Hello! Happy Easter!
At the end of February and beginning of March, Voddie Baucham had to return to from Zambia to the US for emergency medical treatment. In Zambia, they had determined that he was in heart failure - but I'm not sure if the doctor was able to determine the cause prior to encouraging Baucham to travel as soon as he was stabilized back to the States to seek advanced care. The original itinerary was nearly two weeks of travel; thankfully, one leg was able to be done much faster due to seats opening up on a flight.That reduced travel time likely saved his life.
By the time Baucham arrived in Florida, he was in severe heart failure and had to be hospitalized in the cardiac ICU within a few hours of arrival.
I was very worried for him and his family when a reader flagged that development for me. (Thank you!). Heart failure is often due to irreversible structural damage - and I was highly concerned that Baucham was facing a life-shortening diagnosis.
Thankfully for Rev. Baucham, he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation (A-Fib) which is when the upper two chambers of the heart (the atria) have an unorganized beat pattern compared to the two lower chambers known as ventricles. Most people have a sensation of their heart racing or uncomfortable palpitations while also feeling fatigued or short of breath - but atrial fibrillation can be symptom free.
The issue with A-Fib is that the disorganized pumping means that the heart needs to work harder to pump blood - and untreated A-Fib can lead to heart failure due to that increased work load.
The good news is that Rev. Baucham's doctors believe that the A-Fib caused the heart failure which means that he should have an excellent recovery after having surgery. The surgery is fairly simple for a cardiac procedure; the doctors use a catheter to destroy areas of the right atria or pulmonary vein that are sending the wrong electrical signal.
I feel like I've said this a lot this year - but while I disagree with nearly every statement ever made by Baucham - he's got a large family depending on him along with a wife and two adult children who love him a lot. I sincerely wish him an easy, quick and full recovery.
We are beginning Chapter 16 of Jasmine Baucham's book "Joyfully at Home". Ms. Baucham devoted a quick chapter to defending stay-at-home daughterhood from the charge of "How does that square with Jesus' Commandment to go out and make disciples of all the world in Matthew 28:19-10?"
Jasmine's response is "Christianity means living like a middle-class American who is a bit out of date on cultural references and ignored the history of women working outside the home, right?"
As an answer, that sounds a bit off - even to a very sheltered 19 year old woman - so she occasionally makes a point that illuminates far more about how Christian Patriarchy/Quiverful adherents view the Bible than it does about the topic at hand:
For traditional Christians - and in this case I mean every Christian who supports some form of literary analysis of the Bible - not all books of the Bible are created equally.
The four Gospels are written specifically about Jesus' time on Earth. Those four books have higher authority than any of the other books within the Bible. The Old Testament is important for understanding how God has been faithful to Israel through the generations and for the messianic prophecies that Christians believed were fulfilled by Jesus. The books of the New Testament outside of the Gospel are important for seeing how early Christians dealt with emerging theological and practical question. All of these other books are important - but a contrary statement in the Gospels often quashes scads of references in other books.
To explain it a bit more bluntly, Ms. Baucham's response is "I know Jesus' said to get out of your homes and convert people - but a bunch of other people said that I could stay home and I'm going to follow them."
This kind of slap-dash use of Epistles (primarily) to support an insular, female-subordinate home-focused life is part of the reason why some people - including me - believe that CP/QF adherents have actually become Paulines - people who follow the writings of the Apostle Paul in lieu of the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Here's Jasmine Baucham's launch into explaining why living in an American family as a CP/QF stay-at-home daughter is totally what Jesus meant by "Go out and make believers throughout the world":
Oh, I don't have to imagine it; Jasmine has described a pretty average American household. Parents are running a household and raising their kids. Kids are being raised while being kids. To make it more CP/QF, Ms. Baucham jazzed up the jargon by adding "visionary", "biblical" and references alluding to Christian churches - but the family with children she's described is pretty standard issue in most communities.
My bigger question - how many CP/QF families are fundamentally different in more Christian ways than the average American families?
CP/QF kids are brought up to change the world - but the first wave of the perfectly raised generation is is in their mid-forties and the results are underwhelming.
- The Duggars: Josh Duggar abused his sisters and cheated on his wife. Nine of his siblings have married; John David seems to be over his family of origin and his sister Jill has had a falling out as well. John David seems to have started his own construction work business. The rest of the sons are working in their family business.
-The Botkins: One son started a family business that is supporting five siblings and his parents. One son has left CP/QF; two are married with kids and in CP/QF. The business son and one brother are still single as are both daughters. Their ministry output is non-existent unless you count Geoffrey Botkin's obsession with QAnon as a new cult as I do.
-The Maxwells: The family seems to have started two thriving computer businesses along with a vanity-press disguised as a ministry and a few failed businesses. The two thriving businesses have scrubbed all mention of Christianity from their sites. Three of the sons have married women who are much less sheltered than the Maxwells and seem to be raising their children in more "worldly" ways. The youngest son sold his house when he married and is living in an apartment - which is approximately equivalent to Satan-worship in the Maxwell home One son married a woman who could out-Maxwell the Maxwells. The three daughters are unmarried.
-The Bauchams: Voddie and Bridget Baucham moved to Zambia to raise their still-at-home members of their family. Jasmine married, has two sons and works part-time for a homeschool co-op. She seems happy enough and has visibly rejected several of her family-of-origin's beliefs like Voddie's belief that racism in the US doesn't really exist. I don't know how her younger brother is doing - but I worry less about him simply because the Bauchams seemed to take education a bit more seriously and Jasmine was able to get a college diploma which bodes well for her brother.
-The Mallys: Sarah and Gracy Mally genuinely started independent ministries. (They are literally the only people I can think of who did.) Grace Mally married in her early thirties and has an infant daughter. Sarah Mally wrote a book recently and got married in her early forties. Both women look happy - which is nice to see.
The funny thing is that I don't begrudge the families I blog about here following their own lifestyles. I think the lifestyle is harmful - but I do believe that adults have the right to choose how they live. I just wish they'd offer the same grace to the rest of us. I know my family has benefited from post-secondary education for me and my husband. If nothing else, it caused both of us to delay marriage until we had some workable adulting strategies in place. Raising my son has been a challenge and a joy - but I occasionally wake up in a cold sweat when I dreamt that I had Spawn when I was 22....or worse 16.... instead of 35. Having another decade of life and work experience made caring for Spawn workable - especially becoming his medical scheduler and undertrained PT, OT, SPL and psychologist.
I am planning to get back into "The Battle Of Peer Dependency" by Marina Sears - but the chapter we are in right now is such a stream-of-conscious rant with ADD subject jumps that reading it and finding quotes is a bit of a nightmare.
Good news is that Geoffrey Botkin produced a darkly funny video about how to prepare for the dangers of the Biden administration where he explains how he procured multiple passports for his family. I transcribe a bit and read it aloud to my husband. We then laugh immoderately for a few minutes. It's a nice way to kill some time on rainy days.
-The Maxwells: The family seems to have started two thriving computer businesses along with a vanity-press disguised as a ministry and a few failed businesses. The two thriving businesses have scrubbed all mention of Christianity from their sites. Three of the sons have married women who are much less sheltered than the Maxwells and seem to be raising their children in more "worldly" ways. The youngest son sold his house when he married and is living in an apartment - which is approximately equivalent to Satan-worship in the Maxwell home One son married a woman who could out-Maxwell the Maxwells. The three daughters are unmarried.
-The Bauchams: Voddie and Bridget Baucham moved to Zambia to raise their still-at-home members of their family. Jasmine married, has two sons and works part-time for a homeschool co-op. She seems happy enough and has visibly rejected several of her family-of-origin's beliefs like Voddie's belief that racism in the US doesn't really exist. I don't know how her younger brother is doing - but I worry less about him simply because the Bauchams seemed to take education a bit more seriously and Jasmine was able to get a college diploma which bodes well for her brother.
-The Mallys: Sarah and Gracy Mally genuinely started independent ministries. (They are literally the only people I can think of who did.) Grace Mally married in her early thirties and has an infant daughter. Sarah Mally wrote a book recently and got married in her early forties. Both women look happy - which is nice to see.
The funny thing is that I don't begrudge the families I blog about here following their own lifestyles. I think the lifestyle is harmful - but I do believe that adults have the right to choose how they live. I just wish they'd offer the same grace to the rest of us. I know my family has benefited from post-secondary education for me and my husband. If nothing else, it caused both of us to delay marriage until we had some workable adulting strategies in place. Raising my son has been a challenge and a joy - but I occasionally wake up in a cold sweat when I dreamt that I had Spawn when I was 22....or worse 16.... instead of 35. Having another decade of life and work experience made caring for Spawn workable - especially becoming his medical scheduler and undertrained PT, OT, SPL and psychologist.
I am planning to get back into "The Battle Of Peer Dependency" by Marina Sears - but the chapter we are in right now is such a stream-of-conscious rant with ADD subject jumps that reading it and finding quotes is a bit of a nightmare.
Good news is that Geoffrey Botkin produced a darkly funny video about how to prepare for the dangers of the Biden administration where he explains how he procured multiple passports for his family. I transcribe a bit and read it aloud to my husband. We then laugh immoderately for a few minutes. It's a nice way to kill some time on rainy days.
Wait, multiple passports? Like illegal ones, or just passports for everyone in the family?
ReplyDeleteWhen he first buzzes by it in the video, I had no idea if he meant legal passports or some kind of fraudulent ones.
DeleteAfter watching the whole thing, he's still vapid and scattered as always - but I think the 18 passports that he brags about are the 9 passports for his family of origin from the US plus some kind of residency documents from New Zealand for the same group of nine.
Are any of them valid? Got me. All of his kids are old enough that they'd have to be the major actors in renewing passports and dealing with residency issues. Near as I can tell, NZ doesn't allow dual citizenship for Americans - so it's unlikely that they have true passports - but a permanent resident visa would work well enough.
If they have that. Dunno know if they do. He could be waving expired work visas from his media empire fiasco in the early 200's.
Also important to note: he's got three married sons who have multiple children each. Having the original Botkin clan running to NZ to avoid being charged with trumped-up political crime charges - which seems to be his imaginary fear right now - feel gross if that means the sons are leaving their wives and children behind.
Or maybe the two married sons who are still enmeshed in the crazy have been putting together their own piles of passports for their own kids.
So does New Zealand not extradite US citizens to the US when asked? I could see that being the case when the death penalty is in the cards, but other than that it seems strange.
DeleteAs a Kiwi, I can field this one. Yes, we allow dual citizenship with the US, and we absolutely have an extradition agreement with the US.
DeleteWhere it gets a little tricky is which family members are eligible for NZ residency, if any. The Botkins may have had a permanent residence visa, which could include Geoff, Victoria, and their children and would still be valid. However, children over the age of 24 cannot be added to a parent's visa so immigration is unlikely to let the second generation Botkins back in, and certainly won't let the sons' wives and children in. If the visas they had were work visas or non-permanent residence visas, none of them are getting in unless they can get new visas.
My guess - and it is obviously a guess - is that Geoffrey Botkin had a work visa circa 2002 when he worked Cotter to drive a small New Zealand paper out of business by trying to make it weird by including random articles that were strongly against certain politicians.
DeleteIf that whole fiasco took more than two years, he may have permanent residency for himself and Victoria. I doubt they were there much longer; there are some very angry posts still on the internet from NZ citizens who were screwed over by Cotter et al - and many mention how the whole crew was living out of fancy hotels which is hard to pull off for long.
The other thing that makes me think they weren't gone too long is that none of the family has any trace of NZ accented speech. The parents were well-beyond accent forming years - but the five youngest kids were in prime accent formation time. Of course, if they spent two years living in a hotel exposed only to other US expats they might have been too sheltered to pick it up.
Ironically, his family's obsession with self-education may have screwed his children over from getting work visas to NZ. My husband and I seem to be a shoe-in on the points scale for skilled migrant visas - I'm a US certified teacher with 8 years work experience; he owned and operated a dairy farm for over 10 years and also has a college degree in ag - but most of the Botkin kids have nothing like that to show. They've got some skill in CNC manufacturing - but I don't know if they have any way to demonstrate that to immigration officials.
From what you say it sounds as if the Botkins couldn't have been here long enough to qualify for permanent residence. I think visa requirements have changed over the years, but as far as I know the pathway has always been a work visa for two years, then a residence visa which can be upgraded to permanent residence after another two to three years. Only the permanent residence visa is valid indefinitely.
DeleteCNC skills are on the skills shortage list, but each Botkin would need to apply individually with evidence of those skills, and Immigration would be looking for qualifications from a reputable institution. Immigration might accept relevant work experience if they could demonstrate that, but I agree the skilled migrant category would be a very long shot for the Botkins.
Kinda off topic: The US inadvertently makes it hard for skilled trades people to show qualifications from a reputable institution. (Or maybe just makes immigration boards hold really, really long lists of reputable places) Our trades education has suffered badly during the 1980's-1990's in an overreaction to some terrible educational choices made during the 1960's and 1970's. Schools started tracking students based on a single standardized test score into college-prep or trades with no reference to student interests or previous performance. There was also no way to move between tracks once placed. This managed to screw over both kids interested in trades who were good at academic test taking and kids interested in college who are poor test takers at age 12.
DeleteThe overreaction, then, was to eliminate trades training at the secondary level and underfund it massively at the college level. The rationale for that was that everyone should have a shot at going to college and we'd funnel all the money from trades that way.
There was finally some push-back against that in the early 2010's. Funneling everyone into college-prep pushed the percentage of HS graduates who started college to around 50% - but the rate of completion has been stubbornly stuck at ~34% since WWII. The ratio of women in college is much better and people of color are making slow, but steady gains - but the total ratio is pretty much 34% of US HS grades have a college degree completed by age 40.
So what happened to the trades? Well, out East and in the Great Lakes, we had pretty solid unions for skilled trades who took over training in most areas. Some manufacturers also realized that underfunding the tertiary system was going to kill their ability to run factories so they partnered with colleges to fund tool-and-die or CNC or whatever specialties were badly needed.
The places that scare the living snot out of me are the South and the Midwest (eg., the Great Plains, not the Great Lakes since we're often smushed into one category). These areas had limited unions and relatively little manufacturing to start with - so they've really skimped on the details of how to get a license. In Michigan, you need 576 hours of classroom instruction plus 8,000 hours (4 years) of supervised experience as an apprentice before you can test to be a licensed journeyman and 4,000 more hours of work before testing for a master license. This is mostly because we take workplace accidents and not dying in house fires seriously.
By comparison, two of the Maxwell sons have held general contractor licenses in their county of Kansas. You can earn that by passing a written test with 75% or better, doing 12 hours of continuing education every 2 years, carrying $300,000 in liability insurance and shelling out $200 to the county board.
So....yeah. We've screwed over trades training in the US - and we're paying for it now. Our trades folk educated in the 1960's and 1970's are retirement age now and there's a huge shortage of trained replacements.
My highschool had a pretty good trades program and did not track students. Anyone could take vocational training Classes and anyone with the prerequisites and college prep classes just required a good grade it the prerequisite classes. This was 2004-2009 in south Dakota. The school also partnered with the local technical institute to offer seniors opportunities to start on there associates degrees and certifications. So it seems like some places are doing it right.
DeletePeople involved in the stay at home daughter movement are always trying to find Bible verses to support their views, but in reality I think it usually comes down to a combination of gate fever and financial necessity. The outside world can be a very scary place for overly sheltered teenagers who haven't learned how to navigate it, and being a stay at home daughter can seem like a safer, more appealing option. The other problem is that kids homeschooled in CP/QF families often have inadequate education and few contacts in their community who might be able to help them find work. For these young people, the accepted Western process of leaving home and working/studying may simply be unachievable.
ReplyDeleteCP/QF has developed a doctrine which fits around this phenomenon and frames it as part of God's plan, and I think having adult children work in family businesses is the other side of that coin. I don't want to be mean here, but the fact is mum and dad won't necessarily examine Junior's qualifications in the same way a traditional HR department might.
Jasmine Baucham as an adult said pretty much the same thing about her rationale for wanting to be a SAHD - and explained that bowing to that fear did not help her get ready for adult life including marriage and motherhood.
DeleteAs for family businesses - out of the frying pan and into the fire! I grew up in a blue/gray collar neighborhood where everyone I knew worked for a business as an employee of some level. Your job as a student was to figure out if you wanted to be unskilled labor, skilled labor, white-collar or professional level. People mentioned occasionally the idea of starting your own business - but no one I knew actually did it.
Then I married into a community of family-owned businesses - mostly farms - and yikes! That sets up a scenario where the second-generation onward can spend their entire working life without working outside of the family business. That leads rapidly to a loss of boundaries and understanding of professional culture.
My in-laws, for example, have a complete mental block when it comes to the amount of loyalty they expect out of employees vs the amount that is logical to expect. They both grew up and have worked 100% and 95% of their lives on farms owned by their family - so they learned that they should sacrifice right now to keep the farm going for a large pay off later in life. That logic works (albeit with huge drawbacks at times) when the family worker bees will one day own the farm.
My in-laws get all wound up, though, when hired workers who have NO chance of ever being offered a partnership share in the farm refuse to make major sacrifices for 'the good of the farm'. "And why should they?" I always asked. "You're not going to leave them a percentage of the farm's worth in your will, are you?" That would make them think for a minute or two - but they always went back to complaining that the employees weren't dedicated enough.
God only knows what it's like when you are working for Jim Bob Duggar as a son-in-law.....