Origin stories shape how societies assign guilt and authority. When we revisit myths, we don’t just learn about the past, we question the assumptions we’ve inherited about gender, power, and morality.
1 Timothy 2:11-15 states, “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She should remain silent. For Adam was created first, then Eve. Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”
Get Your Women Under Control
Yesterday, Mark Driscoll, a controversial evangelical pastor known for founding Mars Hill Church with 1.3 million followers posted, “Progressive young women are the result of misplaced motherhood. When you don’t marry and have kids, you start mothering pets and terrorists in the name of toxic empathy.”
When a woman in the comments politely expressed her distaste for Driskoll’s message, and argued that Jesus, too, wouldn’t stand by such a comment, a man replied, “Jesus would tell men to do their job and get their women under control because you’re dog walked by your emotions and lack wisdom. Every weak society that falls to a color revolution has women leading because it’s an inversion and abomination of God’s order.”
Get their women under control?
Unfortunately, current American political discourse promotes this biblically-rooted misogyny: the tradwife. Baby bonuses. National incentives for breeding. American right and extremist preachers cast women as property, women as intellectually and morally unfit. Women should submit to the rule of their husbands.
Joel Webbon, a pastor and YouTube personality, tweeted: “The 19th Amendment was a bad idea.” Last week, Webbon added: wives must submit to their husbands with “a sense of fear, and trembling, and awe...not only in things she agrees with, but in everything…She belongs to him. He owns her.” Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, reposted a video in which pastors, again, denounce a woman’s right to vote. Andrew Tate, a men’s rights influencer, posted, “Stop letting women vote, stop giving women positions as judges, stop giving women political appointments … WOMEN: giving you political and social power is how we ended up here.”
A Doll’s House
In the 1800s, women who wanted independence and/or a voice were sent to asylums. A woman was not meant to reject their “natural” state of domesticity. Wives and daughters were institutionalized and abused, poisoned, and tortured. The Women They Could Not Silence follows Elizabeth Packard, who was tragically forced into an asylum by her husband. She then became an advocate for women who were denied freedom.
There’s a scene I can’t shake from Henrick Ibsen’s “A Doll House.” That iconic moment when Nora rejects her husband and 19th-century patriarchal society.
She walks out and slams the door behind her.
(From below, the heavy sound of a DOOR CLOSING.)
Nora asserts her agency and independence for the first time. She had been a “doll-child” to her father and a “doll-wife” to her husband, subservient and without an identity of her own. Nora turns her back on her duties as a wife and mother as defined by the society (in 1879!). She declares her primary duty is to herself, her own personal growth and self-discovery.
Nora’s defiance sparked debate about marriage, women’s rights, and human rights. In short, Nora’s slamming of the door signified her transformation from an obedient, naive wife into an individual seeking her own identity and freedom outside the artificial reality of her marriage.
Modern Misogyny in Politics
Here in the U.S., it’s 2026, and we’ve never elected a female president. At the same time, women who run for office are demeaned with gendered insults, targeted with AI-generated pornography, and physically threatened. We STILL don’t have universal parental leave. Jobs primarily held by women (like teaching) are paid less.
When the men in charge, founding fathers, megachurch pastors, and political leaders hold deeply misogynistic views, the American patriarchy persists. We continue putting abusers and misogynists in positions of power. There’s this persistent, antiquated, biblically-rooted belief that men are above women. Not only entitled, but ordained, to uphold this social order.
“When women ignore men, when women refuse men, when women stand up and fight, and when women name the injustices they have experienced, they are often met with cruelty to remind them where they belong. Even women who are simply going about their days are subject to potential punishment for being “temptations” in a nation where a white man having a “bad day” is enough reason to take another’s life, or a woman’s choice of clothing is an invitation to attack her.” —Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us by Anna Malaika Tubbs
Rooted in Biblical Authority
Women are forced into motherhood by the government, rooted in biblical authority, stretched impossibly thin, trying to hold down jobs while caring for their kids, all with increasingly disappearing government resources and “handouts” like universal parental leave and assistance these same politicians vote against.
At the heart of all of this is faulty Biblical interpretations that elevate men as superior, protectors, and rulers while ensuring women remain submissive. This theology somehow pervades US courtrooms, classrooms, and Congress. Andrew Tate, Mark Driscoll, and Pete Hegseth ensure that women know their place.
We have to be willing to interrogate the stories we’ve inherited: patriarchy is not inevitable or ordained.
This is really good and important IMO.