St Paul: Husbands, If You Want a Submissive Wife, Be Deserving of Her

That controversial passage…

When Ephesians 5 was read at Mass a few weeks back—“Wives, be subject to your husbands…”—I couldn’t help but reflect on the comeback this vision of marriage has made in recent years and, more practically, the implications these words carry for men.

We grew up hearing how these sentiments exemplified the tyranny and unfairness of the past. A chronically indignant professor once told my English class that Saint Paul had “made women’s lives hell” by imposing this yoke on her sex. Why should they take a subservient role in a marriage when they are so clearly equal to men—if not superior? Doesn’t St Paul know that girls can do anything boys can do—only better? Hasn’t he heard that The Future Is Female? No serious person could still take St Paul’s words seriously, we were assured. If anything, the time had come for women to take the lead and for men to be subject to their wives!

The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011 seemed a major milestone in death of St Paul’s vision, as the bride famously cut that last, awkward part from “love and honor and obey” in her vows. Cheerleaders were out in full force to applaud her stunning and brave example and to remind us that Progress was forever on its unstoppable march.

Or so it seemed. Fast-forward a few years, and Ephesians 5 doesn’t appear quite as backwards, at least not in certain corners of Twitter and among religious types. Absolute equality in marriage doesn’t seem to have worked so well as Girlboss Inc promised. And as the results of our enlightened experiments continue to disappoint, and the propaganda only grows louder to cover over the disaster, trad-core is looking more and more interesting. 

The Implications for Men

On topics as controversial as this, it might be a good idea to actually look at the words and read them closely, instead of simply relying on the caricatured interpretation of them offered by people like my professor.

When they howl about Ephesians 5, we’re supposed to picture a chauvinistic and mediocre fellow watching a football game and demanding that his wife make him a sandwich, something like Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel in the early 00s on The Man Show. The king of the couch. All complacency. Basking in the privilege of domestic tyranny.

Ask yourself if that’s what St Paul is getting at:

22 Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

The first line remains jarring to modern ear, but when you read on it becomes apparent that St Paul places an even greater demand upon men—for the husband is to his wife as Christ is to the Church. Did Christ come to serve, or to be served? Was He ever complacent? Did He not lay down His life for the beloved? This consistent with the warning against self-satisfaction that resounds again and again throughout the Good Book.

It’s funny how my professor and anti-Paulines everywhere always miss that part of St Paul’s instructions, almost willfully. 

So if a wife is to be submissive, her husband had better strive to deserve her submission by being virile, courageous, devoted, disciplined, chivalrous—not just the head of the household but master of himself. The couch-jockey with the beer gut is in no position to demand his wife’s submission. Mark this down as an iron law: all privilege must be accompanied by duty.

Disaster follows when the law is broken. The historical disconnection between privilege and duty goes to explain feminism, which was not as a rebellion against strong patriarchal men, but against men made weak by prosperity and industrialization who still expected privileges that strength merits. The historian John Lukacs writes: 

In the 1960s American women found the predominance of the male fettering not because it was real but because it was unreal. They could not stomach those prerogatives of the male […] that dated back to earlier centuries, when men were indeed strong. Now they saw—or, rather, felt—that the men were weak. 

Bronze Age Pervert makes a similar observation: “Feminism then is the revolt of women against the outrage of democracy. They have been in a revolt against the inability of the bugman to command authority or respect.” Seen in this light, (certain) feminists might actually deserve (limited) credit. They were reacting to a real problem, even if they didn’t understand the problem, much less the solution. To be fair, such clarity is not the most common attainment, especially when tempers are high.

Following the botched experiment in democratic marriages, the retvrn of an older vision is a promising development, for men and for women. But we must be the kind of men who understand and embrace the challenge in St Paul’s words, rather than the kind of men who think Ephesians 5 entitles us to anything unearned.