Last week, I wrote about what submission looks like after betrayal. So far, I’ve gotten good feedback on it, but now there’s one part I wrote in it that has been eating at me since I posted it:
“Our husbands are sinful, imperfect people who have been called by God to lead us in our marriages.”
Called by God to lead us in our marriages. I’m beginning to question that. It’s a core belief of complementarianism: the husband leads, the wife follows. Equal in value, different in roles.
And I find that I am really struggling with what I said there. I struggled with it even as I wrote that post.
Because I have read way too many stories where complementarianism gave sinful, imperfect men far too much power over their wives. And those “leaders”, informed by a complementarian view, became corrupted and abusive with that power.
And if there’s anything I’ve learned from being a betrayed spouse, it’s to look at the actions, not the words. And to look at the fruit. And the fruit of complementarianism is rotten.
The late John MacArthur, a pastor who was about as complementarian as you can get, disciplined and excommunicated abuse victims in his church for refusing to reconcile with their abusive husbands. And didn’t bother to discipline their abusers. By all accounts, he didn’t even give them a slap on the wrist.
Mark Driscoll, self-identified complementarian and disgraced pastor of Mars Hill Church, claimed to be against abuse. But he has a long track record of verbal abuse and excessive control in the way he’s treated people under his leadership, and perpetuating a culture of toxic masculinity. He stepped down from leadership in 2014, and Mars Hill Church quickly fell apart.
Tia Levings, who published a memoir titled A Well-Trained Wife, documents the story of her abusive marriage in a church that promoted complementarianism as well as Quiver-full ideas and Christian patriarchy. Her ex-husband adopted all such ideas, and he became so abusive and controlling to his family that Levings had no other choice but to escape in the middle of the night with her children.
The basic tenets of complementarianism aren’t inherently abusive, and I’m certainly not saying all complementarians are abusive. But unfortunately, complementarianism’s core teachings do create a more permissive environment for abuse, whether their adherents realize it or not. The theology is really easy to exploit. And these problems are real! And they have caused real problems! And they have been handled very poorly in complementarian circles. I agree with most complementarians that they should be the loudest voices against abuse, but quite frankly, they’re not. To me, their condemnations of abuse just sound like lip service. All of these issues is making it difficult for me to find compelling reasons to hold on to complementarianism.
And this is eating at me because my views on gender roles in marriage really have become more egalitarian than they used to be. When I was a teenager and a young(er) adult, before I was knocked around by the difficulties of marriage, complementarianism made perfect sense, I thought. Equal in value, but different in roles. There’s clearly defined roles in the marriage. I saw it as like a dance. There can’t be two leaders, because then we’ll both be stepping on each other’s toes. And there can’t be two followers, because we’ll just be standing on the dance floor, doing nothing. There must be one leader, and one follower, in order to get anywhere on the ballroom dance floor (and in marriage).
But nearly six years of marriage taught me something different.
We got married literally months before COVID. When COVID set in, my husband lost pretty much all of his gigs (he was in a band), and I had a fairly stable, well-paying job at a public library. So while he was looking for other work, I was the one still paying the rent. This happened a second time when we relocated so that he could take a job on another state. He lost that job eight months after we relocated. Again, I continued to work on a part-time salary (which didn’t pay nearly as well as my previous job) during the next 18-ish months of his unemployment.
So when we think of the “distinct roles” that complementarianism says we have, the first thing that comes to mind is the husband working outside the home, and the wife staying home and raising the kids. Yeah, my marriage looks nothing like that.
And I’m not sure it’s ever going to look exactly like that. We don’t have kids yet, but I often daydream about what our lives could look like if we do. One thing’s for sure, if we decided that homeschool is the best option for our family, my husband would probably better suited to teach our kids than I ever would be. He’s someone who actually likes teaching. Having him homeschool instead of me is definitely the “road less traveled”, as most families have the mother doing most of the homeschooling. (that’s what it looked like during my 3 short years that I was homeschooled!) But hey, I like the road less traveled. It’s more fun.
Complementarianism also says that the husband must “lead” the family and have the final say in major decisions regarding, everything. But never once has my husband ever demanded he have the final say in anything. Whenever there was major decisions to make, we always made them together. And we made those decisions unanimously. We never (yet) needed a tiebreaker. He always wanted to make decisions with me, and I’ve always wanted the same thing.
So honestly, our marriage looks more egalitarian than complementarian. We didn’t really intend on being egalitarian, but that’s just how we ended up. And I think I like it better this way, because I feel truly valued as an equal partner in my marriage.
So until I see more changes in the complementarian realm, I’m joining team egalitarianism. I’m making a correction to that sentence in my last post so that it better reflects what I currently believe about this issue.
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