I recently saw backlash to a survey that 1/3 of Gen Z men think their wives should be obedient to them. But as a Christian, I’ve been raised with traditional values—including that I should be the head of my household. I think people are misrepresenting this belief, like I’m some sort of a sexist. What am I missing here?

Dearly Beloved,

All families need passionate leadership. But they also need compassionate leadership. 

Every compassionate leader knows that the best teams are the ones wherein everyone is granted genuine respect and a place of honor. 

Despite all the ways the New Testament letters of St. Paul have been leveraged to perpetuate gender-specific hierarchies (like women obeying men), it is hard to ignore his authentic letter to the Church in Galatia. There, St. Paul says, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). 

If, indeed, we are all one in Christ, then the Christian is only called to be obedient to Christ. And Christ is the broken body of God that, dying on the cross, takes worldly powers with it into death. That includes the power dynamics that would demand a woman’s obedience to a man. 

It’s so easy to lose sight of what “traditional values” mean. Today, many religious leaders (and laymen) speak of “traditional values” without even really knowing where “tradition” and its “values” come from. If we better understood this lineage, we’d see that the story is far more complex than we’re often taught. It’s easy to assume that the cultural particularities we grew up with are universal and uninterpretable. However, when we limit Christian revelation to our unquestioned customs, we risk blasphemy. We risk trying to fit a God who does not respect culture into a neat little box so that we feel comfortable and safe in our own limitations. We risk severing our connection with the creative impulse of God that leads us into newness of life and unforeseen wisdom. 

The “traditional values” you reference can be partially traced back—at least in Christianity—to what biblical scholars and theologians call deutero-Pauline letters. Those are letters that are widely considered to have been authored by someone other than St. Paul. In Ephesians and Colossians, specifically, the writer sets out to instruct early Christian communities on how to organize their households. And, you guessed it, those instructions present a very patriarchal structure: “Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior” (Eph 5:22); or “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as it is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly” (Col. 3:18-19). 

If you just read or heard these passages in church without any historical or philosophical context, you’re likely to just run with them. So let me give you that context: early Christian communities, in order to not appear as radical and subversive as the Christ they followed, began adopting Greco-Roman standards for how to construct and maintain families. 

These instructions were survival tactics, not the heart of Christ’s own revolution in consciousness. 

But let’s also consider this ideology practically. When I look back over my own childhood, I see the seasons of my parents’ lives as individuals. And I can see now, with a clarity I didn’t have then, how my mother and father needed each other to be equals. The unpredictability of life raising my sisters and me didn’t allow for static roles. They had to trust each others’ opinions and discernment. My father had to defer to my mother as much as (if not more than) my mother deferred to him. And through this power sharing they demonstrated stability, not confusion. If my father was the head of our household—and there’s a fair argument to be made that we saw him in that way—then his leadership was in his evolving vulnerability, tenderness, and desire to see all of us walk in our power regardless of our gender/s or sex. 

So, to be honest with you beloved, it has been Christian communities throughout the centuries who have been… “misrepresenting this belief.” They’ve been trying to map a first century strategy of sexual difference onto a world that needs God to enter and hold the chaos differently. 

The authentic letters of St. Paul—like the one with which I opened—are often more egalitarian in their messaging around gender. In First Corinthians, there are several times that St. Paul paints a more symmetrical relation between wife and husband, saying things like, “The husband should give to his wife what is due her and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” (1 Cor. 7:3-4). 

I recommend you spend some time with First Corinthians. Not just for St. Paul’s commentary on gender. But, also, for his commentary on power. Though not free of its paradoxes and contradictions, that’s what makes First Corinthians worth sitting with. Its tensions are the gift that invite us into interpretation and wonder. Precisely what any healthy relationship requires.

In First Corinthians, St. Paul enjoins us to embrace foolish wisdom. This is a wisdom that unequivocally turns the kind of power in which patriarchy is rooted on its head. It says to a people, to a world, hellbent on domination that “love is patient; love is kind” (1 Cor. 13:4). Foolish wisdom intentionally risks being subversive and radical so that all people might be raised with Christ from death into lives that proliferate in the uniqueness that God intends. 

Can you still be a follower of Christ if the “tradition” and the “values” propagated in Christ’s name are actually about radical equality and not gender domination? If so, the Spirit will not fail to bless you and whomever you come to love. 

If not, though, then it’s worth interrogating if it’s Christ who you love, or if it’s actually power.  

Go in Peace—Not Patriarchy, 

Father Paul