views and thoughts on topics, especially ones pertaining to christianity – with an emphasis on how most christians either ignore or discriminate against unmarried christians – and how christians have turned marriage and parenting into IDOLS and how there is no true support for sexual purity, virginity, or celibacy among christians – this is a blog for me to vent; I seldom permit dissenting views. I don't debate dissenters ————-
A new study out from the Council on Contemporary Families suggests that contrary to most surveys, people are actually more stressed at home than at work.
Three Penn State researchers measured people’s cortisol, which is a stress marker, while they were at work and while they were at home and found it higher at what is supposed to be a place of refuge.
“Further contradicting conventional wisdom, we found that women as well as men have lower levels of stress at work than at home” writes one of the authors, Sarah Damaske, assistant professor of labor and employment relations, sociology and women’s studies at Penn State (the italics are hers).
In fact women even say they feel better at work, she notes. “It is men, not women, who report being happier at home than at work.”
Another surprise is that the findings hold true, says Damaske, for both those with children and without, but more so for nonparents. This is why, the authors conclude, people who work outside the home have better health.
What the study doesn’t measure is whether people are still doing work when they’re at home, whether it’s household work or work brought home from the office. For many men, the end of the workday is a time to kick back. For women who stay home, they never get to leave the office.
And for women who work outside the home, they often are playing catch up with household tasks.
With the blurring of roles, and the fact that the home front lags well behind the workplace in making adjustments for working women, it’s not surprising that women are more stressed at home.
But it’s not just a gender thing. At work, people pretty much know what they’re supposed to be doing: working, earning money, doing the tasks they have to do in order to draw an income.
The bargain is very pure: employee puts in hours of physical or mental labor and employee draws out life-sustaining moola.
Married Christian Woman Sexually Preys on Kids At Phillips’ Family-Worshipping Church – Married People Not More Godly Than Singles – Married Sex Must Not Be As Hot As Christians Teach
One blog page says that some middle aged (or she might be in her 30s, but I think she’s a bit older?) woman at Phillips’ church was running about hitting on and sleeping with under-aged males in the church, and Phillips did nothing about it.
As I have said numerous times on this blog, and although some Christians do not like to admit this (some have denied this when I talk to them on other blogs), there are indeed stigmas adult singles face from and by the Christian community, such as:
All of us single adults are thought by married Christians to be hussies who hump ten men a day. Never mind some Christian women are virgins at age 40+, no, we are still suspected of being female horn dogs who will hump a married man in a heartbeat.
We are also subjected to the notion in evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, Southern Baptist thinking, and some Neo-Reformed thinking, that married people with children are more godly, above sexual temptation, holier, and more responsible, than never married/ divorced childless Christians.
Also, according to Christians, if one waits until marriage to have sex, the sex will be regular and great. If married sex is so great and peachy, why did this married Christian woman have sex with so many teen boys and such at her church?
So is it not eye-opening to see married Christian women who get caught doing things such as described in this post (it discusses a married Christian woman who had sexual affairs with one teen boy, and who hit on numerous teen boys and perhaps a few 20-somethings at her church, and there were possibly a few adult on adult extra marital affairs going on as well, and the church’s preacher did nothing to halt any of this despite numerous pleas from church members):
It is a very long post, but I encourage you to click the link and read the page, or at least skim. I will only excerpt a paragraph or three:
This is a true story. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. The names of the guilty have not.
For several years I’ve been hearing rumors of clergy sexual abuse at Boerne Christian Assembly. Those rumors, if true, would prove far worse in their ramifications than Doug Phillips’ so-called “extra-marital affair” that resulted in his resignation from Vision Forum Ministries.
… Bob and Cathy Johnson recently emailed me a lengthy and detailed narrative of the years-long unimpeded sexual exploits of Jennifer Grady at Boerne Christian Assembly.
Update: Family Worshiping Cult Leader – Doug Phillips – Admits to Physical Affair / And Christian Skeptics Who Deny that Churches and Christians Harbor Stereotypes Against Unmarried Women (and Men)
Phillips admits there was a physical aspect to the affair (see link below).
Yes, married people commit sexual sin. That should not be a revelation to most people, but to some Christians, it is.
Sexual sin is not, contrary to most Christian views on these topics (sometimes it goes unspoken), only something that happens to or among singles.
Amazingly, I have come across Christians on other blogs in the last few months who actually deny that there is a stereotype that adult Christian singles are sexually promiscuous, or more apt to sexually sin than married couples, or that single women are perceived as being threats to married women, but yes, these stereotypes very much exist. I do not make this stuff up.
Because these doubters themselves have not experienced this prejudice, or have not seen it happen to other people with their own two eyes, they doubt me.
I’ve run into one or two catty married Christian women on those same blogs (I’ve discussed this before, dig through the archives of this blog to see those posts) who sit there – and they are quite rude to me about it – who justify and rationalize their horrible treatment of, and attitudes toward, unmarried women.
These married women should feel guilty and ashamed by their prejudices against unmarried women, but they tend to justify why they feel just fine acting as though any unmarried women they meet wants to bed their husband.
These Christian married women rationalize and spin why they feel single women should be isolated and kept away from married couples. They are bigoted against single women and are proud of it.
I relish the day their husbands drop dead (men usually die before women), and they find themselves widows who then gets subjected to the very treatment that they give to me and other single women.
Let’s see how these types of prejudiced married women like it if their husband dies next week, and they are then treated like potential man-snatching harlots, so all their married friends start avoiding them, or clutch their husband’s arm even tighter when the now-widowed woman steps forward to greet the couple.
Let’s see how they enjoy being treated suspiciously, like a home wrecking slut, even though they’ve not done anything wrong.
I have documented these very stereotypes here on this site before from various sources, and I have been subjected to it personally, and I have read other singles talk about it on other sites.
I am tiffed that there are Christians running around on other forums or blogs saying, “But I’ve never encountered this attitude or stereotype you speak of!”
Honey, just because it’s not happened directly to you or right before your eyes, does not mean it doesn’t happen. Jeeze.
One indirect piece of evidence that this stereotype exists and that I am not making it up is that Christian singles who write articles and books about common challenges to being single discuss it, and Christian married preachers who minister to singles have to sometimes address these biases in their churches, and in their books or blogs about singles, because they see adult singles being marginalized and ostracized and facing discrimination by married couples in churches due to these stigmas.
Some churches will not hire unmarried men for teaching or preaching positions, one reason being because they assume all unmarried people are randy, sex-starved animals who will mount any other person in the vicinity if given half a chance and begin humping them immediately.
So, you have single preachers writing against this situation, and the ones who were single and now married discuss it in their books and blogs, and they explain that these very attitudes are driving single adults away from churches.
One reason some evangelicals have begun pushing “early marriage” within the last five years (and I’ve blogged about early marriage before, please check the blog archives) is precisely because they assume any and all adults over age 18 or 25 are having sex, or will have sex, because supposedly, no adult can withstand sexual urges or temptations (even though, yes, they very well can; I am proof of that, and I have a normal libido, I am not “anti sex,” “frigid,” did not lack the opportunity for sex, or whatever).
There is most certainly a perception among evangelicals, fundamentalists, Neo Reformed, and Baptists, that no human being can wait for sex longer than three minutes, so these sorts of bloggers and preachers have been telling kids to marry by the time they are 18, 21, or 25 years old, because if they do not marry young, the assumption is these kids will turn into that stereotypical Christian unmarried person who has sex every five minutes with married men and every one else.
Regarding the update about the married, nuclear- family-worshipping cult guy who is also a father (Doug Phillips), who admits to having an affair:
From the way Phillips worded his misdeeds, he may not have had standard penis in the vagina intercourse (which most Christians would consider “the biblical sense of knowing someone,” and which is the phrase he uses to deny the extent of what he did), but the way he words things could refer to anything from heavy petting, to French kissing, to anal sex, to oral sex by one or both people, or who knows what.
I am really disgusted and tired of most of conservative Christianity worshipping marriage and the nuclear family, but offering no support for any unmarried adult past age 25 or older, especially the ones who are still virgins or who are trying to stay celibate.
These same nuclear- family idolizers lecture the teens and college students to stay virgins until marriage, they say they view the “family as the backbone of society,” but they themselves are out having affairs, or visiting prostitutes, or viewing porn on the internet – and in effect, ruining their own families with their sexual sins and betrayals.
So, do they really and truly value marriage and family? Nah, I don’t think so.
But they have the nerve to lecture the rest of us for not being married, or just assume we’re all out being promiscuous, as they are doing.
And, this brings to mind the fact that while conservative Christians tell young people that if they stay a virgin until marriage, the sex they get will be frequent and “mind blowing.” If that were true, we would not be so apt to see all these stories of Christian guys, some preachers, who get caught having affairs, or all the sexless marriages.
Also, a lot of Christian thinking, or an assumption, on the topic of marriage (and this comes across in Christian books about marriage and dating, especially aimed at singles in their teens and twenties, though not limited at them only), is that an un-married person has to become mature, totally responsible, and completely godly before God will grant that person a spouse.
Exactly how godly, responsible, and mature is this married, family idolizer Phillips, if he’s diddling another woman while he’s married?
Yeah, see, examples like this go to show that you do not have to achieve sinless perfection or even moral superiority in life as a requirement by God for marriage.
If God really had a set list of criteria (such as being mature and godly) that he expects all Christians to meet before allowing them a spouse, there would be zero married Christians.
I’ve not yet seen a study on this topic, but I wonder, are Christian men more likely to be adulterous or to be abusive towards their wives than Non Christians, or are the numbers about evenly split?
That is, I decided some months ago to discard the “do not be yoked to a Non Christian” teaching, because Christian men, from what I have seen, are no more likely to treat a wife well than a Non-Christian would be, so I might as well increase my odds of marrying by opening up the pool of candidates to Non-Christians.
BY MORGAN LEE , CP CONTRIBUTOR
November 15, 2013|12:39 pm
Former Vision Forum Ministries president Doug Phillips reiterated yesterday that his decision to resign from his leadership position was the proper outcome following his acknowledgement that he had “inappropriate relationship” with a woman who was not his wife.
Phillips also elaborated on the details of his relationship which he had previously only disclosed as “inappropriately romantic and affectionate” and asserted that he had not known the woman in a “Biblical sense.”
“Some reading the words of my resignation have questioned if there was an inappropriate physical component with an unmarried woman. There was, and it was intermittent over a period of years,” Phillips wrote.
In light of his admission that there was Physical activity, here is Olivia Newton John’s Let’s Get Physical video.
How American Christians Were Influenced by 1950s American Secular Propaganda to Idolize Marriage and Children and Against Singles and the Childless -and how over-emphasis on “family” and lack of respect for singleness started a backlash against both (excerpts from ‘Pornland’ book)
Excerpts from Pages 2- 5 of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality by Gail Dines – read it for free on “Google Books.”
(Below this long excerpt are a few observations by me):
For a magazine [Playboy] to clearly state that it was not “a family magazine” in the 1950s was close to heresy.
According to social historian Stephanie Coontz, it was during this period that there was an unprecendented rise in the marriage rate, the age for marriage and motherhood fell, fertility increased, and divorce rates declined.
From family restaurants to the family car, “the family was everywhere hailed as the most basic institution in society.”
The mass media played a pivotal role in legitimizing and celebrating this “pro-family” ideology by selling idealized images of family life in sitcoms and women’s magazines, while demonizing those who chose to stay single as either homosexual or pathological.
The most celebrated sitcoms of the period were Leave It To Beaver,Father Knows Best, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The ideal family was white and upper middle class, with a male breadwinner whose salary supported a wife and children as well as a large home in the suburbs.
The primary roles for men and women were seen as spouses and as parents, and the result was a well-run household populated by smart, well-adjusted kids.
The print media also got in on the act, carrying stories about the supposed awfulness of being single. Reader’s Digest ran a story entitled “You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are to Be Marred,” which focused on the “harrowing situation of single life.”
One writer went so far as to suggest that “except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective, almost everyone has an opportunity to marry.”
In the 1950s, “emotionally warped” was a coded way of saying homosexual, and indeed many single people were investigated as potential homosexuals and by extension Communists, since the two were often linked during the McCarthy years.
This pressure on men to conform not only to the dictates of domestic life but also to the growing demands of corporate America had its critics in the popular media. Some writers pointed to the conformist male as a “mechanized, robotized caricature of humanity… a slave in mind and body.”
According to Barbara Ehrenreich, magazines like Life, Look, and Reader’s Digest carried stories suggesting that “Gary Gray” (the conformist in the gray flannel suit) was robbing men of their masculinity, freedom, and sense of individuality.
While pop psychologists criticized the corporate world for reducing American males to “little men,” it was women in their roles of wives and mothers who were essentially singled out as the cripplers of American masculinity. As Ehrenreich has argued, “the corporate captains were out of the bounds of legitimate criticism in Cold War America,” women were the more acceptable and accessible villains.
Described as greedy, manipulative, and lazy, American women were accused of emasculating men by overdomesticating them.
There has been serious sin in my life for which God has graciously brought me to repentance. I have confessed my sin to my wife and family, my local church, and the board of Vision Forum Ministries. I engaged in a lengthy, inappropriate relationship with a woman. While we did not “know” each other in a Biblical sense, it was nevertheless inappropriately romantic and affectionate.
I am not an expert on all things Vision Forums Ministries, and I tend to lump all these groups together, but like Quiverfulls and Reconstructionsts, if I am not mistaken, VFM (Vision Forum Ministries) is one of thoes groups who teach very, very strict gender roles to the point they may advocate that girls should NOT receive an education, that they should only be brought up to be wives and mothers.
From what I recall, VFM is like Dobon’s “Focus on the Family,” but on steroids. They place far, far too much stock on marriage, having children, and strict gender roles.
Groups such as VFM tend to elevate marriage to the point that singles and singlehood is denigrated. The unmarried are viewed as not being wholly in God’s image, that they are only “one half” until they marry.
If I recall correctly they may be one of the Christian cultic groups that idolize marriage and childrearing/ bearing even more than main stream conservative Christians do.
They probably adhere to the standard stereotypes of the unmarried that mainstream Christians do: that, supposedly, all singles are sleazy, over sexed harlots who are highly promiscuous and who are selfish and immature. So I find it funny that one of their own admits to being involved in an “inappropriate relationship” with another woman.
These hyper family-, hyper traditional marriage- obsessed Christian groups that keep screaming and ranting about things such as single-mother homes, women having more babies out of wedlock, etc, who assume that married people are as sexually pure as the freshly driven snow and that married are superior to singles, need to ‘walk the walk’ that they preach to the rest of us, but they often do not.
I am tired of married Christians acting as though they are more godly or pure than single adult and childless Christians, or they think by virtue of being married and/ or a parent they are “more of a Christian,” but you have long time Christians such as myself, who is age 40+, who is still a virgin (I remained true to biblical sexual teachings).
I am actually living out sexual purity (for three plus decades), but these hyper- pro- family, pro traditional gender roles, sexist, pro patriarchy cretins sleep around (or, in this case, have “emotional affairs.”)
These are the same backwards idiots who have “purity balls,” where they teach their little daughters that their sexuality belongs to their fathers and then later, if they marry, to their husbands.
Novel concept: teach your daughters that their sexuality belongs to them and them alone. You can teach them to believe that sex is for marriage only -that is all well and good- but let them know they can make their own choices in life. Their sexuality is theirs – it’s not even “God’s.”
Quote at me all day about, “you are not your own – bought at a price,” and just no.
How I cringe when Christian pro-celibacy books tell singles, “Your body/sexuality is not yours, it belongs to God/ the community.” Er no, it’s mine, not God’s, not the church’s.
I can see how feeling that one’s sexuality is an individualistic matter can lead to societal problems, but not if you have excellent self control, such as me (virgin at age 40+ here). My sexuality is mine, not God’s, not the church’s, not my “future husband’s” (should I marry).
Anyway, these uber- family obsessed cultic Christian groups cannot even practice what they preach to the rest of us.
Excerpt (please click the link above to visit their blog and read the rest):
Best known for his Vision Forum catalog — a colorful collection of apparently innocuous family friendly products mailed to more than a million people each autumn — Doug Phillips uses the wealth generated by his for-profit sales, as well as donations from the public, to promote his vision on controversial issues including education (home education is the only Biblical method), birth control (wrong in all circumstances), politics (a vote for either Kerry or Bush was a sin), and the roles of husbands and wives (hyper-Patriarchy at home and at church).
Doug Phillips first came to the attention of those of us at Ministry Watchman when he publicly defended his buddy, R.C. Sproul, Jr., who was defrocked after confessing to ecclesiastical tyranny and the theft and illegal use of a church denomination’s tax-ID number.
… The first, an exposé of how Doug Phillips’ family practices have not matched his family preaching, begins below. — MW
Officially, not-for-profit Vision Forum Ministries exists “to encourage and equip the biblical family and to train and facilitate fathers leading their families….” Doug Phillips’ focus on fathers is not an accident; he is perhaps the most prominent leader in the Patriarchy movement, a growing trend of returning to the biblical role models for men leading their families and submissive women helping their husbands or fathers.
Although the inspiration for this movement is understandable — a reaction to the all-too-common problem today of men abdicating their leadership over their families in deference to a radical feminist movement that has pervaded even the church — the danger of reaction is that it can be a pendulum that swings too far to the opposite extreme. While much of Doug Phillips’ teachings on the biblical roles of men and women seems to be sound, some of the applications of those teachings have proven to be very troubling.
Doug Phillips, the Home School Movement’s leading Quiverful Patriarch resigned from Vision Forum Ministries, admitting a “lengthy inappropriate relationship” with a woman. It appears that while as he has been fighting homosexuality and feminism as threats to marriage, he has actually been the threat.
His supporters are lauding his resignation letter as appropriately contrite repentance and arguing that this has no bearing on the validity of Biblical Patriarchy. But actually it does, making this more important than another hypocritical cheating scandal.
Phillips is a key figure bringing Christian Reconstruction into the larger home school world. Building upon R.J. Rushdoony’s postmillennialism and “Biblical Philosophy of History,” he teaches home-schooling families to “exercise dominion” through 200-year plans, “multi-generational faithfulness” and “Biblical Patriarchy.”
His influence is hard to overstate; there is barely a part of the home-school movement his empire has not touched.
… Phillips was a founder of the patriarchal Family Integrated Church Movement. He has close partnerships with Henry Morris at Institute for Creation Research, the Duggar family of 19 Kids and Counting and actor-turned-Christian activist Kirk Cameron.
… Phillips’ infidelity is more than a private matter because, by design, his Biblical Patriarchy makes women vulnerable such that even with a husband repeatedly violating his marriage vows, practically speaking, a wife has no options.
The Family, in Biblical Patriarchy, is the primary institution through which God has delegated authority entirely to men. Women are to be “in submission in all things,” first to their fathers and then to husbands, chosen by fathers. The purpose of the family is the exercise of the patriarch’s dominion, especially through procreation. Women are to bear as many children as is possible. Anything short of that is deemed selfishness, accommodation with the “culture of death” and rebellion against God’s will.
….Education for girls within Biblical Patriarchy is focused on training them for domestic duties. Vision Forum’s catalogs, Beautiful Girlhood Collection and the All American Boy’s Adventure Catalog, stated purpose is to teach “Biblical” gender norms: meekness, submissiveness and dependency for girls; chivalry, curiosity and adventurousness for boys. There are strategies for boys to obtain college degrees without actually attending college but college education for girls is often seen as unnecessary and even destructive.
…For girls they offer a “Father Daughter Retreat” (noted for its creepiness), in which fathers “lead,” “woo” and “win” their daughters to become “industrious, family-affirming, children-loving, women of God.”
Phillips’ scandal calls attention to the dangers of the world he wants to build: A woman raised in Biblical Patriarchy is carefully sheltered, most especially to opportunities to develop any kind of self-sufficiency. If she finds herself with a houseful of children and a husband forced to admit publicly to unfaithfulness that extends over a long period of time, she has no options.
The cheated wife is not likely to be supported by the patriarchal community. The leaders (all male) are likely to be sympathetic the husband’s “temptation” and should she discuss the situation outside of the sanctioned forums controlled by men she will be denounced as a gossip. Sometimes the women are blamed: the “other woman” as Satan’s temptress and even the completely innocent wife for having “let herself go” or being inadequately submissive.
Christian Pundit 