has said in her book). This strikes me as similar to telling the manager of a nuclear power plant to ignore the readers that tell things like the different chambers heat or pressure levels and instead to always keep the switches locked a certain way, because that’s what is illustrated on the front of the manual. Temperature readings? Come on! The front of the manual clearly shows the switches positioned just so! Ignore those silly temperature readings. Somehow, I don’t see that ending well.

God gave us a careful and stern warning as to what women would become in the last days. The prophetic picture of this woman is now in full array. It is the spiritual Jezebel, who is the exact opposite of a help meet, that is the death knell of the most noble institution on the earth—the family.

And this is why I generally distrust any organization that has the word “family” in the title. I’m pretty sure the Family Research Council and the American Family Association mean something very different when they say the word “family” than I mean when I say the word “family”—and I’m pretty sure that’s the case here too. See, in my book, a woman who displays leadership characteristics or takes her place as the spiritual leader of the family does absolutely nothing to threaten “the family.” So clearly, when Debi says “the family” she actually means “the traditional, patriarchal family.”

The next sections deal with Jezebel and then Ruth, Esther, and the Proverbs 31 woman. But for now, I just want to finish this post by emphasizing the extent to which Debi’s writing is anti-man in addition to being anti-woman. Debi doesn’t just erase women’s agency, she erases men’s agency as well. In Debi’s world, men can’t help but acquiesce to women’s doe eyed looks, are “ruled by their feelings” when it comes to women, and literally lose control of their own actions when faced with an attractive and endearing woman. Honestly, to me Debi’s entire book reads like an attempt to ruin relationship by giving such twisted advice that husbands and wives will be rendered incapable of actually sitting down face to face and communicating and unable to discuss issues and make plans like two competent adults.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 110-114

In this passage, Debi turns to famous women of the Bible to illustrate women’s proper role. She starts by discussing Jezebel, rehashing some of the same points she made when she discussed Jezebel in her introductory section. Jezebel, if you remember, was a Phoenician noblewoman who worshiped Baal, and she converted her husband King Ahab of Israel to Baal worship as well, and had Jewish prophets killed. Here is what Debi has to say:

I went back to I Kings to see what the Bible had to say about this woman Jezebel. The first thing I noticed was that Jezebel was more religious than her husband. She was spiritually intense. The Bible says in 1 Cor 11:3, “But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.” Regardless of our circumstances, when we women take the spiritual lead, we step out from under our rightful head.

Once again Debi has a problem with women being more religious or spiritual than their husbands—”regardless of their circumstances.” Which leads me to wonder—what would Debi have women with unbelieving husbands do? Should they, too, cease to believe or risk stepping out from under their “rightful head”?

The second thing I observed was that Ahab was emotionally volatile—unstable. Is your husband prone to retreat? Is he bitter, angry, or depressed? When a woman takes the lead in marriage, her assuming of the masculine role makes a weak man weaker, to the point of “sending him to bed”—as did Jezebel to Ahab.

Notice that Debi’s response to a man who is bitter, angry, or depressed is that his wife better not grow a spine, because that would make things worse. After all, if a woman took the lead in such a marriage and urged her husband to get help, or did what she had to to care for herself and her children, she would be taking the “masculine role” and contributing to making her husband’s problems even worse. This is actually strikes me as rather the opposite of good advice for a troubled marriage—and as unhealthy advice for adults in general.

The third and most significant thing I noticed was that she used his emotional stress to endear herself to him—a strange way of lording over the husband. Jezebel manipulated and accused an innocent man, then had him murdered so that Ahab could obtain his vineyard. Ahab, in depression,  kept his “face to the wall” and let her do her dark deeds. Today, if a woman is willing to play her husband’s role in directing the family, he will lose his natural drive to bear responsibility. He will turn his face to the wall.

Two things to say here. First, some couples work well with the wife taking what Debi would call “the leadership role” and the husband being more laid back and easy going. This isn’t necessarily an inversion of Debi’s patriarchal relationship (although in some situations it can be), because it’s not about the husband submitting, it’s about the couple dividing responsibility and specializing in what they’re good at. Some women are very good at being organized go getters and some men would simply prefer to not have to worry about those things, and that’s fine so long as the couple is communicating and each party is happy. (Note: An actual inversion of Debi’s patriarchal version is just as wrong as her patriarchal version.)

Second, while a relationship in which the wife plays what Debi would call the “leadership role” is not a problem so long as it’s mutually agreed upon and both parties are happy with the division of responsibility, if the wife takes initiative and the husband is unhappy with that and responds by withdrawing and being sulky (which is something Debi seems to be implying happens), that’s a problem, but not for the reason Debi thinks it is. Put simply, it’s not mature to respond to something not going the way you like it by clamming up and sulking rather than communicating and dealing with the problem. If I were to, say, start laying preliminary plans for a family vacation without checking with Sean and he were to be upset, the proper response would be for him to talk to me about it, <i>not</i> for him to stop talking to me and sulk. But then, Debi doesn’t seem to have any idea of how a healthy relationship actually ought to work.

The fourth thing that jumped out at me was that Ahab could easily be manipulated by his wife to suit her purposes. She stirred his passive spirit, provoking him to react in anger. Jezebel used him to set up images and kill God’s prophets. Often, a man becomes involved in the Church, not because God has called him or because it is in his heart to do so, but because he is trying to please his wife by at least LOOKING spiritual. When a husband steps into a spiritual role at his wife’s beckoning, he becomes vulnerable to her “guidance” in that role. Jezebel took steps to help promote her spiritual leaders. In the process, she provoked her husband to destroy those in spiritual authority whom she did not like. Have you influenced your husband to think evil of those in authority because you did not like something about them?

Wow, what a lot to unpack here. First, apparently it’s bad for a Christian woman to try to get her husband to go to church. Because apparently, if a man becomes involved in a church at his wife’s urging, because he wants to make her happy, the result is that he’s somehow under her spiritual headship. One wonders what a wife who wants her unbelieving husband to go to church with her should do. Submit and obey, I suppose, and hope that he’ll figure it out himself? I actually think that might be Debi’s answer, given that she elsewhere talks about how women can witness to their unsaved husbands by simply being the best most biblical perfectly submissive and cheerful obedient wife possible.

Second, Debi seems to suggest that it’s wrong for a woman to ever talk bad about those in spiritual authority “whom she does not like.” Somehow, that is once again exercising spiritual leadership over her husband. And this makes me think of all the discussions of spiritual abuse and the huge sexual abuse scandals that have been rocking Sovereign Grace Ministries. Apparently Debi’s idea of male spiritual headship extends so far that it even applies to women who simply want to talk with their husbands about concerns they have or problems they see—that would be exercising spiritual headship over their husbands. So, Debi’s conclusion from Jezebel: Don’t ever try to exercise any form of leadership in your marriage, including trying to get your husband to go to church or trying to get him to believe that yes, you really did see Deacon Smith being inappropriate with that Hunt girl.

Okay, here’s the thing. I’m pretty sure scripture doesn’t hate on Jezebel because she was more religious or spiritual than her husband. I’m pretty sure scripture hates on Jezebel because she was on the wrong side. As I said before, Jezebel was a Phoenician who worshiped Baal, and she converted her husband Ahab to Baal worship as well, and she had Jewish prophets killed. Her sin wasn’t being spiritual or religious or a leader over her husband, it was worshiping the wrong God. And I think I can demonstrate that.

I’ve noticed that Debi has yet to mention Abigail. There’s probably good reason for that. Her story only takes up one chapter of the Bible, go read it. Abigail, who is described as an intelligent and beautiful woman, is the wife of Nabal, who is described as “surly and mean.” When David sends men to ask Nabal for food and water, Nabal spurns his men and sends them away with harsh words. David decides to make war against Nabal, but Abigail finds out what happens and acts quickly—taking a leadership role and going behind her husband’s back. She goes to David personally, takes his men food and water and apologizes for her husband, calling him “wicked” and a “fool”—which definitely meets the definition of disrespecting your husband in public. David relents and does no harm to Nabal or his people, and when Nabal is struck down by God ten days later (note that it’s Nabal who is struck down, not his rebellious wife who has shamed him by taking a leadership role), David takes Abigail as his wife. Abigail is never punished for disrespecting her husband, and is instead rewarded. Why? Because he was on the wrong side and she was on the right side.

Finally, Debi gives brief profiles of both Ruth and Esther. She explains that Ruth “maintained a thankful and submissive attitude” and that we should note “her humility and the deference she paid to all in authority.” Esther, she says, “rose above her circumstances and her natural fear to honor her husband, even as she made an appeal to save her own life, along with the lives of her people.” It’s funny, I guess I thought Ruth was the story of two women using their female wiles and knowledge of inheritance laws to put a roof over their heads (come on, Naomi is quite the conniving woman!), and that Esther was the story of a brave woman pushing the boundaries of the rules to save her people (she wasn’t supposed to come to her husband without being summoned, remember?). Apparently I read those wrong.

Next week we learn about the Proverbs 31 Woman, and also about what it actually should look like for a woman to be “spiritual.” Let me put it this way: This isn’t something you’re going to want to miss.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 114-116

Proverbs 31 defines the virtuous woman. She is NOT a mousy, voiceless prude. She is confident, hardworking, creative, and resourceful.

In this section, Debi examines Proverbs 31. For those who may not know, Proverbs 31 is a poem about a virtuous woman whose “price is far above rubies.” Evangelicals are quick to hold the Proverbs 31 woman up as a model for women to emulate.

Debi begins her discussion of the Proverbs 31 woman as follows:

Her first virtue is that the heart of her husband is safe with her. That is, he can trust her with his thoughts and feelings, never fearing that he might use the private knowledge she has of him to hurt him in any way.

This is actually really good relationship advice for people of both genders.

A man whose heart is not safe with his wife will never tell her what he intends to do or how he feels, because on previous occasions she has assumed the role of overseer by taking it upon herself to be his conscience and the manager of his time. She reminds him of what he has said he was going to do in a manner that says, “I am holding you to it, What is wrong with you? Are you a sloth or something?” He finds it more peaceful to keep his own counsel. Wives, never use your special knowledge of your husband as leverage to get your way.

Wait. Knowing, say, your husband’s plans for the weekend—to clean out the garage or get the next section of the garden started—counts as “special knowledge”? Also, it’s patently false that reminding your husband of something he said he was going to do is going to make him withdraw and stop telling you his plans—and if it is, that’s something to work out, because that’s not healthy.

But I think there’s a bigger point to be made here. Debi is reading an awful lot into the Biblical text. Here is the actual section she draws from here:

The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.

She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.

Given that most of the text talks about what a good economic agent the virtuous woman is, I read this as saying that the virtuous woman’s husband trusts her in economic matters, not as saying that the virtuous virtuous woman’s husband trusts her to never reminds him that he said he was going to do the dishes. For all her talk of reading the Bible straightforwardly, Debi does it very badly.

Next Debi turns to discussing, once again, the problems with “spiritual” women.

If this passage in Proverbs had been written from our modern perspective, it would have extolled her for having a “quiet time” and being a “prayer warrior,” teacher, or counselor. In all the Scriptural profiles of righteous women, including Proverbs 31, no such concepts are ever mentioned. In our culture, we have lost a clear understanding of what constitutes a virtuous woman. We have accepted the modern idea of the “spiritual” woman circulating in the realm of religious power, and have forgotten that God does not see them in this same “glorious” light. What we think is spiritual, God labels “Jezebel.”

Debi talks about women being prayer warriors, reading the Bible, and serving as teachers or counselors and then says that “no such concepts are ever mentioned” in Proverbs 31. I don’t actually think that’s true, strictly speaking.

She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.

Other translations say the “teaching of kindness” is in her tongue. Granted, there’s nothing in the text about prayer or about going to church or reading the Bible, but to say there’s nothing in it about instructing or advising others, or that the passages indicate that she is to be silent (as we shall see shortly), would be false.

Interestingly, nowhere in this passage does it say the virtuous woman is submissive to her husband. And given that Debi is quick to note that the passage doesn’t talk about prayer and Bible reading, this seems important and relevant. So let me say it again: Nowhere in Proverbs 31 does it say the virtuous woman is submissive to her husband. Not surprisingly, Debi chooses to ignore this.

At least we finally get to learn what Debi thinks true spirituality looks like:

A woman working beside her husband is a spiritual force for them both. A woman providing her husband good sex and fun company is offering her husband a spiritual benefit. A woman preparing healthy meals and cutting the grass so he can go fishing on Saturday is a spiritual woman, because she is placing him above herself.

At last we finally know what being “spiritual” is. It’s not having a prayer life or reading the Bible or having a close relationship with God. No! It’s serving the physical (and sexual) needs of your husband. How very convenient. Interestingly, this must mean that being spiritual is gendered—i.e., that it means something totally and completely different for a man to be spiritual than for a woman to be spiritual. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that men actually get to do that whole relationship with God thing. Women? They get to cook and clean up after their menfolk. Yay?

Outside of this single paragraph, Debi says literally nothing about the huge swaths of Proverbs 31 talking about the virtuous woman’s industry and economic prowess. Here is what I’m talking about:

She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
. . .
She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth not out by night.
She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.
. . .
She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.

Interestingly, nowhere in there does it say the virtuous woman asks her husband’s permission to do any of this. In fact, it doesn’t discuss the whole “help meet” thing at all. Instead, it describes a strong and intelligent businesswoman who makes her own decisions and whose husband is proud of her. If Debi had written these lines of Proverbs 31, it would have read like this:

She buy fabric after checking with her husband, and works willingly with her hands on all his projects.
She has her children go without veggies rather than getting a job when her husband is unemployed.
She cooks appealing meals and keeps them warm for her husband lest he go elsewhere for food.
When her husband considers buying a new house, she keeps silent so as not to influence his decision.
. . .
She is careful to be submissive: she works late into the night unless her husband wants sex.
She lays her hand to the quarter inch plumbing supply line, and her children learn to fear the sight of it.
. . .
With her husband’s permission, she starts an etsy account and sells decorative knickknacks.

The end of this passage makes an odd turn, focusing on how repelled men are by masculine traits in their women and how important it is to maintain femininity—”devoid of dominance or control.” What this has to do with Proverbs 31 I’m really not sure, because that passage seems to have little to do with the sort of femininity that is passive or submissive.

Dominance and control are always masculine characteristics. It is important for a woman to understand that she must be feminine (devoid of dominance and control) in order for her man to view her as his exact counterpart, and thus willingly respond to her protectively, with love and gentleness.

Look, a man is totally capable of relating to a wife as his equal rather than his submissive “counterpart.” And the idea that a man will only be protective of a woman and treat her with love and gentleness if she’s properly “feminine”? This is the sort of rhetoric that is used to show that having women in the army will destroy male-female relationships. Also, it’s bullshit. It only makes sense in a world where men treat other men with harshness and women with gentleness, and if that world exists it’s wrong. Is it so much to ask that people relate to each other as individuals and see each other as equals? But then, I don’t think Debi actually thinks that’s possible.

A woman who criticizes her husband for watching too much TV, playing too much golf, or indulging in any frivolous activity is expressing dishonor.

Part of the function of marriage as I see it is for the couple to help each other grow and become better people. If my husband was a lazy slob and I did nothing about it instead of trying to help him correct that, I would be being a bad partner. And vice versa! And sure, my husband could refuse to change—that’s his right. But that doesn’t mean that seeking to help him improve himself is, in and of itself, dishonoring him.

When the relationship is properly balanced, a wife can make an appeal at the right time and in the right manner, and it need not be a challenge to his authority. We will speak of how to make an appeal in due course. But know of a certainty that when a woman continually tries to assert her own will against her husband’s, throwing it up to him that he is wrong, she is usurping authority over him, lording over him, and dishonoring him. A woman who continues in this behavior blasphemes the Word of God and can expect God’s sure “reward.”

“Properly balanced”? Seriously, how is a relationship where a woman has to “make an appeal” and phrase it in such a way as to “not be a challenge to [her husband's] authority” properly balanced? And can you really see the Proverbs 31 woman “making an appeal”? I sure can’t. She seems like a woman who knows her mind and isn’t afraid to say it or act on it—and it strikes me that this is part of why her husband calls her blessed. Is this so hard for Debi to understand?

A man cannot cherish a strong woman who expresses her displeasure of him. You say that he should model Christ’s love regardless of how she acts. Is that what you want? Is that what Christ wants? Do you want your husband to be forced to seek supernatural power just to find a way to love you? Do you want to be another of his trials—his greatest example of overcoming adversity?

Those who endorse patriarchal or complementarian relationship formulas emphasize that a wife may be required to submit to her husband, and that a husband is required to love his wife. I’ve pointed out before that this isn’t even for a variety of reasons, including the fact that submission is an action while love is an emotion. It’s easy for a man to say he loves his wife even when it doesn’t look like it and that his actions and decisions are for her own good, but it’s not so easy for a woman to claim she’s submitting when she’s, well, not. Here Debi is suggesting that it’s unfair for a man to have to love an unsubmissive wife. Which is interesting, since she insists over and over that women should submit to unloving husbands. It’s conditional in one case and not in the other? Seriously?

And then there’s this, which is similarly centered around the man:

The homefront should not be a spiritual battlefield; it should be the place where a man relaxes and can be vulnerable with the woman he cherishes.

Really? Really? Here, let me fix it:

“The homefront should not be a spiritual battlefield; it should be the place where a man a couple relaxes and can be vulnerable with the woman he cherishes each other.”

Much better. But of course, Debi’s not through yet:

Men will always want to reclaim those times when love was fun and free, with no demands, like the times when she would smile at him with that sweet, girlish, “I think you are wonderful” expression. She was so feminine then, so much the woman. He wanted to hold her just because she was a bundle of delightful joy. He would do anything for her.

Debi seems stuck on the honeymoon jittery feelings sheep eyes sort of love. It’s not that none of that remains, but if it doesn’t become something more than that the relationship is probably not very mature. In a mature relationship between two adults, there is give and take, there is growth, there is cooperation, communication, and an ability to find compromises. And sometimes there are periods that suck, but ultimately the relationship grows and deepens through that (or ends, but that’s another post entirely). In Debi’s view of the proper relationship, though, there’s simply lots of batting of eyes.

Besides, why is this so gendered? I treasure all the times Sean has looked at me with his “I think you are wonderful” expression!

Debi finishes by making a final comparison:

Jezebel Profile

1. Prophetess
2. Teacher
3. One who pities
4. Religious
5. Controller

Virtuous Woman Profile

1. Help meet
2. Silent
3. Encourager
4. Prudent worker
5. Submissive

The virtuous woman of Proverbs 31 is neither silent nor submissive. And what in the world is up with contrasting “religious” with “prudent worker”?! God doesn’t want women to be religious or spiritual, Debi says, God just wants them to work hard serving their men. Lovely.

In the end, I don’t feel like Debi actually read Proverbs 31. I mean, let’s think about what she actually says about the Proverbs 31 woman: She doesn’t criticize her husband or mention his faults, she doesn’t teach or counsel others, she labors in an effort to serve her husband, and she is properly feminine, lacking in masculine traits like control. Somehow, that’s not what I get when I read Proverbs 31. But then, what do I know? I’m only female, after all.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 117-118

Hold onto your hats, because this week is going to be an interesting one. In this section, Debi is heavy on the military metaphors, and it gets pretty intense.

Your husband, dud that he may “appear” to be, is appointed by God to be your immediate Superior Officer in the chain of command. Your position under him is where God put you for your own spiritual, emotional, and physical safety. It is the only position where you will find real fulfillment as a woman. Don’t worry about the quality of his leadership, for he is under the oversight of Jesus Christ. He must answer to God for how he leads his “troops.” You must answer to God for how you obey the one he placed over you. It takes faith in God to trust him when all you seem to see is one carnal man leading you—to “God only knows where.”

Debi’s using a lot of military language here. It just so happens that I have a friend who is in the military. I asked him if soldiers must always obey their commanding officers. He said no. He said that if your commanding officer commands you to break international law, you are bound to disobey. Debi suggests that a subordinate is required to obey his commanding officer no matter what, and that it is the commanding officer who is responsible for what happens while the subordinate is only responsible for obeying. This is simply not how the army works. Debi seems unaware of this.

But let’s step inside Debi’s world for a moment. The reasons a soldier isn’t supposed to obey his commander if he is ordered to violate international laws is that a soldier’s first loyalty is to be to his country and the army as a whole rather than to his commanding officer. In Debi’s world, this would be like saying that a woman’s first loyalty should be to God, not to her husband. Except that Debi argues that this isn’t true. Debi suggests that a woman is loyal to God by blindly obeying her husband in everything. Translated into military-speak again, this would be like saying that a soldier is loyal to his country and to the army as a whole by blindly obeying his commanding officer in everything, even if his commanding officer orders him to shoot a prisoner of war in cold blood, or massacre a village of innocents, or rape a fellow soldier. This seems all sorts of messed up.

Another thing about the army: Romantic relationships between commanding officers and their subordinates are not allowed. Not only does it compromise the cohesiveness of the unit, and the officer and his decision making, the power dynamics of a relationship like that quickly get rather twisted. After all, a commanding officer has a great deal of power over his subordinates, and in a situation where there’s a romantic relationship straddling that line, this power difference can quickly lend itself to abuse. But what Debi’s suggesting is that that power difference be enshrined and romantic relationships between commanding officers and their subordinates be made the norm.

Note also Debi’s threat—her insistence that complete subordination in the marital relationship is the only way a woman can ever feel fulfilled. Debi is telling her readers that if they leave, or (gasp!) become egalitarian Christians, they will live miserable and empty lives. I supposed Debi would probably say that that is what I am doing right now, and that I am lying to myself and to others if I state that I feel fulfilled and happy in my life as my husband’s equal partner. But enough of this, let’s move on:

In all this submit-to-your-superior talk, remember this: God is focusing our attention on the heavenly pattern. The emphasis is not on women submitting to men, but rather on women showing, here on earth, the heavenly pattern of the Son submitting to the father.

Husband = God, wife = Jesus. For all that I heard this repeatedly growing up, I’m still unclear on exactly how it works. After all, within Christianity God the Father and Jesus are one person, two equal parts in the godhead. How can a part of a person submit to another part of a person? This gets all mixed up in the (in my opinion) rather confusing nature of the trinity, something that’s never really spelled out all that clearly in scripture to begin with.

“He is not saved!” you say. God’s Word remains the final authority. Your husband is your knight in God’s protective armor. Even if his armor appears a bit rusty and dull, it is still the armor of God, your safe covering in everything.

It seems that some significant portion of Debi’s target audience must be married to unbelievers, or rather, as is more likely, to Christians who are less ideologically “pure” or less devout. Debi insists throughout, of course, that this is irrelevant. In thinking back to the military analogy, though, wouldn’t this be akin to a soldier saying that his superior officer was actually loyal to the Taliban? And we’re not even talking secretly loyal—we’re talking openly so. As a soldier, wouldn’t it be rather a big problem if your superior officer was on the side of the enemy? In what world would submission and obedience to that officer be seen as loyalty to your nation or to the army as a whole? More to the point, the U.S. military would never put a man loyal to China, or to North Korea, in command over American troops! And yet, that is just what Debi is suggesting God does.

But there’s another point to be made here, while we’re using the military example: A hierarchical system makes sense in the military, but why would this mean it would also make sense in Christianity? Historically, we see a long history of pastors, deacons, bishops, abbots, and conclaves, but we also see a long history associated with ideas like the priesthood of all believers and brotherhood (and sisterhood) in Christ. Sure, there are those verses in the pastoral epistles that set up hierarchy of leadership in the church (i.e. things like bishops), but there are also verses that say things like “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3: 24). As an atheist, I generally stay out of conflicts over how to interpret the Bible—I figure that’s not really my place. I do feel that I’m merited in pointing out that there is more than one way to interpret the Bible, but in this situation what I’m really asking is why hierarchy would naturally be best.

Why couldn’t men and women both serve God, side by side, as equal partners in furthering his kingdom? And more than that, in a relationship where the wife is Christian and the husband is not, why couldn’t the wife serve God directly—teaching Sunday school or a Bible study, organizing drives to bring food to needy families, even serving as pastor if her denomination allows it—rather than being bound to ignore all of that and to instead serve her husband? After all, that’s what Debi is saying. You want to serve God? Stop trying to do so through giving others Biblical counsel or being involved in the church! That is the way of Jezebel! Instead, you are called to serve God by serving your husband! Doesn’t the long history of women serving as nuns, missionaries, Sunday school teachers, hymn writers, camp counselors, and today pastors suggest that women have something to contribute directly to God, and aren’t constrained to doing so through the medium of their husbands?

One last thing I want to mention: Debi is still misusing the “Armor of God” metaphor. This passage has nothing at all to do with husbands being the armor God designed for wives. On the contrary, really. The passage says that all Christians, male or female, slave or free, is to take up “the sword of the spirit” and the “breastplate of righteousness” and the “shield of faith.” It says nothing about how women are weaker and need to stand behind their husband’s armor—instead, it says that women themselves are to put on armor, armor that is totally irrespective of their marital status. The armor of God isn’t one’s husband, and it especially isn’t one’s unbelieving husband—it’s one’s faith, one’s prayers, one’s knowledge of the words of God. In other words, it’s the exact things Debi says makes a woman a “Jezebel.”

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 118

Debi starts this next section with a quick overview of what is required of a help meet:

God tells us that we are to be help meets: We are to submit, obey, and even reverence our husbands. He also tells us WHY we are assigned the role of helper.

Submit, obey, and reverence. No mincing words, that’s for sure. So let’s get into Debi’s why.

1. We came forth from man’s ribs and were created for him. We are a part of him.
“For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, for as much as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man” (I Cor. 11: 7-9).

Debi has already proven that she is really good at taking things out of context. Set alone like this, this scripture passage looks really stark. But this is what comes next:

Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord. For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman; but all things of God.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that these two verses seriously undermine what Debi is trying to do with this passage. In fact, while I haven’t seen a Christian feminist tackle this passage in particular, I’m going to guess that they would argue that these two verses suggest that in Christ men and women are equal, and old hierarchies are no longer valid. Also, you know what’s curious? I remember hearing I Corinthians 11: 7-9 emphasized quite frequently growing up, and I never—and I do mean never—remember hearing the verses that follow it even given a mention. Curious, very curious.

2. Our position in relation to our husband is a picture of the Great Mystery, which is Christ and the Church. We, as the body of Christ, are for him, our living Head. It can be no other way!
“But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God” (I Cor. 11: 3).
“This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church . . . and the wife see that she reverence her husband” (Eph. 5: 32-33).

The first verse Debi cites here comes right before the passage she cited before, ignoring the following context, and the second passage omits “nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself.” Convenient.

I’ve mentioned that, as someone who no longer identifies as Christian, I try to avoid stepping too far into battles over Biblical interpretation. There are so many passages that seem to be in conflict with each other, and so many different interpretations that can be made, that in general I’d rather let those who take that label fight it out amongst themselves.

What Debi is doing here, though, is a problem. She says that women are assigned the role of help meet . . . because they were created from Adam’s rib, and because the Bible uses the husband and wife as a metaphor for Christ and the church. The thing is, I missed where these passages connect the one of these things to the other—there’s nothing about being created from Adam’s rib that means that women must obey, submit to, and reverence their husbands. The Christ and the church example only works if you assume that the author of those passages meant the metaphor to go that far, and if you assume that Christ wants the church to mindlessly submit to and obey him—an idea not all Christians ascribe to—and if you assume that Christ would want the church to mindlessly reverence him irrespective of whether he loved the church or treated her well—something else I’m pretty sure not all Christians ascribe to. The point I’m making is that Debi leaves out a step here, leaping from A to C without ever establishing B.

God tells us WHY our husband is to be the one who rules the home. God explains why it is never his will for the wife to rule.

Rule. Yes, Debi uses the word “rule.”

1. The fall into sin was due to a woman’s inherent vulnerability.
“For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression” (I Timothy 2: 13-14).
“For a man indeed . . . is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man” (I Cor. 11: 7).

We heard this before, remember? God created women without armor, created them to stand behind their husbands’ armor. I’m seriously unsure what the second passage she cites here has to do with the idea that women are inherently vulnerable, though. And as for the first—I don’t think Debi has a very good grasp on exactly what actually happened at the fall, but then, I don’t think the author of I Timothy did either.

2. Curses were placed on the guilty in the fall.
“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3: 16).

And here is where Debi’s interpretive work seriously goes off the rails.

It was God’s design, before the fall, that the woman’s desire would be to her husband and that he would rule over her. This relationship was not punishment, but after the fall it would be a source of suffering for the woman. God created the woman to be the helper of the man—a sinless man. Now that she has led him into sin, she is still his helper, her desires are still focused on him and his goals, and he will still rule over her as before—but now he is sinful, selfish, and carnal.

Um. No. Actually, this is wrong.

Nowhere does the Bible say that it was God’s design before the fall for women to submit to their husbands and their husbands to rule over them. And in the context of Genesis, this relationship actually is meted out as a punishment. (As a side note: If God required Eve to submit to, obey, and reverence Adam when he was a sinless man, shouldn’t we expect that to change when Adam becomes “sinful, selfish, and carnal”?)

Look, the only—and I do mean only—verse that suggests anything other than complete equality between Adam and Eve post-fall is this:

And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.

If we read into this short verse everything Debi says is entailed in being a “help meet” (which by the way she turns into a noun, even though in the actual text it isn’t), then yes, the submit/ruler relationship was indeed God’s design. But that’s reading things backwards and into the text rather than simply looking at what the text actually says.

And then, after the fall, comes this:

14 And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;

19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

This passage makes no sense unless we assume that each of these curses—each of these punishments—implies a change of some sort. In other words, Adam is told that he will have to work hard to farm the land, and will encounter thorns and thistles in the process. This section is generally taken to mean that before the fall, there were no thorns and thistles and there was no need to exert effort in farming the land. And as to the serpent, we would also assume that the curses he receives are new and different from how things were for him in the past. Likewise, any normal reading would conclude that Eve did not previously face labor pains, and that her husband did not previously rule over her. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a curse! Debi’s suggestion that all that has changed is that the man ruling over her is no longer perfect but sinful makes no sense, because that’s not actually what the text says.

You know what? It would be nice if Debi actually read and grappled with the holy text she claims to hold in such high esteem rather than just deciding it says what she already made her mind up that it says even when it doesn’t. But then, I suppose, she wouldn’t be Debi.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 119-121

Some of you have noted that Debi’s getting a bit repetitive. In future posts I’m going to try to move more quickly through parts where Debi’s simply restating what she’s already said. In this section, though, Debi says something I don’t think she’s said before.

God expresses a clear and sure mandate when he tells us: “But I suffer not [do not allow] a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, [that includes your pastor] but to be in silence.” (I Timothy 2:12).

I call your attention back to the argument in a letter we read in chapter 5. [I reviewed that section in this post and this post.]

I have been deeply blessed by women speaking on the platform. I don’t understand how God could move so profoundly through women who are not in accordance with his will.

The assumption of this woman’s argument was that the only reason God would command women not to preach is because they are not very good at it. . . . What she does not realize is that it is on the very grounds that women can be effective public ministers that God commands them not to do so. It is not a question of being qualified; it is a matter of being authorized. . . . If she is effective as a replacement for her husband’s ineffective leadership, that makes it all the more wrong! For then she is, as the Bible says, usurping authority over the man—usurping glory . . . usurping honor . . . usurping control . . . usurping leadership. That is, she is doing what a man should be doing, and thus getting the recognition a man should get.

Yes, this section really happened. This is like arguing that women shouldn’t be artists because art is a male thing, and responding to someone pointing out that women are capable of just as great works of art as men are by saying that that’s not the point—or even that that makes it only more important for women to not be artists. And indeed, Debi finishes this paragraph with concern that if women are great preachers, pastors, and leaders, effectively teaching people the Word of God, men won’t get the “recognition” for being the ones to do those things. Silly women, always getting in the way of men’s desire to be the most important and most lauded.

Modern Christianity has steered women into a perversion of their nature, allowing, and even encouraging, them to be in spiritual authority over men. The fruit of this false doctrine is evident in the unhappy women and dissatisfied men of the last couple of generations. It is a shameful matter of statistics that the fundamentalist Christian home is not as enduring as the general populations.

Debi’s trying to do two things here and I don’t think she can pull them both off at once. First she says that women can be good and effective leaders and teachers but that that’s not the point, and then she says that allowing women to exercise spiritual authority is “a perversion of their nature.” But if women can preach and teach effectively, how can doing so be against their nature? Bringing the art example back in, it would be like saying that even though women are capable of being just as great artists as men are, creating art is nevertheless “a perversion of their nature.”

Also, what is this about pointing out that evangelical Christians have much higher divorce rates and then claiming it’s because of women exercising spiritual authority? Is Debi seriously going to blame feminism in the church for these higher divorce rates? If this is the case, shouldn’t we expect the culture at large, which has a ways to go but is definitely more feminist than evangelical Christianity, to have the higher divorce rates?

Next Debi works to head off feminist influence within evangelicalism by addressing Deborah and Priscilla. Deborah was a judge who ruled Israel, and Priscilla was a missionary in the early church. These two women, along with many others throughout the Bible, are held up by Christian feminists as examples of female leaders or preachers who were praised and esteemed. First, Deborah:

If you actually read the story, you would know that the text makes much of the fact that the men were shamed by allowing a woman to take the place of prominence. There is no question that Deborah performed her job well, that she saved Israel, that God used her; that is just the point. When the men allowed a woman to take their role and perform their job successfully, it resulted in shame to the nation of Israel.

So I just went back and reread the story of Deborah. I honestly have no idea what Debi is talking about here. There is absolutely nothing there about Deborah’s ruling resulting in “shame to the nation of Israel”—in fact, it’s rather the opposite: Deborah’s reign as judge brought Israel victory and prosperity. There is also nothing there about men being “shamed by allowing a woman to take the place of prominence.” Honestly—nothing. Read it yourself.

God’s rule that women not take the lead is not a statement about our being inferior or not as capable as men; it is a statement by God about it not being within our sphere of authority or nature to take leadership over men, to teach them, or to gain a place of prominence among them. Yes, we are capable of teaching, and teaching well. I am teaching you, but this book is not written to men. It is written by an “aged” woman teaching younger women to obey God and their husbands—just what God commanded me to do (Titus 2: 3-4).

I include the above paragraph merely to remind readers how Debi justifies her own leadership role.

And now Priscilla:

Priscilla is never mentioned alone. She is always with her husband, as I am with mine. When my husband goes to speak at a seminar on family and child-training issues, they usually advertise us as “Michael and Debi Pearl.” He takes the stage and does the teaching, while I sit in the audience and support him.He sometime s calls on me to publicly answer questions about child training or homeschooling, but I never publicly teach doctrine to men or women. I counsel women and make sure my husband gets plenty of rest, has something good to eat, and is able to remember where he is and what he is to do next. . . . My role is a support role, as I am sure was the case with Priscilla.

It’s rather hard to respond to this, because Debi is simply making an assertion without any evidence whatsoever. Yes, Priscilla is never mentioned without her husband Aquila (and vice versa), but those mentions are things like this, from Acts chapter 18:

Meanwhile a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was a learned man, with a thorough knowledge of the Scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord, and he spoke with great fervor and taught about Jesus accurately, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they invited him to their home and explained to him the way of God more adequately.

It doesn’t say “they invited him to their home so that Aquila could explain to him the way of God more adequately while Priscilla made sure they had something to drink.” Of course, Debi is right that conferences bill her together with her husband even though he speaks and she doesn’t, so it’s not like I can prove that the same thing wasn’t happening with Priscilla and Aquila. But then, Debi can’t prove what she’s asserting either, because she doesn’t have any actual argument to back up her claim that it was. For someone who claims to approach the Bible literally and take it at face value, Debi does an amazing amount of reading into the text things that aren’t actually technically there.

But then, even if Priscilla were preaching alongside her husband, or even if the text were different and had her preaching alone, Debi would probably simply respond by saying that just because Priscilla could preach and teach effectively doesn’t mean she should have. Oh, and also that she might have won converts but she brought shame on the Christian communities she was involved in.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 221-222

Debi starts this section with these reassurances:

So, is a woman a second-class citizen of the kingdom? Is she to be a subdued, brow-beaten servant to the male species? Certainly not! What the Bible teaches will not put women back into the Stone Age, nor will it turn us into a bunch of Muslim-like women who stay covered in black, sweaty bourkhas. If you knew me (and by the time you finish reading this book, you will know me), you would know that I ma the farthest thing from a mousy, brow-beaten wife. But I know what God teaches about women, and I know that for you to be happy—really happy—as I have been happy, you must follow and abide in God’s role for women.

First, I’m surprised that Debi believes in a Stone Age. The young earth creationist view is that the supposed “Stone Age” lasted a few hundred years max, occurred after the flood and before people settled down and began farming, and was a period when people had a higher mental capacity than today (before human DNA had degenerated as much as it has today, goes the argument). This makes Debi’s Stone Age remark rather anachronistic. Also making it anachronistic is the fact that one widely held theory of the origins of patriarchy holds that gender relations were much more egalitarian in the Stone Age and became patriarchal with the origins of farming.

Second, Debi’s reference to Muslim women smacks of Islamophobia. Muslim women are not a monolithic identity, and most Muslim women do not actually wear burqas. While it is true that some Muslim women are pressured into wearing the burqa, but the reality is far more complex than just that. Some Muslim women cover, and some do not—it’s generally considered a deeply personal decision, one that is ultimately between a woman and God. To criticize Islam as a whole based on the fact that some Muslim women wear burqas is structurally no different from criticizing Christianity as a whole based on the fact that some Christian women wear long skirts and head coverings. Debi’s Islamophobia yet another example of the same arrogant cultural superiority that characterizes the rest of her work. It’s also extremely hypocritical.

God has spoken frankly as to why he made us as he did and what our role is to be.

Yet, so-called Bible teachers today tear apart what God has said and make the average young wife reading these Scriptures feel as though what God has said to her is an insult. I, too, am a woman. I have spent my life counseling women. After almost 35 years as a wife, counseling ladies, reading thousands upon thousands of letters, and chalking up my own life experiences, I have concluded that what the Bible says on this subject is rock-solid truth, and it works! I have also seen the sad results of the teachings that reject the plain sense of Scripture.

When people speak with extreme confidence, people are more likely to believe what they say. The more confident you are, the more likely that they’ll believe you. I think Debi is capitalizing on that here.

My conclusions can be said to be scientifically correct. That is, the “evidence” that leads to my conclusion is reproducible: Anyone can test it and get the same results. The Creator knows best, and His way does work. His Word is meant to be taken at face value. And, when any woman does as I have done, the blessings are incredible!

I don’t think Debi understands how scientific evidence works. You don’t just say something works for you and you’ve seen it work for others and that makes it scientific. And I think she’s also forgetting things like variables. For example, women in the sort of communities she is writing to are often under a lot of pressure to act as though things are okay, even if they’re not. Also, Debi admitted last week that evangelical Christians are more likely to get divorced than are other Americans. How does that square with her assertion? Actually, I think I know the answer to that: Debi would say that most evangelical Christians have adopted feminism in whole or in part, and are not actually following God’s plan for a heavenly marriage.

I have received thousands of letters from women who have entered into God’s miraculous, blessed plan by simply believing and obeying his Word concerning our place as women. I have seen lesbians set free and become wives fit for the kingdom. I have seen broken whores, drug addicts, and church-taught, rebellious ladies all become women who honor their men and become good help meets. I have seen marriages born in hell and then reborn in heaven.

I’m really curious to know more about Debi’s ministry. Thousands of letters? I’d give a lot to actually see Debi’s an mail, the good and the bad. Further, these letters Debi receives (assuming she is being truthful) don’t necessarily present the full truth.  How does Debi know these letter writers aren’t glossing over the problems and fitting their articles to a standard evangelical redemption narrative?

When someone tells you that the Greek doesn’t read submit, obey, or silence, just ask that person, “How is your marriage? Would you say it is glorious? Will God use your marriage as an example in Heaven of how he wants Christ and the Church to be?” Those who change the Word of God concerning a woman being a help meet do so because they don’t know the wonder of a marriage made in heaven. I do.

I would not call a relationship where one party does all the leading and the other does all the submitting “glorious.” Also, Debi is creating a strawman of Christian feminists here. The argument isn’t that the Greek doesn’t say submit, obey, and silence, but rather the statements need to be read in their historical, sociological, and literary context—and in the context of the rest of the Bible.

Also, is “How is your marriage?” Debi’s equivalent with Ken Ham’s “Were you there?” gotcha question? It’s certainly not anymore effective. Debi doesn’t have scientific evidence, she has “gotcha” questions, anecdotes, and overly confident assertions. That’s not how scientific proof works. You know what would be interesting? An actual study. I’m not sure how one could be set up, though, because it would require those in the patriarchal relationships to be honest, and there would probably be disagreement on exactly what made a marriage “heavenly.”

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 124-127

A wise woman understands that her husband’s need to be honored is not based on his performance, but on his nature and his God-ordained position. She learns quickly to defer to his ideas or plans with enthusaism. She looks for ways to reverence him. She knows this is God’s will for her life.

A while back I wrote about the pernicious problems with the Christian theological idea that the relationship between husband and wife was to be a sort of mirror of the relationship between Christ and the Church, and some readers responded by saying that I’d misunderstood, that that idea was only a metaphor and not to be taken literally. I don’t believe I got into how that idea ought to be understood, though. My point was that the way that it is understood in evangelical and fundamentalist culture is toxic, and in this section Debi makes that clear. Make sure you’re prepared before delving into this post—writing this one made me more angry with Debi than I have been since my post on her Command Man section.

Debi starts by quoting from Ephesians: “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church . . . and the wife see that she reverence her husband.” Debi then goes on as follows:

Jesus wants us for a friend. He wants a companion, someone wth whom to discuss ideas. He wants a playmate, someone with whom to laugh and enjoy life. He wants a buddy with wfhom to spend time. He wants a lover, someone to care about and someone to care about him. He wants a help meet, someone to share in his work of creation management. He wants to be a groom and he wants the Church to be his bride. This is the great mystery. He seeks to create in me and my relationship to my husband a working scale model of his relationship to the Church throughout eternity.

Debi, you see, takes this metaphor literally—and very seriously.

Amazing as it sounds, marriage between a man and a woman is what God chose as the closest example of Christ’s relationship to his bride, the Church. You are part of eternity when you submit to your husband. Submission, reverence, and honor are preparing you for your marriage to Christ. You may say, “But it would be easy being married to Christ.” Then you don’t know your Bible. What if your husband required you to offer your son upon an alter as a burnt sacrifice? That is what God required of Abraham. What if your husband killed you for lying? That is what God did to Sapphira.

I don’t. I don’t even.

To start with the most obvious, in the examples Debi uses to argue that being married to Christ is no picnic, she leaves herself open for readers to come away believing that they would be bound to murder their children should their husbands command it, or to allow themselves to be killed by their husbands should their husbands so decide. After all, Debi has said both that such submission unto death is required of the Church and that wives are to submit to their husbands as the Church is to submit to Christ. If Debi offers women exceptions to this rule, she doesn’t do it here, and leaving this passage without a discussion of exceptions—of the differences between the Christ and the Church relationship and the husband and wife relationship, differences Debi doesn’t given any suggestion she actually thinks exist—seems to me both dangerous and highly irresponsible.

But there’s more here than just that, and it’s only worse. Debi describes the relationship between Christ and the Church as the ideal every married couple is to strive for, and then makes it clear that the relationship between Christ and the Church is abusive. In other words, the relationship Debi says women are to strive for is an abusive relationship. And after reading this passage, an abused wife can tell herself every time her husband asks something horrific of her that at least he isn’t asking her to kill one of her children, as Christ asked of the Church (and asked perfectly appropriately and rightly, too, within Debi’s frame of reasoning). All throughout her book, Debi normalizes and promotes relationship patterns that are textbook examples of abuse, but here she perhaps goes the very furthest. And immediately after this, she perhaps goes the farthest she has yet gone in warning women against doing anything to stand up to potential abuse:

For a woman to usurp authority over a man is an affront to God Almighty, like treason in the camp. It would be like a man taking authority over Christ, or like the Church becoming jealous of Jesus’ leadership and taking authority unto itself. It would be doing just what Lucifer did when he said in Isaiah 14:13-14, “I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north . . . I will be like the most High.”

Yes, that’s right, if a woman stands up to her husband—even if he is abusive—she is committing treason against God—she is being like Satan. Some may wonder why I am focusing so much on abusive husbands. After all, most of Debi’s followers are likely married to men who are not abusive. The problem, though, is that Debi’s teachings are absolutely toxic when read by women whose husbands are abusive, or who have the potential to become abuse, and set up such an unequal relationships that they in fact, I would argue, serve to foster the development of abuse. In other words, I would argue that Debi’s suggestions have the potential to make bad relationships worse, and turn good relationships sour.

Knowing that my role as a wife typifies the Church’s relationship to Christ has molded my life. As I reverence my husband, I am creating a picture of how we, the Church, should reverence Christ. You have wondered why God would tell us to do such a think as to reverence our husbands. Now you know.

Yes, you read that right. The reason women are to submit to their husbands is that the husband wife relationship is a type of the relationship between Christ and the Church, and the Church is to submit to Christ. How that makes any sense at all I have no idea.

Reverence: to revere, to be in awe; fear mingled with respect and esteem.

Fear. Yes, fear. Debi tells women that they must fear their husbands—that fearing their husbands is right and good. How Debi’s books got to be so very popular in fundamentalist and Christian homeschooling circles I have absolutely no idea.

1. Obedience is doing what you know the other person wants you to do.

2. Submission is your heart giving over to the other person’s will.

3. Reverence is more than just doing what a man expects or demands. It is an act of the woman’s will to treat him with a high degree of regard and awe.

Do you know what is really baffling? That Debi can say that women are to obey, submit to, and reference their husbands and define the terms like this and then claim that she is not telling women to be doormats. Again and again she assures women that she is no mousy pushover! And then she says—well, this. There is no way a woman can do what Debi is laying out here without being a doormat. I mean, this is sort of the definition of doormat.

Obedience, submission, and reverence are all acts of the will and are not based on feelings. Showing deference toward one’s husband is an act of reverence toward the God who placed you in that role.

One of Debi’s common lines is that by serving their husbands they are serving God, and she is merely repeating that again here by saying that showing reverence to your husband is showing reverence to God. Interestingly, we see this slippage again in the letter Debi quotes in total immediately following this. I’m not going to quote the full letter for you, but it is signed like this:

Loving him,

Judy

It is very common for evangelicals or fundamentalists to sign letters or emails or what have you with things like “In Christ” or “With Christ’s Love,” but that’s not what’s going on in this letter. The context makes it very clear that she is talking about loving her husband, not about loving Christ.

In brief, Judy’s letter—which may or may not have actually been written by someone named Judy rather than by Debi herself—outlines the story of a young wife who learns that her husband is regularly going to strip clubs and seeing prostitutes, and yet decides against all odds to stay with him rather than to divorce him, and focuses on showing him love rather than disappointment and on teaching her son to love his father and see him as the best man in the world. In her response, Debi offers this:

She is reverencing God by reverencing her husband, not because her husband is a fit representative of Christ, and not because he is a worthy substitute, but because God placed her in subjection to her husband. . . . This woman is obeying and reverencing God, and no one else. THat creep of a husband is the fortunate recipient of honor being given to God.

Remember when Debi insisted that women are not “under” men? I’m not sure just what Debi thinks “in subjection to” actually means . . . Also, again, I want to point out well all this works out for the men in the equation: How convenient for them that God has decreed that women are to serve and honor God by serving and honoring men!

If her faithfulness is never rewarded with a new-birth change in her husband, her commitment will not be wasted, for the grace that God is working in her heart is making her supremely fitted to be the bride of Christ. It is an eternal work taking place in her soul.

And here is where I have a question: Aren’t men, too, supposed to be the bride of Christ? The bride of Christ is supposed to be the Church, comprised of a multitude of individuals of both genders. But here Debi suggests that Judy’s submission to her husband is making her especially fit to be the bride of Christ. What of the men? If wives learn by submitting how to be a good future bride of Christ, well, don’t husbands need to learn that too? If both men and women are preparing in this world to be the bride of Christ in the world to come, shouldn’t they be practicing mutual submission? Otherwise, aren’t we going to end up with lots of women in the Church ready to be the bride of Christ and lots of men in the Church thinking that they are to be Christ? But of course, Debi never answers this question—she doens’t even ask it.

When someone tells me in the future that I got that bride of Christ thing wrong—that Christians only believe it’s a metaphor, not that it should at all be taken literally or actually applied to husband wife relationships—I’m going to send them here. Are there Christians who do only see this as a metaphor and don’t ever try to take it further? Almost certainly. But that there are multitudes of evangelicals and fundamentalists who do take this idea literally and seek to apply it in very real ways is something that cannot be denied—or ignored.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 128-132

In this section Debi goes into more depth about just what “reverencing” one’s husband actually looks like in practice. Her focus in this section is on thought patterns—basically, she argues that women should brainwash themselves into only ever thinking good of their husbands. Debi starts by outlining what she argues is a common problem for her intended audience:

In our own strength, we women tend to have minds like old LP records that are scratched. We take our husband’s faults and replay them in our thoughts over and over again, “he’s insensitive . . . he’s insensitive . . . he’s insensitive . . . he’s insensitive . . . ” We get worked up over the smallest offense until our agitation sours into bitterness. He will forget to feed the dog three days in a row. We will look at the empty dog bowl and attribute all kinds of evil motives to him. He will leave us waiting in the car for an extra ten minutes, and we convince ourselves that his lack of consideration is just the top of the cold iceberg of his heart. Since we are “Christian” ladies, and the kids are watching, we don’t rant and rave; we just give him the stone-cold, silent treatment. He must know how much he hurts us, and the best way to retaliate is to hurt him back by depriving him of what he wants most—respect, honor, and love. We know that this will get his attention, and he will eventually have to come humbly asking what is wrong. By then, our miserable countenance should have softened him up for a good case of repentance. Boy, will we make him sorry! But we fully expect that he will try to make up for the birthday he forgot by buying the same kind of candy we told him we hate, and then we hate him all the more for not remembering that we hate that kind of candy. Practice. We are always practicing those thoughts.

The interesting thing is, I’ve seen this happen. A woman will be annoyed with her husband about something he is doing or not doing, and will think negative thoughts and expect the worst of him, and it becomes a cycle. The thing is, when I’ve seen it happen in evangelical and fundamentalist circles it’s often fueled by the fact that women don’t feel that they can talk to their husbands about what’s bothering them. Instead of having it out and talking with their husbands, they let these annoyances fester, and it just gets worse. The cure I recommend is straightforward and honest communication, compromise, and cooperation. But that’s not Debi’s cure.

Remember the 40,000 thoughts a day? Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh. How many thousands of negative thoughts are you thinking in the course of three or four hours? It is your duty before God to think differently. God tells you how to think. When the emotions will not freely allow us to think what we ought, our will can command our muscles to actions and the thoughts will follow. “Commit they works unto the LORD, and thy thoughts shall be established” (Prov. 16:3).

And here I think I have to use an example from my own life.

My husband, Sean, enjoys gaming. I, in contrast, had always seen gaming as a complete and total waste of time. After Sally arrived, I would become royally annoyed when he would game in the evening instead of helping me care for her, or when he would game even though the house was a wreck and the dishes needed doing. For a while, I let that build up, and there ended up being quite a mess of negative thoughts. Finally, though, I simply talked with him about it. I told him my frustrations, and he explained his side of things—that gaming was, for him, a way to relax and blow off steam, especially after a trying day at work. I hadn’t realized that. After talking, we came to a compromise. He committed to not gaming until Sally was in bed, and for my part I gave up seeing gaming as only ever a complete and total waste of time. I became more understanding, and he was willing to listen to me if I was frustrated and to take a break from gaming if things needed doing.

If I had followed Debi’s advice, I wouldn’t have said anything to Sean about my frustrations and would have bottled them up and covered them with attempts to force myself to think highly of Sean. Sean would never have known that his gaming was frustrating me, or that he could help the situation by not gaming while Sally was still up, etc.—he would never have known because I would not have told him. For my part, I would never have known that gaming was for him a way of blowing off steam—-I would never have known because he would never have had the opportunity to tell me that. Might I have gotten over my frustration at Sean’s gaming by shear force of will, even without discussing it with him and finding a mutually agreed upon compromise? Perhaps, but I would have done so by essentially brainwashing myself into thinking that something that bothered me didn’t actually bother me.

Debi has a weird way of saying something that is absolutely correct, and then turning around and saying something that is utterly destructive. She does this not just here but throughout this passage.

This part is good:

A good marriage is good because one or both of them have learned to overlook the other’s faults, to love the other as he or she is and to not attempt to change the other or bring him or her to repentance.

It is absolutely true that if you go into a marriage thinking you’re going to “fix” the other partner, you’re in for trouble. Being willing to overlook your partner’s faults and shortcomings—i.e. not expecting your partner to be perfect—is indeed an important part of a good marriage.

This part is problematic:

A bad marriage is not one that contains more faults between the two of them; it is a marriage where one or both of them gets worked up over issues that good marriage partners let slide and cover up with love and forgiveness.

Who decides exactly decides which issues are issues that someone should let slide? In the previous section Debi told the story of Judy, a woman who let her husband’s constant adultery slide because she believed she was ordered by God to reverence her husband. If that is something that “good marriage partners” let slide, well, that Debi has a totally different idea of what constitutes a “good” marriage.

This part is absolutely destructive:

Eve, today, has many sisters. We still doubt the one in authority over us and imagine that he does not intend good for us. Like Eve, we imagine that we can disobey the authority of God’s Word and of our husband’s word . . .”

Do you see the elision there between God and husband? I’m not even sure which she is referring to in her second sentence! We “doubt the one in authority over us” meaning God, or husband? The fact that I’m unsure speaks volumes!

Where men struggle with fleshly imaginations, we women give ourselves over to emotional imaginations and create a world of hurt for ourselves and those around us . . . We have been tricked into believing that our husbands have committed offenses against us . . . . It is time to get yourself under God-ordained authority. Believe God, believe the best of your husband, your neighbors, your church, your family, etc., and get on with the blessings and joy of life and marriage.

There is so much gaslighting in this sentence.

After this, Debi turns back to Judy, the letter writer who decided to reverence her cheating husband even though he did not deserve it. She stopped being constantly angry and negative toward her husband and instead began teaching her young son to see his father as the best dad in the world. Here is what Debi adds:

In the letter above, Judy got over her “Mad Wife” disease before her son became infected with it.

Mad wife disease . . . it’s like mad cow disease, get it? Ha! Ha! Nope. Not funny.

The little boy honors his dad because his mother honors him. Someday that little boy will be a man. As he grows up, he will discover that his dad has faults, and he will forgive them as his mother has done. When he is grown and can see the whole picture, he will know that his mom is one of the finest ladies on the earth. He will rise up and call her blessed. Someday her husband may grow out of his foolish, lustful stupidity, and if he does, he too will treasure her. She will have earned his love and devotion, because she reverenced him when there was little in him to honor.

Or maybe her son will grow up to wonder why in the world his mother was such a doormat rather than standing up to his father, and to feel that his mother deceived him in teaching his father was a good man when he wasn’t. And perhaps her husband will grow up and stop cheating and then realize that what he would really like is a wife with a backbone. I’m just pointing out that there is more than one possible outcome here.

No one of us honestly thinks Judy’s husband deserved her reverence, or her love for that matter. He is a first-class worm and deserves to sleep alone in an alley under a cardboard box.

Apparently Debi is allowed to speak evil of men while their own wives are not.

And then there is this absolutely bizarre section:

In my lifetime, I have known of just two husbands who were able to reverse the course of an angry, resentful wife and make their marriage into something blessed. In all of Scripture, there is no promise to men that they can save their wife and marriage by conducting themselves in a certain prescribed manner. In contrast, the Bible holds a wonderful promise to women: they have the power to win their lost husbands both to themselves and to God.

I could have sworn that Debi said something just two pages ago . . . here, this:

A good marriage is good because one or both of them have learned to overlook the other’s faults, to love the other as he or she is and to not attempt to change the other or bring him or her to repentance.

Am I the only one seeing a contradiction here? Debi explains as follows:

The Bible tells us that a woman can win her husband without the Bible. In today’s churches, many women have failed to win their husbands because they have tried to be evangelists instead of wives.

“Likewise ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that, if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives” (I Peter 3:1).

A woman wins her husband, just as Judy is doing it, by the manner of her “conversation” or way of living before him. Later, we will discuss how to win your lost husband.

Sorry Debi, you don’t get a pass just because you’re saying women should convert their husbands with smiles and willing bodies rather than with Scripture. You’re seriously contradicting yourself here.

And then Debi steps back into the 1950s:

Men are not the uncaring creatures they sometimes appear to be. They highly treasure their families and like for their homes to be comfort zones. They want respect and a family that gives them security and purpose. Even though home life may get dull, men greatly value their own women and children.

Men may allow the lust of the flesh to pull theme away form that which they value, but they will try to get back to that comfort zone. It is this natural need for his own family that keeps a man caring for and bearing the responsibility for his wife and children. When a woman does not provide for her husband a comfortable nest and reverent attitude, she has to rely on his goodness to “keep him” faithful. She is a fool to expect him to be a good husband when she is not being the help meet God created her to be. A man coming home to a tense and messy home, lousy meals, and a wife who is critical, might not have the “goodness” to remain faithful if a sweet young woman at work seeks to pull him away with the promise (illusion) of a more fulfilling comfort zone.

You know what? I think I actually think more highly of men than Debi does.

Counselors agree that in almost all marriage conflicts, both husband and wife share the blame almost equally. A man’s guilt is usually easy to see. A woman’s guilt is less obvious but just as destructive and evil. God ordained a woman to be a help meet. She is to provide a haven of rest and satisfaction, and to be a delight to her husband. When she fails to obey God, there is often “hell to pay” at home. When she obeys God, even if she is married to a “lost” man, she will usually reap heavenly results.

Debi’s writing here is making me think of MRA insistence that male-on-female domestic violence is just as much the woman’s fault because why would a man lash out physically against his partner unless she provoked him? Indeed, domestic violence is likely what Debi is referring to when she says that a “man’s guilt” is generally easy to see—right before she plants the blame for it equally on the shoulders of its victims.

So, to sum up this section: Women are to stifle any negative thoughts of their husbands and let all of their husbands’ faults slide; realize that they have been “tricked” into thinking that their husbands have “committed offenses” against them when they haven’t; only ever think good of their husbands; and seek to win their husbands to God through submission and reverence rather than through word or argument. Oh, and men need their homes to be “comfort zones” complete with a delicious dinner on the table and a 1950s foot rub or else they’ll start looking lustily at their secretaries. Lovely. Debi finishes with a teaser for the next section:

The next story is about a young wife who also discovered how to win her man through reverence. 

Tune in next week for Debi’s domestic-violence-and-reverence combo.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 132-133

***trigger warning for domestic violence***

This section is called “Earning His Trust,” and calling it that is messed up on about three million levels, as we shall see. It is the story of a young woman named Sunny.

Years ago I knew a sweet young girl who was really dumb. She had a very tender heart (which she thought was GOd’s love and compassion in her), and she always showed a weakness for guys who “needed” her. Her name was Sunny, and she was as fair and lovely as the Sunshine she was named for. Sunny always picked up hitchhikers to witness to, even thought he older folks told her this practice was not wise. One day she picked up a young man of Arab descent, who looked and talked very romantic. To make a long story short, Sunny married him.

We can’t really know whether this story Debi is telling is actually true or a figment of her imagination. I’ve had my suspicions about some of her stories and letters in the past, and I suppose there is no way to know for sure. But seriously? Making the man who as we shall see is about to turn out to be an abuser Arabic? It’s not that this doesn’t happen, it’s just that Debi’s use of the stereotype of the violent Arab makes me feel that the story is likely more fiction than fact.

She was soon pregnant with their first child, and in a manner of weeks, the violence began. Over the next seven years, Sunny was regularly subjected to his alcoholic rages and beatings, and she endured his flaunted unfaithfulness. She and the children were alone for days at a time, even weeks, as her husband stayed away with “friends.” He returned home to vent his rage and take the few dollars she earned to support their growing family. When Sunny was pregnant with their third baby, Ahmed came home drunk and tried to kill her with a butcher knife. Only the miraculous intervention of Almighty God spared her life.

Okay, so bear this in mind as we go through the rest of Debi’s story: Sunny’s husband flies into rages and beats her, is serially unfaithful to her, and at one point actually literally attempted to kill her.

Every time Ahmed came home raging drunk, Sunny would leave the house with loud, railing accusations and go to her mother’s home and cry out her sorrows. She would get on the phone and call all of her friends and tell them what Ahmed was doing to her. But she did not leave him.

Warning: This is where Debi is setting it up to turn the tables and blame the whole thing on Sunny. Oh yes. Just watch.

One day, I saw her at a church meeting—a huddled, sodden mass of tears and exhaustion. Sunny confessed to plotting her husband’s murder. She said she couldn’t tolerate life any more than it was, but her children needed her. She had decided to kill Ahmed instead. Her murder plan was well thought out and could have succeeded if God had not stopped her.

That Sunny got this far is evidence of just how much Sunny needed to get out.

I spent hours in prayer and counseling with Sunny that evening. I asked her to make a decision, either to leave Ahmed once and for all and put the pieces of her life back together, or to stay with him and begin a campaign of winning his heart and saving their life together. I fully expected her to leave him that night, but I discovered something amazing about her: Sunny really wanted God’s will in her life. She had grasped an eternal vision about life, and she now believed God could save her man.

Note that Debi did not tell Sunny flat out that she needed to leave, in spite of the fact that Sunny’s husband had tried to kill her. She did however hold out leaving as an option, which rather surprises me. But then, it was probably stated like this: “You could leave and live in a dumpy duplex and get a job and leave your children with babysitters who would have their boyfriends over for sex, and become a worn down unloved old hag that even your children would despise, or you could stay and start acting like a proper wife and in time Ahmed will start treating you like a princess. Which will it be, then?” In other words, I doubt it was presented as much of a choice. Indeed, notice that at the end of the paragraph Debi tips her hand—she may claim she gave Sunny a choice, but she clearly believed that God’s will was for Sunny to stay with her abusive and dangerous husband in an effort to win his soul, and there’s no doubt that she made that clear to Sunny.

I knew of Sunny’s weakness to blab everything; she couldn’t keep a secret to save her life. I also knew her husband was a very private man, and that her blabbing his sins kept him in a rage, as it would most lost men. I explained to Sunny that in order to win her husband’s heart, she needed to reverence him. This did not mean she had to see some goodness or worth in him that was not really there, but that she needed to show him esteem for the sake of her children and herself. Sunny already did everything else right. She was obedient, faithful, cheerful, a keeper at home, and a help meet. I encouraged her to go one step further and look for an opportunity to reverence her husband. She was not to speak ill of him again. Her conversations with others, as well as with him, would be only praise and appreciation.

O_o

Every so often I come to a paragraph of Debi’s that is so outrageous that it takes me time to actually find the words to refute it. This is one of those moments.

Debi says of Sunny that “her blabbing of his sins kept him in a rage”—this is, pure and simple, absolutely outrageous victim blaming. Debi already said that Ahmed would get drunk and get in a rage and beat Sunny—we’re seriously supposed to see this as Sunny’s fault for telling others about his abuse of her? This is utterly and completely ludicrous. It’s no one but Ahmed’s fault for beating Sunny, cheating on her, and almost murdering her with a butcher knife. Ahmed’s fault. Not Sunny’s.

Next, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it is never a good idea to respond to an abusive husband by reverencing him. Actually, no limb, I’m on solid ground here. For all her supposed understanding of relationships, Debi doesn’t seem to understand how abusers work. Because I’m pretty sure that if you reverence an abuser, his response will be something along the lines of “Hey, look at this, I can get away with murder and she still does whatever I say and doesn’t say a word against me! Sweet!” Not, as Debi seems to suggest, “What could have possessed me to treat this beautiful flower so badly?!”

Finally, in telling her that she must never speak ill of her husband again but must instead only speak good of him no matter what he does, Debi is robbing her of Sunny one way to cry for help. She’s silencing Sunny. She’s dictating Sunny’s words just as she dictated women’s thoughts in the previous section. What if Sunny were to follow this advice and then end up dead six months later, leaving relatives scratching her head and wondering what went wrong when Sunny had clearly told them everything was perfect?

Sunny had a learner’s heart. She took my advice, and the change in her husband was obvious in just one week. It is amazing how vulnerable a man is when a woman treats him with honor. He stopped going off with his drunken friends and got a job so he could help support the family. He came to church occasionally and seemed amazed at the comments people made. “Sunny says you play the saxophone like a genius.” “Sunny told us you were a handsome man.” “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you; Sunny has told us . . . .” Ahmed was shocked, and Sunny continued on her mission. A week or so later, she got an encouraging boost in the form of a dream.

Debi is essentially promising women here that if they reverence their husbands, their husbands will drop bad habits, end any abuse, and get stable jobs. This doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t add up, and besides that, it’s downright wrong. It’s simply another way to victim blame and to goad women into trying to be perfect submissive doormats in pursuit of the elusive hope that if they can just be good enough, their husbands will stop abusing them. It’s also rather demeaning to men, if you ask me, because it suggests that any man is likely to become abusive if his wife doesn’t properly honor and respect him. I personally think better of men than that. Anyway, on to the dream:

She dreamed that a top government official came to the office building where her husband worked on a cleaning crew. The official had a meeting with the manager of the business and told him, “I need to hire a man for a managerial position in my department. The qualifications required are faithfulness, hardworking, honesty, punctuality, and intelligence . . . no special education needed. We can always teach him what he doesn’t know, but we can’t give him work ethics. So do you have anybody who has a good work ethic like that?” The manager answered, “I have one guy who fits that profile, but he is just the clean-up man.” In Sunny’s dream, the government official said, “I don’t care if the guy can’t read or write, if he is a faithful, hardworking guy that I can trust and depend on, then I’ll hire him and double his wages.” In Sunny’s dream, her husband was hired by the government official to fill a managerial position.

When Sunny awoke, she excitedly told her husband the dream. She was sure it was a sign he was destined for greatness. Remember what we learned when we studied Mr. Visionary, how greatness is a state of the soul, not certain accomplishments or the lack of them? Previously, when Sunny called her friends to “tell” them what a creep her husband was, she was reinforcing to him the belief that she thought he was a loser. She publicly shamed him, and he continued to be shameful. Her opinion became his frame of reference. Now Sunny began to publicly exalt him, with miraculous results.

Ahmed thought her dream was silly, but he held his head a little higher when he went to his regular job the next day—on time! Sunny went to her mother’s house and got on the phone. She called all of her friends and told them her dream. This time, Ahmed didn’t mind her blabbing!

This thing about dreams: Debi Pearls’ daughter Rebekah believes her dreams are prophetic, and for a while she kept a blog of them. She took the site down, but it’s been indexed and you can read her dreams and interpretations here. The point is that even as Debi in the next paragraph says she doesn’t think this particular dream was prophetic, Sunny’s belief that it was is not really that off the wall for this community.

To my knowledge, Ahmed is still on a cleaning crew, and Sunny’s dream was just that—a dream. But it expressed her heart toward her husband, and her opinion of him was far more important to him than any job he could ever get. When she dreamed he was a winner and told it around, Ahmed tried to live up to that image. Ahmed found such pleasure and life in his wife’s praise that he became interested in her God. In time, he trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ. The last time I saw Ahmed and Sunny, they were growing in the Lord together. As the Scripture says, she won him “without the word” (Bible) but her “conversation” (I Peter 3:1). God’s way works. Who would have ever believed it? Sunny did—but then she didn’t have the disadvantage of “culture studies” and modern Greek “scholars.”

Debi tells this tale as a success story to prove what she has been saying—that women need to stop thinking ill of their husbands, stop speaking bad of their husbands, stop nagging their husbands abut their faults, and instead focus on reverencing their husbands. Reverence, Debi has said previously, “is more than just doing what a man expects or demands. It is an act of the woman’s will to treat him with a high degree of regard and awe.” Note that with this story Debi makes a case that God requires women to treat their husbands “with a high degree of regard and awe” even if their husbands are abusers who beat them, cheat on them, and even threaten their very lives.

It should be noted that Debi seems to be constantly ignoring that there are children in the picture here. Even if a woman chooses to risk her own life and happiness by staying with an abusive husband, her children have no choice. (Yes, I’m aware that often times abused women’s choices are limited, but they’re still less limited than those of their children.) Debi has previously indicated that the children of abused women who respond by submitting and obeying their husbands will grow up to honor their mother for that sacrifice, but the reality is that many of these children will wish their mothers had had the backbone to stand up to abuse or leave, and that many others of those children will grow up to repeat the same unhealthy relationship patterns they saw modeled by their parents. Note that Debi’s concern is not for Sunny’s wellbeing or for the wellbeing of her children, but rather for the salvation of Ahmed’s soul. If she’d actually been concerned for the safety of Sunny and her children, she would have told Sunny that she should take the children and leave.

Additionally, Debi claims to be giving Sunny advice on how to change Ahmed. The thing is, like I pointed out later, complete submission to his every demand and repaying every unkindness with welcoming smiles is actually a very bad way to change an abuser. If a woman is actually interested in changing her abusive husband, leaving him is probably the best thing she can do. In other words, if Debi was really interested in changing Ahmed, she should have told Sunny to make it clear that she would not put up with abuse, to leave Ahmed, and to tell him that if he wants her back there has to be actual evidence that he has changed and truly so. She should tell Sunny to stop letting Ahmed get away with his terrible treatment and to instead require that he treat her well or else lose her, not to bow under his horrific abuse and take it with a smile. That’s not called fixing someone, it’s called being an enabler.

Let me finish by bringing us back to where we started—Debi titled this story about Sunny “Earning His Trust.” And that’s just three million kinds of wrong. In this story, it’s not Sunny who needs to earn Ahmed’s trust, it’s Ahmed who needs to earn Sunny’s trust. Also, earning someone’s trust is not synonymous with reverencing them regardless of their actual qualities and behaviors. Debi, Debi, Debi.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 136—37

Sometimes Debi misinterprets Bible passages, and badly. More often, though, she simply adds things, brazenly, and without even offering any of her twisted scriptures to back them up. This wouldn’t be such a problem except that evangelicals and fundamentalists make a big deal of adhering to the Bible and the Bible alone, condemning mainline Christians for adding to the Bible.

God created Adam, and commissioned him to take the position of leadership. Since then, every son of Adam has received the same mandate. Man was created to rule. It is his nature. But the only place most men will rule is their own little kingdom called home. At the least, every man’s destiny is to be the leader of his household. To deny him this birthright is contrary to his nature and God’s will.

Okay, so, the thing is, I just reread the first chapters of Genesis. This idea that man was created to rule, and that that’s in his nature? Yeah, that’s not there. Look, I’m not denying that there is plenty of sexism in the Bible. There absolutely is. But I have too much respect for reality to tolerate Debi’s continually ascribing things to the Bible that simple aren’t there, anywhere. Since Debi claims that man was “created” to rule, let’s look at the first three chapters of Genesis. 

• The commonly quoted “be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over . . . every living thing that moves” command is explicitly given to both man and woman.
• When God places Adam in the garden, he commands him “to tend it and keep it,” not to rule.
• When Adam and Eve are cursed after the fall (i.e., this is not part of their created nature), Eve is told that her husband “will rule over” her. This is a curse upon Eve; there is no command to Adam.

I may be wrong, but I honestly don’t think there is anything whatsoever in the Bible saying that God created man “to rule.” And in my time as an evangelical I read through the Bible three times and memorized large passages of it. I think pointing this out is incredibly important, especially as those women who listen to Debi believe her teaching is rooted in the Bible.

And of course, as she offers reasons why wives should reverence their husbands, Debi continues to be extrabiblical.

When a man is not in command of his little kingdom and is not shown the deference and reverence that goes with that position, his kingdom will not be ruled correctly, and the subjects of that kingdom will not experience the benevolence of a king who truly loves and cherishes them. When you neglect to reverence your husband, you are taking something precious away from yourself, your children, and your husband.

When you don’t reverence your husband you are hurting . . . yourself. If you ask me, this paragraph is a case study in manipulation. In the next section, Debi gets more explicit about just what this reverence should entail.

Your husband is not there to show you deference or to be your helper. It is NOT God’s will for your husband to reverence you. It is not God’s plan for you to remain seated at the dinner table or in your lounge chair and expect him to serve himself. Our modern society has conditioned us to expect him to serve us. It hurts our feelings if if he doesn’t do things that we feel he owes us, but that is not the plan God set into place.

You know what I think is foreign to Debi? A relationship where both parties serve each other, while at the same time making sure not to neglect their own needs. Debi’s about to invoke the evil feminists, and that’s pretty clearly what she’s referencing in this paragraph too. Feminism isn’t about forcing men to serve women, it’s about rejecting the idea that women should be expected to serve men while they remain seated at the dinner table or in their lounge chairs.

Our culture stands diametrically opposed to God at every turn. It is time to realize that feminist beliefs have tainted almost all the public schools and even the best of Christian teachers.

Those evil horrible man-hating feminists. They don’t know their proper places as women—which, of course, is to wait on men hand and foot.

Women feel that they will lose some of their self-respect if they if they surrender to a man who is less than wonderful. Surrendering your autonomy to another is not for wimps. People say of an obedient woman, “Oh, she is just the meek and timid type; she needs to get a life of her own.” They know not whereof they speak.

Surrender. Yes, Debi is using the word surrender.

Also, I find it very confusing that Debi goes from endorsing “surrendering your autonomy to another” to laughing at the people who say that an “obedient” woman “needs to get a life of her own.” I mean, really? That whole part involving a woman “surrendering your autonomy to another” is the reason people say she “needs to get a life of her own.” If you surrender your autonomy to another, by definition you don’t have a life of your own. In fact, without autonomy you rather start to lose your own personhood.

This is not abstract, puzzling doctrine; it’s practical and pragmatic. The more I show my husband reverence, the more he treasures me and treats me like his queen. God made man so that our deference and respect feed his tendency to show tenderness and to be protective of us.

First off, nowhere in the Bible does God actually say that. Second, just because this works for Debi doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. Regardless of what Debi says, there is no natural law saying that when a woman reverences a man he automatically treasures her. It’s also possible that a man might want a woman to treat him as an equal and might recoil at being reverenced, or that a man might respond to being reverenced by becoming an egotistical dictator.

Also? Just as we say that women are not coin machines where you put in friendship and out comes sex, even so men are not coin machines where you put in reverence out comes tenderness. Debi seems to see men as machines, and if you just push the right buttons you’ll get out your desired results.

Reverence is not just how you act; it is how you feel and how you respond with words and with your body language. It is not enough to get up and serve him; your eyes and the quick, carefree swing of your body must indicate your delight to be engaged in serving your man.

And this is where it starts to turn into mind control. It’s not enough to reverence a man with your actions, you have to match that with your body language. And with the amount of times Debi is using the word “serve,” I’m starting to feel that the she should replace the term “help meet” with “servant.”

You cannot fool a man. He can see your heart as well or better than you can.

And that is creepy. And disconcerting. And bullshit. And manipulative.

Keep an eye on his dinner plate so you can anticipate his needs. Deference is a hot cup of tea while you take his shoes off after a hard day’s work. It is a glad face when he returns after being gone for a short time. It is thankfulness for his attention and affection. Deference to your man is the height of true femininity. It makes a woman beautiful, gracious, and lovely to all, but most especially to him.

And here is where Debi goes full 1950s.

Also, have you ever wondered what evangelicals and fundamentalists mean when they insist that women need to be “feminine”? Debi appears to connect that term to “deference to your man.” Ugh.

Next week we move away from abstract ideas and into some more personal stories.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 138-139

In this section, Debi tells a story.

A few years ago, I attended a meeting with my husband where a group of leading men were discussing grave matters, trying to come to a conclusion as to what course of action they should take. The men sat in a circle, with their wives sitting beside or right behind them.

Remember, in Debi’s world the men do all the discussing and make all the decisions while the women sit quietly by smiling and nodding.

Sitting across from me was a sober, earnest, young man whom I will call Charles. He was there with his attractive wife.

Notice Debi’s descriptions here. Charles is “sober” and “earnest.” His wife—who is never given a name, even though this story is actually about her—is “attractive.” Since there’s no way I’m going to go through this entire post referring to the main character as “Charles’ wife,” I’m going to do what Debi fails to do and give her a name—Lydia. But then, I think this is a really good example of what I see threaded through this whole section—Debi contends that women should not have independent agency. To have independent agency is to dishonor your husband.

In the midst of an intense part of the conversation, Charles leaned back and draped his arm around his wife’s shoulder. She immediately reacted with obvious irritation, shaking his hand off her shoulder, and leaning forward as if to get away from his embrace. Then she carefully fixed her hair where his arm had disturbed it.

Remember that all we have is Debi’s side of the story here. Debi interprets Lydia’s actions as showing “obvious irritation.” All we actually know is that Charles tried to embrace his wife and she wiggled out of his embrace—which of course makes her persona non grata in Debi’s book. Now is it embarrassing to have your significant other reject a public display of affection? Sure. But it’s can also be ver embarrassing to be on the receiving end of an unwanted public display of affection, put in the position where you either put it off and embarrass your partner or put up with unwanted public contact—contact you may yourself find embarrassing.

While I don’t know why Lydia wiggled out of her husband’s embrace—she might have been tired after a long and trying day, she might have felt it was inappropriate, or perhaps being constantly left out of the decision making—it ultimately doesn’t matter. Her body is her body, and she is under no obligation to receive an unwanted embrace

That said, I felt an immediate bond with Lydia when reading this passage. See, I have personal touch issues. If Sean suddenly drapes himself over me without warning, I have an immediate physical reaction. My personal space is suddenly and without warning invaded, and that feels very very bad. And Sean knows this, and tries to respect it, but sometimes forgets. Now, I don’t have a problem with personal touch when there is forewarning and I can prepare myself for it—and I especially don’t have a problem with physical touch if it’s planned—i.e., if Sean suggests that we have some cuddle time. But when it’s sudden and unexpected? I’ve done exactly what Lydia did in that situation plenty of times.

Again, I don’t know what made Lydia decide to refuse her husband’s embrace, but I do know that Debi’s interpretation is far from the only one—and, in my opinion, far from the most likely one.

But back to Charles:

His mind was jerked off of the serious problem at hand and was focused on her, now—as was the attention of almost everyone in the room. To her, brushing him off was nothing, but to all those in the room (including her husband) it was an act of putting him down like a thoughtless, inept child. Everyone felt his humiliation.

So . . . Debi read everyone’s minds. I mean seriously, how would she know that Charles felt humiliated or that everyone in the room interpreted it as humiliation? Granted, she could judge from the expressions and body language of those in the room, but I really don’t get the feeling from this book so far that Debi’s all that good at that—or that she’s all that honest about it.

But really, assuming that Debi was right and everyone in the room did feel that Charles’ wife had humiliated him—I mean, really? Lydia takes a stand for her own physical space and asserts personal agency, and that’s somehow her “humiliating” him? Actually, this makes sense—in Debi’s world. In Debi’s world, women don’t have personal autonomy, and their not supposed to have agency or wills’ of their own. In Debi’s world, women exist to serve their husbands—and Charles’ wife did not properly serve him by acquiescing to his advances (which, I might add, brings up another point—women are not obliged to accept male touch or physical affection, ever—and to suggest otherwise is rapey).

After that, Charles had nothing else to contribute. For the duration of the meeting, he sat downcast, properly chastened, with his hands in his lap.

Your wife pushes your arm off her shoulders and as a result you clam up and stop engaging with the world? Really? That doesn’t sound very mature. It does, however, play into Debi’s argument that it is men’s wives who make them or break them—who have the potential to build them up by being a good help meet, or tear them down by being a bad help meet.

I wanted to get up and shake that girl until her teeth rattled.

Debi is a violent person.

It would have shocked her to know that everyone in the room felt extreme disdain toward her for her self-centered response.

Two things.

First, that’s all it took? Lydia pushes her husband’s arm off her shoulders, and suddenly everyone feels “extreme disdain” toward her? Talk about judgmental. Talk about closed minded. If they feel “extreme disdain” for a Christian woman who has the nerve to not make her body the constant toy of her husband, what must they feel for those who are non-Christian, or who sleep around? These do not sound like loving people.

Second, note that Debi calls Lydia’s response “self-centered.” Here’s the thing. In Debi’s world, “self-centered” is a very bad word and what it means is anything that’s not completely and totally selfless. And that’s what wives are supposed to be—selfless, as in, not having a self. They’re supposed to exist to serve their husbands. And that, you see, was Lydia’s fault—rather than accepting her husband’s embrace as the proper selfless individual she was supposed to be, she had the nerve to assert her own agency. And that, quite simply, is what being “self-centered” means in Debi’s world.

She continued to straighten her hair, unaware that she had just shown a complete lack of honor and reverence toward her husband, and unaware that she was wasting her time trying to look pretty, for she had lost all that was lovely and feminine in that one act of disdain.

So suddenly, Lydia’s brushing off her husband’s arm was an “act of disdain.” And again, I ask, who died and gave Debi the power to read minds? But seriously, the idea that by asserting agency Lydia suddenly “lost all that was lovely and feminine”? Well. Isn’t that telling. Also, note that showing “honor and reverence” toward your husband means accepting his every embrace. And if you translate that into the realm of the bedroom . . . let’s just say things start getting really ugly really fast.

Carrying that kind of rejection on a regular, daily basis, Charles will never really be able to cherish his wife, and he will never have what it takes become an effective minister or leader.

Debi knows this happens on a daily basis how? Also, note that if a woman exerts agency and (god forbid!) isn’t always accepting of her husband’s touch, he will never be able to “cherish” her. That’s . . . both wrong and extremely unhealthy.

Yes, she is his wife, and he will undoubtedly continue to love her. But his love will always be more of an attempt to win her. Until she repents, he cannot love her with abandoned joy.

Until she repents? For what? For daring to not welcome his every touch and embrace? For showing some sense of independent agency? This might more properly read “Until she gives up her agency and sense of self and submits to her husband entirely, he cannot love her with abandoned joy.” And that is bullshit and the rhetoric of abusers.

A man’s ego is a fragile thing.

Speak for your own man, Debi. My Sean’s ego is not at all that fragile. But then, my Sean is a mature adult.

How can a man cherish someone who cares so little for his reputation?

. . .

All of a sudden I am having visions of a high school guy pressuring his girlfriend: “Don’t you understand? If you don’t sleep with me, my reputation will be nothing! No one will see me as a man! Don’t you care about my reputation?”

Debi’s right that people should care about the reputations of those they love and value. But that’s not the same thing as saying that another person’s reputation should be the thing that is of primary importance to you, or that preserving someone else’s reputation should mean being willing to compromise your own personal boundaries. Caring about someone’s reputation should not have to mean sacrificing your own agency. And the idea that a man’s reputation is based on his wife’s willingness to publicly submit to his every touch and whim? That is disgusting and abusive to the extreme.

Her act was a testimony to the state of her heart. She thought more of her hairdo than her husband’s honor. She was rebelling against God in not reverencing her husband.

Honestly, Debi’s claim that she can read Lydia’s heart based on this one little action reminds me of the time my mother claimed she could tell a bride had had premarital sex just by looking at her. In both cases, I call bullshit.

To reverence is an active verb. It is something you do. It is not first a feeling; it is a voluntary act. As we reverence and honor our husbands, they are free to mature before God and to minister to others. Charles was not free; he was troubled and bound inside.

This idea that a man is not free to mature and grow and help others unless he has a wife reverencing him? I’m pretty sure that’s something a goodly number of Christians would consider blasphemy. Whether Debi thinks so or not, I’m pretty sure men have agency too.

Ugh, this seemingly innocent little story is just gross to its core.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 139—40

Before getting to the purple flowers PJ girl, Debi throws in this bit:

It doesn’t seem fair that the wife is expected to honor and obey her husband even though he has not earned the right; yet she must also earn the right to be loved. If she has to honor him regardless of how he acts, why shouldn’t he love her regardless of how she acts?

Um. What. Debi is, of course, referring to the New Testament passages that require husbands to love their wives and wives to obey their husbands. Neither statement is conditional. There is nothing there about one partner having to “earn” anything, and suggesting that wives have to earn the right to be loved while husbands don’t have to earn the right to be obeyed is inserting things into the text.

If my husband were talking to men, he would tell them to love their wives regardless of how they act. But remember, this is me, the aged woman, telling the young girls what they can do to make a heavenly marriage. You cannot command your husband to love you, and you have no right to expect him to love you when you are unlovely.

Debi has made it clear that men have a right to be obeyed even if they are unkind and unloving. How is it that husbands have a right to be obeyed no matter what, but a wife doesn’t have a right to be loved no matter what? This is a blatant double standard. But it does reinforce something I’ve said before—the love/obey dichotomy is not in any sense equal in its requirements or its application.

But God has provided a way for a woman to cause her husband to love and cherish her. God gave us ladies some keys to the avenues of a man’s heart. God made it so that we can actually inspire him into fulfilling his God-ordained duty. His very nature is made to respond to us it we will only treat him with reverence. A man does not have such power to influence his wife. Women are not built with the same response mechanisms. God did not give men the wonderful promise he gave to women, that they can win their wives with proper behavior.

This . . . is also not actually in the Bible. Debi’s completely making this stuff up.

Now on to the purple flowers PJ girl.

Just last week, while I sat in my van in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, waiting for my daughter, I watched the people as they walked into the store. It was an interesting study in human relations. Of the 25 or so couples who walked into the store together, only three of them were touching each other, and those three ladies were the only ones smiling out of the 25 I observed. On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the prettiest, all three of these gals were 1s or 2s.

O.O

Debi’s not very nice. Throughout the book, she calls attention again and again to women’s looks—and more often negatively than positively. Her descriptions are most frequently, well, like this:

The third smiling couple took the award of the day. He was a muscled-up, gorgeous hunk, and she was almost past describing. She was wearing flannel PJ bottoms that were cut off just above the knees. The shortened pants had 5-inch purple flowers scattered over the white, almost see-through material. She was short, and at least 50 pounds overweight, with most of the extra weight bouncing in the skin-tight PJ shorts. Her hair was chopped off in an ugly cut and really greasy.

Honestly? It seems from her book that Debi’s first instinct in surveying the people around her is to criticize—and this is especially true of women’s appearances. Remember how she described single moms’ looks? Yeah . . .

Her gorgeous hunk had her in a headlock hug. She was laughing and poking him in the ribs while hollering for him to let her go. You would have thought he was hugging Miss America by the way he was grinning. He was really enjoying his purple-flowered sweetie.

Um. Not to belabor the obvious, but it’s kind of important to respect people’s consent regarding their bodies. If this young woman was “hollering” for her young man to let her out of the “headlock” he had her in, and instead of letting her go he was grinning and “enjoying” holding her like that . . . well, some of those things sound like red flags. Sure, Debi says the young woman was “laughing,” and this could have been nothing more than playful roughhousing—but does Debi really know for sure? To be honest, I don’t think Debi knows the difference. She doesn’t think it’s legitimate for women to have physical boundaries in their intimate relationships, because, in her world, women’s bodies literally belong to their husbands.

I caught his eye, and he grinned back at me, not one bit embarrassed. That gal had totally won his heart and my respect. He was proud to be her man. Of all those beautiful girls who walked into Wal-Mart while I waited, it was this girl who was publicly being adored and appreciated. I suspect that she has never removed her husband’s hugging arm for any reason, much less to save her hairdo. She has excepted all of his overtures with thanksgiving and delight.

I’m trying to come up with a cohesive response to this, but I’m having trouble doing so. For one thing, this young woman is not accepting her young man’s overtures with “thanksgiving and delight”—she’s hollering for him to let her go. You know, I think the reason I’m having trouble pulling my thoughts together is that I can see this anecdote in two different ways. Let me address both.

First, it might be that the couple is just playing around, enjoying each other’s company, roughhousing, and laughing together. In this case, Debi’s analysis is off—she attributes their positive and companionate relationship to the young woman having no physical boundaries when it comes to accepting her young man’s amorous moves. But where in the world does she draw this inference? How does she know that it is not, say, their mutual respect for each other and cooperative egalitarian approach to life that has resulted in this degree of camaraderie? I mean come on, she only saw the couple for less than a minute!

Second, one of the hallmarks of abusive men is an inability to accept their partner’s physical boundaries. What Debi witnessed could very well have been a power play in just such a relationship—an abuser making it clear to his victim that he can make her submit to his every whim even when they are in public. In this scenario, the young man takes delight in causing the young woman embarrassment, and grins at Debi in a triumphant and devious “see how much I have conquered and how much I can get away with” sort of way, basking in his power. Debi may be wrong about the young woman laughing, or maybe her partner is tickling her, or perhaps she is laughing to try to cover for her humiliation in an effort to get people to think it’s only roughhousing.

But, of course, Debi doesn’t think about any of this.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 140-141

In the coming pages, we will discuss how we need to cook, clean, take care of your children, etc. These are important and necessary, but the buck always stops right here at the action word reverence. A man will allow his woman many, many faults, as long as he knows that she thinks he is great. If she will just look into his face with adoration, if she is thankful to him for loving her, he will adore her. She can dress awful, be grossly overweight, have terrible hair, not cook so well, be a little lazy and dumb, and not be one bit pretty, but if she will just think and show that he is wonderful, he will love you. It sounds simplistic, but it is the way of a man with a maid.

Wow, simplistic much? Men and women aren’t identical puzzle pieces. Also, really? Debi is promising women that if they adore their husbands their husbands will love them—period? This is quite a big promise to make. And yet, that’s what Debi does—and then asserts that it’s a law of nature. And honestly? This whole input-adoration-output-love thing seems demeaning to men. Men aren’t slot machines. They’re people. 

Also, adoration isn’t something you can create out of thin air. Adoration is natural during the first stages of puppy love, and in healthy relationships it matures into a sort of good, stable sense of peace, acceptance, and gratitude for a life lived together. Can you force yourself to adore someone who has done nothing to deserve your adoration, gratitude, or appreciation?  I suppose you could if you brainwashed yourself, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t how adoration is supposed to work.

Finally, while this sort of pure adoration from wife to husband regardless of circumstance might not result in a complete disaster when the husband involved is a stable and healthy individual, if the husband is abusive or has narcissistic tendencies, it could go very, very badly. 

Women, on the other hand, want their husbands to perform. They expect them to be spiritual, hardworking, diligent, sensitive, and an attentive parent, or they will take personal offense and begin a campaign to change him into “their” image. I find it amazing that a woman would marry a MAN and then become angry because he continues to act like one.

Wow. Debi’s into insulting pretty much everyone here.

So if a woman is unhappy about something about her husband, she should ignore it completely because that imperfection or difference is just part of who he is as a man, so she better shut up about it? It’s true that if you go into a marriage thinking you can “change” your spouse and reshape them into some exact model you have in mind, you’re in for some disappointment. That’s not a healthy way to approach a relationship.

But this idea that what Debi’s suggesting has nothing to do with trying to “change” your husband? Ha. Ha ha ha. Debi promises that women can make thier husbands love them and treat them well if they only approach their husbands with complete adoration and reverence. This sounds to me a lot like mounting a “campaign” to “change” them. Just sayin’.

Finally, ignoring the things that bother you about your husband and trying to change your husband into the ideal man you’ve formed in your mind are not your only two options. I’ve used this example before: When Sally was little, I frequently got annoyed with Sean for gaming when I thought he should be helping with Sally or around the house, partly because I viewed gaming as a complete and utter waste of time. Finally, I told to him about how I felt and we talked about it and we found a compromise that we were both happy with. This is how healthy relationships are supposed to work—and this is what wouldn’t have happened if I’d followed Debi’s advice.

Elisabeth Elliot, in her book, Let Me Be a Woman, wrote to her daughter, “I had been a widow for thirteen years, when the man who was to become your stepfather proposed. It seemed to me the miracle that could never happen. That any man had wanted me the first time was astonishing. I had gone through high school and college with very few dates. But to be wanted again was almost beyond imagination. I told this man that I knew there were women waiting for him who could offer him many things that I couldn’t offer—things like beauty and money. But I said, “There’s one thing I can give you that no woman on earth can outdo me in, and that’s appreciation.” The perspective of widowhood had taught me that.”

Or maybe it’s your low self esteem talking.

Look, in 1969, the same year Elisabeth Elliot remarried, she published her sixth book. Sixth. She was no mere bookworm, either. After her husband died while attempting to evangelize in South America, she put serious effort into learning another language and then spent several years living among the native groups where he had met his death, alone but for her small daughter and another female missionary. This was a woman with courage and tenacity. After remarrying, she went on to publish seventeen more books, teach at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, contribute to the New International Version of the Bible, and host a daily radio show. In no sense was this a woman who had nothing of value to offer her a man other than appreciation. I disagree with Elisabeth Elliot on a lot of things—she is the author of her own how-to-be-a-good-submissive-evangelical-wife manual, after all—but in suggesting that she had nothing to offer a husband Elisabeth is either posturing or demonstrating a startling lack of appreciation for her own talents and abilities.

As I cast around in my mind and heart for a way to define for my readers what it means to reverence a man, Elisabeth Elliot’s letter to her daughter came to my mind.

The very heart of reverence is extreme appreciation and profound thankfulness that this man, just as he is, has chosen to love me, just as I am. 

Elisabeth Elliot is a lovely, talented, successful woman, yet she chooses to honor with thankfulness the man who loves her. It is the state of her heart.

You know what? I honestly wouldn’t have a problem with this whole gratitude thing if it weren’t gendered and didn’t come with a major self esteem knock.

My husband tells young men looking for wives that there is only one absolutely necessary trait that the girl they marry must possess—a grateful heart. He tells them that the girl they choose must be joyful and thankful that you love her. “The more she believes that she is fortunate that you chose her over others, the better the foundation for the true marriage of two souls. If she feels that YOU are lucky to get HER, then you had better run, because that woman is looking for her own help meet, and she thinks you are the one to fill the job. She will spend the rest of her life trying to change you.”

Do you see what I was saying? Being mutually grateful without mixing in the whole thinking worse of yourself bit is absolutely a part of a healthy relationship. But that’s not what this is.

If I were really cynical I’d have to say it sounds like Michael is telling young men to prey on women with low self esteem. No wait, I will say that: Michael is telling young men to prey on women with low self esteem. (Note that unlike Debi, I am calling these women women, not girls.) Note that Michael says that if a woman feels a man is lucky to get her, she is being a man and looking for a helpmeet. In other words, a man looking for a helpmeet should feel that a woman is lucky to get him. This is so unhealthy.

If a husband feels that his wife is lucky to have him and his wife feels that she does not deserve him and is lucky he picked poor, lowly her—this is not a good setup for a healthy marriage. The opposite—a wife who feels her husband was lucky to get her and a husband who feels he does not deserve her—is not healthy either. In a healthy relationship, each partner respects and values themself and each partner is grateful to have the other partner in their life. The imbalance that Michael is promoting is unhealthy and creates a balance of power and esteem that is incredibly ripe for abuse. This is how abusers work, after all—”you don’t deserve me” and “if you leave me, who else would have you?”

To reverence a husband is to be delighted and thankful, like the purple flowers PJ girl. It means that you must be the opposite of the “don’t-mess-up-my-hair” girl and that you believe in him enough to dream good things about him. You reverence him by teaching your sons and daughters that their daddy is the #1 man, and then help them make a sign and hold it high, so everyone can see how you think and feel about him. In summary, it is to believe that you are blessed for being loved by this wonderful man.

Debi says that to reverence her husband a woman must “believe that you are blessed for being loved by this wonderful man.” But what if he is not a “wonderful man”? What if he is abusive or unfaithful? What if being loved by him is not a blessing at all? Two of the four stories Debi references here were with just such men—the first was serially unfaithful and the second was physically abusive and even tried to murder his wife. If these men fit Debi’s “wonderful man” standard, I don’t want one.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 144—46

Guess what? We’re halfway through the book! We’ve finished the entirety of Part 1! And guess what? I’ve only been at this for 11 months! Another 11 months to go! Woot!

Part 1 was called “The Help Meet.” It included 14 chapters with titles ranging from “A Merry Heart” and “The Gift of Wisdom” to “The Nature of Man and Woman” and “King and Kingdoms.” I went through it page by page rather than chapter by chapter. Part 2 is called “Titus 2.” It includes 10 chapters. The first 8 focus on the specific recommendations laid out in Titus 2 while the last 2 focus on when not to obey (you can look forward to sections with names like “Sodomite Predator” and “Cross-dressing” and “My Husband Doesn’t Want Me to Go to Church”) and the coming reward to be reaped.

This week we’ll cover the introduction to Part 2.

Eight Practical Game Rules

This latching onto some number of specific rules, generally based in some individual Bible passage, is actually quite common in fundamentalist and evangelical circles. It reminds me of all those magazine and internet articles detailing the five things you need to do to win your man or the seven things you just have to understand about women. It’s very formulaic and more than a little simplistic.

When I was a child, the word blaspheme struck terror in my heart. My parents were new Christians and did not know much about the Bible, but somewhere along the way, one of our preachers was able to stuff into my little brain the verse on blaspheming the Holy Ghost. As far as I knew at the time, there was only one verse with the dreaded word in it, and it reads like this, “but he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger in eternal damnation” (Mark 3:29).

Today, now at a much riper age, the word blaspheme still causes me to shudder—-as it should.

I’ve written before about the unpardonable sin and the terror it inspired in me as a child. I’m not surprised that Debi, too, grew up with that same fear. It makes me sad, though, for child Debi.

This is a woman’s book about wives and mothers, so you must be wondering what blasphemy has to do with the subject. A lot! As I began to write this book in earnest, my mind was constantly filled with Scripture. I woke up one night with the passage of Titus 2: 3—5 running through my head. As I lay in my bed, I tried to recall the list of eight things that aged women were told to teach the younger women. It occurred to me right then that God had given me the perfect outline in those eight simple instructions.

“The aged women likewise, that they be in behavior as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things; That they may teach the young women [1] to be sober, [2] to love their husbands, [3] to love their children, [4] To be discreet, [5] chaste, [6] keepers at home, [7] good, [8] obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed” (Titus 2: 3—5).

The word blasphemed jumped out at me, “. . . that the word of God be not blasphemed.” Aged women (that’s me) are commanded to teach the young women so they will not blaspheme the word of God! Are young mothers in danger of blasphemy? This passage says they are—not of blaspheming the Holy Ghost, which is the unpardonable sin—rather, of blaspheming the word of God. Even though it is not the unpardonable sin, it sure is a scary thing for Paul to say about young wives.

Enter the fear tactics! Do what (Debi says) Titus 2 says you have to do or you are blaspheming! While Debi does say that this isn’t the same thing as committing the unpardonable sin, she led with the unpardonable sin and makes it amply clear that blaspheming is something that is very very very bad—even scary. 

The word blaspheme in this passage had always seemed to be an overstatement—an emphatic exaggeration. How can a woman be causing the Word of God to be blasphemed if she is not discreet? Does a woman really cause the Word of God to be blasphemed if she doesn’t obey her husband? What if he is wrong? What if she dresses a little sexy and is not as chaste as she should be? Should that be judged as blaspheming? What does it mean to be keepers at home? Why are these eight things so critical to young wives that refusal to do them would be termed blasphemy? 

These are rhetorical questions. Debi’s not actually questioning what the Bible says—i.e., whether it’s true or not—but rather trying to find a way to make sense of it. Still, what Debi’s doing here is a good step—she feels this passage is too harsh and is grappling with that. Unfortunately, rather than forming an understanding that allows her to tone down the immediate harshness of the passage, she concludes instead that she’s not properly appreciating how serious women’s crimes are.

As I lay in my bed that night pondering these things, I asked God to give me a glimpse of his mind and heart concerning this passage, so that I might know how to teach the young women to keep his Word from being blasphemed. He did. And, his answer broke my heart. I could never have dreamed the sad horror that would teach me just why the word blaspheme is the right word. But first, we will examine the eight characteristics, one by one, that God commands aged women to teach young women.

O_o

Sad horror? Really?

[Edited to add]

A commenter just reminded me of an earlier section of Debi’s book  in which Debi railed against women claiming that they’d heard directly from God. Here is what she said in that passage, which I addressed in an earlier installment of this series:

You rarely hear a man say, “God told me to do this,” or, “God led me to go down there.” The few men I have known who talked that way did not demonstrate that they were any more led by the Spirit than other Christian men. I know that when God does speak to my husband and leads him in a supernatural way, he will not speak of it in public. He doesn’t feel the need to promote himself in that manner, and furthermore, he believes that if he has truly heard from heaven, God doesn’t need his publicity. God will vindicate himself. But many Christian women habitually attribute nearly every event to divine guidance. Experience proves that women are prone to claim God as their authority, when God had nothing at all to do with their “leading.” It really is quite appalling to see this shameful behavior still in action today.

Huh. Pot calling kettle black anyone? Why does Debi get a pass here when others don’t? Why does Debi expect her readers to believe and accept her word when she claims to have heard directly from God when she herself earlier stated that “experience proves that women are prone to claim God as their authority, when God has nothing at all to do with their ‘leading’”? Does she see herself as immune from this? Does she expect her readers to question every woman who claims divine guidance . . . except for her? And I should point out, Debi has a history of arguing that women shouldn’t be spiritual or attempt to hear from God on their own. Except for her, apparently.

[End edit]

Debi is doing her best to strike terror into her readers’ hearts. She’s been doing that throughout, though her general method of operation has been to tell women that if they’re not properly submissive their husbands will leave them and they will find themselves confined to dumpy duplexes (her term) and perhaps even slipping into lesbianism—and that if they’re not properly reverent toward their husbands, their husbands will never amount to anything, hog-tied by the lack of reverence. Here Debi is shifting her angle and telling women that if they’re not properly submissive (et al.) they are blaspheming the Word of God—and of course, she is simultaneously emphasizing just how serious and horrifying and scary blasphemy is.

Debi is laying the groundwork for what is to come. She is making sure that readers are prepared to listen to what she has to say in the rest of this section—and by that I mean that she is ensuring they will be motivated by the sheer terror of what will happen to them if they don’t do what God says Debi says. 

This is how Debi’s words make the former evangelical/fundamentalist in me feel:

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 147-148

This chapter starts out fairly tame by Debi’s standards . . . and then turns into a train reck before you have a chance to so much as blink. As a reminder, Debi is now going through the various character traits that Titus 2 instructs the older women to teach to the younger women. This installment begins Debi’s chapter titled “To Be Sober.”

A sober wife is one who faces the fact that she is no longer a freewheeling individual, with time to do as she pleases. She knows that marriage is a joyous, but also a grave responsibility. She cannot be flighty and frivolous. She makes a commitment to be the best wife, mother, and manager of the home that anyone could be. She becomes the acting CEO of a great enterprise of which her husband is the owner.

Yes . . . and no. Being married is indeed a serious endeavor, but it doesn’t mean you have to become all serious and matronly. One thing I’ve learned since being married is that in many ways marriage is what you want to make it. I think of the married couples I know, and each one is different. Some are carefree and “flighty” and unwilling to “settle down.” Others are much more serious and circumspect. Marriage is about forging a life with a partner, and just as each individual is different even so each married couple will have its own eccentricities. But then, communication and partnership aren’t things Debi is big on.

I also find Debi’s analogy here odd. It’s not something I haven’t heard before, but I’m still turning it over in my brain. I think the idea is that the CEO makes the day-to-day decisions while the owner sets the direction of the company. Even so, the wife runs the day-to-day workings of the household while the husband sets the vision and direction for the family. What I’m not sure is how the authority bit works in the corporate structure. Does the owner have the authority to micromanage the CEO? Does the CEO have to do whatever the owner says, on any company matter? I guess what I’m saying is that I think the spheres of the owner and the CEO are more carefully demarcated and that the CEO has more genuine authority than does the wife in Debi’s prescribed world. If anyone wants to shed light on how this works, do!

Her most basic responsibility is to make her husband’s home run smoothly.

Since when is it her husband’s home and not their home as a couple and a family?

She assumes the role of coordinator of all affairs. If the home doesn’t run in an orderly fashion, the marriage will not be joyous and fulfilling, and neither will child training. When a woman considers the needs, time schedule, and resources of her home, then she will be a more efficient help meet. This planning will eliminate tension and helps et a peaceful mood. It is the simple things in life that can break down a marriage and bring about a bitter divorce. But on the positive side, it is the simple planning of life’s activities that can bring health, prosperity, peace, and happiness to a sound marriage and produce gratifying family relationships. Men (and children) appreciate good meals, a clean house, and an atmosphere of peace—a refuge from the stress of life.

I’m not completely sure that the connection between an orderly home and a fulfilling marriage is quite as universal as Debi thinks it (if it was, no one on the show Hoarders would ever be married), but in general, I agree that having a schedule, keeping track of things, and planning ahead are good things—for husbands as well as for wives. Honestly, I agree with this section more than I do with just about anything else Debi has written. Do notice, of course, how gendered it is—it is the wife’s job, and not the husband’s job, to cook, clean, and keep track of daily household affairs. Still, this is what we’ve come to expect from Debi.

And now for the train wreck. It starts with a letter. Yay!

Dear Debi,

I was totally exhausted yesterday when my husband came home from work. The children were sick. I have a new baby, and she was coming down with a fever. He came in and never inquired how I felt or how my day was. He started off by asking why the place was such a wreck and “when will dinner be ready,” because it was the night for choir practice, and he wanted to get there early. He was rude, insensitive, and indifferent to my exhaustion, the kids’ sickness, and everything else. He was so selfish, and it hurt so badly. What was I supposed to do? Reward this selfish jerk with loving service?

Jill

I know how I would respond to this letter!

Dear Jill,

Your feelings are completely understandable! I’ve spent many a day caring for sick children myself, and it can be quite time consuming and emotionally exhausting. You are right—your husband’s behavior was insensitive. Have you thought of telling him how you feel? It’s possible that he doesn’t understand just how much work being a stay at home mother can be, especially when children are sick. Let him know how you feel and what you would like him to do differently in the future—and listen to his feelings and perspective too, of course. This way you and he will be on the same wavelength and the two of you will be able to sync your expectations.

Libby

But of course, that’s not how Debi replied.

Dear Jill,

It is your duty, your job, and in your best interest to serve your husband.

Debi

Ow. Harsh much? It gets worse, because Debi goes on to use Jill as a negative example.

No one would dispute that Jill’s husband is insensitive, but two wrongs do not make a good marriage. One “right” can make a BIG difference in a marriage and change that selfish old guy.

No.

Look, I agree that two wrongs don’t make a right. The problem is that Debi sees any alternative to simply smiling sweetly and serving lovingly as a wrong. Whatever happened to communicating about your feelings? How would that be a wrong? I think part of what’s going on here  is that Debi keeps communication off the table entirely. In Debi’s mind, there are only two options: silent loving service or, well, loud hateful harpy. That there might be such a thing as loving and honest communication is simply never even considered. Actually talking with your husband about things? Ha!

I’ve brought this up before, but when Sally was small, Sean would often game in the evenings before she went to bed, leaving me to care for Sally and do some end of the day cleaning alone. This bothered me. A lot. But instead of bottling it up and simply silently caring for Sally and cleaning and doing everything else that needed doing without mentioning how I felt to Sean, I actually talk to him about it. I told him how what he was doing inconvenienced me, and how it made me feel. And Sean listened. He helped explain to me why he enjoys gaming and what he gets out of it, and we came to a compromise—that he would wait to game until Sally went to bed. After that, I was more understandable of his desire to game, but he was more sensitive to my needs at the same time. In other words, my talking to Sean about my frustrations ended up making things better for both of us and strengthening our relationship. But Debi can’t even consider this option.

And it gets worse.

Always keep in mind that your job is to do a good job serving him, so planning ahead is a must. If Jill had done a better job, her husband would not have been such a jerk.

No.

Seriously, victim blaming much?

According to Debi, it is Jill’s fault that her husband was an insensitive jerk. Also, according to Debi, that Jill was so exhausted and all-consumed by caring for her sick children that she couldn’t get supper on the table is a failing on her part, not something that is simply an understandable part of life and parenthood. Jill should have had supper ready. She didn’t (because she was selfishly caring for sick children), and her husband was an insensitive jerk as a result, and because she hadn’t gotten supper on the table like a good wife her husband’s bad reaction was Jill’s fault.

No. Just, no. Jill’s husband’s insensitivity and jerky behavior was his fault and his fault only. I really shouldn’t be having to say this! Gah! Debi! Come on!

Your husband expects you to plan ahead. He plans ahead at his place of work, otherwise he would lose his job. If you plan ahead, conflicts like this can be avoided, and your husband will be proud to know he has a better wife than the other guys at work.

No.

I mean, is this I-have-a-better-wife-than-you thing sort of like the I-have-a-better-car-than-you thing or the I-have-a-better-house-than-you thing? Because to be honest, that’s kind of what it sounds like to me.

I mean, that’s the goal here? Seriously, the goal is for Jill’s husband to be able to boast about what a good little help meet she is? Not, I don’t know, for Jill and her husband to have a strong and fulfilling partnership characterized by honest communication and the bonding of two spirits?

If you pamper your husband, in time he will become sensitive to your burden, but you must soldier and show yourself strong.

No.

This is not how it works. This is like suggesting that if your child doesn’t keep her room clean, you should just clean it yourself and eventually she’ll notice and start cleaning it. It does not work that way. Think about the anecdote about Sean and gaming. Is Debi really suggesting that if I’d just done whatever I could to accommodate Sean’s gaming and care for Sally myself without ever mentioning that it was bothering me, Sean would somehow of realized that it was bothering me, or realized that maybe he shouldn’t be gaming while Sally was still up to be tended? Because I think it far more likely that Sean would have naturally assumed that if I wasn’t mentioning anything there wasn’t a problem. Because in the normal world, people actually communicate about things that are bothering them rather than turning themselves into silent suffering martyrs and waiting around for other people to notice and read their minds.

Also, is Debi not aware that some people will simply take advantage of others around them, most especially of those who make easy targets? Ugh.

I have had many sick babies, and I know sometimes it was not easy, but you can get the house in order and meals cooked and keep everything running smoothly all the same. As mothers, we will often be stressed over a sick child, but that is no reason to neglect our other duties. A sober wife makes herself the match of every circumstance.

No.

Seriously, way to make Jill feel terrible.

Look, I’m in a facebook group for local mothers of young children, and one thing I’ve noticed is that hardly a day goes by without a mother taking to the list to vent about an overwhelming day gone wrong. Being the mother of young children is hard work, and being a stay at home mother of young children can be especially exasperating. Sure, there are lots and lots of good times and meaningful moments, but there is also lots that can be overwhelming, dispiriting, and just plain hard. Debi’s “you just didn’t try hard enough” and “you didn’t plan ahead well enough” crap doesn’t help anything.

Also? Spending time nursing a sick child is about the best excuse for neglecting other duties I can think of. Supper can wait. Cleaning the house can wait. Just snuggle that sick child close and give her some love and attention. Seriously.

Jill: Please, if you’re out there somewhere, just talk to your husband. I’m begging you. Also, don’t listen to Debi. Her advice is absolutely dreadful.

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 149—154

Remember that Debi just got through shaming Jill for not being able to balance sick kids and getting dinner ready at time. Well, Debi’s about to explain to Jill just how she could have Done Everything Right. Because women’s true role is in the kitchen, dontcha know.

The Assignment

Learn to use the kitchen’s “wonder tool”—the crock pot. Today, as I write this, it is Sunday. This morning at 8 A.M., I put several frozen chicken breasts and some rice into the electric crock-pot. I added some water, celery, bell peppers, and seasonings, and turned it on low heat. When we came into the house at noon, the house was filled with a delicious aroma, and dinner was ready except for a simple salad, which took a scant few minutes. After we had eaten, I added some seasoning and more water to the crock-pot, which now had only a little rice and a few bits of chicken with broth. This simple soup simmered all afternoon and was the basis of our meal that evening.

How dare Jill not think to start a crock pot! If Jill was just Brilliant Like Debi, her husband wouldn’t be forced to be upset with her for not having supper ready on time!

Of course, there is something to be said for what Debi is doing here. Indeed, this is the sort of thing done on mommy blogs the world over, as each passes on some tricks of the trade to others—and there’s nothing wrong with it in the least. If Debi had simply set out by offering tips to young moms struggling with balancing everything on their plates, I would have no beef with it. But what sets me off is that that’s not how she prefaced this. And titling it “The Assignment”? Really?

While at church, I asked one of the eleven-year-old girls about feeding their family of twelve, “If your mama asked you to put a chicken in a crock-pot (or three chickens in three crock-pots) with rice and seasonings every Sunday morning, could you do it?” Her twelve-year-old sister laughed and said, “No problem.”

I don’t really know how to speak to this, because when my younger sister was 13 my parents put her in charge of cooking all of the meals for our family of the same size. Compared to that, asking an eleven-year-old to start a crock pot looks tame. Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Debi is basically telling women like Jill that one solution to having too much to juggle, between meals and children and homeschooling, is to pawn off some of their work on their children. Or is she actually shaming Jill by telling her she’s failing at something even a child should be able to do?

Always offer your children only one choice for breakfast. Several options will only confuse the child’s spirit. Choices always give room for argument or discontentment.

We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. 

In Debi’s world, “children” and “choice” don’t ever belong in the same sentence.

Providing the same simple food every morning (except maybe Saturday) causes a child to look forward to getting cereal on that one special morning. It can actually help your children become more thankful and will bring about a more peaceful morning.

Debi must have said this in a previous book or magazine, because this is how my mom did it. Oatmeal, every morning, every day—except for Sunday. And let me tell you, that one day a week we got to have cereal was like Christmas.

I’m not going to type everything Debi says here, because she’s just getting more and more into the details of what food to serve and when. Debi says to mothers should serve their children a monotonous but wholesome and basic lunch every day, such as burritos—but only if the father isn’t home for lunch, because, as we shall see, dad gets special treatment when it comes to food. Debi suggests using paper plates and paper napkins to make cleanup simpler, and I find myself wondering if this is where the Duggars got their antipathy to dishes that can’t just be chucked in a landfill.

Debi lays out an entire week worth of meal planning to serve as an example and guide for women like Jill. Pinto beans are served with steak and sweet potatoes one night, and then recycled into refried beans and combined with ground beef to be served with lettuce and other veggies as a taco salad. Some of the ground beef cooked up for the taco salad is saved for spaghetti the next evening, to be served with salad and a sauce made of tomato paste and assorted veggies. Black beans and rice with sour cream, fried rice with bits of meat and scrambled eggs, a cookout with hamburgers, and a chicken crockpot graced with a can of cream and chicken soup close out the week.

Having proved her meal planning acumen, Debi steers this back to Jill:

It is not a grouchy old husband or bad days that cause the problems of cooking and cleaning for young wives. It is the lack of simple planning.

Sick kids? Ha! Jill should have planned ahead for that! How dare Jill not have supper ready for her husband!

When I was a child, we always had the same food on certain days. Dinner was ready at 5 P.M. . . . The regular dinners each weeknight made it easier for Mom to plan and buy the week’s groceries. My dad would look forward to the meal he knew would be hot and waiting for him when he came home from work. The key is to plan.

Take that Jill! You just need to be perfect like Debi’s mom!

And then there’s the kicker, because see, this is what’s underlying this whole discussion. Why are wives supposed to be always totally on top of meal planning? Why is a late supper inexcusable? Well. This is Debi. It should be obvious.

As wives, our life’s work should be to perfect how we may please our husbands. 

I didn’t add that bold and italics. That’s how Debi wrote it.

Sometimes, maintaining a good relationship with your husband simply requires the performing of simple tasks, like having a good meal ready on time and a clean house, even when it is not easy or convenient to do so.

If the health of your relationship is based on whether you have a meal ready and the house clean, well, I don’t know what to tell you. That’s just weird. What happened to friendship and communication and cooperation and empathy and shared interests?

Your relationship with your husband is the single most important role you will ever play. If you fail here, then you have failed at your life’s work and have missed God’s perfect plan.

Let’s see if I can pull this together. Your life’s work is to please your husband. If you fail at your relationship with your husband, you fail at your life’s work. Sometimes all that’s needed for the health of your relationship is for you to have supper ready and the house clean. So . . . get back in the kitchen. At least, that’s what I’m getting here. Cook for your husband, Debi says, and don’t you dare keep him waiting for supper, because the fate of your marriage depends on it and your marriage is your reason for existing and if you can’t please your husband you’ve failed at life.

In case you’ve missed the messages so far, Debi offers this handy summary:

Traits of a Good Help Meet: 

• A good help meet provides an oasis for her man.
• She fixes meals that please him; she does not cook to suit herself.
• She plans and prepares well ahead of time.
• She exercises self-discipline.

You think you have the right to cook meals you like rather than simply asking your husband what he likes and cooking that? You terrible selfish woman! You think having sick kids gives you an excuse to not have dinner ready on time? How dare you be so presumptuous! You should have planned ahead and had more self-discipline! You think you have a right to be angry if your husband is insensitive or rude? You didn’t have dinner ready on time! You were clearly asking for it!

Debi next tells us a bit about her grandparents’ marriage:

My grandma honored and obeyed my grandfather. It was their foundation of love and honor that made the family (even the extended family) strong. As you read the next story written by my good friend and first cousin (they were her grandparents, too), you will see how we were conditioned to please our husbands. They taught us to resist taking offense, and that we were never to “give him [our husband] a piece of our mind.” If Grandma did get offended, no one knew it, because it was well understood that a lady had duties, and she must be sober in the execution of them.

I really don’t like the use of the word “conditioned” here. I also don’t like the complete muzzling of women. Sure, simply chewing someone out is usually a bad idea, but since when is the solution silence rather than authentic communication? Also, why does Debi’s grandparents’ relationship have to be laid on the foundation of her grandmother’s obedience to her grandfather rather than on a foundation like mutual respect?

Debi finishes with her cousin’s story, which turns back to food preparation:

Life is  so much different from what it used to be. Several of us ladies were sitting around a dinner table recently, telling about some of our early disastrous cooking experiences. It brought vivid memories of my newlywed days. When I married, I really didn’t know how to cook anything, On top of that, my family ate strictly “country”—peas and cornbread (still my favorite), ham, pork chops, fried chicken, turnip greens, etc., while my husband’s family ate a very different type of diet.

I’ll never forget that hot afternoon. We lived in an apartment in the back of an old Victorian-style house, which consisted of a living room/kitchen combination and a bathroom. We had no air conditioning, and that far down south could get really miserable in the summer. One sultry summer day, I worked hard to prepare a home-cooked meal for my husband, and had it ready when he came home from a hard day of construction work. When he walked in the door, he was so hot and sweaty, he took one look at that hot meal and said in despair, “This is not a day for a hot meal; this is the kind of day you need a cold meal!” My heart was just crushed. Hot and sweaty myself, I had slaved to serve him in the best way I knew how. I had never even heard of a cold meal. What on earth was he talking about? At that point in my life, a tomato stuffed with tuna or chicken salad was totally foreign to me. I must tell you, my story wasn’t very funny thirty years earlier, but as I finished telling it to my friends, we were all laughing about how “crushed” I was that day.

I was surprised to see that one of the younger women at the table didn’t think it was funny, as she huffily retorted, “Did you throw it at him? I would have!” This stopped me in my “memory” tracks. Was I angry? Did I want to throw the meal in his face? I really don’t remember ever having that thought. I do remember being hurt and sad. But my most compelling thought was to figure out how to prepare cold meals. When I married, I became MRS. Lansing. His life, his agenda, and his desires became mine. I considered my marriage to be my career for the rest of my life, and I intended to be successful at it. If he didn’t like the food I cooked, rather than refusing to cook anymore, saying that he was just too hard to please, I learned to cook the food he liked! I just WANTED, and WAS DETERMINED, to please him. And I found that he was really not that hard to please. Most men are not so hard to please; I heard someone recently say that all a man needs is food, sex, and respect, and he’ll be pretty content. That is certainly an oversimplification, but from experience, I know that those things are the basic, rudimentary needs of all husbands. And so, I have worked at it from that perspective for almost 33 years. It is still my GOAL to be pleasing my husband. I am pleased to tell you that he delights in me. I was determined to earn his delight.

Older and wiser and still very much in love,

Frieda

Seriously, it’s your duty to please your man by cooking tasty meals for him really is the theme of this section. It’s no surprise that the idea that men can cook too never seems to occur to Debi.

I really don’t have anything to finish with but this:

Created To Be His Help Meet, pp. 154—156

Debi begins this section with some history.

Liberated to Sorrow

Beginning with the women’s “liberation” movement of the 1960s, women have been taught and are expected to resent men in authority.

Um . . . no.

There is a great deal of diversity within feminism, as there has always been, and there is also change over time (all of this Debi conveniently ignores, along with the suffragettes and Seneca Falls and Mary Wollstonecraft, and, well, everything before second wave feminism). It is true that there were some feminists in the late 1960s and 1970s who wanted nothing to do with men and felt they couldn’t be reformed, but this has never been the majority view. In my experience and my understanding, what most feminists have wanted since the 1960s is a world where relations between the genders are based on equality and respect rather than sexism and misogyny.

As for resenting “men in authority,” I think Debi is missing some nuance. If a man is in authority just because he is a man, I indeed will resent it. And with good reason. But if he’s there because he earned it fair and square, I won’t resent it. In my experience and understanding (and again, there is diversity), feminism is not about resenting men, it’s about wanting a better world than we have now—for women, especially, yes, but also for men. And while we’re at it, I’ll be perfectly honest: from my reading of Debi’s book, I’m pretty sure I like and, yes, respect men more than she does. I don’t think men are overgrown babies who need coddling, for one thing. I would prefer to approach them as equal human beings with their own desires, needs, quirks, and abilities.

All media, magazines, movies, and popular books have promoted eradication of the distinction between male and female.

What. WHAT. Has Debi read Twilight? I mean sure, Harry Potter and the Hunger Games have prominent female characters, but both have faced significant feminist critique. But seriously, what movies? What books is she talking about? I want to live in this feminist utopia where all media, magazines, movies, and popular books treat men and women as individuals without buying into or perpetuating gendered stereotypes! My word, if Debi really thinks popular culture is totally feminist dedicated to breaking down the patriarchy, she needs to spend a week in the feminist blogosphere. That ought to set her straight!

Next, Debi references promotion of the eradication of the distinction between male and female. What exactly does Debi mean by “distinction”? I suspect she means that men are supposed to be macho while women obsess over their looks, or that men aren’t supposed to show emotion, or that women are supposed to be nurturing while men are independent, etc. These things are largely socially created (i.e., children are socialized into them rather than being born that way), but the bigger problem is that they are harmful—to both genders. I want people to be seen as individuals first, not locked into gendered boxes of dos and don’ts. Does that mean I think men and women should be identical, to eliminate all “distinctions”? Debi would probably say so, but I, perhaps not surprisingly, would disagree.

The established churches, as always, are only about one decade behind the world, so Christian books and ministers have followed with their own female liberation theology. Ministers and theologians have devised ways of dismissing the authority of the words of God found in Scripture that speak about the nature and duty of men and women. It has gone so far that the churches are now convinced that the Bible supports this modern view.

Notice that Debi doesn’t actually try to engage or rebut liberation theology, which, yes, does actually have biblical arguments and a biblical case. Instead, she just writes them off entirely and insists that her biblical interpretation is correct and theirs is not. But then, I don’t think Debi thinks she’s interpreting the Bible. I think she thinks she’s just reading it.

When I was a child, no one in our large, extended family could ever remember a divorce on either side of the family, including many aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. Neither was there a case of wife abuse or child abuse. In the last fifty years, all that has dramatically changed.

And Debi knows there wasn’t any wife abuse or child abuse how, exactly? She’s already explained that her grandmother was the very model of the quite and submissive and silent wife she’s promoting in her book, and if the others in the family followed the same patterns and beliefs, how exactly would Debi, or anyone for that matter, hear about any cases of wife abuse?

More generally, though, I see what Debi’s doing. She is suggesting that wife abuse and child abuse was rare before women’s liberation and have since increased dramatically. Yes, I can read behind the lines. And you know what? That’s absolute baloney. Anyone who has actually studied history will know that wife abuse has essentially always been common (and frequently legal!). And you know what? Child abuse—which has always existed, by the way—was only actually acknowledged as a thing that is, you know, bad, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Part of why we hear so much today about these problems is that we finally see them as problems and something that needs changing rather than as simply the unfortunate facts of life.

Moving right along . . .

It is hard to believe, but the following assignment was found in a 1950s public high school home economics workbook. When I was in school, this is what the general public was being taught! Can you imagine what an outcry it would cause if someone put this in a public school textbook today?

Yes, yes she does. That how to be a good wife thing floating around that is supposedly from a 1950s home economics textbook? She reprints it. (Interestingly, Snopes rates the text as “undetermined,” which makes Debi’s reprinting of it rather hilarious in my opinion.)

• Have dinner ready: Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal – on time. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him, and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospects of a good meal are part of the warm welcome needed.
• Prepare yourself: Take 15 minutes to rest so you will be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people. Be a little gay and a little more interesting. His boring day may need a lift.
• Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives, gathering up school books, toys, paper, etc. Then run a dust cloth over the tables. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too.
• Prepare the children: Take a few minutes to wash the children’s hands and faces if they are small, comb their hair, and if necessary, change their clothes. They are little treasures and he would like to see them playing the part.
• Minimize the noise: At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of washer, dryer, dishwasher, or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet. Be happy to see him. Greet him with a warm smile.

• Don’t greet him with problems or complaints.
• Don’t complain if he’s late for dinner. Count this as minor compared with what he might have gone through that day. Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or suggest he lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soft, soothing and pleasant voice. Allow him to relax and unwind.
• Listen to him. You may have a dozen things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first.
• Make the evening his. Never complain if he does not take you out to dinner or to other places of entertainment. Instead try to understand his world of strain and pressure and his need to be home and relax.
• The Goal: try to make your home a place of peace and order where your husband can renew himself in body and spirit.

I’m not going over this text line by line, since it’s not actually written by Debi. What I want to highlight is something I find fascinating. As several commenters have noted, Debi’s “biblical” model for husband and wife looks quite a bit like the stereotypical 1950s model. And as Debi makes clear in this passage, that’s not accidental. She really is gunning for the 1950s. On some level, this isn’t about being biblical, it’s about returning to an era Debi has put on a pedestal, conveniently ignoring things like Jim Crow or the threat of nuclear war.

Which brings me to another point. One thing scholars point out when discussing conservatives’ elevation of the 1950s as the ideal decade is that, for many, this was the decade when they were children, so they idealize it and forget all the bad things. Debi was born in 1950, and she brings her own childhood into this idealized portrait of the 1950s in a way that is entirely consistent with this argument. For people like Debi, it was a pristine and perfect time bereft of domestic violence or gang warfare or “kids these days” or financial struggle. Except that it wasn’t.