by Bruce Bawer
1. Husbands are commanded to govern their wives. (Gen. 3:16)
2. Wives are commanded to submit to their husbands. (Eph. 5:22; Col. 3:18; 1 Pet. 3:1)
3. A wife's submission qualifies her husband for church leadership. (1 Tim. 3:4,5)
4. The headship of the husband is illustrated in Christ and the church. (1 Cor. 11:3)
As these citations indicate, those who insist on the submissiveness of women have leaned heavily on the epistles traditionally attributed to Paul. Other directives are offered without biblical citation: "Wife should dress to please her husband." "KEEP THE HOME FREE OF CLUTTER." "PROVIDE GOOD MUSIC THROUGHOUT THE DAY." The list mandates how women should dress and style their hair; it tells them to allow their husbands time to be alone or with other men (so that the man may "sharpen his thinking" in conversation with them); and it insists that women should not have any expectations of their husbands: "Expectations destroy gratefulness . . . EXPECT NOTHING AND BE GENUINELY GRATEFUL FOR EACH LITTLE EVIDENCE OF YOUR HUSBAND'S LOVE." Millions of American men gladly embrace such rules as legitimate Christian theology, and millions of wives try their best to live by them, having been told that they are God's law. To a great extent, indeed, legalistic Christianity can be understood as a means by which many men, in the age of feminism, have succeeded in maintaining and justifying their authority over women.
This insistence on unquestioning submission by women—and by children, as well—results in an extraordinary degree of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse within legalistic Christian families, and of tacit acceptance of that abuse by its victims and by the church generally. To talk to former legalistic Christians is to hear an astonishing number of stories about abuse going unpunished and unacknowledged in order to preserve appearances and power structures. The high rate of abuse among legalistic Christians should not be surprising. This is, after all, a subculture of authoritarian control and unquestioning obedience; a subculture in which people are taught that sexual feelings are evil and consequently can't bring themselves to openly acknowledge, discuss, explore, and understand their own physical impulses; a subculture in which people are taught to put up a false front of virtue, are discouraged from being honest about their own emotional problems and from seeking counseling, and are taught not to peer beyond their fellow legalists' facades. An interviewee in Growing Up Fundamentalist tells of a Christian counselor who instructed a victim of spousal abuse "to kneel and assume the position of Christ in Gethsemane while her husband beat her. This was supposed to increase her knowledge of Christ and be a witness to her husband." Another interviewee recalled a pastor who "excommunicated a woman for not submitting" when her husband beat her. These are not extreme cases. (This is, after all, as the Halloween pamphlets demonstrate, a subculture in which adults are encouraged to terrify other people's children with the threat of hellfire.)
For all their coverage of controversies instigated by the Religious Right, such as those over NEA funding and gays in the military, the mainstream media rarely notice that behind the family-values rhetoric of legalistic Christians lies an extraordinary amount of unacknowledged family dysfunction and abuse. The history of Susan Smith—the South Carolina woman who, after murdering her two small sons, turned out to have been the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, a local Christian Coalition leader—is not a rare exception in the legalistic Christian subculture but instead reflects a widespread reality behind that subculture's Norman Rockwell images. In 1995, New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted Newt Gingrich's characterization of the murder as a by-product of the sixties counterculture. "The only way you get change," Gingrich said, "is to vote Republican." Yet after Gingrich's remarks, it came out that Smith's stepfather had begun molesting her when she was fifteen—"once," Rich pointed out, "after he'd returned from plastering the town with 'Pat Robertson for President' posters."
Legalistic Christians grow up with such hypocrisy. They live it, they breathe it, they take for granted the jarring difference between the reality of their lives and the way they represent those lives to themselves and others. Just as they are raised not to confront the contradictions within scripture, and between scripture and scientific truth, so they also learn to deny the contrasts between the deep, hidden problems in their own families and the wholesome faces they present to the world. This denial becomes an essential, automatic part of the way they view and interact with the world; so much a part, indeed, that it is fair to say that one of the things they deny is the very fact of their denial. It was this kind of denial that made possible, among much else, the abuse of Susan Smith—and, in turn, her murder of her two children.
The extent of such abuse should hardly be surprising, for such acts are simply one manifestation of an attraction to violence that is widespread among legalistic Christians and that is implicit in much legalistic theology. Strozier describes a fundamentalist of his acquaintance who, though "a gentle man," nonetheless "nourished in his mind a stirring cauldron of images of end time destruction" and was perfectly happy with the idea that God would "wipe out 2.5 billion people . . . because they are not saved." Strozier quotes another fundamentalist who enthusiastically imagined that when the End Times come, the sinners will (as foretold in 2 Kings 8:12) "fall by the sword . . . their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women will be ripped open." Strozier observes that "this deferred violence and shift in agency from himself to God" allowed the man "to separate himself from responsibility for his intense loathing for sinners, especially gays and lesbians"; in the apocalyptic, he found "a vehicle for his own violence toward those whom he felt threatened his fragile self" as well as something that "protected him from having to own these feelings in any real emotional sense. Punishment was in the hands of God, who will carry it out with terrible vengeance after history ends."
This ardor for divine punishment of others is not confined to strict fundamentalists but can be found across the spectrum of legalistic belief. And its profound effect on legalists' attitudes toward good and evil should not be ignored. The tracts distributed by evangelical Christians routinely quote John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life." "God loves you with an eternal love," declares the author of an August 1996 advice column in Charles Stanley's In Touch magazine. Yet Stanley and other legalistic Protestants have affirmed that this loving God will brutally condemn us to eternal hell-fire if we fail to recognize him and acknowledge him in just the right way. He will do this, as that Halloween booklet pointed out, even to an extraordinarily good and loving child. It is impossible to believe in and worship this kind of God, and to call him a God of love, without having a profoundly distorted—and dangerous—understanding of the nature of good and evil.
Indeed, as Sally Lowe Whitehead recalls in her 1997 memoir, The Truth Shall Set You Free, a fundamentalist pastor once told her that "Satan must ask God's permission to touch any one of us. And when permission is granted, it is for the sake of discipline, which is God's mercy." Thus does Satan himself, in the theology of many legalists, become the tool of divine grace.
Bound up with the concept of the authority of God, pastor, and husband, of course, is the concept of the authority of scripture. Though some evangelical churches don't insist on the total inerrancy of the Bible, most of them nonetheless preach something that is very close to inerrancy and that in practice amounts to essentially the same thing. Certainly most of the people in the pews of conservative evangelical churches combine a sentimental devotion to the idea of the Bible as the "Word of God" with a very spotty knowledge of its contents, and thus look with suspicion (or worse) upon any suggestion that the Good Book contains inaccuracies and inconsistencies. One way in which the fundamentalists won control of the Southern Baptist Convention was by casting doubt on their opponents' devotion to the Bible. The lamentable truth is that many Americans today would rather read a Scofield Reference Bible and know what they are s
upposed to believe than pore through the texts, pro and con, concerning such matters as the "historical Jesus" controversy and figure out for themselves what they believe. In the late twentieth century, many Americans feel that there is already too much to think about, and unfortunately we live in a society whose educational system and popular culture don't help children to grow into adults who are comfortable with the idea of thinking critically.
For legalistic Protestants, it is important to believe not only that the Bible is true, but that in some sense it contains all that is true. Other potential sources of knowledge are looked upon with grave suspicion. Nothing that any book or teacher presents as true is to be accepted as such until it has been tested against the Bible—or, one should say, against the Bible as one's pastor interprets it.
In most legalistic Protestant churches, dogmatism extends far beyond the Bible itself. Many such churches have their own strict, narrow bodies of doctrine that are said to be based in scripture. Many of these directives have nothing to do with the Bible, but instead represent the codification of a pastor's own prejudices and predilections— and usually intersect pretty neatly with the social and political attitudes of the men in that pastor's congregation. As one ex-fundamentalist told Stefan Ulstein in Growing Up Fundamentalist, "It's not about following Christ. They take rules and cultural norms that a certain group of people have grown up with and try to sanctify those norms as though they came from God." Another Ulstein interviewee agrees: "Modern fundamentalism's lack of biblical and historical grounding makes it highly susceptible to fads. If it sounds good and draws a crowd, it gets added to fundamentalist dogma. Fundamentalism has changed more than most fundamentalists would like to admit. It's hardly the unchangeable, rock-hard doctrine that it's made out to be."
Curiously, many of those who defend legalistic Protestantism as "the old-time religion," unchanged and unchanging, nonetheless acknowledge and approve of many of the changes that have taken place in the legalistic concept of God. When he was asked by New York Times reporter Gustav Niebuhr, for example, about a book entitled The Management Methods of Jesus—in which a sports marketer named Bob Briner depicts Jesus as a model business manager—Luke Timothy Johnson, a conservative professor at the Candler School of Theology, replied, "I don't think there's anything problematic about finding in Jesus our own ideals." Christianity, however, demands not that we identify our own ideals with Jesus but that we question those ideals and test them against Jesus. A perennial problem has been the eagerness of Christians like Briner to remake Jesus in their own images, however selfish or brutal, and the willingness of Christians like Johnson to approve of those actions to the extent that they bring Jesus more closely into line with the kind of institutional establishment that Jesus taught His followers to question.
In many legalistic churches, the emphasis on law and doctrine represents, in large part, an explicit response to other churches' emphasis on love. "I think that we were actually taught not to love," one of Ulstein's ex-fundamentalist interviewees recalls. "The liberals were always talking about love and the social gospel, so it was probably a reaction. It was almost as if our fundamentalist elders were saying, 'We will preach the truth. To hell with love.'" Interestingly, the specific content of this "truth" is less important than the idea of truth. The more extensively one examines legalistic Christianity in America today, in fact, the more one recognizes the validity of William D. Dinges's observation, in an essay on traditionalist Catholicism, that "fundamentalism is not distinguished by the specific content of its orthodoxy .. . but by the priority of 'correct belief itself." It doesn't matter much, in other words, what one claims to believe; what matters is that one maintains it unquestioningly and that one reject every kind of belief that deviates from it even slightly as false, evil, satanic. "Space scientists," says Southern Baptist fundamentalist Paige Patterson, "tell us that minute error in the mathematical calculations for a moon shot can result in a total failure of the rocket to hit the moon. A slightly altered doctrine of salvation can cause a person to miss Heaven also." Such conviction as to the importance of absolute doctrinal precision is commonplace among legalistic Protestants. To be sure, many legalistic Christians don't think much about specific theological propositions: For many, Jesus is savior, and that's about it; the complexities of theology are a matter of indifference to them. But they retain a strong, stubborn attachment to the idea of orthodoxy. They need to believe that one set of statements is right and that all others are wrong, and that their set—whatever it may consist of-—is the right one. One would think that those people for whom it is vitally important to hold fast to the one single truth would be those most likely to examine all the options, all the faith statements of believers, Christian and otherwise, to see which ones seem to them most persuasive; but the exact opposite is usually the case. The most inquisitive people tend to be the least dogmatic and exclusivist; for the dogmatic, indeed, "faith" becomes an excuse for— even a synonym for—not examining respectfully the ideas and beliefs of others.
Dean M. Kelley, in Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, cites Herbert H. Stroup's observation, in a 1945 study of Jehovah's Witnesses, that "the will to believe is so great among Witnesses that the content of belief becomes incidental" and that "one gets the impression . . . that they could just as well manage all that they are doing for and receiving from the movement if some other absolutist theology were to be substituted." The implicit point here is relevant not just to Jehovah's Witnesses but to members of all legalistic Christian faiths: For such people, the substance of a church's doctrine is all but irrelevant; what matters is that it be harsh, exclusionary, preached with zeal, professed without a hint of doubt, and regarded as the key to all truth and to eternal salvation.
One can get angry at legalistic Christianity for its lovelessness—and then one can chide oneself for getting angry. For isn't such anger a self-contradiction? Isn't it wrong to take a judgmental stance toward judgmentalism?
Yet Jesus got angry, too. Or at least that's what we're told in the twenty-third chapter of Matthew, in which Jesus assails the scribes and Pharisees. Nowhere else in the Gospels do we see Jesus as angry as he is here. Indeed, his anger seems to jump off the page, as if this were not a third-person account composed decades after the fact but a letter by Jesus himself, composed in the white heat of rage. As it happens, biblical scholars say that this speech was in all likelihood put in Jesus' mouth by Matthew; if the anger seems fresh, it may be because what we are witnessing is Matthew's anger toward the scribes and Pharisees of his own day.
But let's be legalists for a minute, and accept the idea that every line of the Bible is inerrant, and that this is unquestionably Jesus talking. What does the twenty-third chapter of Matthew tell us, then, as legalists? It tells us this, quite plainly: that nothing got Jesus angrier than legalism. His speech is a barn burner. Addressing a crowd, he repeatedly says, "Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" Alas why? Alas for several reasons.
• Alas because of their fixation on hierarchical power: "The greatest among you," he says, "must be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; and whoever humbles himself will be exalted."
• Alas because of their judgmentalism: "You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces."
• Alas because of their fixation on meaningless doctrinal distinctions: "You say if someone swears by the sanctuary that is nothing, but if he swears by the gold in the sanctuary he is bound by oath."
• Alas because of their fixation on trivial laws at the expense of the more important and more charitable demands of God's law: "You pay tithes of mint and dill and cumin; but you overlook the weightier demands of the law—-justice, mercy, and good faith."
• And alas because of their show of attachment to tradition even as they attack their contemporaries who will be part of the tradition for future generations. "You build up the tombs of the prophets," he charges, "and embellish the monuments of the saints, and you say 'If we had been livin
g in the time of our forefathers, we should never have taken part with them in the murder of the prophets.' So you acknowledge that you are the sons of those who killed the prophets. Go on then, finish off what your fathers began."
What Jesus is railing against here is, in a word, legalism. For these are the very ways in which legalism manifests itself: in an attachment to hierarchy, power, heartless judgment, meaningless doctrine, trivial laws, and things of the past that are clung to out of habit, prejudice, and fear. "Snakes! Vipers' brood!" Jesus calls them. "How can you escape being condemned to hell?"
Hell: There's that word. This isn't familiar talk from Jesus. He doesn't speak of hell to the tax collectors and prostitutes he socializes with. But if we're going to be legalists about this, we've got to recognize that the one thing he gets so worked up about that he brings up hell is legalism.
Hypocrites, he calls them. Hypocrites. He uses the word over and over. Is there any place in the Gospels where Jesus repeats himself so much? But he can't help it. He's losing it. Jesus loses it! This isn't the Sermon on the Mount. This isn't the Beatitudes. This is a rant. Jesus is angry—angry not just because of what has happened in the past and in his own time, but because he knows that the same thing will happen again in the future. Other prophets will come, and the scribes and Pharisees will harass them viciously, mercilessly, brutally.
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem," he cries, "city that murders the prophets and stones the messengers sent to her! How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you would not let me." What an amazing image: Jesus as a mother hen, kept from her children by those who claim to be God's anointed. This is the reason for his anger—this is the one thing that can move him to the point of emotional outburst.