Growing up, my grandma always kept the cookie jar stocked.  Oftentimes, it was with molasses cookies.  Which are disgusting.  But, apparently, that’s not a common reaction.  “What?  How can you not like her molasses cookies?  They’re the best!”

I’ve noticed a similar attitude coming from this study and the idea of true womanhood.  We’re not forcing anyone into taking a certain cookie, but look, we only offer molasses.

As this series begins to wrap up, I want to highlight a few examples of doublespeak.  Because you can say whatever you want out of one side of your mouth, but when the other side is yammering away about sin and gender roles, your denials lose their honesty.

“It’s not about putting on a certain outfit or conforming to any set of rules – it’s about the heart that says I understand who God created me to be.”

That sounds great.  But if God created someone to be a pastor? A leader? To be a feminist?  A person who has no desire to ‘make a home’?  Are those applicable ways of understanding who God created women to be?

Oh wait.  We have to “understand that being soft and creating those environments is part of what God  has built into me.” 

“We’re not talking about a stereotype here about who does what in the home…It’s not about who does what, but it’s just cultivating that heart, that womanly disposition, that propensity to nurture…”

Domesticity is “part of what’s at the core of womanhood…the Bible really lists having a heart for your home as one of the top 10 things that women need to learn.” 

So you ARE talking about a stereotype!!!  If you say all women have a propensity to nurture, and they must be domestic, and must learn how to do that even better – then that is a stereotype!

It may be that a majority of women enjoy being home and having children, and a majority of men enjoy working outside the home.  But that doesn’t mean that we require it of everyone, or say that it’s a mandate from God that they do so.

That also doesn’t mean that if a woman in fact is a mother and homemaker, that that is only what she was created for, and it must be her priority.  How I live my life should not be dependent on my gender, and displaying the glory of God is not a condition of obedience to cultural gender roles.

“But it’s not the message that, even as we talk about a counter-revolution, this is not a strident message that we’re going out into culture and saying, ‘this is what you need to be doing, get this checklist right.’  That’s not what we’re doing here.”  That’s encouraging.  Because this whole study has felt like one overbearing checklist.

“We’re presenting a message, that really at it’s core is, ‘get your relationship with Jesus right.'”  Oh, there’s the catch.  If you are right with Jesus, then the list checks itself.

It’s also interesting that they say, ‘there is a sense in which independence is a healthy thing…’  And, “feminism identified a very valid problem.”  Because, we know what they think about feminism.  And they dismissed all of the issues that they fought for, so what exactly was valid about it?

I’m curious about how independence is good and how it can be freely expressed.  Does it just mean that I’m free to pick out what to cook for dinner?  Because they also say we shouldn’t intimidate our husbands with our strong-will and determination, and if we wouldn’t micromanage; if we would submit in all the small things.

So we need to submit in the small things, and in the big things?  And ‘women need to have an agreeable spirit…{not be a} loud, wayward, insistent woman.’  Where exactly is the validity of any kind of independence?

I feel like they are being dishonest when they fall back on, ‘we say there’s no one right way to be a woman’, when the whole point of the series is to line yourselves up with God’s mandate to be a wife and mother at home.

Because if this was not the case; if they truly weren’t trying to force women into this narrow mold, they would speak more approvingly of women working.  They would not say that egalitarians are ‘deriding God’s pattern‘.  If they were truly open to people seeking out the way they follow Jesus best, then they would spend more time understanding and affirming differences.

“Our problem is we come and try and present a whole list of do’s and don’ts, and we don’t capture women’s heart for the beauty of the vision of what womanhood is all about.  And it’s our only hope for wholeness, to understand that our whole purpose is to live for the glory of God.” 

“The Bible doesn’t give us a simplistic, prescribed set of rules about what womanhood must “look” like. It doesn’t tell us, for example, how long our skirts should be, or whether we should pursue advanced education…The Bible doesn’t contain such cookie cutter checklists. Women are not the same….God has given us some clear principles about womanhood in His Word. It’s important that we wrestle with how to implement these principles…But we must avoid a cookie-cutter mentality.”

It sounds so nice and good.  Who wouldn’t want to learn about how God has made you to be?  Who wouldn’t want to learn how to glorify God better through your life?  But it’s deceitful.  It is not an open-ended, discover who God wants you to be with your humanity.  It is not a celebration of learning what it means to be an image-bearer.  This study was created out of a cultural ideal, and is implemented with chains and straitjackets.

When you limit what it means to live for the glory of God, you cut out everyone who doesn’t live that way.  You isolate, you exclude, and you turn Christianity into a members-only club.  I don’t know how that squares with who Jesus is, but I don’t care anymore.  You can take your rules and your mandates and have them.  I’m done.

I’ve found freedom and I don’t want your cookies.

 

 

 

This post is part of a series reviewing and discussing the True Woman 101 Divine Design study, by Mary Kassian and Nancy Leigh Demoss:

Part 1 – True Womanhood – Why Airplanes Aren’t in the Bible

Part 2 – True Womanhood – Death to Certainty

Part 3 – True Womanhood – Affirming Female Ordination?

Part 4 – True Womanhood – June Cleaver as Jesus

Part 5 – True Womanhood – An Offensive Gospel

Part 6 – True Womanhood – Compassionless Christianity

Part 7 – True Womanhood – Oppressing Women since Creation

Part 8 – True Womanhood – Get Abused, Win A Crown!

Part 9 – True Womanhood – Cookies and Chains

Part 10 – True Womanhood – Tension, Cracks, and a Concrete Faith