19th Century Marriage Manuals: Advice for Young Husbands

The destruction of Western society's moral backbone through the degeneration of traditional marriage such that the Victorian account reads anachronistic to a modern reader, is, I'd venture, a relatively positive development. The conception of traditional marriage that cruder familialists and social conservatives promote then is not really that traditional, nor divinely enshrined.

From the article:

    > Indeed, in many conservative religious denominations,
    > the same tenets are echoed today.

While I'm not going to claim I hold the same tenets as a book I've never read, I guess that I'm in one of the "conservative religious denominations" which the author is indicating here. I can certainly see some resemblance between a few of the examples cited from the book and my current (religiously-inspired) views on marriage.

However, one thing I'd like to explicitly disclaim is the notion that there is any prescriptive support in the Bible for the victorian-era idea that wives should be Doormat Debbies, as alluded to throughout this article.

The most often-cited passage in this regard is Ephesians 5:22-24...

    Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do 
    to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife
    as Christ is the head of the church, his body,
    of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits
    to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands 
    in everything.

If this is all you know of "Christian marriage philosophy", please take the time to inform yourself. I'd suggest you find someone who claims to follow the Bible in their marriage and ask them how this passage specifically plays out in their married life. (Hint: If the passage is truly being followed, what you will find is anything but a bully of a man and a brow-beaten woman)

Bully and browbeaten seems to be a common complaint in modern Biblical families. Obviously there are millions of Christians who have lives they call Christian that are informed by centuries of culture that postdates the Bible.

Perhaps a problem is that this passage tends to be the most taught marriage-related passage in the evangelical churches and para-church organizations I've attended?

One can make many cases for models of Biblical marriage (David, a "man after God's own heart" was polygamous. This is not spoken against in the Bible, but his adultery with another man's wife was condemned. To me, this is implicit support.)

One can also talk about whether Jesus himself would have supported Paul's interpretation and writings about marriage. I tend to find their respective teachings disharmonious.

Paul very much believed in the order of things, and in authority. And in this case (as in the case of master/slave relationships!), the man has authority. Both masters and husbands have obligations to use their authority kindly, but Paul did not decry the authority of one individual over another.

So yes, in the most common interpretation of evangelical Pauline Christianity (i.e. that practiced in Heartland America), the men are not bullies, but they do possess power and authority over women, and I think this power is the thing liberals and humanists take issue with.