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At a time when tradwives rack up millions of followers and right-wing extremist pastors gain traction with calls to repeal the 19th Amendment (which gave women the right to vote) and enact “household” voting, it’s important to recognize these aren’t new ideas. They’ve long been pushed in conservative Christian circles.
In recent years, however, there’s been pushback from many of the same voices who inspired that movement. They’ve realized the error of their ways and they want to do what they can to make amends—or at least warn people not to listen to anyone who advocates for the very things they used to advocate for. In 2018, for example, Joshua Harris, the one-time unofficial Christian spokesperson for abstinence, courtship, and waiting until marriage to do everything as a result of his book I Kissed Dating Goodbye, apologized for the harm he caused and renounced his own book.
In 2005, Anna Sofia Botkin and Elizabeth Botkin wrote a book called So Much More: The Remarkable Influence of Visionary Daughters on the Kingdom of God. They began writing the book when they were 15- and 17-years-old in order to offer “practical, biblical solutions for the young woman who wants to do so much more than just ‘survive’ in a savagely feministic, anti-Christian culture.” In 2007, they produced a documentary called Return of the Daughters that featured several girls who were doing the very things they espoused in their book.
More bluntly, they promoted the “stay-at-home-daughter movement.”
They said that serving their fathers—and eventually their husbands—was the “only good option for a serious Christian girl.” That meant not going to college and not pursuing outside careers—that’s what “God-hating Marxists” wanted you to do. Instead, you should learn household skills, help out with the ministry, get ready for marriage, or work as a nanny (though that could be low paid or unpaid).
It’s the sort of Purity Culture bullshit that was always laughable and ridiculous—but which still influenced countless young evangelical girls. Many of the ones who came to realize how bad this advice was didn’t come to that realization until much later in life.
But here’s the twist.
The Botkin Sisters want to apologize.
Not with some quick tweet or short video. I meant they want to apologize.
That includes an insanely long open letter dissecting the 15 biggest problems they now have with their own childhood advice—and a two-hour-long video from Elizabeth Botkin Thompson saying it out loud:
We are deeply sorry, for all of the book’s wrong teachings and for any ways they hurt you. We ask your forgiveness for any ways our teaching contributed to decisions you regret, opportunities you can’t recover, or abuse you couldn’t escape. We grieve with you over all that our influence may have cost you.
The sisters also made a shorter 15-minute video offering more personal contrition for those who don’t have the time or patience to read their apologia in depth:
Part of the reason they say they’re doing this now, they explain, is because their book and movie still have an impact on young women’s lives, so they feel a responsibility to recant what they used to promote. “We have come to the very painful conclusion that we believed and taught some very destructive things when it came to stay-at-home daughterhood,” says Anna Sofia.
To be clear, they’re still very much Christian. Just not those kind of Christians.
The sisters say that what they pushed for was a “hideous contortion of God’s ethics.” They’re sorry they “depicted God as only giving his daughters a few options.” And as to the girls who were stuck in abusive homes or situations were they were taken advantage of (spiritually, emotionally, etc), they say this:
God does not actually side with tyrannical parents who provoke their children to wrath.
He doesn’t actually side with parents or elders who neglect or enrich themselves on the people in their care.
God does not in his word actually optimize for keeping the vulnerable in terrible situations.
The paper they published is a fascinating read. The bulk of it focuses on their acknowledgment that telling girls to live at home until marriage and that every alternative (“worldliness, feminism, and selfishness”) is unacceptable isn’t a fair dichotomy. In some cases, they admit, that advice traps girls in “non-ideal situations.”
They say they were wrong to center a girl’s relationship with her father as the most important thing in life. (“A central focus on pleasing a man is not what God wants the single woman’s season to be about.”)
They say serving a man, including her father, could prevent girls from living own their own calling from God.
They say their advice really shouldn’t have applied to older single women—who, if they read the book, were told to keep serving their fathers indefinitely.
They say using marriage as the ultimate goal, and girls only doing things that prepared them for marriage, deprived them of countless opportunities. (“In trying to elevate something we saw the feminist movement undercutting (marriage and motherhood), we accidentally devalued the powerful ways God regularly uses women outside of marriage or motherhood.”)
They admit it was wrong to treat “college” as a “universally bad experience and a choice no serious Christian woman could seriously make.”
Throughout all of this, they cite passages from their own book (as bad advice) and Bible passages (as good advice). Again, they’re still Bible-believing Christians, so that’s not a surprise, but they now say they reinterpret Scripture a lot differently.
What’s fascinating is how much they’ve evolved.
If you go to the Internet Archive and look at their website as recently as last year, it’s clear they hadn’t updated it since 2018 and relics of their fundie beliefs are right there in the open. A lot has changed in a decade and those old posts have been scrubbed from the site.
The Statement of Faith, however, is still there, unedited. They say in their open letter that “there is an actual science to interpreting and applying” the Bible, which is… concerning. After all, who’s to say that their current interpretation is any better than their previous one, if they’re still trying to shove their understanding into an ancient book that be be interpreted any way you want?
In an essay for Slate, author Sarah Stankorb writes that the Botkin Sisters’ mea culpa, along with those from other longtime proponents of patriarchal thinking, mark “a sign that gender-based authoritarianism is unsustainable, even among the biggest advocates for women’s submission.”
She goes into how their book was a product of Vision Forum, a Christian ministry that had a lot of sway among fundamentalist families, and actively pushed by their own father:
Vision Forum sold a DVD of a speech by Geoffrey Botkin, Elizabeth and Anna Sofia’s father. In it, he described how when Anna Sofia was born, he placed a hand on her tummy and prayed for the eggs the Lord had placed inside her—seeing the infant as the generational mother of tens of millions. He said Elizabeth could remember him talking to her about marriage when she was in her high chair. Botkin had a 200-year plan for his family detailed on “an Excel spreadsheet with all of his children’s names on it, and all of the projects that he planned out for them,” notes Elena Trueba, a writer working on a book about the stay-at-home-daughter movement. “One of those projects was a book for his two daughters to write.”
Yiiiikes. There’s even more about Vision Forum and the Botkins in this video from Fundie Fridays:
Stankorb also notes that while the apologies are appreciated, Elizabeth Botkin is still working for a different ministry:
Among the written apology’s plentiful Bible citations are references to Phillip Kayser, who runs Biblical Blueprints, where Elizabeth and her husband now work, raising the specter of at least one of the Botkin sisters having traded out an old authority figure for a new one.
All that said, it’s hard to fault victims of the movement even when they’re active participants in it. Especially when they were literally children when they wrote the book that made them famous. All you can ask for, at this point, is that they recognize the harm they caused and do what they can to steer people away from their own past teachings. That’s what they seem to be doing now.
A commenter on Reddit put it well:
… In the end, I can’t blame two teenagers for what they wrote. I can and still do blame their dad for supporting their message, Doug Phillips and the Vision Forum for giving it a platform, and my parents for buying in to it. I have to remember that these people didn’t come to their conclusions in a void. Some life experiences they had made them feel like this was the answer. They didn’t have my experience. That’s not an excuse, but it can help me forgive them for causing harm when they intended the opposite.
This is what the Botkin Sisters appear to have finally figured out: There was never a nice way to spread their old beliefs without falling into harmful generalizations and sexist language. It was always a binary decision: be a woman of God or be a godless feminist. At some point over the past decade, they figured out that’s not the case at all. (How long might it be before they realize the problem stems from religion itself, not just one particular interpretation of it?)
That’s why this apology matters. The girls who were told to put their own ambitions aside and submit to the men around them have become women who realize that was harmful, restrictive, and un-biblical advice. They know they wrongly treated women’s freedom as rebellion, even when obedience may have kept them trapped in bad situations.
Let’s not forget this didn’t just happen in a vacuum. Their father shaped the message. Vision Forum gave it a platform. Churches promoted the book and film. They all taught girls to cram their hopes and dreams into a man’s plans for them, and they all bear responsibility for harming the people who took their advice seriously.
The Botkins’ youth and naïveté might explain how they became poster children for this movement, but maybe the bigger takeaway is that growing up in an environment like this doesn’t mean you will stay this way forever. The Botkins refuse to pretend that good intentions should absolve them of the consequences for what they did.
Their apology won’t give anyone back the education, independence, or years they lost. But it can tell them: You were right to question this. The system that blamed you was wrong. We need more apologies like this—and more from the pastors, parents, ministries, and influencers who continue acting like these ideas are worth following.
Turns out even a 200-year plan can be derailed by women who have the audacity to think for themselves.
I might have had more sympathy for them had they left Christianity behind after all the damage it and they did. But they're still part of the system that abuses women and girls. They've not truly liberated themselves. Had they done so, their message would've been far more powerful.
𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑏𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑛 𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 15- 𝑎𝑛𝑑 17-𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑠-𝑜𝑙𝑑 𝑖𝑛 𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑒𝑟 𝑡𝑜 𝑜𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑟 “𝑝𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙, 𝑏𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑔 𝑤𝑜𝑚𝑎𝑛 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑤𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑑𝑜 𝑠𝑜 𝑚𝑢𝑐ℎ 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑛 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 ‘𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑣𝑖𝑣𝑒’ 𝑖𝑛 𝑎 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑎𝑔𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑓𝑒𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑐, 𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑖-𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝑐𝑢𝑙𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒.”
They were at the height of the indoctrination while still children. Whoever that doesn't excuse the harm, it does make forgiveness easier.
"𝑊𝑒 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑒𝑒𝑝𝑙𝑦 𝑠𝑜𝑟𝑟𝑦, 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘’𝑠 𝑤𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑎𝑛𝑦 𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 ℎ𝑢𝑟𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢."
Even the deeply indoctrinated can learn. There is hope.
𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑠𝑎𝑦 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟 𝑜𝑝𝑒𝑛 𝑙𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 “𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑎𝑛 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑙𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔” 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐵𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒, 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑖𝑠… 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔.
Baby steps. Their eyes have been opened to the very real harm they caused. There is still hope that they will break the shackles of their indoctrination completely. The path from indoctrinated robot to freely thinking human can be long and arduous.