Finally finished reading Created to Be His Help Meet, and I simply can't give it an unqualified recommendation. Generally speaking, Mrs. Pearl does an excellent job of consistently asserting that the vast majority of wifely suffering arises from refusing to be a help meet or to be obediently submissive in general. However, that quote I posted 3 weeks ago came from near the beginning and resonated enough with me that it sat on my mental shoulder throughout the remainder of the book. I suppose she probably believes she has discovered the full prescription for why it would be the case that fundamentalist Christian homes have in recent decades been more likely to end up broken than homes in general: not enough submission going on here. But she never again addressed the subset of fundamentalist Christian homes, and in ignoring what she had set up as such a cogent question she consequently failed to consider what one can probably consider to be an indisputable fact: it's extremely unlikely that fundamentalist Christian wives are more rebellious and independent than are wives in general -- especially secular wives.
I loved most of the book until near the end, but it ends in a puddle of verbal vomit, in my opinion, because the wind-down of the book is a list of circumstances in which Debi and Michael Pearl give their full blessing for women to be not only disobedient but rebellious and antagonistic. In my opinion, the Pearls demonstrated their own fundamentalist blind spot by providing women far too much leeway to seize control of their families, and all I could envision when I considered the women whose letters about familial overthrow they applauded were, well, the typical battle-ax women I've experienced at fundamentalist churches. Give them a sinful inch, and they take a pious mile.
Could it possibly be the case that fundamentalist wives are among the most likely to grind down their imperfect husbands with loud proclamations of piety aimed at demasculating them?
