Towards a More Perfect Representation

Understanding Functional Authority

In the last issue I unduly favored the say-so of Sir Walter Scott. I would like to give that honor to G.K. Chesterton, not because he was always right or was free of intellectual dishonesty in his religion, but because he had the courage to be outspoken on a number of issues and in a manner prophetic beyond his years. His argument is that the franchise is contrary to the benefit of women is based on the separate attitudes and responsibilities and spheres of the public and private house. Government, the use of coercion to order society, is a dirty business. It is meant to be. It is not supposed to be cleaned and tidied up, he says. By denying women the public house, they are not being denied the civic process and actualization as citizens so much as being protected from the grim reality of sharing in the collective conscious of the executioner or lynch mob. Man is meant to be coercive and be coerced; woman is a creature of persuasion. Man barks, woman alternatively sooths or cajoles to achieve her end. His is a decent argument at points, but breaks down because of the democratic basis. You see, the same thing could not be said of the Church, that it is a dirty business of coercion so women ought not to be priestesses. And the "ought" carries little weight for the serious scale of society we are dealing with.

Neither does one argue that women ought not to be involved in politics (sacred or secular) because they would not be good at it. The common preconception associated with this view is that men are just naturally better equipped in the brain. "The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man attaining to a higher eminence in whatever he takes up, whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands." This is the sentiment of Darwin in The Descent of Man. It is not my position, for the issue of the woman's role in society is not a question of ability, or else there were be exceptions galore.

Finally, and most importantly, I am contending that equality is not one monolithic value. It may be a bad thing in some cases and there may be different applications to its meaning. Equality in one sense does not guarantee it universally. Napoleon crowned himself as leader not of France, but of the French, and he was seen as the people's democratic hero. Of course, elsewhere in Europe he was seen as the antichrist. Conversely, Christ laid down His crown, office, or form of rule to take on the form of a servant (Phil. 2:5,6), yet never lost essential equality with God. This is true. Otherwise, we would be left to believe by the egalitarians that if we are not in control, we are slaves, if not sadists, then masochists. Thus, the feminist pushes to relegate child-rearing to the State, and to goad women out of the house and into the corporate struggle for superiority. However, despite the rhetoric against the "institutionalization of the oppression of women — especially the institution of marriage" (qtd. in Lutzer 91), all women just wish to make a way to where women are infinitely valued for who they are. The disillusionment that goes with their failed lobbying and legislative attempts to restore order to society and thus to the family has diseased their minds into supplanting the world with a matriarchal order. But the path forward is to first go back Genesis.

In Genesis 1, God created Man in His own image, male and female, He created them. In essence then, they are different, but equal. In Genesis 2, a fuller story is given, and the narrative shifts from that of the whole of creation to the scene of mankind, telling that man was made first, and then woman thereafter as a helpmeet. In function then, they are different and unequal. If we are to see society transformed, it will not be done through politics. Begin with the family, woman, by praying for the husband's responsible leadership so you can be free to follow. And, you man, die to yourself and model Christ, knowing you incur a stricter judgment.

Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Women obviously did not agree with Chesterton's protective (some argue ‘condescending') position and would have loathed Darwin's naturalist blindfold. Unfortunately, she also does not consider arguments of functional authority or of spiritually reforming the family to be worthy reasons to take for a guide. She, in fact, has only one touchstone: Reason itself. In championing many reasonable remedies to the enforced ignorance of women in her day, and committing a few hasty generalizations along the way, she nevertheless was opposed to much that characterizes the modern feminist movement. There is also a small, easily missed sentence: "I may excite laughter, by dropping a hint, which I mean to pursue, some future time, for I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government." There was a short time before the American War for Independence that women voted in Virginia and New Jersey. In 1776, sixteen years previous to Wollstonecraft, Abigail Adams was more adamant in writing to her husband, "Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound to obey the laws in which we have no voice or representation."

Now there are really two arguments the early suffragists employed to gain the vote. They practically breathed the language of the Declaration of Independence, Social Contract theory, and ‘Enlightenment' principles in general to claim that the powers that be derive their authority by the "consent of the governed". Woman are of those governed, ergo they have the natural rights to participate directly in government. Secondly and more in the forefront, they claimed that the vote was expedient to social reform. All the evils of the capitalist-industrial age like the factory labor laws, the powers of booze and tobacco that harmed their families, etc. were not being fixed by men, but they, the distaff and spindle, were ready to stand in the gap for such social concerns. A corollary to this was the fact that they saw the vote as the best means of ensuring their own protection (i.e., intellectual or legal). If those concerns that affected the family were important, those that immediately affected women, like property laws for single women or contraband contraceptions, could only be amended by direct action.

However, here is the rub. The idea of the franchise can only be derived from democratic presuppositions, just as our Republic was written upon the self-evident laws of Nature and Nature's God. In this fashion, we could say that feminism, the daughter of democracy, arose to fix the imbalances caused by the prevalence of industrial capitalism and the religion of secular humanism. This is where Mrs. Adams is getting her ideas about the universal tyranny of man. She did not understand the hierarchical conception, or else ignored it, for when she threatened rebellion, she was in fact already in rebellion vis a vis pretending she and he were equals and thus his inferior treatment of her was illegitimate (thus the tyrant allegation). In the same way, Wollstonecraft sees lack of suffrage as unreasonable because it strikes her as "arbitrary." She reads preferential capriciousness instead of intrinsic roles. What is passed by is the singular idea already mentioned, which I incidentally first learned from a woman, that inequality in one respect does not mean inequality in all respects, or, in other words, inferiority in authority, rule, or function does not mean inferiority of value or essence.

If we were to approach the constitution of government or the human family from a monarchial or republican model, or even the spiritual analogue of Christ and Church, we come up with very different results than the democrat would draw. Egalitarianism and democracy are as hard to unlearn as macroevolution. Both have been ground into us without the choice of any other ideologies since we were young. It pervades our society because it has invaded our home life. Douglas Wilson notes in Angels in the Architecture, "Egalitarianism may be seen as the very skeletal structure of modernity. . . We see every relationship as a competition or struggle for power between individuals. The man has his perspective and the woman hers. With this assumption we then see the Scriptural requirement of submission as though God weighs in on the side of the males. We believe it is saying that whenever there is a disagreement, the man as an individual gets his way. But this is not the sense at all. The man is an individual, a private person, but as a husband he also holds a public office. He is invested with this office; he is called to wear a metaphorical robe. He and his wife are both individual citizens of this small republic, and they each have their own individual perspectives. But he is also a public person, and is called to function in that role as a representative head of his household. In a very important sense, he is that household. It is this sense of familial identification which modern men have lost."

Chesterton is more helpful in the pushing functional argument as related to the public/private house idea:

"For in the average human house there is one hole by which money comes in and a hundred by which it goes out; man has to do with the one hole, woman with the hundred . . . Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs . . . How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness."

But, some say, if women don't do this task, who will? It is the same idea with parachurch organizations, and there are a myriad of them. Their intention surely is noble: to fill the gap left by the Church proper. However, in filling these areas of ministry, in youth work, evangelism, discipleship, prayer, benevolence ministries, or church-planting, they have actually subsumed every role and responsibility of the Church, allowing her to keep the convenient excuse in her sloth and disobedience. Thus, both parties suffer since the organization is not built organically like the Church ought to be and the Church is cut off from the life-blood of her calling, left only with the much vaunted sermon hour, glitzy worship time, and second-hand Sunday School.

The Representative Fallacy

For some, convinced that each individual can only represent his or her own interest, the question lingers of why select Congressmen should be trusted to handle with fairness issues like child support and violence against women? They support the franchise for women since only women can represent women's interests, and protest what I call "domestication without representation". Unfortunately, the logical conclusion of this line of thinking brings to awareness a multitude of other under-represented groups. Those who are underneath the age of eighteen, for example, are enslaved to conditions voted on them by people perhaps only one day older. Working immigrants as well are unfairly exploited in economic contracts, which only citizens can bargain over. This is the fallacy Mrs. Wollstonecraft and Mrs. Adams were caught in. If we were to take the democratic "consent of the governed" argument to its conclusion, it seems odd we have not made the vote universal without regard to age, intelligence, or education. But of course it is ludicrous to have a ten-year-old vote, even though his concern for politics may exceed that of the mass of modern apathetic voters, for it would in fact mean he ought to be allowed to strike his parents with a crimson vote, or, in the case of the immigrant, to stir up strife by voting for higher taxes or a war in negation of the wishes of the rest of the citizenry. Each is but another manifestation of the democratic specter Marx prophesied had come to destroy hierarchy by removing classes and bringing absolute equality.

When a man votes inclusively with his wife's banner under his own, he mirrors her voice. When a woman votes the same as her husband, she is merely adding to his own decision with a redundant, though demonstrably vocal, one of her own. But when she votes contrarily, and removes her banner to be her own army, she cancels out the vote of her whole family. Or, if they have children that are of age that are still underneath the father's roof, the political concerns in each family would be as varying and opposing as the number of its members, and the house that is America would merely be a divided and chaotic platform for special interests. It is like the amphisbaena with a head at each end. You mean you haven't heard of such a creature? It is because it is only legendary; such a fantastic anatomy would devour itself. So it is with a sexually dualistic society. After addressing the Platonic theory of hierarchy, philosopher Douglas Soccio illustrates the deadlock: "Consider the family as a functional system: If young children are allowed to spend money, determine bedtimes, and so on, the whole family suffers . . . If every family member is free to pick and choose what he or she feels like doing . . . there can be no family" (164). Any architect can see that when the foundation pillars have been dug up and there is no designated capstone, a collapse is inevitable.

Finally there is talk about of Hilary Rodham Clinton running for president and all the inevitableness of having a woman in the Oval Office. However, if I may pose a question of that inevitability: why should a woman have the vote if she cannot vote herself (meaning womankind) into the presidency? What is the point of supplying the means if you did not intend for the ends? Here again, we are confronted with the claims of a sexually dualistic society, which would demand not only a woman in the presidency, but the absolute equality of a dual presidency with a man, unless the country would go for a hermaphrodite. Indeed, racial egalitarianism would actually demand no less than a dozen of simultaneous presidents for every shade in the spectrum since, apparently, a single person can only be fair to others of his or her own gender, race, creed, and shoe-size. In the final assessment, how is it known when total affirmative equilibrium and unilateral action has been achieved between all parties and you have pleased all the people all of the time?

We have looked at the Creation order and doctrine of headship. We have examined how a family, or any body, must function according to division of labor and how this system is canceled by having one too many heads. Finally there is the slippery slope that shows the logic of wanting to have women presiding over school boards, and if school boards, then why not pastorates, and if pastorates, what qualitative objection is there to the presidency? But I come now to the main reason for this article, which is the dying state of marriage today. If the fundamentals of society really do rest upon the family and the government of families really does depend on the truth of marriage, then there is no greater concern this side of salvation than the responsibilities delegated to husband and to wife. For there are two paths to take and only two: either those powers or rights are the product of society and circumstance (despite some platitudes of inalienable inherency) or else derived from their Creator, delegated from an objective spiritual reality above and elucidated in an incarnational reality here on earth. As the state of matrimony sinks further into obscurity (Just two? How about three or four in marriage?) and derision (Why bother with patriarchal traditions of the dead?) and defeatism (We tried, after all), the only answers we have is to throw out a confident shrug, guess and check ourselves to see what feels right, and burn down any intrusive busy-bodies that suggest fault. But there is fault. And it is other people's business how you interpret husband-wife dynamics. That is why I have drawn my conclusions from Christianity. In an unbroken chain, it is apparent that we did not create ourselves, did not decide our country, family, race, and gender, did not decide how much time we are given to live, or the nature of beauty, truth, and goodness. Order and degrees of honor are here despite our wishes. Love is never free no matter how much the hormones of this generation or any other protest. ("What do you have that you did not receive?" the apostle asks.) So if we wish to reclaim marriage, family, and government, it is incumbent upon us to decide a priori whether they follow our democratic convenience or God's representative covenant. France, that bulwark of democratic raving in the eighteenth century, has at last count gone through five republics. The United States, one of the most steadfast of countries in the world, has seen its constitution striked and amended a couple dozen times. The Ten Commandments may be removed from every public ediface, and there are thousands of buildings yet to be censored, but it has never once needed updating. When Adam daft and Eve span, who then was a gentleman? Why, Adam was, and Eve was his lady. She was made for him, and he for God. The garden, the wide world, was his property, leased by God, and repossessed the moment their votes divided against Him and each other.