SMM: Chapter 4—Dominion and Helping Our Fathers

A Guest Post by Kate

Originally posted Time To Live, Friend

Thought the nightmarish Chapter 4 was over? Nope, there’s so much more (pun intended).

The Botkins have established (albeit, unconvincingly) that a woman, whether married or single, is to be a helpmeet. Now, they begin discussing Dominionism, God’s plan for the world, and how girls are to help their fathers in their vision. Girls are not to have their own visions. They are simply to accept their father’s vision.

And how are girls to do this? According to the Botkins:  

“We show our fathers that we love them by giving them our hearts. A girl turns her heart to her father by caring about what he loves, learning about what is important to him, desiring and seeking his counsel and approval, caring more for his opinion than that of her peers, serving him, helping him, sharing his vision, letting him know her heart” (40).

Okay, so first, get it into your head that your heart doesn’t belong to you. Secondly, forget about learning to love what God loves and forget learning about to love Jesus because you must only care about your earthly father. Thirdly, your peers are kind of useless and will probably just lead you astray so you shouldn’t really care too much what they think. (Might I add that it’s probably safer to just not have friends anyways).

In other words, let’s raise a whole generation of women who don’t have to think for themselves, tell them their only worth is in serving a man, and then tell them that their only purpose is to have as many children as possible to further the “Kingdom.”

Am I making this s*** up? I only wish I were.

One girl says,

“I thought I loved my father before, but it was for selfish reasons. He was just my dad. But now he is my father, my friend, my guardian, my priest, and my knight in shining armor” (40).

Loving your father just because he’s your dad isn’t enough now? And fathers our are priests? I don’t have a problem a “priest,” but there’s a big difference between someone who has been trained and studied theology, versus a father who does not have to have said training and then has absolute power over his daughter. In a church setting, you do not have to follow a priest if you feel God is telling you something different or if you decide the priest is a bit wonky. In the Botkins setting, your father IS God to you and you have no such options.

Like I said before, the Botkins are simply replacing the approval of one man in a girls life (for instance a boyfriend or a friend) for another—her father. A girl is always dependent on this, they say. A girl cannot have worth apart from a man, because she was made FOR man.

“As we stated before, every woman is, by nature, a man’s helper. You are a helper, no matter what your age or marital status. The choice before you and ever other young woman isn’t ‘to help or not to help?’ It’s whom to help” (42).

So the choice is before you: are you going to be a good, godly daughter and be a helpmeet to your father?

Rebekah says,

“It is my duty as a girl and as a daughter to seek out what pleases him [her father], and what makes him strong in his vision, so that I too can embrace his vision and make his passions my passions. My position as a daughter is to be feminine and content with whatever my father does, and in being feminine, I can help my father in his masculinity and can give him confidence by being confident in whatever he says or does”  (42).

Rebekah feels that if she doesn’t embrace her father’s vision and agree with him 100%, he will feel less masculine. What, exactly, does that say about a person’s confidence and ego complex that people can’t even disagree with them without making them feel inferior?

The Botkins spend the rest of the chapter talking about Dominism, and daughters helping advance their father’s vision by asking them what they need help with and other things. For a good overview of Dominism, I’d suggest reading this post. In short, Dominism is kind of scary.

The Botkins continue the chapter by talking about how girls are their daddies’ helpmeets. It’s pretty disturbing.

But not as disturbing as this quote.

Ready?

“The job of Christians is to teach all the nations and peoples to obey God, to bring all the earth into complete subjection to Christ. This means that Christians have to do more than just evangelize all nations, but teach them all to observe all that God commands and to live in complete, perfect conformity to His pattern for mankind. And we’re not only to convert natives and savages to this, but also kings, fashion designers, film makers, newspaper reporters, businessmen—all mankind!” (45)

Gee, that’s not racist at all.