Huckabee’s “Gracious Submission” Argument, More than Meets the Eye

The latest firestorm set off by controversial Republican presidential frontrunner Mike Huckabee is over his 1998 signing of a statement by 129 other evangelical leaders that “a wife is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”

Newsweek’s Expertinent blog has a great explanation of what that’s supposed to mean. Basically a husband is a servant to his wife, and she is to submit to him. This means that they consult one another as partners and friends whenever an issue arises. But if they cannot reach an agreement, the wife is to submit to her husband’s judgment.

In principle, about 90% of this seems right. A wife and husband should make decisions jointly, and they should serve one another. That commitment is in fact the basis for love that lasts a lifetime.

But as we saw in Joni Ortlund’s book Fearlessly Feminine, Christian nationalists are very adept at dropping just a tiny bit of their ideology into statements that are 90% conventional wisdom. That’s what’s happening here. In the end, this arrangement still gives the man the upper hand.

If this style of relationship works for the Huckabees, I wish them well. Marriage is an intensely personal commitment, one that no one has the right to tell another person how to make. The Huckabees obviously have a strong marriage that has withstood many trials — her cancer, his money troubles — and are to be congratulated for their fortitude and commitment to one another.

But let us not forget for an instant that Mr. Huckabee has no aversion to making his personal experience a policy benchmark for the rest of the world to meet. His basic resistance to gay marriage is one crucial example. Were he only opposed to the idea on religious grounds, then he would logically be willing to make legal partnerships possible for same-sex couples. Whether religious institutions consecrate those relationships is of no concern to the government.

But Mr. Huckabee holds that same-sex marriage would lead to the downfall or our society because — he says — no society has ever survived any redefinition of marriage. Never mind that we’ve been working toward radically redefining marriage from a owner-property relationship to a merging and protection of assets between equals for more than a century now without our society falling apart at the seams.

If Mike Huckabee is so against gender-neutrality in marriage that he wants to write gender bias into America’s constitution, then it’s not just a gay rights issue. It’s about a fundamental power imbalance in the moral fabric of our society. His attitude toward “gracious submission” should illustrate that quite clearly for all of us.