This Slate piece working to understand how Michele Bachmann's presidential candidacy can be harmonized with Christian sexuality is another proof of what Jesus said, that "the sons of this age are more shrewd in relation to their own kind than the sons of light" (Luke 16:8). Slate turns to the "influential" Council on BIblical Manhood and Womanhood to do the parsing for them and here is their description of CBMW's position:
...the civic sphere is distinct from home and church and governed by different rules, (CBMW reasoned), and if the Bible didn't explicitly "prohibit [women] from exercising leadership in secular political fields," neither would they.
Slate points out that CBMW's "compromise was an uneasy one" quoting the New York Times which labelled the compromise "soft patriarchalism."
It's hard to tell what, exactly, the notion of wifely submission means in marriages where the wife in question has a high-powered career outside of the home. Last year's New York Times Magazine piece on female evangelical leaders described these unions as enacting a "soft patriarchalism."
Here's a principle I've learned in living for God. If you think you can negotiate with the Devil...
giving him some territory in exchange for his leaving you alone to be godly elsewhere, keep in mind you're negotiating with the Devil and lying is his native tongue. He'll take what you give him and after promising to leave you alone elsewhere, he'll come after the elsewhere and take it, too. The principle is seen in many battles.
As Lewis said, they'll tell you that you can have your religion in private, then they'll make sure you're never alone. While the radical two-kingdom error prides itself on protecting the Church by ceding the public square to nakedness, two things are happening: Jesus' "all authority in Heaven and on earth" has transmogrified into "some authority when the church assembles for corporate worship on the Lord's Day;" and even that authority is in the process of being gagged by habits carefully cultivated the other six days and twenty-three hours a week when we must avoid hate speech and do our best to end teen suicides.
It's the same with the "compromise (of) soft patriarchalism." Telling our daughters to cultivate the feminine deference of a quiet and gentle spirit while pushing them into law school and promoting their candidacy for the presidency of These United States is to deceive ourselves into thinking if we give the Devil everywhere but the Church and the home, we'll be able to hang onto our male perquisite of bossing our womenfolk where it really matters, where our private honor and comfort are most at stake. Thing is, Scripture never hints at sexuality being a perquisite at all, let alone a private matter for Christians in the Church and home, only. It says male leadership and authority is a duty. And it declares "Adam was created first, then Eve," applying that order to man's authority and woman's submission with no explanation of where sexual origin and identity don't matter and are not subject to God's order.
We can defy it at work and in our courts and in our presidential elections while desperately trying to cling to it at home and in corporate worship behind the pulpit, but our uneasy compromise will never stand, in this life or the next. For all time we will be known as the soft patriarchalists who thought they could win the war with hard feminists and stone-cold egalitarians who are taking their orders from Satan.
They have won. We have lost. And the casualties are our consciences and children.
(TB, w/thanks to Kamilla)
