It is important and fascinating, of course, to note that women
never, no matter how deluded or needy or desperate, worship
Jesus as the perfect son. No faith is that blind. There is no religious or cultural palliative to deaden the raw pain of the son’s betrayal of the mother: only her own obedience to the same father,
the sacrifice of her own life on the same cross, her own body nailed
and bleeding, can enable her to accept that her son, like Jesus, has
come to do his Father’s work. Feminist Leah Fritz, in Thinking Like
a W oman, described the excruciating predicament of women who
try to find worth in Christian submission: “Unloved, unrespected,
unnoticed by the Heavenly Father, condescended to by the Son,
and fucked by the Holy Ghost, western woman spends her entire
life trying to please. ” 3
But no matter how hard she tries to please, it is harder still for
her to be pleased. In Bless This House, Anita Bryant describes how
each day she must ask Jesus to “help me love my husband and
children. ”4 In The Total Woman, Marabel Morgan explains that it is
only through God’s power that “we can love and accept others,
including our husbands. ” 5 In The Gift o f In ner H ealing, Ruth Carter
Stapleton counsels a young woman who is in a desperately unhappy marriage: “T ry to spend a little time each day visualizing Jesus coming in the door from work. Then see yourself walking up
to him, embracing him. Say to Jesus, i t ’s good to have you home
N ick. ’” 6
Ruth Carter Stapleton married at nineteen. Describing the early
years of her marriage, she wrote:
After moving four hundred fifty miles from my first family
in order to save my marriage, I found myself in a cold, threatening, unprotected world, or so it seemed to my confused heart. In an effort to avoid total destruction, I indulged in escapes of every kind. . .
A major crisis arose when I discovered I was pregnant with
my first child. I knew that this was supposed to be one of the
crowning moments of womanhood, but not for me.. . . When
my baby was born, I wanted to be a good mother, but I felt
even more trapped.. . . Then three more babies were born in
rapid succession, and each one, so beautiful, terrified me. I did
love them, but by the fourth child I was at the point of total
desperation. 7
Apparently the birth of her fourth child occasioned her surrender
to Jesus. For a time, life seemed worthwhile. Then, a rupture in a
cherished friendship plummeted her into an intolerable depression.
During this period, she jumped out of a moving car in what she
regards as a suicide attempt.
A male religious mentor picked up the pieces. Stapleton took her
own experience of breakdown and recovery and from it shaped a
kind of faith psychotherapy. Nick’s transformation into Jesus has
already been mentioned. A male homosexual, traumatized by an
absent father who never played with him as a child, played baseball with Jesus under Stapleton’s tutelage—a whole nine innings.
In finding Jesus as father and chum, he was healed of the hurt of
an absent father and “cured” of his homosexuality. A woman who
was forcibly raped by her father as a child was encouraged to remember the event, only this time Jesus had his hand on the father’s shoulder and was forgiving him. This enabled the woman to forgive her father too and to be reconciled with men. A woman who as a child was rejected by her father on the occasion of her first
date—the father did not notice her pretty dress—was encouraged
to imagine the presence of Jesus on that fateful night. Jesus loved
her dress and found her very desirable. Stapleton claims that this
devotional therapy, through the power of the Holy Spirit, enables
Jesus to erase damaging memories.
A secular analysis of Stapleton’s own newfound well-being
seems, by contrast, pedestrian. A brilliant woman has found a socially acceptable w ay to use her intellect and compassion in the public domain— the dream of many women. Though fundamentalist male ministers have called her a witch, in typical female fashion Stapleton disclaims responsibility for her own inventiveness and
credits the Holy Spirit, clearly male, thus soothing the savage misogyny of those who cannot bear for any woman to be both seen and heard. Also, having founded an evangelical m inistry that demands constant travel, Stapleton is rarely at home. She has not given birth again.
Marabel Morgan’s description of her own miserable marriage in
the years preceding her discovery of God’s will is best summarized
in this one sentence: “I was helpless and unhappy. ” 8 She describes
years of tension, conflict, boredom, and gloom. She took her fate
into her own hands by asking the not-yet-classic question, What do
men want? Her answer is stunningly accurate: “It is only when a
woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships
him, and is w illing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful
to him . ”9 Or, more aphoristically, “A Total Woman caters to her
man’s special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex, or sports. ” 10
Citing God as the authority and submission to Jesus as the model,
Morgan defines love as “unconditional acceptance of [a man] and
his feelings. ” 11
Morgan’s achievement in The Total Woman was to isolate the
basic sexual scenarios of male dominance and female submission
and to formulate a simple set of lessons, a pedagogy, that teaches
women how to act out those scenarios within the context of a
Christian value system: in other words, how to cater to male pornographic fantasies in the name of Jesus Christ. As Morgan explains in her own extraordinary prose style: “That great source
book, the Bible, states, ‘Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed
undefiled. . . ’ In other words, sex is for the marriage relationship
only, but within those bounds, anything goes. Sex is as clean and
pure as eating cottage cheese. ” 12 Morgan’s detailed instructions on
how to eat cottage cheese, the most famous of which involves
Saran Wrap, make clear that female submission is a delicately balanced commingling of resourcefulness and lack of self-respect. Too little resourcefulness or too much self-respect will doom a woman
to failure as a Total Woman. A submissive nature is the miracle for
which religious women pray.
No one has prayed harder, longer, and with less apparent success than Anita Bryant. She has spent a good part of her life on her knees begging Jesus to forgive her for the sin of existing. In Mine