⚔️ Upbringing and Marriage

I have previously written on two subjects pertaining to Biblical order in the Christian household: wives submitting to husbands and parents disciplining children.

In the first, I argued that Scripture is unambiguous and consistent across three passages — Ephesians 5:22, Colossians 3:18, and 1 Peter 3:1 — that wives are to submit to their husbands, and husbands are to love their wives. Crucially, this pairing is never reversed. The order in which these commands appear is not accidental, and ignoring it has consequences. The modern church, seduced by feminism and the postwar consensus, has largely abandoned this teaching, pointing every finger at husbands to love more sacrificially while wives receive no corresponding challenge to submit. The result is marginalised, disenfranchised men, and an exodus of men from the church.

In the second, I argued that the rod of correction is not a relic of barbarism but a divine prescription rooted in love. Proverbs 13:24 is plain: he who spares the rod hates his son. Discipline functions propitiatorialy — it neutralises the accumulation of parental anger before it becomes bitterness and verbal abuse. The Western church, swayed by Enlightenment humanism and the likes of Rousseau, abandoned corporal discipline in the 20th century and declared it knew better than the Bible. Within two generations, British church attendance collapsed from over 90% to less than 5%. The fruit is visible to anyone willing to look honestly at it.

Lately I have come to realise that these two things are not merely related. They are one. Let me explain.

One observation I have noticed, without exception, in Christian households whose grown children are not believers — those parents who have failed to transmit the faith to the next generation — is a single common factor. Not poverty. Not education. Not the absence of church attendance. It is this: a weak, effeminate husband, and a strong-willed wife who does not submit to him.

Now I think I understand why.

Here is the mechanism. The father identifies a situation where the child clearly needs the rod. He moves to administer it. The mother steps in. She places herself between the father and the child, overrides him, countermands the correction. This becomes a pattern. The children are not slow — they learn quickly that the father’s authority has a ceiling, and that ceiling is the mother’s veto. The father is effectively neutered in his own home.

Now those children grow up and are told they must submit to a Heavenly Father they cannot see. But the model they watched every single day — the most formative model any child has — is their mother refusing to submit to the father they can see. What exactly were they supposed to learn? The mother has not merely failed to support the father’s authority. She has actively catechised the children in rebellion. She has demonstrated, daily, that authority is negotiable. That it can be refused. That it bends if you push back hard enough.

Is it any wonder they carry that lesson into their relationship with God?

How can children be expected to submit to a Heavenly Father they cannot see, when their mother models rebellion against the father they can see?

There is also a biological dimension to this, and it is not merely a matter of spiritual principle — it is written into our neurology. Research in neurobiology and psychology has demonstrated that men and women react differently when witnessing punishment applied to those who have cheated or wronged others. A prominent study published in Nature in 2006 showed that men tend to experience satisfaction when they see a wrongdoer punished, while women feel empathy even toward that wrongdoer. Neither response is sinful in itself. But in the context of disciplining a child, the asymmetry matters enormously. The mother who steps in when the father raises the rod may not even be acting from rebellion — she may simply be acting from her nature. This is precisely why God designed the household with a father and a mother in distinct, complementary roles, and not two mothers.

I am reminded of Zipporah, Moses’ wife, who had been withholding circumcision from their sons. We do not know how many times Moses had deferred to her reluctance. But when the Angel of the Lᴏʀᴅ came to kill Moses, she finally acted. She performed the circumcision herself and cast the foreskin at Moses’ feet. Her resistance to the commanded sign had brought them to the edge of catastrophe. The lesson is not subtle.

Let us recover the Biblical pattern in our households. Let us not go with the culture. We are to lead distinct lives, according to God’s Word — even, and especially, when that Word cuts against everything the age around us considers enlightened.

The stakes are not abstract. They are the souls of our children.