Feature
Soft Servants
Patriarchy, Marriage & the Future of Evangelical Christianity
by Russell D. Moore
Would a woman and her children rather see their husband and father sitting in front of the fireplace with a copy of Car and Woman magazine or a copy of The Purpose-Driven Life? Would they rather Dad be found on the golf course on Sunday mornings or in a church pew? Would they rather he model his life on the epistles of the Apostle Paul or on the autobiography of Hugh Hefner?
While the answers may seem obvious, much of the media and academic establishment insists with regularity that “right-wing” notions of male headship and female submission produce homes seething with resentment, with husbands who neglect, exploit, and even physically abuse their wives and children.
Yet, conservative Evangelical men are actually more likely to hug their children, help their wives with housework, read Goodnight Moon for the 114th time over a toddler’s bed, and coach Little League baseball. “Right-wing” Evangelical fathers are unlikely to abuse their families, as compared to their secular or liberal Protestant counterparts, but are more likely to say “I love you” to their wives and children.
They are, in the words of University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox in his groundbreaking book Soft Patriarchs, New Men, “soft patriarchs”: men who hold both to male headship and to the responsibilities and sacrifices that headship entails. They are closer to Mike Brady than to Homer Simpson—or, better, to Jesus than to Herod.
Conservative Evangelicals have much to rejoice about in this book, since it demonstrates what confessional Christians have always known: Male headship is not about privilege or priority but about the joyful burden of responsibility and protection. Even so, the book is not unambiguously good news for gender traditionalists. When compared with several other recent works on Evangelicals and gender, Wilcox’s research shows that the Evangelical patriarch may be “soft” in more ways than one.
If Evangelicals lose their countercultural edge on this one, we will lose more than simply our orthodoxy. We will lose our wives and children, too.
The Softest Homes
Wilcox’s book describes how Evangelical men actually think and live. He brings forth the demographic statistics and survey results on issues ranging from paternal hugging of children to paternal yelling, from female responses about marital happiness to the divisions of household labor. In virtually every category, the most conservative and Evangelical households were also the “softest” in terms of familial harmony, relational happiness, and emotional health.
Unlike many researchers, Wilcox actually studies real, live Evangelicals, rather than simply speculating on how such “misogynist throwbacks” must live. He has read what Evangelicals read, listened to Evangelical radio programs, and otherwise immersed himself in an Evangelical subculture that few academics seem to understand.
Wilcox demonstrates that his results are not an anomaly. They are not akin to discovering that nineteenth-century slaveholders had less racist attitudes than northern abolitionists. Instead, he shows that the “softness” of Evangelical fathers is a result of patriarchy, not an aberration from it. When men see themselves as the head over their households, they feel the weight of leadership—a weight that expresses itself in devotion to their little platoons of the home.
Russell D. Moore is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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