My father was a Baptist lay minister, the pianist, deacon and Sunday school teacher in our small country Baptist church.

My mother had become involved in the Pentecostal church. I remember when I saw the hypocrisy of their male headship teaching. They had women evangelists, but the same woman who preached a revival could not then go into a Sunday school room and teach a mixed group of men and women. I was eight years old and knew that did not make any sense.

For 50 years I was so proud to be a Baptist. I believed in their Great Commission and their missionaries. Don and I married in the early 1960s at my church, and I promised to honor and obey. It never occurred to me that I was vowing to honor and obey him, and I am sure it did not to most women. It was just what we were supposed to say. In later years when I realized what I had repeated in the vows, I thought it meant I was honoring our marriage, never even thinking that he was not asked to promise the same thing. We were married 55 years until his death. My life still honors our marriage because I want it to.

Much of my time was spent in our Baptist church. I taught Sunday school, was on all committees and raised our two sons in church. I was very happy and felt I was serving God the best I could.

It was in the midst of the Hippie Movement when things really began to change for young people in the United States, and all across the world. I married right out of high school which is what many young people did. The Hippie Movement changed that during the 1960s and 1970s. Suddenly girls were going off to college, having “free sex” (the boys always did), but that fact was now out in the open. The drug culture began.

At this time 70% of women did not work outside the home. Only 34% of college graduates were women in 1964.

These changes were having an effect upon religion. Up until that time, religion was still very strong in families. Mom and Dad went to church and their children went to Youth camps. For Baptist families, church meant Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night and week-long revivals in the Spring and Fall. We were immersed in church, while the Hippies went about doing their thing, we did our own thing, and that was church.

In 2006, I became employed by Baptist General Convention of Texas. My husband began telling me that Baptists were not fair to women. I was doing everything I wanted to do in church and never even considered that other women were being denied the privilege of serving as a deacon, or even preaching. Our church sent many women to the mission field and we thought that was exactly what they wanted to do. We did not understand that that was all they were going to be allowed to do.

These changes in society caused much consternation among religious leaders. They thought they had to do something about it. Like many young Christian people in the sixties through the seventies, I thought so too.

They went too far and held on too long

Religious leaders, pastors, seminary presidents, and professors went too far. And they have become even more radicalized. It is this radicalization that my book The Biblical Marriage Myth: The Devil Comes Calling draws your attention to.

The CBMW and SBC, and others, have made marriage the focus of Christianity. They have marginalized a wife to the point that she must submit to her husband, or else the Devil will come into their home. In this way, they have brought witchcraft into the marriage, and are actually calling women witches, because the only way the Devil can influence the wife, is to whisper in her ear, by telling her to work outside the home, and to quit submitting to her husband in all things. By doing so, she is acting out the scheme of the Devil, as Ralph Drollinger says in his White House Bible Study that was sent out to all governmental leaders on September 4, 202.

Wives are to obey their husbands in the real definition of the word. Young girls and wives are told they should not work outside the home. They should have many children and homeschool those children.

They want us to go back. What they do not acknowledge is that there is no perfect time in history, and it certainly was not perfect in 1950.

Shirley Taylor Books (available on Amazon in print and on Kindle)
The Biblical Marriage Myth: The Devil Comes Calling
The Power of a Book: The Street Evangelist
Raising the Hood: A Christian Look at Manhood and Womanhood
Women Equal: No Buts
Dethroning Male Headship: 2nd Edition