The Mission and the Men

I know the patriarchal system not as an abstract concept but as lived reality. Raised in a high-control religious organization, I became intimately familiar with religious patriarchy and its devastating effects on women, children, and entire communities.

Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power, dominating political leadership, moral authority, social privilege, and control of property. Doesn’t that sound like nearly every mission board, church, and political system you know?

It is a choice, not an accident, that most religious groups are centralized through patriarchy. No one stumbled into this arrangement. Generations of men wrote the rules, interpreted the scriptures, built the hierarchies, and enforced the consequences.

Patriarchy tells a man that he is the pinnacle of social standing. Women exist for his pleasure and service. Children are a necessary extension—property, really—to carry on his lineage.

Under this logic, love becomes ownership. Protection becomes control. A father’s “authority” justifies a clenched fist. A husband’s “headship” justifies demanded sex. A pastor’s “spiritual covering” justifies silence, shame, and exile for anyone who speaks the truth.

This is not a bug. It is the feature.

In high-control religious organizations such as Ethnos360 (formerly New Tribes Mission), policy and agenda were not accidental. They were engineered around control. Specifically, the control over women and children that comes from patriarchy.

Because patriarchy is male-dominated, it is also male-protected. That is why women and children do not survive well under it. By 2026—on our so-called evolved human journey—we should have recognized this toxic system for what it is: the thing destroying us from the inside out.

Ask yourself: Who holds final authority in your mission board? Who interprets the rules? Who disciplines the dissenters? Who decides where the money goes? If the answer is consistently male, you are looking at patriarchy. And if you question it and are met with silence, dismissal, or punishment, you are looking at patriarchy protecting itself.

Before missionary contact, many Indigenous societies (e.g., in Papua New Guinea, the Amazon, West Africa, and Southeast Asia) operated with shared parenting, extended family structures, lower rates of interpersonal violence, women’s significant influence in decision-making, spiritual practices honoring the feminine, and little concept of original sin or eternal punishment.

After missionary contact—especially from Evangelical, fundamentalist, or purity-focused missions like Ethnos360—the introduction of patriarchal authority, shame-based purity culture, toxic theology (inherent sinfulness, submission to male authority, fear of hell), and destruction of traditional kinship systems produced documented consequences:

• Rise in domestic violence (men taught they had “biblical” authority to discipline wives)

• Rise in child abuse (physical punishment justified by “spare the rod” theology)

• Loss of women’s social power (female elders nonexistent or marginalized as “not the right church teaching”)

• Psychological trauma (internalized shame, loss of cultural identity)

• Breakdown of communal child-rearing (isolated nuclear families, stressed parents, neglected children)

This pattern is not an accident. It is the direct result of imposing a patriarchal, shame-based worldview onto societies that had developed healthier, more sustainable ways of organizing care and power. And it is why, generation after generation, children in these systems develop CPTSD—not because they were “hurt,” but because the system wanted them harmed enough to be controlled.

Understanding how patriarchy operates has urgent practical implications:

• For survivors of purity culture and spiritual abuse: Recognizing that the shame and violence they experienced are not “just how things are” but an imposed theology can be liberating. You were not broken by accident. You were broken by design. And that means you can name the designer and reject the design.

• For parenting and community design: The nuclear, father-authoritarian family model is not the only way—and evidence shows it is far from the safest. Learning from cultures that distribute care across extended kin and community can help reduce child abuse, support overwhelmed parents, and build more resilient households.

• For gender justice: Deconstructing patriarchal authority allows us to imagine alternatives—not about swapping which gender holds the whip, but about abolishing the whip altogether. Shared responsibility, mutual consent, and the dignity of every person are not naive ideals. They are achievable structures.

• For decolonization: Acknowledging that missionaries did not bring “civilization” but rather destroyed thriving cultures—including their systems of shared power and low violence—is part of reckoning with colonial violence. This reckoning is painful. It is also necessary.

When Ethnos360 and similar groups arrived, they didn’t “rescue” anyone. They destroyed societies where children were maybe safer, women were respected, and men were not forced into rigid dominance roles. They replaced those systems with shame, violence, and hierarchy. And they continue to produce survivors of trauma—not accidentally, but by design.

For those of us who carry the scars of that design, naming the truth is not bitterness. It is survival. The system wanted to harm us. It wanted us silent, obedient, and afraid. And we are still here, telling the story anyway.

The fear of losing patriarchal control is, at its core, the fear of a world where power is not a weapon but a shared responsibility. And that fear says far more about patriarchy’s failures than about any alternative’s possibilities.

The question is not whether we can imagine something better. The question is whether we are brave enough to build it—for the children who deserve not to be traumatized, and for the adults we are still becoming.

~Christine