Is Doug Wilson right to say that women who refuse to marry,  bear children and carry out domestic chores are turning after Satan?

The short and simply answer to what might be considered a silly question is “No.”  But obviously for us to end up with such a silly question, Doug Wilson has been saying something silly. It’s worth having a look at what he has been saying as it gives us an insight into the kind of wony exegesis used to support culture war.

You can find Wilson’s article here:  He writes:

Paul says that women who turn aside after Satan are women who avoid marriage, avoid having babies, and who avoid the domestic arts. That’s how women turn aside after Satan. And all God’s people said yikes.

He is referring here to 1 Timothy 5:11-14  which says:

“¹¹ But refuse to enroll younger widows, for when their passions draw them away from Christ, they desire to marry ¹² and so incur condemnation for having abandoned their former faith. ¹³ Besides that, they learn to be idlers, going about from house to house, and not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not. ¹⁴ So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander. ¹⁵ For some have already strayed after Satan. 

You will notice that the context is Paul’s teaching on how to care for widows.  Older widows are to be provided for by the church, a widows list is to be created. However, Paul says that younger widows should not be included on the list.  There is a risk that they might, once provided for, with nothing to fill their time becoming distracted away from godliness and turn to gossip and slander. 

Notice first of all, that Wilson makes what has been specifically about the care of widows about women generally.  He turns a piece of situational advice into an exhaustive command. This would require Paul to contradict both his own experience as a single man and his teaching in 1 Corinthians 7 that there were benefits to singleness.

Secondly, Wilson turns the Biblical idea of managing your household, having oversight and responsibility for it into household chores or “the domestic arts”.   This fits into a worldview where wives are there to do the washing, cleaning and cooking but that’s a long way from the circumstances of the New Testament and indeed of much of history.

Thirdly, Wilson links the turning to Satan with turning away from those things and misses that Paul explicitly states what the danger is.  The danger is not that they don’t do certain things. Rather, it is that they find themselves doing ungodly things.  Turning to Satan is a turning away from godliness and specifically to slander and gossip.

At the end of his article, Wilson writes this patronising nonsense:

“Someone asks you, as they always do, what you want to do after you graduate. You should say something like this: “I would like to have eight babies in a row. And I would like at least six of them to have chubby cheeks!”

I would suggest that a woman might better respond if Doug should ask them what they want to do when they graduate “I want to handle God’s Word better than you do.”