Billionaire Bishop Edir Macedo made daughters skip college so they wouldn’t be smarter than husbands
Edir Macedo, a billionaire evangelical bishop and founder of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil, is coming under fire online for saying he made his two daughters skip college because he didn’t want them to be smarter than their husbands, effectively making them the “head” of their households.
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God is one of the largest and strongest Neo-Pentecostal churches in Brazil which boasts some 8 million members in more than 150 countries around the world.
Macedo is a former street preacher and lottery worker who built the UCKG into a billion-dollar church-media juggernaut over the last four decades, according to The New Republic. He holds a 49-percent stake in a private Brazilian bank, Banco Renner, as well as a growing media empire, Rede Record, whose properties include Brazil’s No. 2 television network, which the 74 year old effectively used to help elect Brazil’s first Evangelical President, Jair Bolsonaro, in October 2018.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
“I will tell you something that is strong, but for you to know. When we went outside, in the United States, I said, 'You're going to high school,' which is high school, 'you're not going to college.' Esther, [my wife], supported me, but the relatives found it absurd,” Macedo said in recently recorded speech, according to a translated report from Hora Meia.
“Why don't you go to college? Because if you graduate from a particular profession, you will serve yourself, you will work for yourself. But I don't want that, you came to serve God, I want you to serve God. Do you understand what I am talking about? I am not against you studying and graduating, but in their (daughters’) case, I did not create them to serve themselves, I created them to serve you. ”
Macedo said if his daughters, Cristiane and Viviane, attended college it would be too problematic.
“If Cristiane were a doctor and had a high degree of knowledge and met a boy who had a low degree of knowledge, he would not be the head. She would be the head,” he said.
In his speech, Macedo reportedly suggested, according to another translation from Hypeness, that a woman’s happiness is only possible through submission to a man. Sending his daughters to college does not help them to submit.
"What is taught is, 'My daughter, you will never be subject to [a] man.' OK, so you won't be subject without happiness. Because there is no family, there is no happiness, [being] the woman head and the man body. So much so that there are intelligent women who can't find their heads. How [does] a person who has a head up there submit to a person who is [down] here? ” he posited.
While Macedo’s views are frowned upon in many parts of the western world, The Christian Post recently reported that women in America are facing a significant shortage of highly educated “economically attractive” unmarried men who earn at least $53,000 and have a college degree.
Researchers Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell University, Joseph P. Price of Brigham Young University, and Jeffrey M. Swigert of Southern Utah University concluded in their study, Mismatches in the Marriage Market, published this month in the Journal of Family and Marriage, that the situation could result in unmarried women remaining unmarried or marrying less well-suited partners which can be a recipe for divorce.
