Women’s Liberation Through Submission: An Evangelical Anti-Feminism Is Born

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/890/women%27s_liberation_through_submission%3A_an_evangelical_anti-feminism_is_born/

Six thousand evangelical women gather to support biblical womanhood, and hear from theological leaders about the great influence wielded by “a woman on her knees.”

This October, more than 6,000 women gathered in Chicago for the True Woman Conference ’08: a stadium-style event to promote what its proponents call “biblical womanhood,” “complementarianism,” or—most bluntly—“the patriarchy movement.”

Women gathering to support the patriarchy movement? It’s evangelical counterculture at its most contrarian.

The Associated Baptist Press explains the relationship of biblical womanhood to feminism, highlighting an ambitious initiative that arose from the meeting: a signature drive seeking 100,000 women to endorse its “True Woman Manifesto,” which, the ABP writes, aims “at sparking a counterrevolution to the feminist movement of the 1960s.”

The “countercultural” attitudes that signers support include the idea that women are called to affirm and encourage godly masculinity, and honor the God-ordained male headship of their husbands and pastors; that wifely submission to male leadership in the home and church reflects Christ’s submission to God, His Father; that “selfish insistence on personal rights is contrary to the spirit of Christ”; and, in a pronatalist turn of phrase that recalls the rhetoric of the Quiverfull conviction, their willingness to “receive children as a blessing from the Lord.”

I find this article truly disturbing.

[BattyDem]

1. You wanna be a slave? Fine ... but leave the rest of us out of it.

We have minds and we enjoy using them.

[Sequoia]

2. Creepy.

[Hydra]

3. "Religions do good things"

Like this?

:puke:

[madmom]

4. What about the "books" they chose not to adopt that showed women having and equal roll?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. This is a rehash of the Total Woman movement of the 1970s

At that time, some more intelligent evangelicals noted that absolute obedience to one's husband was idolatry.

[struggle4progress]

6. And God the Lord said, it is not good for man to be alone. I will make him a helpmate AGAINST him"

Fundamentalists, who think women only exist to help men, may not even be translating their texts correctly: it's my understanding that the original Hebrew suggests that the helpmate stands rather in opposition

- Why won't you support me? You're supposed to be helping!
- I AM helping, you numbskull: you're about about to do something really stupid

[SammyR]

7. Just read

their forums. It will make you sick the way they try to justify their thinking (or not thinking). I'll never understand why some women are against their own gender. Are they just scared they'll actually have to think for themselves and make a decision? They deserve what they get.

[Triana]

8. you'd think the slave trade was illegal..

...but it isn't.

[backtoblue]

9. brainwashing

It's brainwashing from an early age in their churches. These preachers have more mind control than the CIA.