(AP Photo/Jim Mone, File)

Republican Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Paul Gazelka — who sent his child to conversion therapy and pushed the falsehood that sexual assault can turn women gay – tried to use the Bible to justify his idea that wives must submit to their husbands or bear the consequences. Multiple pastors disagree.

The former Minnesota state senate majority leader wrote his 2003 book, “Market Place Ministers,” as a guide for those who want to bring Christian ministry into business. In the first half of the book, Gazelka tells his own story of becoming a combined minister-businessman. The second half is his roadmap to success for those who wish to do the same. In the final chapter he “addresses a godly strategy for reaping the End-Times harvest.”

In that section, Gazelka writes on his interpretation of Christian power dynamics and raises Ephesians 5:22-24 (of the New American Standard Bible): “Wives, be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.”

He goes on to say a wife “honors the Lord with submission to her husband. But if a wife refuses to honor her husband in this relationship, she will find that her children do not submit properly to her co-authority over them. She will reap what she sows.”

Rev. Lawrence Richardson, a pastor at Salem United Church of Christ in Farmington, Mich., said in an interview, “The concepts of marriage and gender dynamics and, certainly, sociology were very different 2,000 years ago”

Richardson said the United Church of Christ takes the Bible very seriously, but not literally.

“We also take it in context,” he said. “We have to apply our knowledge and research of what the contextual realities of the people living during those times were.”

You can’t take the lessons and directly apply them, he said, because situations at the time the Bible was written “may or may not be contextually relevant.”

In the following and final chapter of Ephesians, the Apostle Paul addresses the role of children and slaves. Richardson said that’s an example of how much views have changed from 2,000 years ago.

He says, in much the same way society no longer believes that children should only be seen and not heard, “that we can say that there is no justification for enslavement of another human being, we can also say that a woman would never have to be completely submissive to a man.

“We know that a woman is, first of all, not beholden to anyone but herself, certainly has the freedom to think for herself and certainly doesn’t need to be married or heterosexual.”

After calling on wives to submit to their husbands’ spousal authority, Gazelka moved directly to the sixth and final chapter of Ephesians. Minister JaNaé Bates, the communications director for Faith in Minnesota in St. Paul, said in an interview that Gazelka skipped over some key passages about the husband’s call to love his wife “in the same way the Christ loves the church.”

She said husbands “have a much greater call around a certain type of submission to their wife. That seemed to get completely unacknowledged.”

It’s unfortunate, Bates said, to have to contest “with folks of faith who read the same text that we do, and they read it in a way that allows them to believe that they should be sexist, or racist, or xenophobic.”

Both pastors agreed cherry-picking from scripture was a major issue. “So much of it is dependent on the one before and the one after,” Bates said.

“I think it’s convenient,” Richardson said. “If you’re cherry-picking, you obviously have a bias or you obviously have a lens that you’re looking to find scriptures to fulfill.”

(2/18: A previous version of this article said Gazelka references the New International Version of the Bible in his 2003 book. He actually referenced the New American Standard version. The article has been corrected to fix this mistake.)

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