Community -- Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

Traditional Family Values

The future communities of the Ideal World will be safe and loving for women and children. It will honor the differences between men and women. Not only is there "absolute sex," there is also absolute sexual roles. Excellent books on these absolute Biblical roles are Helen Andelin's Fascinating Womanhood and Aubrey Andelin's Man of Steel and Velvet.

These ideal communities will live by traditional family values. Women will help each other to be excellent at their careers of homemaking and community service. In the sick feminist world of today, millions of women leave their home to compete with men which demoralizes and castrates them. They leave their children all day at impersonal day care or immoral public schools. Communities centered on True Parent's message of traditional family values will be a place of true love. True love means massive love.

Eventually the harsh idea of sending high school students to live years on end in Korea or at the UC high school, New Eden Academy that is on the campus of the University of Bridgeport will pass. Unificationist women will band together to do homeschooling in the common house. The kids will learn right values and get loved all day by people who adore them, as well as learn the three r's and facts about the world.

Women will also take care of the elderly. In God's communities the weak are protected and loved. Old folks will be lovingly cared for at home or in a nursing home in the community. It is too much to ask women to care for children and the elderly all alone in isolated homes in the suburb. One woman cannot always cook, clean, teach homeschooling, care for the aged, and still find time to witness, mentor other women, pursue some hobby and help others in charity. With the strength in numbers of a close community, there will always be nutritious meals on time, school in session, and the elderly watched 24 hours a day.

THE TRUE WOMAN

Susan Hunt in The True Woman has a chapter titled "Domesticity." She says, "This chapter is an affirmation of home. I promise I am not going to say that you must rush out and buy Martha Stewart's latest video and learn to grow bug-free roses, match your plaids and florals, prepare gourmet lunches, and stencil the lunch bags." Martha Stewart, by the way, is a terrible role model. She is the most famous woman in America today on external homemaking. Internally she is empty to the core. She has to no husband because he left this dynamo businesswoman and married her young assistant. She hasn't got a clue to what a loving home is all about. She is called "America's favorite homemaker" but sadly she is the epitome of someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The first focus of a woman is to have godly values -- something Stewart will never comment on. Susan Hunt talks about the spiritual ambiance of the home. It should be as nice as possible externally, especially clean, but the emphasis is on the spiritual.

DOMESTICITY

Domesticity means a devotion to home life. It pertains to the family or household. The strongest, most definitive statement on domesticity was made by Jesus: 'Do not let your hearts be troubled. ... In my Father's house are many rooms. ... I am going there to prepare a place for you" (John 14:1-2).

The virtue of domesticity begins with an untroubled heart that ... is focused on our heavenly home. This is accomplished as we reflect the character of Jesus in our homes and churches, thus making them homey places where troubled hearts find rest and safety." There is too much macho and steel in the UC. It needs a balancing of feminine and velvet.

This definition of domesticity is seen in the proverb: 'The wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down' (Proverbs 14:1). This is obviously not the physical structure. It is the building of loving, caring relationships in the home and church. This virtue is tied to wisdom -- that way of thinking about and reacting to life's experiences that reflects the teaching of a personal God who is holy, righteous, and just and who expects those living in covenant relationship with Him to reflect His character in the practical affairs of life.

The following quotes from the nineteenth-century preacher John Angell James underscores the high priority the Puritans put on family and on the woman's role in the family in his book Female Piety written in 1860.

[We can't help but mention that a theme in our books is that we often have to go to previous centuries to find truth. We should be humble to the truth, no matter where it comes from.]

"... home, sweet home, is the sphere of wedded woman's mission ... to make one such home a seat of holiness and happiness; to fill one such sphere with an influence so sweet and sacred; to throw the fascination of connubial feeling and of maternal influence over one such community; to irradiate so many countenances with delight; to fill so many hearts with content, and to prepare so many characters for their future part in life; such an object would be deemed by an angel worth an incarnation upon earth.

"... the springs of an empire's prosperity lie in the domestic constitution, and in well-trained families. ... Even one such family is a contribution to the majestic flow of a nation's greatness. Can such families exist without a woman's care, and oversight, and wisdom? Has it not grown into a proverb, that home has ever been the nursery of great men, and their mothers their instructresses? It may be said as a general principle, that woman is not only the mother of the body, but of the character of her children. To her is first entrusted the instruction of the mind, the cultivation of the heart, the formation of the life. Thought, feeling, will, imagination, virtue, religion, or the contrary moral tendencies, all germinate under her fostering influence. 'The greatest power in the moral world is that which a mother exercises over her young child.' The decisive moment in education is the starting point. The dominant direction which is to determine the whole course of life, lies concealed in the first years of infancy; and those belong to the mother.

"I very distinctly perceive, and as impressively feel, the importance of the female character on account of its influence upon the well-being of society. And it is clear to me, that woman's is a domestic mission, which is to affect society through the medium of family influence. As she fills up her place with wisdom and propriety, so will she promote the well-being of the community. Nor is it society only, but the Church of Christ, that is concerned in, and promoted by, the female character."

Friedan's Attack on Femininity

Hunt goes on to say, "Even Christian women often cringe at such notions because we live in a culture that degrades domestic virtues. George Grant has written that Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique 'warned that among other things depression, addiction, and even suicide stalk women who spend too much time in their home harboring Victorian ideals. Perhaps feeling that she wasn't quite making herself clear on the issue, she went on to argue that none but the mentally retarded could find housework fulfilling, and that women who accept the role of housewife are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own deaths in Nazi gas chambers. In the days that followed, Friedan's rhetoric contributed mightily to the editorial profile of virtually all of the women's magazines. ... Each gleefully trampled upon everything associated with domesticity with the pious assurance that such things were not merely beneath the dignity of women, they were downright menacing.'"

Grant goes on to say that one indication of the backlash to this hatred of homemakers is the popularity of a magazine titled Victoria that shows the beauty of domesticity.

MOTHERS AT HOME

The organization Mothers At Home (www.mah.org) has books on domesticity that help women who stay home feel good about themselves against the dark forces that dominate our culture that puts down stay-at-home moms.

NO SPECIFIC AGE

In the book What's a Smart Woman Like You Doing At Home? we read that "There is no specific age when a child stops needing you. It is ironic that a nation that has developed a veritable fetish of 'bonding' with an infant at birth advises us of the wisdom of leaving them as early as a tender six weeks of age. As child-care 'experts' conduct studies and draft papers and haggle over pinpointing the time at which a child no longer needs our full-time attention, mothers themselves have long known the answer."

Children need a stay-at-home mom their entire life. Even when they are grown. They will always need to be focused on. How can a woman be a true grandmother when she works? She can't. She is divided. It is all right for men to work, but women should not because their husband and children are their career -- not being with other men during the day. The authors quote some women about how age does not matter. Here is one example: "Dee Costa of Leona Valley, California, did not go back to work briefly. 'I am forty-seven and have three grown children, all married and doing fine. I was home with them until the youngest was sixteen; then I listened to the world and sought a career so I could be fulfilled. My sixteen-year-old daughter became very depressed and I knew something was wrong. She needed me as much at sixteen years as she did at sixteen months.'"

SUBMISSION

Hunt ends her book with a chapter titled "Submission" saying, "If the defining virtues of the true woman are provocative, this particular virtue out-provokes the others. The new woman cannot bear the sound of this word. Yet without trying to be contentious, I am declaring my allegiance to this virtue by stating unequivocally that this is the defining virtue of the defining virtues. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is the watershed issue for the true woman. Submission goes to the center of our heart; it is the infrastructure of our obedience. There is probably nothing that exposes our hearts as plainly and painfully as our attitude toward submission.

BY DESIGN

"As I said [in By Design]: Headship and submission are two sides of one coin. They go together. But neither is exempt if the other forfeits.

"Headship and submission begin with a spirit of humility: 'God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Submit yourselves, then, to God.' (James 4:6-7)

"Submission, whether it is to God, to one another, to husbands, or to male leadership in the Church, is a grace-empowering virtue of humility and reverence for God. It has nothing to do with superior/inferior status or equality."

She continues in The True Woman, "Submission is not about behaviors; it is about character.

"... every woman is not to submit to every man, but every married woman is to submit to her husband. The scriptural command to women is that we are to 'be submissive to your husbands' (1 Peter 3:1). In Titus 2 we read that older women are to teach younger women to 'be subject to their husbands.'"

BAD HUSBANDS

We have to use common sense here and not give the impression that every married woman is to follow her husband. There are crazy, evil, sick, irresponsible, drunken, low-life pigs for men out there and a woman should not follow these jerks anywhere. If a man is incompetent to lead, he should not live with his wife. Other men and their wives should help the poor woman until the bastard gets his act together. They should not divorce, but separate until the man grows up and gets his act together.

The problem is deciding what constitutes bad behavior. Violence and extreme immaturity are obvious, but we must be careful to see that oftentimes women in our culture judge men too quickly and too harshly. Many times it is they who are the cause of the man turning to drink and drugs and laziness. Each marriage is different and must be handled on a case-by-case basis. The best place for this to happen would be in a community where there are elders to help who live a few steps away.

Hunt ends her book The True Woman saying, "God said that man needs a helper. The true woman celebrates this calling and becomes affirming rather than adversarial, compassionate rather than controlling, a partner rather than a protagonist. She becomes substantively rather than superficially submissive.

"The true woman is not afraid to place herself in a position of submission. She does not have to grasp; she does not have to control. Her fear dissolves in the light of God's covenant promise to be her God and to live within her. Submission is simply a demonstration of her confidence in the sovereign power of the Lord God.

"The true woman 'opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy' (Proverbs 31:20) with freedom and beauty because she has submitted to her husband and the ordained male leadership in the church."

Elisabeth Elliot says of Hunt's book, "Striving to be a true woman of God? This book is a valuable guide." Elisabeth Elliot is a wonderful author on men/women's roles and said the following true words about the deadly ideology of feminism: "The feminist movement is a Marxist movement. It is thoroughly godless. No wonder they have no solutions to offer to the restlessness and the anxiety, and the loneliness, and the fear and the perplexity. No wonder nothing has changed on those fronts in the 20 or 30 years since feminism began to take hold of our minds."

D. James Kennedy praises Hunt's The True Woman saying, "This book goes to the center of all that it means to be a godly woman. Every American woman should have the opportunity to read it."

We write about traditional roles for women in our book Cultural War Since 1848. In it we have a chapter on how depraved society has gotten by having women as cops and combat fighter pilots.

I WANT EQUALITY -- I WANT YOUR JOB

Donna Otto gives some good advice for Christian women who make homemaking a career in her book The Stay At Home Mom (1991). In one insightful part she explains her duty as a wife is to help her husband who must battle it out with other women and feminists in our disorderly world: "For over 20 years women have been yelling in my husband's ear, 'I want equality. I want your job. I want your salary. I'm as good as you. I'm better than you.' Day in and day out he is faced with this kind of pressure in the business world. His response as a godly man is to be kind and tender-hearted toward the demanding women who work around him.

"But when he comes home, I want to make sure he feels supported as a man, a husband, a father, and a fellow believer in Jesus Christ. It is my desire to demonstrate that support by creating an environment in which he can rest, relax, reveal himself, and restore himself. His constant provision for our family in financial, emotional, and spiritual ways is a daily blessing to me. In return, it is my desire to be for him the comfort and support I feel God has called to be in his life. I hope you have a similar desire about the man who lifted your veil."