A friend wrote privately to ask me this: “Isn’t there a difference in kind between a woman being the CEO of a homeschool curriculum company and a woman serving as the commander in chief with authority over the generals?” And someone in the comments asked: “what if, instead of a Chemical Engineer husband and a curriculum company running wife — what if what we are looking at is an Army Colonel husband and a Commander-in-Chief wife?”
And the answer is yes, there is a difference, but we have to be prepared for some answers here that don’t appear to be strictly logical. Of course I believe that God’s moral order is all internally consistent, but it doesn’t always initially appear that way. As Rita Mae Brown put it, if the world were a logical place, men would ride side saddle.
To illustrate, I don’t have any problem with girls competing athletically. But you cannot just say that “basketball is basketball,” and throw them all in there to compete like generic human beings. No, if you are going to have a girls’ basketball team, then one of your goals should be to teach the girls to play and to compete like ladies. If masculine patterns of competition are just accepted across the board, the results will be appalling. In some sports, the girls should compete differently than the boys, and in others, it is grotesque for them to compete at all — in shot put, say, or boxing.
This is what I meant by the appearance of being contradictory. I don’t have the same problem with a woman learning fencing as I do with a woman boxing. But that’s alright. If it makes you feel better, you can call me names, and the comments are open.
Now it is the same sort of thing with women in positions of authority over men. Some of those positions distort the very nature of the relationship between men and woman (a job equivalent of the shot put), and some of them don’t.
My friend asked if I agreed with John Piper at this point:
“The God-given sense of responsibility for leadership in a mature man will not generally allow him to flourish long under personal, directive leadership of a female supervisor. J. I. Packer suggested that ‘a situation in which a female boss has a male secretary’ puts a strain on the humanity of both . . . I think this would be true in other situations as well. Some of the more obvious ones would be in military combat settings if women were positioned so as to deploy and command men; or in professional baseball if a woman is made the umpire to call balls and strikes and frequently to settle heated disputes among men. And I would stress that this is not necessarily owing to male egotism, but to a natural and good penchant given by God” (John Piper, Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, p. 52).
Now I do agree with this principle, but we have to take care not to apply it woodenly. There is nothing in the Bible that expressly prohibits a man from being a secretary for a woman, but I still don’t see anything good coming out of that. Neither would I recommend a man becoming a pedicurist so that he could paint the ladies’ toes all day. But I could see an aristocratic lady, to the manor born, giving instructions to the head gardener about what to do with the rhododendrons. That doesn’t seem creepy at all. It seems more like the natural order of things. To some this will just seem arbitrary, but I actually believe there is a deep structure here that makes good sense of all of it. If Lydia from the book of Acts was typical, her “household” probably had a couple hundred people in it, including grown men. And if she told those men where to stack the dyed bundles of cloth, more power to her.
That said, I am appalled at how women have been put into combat roles, and even more appalled at how quickly so-called conservatives accommodated themselves to it. A woman leading men in combat is an abomination (Dt. 22:5). God hates it, and so should we. But this is quite different from a decision being made at court, resulting in battle elsewhere (Esther 8:5). Esther was quite successful at court politics, and her successes there resulted in victorious combat elsewhere for the Jews. Way to go, Esther. Bathsheba does something similar (1 Kings 1:31).
Warriors would not do well at all if led into hand-to-hand combat by a woman. Gkkk. They can do very well indeed when they go and fight for the queen, at the direction of the queen. You might say this is not logical, but it is not a logic problem. The men who fought for Elizabeth I, and for Victoria, for that matter, were among the most masculine the world has ever seen.
So what if a woman were Commander-in-Chief, and her husband were an Army Colonel? Actually, I would far prefer an arrangement like that. If he were a successful interior designer, we would have mega-problems. If he were a colonel, it would seem to me something like it would have been if Sir Philip Sidney had married Elizabeth I, which would have been absolutely fine by me. “Go right ahead” about sums up my views.
We need to recognize that civil government has a separate set of divine authorizations from God. Too many Christians assume that the family has a separate covenantal existence in the mind of God (which it does), but that civil government is just “an arrangement we came up with.” I don’t believe this latter idea is true at all. This is where my illustration of a private curriculum business doesn’t answer all the questions. With the private business, the husband has a final authority over the whole thing. He could decide to sell it, or shut it down, etc. But if a husband granted his blessing on his wife running for president, and if she were elected, a certain measure of authority passes out of his hands when she takes the oath of office. There is overlap between two separate authorities, but there are also areas where they don’t overlap. This takes wisdom, and this is why which woman and which man are the first to do this is so important.
When she is making a decision that she has the responsibility to make, he is still her head. He is still responsible for her personally. He sees that the Secretary of Education is a skunk, and she is not so sure. But — and this is crucial — this should not be taken as him being the shadow president. That is not what he would be. He should be the president’s husband.
And if the whole thing went to his head, and he told his wife that she should declare martial law, abrogate the Consitution, cancel the next election, and make him a Grand Duke, her responsibility should be to disobey her husband — and have him arrested.