Thursday, January 7, 2010

Towards Understanding Voddie Baucham

Bacham's missing blog post copied elsewhere
Please Refer to the Index of Blog Posts about Voddie Baucham that follows this narrative.

Revised March 2023

In March of 2008, I presented a workshop at a meeting of a  counter-cult apologetics organization on the history of the Patriarchy Movement among some ten thousand Evangelical Christian homeschoolers from across many denominations and backgrounds. In the early-1990s, the group developed a style of worship in what they eventually called Family Integrated Churches (FIC). I described the movement as an affinity group patterned after the Roman Paterfamilias for separatist homeschoolers who follow the principles of the Quiverfull Movement (QF). At that time, I'd only heard of Voddie Baucham twice before (on a blog and in the Return of the Daughters video). Later that year, Baucham claimed in error on his website that my presentation came about because he was unliked by the seminary where the conference just happened to be held that year.

Emails

After writing a blog post to explain that my lecture didn't even list Baucham in the extensive bibliography, Voddie (who then permitted me to refer to him by his first name) sent a short email, calling me "sister" with an apology as he didn't intend to hurt me. I wrote back to explain that if he were genuine he would delete the reference to me from his blog. Voddie then proceeded to write several very long emails to me, seemingly to "get me to admit" that he played a part in the causality that led to that lecture. 

During that exchange, he agreed to answer a list of questions that I started to prepare for him. When the President of the organization wrote to explain his causality was false, all communication stopped, and Voddie deleted the blog post. Still, he wrote a new one with a fresh insult that included wrongly attributed and misunderstood quote. Voddie's retaliation blog post also quickly disappeared from his blog by the next day. A version of this false causality still appears in one of his books. He also never answered the questions that he'd previously agreed to answer.

Child Training

I took the information in Voddie's lengthy emails and developed blog posts evaluating them. Soon after that, people who had left his church in Texas wrote to me after they left, many of them stating that they found my blog because of Voddie's statements that women on the internet were obsessed with him. At least a year after that, I found an online comment that he made claiming that obsessed women told horrible lies about what he taught concerning corporal punishment ("child training"), which I assumed to refer to me. To demonstrate the truth, I then took a small segment from an audio sermon and put it in video form so that Voddie's own voice could attest to the truth of what I'd written on my blog about his public teachings. I noticed a similar issue in the past where he denies that he made claims that young women did not need a college education, a position about which he's said many different things, depending on his audience.

Not otherwise noted here is a quote from another "obsessed" critic who quoted now-deleted videos that featured segments of a recorded sermon by Baucham on "Biblical Womanhood." I first noticed it in 2008, citing its claims that Sunday School became a practice because of Cultural Marxism. When criticized for his provocative statements about daughters, the videos and a short-lived rebuttal that was once noted on his blog disappeared. You can read the larger transcript here, but I will include just this portion:  “A lot of men are leaving their wives for younger women because they yearn for attention from younger women. And God gave them a daughter who can give them that."  His daughter has since abandoned this ideology and her book about it and now works as a teacher. (As in many FIC and QF churches, working outside the home is considered a type of adultery for "serving the vision of another man.")

Social Justice

When the Black Lives Matter protests began in 2020, I was asked why Voddie Baucham spoke negatively about them, and I wrote a series of blog posts to explain his position. While I don't dispute many of his arguments about the Modernist Movement, I find that he makes too big of a bogeyman out of the specific influence of Cultural Marxism, which is now used as a narrative by Evangelicals to explain away everything that they dislike about modern society. I focused on his catastrophizing and fear-mongering which I see as a function of his preferred way of understanding truth along with his mindset of Right Wing Populism in a series of blog posts at No Longer Quivering at Patheos. 

While his view as a Baptist likely shaped his perspective, I grew up in a denomination that first began in1906 with the Azuza Street Revivals that ordained women and taught children's ministry long before the advent of Cultural Marxism. Thus, his claims that I am an example of his primary bogeyman's direct influence are not compelling. Before abandoning Christian Reconstruction and before Cultural Marxism became an Evangelical trope, I was a member of the Constitution Party before it became a vogue focus within those circles. The influence of the Frankfurt School was never mentioned until long after I'd left when William Lind laid claim to the new idea which Baucham now uses to brand himself and sell books, much like he did with the FIC. He has a long habit of running ahead of the crowd and playing band leader, but that is my opinion.  We all have opinions.

With the advent of the 2022 Frankfurt Declaration Bachaum advanced in early 2023, I was again asked about him. I will adapt and repost the material that I wrote about the Social Justice movement for No Longer Quivering here on my blog and will add information about the Frankfurt Declaration. I hope to be finished by the end of April 2023.
Links on Under Much Grace 
Concerning Voddie Baucham 


Baucham's Reiteration of Quvierfull's “First Time Obedience” (FTO)

(Corporal Punishment / “Child Training” under “Multigenerational Faithfulness”)

  • Baucham's Teachings About Multigenerational Faithfulness (2008)


Baucham's Equivocations, Distortions, and Logical Fallacies

Bacham's Redefinition of Terms

Baucham's Use of the Hidden Curriculum


Baucham's Position on College for Daughters

  • He ascribes to Vision Forum's confessional documents and the Tenets of Biblical
    Patriarchy     which declares training outside the home “non-normative” (understood as a sin in FIC/QF circles). But per his emails to me, he had to sacrifice some things to help the cause of the FIC, even though he claims not to believe most of the things that the FIC professes.. Except that a decade later, he claims that he never compromises on religious matters that are critical. I don't buy it. It's my observation/opinion that he does what works for him at the time, depending on his audience.



Voddie Baucham on the Family Integrated Church

Corresponding with Voddie Baucham
  • Apologies that Aren’t.  (Discerning genuine apologies from “blanket apologies” that offer no shows of contrition or attempts to make restitution.)

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