This particular pair of family members belong to a nondenominational Christian church. Sounds harmless enough, until you start really looking at it. It's a church that is designed for "singles, college students and young couples." It's bad enough that it's basically a Bible-literalist church ("It was uniquely, verbally, and fully inspired by the Holy Spirit and was written without error in the original manuscript"), but this really got me:
We believe that God designed men and women to be different. The husband and wife have differing but complementary roles in the family. The husband is the head of the household, loving and leading his wife, as Christ as his example. The wife is to support and respect her husband. (Emphasis mine.)They reference Ephesians 5:21-6:4
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. (Emphasis mine.)This makes me ill. There it is in black and white -- the crudest form of sexism wrapped in religion.
So this invitation was for us to attend a church service at this vile and loathsome place, during which these people's children will be "dedicated."
Right. So they extended the invitation to the two people who they know for a fact are not interested in religion and who have had numerous tearful and angry discussions and arguments about it. (We just don't bring the subject up anymore.) That's fine -- the invite went out in a big batch to everyone in the family. But Husband and I had to figure out what to do about it. Make up an excuse? Be straightforward? At first I was resigned to just sucking it up and going for the sake of family. But the more I thought about it the worse that idea became. Nobody should ever be guilted into going to religious service. As Husband says, unless someone's getting married or buried, he doesn't want to set foot in a church.
Today Husband told them to not include us in invites pertaining to this church. I'm so relieved. But at the same time I'm very, very sad for these two little girls. Everyone has the right to raise their family how they see fit, so we just have to deal with the fact that these kids are going to be growing up thinking they're inferior and subservient to men. Oh, not to mention the homophobia (I've been told to my face that I'm not as good of a person as these people because I'm not Christian and bisexual). It breaks my heart.
2 comments:
Just offering hugs of support and agreement in your decision and, am so glad you guys are in agreement on how to handle this delicate situation. I would react and act the same way as you. We have many similiar situations that we opt out of because of our very non-religious household. It does piss off my in-laws..but so be it. I live by who I am 100% and teach my daughters to be the same way. I just cannot blog about it because my MIL reads my blog. Bummer.
xoxo,t
How very Christian of them to judge you that way. I thought God loved all of his children equally, regardless of their beliefs. Apparently not in their eyes. It's just something they'll have to answer for when they meet their maker someday.
There's always hope that when those girls grow up they will be smart enough to think for themselves and choose whether or not they want to continue being subjected to such archaic and vile belief practices.
Post a Comment