American Women Trained to Be Good Wives

[MrMan]

I was watching a documentary about the religious movement the Duggars were a part of. The Duggars had a popular show on TLC where they started the show with 14 kids and went going until they got to 20 and then a miscarriage. Apparently, they were involved with a ministry by Bill Gothard called IBLP, and that ministry encouraged Christians to have as many children as they can since children are blessing. The ministry had home school materials and there were a lot of teachings on how to live as families.

I suppose it is still going on without Gothard leading it. Anyway, the documentary seems to have been made or at least commented on by a lot of people who were raised in that movement who were out of it and many went to a left-wing extreme.

Basically, the movement teaches this umbrella teaching that God is the authority, then the pastor, then the husband, then the wife, then the children. In the home, wife and children have to submit to and obey the father. That part is fairly traditional Christian teaching. Whether pastors (elders, etc.) should be authoritarian is another matter. They are really conservative about dress, teaching women not to show skin or tight stuff. They teach against sexual immorality. They encourage home schooling the kids to keep them out of the corrupted school system. If they come from large families, they teach the kids to handle different responsibilities, and the girls may grow up raising younger siblings, mother training from a young age. It did seem like the training on spanking could lead to some extremes.

Here is something else, they teach the wives to be sexually available to their husbands whenever they want it. That's good wife training right there. Actually, sex is a debt that the wife owes the husband and the husband owes the wife in the Bible. So I don't know if they teach the wives to be assertive about getting their needs met. IMO, that would be a good trait in an ideal wife.

During dating and engagement, singles are to be chaperoned. Instead of dating, a man asks the girls father if he can court the man's daughter with an aim of getting married. That last part seems a bit presumptuous, IMO, but it seem superior to our dating culture.

I've got a friend who was raised in a big homeschool family, and I am planning on Facebooking to ask if he was a part of his movement. He's over 40 and marriage never has happened for him.

The women might dress a little like pilgrims or the wives of German Brethren groups a little bit, but if I were single, I might go to one of these conferences. I find some of their teachings to be possibly legalistic and extreme. I don't think we have to have as many children as we possibly can in life, necessarily. The girl is trained to obey her parents, especially her father, and at the marriage, the authority is transferred to her husband. So he can say no to some of those odd particulars about how she was raised. If she dresses like a pilgrim in public, she could still look good naked for her husband at home. She's been taught to obey her husband and speak to him kindly with respect, to give him as much sex as he needs. She's been chaperoned all the time to protect her virginity. She may have grown up doing household chores and raising siblings so she's been trained to be a mother. I don't know if the Amish even hit all those points in their child raising, and these girls would know how to work an electric washing machine, unlike an Amish girl

One of the Duggars admitted to having molested some sisters. He admitted to feeling sisters up while he was asleep. Then he got caught with an account on a adultery website, and was later convicted of a child porn download. He pleaded not guilty. (This was a case where a conspiracy theory makes sense, that a political opponent or someone who felt upset he didn't get jail time for molesting his sisters when he was a kid set up a complicated Lennox system on his PC and downloaded the worst kind of kiddie porn to get him sent up the river, and everyone would believe it because of the news about him in the past. I'm thinking that could make an interesting TV movie whether it's true or not. Apparently, all you have to do is download it and have it on your hard drive to get prison time.)

The video tried to paint the movement as producing predators. But what I didn't see is the idea that the rates of this sort of thing were any higher in this movement. I'd imagine sex predators could take advantage of a religious movement, but I would suspect that there would be more sex perverts among LGBT allies than among a religious group like this. They also had a woman who'd been in this group whose husband would whip her if she got out of line, and the video indicated that this was something fundamentalist families do. That was a crazy accusation to me. Wife-spanking is a very niche thing, not something I've ever heard of Baptists or other fundamentalist groups doing. My extended family is predominantly Baptists and both my parents were raised in Baptist churches. A couple of my now deceased uncles were Baptist pastors, one of them Independent Baptist. I gather he was kind and gentle to his wife, and he always filled up the gas in the car and never made her do stuff like that. She had to learn how to after he passed away last year. They also made weird generalizations about fundamentalist home school families.

A lot of the stuff they'd say on the video with eerie music behind it was good stuff, mixed in with a few alarming or weird things here and there.

But for someone who is a serious Christians from an evangelical background, I would imagine going to one of these family conferences and talking to the dads of pretty young women might be a way to start courting and to get the ball rolling toward finding a wife. You might have to pay for dates with not just her but her sister or brother, too.