Harrison Butker on Women, Work and Calling
A strange way to do a commencement speech.
By now, everybody knows about the controversial commencement speech that Harrison Butker gave at Benedictine College, a Catholic school in Kansas. He said a lot of things that got people riled up.
A little context helps to explain this. Benedictine College had become a bastion of “Trad Catholicism,” a very conservative movement that wants to go back to before the reforms of Vatican II – which means going back to the Traditional Latin Mass, and delineating vocations as: (1) the vocation of the priesthood to be the ministers of the gospel, and (2) the vocations of the laity, which is primarily that of family-raising, with men as husbands and fathers, and women as homemakers.
Butker’s speech fit well in this college’s culture, which the college’s president, Stephen D. Minnis, created for the past 20 years. You could hear this Trad Catholicism in all the criticism Butker had for Catholic priests and bishops while heaping praise for Minnis.
Butker’s Ideal Vocation for Women: Homemaker
Among all the controversial things Butker said, I want to focus on what he said about women and their vocation. Here is what he said:
“For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you, how many of you are sitting here now about to cross the stage, and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you’re going to get in your career. Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world. But I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.
I can tell you that my beautiful wife Isabelle would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother. I’m on this stage today and able to be the man I am because I have a wife who leans into her vocation. I’m beyond blessed with the many talents God has given me. But it cannot be overstated, that all of my success is made possible because a girl I met in band class back in middle school would convert to the faith, become my wife and embrace one of the most important titles of all: homemaker.
She’s a primary educator to our children… And it is through our marriage that Lord willing, we will both attain salvation. I say all of this to you because I’ve seen it firsthand how much happier someone can be when they disregard the outside noise and move closer and closer to God’s will in their life. Isabelle’s dream of having a career might not have come true. But if you ask her today if she has any regrets on her decision, she would laugh out loud without hesitation and say, ‘Heck no!’”
Ironically, the Sisters of Mount St. Scholastica, the order of nuns who co-founded Benedictine College, released a statement via their Facebook account, saying,
“The sisters of Mount St. Scholastica do not believe that Harrison Butker’s comments in his 2024 Benedictine College commencement address represent the Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college that our founders envisioned and in which we have been so invested… One of our concerns was the assertion that being a homemaker is the highest calling for a woman. We sisters have dedicated our lives to God and God’s people, including the many women whom we have taught and influenced during the past 160 years. These women have made a tremendous difference in the world in their roles as wives and mothers and through their God-given gifts in leadership, scholarship, and their careers.”
There’s the rub. Butker’s male-dominated worldview doesn’t even have a category for women’s service as Nuns! These nuns state that they didn’t start their college to just make homemakers. I looked at the Benedictine College website for the degree programs, and there wasn’t one called “Homemaker.”
The young women in the seats ready to celebrate their graduation were just told by their commencement speaker that all that hard work to accomplish their four-year degree was a waste of time.
Women, Work, and Calling
Before Butker’s commencement speech, we had Joanna Meyer on the Reintegrate Podcast, talking about her new book, Women, Work, and Calling: Step into Your Place in God’s World (InterVarsity Press, 2023).
“Calling” is a synonym for “Vocation” (The word vocation comes from the Latin vocatio, “summons”, from vocare “to call”). Joanna and her workmates at the Denver Institute for Faith and Work are trying to fill a vacuum in our discipleship: We need to help women reintegrate their faith into all of their callings, including their careers and, for those with families, their motherhood.
She said,
“More women are working than ever before. But one of the challenges as we think about discipling and developing women for influence in public life is that the organizations and institutions that form women, like our local churches or faith-based organizations, rarely speak into women's working lives, or they may not offer an integrated vision of their roles—all of those different unique responsibilities we carry under that broad umbrella of calling. And so there is a discipleship gap there, which means that women may not to live freely or confidently in the fullness that God has made them to be.”
People like Harrison Butker heap an extra burden onto women who have callings outside the home. Joanna (again, not responding to Butker, for this interview happened beforehand) said,
“There's a sense of not only do you need to be a competent worker, but you need to be a highly competent and perfect mother. There's that extra burden of how we integrate our roles or even the responsibility of bringing in caretaking responsibilities. It's been fun to see more and more men step into carrying household responsibilities, but the data still shows that women are carrying the bulk of that. And so there can be this pressure. Not only do you have to be competent at work, but you have to be highly competent at home.”
Masculine vs. Feminine Roles?
In her book, Joanna quotes Nancy Pearcey (from Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality), who explains how we got to our presuppositions about masculine and feminine roles:
“In pre-industrial societies, most work was done on the family farm or in home industries, where husband and wife worked side-by-side. Women were involved in economically productive labor, while men were far more involved in raising and educating children than most are today. What changed all this was the Industrial Revolution. It took work out of the home—and that seemingly simple change dramatically changed gender roles. The result was greatly constricted roles for both men and women—which in turn led to narrower definitions of masculinity and femininity.”
Thus, this concept of “Homemaker” is a relatively new one. So, Harrison Butker wants to get back to before Vatican II (1965) but not too far back… He wants to stay after the Industrial Revolution (1840).
He certainly wouldn’t want to go all the way back to Old Testament times, when wives who had vocations beyond that of homemaker were seen as “strong/powerful/valorous” (the Hebrew word, hayil, which the ESV translates as “excellent”). Proverbs 31:10-31 describes such a woman:
She is an exceptional wife (vv. 10-12)
She has created multiple sources of revenue:
She works with raw textiles (v. 13)
She is a merchant (v. 14)
She gets up before the sun rises to get her work done (v. 15)
She considers an investment in a field and buys it, and plants a vineyard there (v. 16)
She determines how to make a profit (v. 18)
She has a business of making fine linen garments and sashes (v. 24)
She is a person who speaks wisdom and teaches kindness (v. 26)
She does not eat the bread of idleness (v. 27)
The writer of this Proverb ends by saying,
“Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates.” (v. 31)
In other words, a woman’s work that serves her family beyond “homemaking” is still a vocation, a calling from the Lord.
Not many women have the luxury of being married to an NFL placekicker who makes over 4 Million Dollars per year. But the reality is that not many women around the world are married to someone who can make enough with his single income for their families to stay afloat.
Butker thinks that since he’s got a wife who doesn’t need to work or wants to work, then this is the norm. But that is not the case—neither in history nor in most of the world today. Women with degrees get better work and can pursue more desirable callings than women without.