Huckabee on Mutual Submission

Both Mainstream Baptist and the Big Daddy Weave are hammering Huckabee this morning over his comments last night during the Fox News Republican Debate in South Carolina. Huckabee asserted a mutual submission interpretation of marriage based on Ephesians 5, and claimed that was the intent of the Southern Baptist 1998 Family Statement. Prescott and Big Daddy disagree, saying the Family Statement endorsed “a one-sided submission by the wife to the rule of her husband.”

Prescott writes,

Huckabee can’t have it both ways. He can’t endorse the the 1998 family statement and the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message and then endorse the egalitarian interpretation of Ephesians 5 — an interpretation that the family statement was written to deny.

The unconditional nature of the wife’s subjugation was made clear in 1998 at the official press conference following the statement’s adoption. Dorothy Patterson, wife of Southwestern Seminary President Paige Patterson and a member of the committee that drafted the family statement, said, “When it comes to submitting to my husband even when he is wrong, I just do it. He is accountable to God.”

Big Daddy writes,

Just a few years ago, Russell Moore, theology dean and academic vice president at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary denounced the practice of “mutual submission.” Touting “Biblical Patriarchy,” Moore argued that evangelicals who practice “mutual submission” in marriage have been influenced by a “thoroughly feminized grassroots theology” which he says is “bubbling up” in academic and denominational life.

It appears to me that Huckabee would pose a major problem for Republicans if he wins the nomination. Moderate Baptists, independents, and Democrats will find him to be far too regressive on important social issues such as marriage. Conservative republicans are already fearful of his quasi-populist approach and willingness to deal somewhat realistically with taxes.