Eric misses the mark... mostly

Eric, over on ‘Quivering Daughters’, an anti-patriarchy site, has offered up a post entitled “The Bondage of Betrothal”. He states that Betrothal, or ‘Christian Courtship’ is one of the foundations of the modern Patriarchy/Quiverfull movement. Would that it were so Eric. While it is true that most of the Vision Forum/Qiverfull/Patriarchalist types do advocate a form of courtship… those forms fail at almost exactly the point where Eric accuses them of succeeding.

Unfortunately for Eric’s argument, and for the courtship movement, almost no courtship advocates actually teach that the father of the daughter (let alone the father of the son!) gets to ‘pick’ the spouse. What they do do (and this is very unBiblical, although Eric would be appalled at how) is propose that the father act as a gatekeeper and a veto for his daughters spouse. What this ends up doing, in most cases, is to delay or even prevent marriage. But it is not a ‘picking’ of the kind that Eric seems to indicate. Certainly not a ‘total control’ over their daughters choice of husband… since one of the foundation rocks of all of the courtship models that I have ever read is the daughters ability to say ‘no’ to anyone that has passed through her father’s gatekeeping. Far from that daughter being held up as rebellious, in most systems, she is applauded as acting by the Spirit of God.

And for the son it is doubly untrue. Almost all courtship systems leave the father of the son entirely out of the process of deciding who to court process. He comes back in, usually, in the ‘deciding whether to marry’ part, but, again, only as a veto.

So, if Eric wishes to argue with what I propose, he has a fair target. But, unfortunately, he misses the mark for most courtship and betrothal advocates. (And he doesn’t seem to want to debate me, despite my invitation.)