The Daughters Would Like A Word
The girls in my childhood church, Christian Fellowship Center, were not viewed as humans with individual agency. We were ambulatory wombs.
“I was raised to be a wife and a mother.”
opens the documentary For Our Daughters with this description of an all-too-common reality in Christian circles.
One might protest that there’s nothing wrong with being a wife and a mother. As a wife and mother myself, I’d agree!
But when Cait describes her childhood, she is describing something far more controling and abusive. I also bear witness to that reality.
We were raised to be wives and mothers to the exclusion of everything else. The girls in my childhood church, Christian Fellowship Center, were not viewed as humans with individual agency. We were ambulatory wombs. Our purpose in life was to give birth to as many children as possible so that we could out-breed non-Christians and take dominion over our culture.
Two years ago, my childhood church advertised Rachel Jankovic’s Detox for the Modern Mom. Pastor Rick Sinclair and his wife Darlene gushed about Doug Wilson and his daugher Rachel and how this seminar was such a wonderful opportunity for all women. And not just adult women.
“…if you’re a mom and you have daughters at home, you want them to be groomed in a standard of biblical womanhood and motherhood,” Darlene says. Girls like me were groomed at a very young age. Darlene invites mothers to bring daughters as young as 10 years old: “I could say 12, but I know some 10-year-olds who are ready to take this in.”
Why so much pressure to raise girls to be “biblical” wives and mothers? Because that’s how you take dominion in a world that’s crumbling.
We want to be world changers. Our culture is moving fast and furiously in the wrong direction when it comes to training the next generation, when it comes to motherhood and fatherhood, when it comes to man and woman, it’s all crumbling. All around us, we can see it crumbling. We as the church, as the bride of Christ, as believers, have the chance to impact our culture right here in Northern New York. How exciting!
-Darlene Sinclair, May 8, 2022 worship service at North Country Christian Fellowship (CFC Gouverneur)
Christian Fellowship Center and similar churches don’t see women as inherently valuable. We’re valuable because we raise the next generation for a high-stakes battle of good and evil. As Darlene puts it: “when we impact the women around us, we impact the next generation. We can touch this culture here in Northern New York.”
In a world where men and women have separate and unequal status (no matter how hard complementarians protest otherwise), abuse runs rampant. For Our Daughters highlights that reality in excruciating detail.
I saw this when Christian Fellowship Center pastors learned that a man in the congregation had molested his young daughters. Not only did they refuse to report it or alert the congregation for five years, but when the man got a plea deal because of uncooperative witnesses, the church held a special meeting and welcomed him back with open arms.
As Rachael Denhollander says in For Our Daughters, “it’s very emotionally satisfying to accept this ‘reptentance’” because “it gives you this pretty little package with a bow on top where you can say ‘look how beautiful it is, God redeems!’ and it costs you nothing.”
I’ve seen this again and again and again in my work with church abuse survivors.
As Rachael says, “It costs you something to side with the vulnerable and the weak and the oppressed. It costs you nothing to side with the one who’s in power.”
The vulnerable are sacrified on the altar of power. Girls like me—and Cait, and Jules, and Christa, and Tiffany—are ignored, silenced, and all too often abused. This is the state of the church in America.
If you think this kind of misogynist nonsense doesn’t impact you, I’m here to tell you otherwise. I lived that reality. And the people who raised me want to make sure that’s your reality too.