At last night’s intermittently entertaining GOP debate in South Carolina, Mike Huckabee was asked about a 1998 USA Today advertisement in which he and 130 other signatories endorsed the Report of the Baptist Faith and Message Study Committee to the Southern Baptist Convention.
One of the lines from the report that Huckabee and others praised a decade ago reads as follows:
“A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”
For months now, bloggers have been mulling this over -- something that the diligent Fox News staff must have picked up on (Though the ad, I as best I can tell, only appeared in USA Today and not The New York Times , as Carl Cameron's question indicated). Huckabee responded calmly, with the demeanor of a professor clarifying a popular misconception expressed by a well-meaning, but utterly misguided, freshman.
He began by citing the scriptural prooftext for the SBC statement which is found in the Book of Ephesians. In his own words:
"... the point, and it comes from a passage of scripture in the New Testament Book of Ephesians, is that as wives submit themselves to the husbands, the husbands also submit themselves, and it's not a matter of one being somehow superior over the other. It's both mutually showing their affection and submission as unto the Lord.
"So with all due respect, it has nothing to do with presidency. I just wanted to clear up that little doctrinal quirk there so that there's nobody who misunderstands that it's really about doing what a marriage ought to do, and that's marriage is not a 50/50 deal, where each partner gives 50 percent.
"Biblically, marriage is 100/100 deal. Each partner gives 100 percent of their devotion to the other and that's why marriage is an important institution, because it teaches us how to love."
Huckabee seems to have interpreted those verses of Scripture liberally (so to speak) at best, and incorrectly at worst (I think the same can be said about his reading of the SBC report that he was praising in that 1998 ad, but I have not had time to peruse the entire statement).
Here is the passage from Ephesians 5:22-25 in the King James Translation (I have bolded the relevant sections):
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. (23) For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body. (24) Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. (25) Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;
The verse does say that wives should submit to their husbands. It does not say, as Huckabee implies, that husbands too -- in some grand spirit of aforetime marital egalitarianism -- should submit to their wives. Husbands are enjoined to love their wives as Christ loved the Church. The men do the loving. The women do the submitting. (I repeat that I can't tell yet if this gendered division of labor is something that the SBC document concurs with).
I have noticed in previous posts that little mistakes like this happen all the time with the Bible. I make them frequently as well. And I am much more concerned about another aspect of his response to this question, which I will elaborate upon next week. Still, if Huckcabee’s faith is his life, if it “defines” and “drives” him, then he will need to give the electorate a more detailed and accurate explanation of his understanding of that troubling passage from Ephesians.
(For more information about religion and the candidates, visit Faith 2008 by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs.)
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