Being female in the IFB: wife and mother

By Rebekah Palmer

I remember when I was a little kid playing with my sibling and our friends, either our perspective of family life or using Barbies and dolls to act out family life by calling it “playing house,” I announced that I probably wouldn’t have sex until I was married and even after marriage wouldn’t do it.

The word “sex” filled my body with fear and disgust and dread.

However, in the Baptist church I attended with my family, sex was preached about as such a vile act outside of God’s plan, which was defined as between a male and a female bound by holy matrimony. But inside the relationship between a male and a female bound by holy matrimony, sex was then described as the most blissful act two people could perform, because it would bring the blessing of children. 

I always imagined I would meet a loving man who would see me and understand how I felt about sex, and we would then adopt our children.

As I became a teenager inside of an Independent Fundamental Baptist church, this fantasy just became more of a fairy tale that would never exist. I remember being taught in specific classes at the high school inside our church that female bodies were to be kept fit and healthy if we ever expected a godly man to be interested in us as wives.

In my mind, I was automatically never going to be a godly man’s choice because I lived with a rare disease and chronic illnesses. A wife and mother were treated as the only available roles for female adherence to the will of God as preached by our church. 

As a 16-year-old, I was told by my youth pastor that my emotional and mental health shouldn’t worry me so much because a man would rather have a mentally ill wife than a fat wife. Looking back, it’s completely troublesome to see that someone who was a youth mentor for teenagers was more concerned about me appearing fit according to white Western beauty standards for a man that might be hypothetically interested in me, instead of being concerned with the level of anxiety and despair I was enduring.

Females were to repress our anger, fear, grief, rage, and sorrow in order to be pleasing for men and examples for our future children they would bless us with in our union. No wonder my child self declared through playing house that she would not be having sex, even inside a church-approved marriage!

But with the constant pressure at the church school and the church services telling us that people who had a uterus could only be worthy to God inside marriage and motherhood, I grew ever more despairing and isolated inside my own body and mind. I would imagine I wanted to be married and have my own children someday so I wrote letters to a future spouse and named hypothetical children.

Because we were a small church with few options of matrimonial prospects and the church leadership claimed to want more people skilled in ministry positions, they recommended Bible college to me. I went to the Bible college that pastor recommended and promoted above a few others. At the time, I just wanted to go to this Bible college to grow in faith and learn more about practicing my beliefs, and I didn’t have any words for the pressure I also felt to find that husband/future-father-of-my-children there.

Instead of becoming enrolled in the missionary major I wanted, I was convinced by a female staff member to switch to secondary Christian education, because someday I would be assisting my husband in his ministry, and he would want his children educated at all ages, which would be my work, especially if we were traveling as missionaries. 

Often the pastor of the church that founded the Bible college would visit and reinforce the ideas about males and females that I had heard from the church in which I came of age, and added that it was the man’s responsibility to form his wife to meet every need he had. All of this, above the needs of any children produced by the union, as well as any needs her family and friends might expect of her.

He declared a woman to be a baby-making machine and her parts were all creatively crafted by God to enable and sustain human life, and that life residing in her womb was to be protected above all life. And once that life became independent of her body, she and her husband were then to mold that child into another Christian after the teachings we were taught. He claimed a woman’s primary function was to assist her husband in his work and raise his children.

If a man had a good woman by his side, he said, there was nothing that the ministry couldn’t achieve. The failure and success of a man’s life was placed solely on the reputation of his wife and mother of his kids.

And here I was already determined that sex would be a “no” and biological children would be a “no” in a Bible college and a church full of males expecting a “yes” to everything they could desire.

I was often admonished for my attitude towards marriage and motherhood as lacking faith that God could use me in these meaningful roles, and told that I had no evidence that men wouldn’t choose me due to physical and mental illness and that I could overcome my health reality as God could provide a man with children already from a previous marriage with a wife who had died which would be my job to raise.  

The only way to cope with my shame of existing as a female who had wanted to know how to say “no” to men who had already taken sexual advantage of me, I felt as though the only way I could refuse the status of wife and motherhood was to bury myself in the belief that a sick body and mind could not adequately conform to marital or motherly duties.

Because how dare I choose to remain single, celibate, and childless? How dare I cry out in distress and pain and expect grace and love for suffering that I had put upon myself?

The mustard seed of faith that was planted in my heart as a child was to the church leadership so despicable, because it was not developing into the woman they wanted all females to be, to prop up a system scripted for their own interpretation of God. They slapped the label of “God’s Design” according to gender onto any soul sitting at their feet.

In creating females to be enablers of abusive males and calling it “good,” they delude themselves that this is the order of the will of God.

No. I will not conform inside this jailhouse that calls itself church.

I will not consent to a man to form me. I will not create biological children.

I will not demand that any human with a uterus do exactly what the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement wants.

For myself, I will move forward with the seed of faith germinating in my spirit and have hope in growing into a bountiful tree that will practice love for any who come under her branches. 

Rebekah Palmer (she/they) holds a degree in Professional Communication and Emerging Media from UW-Stout in Menomonie, WI in addition to a religious degree in parochial school teaching and secretarial training. She currently serves as the Vice President of Awareness and Education at Next Generation of Cystinosis. She is a dedicated rare disease advocate and a published author, and her articles have appeared on the rare news website PatientWorthy, digital magazine Rare Revolution, and #RareIs. She identifies as a white, disabled, Christian, queer and non-binary human.