Taking America Back for God by Andrew L. Whitehead & Samuel L. Perry

Author:Andrew L. Whitehead & Samuel L. Perry [Whitehead, Andrew L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

A Woman’s Proper Place in a Christian Nation

Americans have strong feelings about how to define a family, as well as how families should operate. Gender is central to these understandings. Social scientists find that belonging to particular religious groups, holding certain religious beliefs, and engaging in a variety of religious practices are each associated with how egalitarian, or how traditional, an American’s beliefs about gender roles are. And research shows the official and unofficial opinions of religious groups regarding “proper” gender roles change over time.8

Christian nationalism is intimately intertwined with Americans’ definitions of the family and the proper roles for men and women within the family. The stakes are high, in this view, because having families that conform to God’s ideal standard are a vital step toward having a country that he will bless with prosperity. In the early decades of the Christian Right, leaders like Jerry Falwell Sr. excoriated secular feminists and “bored,” “lonely,” Christian women whom he believed were disgruntled with their God-given roles.9 While one does find some Christian nationalist writers like Wayne Grudem who directly rebuke “evangelical feminists,” most in recent years seek to restore traditional gender roles to American society by challenging men, specifically husbands and fathers.10 In a popular book edited by Grudem and John Piper, pastor Weldon Hardenbrook writes, “Throughout the historical transitions of a variety of cultures, the family existed as a natural society that provided the soul of each nation and that was to be nourished and protected through fatherhood . . . .I humbly but firmly submit that the soul of our nation is in crisis in large part because American men have—from ignorance and for various and sometimes even subconscious reasons—abandoned their God-given role of fatherhood.”11

Like Hardenbrook, Ambassadors we spoke with connected the absence of men and masculinity in the family with the breakdown of society as a whole. One connected the absence of father figures to various social problems like school shootings and drug abuse and sees broken homes as “a huge issue in this country, even bigger than the wall.”12 Lori explicitly connected the proper order found in patriarchal Christian families to the strengthening of the nation itself.

I think we need to get back to the foundation where the man is the spiritual [leader of the] household and he’s the leader of the family and put it back in the way God had planned family. Obviously if God planned it and ordained it that way, there was a reason and a purpose and I think he knows that that would lead our family units better. We wouldn’t have this division and power struggle between a man and a woman. There’s so many women out there . . . you think of that famous song, “I am Woman, Hear me Roar.” Yes, but if I want [the United States] to be a Christian nation, I want to have the husband as a spiritual leader. I want him to guide and protect and lead my family in the ways of the Lord.

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