US Authoritarianism

When I got married, my wife really wanted her hometown pastor to do the religious stuff because it was important to her family. She warned me that I wouldn’t like it, but he literally included “submitting” in our vows.

Now nothing of the sort has or will happen, because her free will matters to me…. But in many religious communities this is normalized.

That's the beauty of Christianity. The Bible is so contradictory and vague that it becomes Choose-Your-Own-Adventure.

Ephesians 5:22-33

Wives, be submissive to your own husbands as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head and Savior of the church, which is His body. But as the church submits to Christ, so also let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.

Highly variable. My church growing up was chill. We learned to play dreidel and talked about Acts. Very little memorization.

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Then I went to Awanas with a friend. Pre internet times. Holy hell, that was rough. Station to station with rote memorization tasks followed by a serman wherein we were all told if our names were not already in The Book of Life we were all going straight to Hell and there was nothing we could do about it. That was a first and last Awanas for me as a kid.

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Highly variable. Like you, I heard nothing of submission from my childhood church. But that preacher at Awanas? Wouldn’t surprise me.

A woman needs to marry young so he husband can guide her and be to her like god is to man. She is to submit to him like man to god.

That's paraphrasing speeches I've heard at many old school christian weddings, and still hear today.

I've been a Presbyterian/Episcopalian most of my adult life. Most Mainline Protestant churches allow women to serve in all capacities.

But, I was raised Baptist and even the suggestion that a woman could teach an adult Sunday school class would be enough to make their heads explode.