Married Couples Should Be Led by Husband, Say Southern Baptists

Married Couples Should Be Led by Husband, Say Southern Baptists
By GUSTAV NIEBUHR

This appeared in the New York Times on June 10, 1998

SALT LAKE CITY -- The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination and an increasingly conservative force among American religious organizations, amended its essential statement of beliefs Tuesday to include a declaration that a woman should "submit herself graciously" to her husband's leadership and a husband should "provide for, protect and lead his family."

SALT LAKE CITY -- Following is an excerpt from a 250-word declaration on family life adopted Tuesday by the Southern Baptist Convention:

The husband and wife are of equal worth before God. Both bear God's image but each in differing ways. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect and to lead his family. A wife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being "in the image of God" as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his "helper" in managing their household and nurturing the next generation.

The amendment, a 250-word declaration on family life, was adopted by a show of hands vote at the Baptists' annual meeting here as an addition to the denomination's basic theological statement of beliefs, the Baptist Faith and Message Statement. The vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the amendment and an attempt to soften the language was soundly turned back.

The amendment ranks as among the most prominent statements on family life by a major religious organization in recent years. The Southern Baptist denomination claims nearly 16 million members, among them President Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.

While it says that husband and wife have "equal worth" before God, the choice of words about marital relations also makes it one of the most conservative of such statements. The amendment relies on such biblical passages as Ephesians 5:22-33, which compares the husband-wife relationship to that of Christ ruling the church, but which is today seldom interpreted so literally among mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics.

For example, U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, in a pastoral message on family life four years ago, said that marital roles, although different, should be characterized by "mutual submission" of a husband and wife to each other.

Paige Patterson, a seminary president from North Carolina who was elected Tuesday as the denomination's president, said the amendment was a response to "a time of growing crisis in the family." He also said that people who found the language of the amendment provocative are those "who happen not to be real familiar with the Bible."

R. Albert Mohler, Jr. president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said the amendment was based on a Southern Baptist belief in the literal interpretation of scripture. He said the submission of wives to their husbands is "not a modern idea" but "is clearly revealed in scripture."

Speaking of amendment, he said "the secular world may hear it as strange, but it is, we believe, God's pattern."

Because the Southern Baptist Convention is a creedless organization, no Baptist is required to agree with the Faith and Message Statement or the current amendment. But the statement is nonetheless important on two grounds. It stands as a central theological proclamation for the denomination, and Southern Baptist employees, seminary professors and often ministers are expected to agree with it.

One who criticized the amendment was Robert Parham, executive director of the independent Baptist Center for Ethics in Nashville, Tenn. "They hope to make June Cleaver the biblical model for motherhood, despite numerous biblical references to women who worked outside the home," he said.

Recent Baptist conventions have passed resolutions that express a sense of the denomination on social issues such as opposition to abortion, but have said relatively little about the family. The Faith and Message Statement is a broad theological statement dealing with God and church and until now has not included social stands. Until Tuesday, the message statement had been amended only once, in 1963, when a section on higher education was added.

Amending the statement represents a triumph for the denomination's conservative leadership, which came to power in 1979 and has gradually shifted Southern Baptist agencies and seminaries to the right. Theological moderates have remained within the denomination, but many have started their own seminaries and other institutions, and they have also largely quit coming to the annual conventions.

Tuesday's vote helps reinforce the image of Southern Baptists as staking out some of the most conservative positions among evangelical Protestants, a growing group who account for about a quarter of the American population, according to recent polls. A year ago, Southern Baptists called for a boycott of the Walt Disney Co., alleging that the entertainment giant condoned homosexuality. In 1996, the annual convention voted to appoint a missionary specifically to evangelize Jews, a move that provoked outrage among Jewish groups.

The family life amendment is "different from the kind of mainstream evangelical position," said Nancy Ammerman, a professor of the sociology of religion at Hartford Seminary, who has written extensively on the Southern Baptists. Many evangelicals, she said, have moved toward a practical understanding of male "headship" within family life that "includes a strong dose of men and women consulting with each other, and engaging in mutual discernment of God's will for the family."

But random interviews among women attending the convention, conducted before the vote, suggested that the amendment was seen as consistent with Baptist teachings. "I think Christ intended the man to be head of the home," said Bea Wallace, 71, of Blackfoot, Idaho.

Rosie Conrad, 55, of Pine Bluff, Ark., said that if a husband "is the Christian leader he should be," then a wife would willingly follow his lead. To that, Mary Hilburn, 57, of Little Rock added that that did not mean a man could be a "dictator" in his home. "But the husband is to be the umbrella and we are to be under that," she added.

The Faith and Message Statement was originally written in 1925, in the midst of an intense controversy within Protestantism between liberals and fundamentalists over how to interpret the Bible.

The current amendment was drafted by a seven-member committee drawn from among the denomination's top leaders or their relatives. One of the two women on the committee was Dorothy Patterson, Paige Patterson's wife.

The amendment states that the family is the "foundational institution" of society, and is composed of people related by "marriage, blood or adoption." It implicitly rejects divorce, the validity of homosexual unions and abortion. It says a husband should love his wife as Christ loves the church, and a woman should submit to her husband's "servant leadership" as "the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ." Servant leadership means leading with humility. The wife, the amendment says, "has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his 'helper' in managing their household and nurturing the next generation."

The vote to adopt the amendment may also have had a geographic significance as well. This week's convention is the first Southern Baptists have ever held in Salt Lake City, headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Bill Leonard, dean of Wake Forest Divinity School and a historian of the Southern Baptist Convention, said that a conservative approach to family issues was "the high ground that the Mormons have claimed." He added: "The one place that Baptists had to admit that Mormons had something was in the strength of their families."

Prior to the meeting, the Southern Baptists' domestic missionary agency, the North American Mission Board, printed and distributed pamphlets critical of Mormon theology and offering guidelines on how to evangelize Mormons.

Since last Friday, many hundreds of Southern Baptist volunteers have held rallies, block parties and other events, as well as gone knocking on doors seeking to persuade local residents, Mormon and non-Mormon alike, to convert.