The Right offers women a concept of love based on order and stability, with formal areas of mutual accountability. A woman is loved for fulfilling her female functions: obedience is an expression
of love and so are sexual submission and childbearing. In return,
the man is supposed to be responsible for the material and emotional well-being of the woman. And, increasingly, to redeem the cruel inadequacies of mortal men, the Right offers women the love
of Jesus, beautiful brother, tender lover, compassionate friend, perfect healer of sorrow and resentment, the one male to whom one can submit absolutely— be Woman as it were— without being sexually violated or psychologically abused.
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
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
each day she must ask Jesus to “help me love my husband and
children. ”4 In
only through God’s power that “we can love and accept others,
including our husbands. ” 5 In
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
