The Southern Baptist church has this interesting website about gender, and I have been mining it recently for enlightening articles about the current state of gender relationships in the United States. It seems that if we only went back to the Biblical roles everything would be just find and dandy. And what exactly are these roles?
J. Lincoln Dugan can tell us. He's the chairman of the board of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. He's also the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Jackson, Mississippi. Here's pastor Dugan's ideas about Biblical Manhood:
If one looks out at the church today and doesn't see that one of the top crying issues in the evangelical church, in America and the western world in general, is the desperate need for virile, manly, godly servant-leader males in the local congregation, they are missing one of the big issues of our times. You cannot cultivate that in a culture of effeminacy in a church, and the minute you cave in on gender issues whether it be female officers, whether it be refusing to address male-female role relationships in the context of marriage, when you refuse to address those issues, you are refusing to address one of the key issues relating to church issues in our time.
"Virile, manly, godly servant-leader males"! This is hot stuff.
And the effeminacy of the church is very disconcerting, too. No doubt the Western civilization is going down the drain because of the lack of attention to the importance of virile and manly servant-leaders.
Pastor Dugan feels very sorry for all those Christians who struggle with the idea of equality between the sexes. He will have none of that modern rubbish; all that is needed is the word of the holy Bible on this question, and everything becomes clear:
It is the ultimate head in the sand approach not to address the issue. . . . If the Bible is unclear on this, then there is nothing that the Bible is clear about. If you can skip over the Bible's clear teaching on this, then you have just undercut yourself in terms of the interpretation of Scripture. The Bible speaks more clearly to this than it does abortion. . . . It is vitally important for a man to face these issues.
What about the Biblical womanhood, then? Well, it's easy to guess that it doesn't involve equality or women in leadership positions, and some women might at first find this a little hard to take. But not to worry! According to pastor Dugan things are not so bad, really:
The first think[sic] is to remind men how many good women out there are just dying for this. If you came to visit me in Jackson, Miss. (which is not known for its cultural progressiveness), your guess would be, in terms of marital male-female issues, that I, as a pastor, would see more issues of male abuse or domination of women. That would have been my guess too and certainly would have been the presupposition of a New York egalitarian. Though I have seen that on rare occasion, nine-to-one the main complaint I get from women who show up in my office to talk about failing or struggling marriages, is that [they say] 'Dr. Duncan, I so desperately want my husband to lead me spiritually, to lead our family, I want a strong spiritual leader. He's not interested.' I tell my men that. They are dying for somebody to shepherd them spiritually. That is an instinct that God has built into every godly woman, even if she doesn't know what that looks like. I think there are women out there who want it even if they don't know what it looks like. But we have not had, for several generations, that kind of male husband/father spiritual leader in the homes, so first of all, I say to the men, 'don't think that every woman is going to reject this. Most women already know that they want this.
Oops! I never realized that I have always secretly pined for a virile, manly servant-leader in the Snakepit Inc.. I thought that having two dogs and twenty snakes boss me was enough for one goddess but I am obviously mistaken. Pastor Dugan tells me so.
He has a lot more to say about the evils of feminism in the second part of the interview. Read it if you'd like to have indigestion today.