Columnist Scott Dickensheets: A gracious view on matters of submission

Scott Dickensheets

Friday, June 12, 1998 | 10:15 a.m.

(The Southern Baptist Convention) amended its statement of beliefs for the first time in 35 years to include a statement that says women should "submit graciously" to their husbands.

-- Associated Press, Wednesday

"I'VE BEEN telling you that for years," I said to my wife as she helped herself to dinner the other night. "In fact, I think you should graciously submit that plate of food to me right now."

From her I got the rolled eyes and screw-you look I deserved. She is Southern Baptist, all right, but no gracious submitter -- I wouldn't have been inclined to marry her if she was. I wasn't looking for a sidekick.

This week, the Southern Baptist Convention codified its definition of what a family is and isn't. Is: a heterosexual couple headed by a man. Isn't: anything else, including, for instance, a widow with children -- there's no "family" in "The Partridge Family." It took these actions to hold the line against the decline of family values, eroded daily by pop culture, casual relationships, a laissez-faire attitude toward responsibility, and Disneyland. It's in character with the church's conservative hardening in recent years, and it wouldn't bother me much if the SBC hadn't so obviously meant it as a political statement, a family values challenge to the wayward rest of us.

"There's nothing new about it," boomed the amiable Rev. Jaffus Haley of Calvary Baptist Church in Las Vegas. "It's just the same old story from the word of God." "It's not a controversy in our church," says John Mark Simmons, pastor of Henderson's Highland Hills Baptist, although he admits some younger congregationalists, steeped in contemporary feminist culture, might not agree so readily.

The pastors say people misunderstand that whole "submit graciously" business. "It's not about superiority or inferiority, although that's what the world thinks," Haley says. They provide explanatory metaphors: "At your job, you have people over you," Haley says. "But they're not better than you. For things to function, people have different positions."

"The husband is the pilot," Simmons says. "The wife is the co-pilot. One is not better than the other." They are equal partners, he says. "It's not about the husband ordering the wife around, it's not about the woman being a doormat."

Call me a soft-shelled liberal or a hard-boiled heathen, but, as the husband of a Southern Baptist woman, I'm not inclined to agree. Take Rev. Haley's corporate-family model (husband as benevolent CEO, wife as vice president in charge of domestic operations). In any company, the top man gets better benefits, pricier office furniture, greater credit for the company's success -- a sweeter deal all around. And while pilot and co-pilot sit side by side, there's no doubt about which one is driving. Nonetheless, Simmons is passionate about his belief in their equality, even as he says, "When it comes to making a decision, the husband is the leader and the woman should submit to that."

It's in the Bible! "God made the man the head of the home," Haley says. "It's no big deal, not for us Christians, anyway."

He's right -- it is the word of God, at least according to a statement released by His spokesman Paul, who wrote, in Ephesians 5:22-23, "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." It's important, Simmons says, not to excerpt this passage without noting that husbands are also commanded to "love your wives just as Christ loved the church ... husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies."

Alas, the ground starts to shift quickly. A few verses later, in Ephesians 6:5, Paul also said, "Slaves, obey your Earthly masters with respect and fear." My point being that times change. We've discarded slavery and, therefore, Ephesians 6:5. So why tighten the grip on 5:22-23? It seems to me the challenge of the new millennium is how to expand our humanity, not constrict it. I'm for whatever family works for you: a traditional mom 'n' pop operation, an ad hoc alliance of friends and lovers, a union with a lesbian sitcom star.

Whatever the hereafter holds for my wife -- presumably a heaven of eternal shopping and sugar-free foods that don't taste sugar-free -- this is her one crack at this life. It doesn't seem right that she should spend it in gracious submission to anyone, me included. Lord knows I wouldn't want to.