I’ve often mentioned my fondness for the conservative Catholic journal, First Things. I agree with, oh, 5% of what I read within its pages. But my goodness, the quality of the writing is invariably top-notch. Sometimes what I read raises my blood pressure a bit, but that’s not always a bad thing.
The May issue (not fully available online yet) has a short piece by the current boy wonder of the “traditional family” movement, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox. (I reviewed his “Soft Patriarchs” book here.) This month’s article, “As the Family Goes”, predicts (without much regret, I note) that the decline in attendance at liberal, mainline Protestant churches will continue. Wilcox’s theory is moderately interesting: the most reliable church attenders are adults with young children; by focusing on non-traditional families, gays and lesbians, and single folks, the mainline denominations (like my own Episcopal Church) have signed their own demographic death warrants.
Though I disagree strongly with that analysis, that’s not what grabbed me. It’s this zinger that Wilcox drops in:
Men’s comparatively fragile faith often depends on wifely encouragement to flower.
I read that, and choked on a very nice fruit smoothie. I have long railed against the culturally pervasive “myth of male weakness.” (See here, here, here). The myth of male weakness takes many forms, of course: it’s often used to blame women (or their “immodest” clothing) for bad male behavior. If men are weak, then women must be strong, the theory goes — and women must do for men what they can’t or won’t do for themselves, such as setting healthy boundaries. The myth of male weakness is an odious lie, peddled by those who are eager to excuse bad male behavior and to force women into the traditional straitjacket of nurturer and defender of virtue.
But Wilcox takes a different tack. Men, he believes, have “fragile faith” that needs “wifely encouragement to flower.” While the evolutionary biologists (or their popularizers) argue that men are sex-crazed, incapable of initiating restriction without women’s help, Wilcox the sociologist argues that women have to do more than save men from sexual chaos: women also have to nurture our weak spirituality. Wives, apparently, are gardeners; they must tend and prune and fertilize what is small and frail. I couldn’t wait to tell my wife that I am just a little seedling, and that it’s her job to make sure that my relationship with Christ continues to grow! (The image of the gardener — of making things flower — is ubiquitous in the New Testament. But women aren’t the gardeners, God is, and we are all called to equal relationship with our God).
Traditional, orthodox (small “o”) Christianity often collapses on its own contradictions. On the one hand, women are “stronger” than men; men’s faith is “comparatively fragile.” On the other hand, women are supposed to submit to men (but not vice versa), and men alone are to hold the role of pastor. So, to stick with Wilcox’s metaphor, the gardener ought to submit to the headship of the plant. It makes my head hurt.
Patriarchal culture has often tried to appease the women whom it oppresses by reassuring them that “women really are stronger than men.” Women are told, over and over, that “behind every great man is a woman” and that the “hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Women are sometimes even told that they are morally superior to men; while men “need” to exercise overt power in order to feel “like real men”, women can be content with the more subtle powers of the nurturer, the adviser, the mother, the wife, the gardener. Thus in a very real sense, the survival of patriarchal values depends on sustaining the myth of male weakness. The idea that a woman’s role is to complement and nurture (and gently submit) only makes sense if we believe that men are too fragile, too self-destructive, too vulnerable to lust or pride to make healthy, wise, faithful decisions without a woman’s help.
I love my wife. I love that she and I share a vibrant faith in God, and that we are each committed to our individual and mutual transformation. We encourage each other, nurture each other, support each other on the journey we are taking together. Somedays my faith is more fragile, not because I am a man, but because I’m having a hard day. On those days, my wonderful wife bucks me up with her wise words and her warm hugs. On other days, my wife’s certainty grows more frail — and I am there for her, tending to her, standing behind her to offer her my unconditional support.
All of us who believe will be fragile at times. All of us are capable of extraordinary strength. And our chromosomes and our anatomy have nothing to do with it.
Does Wilcox actually believe that men have a fragile faith that depends on their wives’ encouragement or is he making a empirical claim about what is the case in the families he’s looked at?
He doesn’t say. At the beginning of the article, he mentions the General Social Survey, but offers no evidence for this particular assertion.
1. How does “traditional†orthodox theology collapse on its own contradictions? This is one particular individual who considers himself “traditional†and has a theory. He doesn’t own the theology.
2. Would you consider a theory called “the reality of some lazy males†to be the antidote to the male weakness myth?
Dave, I’m referring to the theology often advanced by some in the traditional Christian world:
1. Only men are called to leadership
2. When it comes to sexual temptation and spiritual development, women are generally stronger than men.
That’s fundamentally contradictory.
The myth of male weakness is not that men can’t choose to be lazy or weak. The myth is that it isn’t a choice, that biology or acculturation or divine design has made men inherently more vulnerable to lust, poor decision making, selfishness, what have you.
Hugo, it’s only contradictory if you try hard to make it so.
A more worked-out and less strawman-ish version is something like this.
Men and women have typical, gender-specific strengths and weaknesses.
Men’s weaknesses are self-reliance and lust.
Women’s weaknesses are gullibility and indecisiveness.
Women’s strengths are emotional sensitivity and openness to new directions.
Men’s strengths are long-term pursuit of consistent goals and willingness to not go along because it is easier when necessary.
From those premises, it makes sense that:
1) Men are less likely to come to God.
2) Men are more likely to struggle with lust and some forms of pride.
3) Men who have by grace overcome lust and self-reliance are better leaders than women are.
4) Women who by grace have overcome gullibility and indecisiveness are better nurturers than men are.
Sam, if I accepted your initial premise, we might get somewhere. But your initial premise is at the heart of the very myth that feminists and egalitarian Christians are fighting against. I have no doubt that your reasoning is precisely that used by conservative Christians, but it is grounded in sweeping, unsupportable assumptions about men and women.
Just for clarity–I’m not sure I accept the premise that men and women have typical, gender-specific strengths and weaknesses. I italicized the assumptions section in hope of making clear that I was reporting, not making, the argument.
Couldn’t the conclusions of 3 and 4 be just as easily reversed?
Brad has, if you will pardon my non-Christlike crudity, a real hard-on for making arguments about how women are gentle flowers who should keep their asses at home, and he’s not in any way above distorting or misstating the facts in order to make his point. His dishonesty is the reason I quit reading the Family Scholars Blog; it’s one thing to disagree with a poster, it’s another thing to realize that no matter how many times somebody points out that what he posted just ain’t so, he’ll keep on doing it.
I guess that’s why he’s the Boy Wonder. Never apologize, never explain, right?
This posting reminded me of a recent comment in the Guardian (UK) newspaper which began by quoting the dismissive statement of an atheist publisher that religion was for “women and queers”, and explores the notion of Christianity benefiting the underdogs as well as the powerful. Link
Why this should be the case is a mystery. The Bible is not a notably feminist or gay-friendly document. But it is not, of course, the Bible that turns people into Christians, but some kind of personal relationship with the stories inside it and the people they reveal
The phenomenon is intriguing, but what is the answer? Why should married (and, presumably, straight) mens’ faith require wifely encouragement to flower?
Hugo, my two cents, on a coincidentally related topic, are in my weblog:
http://myth.typepad.com/breakfast/2007/04/your_questions_.html
I’m linking you there. You are a strange bird, but the plumage is pleasing.
This is only tangentally related, but in my travels abroad I have noticed that women are the ones who keep traditional faith and culture alive. They are the ones who wear traditional garb and go to the Buddhist temple or whatever other religious services. They seem to be expected to keep up the culture even while their husbands & sons wear jeans & t-shirts and never go to Temple.
I don’t know if the women do what they do because they feel expected to by men or because they truly do have more faith.
Has anyone else noticed this in travels abroad? I’m speaking specifically of Ecuador & SE Asia. Although I really only have the right to speak on Ecuador. I lived there for a year. I merely visited SE Asia.
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