A Different Kind of Epitaph for Voddie Baucham

I hope Voddie Baucham found whatever it was he was looking for and that his family finds comfort. A former follower-friend of his told me that he was basically a child inside who was desperately afraid of ending up alone, powerless, and desperately poor again, like he was as a child in LA. 

(Summary of posts concerning Voddie Baucham.)

I prayed often for his healing, and I usually think of him when I read quotes and content from Alice Miller, the child psychologist who opposed "the black pedagogy" of child abuse. He read like a page out of her textbook that described wounded children who grew up to become intolerant of the behavior of children or outright abusers themselves. He worked so desperately to be acknowledged, seen, powerful, and important. His wife has lupus pretty severely, and I hope that she remains as well as she can.

But at the same time, I feel like one of the biggest, meanest, most manipulative bullies of this genre is now gone. The people whom he cruelly intimidated and manipulated, lording his education and position over them in intimidation and what sometimes sounded like anger... those people can feel free today. They don't ever have to worry about running into him somewhere, and they can know that he can no longer hurt them again in any way.

Many people love him, but they don't know what it's like to be someone he decided to use, tearing them down as an example so he could feel powerful, right, and so much better than them. (he tried with me but never succeeded, thanks to the grace of God and the power of truth. How ironic that his death falls so swiftly behind Kirk's. I saw a comment in an announcement about Baucham's passing that asked, "Will they put me on a government watch list?" because they had nothing good to say about him.

He lied about me online and personally insulted me -- and then started writing to me, lying to me and about me, following that up with more lies as time went on.  He'd told at least a dozen different people that he was suing me (which was another lie).  He claimed that I lied about him, which always went poorly for him.  He published a miserable fable about me in a book that others encouraged me to sue him over. Instead, I said that he wasn't that important. Because he wasn't. However, when I read his emails, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

I didn't get any backlash from him when I wrote about him on No Longer Quivering in 2020, choosing to acknowledge him as a fellow believer with some aberrant beliefs, and someone whose perspective and epistemology differed from mine. I called for unity through love, while still acknowledging the theological and philosophical differences between us. But I affirmed him as a fellow Believer. I don't believe he ever responded, if he ever took notice.

I will not see Voddie in Vahalla, but I hope to be happily seated with him in unity at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb one day. Soon after he "slammed" me on his blog, I went there to see if I could find the post to quote it, but he'd deleted it. He deleted all of them before it ever occurred to me that he would do such a thing. Instead, I found a sweet picture of him holding a baby, announcing that he'd just adopted a little girl. I found it commendable and rejoiced. (Other cohorts of his would only adopt boys.) I'm glad that he dared to do that back then, and that's the picture of him that I've continued to hold of him in my mind's eye. He expressed great love in that photo with a tiny baby, and I always prayed that God would multiply it. It was lovely and seemed genuine.

Our lives are but a vapor, and in that sense, I hope that I will soon see Voddie. As people tell of glimpses of heaven, loved ones come to meet new arrivals when we make our way to that undiscovered country. Should I be found faithful, I hope that Voddie is among those who gather to greet me.

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Bad Apples or Bad Barrels? A Final Look at the Apple Meme with Philip Zimbardo

On Monday, Raw Story published an article written by Vyckie Garrison offering a critique of a meme that appeared online which likens girls to apples. Within a day or two and after much discussion, it came to my attention that the meme that appeared on the Patriarchal website called Let them Marry was actually a commentary on a previous meme.

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The Young Turks' Commentary: Use the Quiver to Burst the High Demand Bubble

Here's another twist on the Apple Meme Theme resulting from Vyckie Garrison's recent Raw Story article and Cenk Uygur's commentary on it (see video below).

Most Christians have likely heard the words from Psalm 127 which were borrowed to describe the Evangelical Christian “Quiverfull Movement” (QF) and will recognize that compares families to an archer who is prepared for battle: “As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are the children of one's youth. Happy is the man whose quiver is full of them.” 

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Apples in Context

More commentary on girls and apples will be forthcoming in a day or two, but this context should shed some light on the intent of the author of meme #2.  It was actually a response to meme #1.  (Thanks to a reader named Ezzy at No Longer Quivering for information on the first meme.)

It's still patriarchal, objectifies girls (and seems to imply that it is true of all women), but at least it makes a bit more sense in context.

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Towards Understanding Voddie Baucham

Bacham's missing blog post copied elsewhere

  NEW EDIT 29Sep25: 

An Epitaph for Voddie

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.

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The Linguistic Snare of Men as Prophet, Priest and King for Families

Please read this prerequisite post
about this logical fallcy first.

Voddie Baucham mentioned a fine (and unsolicited) example of the linguistic snare of the redefinition of terms in his email correspondence with me. He is one of many who has promoted the trap of logic inherent in this particular teaching, but because of the centrality of fathers in the Family Integrated Church (FIC) paradigm, the teaching creates special, unique problems with many undesirable effects. Because Protestants believe that prophesying through the Word and Spirit passed to all believers who no longer require the intercession of any earthly mediator resulting from the atoning work of Christ, the special assignment of the duties of prophet and priest to husbands and fathers, however limited, becomes ambiguous and predisposes the unsuspecting believer to error.

As mentioned in the previous post, redefining terms does not constitute a fallacy in and of itself, but it often predisposes one to fall back into the old understanding of the original and traditional definition of the word out of habit without realizing it. Redefinition thus paves the way for the Fallacy of Equivocation, because the redefined word or phrase holds two or more distinct meanings. Manipulators can subtly pressure their marks and then vacillate between the two understandings and distinct meanings, gaining only the benefits of both and while avoiding all criticisms. Sometimes this is done quite innocently, but the practice of redefinition creates problems of equivocation just the same. A sermon by George Whitefield presents us with one such example.

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