Huckabee - Submission Versus Servant Leadership.

There has been a stir in the news this past week about Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's views on women. The ordained Southern Baptist Minister and former governor of Arkansas signed an ad in 1998 along with some other prominent Southern Baptists advocating teachings on the family contained in the document “The Baptist Faith and Message.” The document spells out that:

The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God's image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation.

The words that Huckabee is in the doghouse over are “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband (…).” What troubles me is the use of the term servant leadership. Robert Greenleaf, who developed the idea of servant leadership, never defined it as meaning one-person leads, while another submits, based on their gender. Based on my reading of the above statement, “patriarchy” might better define what the Southern Baptists are really talking about.

Patriarchy - social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line; broadly : control by men of a disproportionately large share of power

Using the terms “servant leadership” and throwing in some “equals” does not negate a hierarchy with control based on gender. Following the teachings of Robert Greenleaf might be one way for the Southern Baptists (and many other religions) to really practice servant leadership.