For all of Wilson’s assurances to the contrary, the language choices that he consistently makes reveal that for him, a wife is, ultimately, a passive receiver/responder in his view of marriage. She is an object and not a person. Her identity, calling, vocation, and her very self have been subsumed under her husband. She exists to serve and glorify him. Consider that the word ‘listen’ fails to appear even once in the exhortations to husbands. For Wilson, the wife has no self and, it seems, no voice. Far from the glorious picture of honor that Wilson paints, the reality is that she is not on a pedestal. She is the pedestal.
What is marriage? What is Biblical headship? What is a Christian wife? According to prominent leaders in the Reformed and/or broadly evangelical Christian community, gender roles and sexuality are among the most, if not the most, important issues of our day.
A controversy of major proportions has spread throughout the church. Now more than ever before, gender roles are openly questioned in the wake of evangelical feminism—a movement that is having a profound impact on society, the home, and the church. (John Piper and Wayne Grudem)
What is the confessional issue of our time? The confessional issue of our time is human sexuality, biblically defined. (Douglas Wilson, How to Exasperate Your Wife, Kindle Locations 984-986)
What we believe about our identity as man or woman is central to who we are are individuals, couples, and families and how each of us pursues our life calling…Biblical manhood and womanhood is too important a subject not to think through carefully as a Christian. (Andreas J. Köstenberger and Margaret Elizabeth Köstenberger, God’s Design for Man and Woman, p. 14)
These bold claims, combined with recent events such as the unfolding Duggar scandal and John Piper’s comments about women showing deference to the (presumably male) mail carrier, to whose defense Douglas Wilson quickly leapt, demonstrate a need to examine carefully views about gender and marriage among those with patriarchal leanings. In this article, we focus on the writings of Douglas Wilson, using his often controversial statements about marriage and gender as a means of achieving some understanding of where some of these patriarchal and complementarian church leaders are coming from. What do they mean, for example, when they say things like, ‘So, no. A Christian complementarian woman should not become a cop, especially when it involves riot gear. No.’
Why Wilson?
Doug Wilson is regarded by some, perhaps many, as something of an easy target. Certainly, speaking his name among any who recognize it tends to evoke a strong reaction. He has been aptly described as the ‘nonconforming Calvinist who has made so many enemies in Reformed circles that no denomination will have him’. Many of his statements about history, slavery and marriage and the marriage bed are inflammatory, causing many to accuse him of racism and misogyny. And yet, as one writer puts it,
Wilson has quite a following, particularly among Reformed Christians. He’s written
numerous articles for Mark Driscoll’s “Resurgence” blog, has shared a stage with popular pastor John Piper, and his book on fathering was released by Christian publisher Thomas Nelson in 2012. He has more than 16,000 twitter followers.
In Wilson’s writings, we observe a complexity and contradiction that make it difficult to dismiss his ideas immediately. How do we make sense of views that, on the one hand, espouse Biblical requirements for a husband’s gentleness, contentedness, faithfulness, and Christ-like self-sacrifice (Reforming Marriage, p. 25) and yet, on the other, generate oddly specific guidance on a woman’s hair length, argue that separate careers for husbands and wives are unBiblical (Reforming Marriage, p. 30), and endorse church discipline for a wife’s ‘neglect’ of the dishes (Reforming Marriage, p. 49)?
In this article, we focus on the ways in which Doug Wilson fleshes out what he calls the ‘father rule’ model of marriage. We begin by analyzing some of Wilson’s blog entries to identify the actions, roles and attributes he associates with husbands and wives. We then look elsewhere in his writings to explore how he fleshes these out in a couple’s daily lives.
We find that, at first, Wilson’s exhortations to husbands and wives seem to be words of encouragement designed to prepare husbands and wives for the challenges of marriage. On the surface, husbands are told to die daily, to love their wives in a sacrificial way, as Christ loves the Church. They are exhorted to see their wives as their glory and crown. Wives are instructed to honor and respect their husbands like the Church honors and respects Christ. They are encouraged to help and advise their husbands. All of these ideas sit comfortably, at first glance, within an orthodox, Reformed Christian view of marriage.
However, careful scrutiny of Wilson’s teachings about marriage uncover a concerning theology of marriage wherein the woman is a passive responder, a recipient of all that the man does and brings, a glory that serves merely to reflect the splendor of her husband. In Wilson’s published marriage exhortations and other writings about marriage, we find the practical implications of such views, each of which we will explore in turn, each of which suggest that, in the end, the woman has no self other than what the husband gives to her.
Texts and Technique
Our approach in this piece stems from two main principles:
- Language choices reveal one’s attitude towards the topic s/he is speaking or writing about. By systematically examining Wilson’s language choices about marriage, we can cut to the heart of his sometimes elusive views.
- Not all words in a text are created equal. Certain words and phrases appear more often than others. By looking at the frequency with which words and phrases in a text occur, we gain insight into what language a writer associates with a particular topic. This concept is known as lexical inequality.
Our discussion is based on analysis of 63 (out of 68) wedding exhortations extracted from Doug Wilson’s blog Blog and Mablog in August, 2015. Five exhortations on the site were excluded because they do not include individual exhortations to the bride and groom.
Our focus is on the particularities of the wedding exhortations given to men vs. women. To do so, we created two sub-corpora (groups of texts). This was done by identifying the place in each exhortation (always towards the end of each exhortation) where the groom and bride are spoken to directly by name and individually. In every case, Wilson speaks to the groom first and then to the bride, although after this, he occasionally switches his attention back to the groom and then again to the bride. Wilson averages 217 words in his individual exhortations to the husband and to the wife, 208 words, only slightly lower.
Once these sub-corpora were created, we then relied on AntConc, a corpus analysis tool, to identify keywords in each sub-corpus. In corpus linguistics, keywords are items of unusual frequency in comparison with a reference corpus. They are calculated via a statistical test which compares each word’s frequency in a text against its expected frequency in another corpus. This test allows us to rule out (to a large extent) the possibility of a keyword appearing more frequently just by chance. For example, the word ‘respect’ occurs 39 times in the wife sub-corpus and 4 in the husband sub-corpus. The ‘keyness score’ for this word is 34.8, which is far above the threshold for statistical significance (around 3.9). Further, in all four times this word appears in the husband sub-corpus, the word is actually referring to the wife’s respect. So we can safely assume that, for Wilson, this concept is strongly associated with being a wife but not a husband.
Once we identified lists of keywords for each group of texts (husband and wife), we were able to look at each in its various contexts and then identify emergent themes. In what follows, we explore two of the most prominent themes: being not doing and receiving/responding not initiating, focusing our attention particularly on the wife sub-corpus. The keywords in these two themes constitute roughly 33% of the total keywords in the wife exhortations and consistently have strong keyness scores, which, again, means that, for Wilson, these themes are central to what it means to be a wife.
Wilson’s Wives
At the heart of Wilson’s theology of the wife is the notion of being something belonging to her husband, signaled in part by the possessive form ‘his’, which appears 75 times in the female sub-corpus and has the 7th strongest keyness score of any word therein. Most frequently, the wife is identified as the husband’s glory (69 times, 5th strongest keyness score) and his crown (32 times) (see examples below). While the phrase ‘your husband’ appears 38 times in the female corpus, these frequently serve as a means of rephrasing this possession, as in ‘You are the glory of your husband’, ‘You are appointed to be your husband’s glory’, and ‘You are the crown of your husband’. The phrase ‘her husband’ fails to appear even once in the corresponding male sub-corpus.
(1) …this is the day of Blake’s coronation, and you are his crown. (2007-10-20 Blake and Peggy)
(2) Every wedding of a Christian man to a Christian woman is a coronation. Emily is your crown, your glory, and your symbol of office. (2009-06-13 Nethaniel and Emily)
(3) You are the crown of your husband; you are to be his glory. He is the steward of grace; you are to be that grace. He is the guardian of peace; you are to be at peace, and not give way to fear. (2012-01-14 Jonathan and Allie)
Other, less frequent images (also possessed by the husband) Wilson identifies a bride with are a garden, a wonder, and a gift. These images are occasionally referred to as ‘stations’ to which a wife is appointed (rather than those she holds by virtue of her inherent worth).
(4) Annike, you are called to be that Garden for him, a place of refreshment and help. You are called to be his glory and crown, and to be, by the grace of God, the kind of Garden he would gladly die to preserve. (2011-08-27 Jonathan and Annike)
(5) I am charging you with the responsibility to be a wonder. This is not beyond your reach—this is what God created women for, and when you step into that role by faith you are working at the center of God’s creation design. The Bible says plainly that women are the crown and glory of their husbands. Accept that honor gladly. (2008-03-16 Brad and Nicole)
(6) The best thing you can do, the way to be the greatest help to your husband, is to be that gift. (2012-10-20 Tyler and Stephanie)
You can read Doug Wilson’s response here: The Critique of the Bluestockings