Headship and Representation

Today I am going to generalize, because there’s no way to discuss the topic at hand usefully without doing so. Since it is my occasional, bitter experience that some people detest generalizations, I will dutifully warn you up front that you are in for endless amounts of them if you read on. Best come back another time if you find yourself emotionally triggered by statements about averages offered in the absence of hard evidence.

You heard me right. I’m not even going to offer statistics to support the assertions that follow. Why not? Because people of a non-generalizing disposition who dislike what I have to say will simply dispute the data. Again, bitter experience. That, and those capable of pattern recognition don’t need statistics to back up what they already know.

Suffering Suffrage

I have been reading Chesterton lately. The so-called Apostle of Common Sense often starts with an observation that appears sufficiently self-evident to garner general assent, then quickly moves on to analyzing and describing his subject with such wit and dexterity in the English language that most readers will never go back to the original assertion and ask themselves “Is it really so?” Often, a social ill Chesterton observed in early-1900s Britain is very much present today. Other things were true when he wrote about them, though the situation has since changed. We cannot fault him for that. Sometimes what he said was truer in England than it might be across the Pond. Again, no fault to find. But sometimes … well, anyway. He’s a great writer, but he too generalizes. A lot.

The book that inspired what follows is What’s Wrong with the World, in which Gilbert Keith mulls over the downside of feminism, specifically the suffragette movement, which gave women the vote in democracies across the world, ultimately producing Justin Trudeau and many other grave ills entire Western nations would have been better off without. Trudeau is far from the only current head of state whose election (twice yet!) was directly attributable to the female vote, but he is certainly the most notorious. No nation in which only the male vote counted would ever have elected him, and it wouldn’t even be close.

In the very early twentieth century, you could actually ask whether giving women the vote was a good idea, and consider the societal perils that might attend doubling the voting base without risking being bound to a stake and summarily incinerated. Today, not so much, and men have largely given it up. Those who are most vocal today about the evils of women voting are … women. Many would happily give up their personal right to vote in order to wrest the vote away from the fifty-odd percent of the population least capable of dealing with generalities, averages and abstractions. Such are incapable of seeing the potentially disastrous consequences of what often passes for empathy applied on a large scale in a fallen world. As Ann Coulter famously put it, “If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president.”

Generalities and Exceptions

In my online world, the women expressing versions of this view are all Christians. These sisters in Christ are implicitly accusing the vast majority of their own sex of operating outside their area of greatest competence, and I have to take them at their word. They should know. They come from a hundred-year tradition of women opposed to suffrage as fundamentally unfeminine, even disadvantageous to women.

That is not to say that all women are incapable of considering abstractions or offering sage political analysis. Definitely not so. But the few women as competent with the macro as with the micro are only-daughters raised with brothers, older and single, or else found themselves thrust into roles in which they had to behave like men in order to survive and/or protect family members. Having been obliged to both breadwinning and budgeting, and to considering the bigger societal questions men have to deal with every day, they are better equipped than their sisters to make sound decisions about policy, being taught by hard experience that attempting to fix things we don’t like about the world around us often results in making them far worse.

Such women are exceptions because they are not doing what the average woman was designed for, which was to keep a home and raise a family. Instead, out of necessity they are operating like men in the world or, in some cases, like more of a hybrid of the sexes. More than a few wish circumstances had offered them the opportunity to live the way God intended for most women throughout history. A more expansive view of reality is both a blessing and a curse.

Men have no corner on wisdom, but we also tend to better recognize the inherent limitations of human authority structures and to be on guard (in ways many women are not) against the manipulations of those who operate them.

No Rules for One’s Mind

Chesterton writes as follows concerning the average woman behaving according to her natural disposition:

“A woman does treat each person as a peculiar person. In other words, she stands for Anarchy; not anarchy in the sense of having no customs in one’s life (which is inconceivable), but anarchy in the sense of having no rules for one’s mind.”

You could not write this in 2024 and be taken seriously, yet I have found G.K.’s observation repeatedly true of loving, godly women in my life, whether they have spent their years at home or in the work force. They struggle with absolutes and non-negotiables, even to the point of arguing with the word of God over its generalizations and principles. Their commendable desire to salve every wound, take home every stray and fix every source of unhappiness leads them to leap to proposed across-the-board societal solutions no man who has lived in the real world would ever consider, and to offer quick and easy answers to vexed questions that are far worse than the original problem. To leave any sad situation untackled goes against their nature.

A Sad Example

For example, I have a friend with diabetes, hospitalized for over a year. His friends and family are pleading with him to lose 100 pounds. So far, he lacks the self-control to do so. No fewer than five otherwise perfectly sane women have offered some variation of the following: “Why don’t they [the hospital, presumably] just restrict his diet?” All these empathetic ladies would be perfectly happy to see an adult treated like a convict in order to increase his likelihood of a few more years of (largely miserable) existence. The importance of maintaining his right to make his own choices is not even open to discussion, and the fact that he will never follow a regimen forced upon him against his will once he regains a measure of self-determination outside of the hospital is not even considered. The possibility that, as a man, his autonomy is critical to his sense of self is entirely lost on them. There are almost no indignities they would not lovingly perpetrate on my friend to get his weight down to where it needs to be. In his best interests, of course.

That’s what it means to have no rules for one’s mind: the inability to keep a bigger picture in view when confronted with a suboptimal, emotion-producing situation, and set limits on what you are prepared to do to address it.

Attempting to Fix the Unfixable

Now, when you are raising children, enforcing dietary rules is a perfectly acceptable tactic. We trust that becoming accustomed to them will aid the child in making good food decisions as he matures. But adults require different treatment. We ought to give them that dignity even if they have not personally earned it. Men generally consider institutionalizing an otherwise-functional person against his will an imposition of force that is not proportionate to the potential good it may produce. We see the bigger picture, and consider that, so long as he can continue to pay his bills and so long as he is unwilling to consent to a program of coercion, taking away a man’s autonomy is worse than watching him struggle with his weight and ruin his health.

In short, there are evils in the world for which there is no quick fix. The poor you will always have with you. Why? Many have no self-control, and enslaving or institutionalizing them to feed them three squares a day is a solution worse than the problem it proposes to address. The average woman does not realize this. She will tilt at every windmill presented to her.

Another Example

Another example, if you will. Open Bible studies in a home offer opportunity for women to weigh in on the meaning of the word of God in ways they don’t usually in church. I find women will argue with scripture in ways men never will. That’s probably not because we men are all subject to it as we should be, but because at very least we recognize that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. That is to say, we do not base our interpretations of scripture on the exceptional stories people always bring up, which are invariably impossible to prove, disprove or even examine dispassionately. The occasional exception does not invalidate the rule, which, generally speaking, does more good than harm.

In studying 2 Corinthians recently, we discussed the unequal yoke passage. Its message is plainer than plain: “Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.” Never do it. It doesn’t work. God commands otherwise. One woman struggled with this basic point. “I’ve seen many situations,” she opined, “in which two Christians can’t get along either.” Asked to explain her position further, it became clear she entertained the possibility that her perceptions about the failure rate of Christian marriages invalidated the words of an apostle; either that or she was determined to introduce an issue that had nothing to do with the subject at hand.

Scripture and Subjective Impressions

Now, it’s certainly true that there are some unsaved women I get along with better than most Christian women, but that never means I ought to consider marrying one of them instead of a believer. Violating the plain teaching of the Bible always ends badly, period. Christian marriages sometimes end badly, not because of their Christian-ness but because of a deficiency thereof on one side or both. Unequal yokes, in my experience at least, are batting absolute zero over the long haul, and citing a long list of wholly anecdotal “successes” in that department (all of which are invariably works in progress with the ending of the story yet unknown) would not change the fact that we are reading an apostolic command. Disobeying it is never God’s will regardless of real world outcomes.

That’s what it means to have no rules for one’s mind. There is a way around the solipsism problem, and many godly Christian women have found it; that is to acknowledge that a general principle of scripture always trumps my subjective impressions of reality. That’s a truth both men and women need to come back to repeatedly, but I think it is easier to accept for men than women. Further, women who have godly male leadership in their lives tend to see it more easily than those who don’t.

These are not simple issues, and there are few obvious solutions apart from the return of Christ, whereupon nobody’s vote about anything, male or female, will be required.

Household Voting

Back to voting here and now. There’s no point in talking about reforming the political landscape, which is beyond help at this point. If it were up to me, not even all men would get the vote. I would limit it to those who have made a net financial contribution to society over the last four years. That is to say, nobody dependent for their existence on the tax system would be able to tell those paying into it how much they’d like for Christmas this year. Fat chance of that happening!

On a more realistic subject, my brothers and I recently briefly discussed the policy of household voting in churches. Some denominations use this process to ratify the decisions of elders. Rather than one vote per person, members receive one vote per household. That effectively cancels the vote of married women (assuming, rightly or wrongly, that their husbands will represent their interests reasonably), but gives a voice to single women who are effectively heads of households and who have had of necessity to make the sorts of decisions men usually make, and perhaps to develop a broader perspective on decision making. In other words, the leadership of such churches is trusting that these women are more conscious of the potential pitfalls of reflexive change than the average Christian homemaker.

Living in a generation in which the vast majority of non-widows were at home full time under the headship of father or husband, Chesterton might balk at such freedom. My brothers and I were not thrilled by the prospect of voting in churches at all, let alone in some binding way. Let the leadership lead, I say, so long as they consult. The apostles did.

Representation without Courting Disaster

However, there is something biblical to be said for household representation of one sort or another. You may be surprised to find that scripture mentions the five unmarried daughters of Zelophehad on five separate occasions (Numbers 26, 27 and 36, Joshua 17 and 1 Chronicles 7). Their God-given right to inherit property was groundbreaking in its day. God himself commended their chutzpah in asserting their rights. We are living at a time in which there are probably more single women in church than at any other period in history. These women are essentially living like men in our society, with all the freedoms, responsibilities and challenges that brings, and the broadened worldview that comes with it provided they mute their feminine instincts and pay attention. It’s only reasonable they too have a voice, even if there is an element of risk in admitting feminine wisdom outside its area of greatest expertise.

Modern churches need to find some way of dealing with that reality without moving to society’s “sex equality” model, which is not only profoundly unbiblical, but has also proven disastrous for Western civilization. The feminization of our culture is not working for us, and expanding the vote is not a panacea.

Sometimes greater representation creates more problems than it solves.