Soft Patriarchs
It’s good for egalitarians to remind themselves that the patriarchal traditionalist scholars do teach that men are to love their wives and children and take responsibility in the family, even though we suspect that that message is not filtering down to the average guy in the pew. This month’s Mars Hill Audio (Vol 74) has a very interesting review of a 2004 book by W. Bradford Wilcox called Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands. Dr. Wilcox’s thesis is that the gender-role patriarchal structures within conservative Protestantism are overcome by their strong call for husbands to take a loving role in their families, to invest emotionally in both their wives and children, and that his research shows that they are more successful at producing loving, involved fathers than are Mainline Protestants and religiously nonaffiliated fathers as long as church attendance is high. [There’s the big “if.”]
Secular-biased studies tend to either take the approach that secularization forces of the West are inevitable and so strong that they will continue to make inroads in the ability of religious institutions to shape the culture and the way family life is conducted, or that conservative gender ideology has a negative impact on families, especially on men — that it’s no more than a reactive subcultural backlash against the gains women have made in the marketplace. But their studies tend to measure only the amount of spanking and the amount of equality or lack of equality in the division of household tasks. Wilcox counters these approaches with measuring one-on-one interactions fathers have with their children, the amount of hugging, the number of praise incidents, etc.
Wilcox concludes that “conservative Protestant married men with children… hold views that are more moderate [read ‘more egalitarian’] than those expressed in the ideological discourse of conservative Protestant institutions and leaders.” Basically, the large doses of increasingly therapeutic family advice and encouragements to put in lots of constructive emotion work with their wives and children “offset the negative effects of gender role traditionalism.”
But then why teach something that needs to be offset?
Del Birkey comments on the whole “soft patriarchy” thing in his latest book “Fall of Patriarchy” He talks about this very book in fact. he has zero patience/tolerence for patriarchy, no matter how soft it is. It was a very interesting read bc I really began to belive that patriarchy, no matter how its talked about, is evil as its root, no matter how “Christianised” it is. I really wish Christianity would let go of it, but it doesn’t seem to want to budge from male dominated power structures. sigh.
What’s so sad to me is that the Christian institution charged with setting out God’s morality is the very one that sets up these roadblocks to personal piety and right living. But I think that God sees his church in larger terms than the visible organizations that claim His name. His church is really an organism, and all the ordaining in the world will not increase the moral authority of these patriarchal structures.