VIRGINIA
The American Conservative
By ROD DREHER • February 19, 2014
Kiera Feldman has a disturbing report about the alleged cover-up of sexual assaults at Patrick Henry College, a conservative Evangelical school in rural Virginia. I don’t have anything to say about the substance of her report. If what she says is true, then it’s horrible, and must be dealt with strongly, clearly, and justly. You all know by now how I feel about institutions of any kind covering up sexual abuse in their ranks for the sake of protecting the institution. I have no interest in either attacking or defending PHC, at least not enough to dig into the story to sort our who’s right and who’s wrong. Maybe I will, but not today.
What caught my eye in reading the story was this graf (emphasis mine):
Underlying homeschooling culture is the Christian patriarchy movement, which teaches that men and women have separate, “complementarian” roles: A woman’s highest calling is as a mother and submissive “helpmeet” to her husband, who in turn functions as God’s representative on Earth. “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church,” reads Ephesians 5:22, an oft-cited biblical passage in the movement that is also invoked in the PHC student handbook. The most conservative patriarchy devotees—like Farris, a father of ten—call themselves “Quiverfull” and believe in having as many children as God gives them.
Kiera Feldman ought to ask my wife, who heads the homeschooling in our house, if she considers herself a submissive helpmeet to Your Working Boy. It’s hilarious to anybody who knows us. What’s not so funny is that this wildly inaccurate stereotype about homeschooling flew past copy editors at a magazine as sophisticated as The New Republic. The “Christian patriarchy movement” may well underlie the homeschooling movement associated with Patrick Henry College, but it by no means characterizes homeschooling in general, or even Christian homeschooling. True, we Christians who homeschool — and by no means are all homeschoolers Christian — are likely to be more traditional on gender roles than others, but there’s a vast sea of difference between total egalitarianism and the strict gender roles embraced by the Quiverfull families. In fact, we have far more in common in this regard with public-schooling families we know than with the homeschooling Christians who adopt the Christian patriarchy model.
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