Piety: Reality or Facade?

Crossposted from Hiding in the Backwaters.  By Sean.

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I have just been swamped lately and haven’t had time to post much of anything, but I just couldn’t let this pass. Today I stumbled on to this bit from The Nation, originally published May of 2005.

Back at Asbury, Hager cast himself as a victim of religious persecution in his sermon. “You see…there is a war going on in this country,� he said gravely. “And I’m not speaking about the war in Iraq. It’s a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians. It wasn’t my scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It was my faith…. By making myself available, God has used me to stand in the breach…. Just as he has used me, he can use you.�

Up on the dais, several men seated behind Hager nodded solemnly in agreement. But out in the audience, Linda Carruth Davis–co-author with Hager of Stress and the Woman’s Body, and, more saliently, his former wife of thirty-two years–was enraged. “It was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard,� she recalled months later, through clenched teeth.

Davis, a former beauty queen, was a disengaged student eager to get married and start a family. A Hager-Carruth marriage promised prestige and wealth for the couple; her father was a famous Methodist evangelist, and his father was then president of Asbury. “On the surface, it just looked so good,� she remembers. The couple married in 1970, while Hager completed medical school at the University of Kentucky.

“I don’t think I was married even a full year before I realized that I had made a horrible mistake,� Davis says. By her account, Hager was demanding and controlling, and the couple shared little emotional intimacy. “But,� she says, “the people around me said, ‘Well, you’ve made your bed, and now you have to lie in it.’� So Davis commenced with family making and bore three sons: Philip, in 1973; Neal, in 1977; and Jonathan, in 1979.

Sometime between the births of Neal and Jonathan, Hager embarked on an affair with a Bible-study classmate who was a friend of Davis’s. A close friend of Davis’s remembers her calling long distance when she found out: “She was angry and distraught, like any woman with two children would be. But she was committed to working it out.�

Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn’t emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could “buy� peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. “Sex was coinage; it was a commodity,� she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. “He would say, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to have anal sex with you; I can’t feel the difference,’� Davis recalls incredulously. “And I would say, ‘Well then, you’re in the wrong business.’�

By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn’t have otherwise engaged in–for example, $2,000 for oral sex, “though that didn’t happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser,� Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for several years.

Money was an explosive issue in their household. Hager kept an iron grip on the family purse strings. Initially the couple’s single checking account was in Hager’s name only, which meant that Davis had to appeal to her husband for cash, she says. Eventually he relented and opened a dual account. Davis recalls that Hager would return home every evening and make a beeline for his office to balance the checkbook, often angrily summoning her to account for the money she’d spent that day. Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis’s friend of twenty-five years and her neighbor at the time, witnessed Hager berate his wife in their kitchen after one such episode. For her part, Davis set out to subvert Hager’s financial dominance with profligate spending on credit cards opened in her own name. “I was not willing to face reality about money,â€? she admits. “I thought, ‘Well, money can’t buy happiness, but it buys the kind of misery you can learn to live with.’â€? ¹

I’m not sure who I’m more enraged with the asshole of a husband or her stupid, idiotic “support network� who told her “you’ve made your bed, and now you have to lie in it.� The thought of one of my daughters in a relationship like this makes me damn near homicidal, and you can bet good money if my daughter came to me with a story like this she would be out of that house so fast the bastard’s head would spin. That her bastard husband publicly pretends to piety and a Christ-like love for women is just salt on the wound.

While it seems common to at this point launch into a diatribe about the personal hypocrisy of “religious types,� I really don’t want to go there. I am suspicious of anyone publicly flaunting their “righteousness,� and I do believe religion encourages silence and pretense. Still, I hardly believe every religious person is a fraud. What really bothers me is how the religious right holds up marriage as some holy sacrament, while turning a blind eye to travesties such as this. While they’ll publicly claim to “obviously� be against such behavior, they don’t do much to stop it either. When was the last time you heard Pat Robertson or James Dobson talking about spousal or child abuse? The advice of “the people around� Mrs. Davis (interesting she doesn’t call them her friends) doesn’t speak well of “compassionate conservatism� either. It seems to me if they want to improve the stability of marriage as a social institution, they could make a good start by teaching men what it means to be a husband. (Not that there aren’t women who need to be taught what it means to be a wife, but the story is about a bastard of a husband, not a bitch of a wife.)

If the government wants to be in the business of licensing marriage, then maybe they should start doing a better job of vetting candidates. “I’m sorry, sir. Your application for a marriage license has been declined because you’re a self-centered, controlling bastard.�

¹McGarvey, Ayelish, “Dr. Hager’s Family Values,â€? The Nation, May 30, 2005, www.thenation.com.