Butker’s commencement speech echoes MacArthur and other male supremacists

With Pride Month looming over the horizon and women graduating from college, Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker decided to attack “dangerous gender ideologies” when he gave the commencement address at Benedictine College.

Butker, an outspoken conservative Catholic, believes the gender ideologies he is concerned about go beyond simply being dangerous. He thinks they’re caused by demons targeting women.

“I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolic lies told to you,” he told graduates of the Catholic school in Atchison, Kan., who had paid about $26,000 per year to get a four-year degree.

Given that the occasion was a college graduation, one might assume the dangerous, diabolic gender ideologies would be messages people tell women that keep women down, disempowered or discouraged. But that’s not what Butker had in mind. Instead, his concern was that women are being too empowered.

“Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world,” he said.

“I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.”

Then Butker made it personal: “I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say her life truly started when she started living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I’m on this stage today, able to be the man that I am, because I have a wife who leans into her vocation.”

His throat began to constrict as he started choking up. “I’m beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me, but it cannot be overstated that all my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife and embrace one of the most important titles of all: Homemaker.”

Apparently, Butler’s wife wasn’t truly living until she met and married him. Never mind her childhood, apparent love of music or personal perspective on the world. From Butker’s view, his wife’s life didn’t start until she agreed with his religion, became his wife and looked after his home. In other words, her entire existence is in reference to him.

‘Pervasiveness of disorder’

Many of the news stories covering Butker’s speech have interpreted it as an attack on President Joe Biden, LGBTQ people and women, as if these are three separate topics.

But if you pay close attention, you’ll notice how all three topics are connected.

“While COVID might have played a large role throughout your formative years, it is not unique,” Butker said. “The bad policies and poor leadership have negatively impacted major life issues. Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for the degenerate cultural values and media all stem from pervasiveness of disorder.”

Sure, talk about “bad policies and poor leadership” are likely an attack on Biden.

Also, going after abortion, IVF and surrogacy paired with his words about women being homemakers is going after women.

And “degenerate cultural values” paired with “dangerous gender ideologies” is a dog whistle for conservatives who oppose LGBTQ people.

But to Butker, these three issues are rooted in a “pervasiveness of disorder.”

So the question we should ask is: What do conservatives like Butker mean by an order as it relates to gender?

The created order

For them, ordering genders is the fundamental nature of the universe.

Consider the teaching of John MacArthur, a pastor who, like Butker, opposed COVID precautions and obsession with gender orders: “Authority and submission pervade the whole universe. In the relationship between man and man, there is authority and submission. In the relationship with man and God, there is authority and submission. In the relationship between God and God, there is authority and submission. The entire universe is pervaded by this concept. And what is new here is not that the wife is to be subject to her husband. That isn’t new, because the Old Testament taught that. What is new is the vastness, the scope of this principle. That it absolutely pervades everything.”

For conservatives such as Al Mohler, this created order of male authority and female submission means Christians must discriminate against LGBTQ people in society. When asked in 2022 whether adultery and homosexuality should be illegal in the United States, Mohler appealed to “ordered liberty.”

In Mohler’s theology, the survival of America depends on having a commitment to Christian views of marriage. And in his theology of Christian marriage, God made Eve to be “a helper, a compliment” to Adam.

In other words, the “order” conservatives speak of is an order of patriarchal power that prioritizes the dreams of men and positions women as their helpers, maintaining the home and helping them fulfill their dreams.

Women being ranked under men

MacArthur says the created order carries a military image. In a sermon titled “The Willful Submission of a Christian Wife,” he said, “It means to place yourself under, to rank yourself under; that’s what it means in the military sense; it is to rank yourself under those in authority over you, under those who have responsibility for you, to be under someone.”

Pastor and author John Piper agrees with MacArthur’s military language. In an interview titled, “Should Women Be Police Officers,” Piper argued: “A drill sergeant might epitomize directive influence over the privates in the platoon, and it would be hard for me to see how a woman could be a drill sergeant — ‘hut two, right face, left face, keep your mouth shut, private’ — over men without violating their sense of manhood and her sense of womanhood.”

In Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, John Piper and Wayne Grudem say this means if a woman is in her backyard and a man walks up to her fence to ask for directions to the freeway, “she is giving a kind of leadership” and “has superior knowledge that the man needs and he submits himself to her guidance.”

Yet because Piper and Grudem think God ranks women below men, they say, “We all know that there is a way for that housewife to direct the man in which neither of them feels their mature femininity or masculinity compromised.”

Grudem, who is one of the most influential conservative evangelical theologians of the last century, retired from teaching two weeks ago. He was so obsessed with sacralizing male authority over women that it took him until his 70s to admit it is OK for women to divorce their husbands in cases of abuse.

Women in the workplace

Piper’s central concern is: “To the degree that a woman’s influence over man is personal and directive it will generally offend a man’s good, God-given sense of responsibility and leadership, and thus controvert God’s created order.”

So he argues workplace environments that are legitimate for women must be careers that are either “personal and non-directive” or “directive and non-personal.” For example, “A woman who is a civil engineer might design a traffic pattern in a city so that she’s deciding which streets are one-way, and therefore she is influencing, indeed controlling in one sense, all the male drivers all day long. But this influence is so non-personal that it seems to me that the feminine/masculine dynamic is utterly negligible in this kind of relationship.”

Considering his traffic pattern example, Piper says, “You can see how flexible it is.”

On the other hand, Piper says, “If a woman’s job involves a good deal of directives toward men, they’ll need, in general I think, to be non-personal, or men and women won’t flourish, I don’t think, in the long run in that relationship without compromising profound biblical and psychological issues.”

These profound biblical and psychological issues are why Piper concludes women shouldn’t be police officers or managers over men in the workplace.

Women as homemakers

MacArthur has a different idea for women. Because women are to rank themselves under their husbands, he tells women: “Your task is at home. A woman’s task, a woman’s work, a woman’s employment, a woman’s calling is to be at home.”

If a woman works outside of the home, MacArthur says, it “removes her from under her husband and puts her under other men to whom she is forced to submit.”

In her book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, Katherine Stewart describes how MacArthur treats women in the workplace he leads at Grace Community Church and Masters Seminary.

She tells how Dennis Swanson, who worked at The Master’s Seminary for 24 years, “asserts that few women on campus held positions of consequence, and female academic visitors were distinctly unwelcome. When the acclaimed German Protestant theologian Eta Linnemann paid a rare visit to the area, Swanson said, she was compelled to meet with students off campus. Even at the library, he says, which he ran for some time, the acquisition of books by female writers was frowned upon.”

According to Swanson, “If MacArthur found out your wife worked, he’d fire you. Or, if he liked you, he’d give you a raise so she could quit her job.”

Who is belittling whom?

As many people are responding to Butker’s commencement speech with condemnation, conservatives across social media are claiming his vision is beautiful and honoring of women. One woman told me, “Beautiful! Homemaking and child-rearing are underrated in our culture!”

To them, those of us who say it’s wrong to rank women under men and to make women subservient to men’s dreams are the ones who are belittling women because we’re supposedly attacking homemakers. In their world, for us to say women shouldn’t be ranked under men is to attack women. It completely defies logic.

But they sure try to make it make sense.

MacArthur says his ranking of women under men in a military sense “has nothing to do with spiritual inferiority; nothing at all to do with spiritual inferiority — there is no inferiority among believers between men and women, none at all.”

Of course, what MacArthur doesn’t understand is that social hierarchies are indeed about superiority and inferiority.

In the ancient Greco-Roman hierarchies in which the epistles were written, society was structured as a hierarchy that included:

• The imperial family
• Senators
• Equestrian
• Aristocrats, magistrates
• Merchants, soldiers, artisans,
• Manual laborers
• Freed slaves
• Slaves

In the Great Chain of Being that formed much of the spiritual language of the church, the universe was structured as a hierarchy that included:

• God Most High
• Angels
• Demons
• Humans
• Animals
• Plants
• Non-living creation such as water, wind, land and rock
• The damned in hell

In other words, to move women down in rank is to move them toward slavery, the animal, the non-human and the damned. This is why you cannot hold to complementarian gender hierarchies without dehumanizing women. You cannot claim to be honoring women or to be treating them as spiritual equals when you’re lowering them down in rank toward the non-human.

Men as homemakers

But what about the career of being a homemaker? Conservative men like Butker, MacArthur, Mohler, Piper and Grudem like to say it’s “one of the most important titles of all.” In their warped view of reality, they honor women by limiting their choices to the high calling of being a homemaker.

Unfortunately, their true colors are seen when men like me break the rules and become stay-at-home dads. Ever since I left my company to become a homemaker and pursue writing, I have been under the most vitriolic attacks from conservative men.

“I’m wondering what self-respecting grown man is doing staying at home with his five kids,” one person wrote.

“Go make me a sandwich,” demanded another.

“If he’s able to produce music, then he’s able to provide for his wife and children. It’s a creation-design issue. Why would any self-respecting grown man take what he writes seriously?” asked another. “A good example of how not to be a man.”

When I wrote my BNG piece exposing Voddie Baucham’s claim that women should stay at home and serve their dads until they get married to serve their husbands, one YouTube Channel went after me in a video garnering 52,000 views and hundreds of comments.

The host called me a “sissy britches stay-at-home dad,” an “effeminate little weirdo,” a “housewife,” and said I’m probably “sitting in the bathtub with his essential oils and his glass of wine.”

“When these conservatives come after me like that for being a homemaker, they’re telling us what they really think about women.”

The reality is that when these conservatives come after me like that for being a homemaker, they’re telling us what they really think about women.

There’s nothing wrong with women being homemakers because there is no hierarchy of careers. What’s wrong is when we tell women graduating from college to become homemakers to support their husbands’ dreams and don’t invite men to do the same, or when we create dynamics where men and women can’t equally pursue their dreams.

The only hierarchies going on here are power games created in the minds of patriarchal men like Butker who have no self-awareness of the harm they’re causing. Women getting degrees are not causing psychological issues and are not pushing dangerous and diabolical gender ideologies.

Those of us who break their binaries and expose their hierarchies are causing their tower to crack. And they simply can’t handle when we aren’t submitting ourselves to a lower ranking than they are. So maybe they’re the ones with the profound psychological issues.

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.