In the realm of the Christian Patriarchy Movement, if a wife disagrees with her husband, or communicates too forcefully, she’s fundamentally dishonoring him. Is it any wonder that marriages, finances, careers, children, and churches crash and burn? No one can tell the Pilot when danger is approaching. And if the plane crashes…oh well, it must have been God’s will.

The Quiverfull/Patriarchy culture produces plenty of “how-to” books, such as Fascinating Womanhood, and Created to Be His Help Meet, to show women how to be the most “godly” wives and mothers they can be. Since I practically absorbed a ton of these types books through my skin for the first eight years of our marriage, I noticed one thing they all had in common: they tell us how how to talk to our husbands with “respect,” “honor,” and “deference to his authority.” We learned how to use encouragement, childlike phrases, praise, focusing on the positives, and carefully worded requests to communicate within our marriages.

For example, in the book Fascinating Womanhood , a man is about to make a disastrous financial decision, where he could lose everything. The author encourages the wife to say, “It sounds like a good idea, and I can see why you’re excited about it, but for some reason, deep inside, I just don’t feel right about it.” It’s not that she doesn’t see specific reasons for the financial danger—it’s that saying those reasons outright could hurt what the author calls his “Sensitive Masculine Pride.”

In Created to Be His Help Meet , Debi Pearl states: “It is important for a woman to understand that [a wife] must be feminine (devoid of dominance and control) in order for her man to view her as his exact counterpart, and thus willingly respond to her protectively, with love and gentleness. A woman who criticizes her husband… is expressing dishonor. When the relationship is properly balanced, a wife can make an appeal at the right time and in the right manner, and it need not be a challenge to his authority.” (emphasis mine)

These books promise that if you do speak to him just the right way, he will listen to you.

And if he doesn’t listen to you, it’s the outcome God wanted anyway.

The good news is that this method of communication has already been tested extensively in another context—commercial airlines—and the results were startling: they caused planes to crash.

Malcom Gladwell, in his book Outliers, tells us of “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes.” Apparently, when investigators analyzed the events leading up to many crashes, using the black box recorders, they found a common thread. More than engine failure, bad weather, pilot exhaustion, or drug use, the most common cause of a plane crash was what the author called “Mitigated Speech” between the Captain and the rest of the flight crew. For example :

“In the 1982 Air Florida crash outside Washington, DC, the first officer tried three times to tell the captain that the plane had a dangerous amount of ice on its wings.

FIRST OFFICER:
Look how the ice is just hanging on his, ah, back, back there, see that?

[Later]
FIRST OFFICER:
See all those icicles on the back there and everything?

[Right before take-off]
FIRST OFFICER:
Let’s check those [wing] tops again, since we’ve been setting here awhile.
The captain says, “I think we get to go here in a minute.”
They don’t de-ice the wings.
The only direct statement this co-pilot made to the captain was as they were crashing into the Potomac River: “Larry, we’re going down, Larry.”

In an analysis of a similar crash, the investigators report was heartbreaking:

“The copilot was right. But they died because… when the copilot asked questions, his implied suggestions were very weak. The captain’s reply was to ignore him totally. Perhaps the copilot did not want to appear rebellious, questioning the judgment of the captain, or he did not want to play the fool because he knew that the pilot had a great deal of experience flying in that area. The copilot should have advocated for his own opinions in a stronger way…” (emphasis mine)

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