You Can Have Your Hell: John Piper and the Brokenness of a Hell-based Gospel

[trigger warning: death of children]

I’m sure by now you’ve heard all about John Piper’s “missteps” this week. This post is not about him, not really, though we have plenty of reason to be wary of his “Gospel.”

This post is about the Church - the churches I grew up in, the places that granted me my theology degree, the conferences I attended, and the way we view other people.

When I was in college, I was involved in the evangelism ministry of Campus Crusade For Christ. For my first two years of college, over Christmas break, I attended a big conference in downtown Minneapolis called TCX. It was at TCX that I was taught how to evangelize, how to make sharing the Gospel a priority, and how to see people not as people but as receptacles for my speeches.

One year, we were all given little pieces of red or green construction paper and told to hold them against our foreheads. We were told that “green” means “saved” and therefore that person was fine and we could move on. “Red” meant “unsaved” or “unbeliever,” and therefore it was our goal to turn that red into green – like a stoplight. We were literally taught to see the people around us emblematic of a category and to prioritize “getting them saved” over any level of comfort they may have.

Another year, we were shown a video that featured a large man tackling people – painfully! – in his effort to evangelize. The “funny” of the video was that, if you didn’t evangelize, you were going to get painfully knocked to the ground and yelled at by a large black man. No one literally thought this would happen, of course, but the message was clear – evangelism and “saving souls” was the most important thing you can do, because Hell is a bad, bad place and we want to make sure Heaven is populated.

These are the sermons I grew up with – Hell is real and we need to save people from it.

In high school, I had an atheist best friend. I remember one awful night where I was “convicted” of my “lack of witness” for her soul. The next morning, I showed up to school and immediately started badgering her about Jesus and how much Jesus loves her, paying no attention to her comfort level. It was more important that she just heard the message because that would assuage my conscience.

The conversation ended when she screamed “FUCK YOU, DIANNA, I DON’T CARE,” and walked away. Even then, I was more hurt that I’d been told to fuck off than that I’d hurt my best friend by seeing her as a soul, not a person.

That’s why it didn’t surprise that John Piper put forward yet another insensitive call to repent following the Oklahoma tornado that smashed through Moore – and did so on the very night they were still searching for children in the rubble of the school. And it didn’t surprise me further when followers of Piper and other evangelicals defended his tweet with arguments about how the timing doesn’t matter as long as the Gospel gets said.

I've encountered a lot people who literally could not see a problem with delivering a “turn and repent for the brokenness of the world” message in the wake of a disaster. They literally thought it was justified to instruct parents and spectators to repent because their sin is what caused this disaster – before it was even known which children had died, before the parents knew whether they’d spend their week planning a funeral or sitting by a hospital bedside.

There’s a reason for this. We have given the specter of Hell such primacy in our Gospel that it has turned us into unsympathetic robots. We have made Hell necessary in a way that distorts, twists, and destroys the Gospel. We have made Hell greater than Heaven.

We tell people to turn and repent because we are sinners in the hands of an angry God, dangling like spiders over a pit. At the same moment, we insinuate that God is the creator of the pit because a righteous punishment is needed and necessary and he is righteous. We give Hell such centrality in our Gospel message that we can’t describe what Heaven may look like – we are so busy saving souls from Hell that we forget real people exist.

And what are we saving them to? A god who, but for a few words in a prayer, would have cast the lot of us into fiery torment? A god with such a temper than he kills children? A god who needs an evil Hell to exist in order to contrast his Heaven?

What if we gave up on Hell? What if we stopped being so concerned about what we’re saving people FROM and instead focused on what we are bringing them TO?

How do we enact the Kingdom of God, on Earth as it is in Heaven, if we are so focused on Hell and torment? How do we bring about Kingdom justice and Kingdom mercy when we are so focused on making sure people are “right with God so they don’t receive His wrath?” How do we sustain a life with Christ when we are so focused on Good Friday and not Resurrection Sunday?

The Gospel is not about saving people from Hell. The Gospel is not about turning and repenting. The Gospel is not about a God with a magnifying glass and us as the ants, hoping not to burn. The Gospel is not about Hell.

The Gospel is, instead, a community of life, a way of living that enacts justice and mercy in today’s world, regardless of whether Hell exists or not. The Gospel is, instead, a gracious, life giving story in which people are called to play their parts fully, to their full giftedness. The Gospel is one in which people are allowed to be fully human, fully who God created them to be, and fully in communion with others in peace and grace and justice and mercy.

The Gospel of the Jesus I know is one which does not blame the victims for the tragedies they suffered, but instead understands that weeping with those who weep and mourning with those who mourn is a better display of love than any message of “turn and repent.”

The Gospel of the Jesus I know proclaims that love and understanding and seeing the full humanity of our fellow human beings is part of living within the Trinitarian reality of the Image of God.

The Gospel of the Jesus I know contains a Holy Spirit, who begs us to “shut the fuck up and listen” more often than She asks us to open our mouths and speak of repentance. Indeed, when She requests that we speak, it is more often of liberty, of liberation, of justice than it is of wrath and pain.

The Gospel of the Jesus I know frees us to see people as they are, humans, created by God, worthy of justice and mercy simply because they exist as God’s creation, and our brothers and sisters in grace.

This is the only Gospel I am interested in, because this is the Gospel that requires more of me than any other. This is the Gospel that doesn’t provide me with answers, that doesn’t give me an easy out like “turn and repent” when evil happens. This is the Gospel that requires I sit with the hurting for seven days and seven nights, that I wear sackcloth with the mourning, and that I remain silent except to cry out in empathy with the suffering.

This is the Gospel I believe. You can have your Hell. I’d rather have humanity.

Everybody's a Little Bit Racist: Why Being Called Racist Is Not The Issue

Oh Tony Jones. We remember him, right? He of the “why aren’t women participating in my discussions?!” fame. He’s back. This time, it’s to announce that he’s “tired of being called racist.” And, apparently, we can expect a future article in which he talks about how he’s tired of being called “misogynist” (bonus bingo points if he comments about how much he loves the womenfolk).

Sigh. But this post is not about Tony. This post is about me.

I’m afraid I have a confession to make: I’m racist.

I know, I know, for those of you who have known me for years, this is probably a bit of a shock. I mean, I have friends of all different races! I spent time on Twitter this morning calling out the South Dakota government for its racist treatment of Native Americans! Surely I, of all people, could win awards declaring me Least Racist of All the White People?

I may not march about in a KKK robe or call people of color slurs, but if that’s the sole marker for “racism,” then the definition of racism is sorely lacking. I am white. I grew up in America. Because of that, I am racist and I benefit from racist structures.

Back during the turn of the Chinese New Year, the Chinese ministry team at my former workplace hosted a luncheon of food and celebrations for us. It was a fun time, and I ended up seated next to one of the younger Chinese staff. During the meal, I turned to him and asked him when it’s appropriate to eat the fortune cookie. He pointed out that fortune cookies aren't even really Chinese and he had no idea what the custom would even be, as he was raised in America.

That was a pretty racist thing for me to do.

I grew up in a very white city in a very white state. As much as I am socially aware and knowledgeable about the struggles of people of color in America, I still find myself running into my own racist thinking and racist ideas, which I then have to recalibrate.

I am a white person living in a system where white people and white opinions are often privileged as more legitimate over the opinions of people of color.

I can rest assured that if I go missing, as a single white woman in a rich suburb of Chicago, the police will not be asking my parents if I was into drugs or involved with gangs – at least not right away. My disappearance might even be a national story.

I can walk safely in any number of places and not have to worry about being seen as a shoplifter or thief when I go into a store.

I can also safely position my Baptist, Midwestern, White, Evangelical upbringing as the “normal,” “neutral” theology without most of academia even so much as batting an eye. Meanwhile, my brothers and sisters of color who support liberation theology have a continued fight to even be seen as orthodox, much less “normal.”

This is what racism is: it is the slurs, the outright proclamations, AND it is the subtle, micro-aggressive, “white-as-normative objective reasoning” that people don’t even necessarily notice unless it’s pointed out to them. And you know how it’s pointed out to them?

“Hey, that’s kind of racist.”

There’s a lot more to be said about the reception and inclusion of people of color within the modern post-evangelical/evangelical/”Incarnational” spheres, but this needs to be the baseline starting point: if you are a white person, you are going to do and say things that are racist. It is a fact of existence. And you are not the arbiter of whether or not something you did was racist (or sexist or homophobic or transphobic or ableist) – the people from those marginalized groups on that privilege are. This feels bad, I know. It's supposed to.

This understanding of one's own privilege is the baseline for communicating about race, sexuality, gender, and everything surrounding marginalization. Your privilege will give you blind spots. And you don’t get to determine the lengths of that privilege.

Calling something racist doesn’t halt discussion. Being unwilling and unable to accept it does.

White Lady Feminism, Christian Blogging, and the Worst of Both Possible Worlds

Meta discussions about discussions are the worst. I know. So I’m warning you ahead of time, this is kind of one of those posts. But I think there’s also something more important here, so, please, bear with me.

My hypothesis: Much of modern, online feminism suffers from the same pathologies and problematic issues that plague modern day evangelicalism.

As someone who straddles both the worlds of feminist activism and the evangelical/post-evangelical/churchy sphere, I’ve been put in a unique position of trying to work out two ideologies at once and reconcile them to each other.

When I can get the two to reconcile and work together well, I find a vibrant, healthy, awesome community of support that pushes me to be a better person while simultaneously loving me as I am. I don’t view “you can do better” and “you are a person worthy of love” as contradictory messages, due in large part to this reconciliation between two schools of thoughts previously believed disparate. There’s a lot to love in both feminism and Christian theology. The first helps me to fight for my rights, to see myself as a person, to understand the world and the socializations within which I function. The second helps me with the why of things, gives me a steady hope for deeper change, and grounds my love within a theology of community.

But, when either of these two goes wrong, they go really, really wrong. And, remarkably, I’ve noticed that they tend to go wrong in almost exactly the same ways. It’s a disturbing confluence of the problematic nature of ideology embraced above hearing opposition and it is, in many ways, a perpetuation of marginalization and oppression.

It goes like this: prominent person says something controversial or promotes a problematic idea. Criticism comes in – some just downright mean, some hard to hear, and some spot on. Flurries of typing, tweets, and comments result in a sometimes overwhelming response. People post blogs in response, in defense of, in offense of. After about a week, or maybe longer, the meta discussions begin, and almost all of them have the same tune: “We’re broken, we’re bickering, the infighting is killing us, why can’t we all just get aloooong.”

See, for example, Jill Filipovic’s response to criticism of both Sheryl Sandberg and the #femfuture report, in which she accuses critics of going forth in “kneejerk critic” mode, and admonishes them for attacking “successful feminists.”

See, for example, Matt Appling’s post in defense of Emily Wierenga after she posted an “open letter to feminist sisters” and Wierenga’s own posts portraying herself as a persecuted martyr.

Feminism, indeed, offered me affirmation of my questioning that I hadn’t found in evangelicalism. But then I started to notice the same, uncomfortable pattern. “Successful” feminists – including both male and female feminists – would respond to criticism of their movements by appealing to their marginalization, saying that “we need to present a united front! Stop dragging down successful women! No wonder we can’t get anything done.” It didn’t matter what the criticism was – legitimate or not – the criticism itself was a problem. Christians, likewise, play this card, picturing themselves a persecuted minority in a world unfriendly to Christians, and that we therefore must be united as much as possible. It feels, in many ways, like I’ve traded one bad system of thought for another.

This is a problem for feminism in the exact same way it is for evangelicalism – critiquing the tenets or the output of popular persons within the faith is infighting, bickering, failure to present a united front to The World Out There Because They Are Watching.

This rhetoric was incredibly useful for shutting up dissenters when I was a conservative Christian. After all, if I’m a perpetual witness for the faith and I’m not getting along with my Christian brothers and sisters, what impression does that leave of the faith itself? How will we get converts?

But the same thing happens in feminism – we need to be united as sisters because if we don’t, we show the world that Feminists Are Catty and Eat Their Own and Look at Those Terrible Women. If we cannot be a good witness and keep our disagreements quiet, how are we going to get converts?

It’s no coincidence that the person who first made big-f Feminism okay for me was a woman who self-describes as a “feminist evangelist.” The rhetoric of such a movement is remarkably similar to the right-wing Christian rhetoric within which I was raised – it’s all about winning people to the cause, changing hearts and minds, and presenting the best image of feminism we can.

And, in a way, I’m all for that. Making feminism palatable for people who have grown up with distaste for it is part of my motivation in blogging.

BUT, when we prioritize being witnesses for the ideology over being good feminists (or Christians), we end up in a place where we quash discourse, where the appearance of presenting a united front is more important than actually sorting out what it means to be alive. We end up prizing conversion to the ideology over and above a discussion of what that ideology looks like. We end up prioritizing the appearance of being good people over being actual good people.

And these calls for unity tend to follow lines of power. Those spouting these ideologies tend to match the status quo of capitalist power; they end up supporting (even unknowingly) white institutionalized power structures and patriarchy. These calls also tend to flatten all criticism into one furious strain, as though all people offering criticism are simply “haters.” They contain within them a sense of martyrdom, of persecution, of marginalization within a marginalized movement, despite being the one who either started the discussion or who benefits most from the promotion of existing power structures.

Take, for example, the reaction to critiques of Sheryl Sandberg’s ”Lean In” campaign. Many feminist women of color have pointed out that Sandberg’s Lean In really only works for white feminists who work well within masculinized power structures. For Latina feminists, for example, Sandberg’s advice does not quite work as it does nothing to disabuse people of stereotypes of Latina women. It is also only applicable to middle class women who have the means and access to a job that has a corporate ladder. This is an important intersectional critique, because a feminism that is only applicable to women willing to work within white male power structures is a very limited feminism.

Filipovic, however, characterizes the criticism this way:

No one would be expected to speak for all of womankind. Sheryl Sandberg could write a book about gender in the business world without facing attacks from other feminists, criticizing her for having a nanny, for talking to male CEOs more than female domestic laborers, or for not representing working-class women – the takeaway being that Sandberg isn't enough of a caretaker, and therefore not sufficiently feminine. And in a more perfect world (or movement), a feminist book written by a female domestic laborer would get as much traction as one penned by the COO of Facebook.

The solution to those imperfections, though, is not to attack the women who do succeed or stand out. That only creates a movement of knee-jerk critics, who, when presented with a piece of feminist work, engage the "find what's wrong with it" mode.

Similarly, almost any time something problematic by Mark Driscoll or John Piper gets bandied about in the evangelical/post-evangelical blogging world, we get told that we’re ignoring the good things this Man of God does in favor of nitpicking, and that we shouldn’t criticize our brothers. Criticism that is legitimate is conflated “bashing” and “divisiveness.”

The similarities between the two spheres are remarkable. The similarities also mean that a solution is similar: stop caring about unity.

A good movement isn’t built from making sure that marginalized voices wait their turn while the successful white men and women move on and through. A good space for exploring what we think isn’t built from everyone either agreeing or shutting up or even phrasing their criticism in the nicest way possible. You aren’t going to win people over simply by being nice or by getting dissenters to play nice.

Embrace the questioning, embrace the criticism, embrace the messy. The messiness of discussion in both feminism and the Church is important. It is life changing. And trying to quell that by playing the martyr or implying critics are simply jealous simply perpetuates the movements of power we claim to be fighting. Quashing criticism – especially criticism from marginalized voices – in the name of “unity” is just another way to reinforce existing kyriarchy.

Every Christian and every feminist needs to be wary of perpetuating power structures which marginalize. Every Christian and every feminist does not need to agree on every little thing – the spaces between, the gaps and disagreements: that’s where life is.

If our feminism, if our theology, is not going to be bullshit, we need to understand that disagreement, criticism, discussions, and getting called to the carpet are all part of the growing pains that will help us be better. Better as feminists, better as Christians, better as people. But only if we don't throw up our hands and cry "persecution" at the first sign of dissent.

We Need to Talk About Kermit (Gosnell)

[Trigger Warning: brief descriptions of Gosnell’s crimes]

Last week, a tweet came across my feed announcing that the grand jury proceedings had been released and that Kermit Gosnell had gone to trial. I knew who Gosnell is, and why he was on trial. I read the tweet as nothing more than an update on a story that was a few years old – there was no doubt that Gosnell was going to go to prison for a very long time.

Then the internet decided that because they hadn't been paying attention, the media was engaged in some sort of cover up by not talking about Gosnell every day.

It seems silly to even address the idea of a media cover up in this story. Those who are going to believe that there’s a vast conspiracy here aren’t the type of people who are going to be reading my blog. And frankly, I’m uninterested in that narrative as it’s, well, entirely asinine. What I am interested in is what the Gosnell case has to say about the interplay and intersections between poverty, education, sexual health, and the State.

To be absolutely, totally, clear: I’m pro-choice. Have been for a while. I think access to safe and legal abortion is an important part of reproductive health and that the stories anti-abortion folks tell about women who get abortions are often naïve and self-serving (she’s a slut who just doesn’t understand what she’s doing!). I think allowing these narratives to dictate the abortion conversation on a policy level is a miscarriage of both mercy and justice. This is the framework with which I approach the Gosnell situation.

Here’s what we need to keep in mind:

Gosnell is a butcher, not a doctor. He was an abortion doctor in the same way a man who punches you in the mouth is a dentist. He was allowed to do what he did for so long because of a collective failure of the community government – the health department did not check in on him, despite numerous reports from other abortion doctors in the area. What he was doing – delivering live, viable infants and then killing them – is already absolutely, fundamentally illegal.

The intersectionality of this issue cannot be ignored. It is vastly important that most of his patients were poor people of color, that they were already in impoverished circumstances and that an unintended pregnancy, for many of them, meant losing their job, their housing, their social safety net. And that the tenuous position they were in also meant that it was impossible to raise funds for legal abortions or to access a clinic in their area without having to travel. To have a conversation about Gosnell’s actions is to have a conversation about race, poverty, and education.

To change the conversation into one of how “the media” aren’t talking about abortion and are purposefully covering up Gosnell is to once again ignore and erase the already marginalized. It is to take the easy road of partisan bickering rather than looking at the hard facts of the case, the institutional structures that put these people in a position where Gosnell seemed like a viable option.

That is the story here. That is what is important. The trial of Kermit Gosnell brings forward this one truth: that making abortion harder to get does not solve the problems facing a person who finds themselves pregnant when they do not want to or cannot afford to be.

Abortion is not an isolated issue. It does not happen in a vacuum. It is nonsensical to ignore the myriad reasons people get abortions and it is nonsensical to pretend that there is a singular narrative. A conversation about Kermit Gosnell is necessarily a conversation about poverty, justice, and health care.

Other People's Reasons and Our Narratives: On the Appropriation of Suicides

[trigger warning: suicidal ideation, description of suicide methods]

In October of 2010, I wanted to kill myself. I started plotting, on a daily basis, how it would happen. I’d stare up at the roof of my apartment building as I walked up the hill toward class, wondering who would spot my body first when I hanged myself using the loose wires up there. Or perhaps I would use one of those toxic bug bombs I still had on hand from when my apartment had become infested with roaches during the summer. I was living in Japan at the time and mercifully didn’t know enough Japanese to buy myself enough drugs to overdose.

2 months later, I quit my job, returned home, and began the slow road to recovery.

It was a dark, terrifying place to be. It’s not something I talk about easily or openly – few people, to this point, ever knew that this was the case and that this was the real reason I left. At the time, I said it was because I had a lack of Christian community around me, that I wasn’t getting the spiritual food I needed and it was leaving me hopeless. This was only a small part of the truth – the real problem was that I was deeply, deeply unhappy, and deeply, deeply broken. Even three years later, I can’t truly tell you what went wrong, other than a pervasive sense of being entirely unmoored from any reality I’d ever known.

I tell you this not to garner pity or to elicit sympathy for my case – I am recovered and I am in a much better place now. The fact that I can even talk openly about it is a sign of a good recovery.*

No, I tell you this because I was triggered – trigger is the only way I can describe it – by an offhand reference in a piece I read this morning, a sublimation of the story of a person who committed suicide into an anecdote about submission.

And I am furious.

Emily Wierenga wanted to talk about servanthood, submission and the feminist conflict. I understand where the piece was attempting to go. But the piece derailed for me when she chalked up her grandmother’s suicide to her grandmother’s inability to submit properly:

My dad was a pastor but when I was a little girl, the church was the only place he was a leader. At home, my mum made the rules. She told my dad when to punish us; my dad would always tell us to go to our mum when we asked for permission, and she ultimately made any decisions affecting the family.

And my dad let her. So I not only didn’t fully respect my dad growing up, because he didn’t stand up to my mum, but I didn’t really trust him to protect me. To come to my rescue if I needed him to. And when I first got married I treated my husband the same way; I bossed him around and got annoyed when he wouldn’t listen to me.

My mum’s mum was that way too. My Nanny and her husband divorced, because he couldn’t please her, and in the end, she committed suicide, because she wasn’t able to get her way and so I come from a long line of willful women.

“In the end, she committed suicide, because she wasn’t able to get her way and so I come from a long line of willful women.”

Perhaps I am too close. Perhaps the memories of lying in my bed at night imagining the different ways I could end my suffering are too stark in my mind. Perhaps those afternoons of pajama clad vegging on the sofa, being utterly and totally incapable of even getting dressed to walk to the grocery store are still too close in my memory. Perhaps I am biased. Surely, that is the pushback I will get here, for telling this part of my story – that I cannot see the forest for the trees, that I’m unable to separate one line from the thesis of the piece as a whole, that her grandma’s suicide isn’t the story she’s trying to tell.

Valid.

But consider this: whose story is it to tell when a person commits suicide? What right do we have to ascribe a meaning to their personal tragedy?

Surely, the appropriation of another person’s story – especially to support a point about selfish willfulness – has to be considered, has to be weighed, and has to be understood. Surely, this distilling of a person’s story – complex, multi-faceted, and ultimately tragic – into one line is a microcosm of everything wrong with how we tell, appropriate and understand each other as people, as complex human beings, as sisters in Christ. Surely, we need to discuss how we talk about and handle suicide and depression.

I cannot begin to imagine how Wierenga’s grandmother felt in her final days. I didn’t know her, and I don’t know her story. But as a person who has been in that dark place, and who managed to get out by the skin of her teeth, it horrifies me to think that someone would use my story to malign me, to paint me as someone who “couldn’t get my own way,” to pretend to understand all the reasons that go into such decisions and such thoughts – reasons I still don’t fully understand myself.

This one line matters because this woman’s story matters. We can talk about the abuse apologism (reflective of John Piper’s “enduring wife” ideas) and the idea of servanthood until we’re blue in the face, but if we’re not willing to honor another person’s story, if we’re not willing to give tragedy the weight that tragedy demands, if we are not willing to see others as human beings and their stories as valid stories that cannot be boiled down to one sentence, then we have failed – miserably – in our duty to be like Christ. When we appropriate another person’s tragedy to build our personal thesis and ascribe our reasons to their actions rather than listening to the stories themselves, we are doing a disservice to our church family.

I will not stand by and watch people who claim the name of Christ shame those who contemplated or committed suicide. I will not be silent in the face of those who would call suicidal people selfish. Because my story, this grandmother’s story, and the stories of countless other people, matter. They are complex, they are human, and they are not ours to play with.

_______________

*If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts and depression, please get help. Here’s a hotline or chat-line you can use.

The Case For Getting Married Whenever You Damn Well Please

This piece of satire was inspired by yet another “The Case for Marrying Young” article, this time appearing in The Atlantic.

A compelling case can be made for the advantages, particularly for women, of marrying just after you graduated high school. As a lazy writer and radio producer*, I’m disinclined to wrestle with the statistics right now though I’m perfectly capable of doing the math, but I believe a good case can be made, alternatively, for marrying whenever you damn well please.

There are costs to marrying at a very young age, a tradition the institutional Church seems intent on recommending, with articles consistently bemoaning the increasing ages of first marriage and dissecting all the causes. New research declares that I no longer give a damn what “new research” has to say about my life as a single woman. While marrying your first serious romantic partner does have benefits like having someone else on hand to open that jar of spaghetti sauce, the news isn’t all good.

While men and women are waiting longer to marry, some people are having kids outside of wedlock. While I can’t for the life of me think of why “out of wedlock mothers” became synonymous with “single mothers” even though linguistics and statistics don’t bear that out, I suppose I could allow for some concern over that idea. Because apparently single parents can’t provide stable homes for people who might grow up to become, oh, I don’t know, The President.

Also, there’s something to be said about seeing surveys about “satisfaction” and selectively reporting them as referendums about single and married life in general. And that something is “nuh-uh no way these self-reported surveys often have known biases that skew the results toward marriage as a symbol of ‘adulthood.’”

Of course, marriage has changed considerably over the course of history. In Bible times, women were married off pretty much right after their first period and didn’t really have a choice in whom they married. This was probably even the case for Mary and Joseph, the folks who raised Jesus – I mean, the whole problem of that thing was that Mary was *gasp* an unwed mother! OH NOES.

...where was I?

Oh, yeah. We’ve agreed basically by consensus of our changing culture that maybe having people with uteruses (uteri?) start spitting out babies shortly after they’ve started their monthly bleeding cycles is a Bad Idea. So we can probably adjust our culture to the shifting ideas of what marriage and family look like now without rending our clothes and grieving in sackcloth over the demise of an idealized image of the American Family That Never Was.** And it doesn’t necessarily matter if/when a woman gets married because autonomy, y’know?

Of course, the idea of autonomy seems mightily offensive to some folk. But see, when they long for the good ol' days when women and men married at 20 and settled down, what they're actually saying is that they'd like to see marriage returned to the time when women were encouraged not to educate themselves but rather to depend solely upon a man. This frequently trapped young women in abusive or just plain unhappy marriages because women weren’t educationally or vocationally equipped to leave.*** But now apparently cishet women choosing career and financial stability before (not instead of, but before) a husband, asserting their autonomy and taking the right choice instead of the first choice is hedonism. Or something. That argument is really unclear, because you'd think hedonists wouldn't get married.

Let’s insert a completely unnecessary personal anecdote, because the plural of anecdote is TOTALLY data, right?

I’m twenty seven years old. I’m single. I have two higher education degrees that have enabled me to find a stable job to support myself and pay back my educational debt, and find a fulfilling life doing what I love. I have a cat, and yes, I drink about a bottle of wine every couple of weeks, because I enjoy having a glass of wine now and then and White Zinfandel tastes good.****

What’s more is that I am happy. I am satisfied with my life. I’ve had the opportunity to travel – I’ve lived in England and Japan and travel internationally on a yearly basis for my day job. I also have the freedom to take off for a weekend if I want and an open schedule that only I dictate. I am also responsible – I pay my bills on time – and I am successful – I have a steady job, a blog with good stats, and friends I dearly love and am incredibly grateful for. I have a number of people who are my chosen family who would go to bat for me in a heartbeat (and frequently do). I know people of all different walks of life and I love that being single in my 20s has afforded me the opportunity to know them. My life that would be entirely different had I married at 19. Not bad, just different.

And you know what? I know people who got married at 19 who are happy with that decision - fewer of them than these older Christians who keep urging us to marry young. And I think the high divorce rate that correlates (but is not necessarily caused by because, gee, social trends are complex!) with an earlier age of marriage is something to be concerned about - a trend that these people who urge for early marriage seem unconcerned about or intent at sweeping under the rug.

 What's important here though is this: my life decisions are not a referendum on anyone else’s and they are not an invitation for white American Christians to pearl clutch and whine about how “times have changed” and “demographics are different.”

My life is my life, married, singled, divorced, widowed, or otherwise affiliated. Marriage, if it happens, will be the icing on the cake of a life well lived and that does not make it any less valid or any less awesome OR any less of a cornerstone that will change and alter my life.

End of discussion.

_______________

*Note that this has nothing to do with the subject at hand. I just thought I’d brag about my TOTALLY AWESOME job.

**I mean, read The Feminine Mystique, people.

***Again, read the research, people.

****Shut up, Preston.

Heavy Words and Co-opted Meanings

As I like to say, over and over, words mean things. Matt Appling of The Church of No People seems to have missed out on this lesson. With this post, his non-apologetic clarification, and then this guest post on a different site, he seems to be on some sort of crusade of pushing back against the progressive Christian world. The only problem is that he doesn’t seem to have taken the time to understand it before diving into critiques. And in doing so, he’s perpetuated a lot of harmful thinking and theology. Appling suffers from a common malady that afflicts a lot of white male evangelicals – not bothering to research the actual definition of the terms they’re using, and predicating entire ideas on a misunderstood definition. But, like Elora said earlier this week, words mean things. In fact, knowing and understanding what certain words mean and how they apply to one’s own life is vital for healing from abusive situations. Being able to say "I was abused," and "I suffered," gives those experiences meaning and weight and context.

Changing definitions of healing words to one’s own purpose and worldview – to complain about pastoral issues, for example  – can, itself, be abusive and oppressive behavior. One may not be intending to oppress or abuse, but intent isn’t magical. If your writing is predicated on terms that survivors and victims use to understand what happened to them, and you change the definitions to complain about something petty, you are appropriating a term that is not yours to use.

Take, for example, Appling’s guest post on spiritual abuse (linked above). In the post, he talks a bit about how spiritual abuse has become a buzzword, but that we forget a big victim of spiritual abuse – pastors.

Now, there is an angle here that could have worked – pastors can and do suffer spiritual abuse in terms of being held to what the person above them in the chain of command (or an elder board) wants. The main character in John Hassler’s North of Hope, for example, suffers from a version of this.

But that’s not Appling’s take. No, Appling says that congregants who expect too much of their pastors, who don’t parent their kids (???), who criticize the preaching style of the pastor are “spiritually abusing him” (and in Appling’s world, it’s only ever a him). Appling writes:

Too many times than I can count, I have heard friends and acquaintances complain or denigrate (read:abuse) their pastor over his oratorical abilities.  Not his ability to interpret scripture or his character, but just his ability to entertain them.  For one reason or another, a mere man is not able to live up to their sky-high standards of performance.

...

Likewise, I have heard so many people leave churches for the last time with the parting words, “I’m just not being fed.”

...

No?  Then how can you expect a church to spoon-feed you everything you need? You know how some couples fight over housework?  Some guys think that cooking meals equals “woman’s work?”  Well the same abusive attitude exists at church.  Keeping everyone spiritually fed somehow equals “pastor-work” while everyone else sits back and relaxes.  That’s not what church is about.

This is the part where I grab a megaphone and start yelling.

Do people critique pastors unfairly sometimes? Yes. Do pastors get unwarranted criticism because American Christianity has turned the church into a capitalistic enterprise where attendance coins get put in and we expect happy spirituality to fall out? Yes. Do people expect too much and does that factor into pastors suffering from burn out? Yes.

Does it fit the definition of spiritual abuse, though? Not really.

Even a cursory glance at the Wikipedia page for spiritual abuse would have informed Appling of the idea that “complaining about your pastor” or leaving a church because "you're not being fed" doesn’t fit the definition of spiritual abuse. Spiritual abuse, like other well-defined forms of abuse, has a definition, symptoms, and signs. One of those major signs is a controlling authoritarian structure in which people who complain or challenge the authority are punished and either forced to leave or forced to undergo steps for repentance and re-education. Authority is a huge factor in spiritual abuse. And congregants shopping around to different churches simply aren't authoritarian figures in the scenario Appling puts forth.

I understand, partially, where Appling is coming from. He wants to encourage people to treat their pastors well. I have a lot of friends who are pastors or who are in ministry who have been treated poorly by their church congregations. Whether or not those congregations have spiritually abused them must be taken on a case by case basis, however, and the incidences run much deeper than someone complaining about preaching style. I'm not here denying that pastors experience spiritual abuse (because they do), but to claim that congregants are abusing their pastor when they complain about him is a sweeping generalization I cannot get behind.

By using “spiritual abuse” to mean petty complaints about pastors, Matt Appling dilutes the powerful meaning the term has.

Maybe an analogy would help: we’ve all met the person who insists on having her pencils lined up neatly on her desk and jokes “I’m so OCD!” And we rightly find this person annoying.

Joking about having a serious disorder like OCD takes away from the real nature of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Correcting this joking is actually advisable, because it makes it easier for people with real, diagnosed OCD to feel more comfortable. It doesn’t dilute their mental illness down to a quirk.

I choose OCD because my oldest brother suffers from mild OCD as part of a spectrum of illnesses that often accompany Down Syndrome (which he has). Before he sits down in any chair, for example, he feels the need to reach down and “remove his shadow.” He does this anywhere and everywhere – in restaurants, getting into the car, in his own living room. People who are around him in daily life have grown used to it, recognizing that it’ll take him a little longer to settle things and to “feel right” in a new situation (he is on medication for it, as well).

So people joking about OCD because they like things to be tidy? Really bother me, because it makes it harder for people who have variations on the illness to feel “normal.” Changing the definition of a diagnosed illness or a defined and research form of abuse makes it harder for those who actually do experience these things to feel like they can claim them as part of their story. Calling a desire for neatness "OCD" co-opts and appropriates a legitimate term with a specific definition. It uses mental illness to define a "quirk."

Similarly, those of us not healing from or experienced in things like rape or abuse should not appropriate those terms to describe situations we happen to find unpleasant. Example: "That test raped me." Or "that debate round really abused me." You should never, ever use something horrific to describe something you simply don't like. Doing so cheapens the words and makes them lose force of meaning.

Words have to have certain, defined meanings because learning the vocabulary for what happened to you helps give those things weight, and place, and shape, and context within your life. When we use these heavy, weighty words to describe things that are not heavy and weighty, we rob people of the contexts they need to heal. And a person without context is a person lost.

__________

For coverage of Appling's other posts on equality, I recommend this post from my friend Sarah, about equality and humility (spoiler alert: Appling doesn't get what those mean, either!).

Photo by Lainey's Repoertoire on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons licensing.

An Unholy Evil: Ignorance, Silence, and Abuse

[Trigger warning: abuse apologism] I didn’t set out to become someone who blogs about abuse regularly. But in three years as a blogger, I’ve forged many friendships with people who have been marginalized and hurt by people in the church. The stories of survivors have wrecked me and enraged me and filled me what I think Paul might term a “holy and righteous anger.”

We live in a culture that demands victims of abuse must stay silent for the comfort of others, that tells them their hurt and anger is out of place, that privileges their abusers and demands that healing on a schedule.  Christianity, to me, must be about centering  the voices of the abused and marginalized: hearing, understanding, and magnifying them. It is within that airing of grievance, that anger at mistreatment, and the fight for justice that we find every element of Christian community and justice and love and mercy.

This isn’t about me; it’s about what Christian love means when it comes to listening to the abused. The first step in showing this love to is shut up and listen to what survivors of abuse have to say. The writing I’ve done about abuse has come out of a process of learning from survivors how to stand in solidarity with them as they demand to be heard, and amplify their words. We cannot love victims of abuse if we refuse to hear them. We cannot support them, understand how abuse and abusers work, or comprehend its effects without listening to those who have experienced it.

Tim Challies has apparently never opened his ears to the victims of the abused.  Tim Challies doesn’t appear to understand what abuse is.

Why else, then, would he produce this steaming pile of weaksauce?

According to what Challies wrote here, he believes it better to remain ignorant in cases of abuse, in order to let the alleged abusers and their victims work it out amongst themselves. It is destructive to Christian unity to challenge Christian brothers who are being accused of abuse, to speak out against their actions. No. Really. Read it (emphasis mine):

We, of all people, should be slow to put aside hope and belief. This means that I owe it to C.J. Mahaney, to SGM and to those who have levelled allegations to believe the best about them, to hope all things for them.

….

However, the majority of us are far on the outside with very little at stake. For this reason many of us simply do not need to have an opinion.

The farther we are from being stakeholders, the less the likelihood that we are equipped to helpfully evaluate the facts and that we can do anything helpful with the information we learn. The farther we are from being close to those involved, the greater the likelihood that we are drawn more to the scandal of it all than any noble purpose. Not all knowledge builds us up; not all knowledge helps us; not all knowledge helps us love God and love one another in deeper ways. The fact that today’s media allows us to have access to facts, does not necessarily give license to avail ourselves of them.

If it is true that I am called to love other Christians, that I am called to believe and hope all things, that I am far outside this situation, then I think I do well to learn less rather than more. I need to know only enough to understand that I don’t need to know anything more! For example, when the leaders of a church call a members’ meeting knowing that there may be someone there transcribing the meeting with a view to making it public, and when that church’s pastor specifically asks outsiders not to read the meeting’s proceedings, I, as an outside observer, do well to honor that request as a show of love and respect to a brother in Christ. When thousands of pages of documentation appear on web sites, I do not benefit from reading and studying every word.

For this reason I have deliberately avoided learning too much. I have had to question my motives, especially since I have repeatedly been on the receiving end of scathing criticism for not using my platform to speak out against Mahaney. I have chosen to read the news stories, to understand the basic facts, but conscience compels me to stop there. To do more may not be spiritually beneficial, it may not reflect good time management, and it may not be loving toward those who are involved.

I almost can’t write this. My hands are shaking and I keep reaching over to my water bottle, hoping that the icy liquid will cool the searing pain from the bile rising in my throat.

Challies is writing as though no one in his audience is privy to an abusive situation. As though Christians are merely outsiders to an anomaly. As though abusers don’t sit happily in the pulpits and in the congregations of churches across America. If your congregation is a decent sized cross section of America (as most are), there is an abuse victim in your audience, probably sitting next to their abuser, every Sunday. Challies’ assumption that one can simply be ignorant of abuse, that one can avoid getting their hands messy on the topic, is an exemplar of privilege run amok.

Sure, he’s talking about one specific case. But he’s also making declarative statements throughout his piece about what Christian actions in cases of abuse should be – and those instructions are horrifying. We should be careful to listen to both sides, we should withhold judgment, we should actively make efforts to learn no more.

Challies failed in his responsibility as a pastor and as a man of God the second he hit publish on that post. His instructions go far beyond the specifics of SGM (which has not, as Challies says, been “slow or hesitant to release information” but rather has actively sought to prevent any information from being disseminated and actively fought investigations). And in that action, he silences victims and gives bulwarks of support to their abusers.

You see, victims – especially victims in evangelical environments – are told that their allegations of abuse are private matters, that opening their mouths and saying that things are not okay is “divisive” and “against Christian unity.” It is no small matter for victims to bring forth accusations and to go to court against their abusers. It is no small feat for them to stand up for themselves and continue to speak.

Challies’ rhetoric would have those victims remain silent. And it would have their Christian brothers and sisters remain willfully ignorant. Challies here abandons victims of abuse the very second he proposes that we are enacting a Biblical model by remaining uncritical of an abusive church situation.

It is horrific. It is beyond the pale. And it is the farthest thing from “Christian” one could possibly be.

Jesus was an ally to the marginalized. Jesus did not hesitate to call out those abusers of men – brood of vipers, whitewashed tombs. If we are to model Jesus, ignorance and silence in the face of abuse is the last thing we should be doing.

________

Photo by fotologic. Used under Creative Commons licenses.

For more responses to Challies, I recommend this post on Wine and Marble and this post by Rachel Held Evans.

My Birthday Wishes

Today is my twenty-seventh birthday. In the years I've been alive, I've seen Don't Ask Don't Tell implemented and repealed.

I've seen great leaders rise and fall.

I've seen the landscape of New York City change in an instant, watching from a South Dakota classroom on a Tuesday morning, distanced from the event and yet so very present.

I've seen women as viable candidates for President and become well-respected at the highest levels of government (though that highest office evades us still).

A black man was elected leader of our country - a fantastic milestone that, in some ways, served to highlight how much further we have yet to go in discussions of race.

Women made hard won leaps forward, only to realize how much we're still rehashing and refighting the battles of our mothers (abortion, birth control, the mommy wars).

I've become a person who - though still learning about myself - makes it a priority to be intersectional, intentional, justice-oriented, while still maintaining a biting quick tongue.

And as I look forward to (hopefully) many more years, I have high hopes (and higher standards) for the future my nieces and younger cousins will inherit.

I hope they find a world in which the church encourages healthy development, no matter their gender or sexual identity.

I hope they find a world in which they are able to live and be who they are without fear.

I hope they find a world in which those who abuse are vilified, not the victims.

I hope they find a world in which love and grace reign, not unrealistic standards about what it means to be a man or a woman.

I hope that they find a world in which who they are is not forced into subjugation due to outdated, unbiblical gender roles.

I hope they find a world where they learn with love, faith, and grace.

I hope - on the occasion of my 27th birthday - that the work I do now helps to create a better world for them, a world in which they love and are loved.

Join me?

Purity Culture is Rape Culture: A Case Study

[Trigger warning: rape, intimate partner violence] A few months ago, the feminist Christian blogging world had a collective shaking of the heads over Secret Keepers, a modesty movement aimed at girls 8-12 years old. The movement is founded by speaker and author Dannah Gresh. Those of you involved in the complementarian world will recognize her as a “moderate, mainstream” complementarian name – usually pointed to in order to balance out the extreme examples of Driscoll and Piper or even Debi and Michael Pearl.

I have to admire Gresh’s heart for young girls and people. She is really, truly passionate about what she does, and is clearly a good, strong woman, who has benefited from feminism in many ways.

But, I cannot see her work as benign, mainstream complementarian. Because if this is what mainstream looks like, complementarianism and purity culture have a real problem on their hands.

Dannah Gresh’s chastity movement is designed so that it can take a person all the way from childhood to puberty to adulthood firmly ensconced in purity teachings. Her Secret Keepers foundation speaks to girls as young as eight and explains to them the virtues of being modest. On their website (and, according to this video, at conferences on tour), the girls are instructed to conduct a “Truth or Bare” Modesty Test.

The test is framed in such a way as to make young girls hyper-aware of the masculine sexual drive years before they even know what sex is. Granted, the FAQ on the Secret Keepers website states that sex is never directly mentioned from the stage on the tour and though you can’t find a mention of actual sex on the website, this is a technicality. One doesn’t need to talk about intercourse in order to frame the discussion in a way that enforces and supports the male sexual gaze as prime.

Take, for example, these instructions from the Truth or Bare test:

Bellies are very intoxicating and we need to save that for our husbands!

Lean forward a little bit. Can you see too much chest or future cleavage? Your shirt is too low.

It all depends on whether God has chosen to bless you with breasts or not.

The Secret Keeper movement doesn’t even have to mention sex for it to be clear to these young girls that they do not have say over their bodies – at eight years old, these girls are already being told that they do not belong to themselves, that they are a threat merely by existing, and that their private parts belong to a future man. The language and framing within this set function to disempower these young women before they can even understand what bodily autonomy might mean.

As I said last week, the ownership of one’s body, one’s bodily autonomy, is vital to developing a healthy sexual ethic. By telling these children that their bodies are not their own and should be hidden, Secret Keepers – and Gresh, as founder – are reinforcing the idea that women’s bodies are provocative, seductive, things that are threatening (and “intoxicating!”) to men. They literally say they should hide themselves.

The implied consequence of this, as has been discussed ad nauseum in the feminist world (and will continue to be discussed until people get it) is that sexual violence is then, quite possibly, the fault of the woman assaulted.

Think that’s too big of a leap? Consider, then, Gresh’s sermon (audio file) to college students at Grove City College in Grove City, PA, this past Valentine’s Day (yes, Valentine’s Day).

First, she discusses the Hebrew “ahava” – slightly misinterpreted as dangerous, lustful, love-at-first-sight kind of love, though still close the original meaning of romantic love. She seems to be setting up romantic, sexually-tinged love as a dangerous type of love that should be avoided. She has this to say about the story of Dinah in Genesis:

We find in the Bible several instances in-where there are stories where people fell in love. See if some of these are familiar to you. Um, there’s Hamor the Hivite who fell in love with Dinah. The Bible says he was deeply attracted to her and he loved – ahava – her. Well if you know how that story ends, he ended up raping her, which promoted her brothers to seek revenge and started a terrible war.

[Editor’s note: Dinah was raped by Schechem, son of Hamor. And love – ahava – is spoken about after the rape occurs in Genesis, which is sketchy. You can find her story here.]

Within Gresh’s framing, sexual violence is a natural consequence of awakened lust. While she does not blame Dinah, it is not a hard leap to victim blaming here, as Gresh later cautions in her sermon that women are needy and looking for love and will often settle for ahava when they really need agape.

She sets up ahava and agape in contrast, even though in Proverbs 10:12, we see ahava used in a way that is similar to agape. But that’s a minor point, because the illustration Gresh uses to demonstrate agape love – ie, the type of love she wants men to have for women, the type of self-sacrificing love she believes God has for us – is violently abusive (forgive the long quote):

And here’s the thing, as I was looking over my dating years with my husband, as we were college students. I remember one very distinct time. I was thinking ‘when were the times that he expressed agape love to me?’ I could think of a lot of really neat ones, but I thought of one that was probably harder for him than all the rest. You see, we had recently gotten engaged and I was living in an apartment and going to summer school so I could finish up a little early – not that I was in a hurry to get married or anything. And he came to see me. And we hadn’t seen each other for months and we missed each other very much. And it probably took one fifth of a second when he was inside of that apartment for us to realize we were really in love. And we found ourselves horizontal on the sofa. And it really wasn’t okay. You get the picture. But it  lasted about a second and before I knew it, my fiancé picked me up off the sofa, threw me against the wall, and ran outside of my apartment.

[laughter]

Yes, I felt horribly rejected.

[more laughter]

But I brushed myself off and I walked outside and I said “What was that?”

And he said, opening the car door, “Get in, we need a chaperone. I can’t be alone with you. We’re going to Professor Haffy’s house.”

[more laughter]

and we spent the weekend in one of our professor’s homes.

That’s agape.

Taken as a whole, from Secret Keepers up to what she tells college students, the violent, abusive, disempowering vision of love that Gresh presents is truly frightening. It is a culture wherein women are told that their bodies do not belong to themselves, and that sexual and physical violence are both their own fault and part and parcel of romantic, sacrificial love.

This is deeply, deeply problematic. This type of speech - from little girls to college students - is evidence of a rape and abuse culture. It is the kind of culture where women feel like they cannot escape, where they feel like taking abuse is their duty. It is the kind of culture that promotes abuse and rape by telling women that they must think of themselves only in relationship to men, and not as autonomous beings who own their bodies.

Gresh is not some fringe. Gresh is frequently pointed to as an example of a moderate, mainstream complementarian. It appears that even mainstream, moderate complementarians cannot avoid the inherent problems in much complementarian thought – when you disempower women, love starts to look an awful lot like abuse.

_________

Note: you should read this Grove City alum's take at Wine and Marble. I also recommend this post by Shaney.