Here’s a good piece by Frank Schaeffer, who has a former insider’s perspective on the extreme religious ideology followed by Michele and Marcus Bachmann: Are Michele Bachmann’s Views About ‘Christian Submission’ Even More Extreme Than She’s Letting On?

The issue of wifely submission is at the heart of the entire anti-feminist agenda that shaped Bachmann. I should know. As I describe in my book Sex, Mom and God, the current crop of religious right leaders — including Michele Bachamnn — got their ideas and inspiration from my family’s work, books and film series. As the New Yorker correctly noted about my late father and the movies I directed when I was his nepotistic sidekick:

[Bachmann and her husband] experienced a life-altering event: they watched a series of films by the evangelist and theologian Francis Schaeffer called “How Should We Then Live?” Schaeffer, who ran a mission in the Swiss Alps known as L’Abri (“the shelter”), opposed liberal trends in theology. One of the most influential evangelical thinkers of the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, he has been credited with getting a generation of Christians involved in politics. Schaeffer’s film series consists of ten episodes tracing the influence of Christianity on Western art and culture, from ancient Rome to Roe v. Wade… He repeatedly reminds viewers of the “inerrancy” of the Bible and the necessity of a Biblical world view. “There is only one real solution, and that’s right back where the early church was,” Schaeffer tells his audience. “The early church believed that only the Bible was the final authority. What these people really believed and what gave them their whole strength was in the truth of the Bible as the absolute infallible word of God.” …Francis Schaeffer instructed his followers and students at L’Abri that the Bible was not just a book but “the total truth.” He was a major contributor to the school of thought now known as Dominionism, which relies on Genesis 1:26, where man is urged to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Bachmann’s Reconstructionist Gurus

Besides my father, Bachmann signed on as a follower of other leading “Reconstructionists” teaching “dominion.” And out of that movement came the big family, home-school movement that included a push to restore “traditional” roles of women.

This is a subject I know something about because I was the person who discovered and promoted one of the leading anti-feminist leaders who teaches absolute submission of women to their husbands — and not in the “We respect each other” Bachmann-style whitewash.

In fact, the whole conservative evangelical movement Bachmann is part of is distinguished by its hatred of the feminist movement top to bottom.

In her hedging about what submission means to her, Bachmann has signaled with a wink and a nod to the Fox News crowd that she’ll have to soft-peddle some of her harsher views – at least as she’d theoretically apply them to other ordinary evangelical moms not running for president.

Also see:
The Christian Right, Dominionism, and Theocracy