by Incongruous Circumspection

I will be quoting Bill Gothard’s material in this text style and my response will be in the normal text:Bill Gothard has published a manual on how a wife should meet her husband’s seven basic needs, as well as how a husband should meet his wife’s.  As you’ll see, the latter part, directed at the husband, is highly disingenuous because, according to Bill Gothard, a marriage relationship is skewed completely toward the man.  The wife is only a cheerleading, supposedly willing, party.As Bill is notorious for, he takes anything he can find in the Bible to support any point he dreams up, disregarding the context, the era, even the writer’s style, etc., and sandwiches it in with his unique, sleight-of-hand, wording to numb your mind into believing he knows what he is talking about.

The unsuspecting reader may look at Bill’s words as a sort of optional guidebook that might work for some and not others.  I will prove to you that this is not the case.  Bill makes it very clear that, if a woman does not follow his directions to the letter, she is a fool.  Worse yet, she is a horrible wife.

Finally, why are there not 8 basic needs?  Or 16.5 of them?  We’ll never know how Bill finds his “rhemas” as he calls them.  We can only look at what he gives us and blow his theories out of the water.  You will find that much of my commentary will be decidedly personal, but that’s just fine.  Why?  Because Bill makes the assumption that he is speaking for all men, and last I checked, I am a member of “all men”.Now, let’s begin with a look into Bill’s introduction to the Seven Basics Needs of a Husband and Wife.

Your spouse has many needs. Even if he or she is not consciously aware of all of these needs, when they are unmet, your spouse will exhibit sorrow, confusion, and frustration.

This is a setup.  It is a very effective tactic to come out at the beginning of any “new truth” and state that the receiver of that truth may not even be aware of the need for it.  By saying this, any person who wants to “debunk” the message, as I am doing, can be easily dismissed as ignorant, or even better, accused of willfully denying what is obvious truth – obvious because Bill Gothard says so.  Thus, if I say that I don’t need my wife to meet my basic needs, as laid out by Bill, the author would state that I am simply unaware of my basic needs and, more importantly, the correct process or person to have those needs met.Then Bill polishes off this introduction by proving to the reader that spousal sorrow, confusion, and frustration are symptoms of not following his formulas that will come later.  This isn’t new though.  All “how-to” manuals begin this way.  They sneakily position one or many common human emotions as being negative, and then hit you with the reason for that emotion – the reason being a common trait in society, as well.  Bill is a master at this.