Mary

Sorry, gengwall; I missed a letter in your name.

Alison, it’s too bad your “mentor” has so little faith in your future husband, as to think he would even want to marry a woman whose independent spirit (probably the mentor distrusts self-sufficient, competent women) had been trained out of her. Who wants to marry someone who’s trying to be something other than her true self?

And your point about comp theory not making sense is important, I think. There are certain theological truths that are beyond our full comprehension in this life, such as the Trinity, the vastness of God’s holiness, the “why of the Atonement, etc. However, anything purported to be biblically sound practice, such as patriarchy, shouldn’t be nonsensical. It’s not enough to say, “I don’t know why God set up gender roles, I just know that patriarchy is the system God commands.” They often claim that these elusive “gender roles” are pre-Fall mandates, but there’s no biblical support for that claim.

I think that there are quite a few comps who know perfectly well that they’re deceiving people by teaching patriarchy as biblical. I suspect, however, that the rank and file Christian who accepts such teaching has not considered that it just might not be biblical after all. A very few do try some version of what they think of as egalitarianism and then return to compism, though when they tell the story it becomes clear that it wasn’t actually biblical equality that they’d tried in the first place. I know of one individual who rejected biblical equality out of disappointment that egalitarians are as fallibly human as that individual is, and who blamed being an egalitarian for a failure to attract a spouse. (I’m not exaggerating; I’ve read it in that individual’s own words, which continue in vindictive anti-egalitarian diatribes even today.) But in general, people who go to the Scriptures willing to be challenged in their beliefs, find that biblical equality makes far more sense than religious patriarchy, which is nothing more than the world’s practice of the (physically and socially) more powerful ruling the less powerful, but dressed in Sunday clothes.