The Flesh as Bogeyman: Sex, Self-Control, and Post-Evangelical Culture

[trigger warning: rape culture, purity culture, disordered eating]

In the dash yesterday that was going to the mechanic to remove a plastic bag from my car's engine ($62! For a plastic bag!), a few things escaped my notice. Since one references the others fairly heavily, I don’t think it’s unfair to attempt to boil them down to the significant points. I think these posts create a convenient beginning point for discussing some larger issues within post-evangelicalism’s grappling with purity culture and its unwillingness to step back from a broken doctrine.

There’s a discomfort, when discussing purity culture in a post-evangelicalism/emergent sphere, to try very, very hard not to throw the baby out with the bath water, to develop new language to discuss abstinence until marriage that doesn’t reach back into shaming. This is what Jamie Wright and Rachel Held Evans’ posts are trying to do. They’re reframing the discussion as one of self-control and holiness, rather than shame and purity. They’re encouraging waiting to marriage as a matter of holiness, connecting it (in Rachel’s case) to monastic discipline and denial of self and the flesh. Waiting until marriage, then, is a high holiness calling, but not waiting is merely a stumble, not an earth-shattering destruction of self-worth. Rachel tells me that her intent was not to create a universal and I want to acknowledge and appreciate that. But I think we need to be especially careful when we discuss sexuality in terms of self-control.

While I appreciate the move away from tying one’s moral and spiritual worth to virginity, I’ve been discovering more and more that these reframings of the discussion often end up just being window dressing on a concept that is broken in of itself. I cannot, in good conscience, say that God’s plan is for me to be a virgin on my wedding day. Neither can I state that this denial of self is a marker of holiness because that buys into an uncomfortable hierarchy of holiness - in which spartan hermit monks will always be closer to God than I. I also cannot, in good conscience, get behind the language of self-control as it pertains to sexuality because it implies a false dichotomy between people who wait and people who choose to have sex - it fails to provide adequate sexual ethics of consent and respect.

The problem, I’ve found, is much larger than simply the discussion of virginity or purity or sexuality, though that part of it is important. Instead, our language and philosophies have been heavily infiltrated by the heresy of Gnosticism. It’s hard to sum up in a couple of paragraphs, but Gnosticism is based out of dualims, which preaches that our bodies and our souls are separated entities. There’s a famous quote (that’s not actually, if I recall correctly, from CS Lewis but is attributed to him) about how “You are a soul. You have a body.” This is, I’m sure you recognize, very common teaching in evangelicalism.

Dualism often becomes combined with Gnosticism – Gnosticism preaches that The Flesh is inherently bad – it is what carries our sin, and therefore must be subdued. The Flesh extends out to the material world in general in Gnosticism, therefore living without the pleasure of the material world is much more holy. Unfortunately, this leads to a setting aside of the created world in entire – it makes God’s creation into an evil.

This is, I propose, what the evangelical language surrounding purity – including these new(ish) self-control ideas – does to our bodies. When we discussing purity and holiness as a mastery of our flesh, we invoke the spectres of dualism and Gnosticism. We Other our own selves from the God-created bodies we are. We make our natural, God-given, God-created sexual appetites into bogeymen that must be defeated, mastered, and controlled.

This idea of self-control of sexual desire as holiness is a problem – one that recourses right back into the harmful ideology of the purity culture.

When I first started questioning purity culture, one of the first things I latched onto was how purity culture creates a disordered view of one’s sexual desire. Because it requires so much denial of the self, it ends up unfairly demonizing sexual desire in itself. Rather than contextualizing sexual desire and intimacy as merely aspects of a person, purity culture makes sexual desire into something outside us that requires much control (and promises a reward at the end for all our hard work). The desire to control sexual desire in purity culture, indeed, mirrors the desire to control one’s intake of food in eating disorders. Rather than integrating one’s appetite into one’s personality and life as simply a part of oneself, disordered control about eating turns a very basic biological mechanism into a thing to be feared – into a bogeyman that must be subdued.

Purity culture treats sexual appetite as diet culture treats a biological food appetite – creating a disordered, destructive attitude toward our very selves. The ability to know yourself well enough to moderate and eat in a healthy (dare I say, consensual?) manner is far more important than simply controlling yourself to the point of not eating. But talk of controlling  and mastering  doesn't do that, especially when the end result of control is the encouragement of complete abstinence until a designated time. It doesn't give you the tools to indulge in a healthy manner anymore than "eat less" helps you to form a nutritional diet.

I discuss this more in the book, but I think it’s important and relevant here – purity culture made me so good at self-control that I divorced myself from my body until I was in my early 20s. I was so good at controlling my sexual appetite that I wasn’t even aware that I had one. Lust wasn’t a thing I experienced, except in the tame “I’d sure like to hold hands with that guy” way. But even that slight desire was worth pages and pages of self-flagellating diary entries, praying for God to give me the self-control to overcome my lust and to bring my future husband into my life so I could be fully holy.

Notice the language. Self-control. Holiness. It’s all much the same. Wrapped up in the intense shaming of purity culture was also the idea of self-control. Those who lusted did not have adequate control over their sexual appetites – they had failed in the mission to give everything up to the mastery of God. I viewed my natural sexual appetite as inherently disordered, inherently sinful, merely for the fact that it existed in the first place. And I had no understanding of myself as a sexual being, which divorced me from understanding the fullness of who I am as a person.

It all wraps back into Gnosticism and dualism. Self-control and holiness sound good, until you realize that this control is over one’s God-created and God-given desires and appetites. The language of self-control, as regards sex, is often language that mirrors the negative self-talk of the anorexic teenager. 

"Delayed gratification," for example, places our bodies into a give and take reward system (if I wait to do this, it'll be EVEN BETTER later!), rather than placing us in a context of asking ourselves why we want to act, what we hope to get from it, and how it functions within our lives. As such, it turns our responsibility for such acts into an equation of possible good or bad outcomes, rather than understanding and knowing ourselves. "Delaying gratification" isn't strong footing for any ethic, much less sex.

This metaphor of disordered eating, of course, only goes so far – sex is not necessarily a needed survival mechanism like food is, but taking the view that one must starve one’s sexual appetite until it can rightly be indulged creates a disordered view of relationships and one’s own flesh. It removes one’s sense of autonomy from one’s decisions.

How? When we talk of saving oneself for marriage as an act of self-control, we necessary posit those who do not wait as unable or less able to control themselves. In doing so, we remove from them the idea that they make the decision to have sex of their own volition. It prevents those who do not wait from owning their decisions – and thus understanding themselves as sexual beings capable of autonomy and consent, rather than souls who just temporarily lost control of their bodies.

This, to me, is where the post-evangelical discussion of self-control fails. Having premarital sex still, in this mindset, ends up being categorized as a failure of holiness, as a failure of one’s will or relationship with God, which prevents the experience from being something in which one can learn about one’s self and one’s wants and desires and pleasures. It necessarily demonizes the flesh (and therefore one’s sexuality) by making it into something that must be tamed rather than something that must be understood. Instead of framing the experience in a positive - "Why did I make that choice and what can I learn about myself from it? Was it healthy?" - it necessarily interjects a negative - "Failed to control myself again."

It’s a subtle difference, but it is a necessary one. It is impossibly hard to find a sexual ethic that still encourages saving sex for marriage without also demonizing sexuality and sexual desire in itself. It is, I propose, because no such universal exists. Healthy sexuality is far more important than delayed sexuality. Healthy demands introspection, understanding, and responsibility, not just self-control and delayed satisfaction.

__________

A note:

If you want to wait, even for religious reasons, that’s fine. I have zero problem with that. What I am discussing is how we frame that discussion, especially within universal ideas. Your self-control language may help you, but for many of the rest of us, it is simply another prison.

Also, thanks very much to Abi, Sarah, and Grace, who discussed this with me when I was awake and thinking about it at 1AM this morning.

On Triggers, Boundaries, And Privilege: Respecting the Fences of Our Neighbors

[trigger warning: abuse culture, rape and rape culture, potentially triggering discussion of boundaries being crossed]

When I was in college, I was staying at my parents’ over a break. It was a Saturday morning and I, being a college student, was sleeping in. I’d arranged to hang out with one of my friends from high school later that day and was looking forward to it. At about 8AM, a college friend showed up at my house unannounced. He was in town, and wanted to take me to breakfast. I was tired, I was in my pajamas, and I already had plans for that day. But suddenly this guy was standing in my bedroom doorway as my mom poked me and told me I needed to get up and go with him. I raised my head, saw who it was, said hi, and told him I wouldn’t be going out with him that day. I then rolled over and put a pillow over my head.

A little rude? Sure. But the boundary of both my parents’ home and my sleeping schedule had been broken. I was sleepy, and I already had plans for later. I did not want to go. My mom later told me it was disrespectful of me to turn down his invitation.

Unfortunately, it seems, this setting of boundaries is seen as an affront to graciousness and good discussion. Setting a boundary is viewed as hostility especially in the Christian world, in ways that I haven’t witnessed elsewhere. I mean, my experience is pretty limited, but there seems to be a particularly insidious hostility to setting a boundary or to having personal space. This goes double when the person setting the boundary is a survivor of abuse.

These violations of boundaries that we set are spiritualized – we are told in the church that loving others means sacrificing of ourselves so that others may see Jesus. In practice, that usually means that the marginalized – those who most need boundaries, those who are survivors of horrors, those who are in literal danger if their boundary is not respected – have to kowtow to the comfort of the privileged.

It looks like this:

If you’re triggered by something someone says, well, maybe you shouldn’t be reading it! Why should I have to adapt how I present my articles?

If you can’t stand the heat of a discussion, then don’t speak! Why engage in a discussion if you can't take negative pushback?!

How DARE you walk away from this discussion! I wasn’t done yet!

It’s so unchristlike that you don’t want that person in a space you consider safe. Forgive and forget!

Saying that I triggered your anxiety and memories of abuse is a low blow and a derailing tactic. It’s like you’re comparing me to Hitler! You just want to silence me.

…I could go on. All too often, I've seen reactions to boundaries and safe space taken as a threat to free speech, an insult to those who don't need the safe space in the first place. The constant and consistent misunderstanding and misconstruing of triggers and trigger warnings - especially within the church - makes me wonder if we really care about helping the abused at all.

Triggers, trigger warnings, and people informing you that they are triggered are not “tactics.” They are not things created out of thin air to get out of an uncomfortable discussion. They are not things people are faking.

Trigger warnings exist for the rape survivor, for the domestic violence survivor, for the person with suicidal tendencies, for the person with a history of disordered eating, for the victims of hate speech, for the victims of racism, transphobia, homophobia, and ableist attacks.

If you are privileged enough to be able to read an article without getting a panic attack, to be able to have a discussion and have it stay simply as a discussion, then trigger warnings do not exist for you. If you’re privileged enough that your boundaries have been respected in the past and that you can reasonably expect them to be respected now, you have absolutely no business disrespecting the boundaries of survivors.

And yet. And yet. Emergent church dudes wail that being called “triggering” is a black mark on their records. Bloggers are mocked for setting boundaries after being triggered. People who run blogs that are supposedly for survivors tell survivors that they should just leave if something is triggering. The tyranny of the majority complains about having to adapt to protect a minority – a distinctly unbiblical message if there ever was one.

The marginalized, the hurting, the survivors want to participate. Many of them want to be at the table. But Christian culture and the behavior of Christians makes that impossible. It is an absurd meme that says having boundaries to protect your psyche means that you’re unloving, or that refusing to engage with a person who behaves in a triggering manner means you’re failing to show Christlike love.

What of the least of these? What of one who cannot eat meat sacrificed to idols? What of the weaker brother? Are these not Gospel? Are these not Christlike? Why, then, is understanding and respecting the boundaries of the marginalized seen as a burden? Why am I the bad guy for requesting that my boundaries get respected, for taking the time to care for myself after I have a panic attack?

Why must the marginalized bow to the powerful? How, then, is that love?

My Life Is Not a Question Mark: The Harm of "Harmless" Questions

[trigger warning: rape, rape culture, abuse] 

A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with a friend about questions – specifically, what gets treated as legitimate questions within the church and the unintentional harm  inflicted by treating specific things as debatable.

I thought of that again today when I came across this article from Think Christian, a site I occasionally contribute to and know the editor of. The article asks, “What role, if any, does consent play in a Christian sexual ethic?”

And I found myself seething at the idea that consent was a question at all, especially tied to a specifically Christian ideal. It’s a question that should not be asked because the very asking of it indicates a lack of safety within the Church.

I’m a fan of questioning things. Being willing to question those things the Church treated as given helped me arrive at what I feel is a healthier life ethic – healthier because it’s an actual ethic, not just a rule of “say no until the wedding.” Questions have helped me fill out my personhood, so to speak – they’ve helped me to see others as human beings and to see the gray areas in the middle of the black and white absolutes I was taught.

But, questions can also be dangerous – when we treat the very humanity of another human being as a theological question to be tossed about and debated, we do harm to people.

Take, for example, the raging debate within the church over LGBT people. It’s often framed as “The LGBT Question.” Straight pastors and preachers and theologians spend countless words and hours and blog entries dissecting the question of homosexuality and where it fits within God’s plan for the world and so on and so forth. But in treating it as a question – in asking, essentially, “are these people going to hell?” – they erase and ignore the very people they're discussing.

Everyone’s seen the television cliché where three people are in a room and two of the three are talking about the third. The third person – who is being discussed – will interrupt after a little while and yell, “HELLO. I’M RIGHT HERE.”

When a person's humanity is a question to be debated and discussed, the person themselves get erased. They are in the room. They are right here, right now, listening to people discuss their life as though it’s an intellectual exercise, a fun discussion to keep you up until 2AM with your college friends.

It’s an element of privilege, that a person’s identity is something to be questioned and debated and discussed within frameworks of sin and hell and forgiveness. The Church labels itself as unsafe the very second it treats something that is vitally important to someone as a legitimate question, up for discussion.

This extends beyond LGBT identities, though that is the most obvious example. The aforementioned question of “consent” is another one. All too often, I've seen rape, abuse and consent treated as debatable topics, as though someone outside the experience somehow has an objective eye to determine what really happened. Treating consent as a question revictimizes victims - it tells them that, once again, they may not be believed or trusted.

Debate is good. Debate gets you places. But when the debate is centered around the public question of “is consent important?”, the church just signaled to 1 in 6 women that their experience is “questionable."

One thing I try to remind myself when I discuss hot-button issues is that there is probably someone in my audience who has experienced this trauma or who identifies with that group. Part of letting people know that I’m trying to be a safe space for them is to not treat their lives and their experiences as questions to be dissected and discussed and broken down.

I reject the premise of any question that does not start from a baseline of bodily autonomy and acknowledgement of individual identity.

A pastor treating consent as a matter of debate – and refusing to call nonconsensual sex rape – just told rape victims in the congregation that their stories are up for debate, yet again.

A pastor preaching about abuse who frames abuse as “maybe the husband hits the wife once or twice” just informed the abuse victims in the congregation that the church is not a safe place for them.

A pastor who asks “Can gay people be Christians and still practice homosexuality?” just erased any Jesus-loving LGBT people who might have existed within the congregation.

The Church needs to be very careful about the questions it asks and the things it treats as up for debate. If you treat someone’s identity as a hook for your “interesting” blog post or sermon, you have become yet another in a long line of people who make the Church unwelcoming for anyone who is not like you. My life and my identity and my experience are not your thought exercise.

Guest Post: Faith Like a Child

Kate is a Nashville, TN biologist who has recently turned into a seminarian. She is a lover of Christ, all things science, working for equality and mutuality in the church, a good cup of coffee, very short hair, laughing until crying, humanitarian work, and the triathlon. Though sometimes she can barely work a toaster, she enjoys writing about it and the joys and pains of the journey of life; she prays for a few traveling mercies along the way. She blogs here and tweets here.

Faith like a child is a curious thing. A precious thing, which fills a need, something deep and persistent as we develop through infancy, toddler-dom and childhood. I needed to know that I was loved, cherished, and made for a purpose. God was the source. The loving household I was reared in was so full of love because of God’s first loving us, then my parents loving each other, and finally, them loving my brothers and I. It was easy for me to see that God is love because I experienced such tangible love from my family. As I matured through childhood, I began to perceive that there was another part of God, one that required perfection, which was unattainable, thus a sacrifice was needed. Learning from my church, I began a complex relationship with God in which I viewed God as a commandment-driven, to-do list juxtaposed concurrently with an intimate, loving relationship.

Maturing through my teenage years, God was presented in a very patriarchal manner, which never sat well with my spirit as I was a budding feminist in the buckle of the Bible belt. In my spirit, God’s expression to me was intimate and equally available for all regardless of any defining characteristic.  

As my spiritual journey has progressed through the years, God’s expression has grown into a very deep, personal experience. It is not an experience that I was taught rather, it is one which has evolved alone, which I think is the biggest spiritual shift that I have experienced since my childhood. God is, to me, a life-giving entity. One which makes dry bones come alive, one which is grieved by discrimination and inequality, one which teaches me to speak from my scars and not my wounds, one who does not punish with floods and earthquakes, one which makes beautiful things out of us. I know so little about this God… except that I know I desperately need this expression of the Holy in my life.

God’s work is done by God’s people. I have come to realize that though my experience of God is personal, God is also revealed communally. When a fellow sojourner weeps when I am weeping, laughs when I am laughing, bears my load with theirs, holds my hand firmly reminding me of the meaning of grace and peace, God’s countenance is shown, visibly and powerfully. The love I see when a community surrounds each other, refusing to give into despair, stubbornly singing alleluia through violence, uncertainty, and pain, makes me certain that the Holy is present. And I can only experience God in this way in a communal manner; it is a miracle to love unselfishly. From this I learn that perhaps this is the mission Dei of the Holy in my life… that I learn to give radical hospitality, loving especially in inconvenient times, that I hold my brothers and sisters hands through life, knowing the Source of purpose, strength, and love.

I am thankful that my faith like a child experience was one in which I experienced God as love well before I was taught about the God of exclusion and conditions. So in some ways, the expression of God in my life has changed dramatically, but in others, it remains unchanged. It is alive and sustaining, intricately mixed with doubt, grace, beauty, and pain, and I need it like I need the new life of spring after a long, bitterly cold winter.

What About the Menz: A Brief Book Preview

I finished the first draft of my book two weeks ago. At 53,000 words, 102 US letter pages of single-spaced, size 12 Times New Roman font, it is the longest and largest thing I have ever written. I'm entering the editing stage, and thought it might not be a bad idea to start sharing some snippets for discussion. These snippets may or may not end up in the final book (that's the editing process for you!), but I thought they might do to stir some discussion and hopefully whet your appetite for the book itself.

The section I'm sharing today is from a late-added chapter about the experience of men in purity culture. One thing I've been realizing a lot lately is how purity culture infantilizes men - it treats them as insatiable sexual beasts, unable to control themselves. This view is pretty darn offensive when you give even two seconds thought of it - do we not have more faith in men? In light of Senator Chambliss' comments during the hearing about sexual assault in the military, it appears that this low view of men is alive and well.

One thing, too, I have noticed is the marriage of masculinity with a violent heterosexuality. The image of men as defenders and protectors of damsels in distress not only paints women as weak and unable to stand up for themselves, but also forces men toward violence. With that in mind, I want to share this section from the book. Keep in mind that it's rough!

Violence being a primary showpiece for masculinity creates a violence-oriented world. In America, boys are given toy guns and taught to play cops and robbers. Entertainment plays at violent masculinity and sexualized womanhood. And evangelical churches paint men as knights rescuing damsels in distresses - men as the violent active and women as the passive receiver of their violent action.

Perhaps one of the more disturbing things about this trend of violent masculinity is the mapping of these “virtues” onto the person of Christ Himself. Mark Driscoll has explained that the Jesus he worships is not some “neutered, limp-wristed popular Sky fairy,” or “Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ.” Instead, Driscoll says, he worships “a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand, and the commitment to make someone bleed.”

Disturbing as that image is, it is a part of the evangelical attempt to save Christian masculinity from the feminization of the American church. Slow worship music, good lighting, talking about feelings - all these things are seen as feminine, and as the reason for men leaving the church. Therefore, the way to win men back is to marry Christ - the Christ who stayed Peter’s sword in the garden and who submitted himself to the utmost violence - with a violent, protective masculinity. The sacrificial Christ becomes a Clint Eastwood-type man who shoots first and asks questions later.

Having feelings, crying, expressing emotion in anything but anger or firmness? These are no-no’s in a violently strict masculine culture. Men are “wolves,” as Mark Driscoll paints them, in their most basic state. They are uncontrolled libido, violent tendencies, and unfeeling robots. Rather than challenge these ideas about what men are and what men can be, the new movement toward Christian masculinity demands that these “natural tendencies” are merely channeled into a worship of God. A violent man now becomes a protector. A man with an insatiable libido is merely a man and his wife must serve him. The man who cries during worship or who cries during times that are deemed “unmanly” is not holding up his end of the emotional bargain.

This type of masculinity defines manhood in terms of what it is not - women are tender; therefore men are firm and violent. Women are weepy; therefore men cannot be. Women are servants in the bedroom; therefore men are the colonial masters. In response to a feminist world in which all genders are equal, evangelical men have been taking back their power by taking back masculinity, and making it about whatever an arbitrary womanhood is not.

How I See the World: Some Brief Thoughts on Empathy

This is how I see a year, and the colors that correspond to each month.

Today, I had a Eureka moment. Or, in the common parlance, a “DUDE THIS IS SO COOL!” moment.

Mara Wilson – former child actor and current awesome writer – tweeted a blog post about her sister. In the post, Wilson talked about how her sister Anna is a “synesthete,” or someone who see sounds and words and letters as corresponding to particular colors. Upon reading the Wikipedia article about synesthesia, I realized something – I am a number-form synesthete.

For as long as I can remember, numbers and dates and months and years have occupied geographic space. The year forms a clockwise loop, with December and January meeting to close the loop. The summer months are at the widest part of the loop, occupying the largest geographic space, and December squishes into a smaller geographic space. February, despite being the shortest month in the year occupies a larger geographic space than any of the other winter months – likely because it’s my birth month, and my brain assigned it greater importance.

In addition, months of the year have certain corresponding colors. January is a light Baby-Blue, February is Pink, March is Green, April is yellow, May is a lighter yellow-almost white, June is teal-ish, and July and August don’t really have color. Color picks up again with September being red, October being Orange, November being brown, and December being white. Because these colors seemed to logically (at least, to me) correspond to what you would think a month is (red for the beginning of Autumn, for example), I never bothered to mention it to anyone.

All my life, I've just assumed that everyone else had maps of the year in their head that may/may not be similar to mine. It never occurred to me that something so basic as how one sees the calendar year could vary so much in between people. Within a few seconds this morning, my entire world shifted and grew larger.

Perhaps part of the issue of continuing disagreement in human life and, more narrowly, the church isn’t necessarily chalked up to the theodicy explanation of “brokenness” and “sin,” but to the simple fact that some people literally see the world differently. People literally experience God in different ways.

This is basic, obviously. But this is absolutely vital to the practice of empathy. Synesthesia is a concrete example of how some people simply approach the world in a different way. Now, I’m not proposing that some theologies and theological stances are hardwired and therefore we shouldn’t discuss them. Instead, I think synesthesia provides us with a metaphor for how we can have grace within those situations. We can realize that someone doesn’t see the map the same way we do, that what is obvious and plain reading to one person looks like a twisting and turning of the map to others.

Perhaps, we all need reminders that the world looks, quite literally, different to other people.

Glitter, Modesty, and Trusting Women

I’ve been thinking a lot about modesty lately. I think about it a lot as it is, but with the days growing hotter and the shorts getting shorter, it’s on my mind. It’s a complex, thorny, subject that’s hard to respond to and draw lines around. So while I initially laughed at Sharideth Smith’s post over at Rage Against the Minivan, after taking a few hours, walking away, and buying a bikini, I’ve come back to it with a bit more caution than I initially had.

I think Sharideth’s post failed to pay due respect to the conflict between bodily autonomy and the culturally conditioned narratives about how our clothing communicates. I’m left with a lot of questions.

We say clothing communicates, but then we have to wonder how much of that communication is happening along culturally conditioned narratives. Does wearing a low cut top in a bar really demand “leer at me!”? Or is that how we’re culturally conditioned to view women – as objects whose clothing, when outside the "norm," means “stare at me"?

How do we get around the thorny issue of saying that our clothing communicates certain things while also deconstructing the culturally constructed narratives about what that clothing communicates?

This, to me, is the thorn in the modesty issue. Many critiques of feminist reactions to modesty culture tell us that we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we want to remove all standards for appropriate dress and have people show up in bikinis to work. And it’s often easy, in trying to find the middle ground, to fall back into the patterns of modesty culture.

Upon closer examination, I think this is where Sharideth’s post landed. We need to be able to talk about how our clothing communicates and what sort of culturally conditioned reactions we can expect from our clothing without denying a person’s right to bodily autonomy and to wear whatever the hell she wants. It’s a fine line, and I think the post crossed it. We need to be able to challenge cultural norms while also acknowledging that much of the world still operates by them.

What occurs to me here is the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network’s approach to how to reduce one’s risk. They are incredibly clear that there is no way to fully eliminate the risk, and that a victim of rape is never, ever to blame for what happens to them. But, they also say that, due to our cultural narratives and culturally conditioned responses, here are some things one can do – things like being aware of surroundings, avoiding isolated areas, making sure to have your cell phone with you at all times, etc, etc.

This kind of approach, for me, strikes me as a good way to discuss modesty. While you can never do anything to prevent the leers of other people, you can still be aware of how your clothing communicates in certain situations. This sort of discussion must come with careful caveats that we can trust women to know the difference between a leer and a doubletake and that we must always challenge the culturally conditioned narratives of what is “suggestive.”

Bottom line: we need to trust women to know what they are doing and wearing. We also need to be aware of how we place these narratives within heteronormative frameworks.  Leering isn't restricted by gender, but our cultural conditioning makes it more expected that men will leer at women, and that women should expect this behavior if they wear certain clothing. We can trust women to understand those cultural narratives while challenging them in the moment. Even if she does have glitter on her boobs.

After all, if we don't trust women to understand themselves, do we really trust women at all?

Getting My Bikini Body: A Story

I've never worn a bikini. Most of the time, it's been a one piece swimsuit and shorts - because God forbid I show leg in a swimsuit.

I remember when I went to summer church camp out in the Black Hills - we'd have one day to go to the water park and go swimming. There were often explicit rules about what the girls could wear. The guys' only rule was, basically, "make sure it can't fall off."

Girls, however, were instructed to wear only tankinis or one piece suits, and if the suit was deemed unsuitable (pun intended), they were instructed to wear a tee shirt over it. Usually, if the girl didn't have a tee shirt, she had to borrow one from someone or sit out. As a result, there were often quite a few girls swimming in shirts that were too large for them.

Have you ever tried to swim in a tee shirt? It's impossible. I'm a natural swimmer, having spent most of my childhood with a pool in the backyard. I was nicknamed "the fish" by my cousins when I was younger - I could do all sorts of different swimming techniques and was in the pool every good-weather day from May-August. But put me in an oversized tee shirt and suddenly all I know is doggy paddle.

But this is what modesty culture demands - in a situation where everyone else is concentrating on their own thing, on how to make the most of a day at the Hot Springs, women's bodies are restricted and constrained by the possibility that a man might leer.

This dictate about swimwear has seeped into my consciousness. The other day, I browsed through the swimsuit section at Target, looking for something new that I could exercise in since my old swimsuit no longer fits properly. I found myself paralyzed in the midst of rack after rack of cute bikini tops and bottoms, unable to decide what I could give myself permission to purchase. Even having rejected modesty culture and its mores, I'm at a loss.

Women face a lot of pressure in what we wear. For someone, somewhere, our clothing will be "immodest," no matter how covered we are. Even if we're modest, we still face body-shaming and body-policing if we're overweight or don't have a perfectly flat stomach. Our bodies are public property, and that's never more obvious than during swimsuit season, when the male gaze is simultaneously telling us to bare it all and cover up, to be sexy without being sexy, to be eye catching and invisible, all at once.

I haven't gone swimming since 2011. This summer, that will change. My apartment complex has an outdoor pool, and I aim to make use of it while I can. Rather than sitting in my apartment and roasting in the 90 degree heat, I'm going strip down, put on a swimsuit that fits me, and swim the laps I've enjoyed since I was five years old.

My body is mine and no one else's. I'm no longer going to let fear dictate my decisions. I'm no longer going to allow the male gaze to tell me how I can and cannot decorate my body.

My name is Dianna Anderson. I am 27 years old, five foot eight, and 164 pounds. I have "love handles." And I am going to wear a bikini this summer.

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.

Guest Post: The Elusive God

The Account and Countenance series continues with a guest post today from Anna Kaye Gilbreath. She is a Tennessee Native, currently living in Orlando, Florida. She is an aspiring writer, photographer, lover of nature and caffeine. She blogs here and tweets here. If you're interested in contributing to this yearlong, biweekly series, send me an email on the contact page.

I think everyone can attribute their first concepts of God through the perspective of their childhood; at least that’s how it started out for me. If God was a loving and omnipresent at the scriptures claimed, why would he not fix my situation? It was a hard concept for a little girl to understand. I remember flinging myself on my bed and praying with every single fiber of my 6 year old self asking God to make it stop, please make it stop…but it never happened.

From then on, I viewed God as a passive and uncaring observer in this whirl wind spiral called life. I never doubted that God existed, but I did doubt whether or not he cared for me.  I always pictured him sitting on his golden throne in the sky watching the world’s devastation and its broken people in an elusive manor.  He was the judge who had our names on a list and kept score of each person’s walk with him and whether they were on the right track.

Growing up I’ve been subjected to many versions and descriptions of God.  Throughout church sermons and Sunday school lessons, God had multiple identifies: The Father, The Miracle Worker, The Provider, The Romancer, and The Omnipotent.  Each one of these words described God’s character and disposition, all powerful and awe inducing but which one of these gods was the one who saw and loved Anna Kaye?

During High School, I remember reading a book by Leslie Ludy called Authentic Beauty; she called God, her white knight, her prince charming and the author of Romance. She seemed to have an incredibly intimate connection with God. I wanted my life to be like that but I had made a lot of mistakes in my life and it didn’t’ look anything like Leslie’s. So why would God even want to pursue something like that with me?

It all seemed utterly unattainable or only available to those who had spotlessly clean Christian records and only committed minor sins. I felt God had a check list of my sins, number from 1-10 and this secret tally that I believed he kept, was hindering my ability to have favor with him.

Sometimes I would feel like a fraudulent follower of God. How could I call myself a Christian when I was struggling to pray or struggling to believe the truth presented to me? Would doubt always scream so loud? I would be afraid for anyone to see me and my struggles that would mean I wasn’t the strong Christian I made myself out to be.

I’m still working at processing God’s character and what it means to me.  I don’t have it all together and I don’t have the answers all tied up nicely. If you’re struggling in this area of your walk with God, you’re not alone. It doesn’t make you any less of a follower of God if you have doubts. It makes you human. Try and keep the perspective that you’re going to have days when the doubts aren’t so loud and your identity not so fragile. You doubts don’t define or discount your value.  All I can do is keep hoping that God isn’t done with me yet.