Not a Prize: The Language of Pursuit in Dating

(Many thanks to Emily Maynard, Antonia Terrazas, and Preston Yancey for the discussion that led to this post)

My brothers and me with Aladdin and Jasmine in Disney World.

If you follow me on twitter (and please do, even though I tweet a lot!), you know that I'm actively dating right now. In the past 20 months, I've had my first boyfriend, got dumped, gone out on multiple dates with other guys, kissed a few of them, been stood up, canceled dates, had dates cancel, joined meet up groups (and gotten hit on because I was the only single woman there, subsequently leaving said meet up groups) and shamelessly flirted my way into more than one movie-based make out session.

All that say, I have had a year and a half of "yeah, sure!," agreeing to many dates to see what was out there, to meet new people in this new city, to try and make a connection. I've done everything short of speed-dating and signing up for Christian Mingle. I'm what you might call "actively looking."

But, in the process, I have also refused to let my career or my education fall to the side - I have a Master's degree, I've traveled a lot, and I've got a book contract. The fact that I am looking does not detract from the fact that I am living life to the fullest while I am single. Marriage, for me, is not a prize, it is not a crown jewel, it is not something I can call into existence by being "good enough" or "having the right interest." The very language I use to discuss marriage is at odds with much of the way the Christian world discusses it.

I have heard, since I hit puberty, of pursuit, of chase, of tracking down a spouse. The very language we use to describe a relationship of marriage, especially within the Christian world, is often quite violent. John Eldredge takes of men pursuing women, of true manliness being caught up in rescuing a damsel in distress. And his wife, Stasi, discusses the flip side of that coin in the book Captivating, how it is our duty as women to be rescued.

Gary Thomas, on Ally Vesterfelt's blog this week, attempts to redeem some of that language by - I'm guessing this is the intended meaning - giving women license to pursue. He talks of pursuing a spouse as one would a job, putting as much effort into it as one would a post-college job or even a college degree. He also brings forward shopping analogies, talking about how shopping for a spouse and shopping for the right dress are similar.

But all of that still buys into the pursuit and prize, hunter and hunted language. And that very language is problematic. That language sets up marriage as a race, with a spouse, a partner bound to you for life, as your prize. It praises the value of marriage but functions to commodify it in the same breath. If I do the right work, I'll get a man as a prize - it doesn't matter which man, just a man.

I don't like that metaphor. I don't like that language. In the words of Jasmine, one of my favorite Disney princesses: "I am not a prize to be won!" When we turn marriage into a pursuit, into a life goal, into an achievement, a stepping stone to happiness, we set ourselves up for objectification of our spouse, for a poor understanding of what a life together means, and for many, many problems. Because when you're pursuing a spouse, it doesn't matter who it is as long as it is a spouse.

I'm not here for that. I'm not dating around for that. I'm looking, but I'm not looking in pursuit of some prize. I'm not interested in being married simply for the sake of being married.

I don't think it's idolatry to say that I would like to be married. I also don't think we should swing the pendulum the other direction and uproot ourselves and our lives in pursuit of an ethereal other that we don't even know how to find them or even, really, what we're looking for. We can actively look without pursuing blindly; we can date around without shame; and we can be still and know that time will come when and if it is supposed to.

In the meantime, I am not some prize for some dudebro looking for a knighthood. I'm just a person, enjoying my life, hoping that one day, I'll have a partner - the right partner - to join me.

Guest Post: The God Who Speaks English

Today's guest post comes from perfectnumber628. Perfectnumber628 grew up evangelical Christian in the northern US, and is now trying to move to China. She blogs at http://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/ about Christianity, feminism, Chinese, and everything else.

__________

I thought God was white.

Of course I didn’t actually think God was white. If someone would have asked me, “is God white?” I would have laughed and said of course not. God doesn’t have any race, because God’s not a person, obviously.

But I still subconsciously thought God was white. And American. And a lot like me.

I grew up in a white, Protestant, suburban church in the northern US. It’s a great church, but the lack of diversity seems to have given me a very skewed view of who God is. I subconsciously assumed God was like my pastors and Sunday school teachers- white, American, native speakers of English.

But everything changed when I went to China on a mission trip.

I encountered a culture totally different than anything I had ever experienced- and a God who was already alive and active in that culture. I encountered a language I couldn’t understand- and a God who was worshiped in that language by my Chinese brothers and sisters. I encountered cultural differences and misunderstandings- and a God who understood everything that I couldn’t.

But more than that, I felt like I had discovered a whole new world. China was so different that it was hard for me to even believe that both China and the US could exist at the same time. So amazing, so fascinating, that I felt I had no choice but to dedicate my life to learning the language and culture, and hopefully someday I’d go live there. (And “learning the language and culture” is exactly what I’ve been doing in the years since then.)

But how could God understand what I was feeling?

In China, I’d seen another side of God, but I still had this subconscious assumption that God was like the people at my church. People who thought it was brave of me to go on a mission trip to somewhere so weird and different. People who reacted with surprise when I told them I planned to move to China. People who, after I had learned Chinese, were astonished that it was possible for someone like me to learn Chinese. People who thought that obviously I was supposed to live in the US, and the only reason to move to China was if God forced me to go there as a missionary. People who thought the US was obviously the best country.

(And actually, for some of those descriptions, I’m not really talking about “people from my church”- I’m talking about ME.)

I thought God was a white American man, with headquarters in the US and a plan to send people out from there to the less awesome parts of the world, because apparently God’s required to love those people too, even though they’re not American. I thought God’s first language was English and he learned the other ones in school. I thought God visited all the other countries and had a good time, but spent most of his time in the US. (And like I said, all of these horrible, racist, blatantly wrong ideas were totally subconscious. I totally didn’t know I thought of God that way- until going to China changed my life.)

The truth is, my God is the God of the whole world. But subconsciously I still fear that it’s not true. I fear that God doesn’t understand- because it seems like nobody understands. Because I don’t even understand. I just know I need to go to China.

My God is the God of the whole world, with absolutely no special preference toward the white American English-speaking subculture that I come from. According to Christianity, this has to be true- but I still struggle with it. I still struggle with this image of a God stuck in a white American church.

But that fake God won’t stop me. Soon, I’m moving to China, and I expect to find God already there.

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.

Guest Post: Poisoning the Well

Today's guest post comes from one of my favorite people, Grace. Grace is a former evangelical Christian, recovering academic, spouse to a pink-haired musician, and mama to a wise-cracking 4-year old. She's the founder of the religion and gender blog Are Women Human?, and a writer and commentator on media and culture from a black, Nigerian American, queer feminist perspective. Say hi to her on Twitter at @graceishuman. _____________

My spiritual history looks like a classic evangelical cautionary tale. I was raised in “bible-believing” churches that were extremely conservative, politically and theologically. By the time I graduated from college (a “secular” school far enough, at least, from home,) I was a political moderate and emergent-ish Christian, pretty close to universalist on the question of salvation.

A year later, my husband and I were attending mass and on our way to officially joining the Catholic Church. After a few years as devout and liberal Catholics, we both went through a period of intense spiritual doubt, triggered by becoming parents, and realized - though not quite at the same time - that we no longer believed in God at all.

To some, our story is confirmation of all they fear about “liberal theology”: that it is, as Erasmus Darwin once said of Unitarianism, a “feather-bed to catch a falling Christian.” We didn’t head down the slippery slope to apostasy so much as tumble to the bottom at breakneck speed.

From where I stand, though, this path was created not by my exposure to different Christian traditions and other faiths. It was created by the rigid, exclusionary faith I was raised with - one that left little room for growth, adaptation to new information about the world, or questioning. Underlying all this was the image of a God who demanded “love” in the form of fear and complete obedience, and whose “justice” meant harsh punishments for minor, arbitrary sins.

In retrospect, my spiritual wanderings were an attempt to make sense of the inherent contradictions in what I’d been taught about God. The more I learned about myself and others, about the world, the less I could reconcile fundamentalist claims of divine love and justice with the actions and consequences claimed in their God’s name.

I guess things began to get shaky when I started attending public school, in 9^th grade. I can already hear the knowing comments - public schools are cesspits of iniquity and lefty brainwashing, after all. But the challenge wasn’t liberal indoctrination; I was quite set in my beliefs. No, the problem was that I made friends who weren’t Christians, or the right kind of Christians, for the first time, and they were nice people. Many of them seemed to embody real kindness and love better than I or most “bible believers” I knew.

How to reconcile this with the dogma that they were all condemned to eternal torture because they believed the “wrong” thing? I couldn’t. Instead, I found comfort in a theology of salvation cobbled together from Lewis and L’Engle. A loving and just God would want salvation, not hell, for as many people as possible. He would honor a good life, lived in good faith, Christian or not.

Each successive step outside my Christian bubble chipped away at the image of God as judgmental patriarch. My very first night at college, I met someone who was openly lesbian for the first time. Much to my confusion, she was also a devout Christian. Another puzzle. I met all sorts of people I’d been taught were “worldly,” incapable of true good, enemies of the family, haters of God: Muslims, liberals, feminists, atheists…It didn’t take long to realize I had been egregiously lied to about who these people were. And it made me wonder all the more if I’d been lied to about who God was, too.

My faith looked very different by the time I finished college. I no longer believed in demons - folks who grew up Pentecostal know what a big deal this is. I was iffy on the Devil.  I was pretty sure God condemned very few people to hell. The Hitlers and Stalins of the world, sure. But everyone who wasn’t a “true” Christian? No. More than that, I was certain that love in action and treating others as I wanted to be treated were at the heart of the Gospel. And a God who wanted people to live according to this Gospel would be more concerned with whether people showed love to others than with, say, who they slept with.

In a sense, Catholicism allowed me to keep my faith for a time. It seemed to resolve the contradictions between worshipping a Christian God and my growing convictions about social justice. Whatever else one says about the Catholic Church, they have a robust, diverse social justice tradition that allows liberals and progressives to continue to call the church their spiritual home even as they disagree strongly with some of its leadership.

I ultimately left the Church, not because of any particular issue with it - though I certainly had serious disagreements on LGBT issues, and on gender justice more broadly. Rather, the birth of our daughter brought up, for both my husband and me, memories of our religious upbringing in conservative churches. We both remembered being terrified of God, terrified of hell, just terrified in general. We didn’t want that for our child. But somehow the idea of raising her to believe in a truly loving and just personal God didn’t make sense. I could no longer sustain the belief that such a God existed.

I’m not talking about scientific probabilities, though I think the odds that a personal God exists are vanishingly low. What I mean is that the God I wanted to believe in, a loving, kind God who was slow to judgment, was still haunted by the God I was taught to believe in. I couldn’t shake off the message drilled into my head as a child, that people abandon “difficult” and “challenging” faith in a divine judge because they want a God who signs off on whatever they do.

I knew, intellectually, that this wasn’t true. Neither my one-time faith as a liberal Christian nor my current agnosticism came out of a search for a philosophy that would allow me to indulge my whims. I was in search of a God who was truly love, not just the assertion of it. But the longer I tried to hold on to belief in God as Love, the more it felt like a cop out. Like I’d made for myself the kind of God I wanted.

The God I was raised to believe in was an abuser wrapped in the trappings of divinity. I couldn’t believe in him. But I couldn’t believe in a God who was anything else, either.  The faith handed down to me was a house of cards that threatened to blow over if any single tenet was less than entirely true, and its cornerstone was a poisonous image of God.

I don’t wish I hadn’t been raised Christian. This might surprise some people to hear. I wish I’d been raised with a more expansive, less fearful faith. The cramped, narrow Christianity I was raised with ended up killing my faith in God. That’s the danger in what you teach your kids about who God is: they just might believe you.

God in Three Persons: Blessed Trinity

Two weeks ago, I left you with a story that was hard for me to write, especially since altogether, it looked pretty bad and despairing. But I needed to tell that story in order to tell this one: how I’ve readjusted my image of God. I was a theology/philosophy major in college, which my best friend and I jokingly called the “phil-the” major (filthy, get it?). And while it gave me the tools I need for Biblical study, I was still struggling with using theology to create rules about what is right and what is not. Since I’d been raised in a fairly legalistic mindset, hearing more about sin than about love, it was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that love also meant eternal punishment, as much of the way we sell theology from the pulpit. This God seemed distant, judgmental, and never responded to any of my prayers.

But, in my sophomore year of college, I had a bit of a revelation. I’d been involved in Campus Crusade for Christ since the beginning of my college years, and attended a big conference over the winter break each year. One of the sermons given at this conference had a line that stuck with me – the preacher was talking about seeing a homeless man on the street. The preacher passed the guy by, until preacher’s father pulled him aside and said, “Son, that man is your brother.”

Despite all the talk and care I’d given to caring for “my brothers in Christ” by watching how I dressed, how I acted, and keeping my purity intact and quiet, I’d never thought to apply brotherly theology to the social justice realm. The idea that poor people weren’t lazy good for nothings but instead people who shared in the grace and Body of Christ was something that, I’m ashamed to say, had never occurred to me.

I had Othered them so completely that I’d failed to acknowledge their basic humanity.

It would take a few years for that to really, truly sink in – a semester at Oxford helped, but it wasn’t until I was in Waco, TX, living in an apartment with bars on my windows that I truly began to understand what the Image of God is.

Saying that we, as individual corporeal beings, are the image of a Triune God is nonsense to me. We are not three persons in one being and God is not corporeal except as Jesus - that’s very much talked about as God shedding portions of his power in order to become human, not that humans are literally already God’s image (cf. Philippians 2 and the concept of kenosis, which is worth researching).

In order to be in the image of a Triune God, it had to mean something more than this individualistic, highly American, “faith is a private journey” talk I’d been getting most of my life and we sin individually and take individual steps.

You see, we American evangelical Christians are good at using the call to community when it suits us. We tell women they must care for their brothers’ lusting, and that brothers must protect their sisters’ purity by not violating another man’s future wife. We call on brotherhood and community when someone asks potentially divisive questions, and use the “community” of Christ as a shaming tool.

But what we don’t do is recognize that community is the image of God itself. God is three persons in one, working in perfect harmony together. God is, by Their very nature, a communal individual. Servant communing with King, with bonds of love making them equals. Son, God, and Holy Spirit, tied together with bonds of love, not rules.

That is what the image of God means. That revelation is what changed my life. The oppressed are not merely brothers, but people without whom the image of God is incomplete.

American evangelicalism has done a lot to obfuscate and destroy the necessity of the Trinitarian nature of God. The first time I heard of the Holy Spirit, I was 18 years old, in my Christian Thought class in college. “God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity” was a line with no meaning to me – and I came from a mainline, Baptist church in the heart of America.

We’ve reaped great damage by rending the Trinity from its necessary parts and individualizing it. “I just need Jesus” is nonsense, though the life of Jesus is an important filter. We no longer understand what it means to be made in God’s image and instead persecute, shame, and guilt our brothers and sisters instead of following the principle the Trinity follows – which is love. Love. Always love.

I’ll be covering this more in depth as the series continues, but this hopeful, loving, gracious image of God is what keeps me going and keeps me believing. It is, I believe, a way grounded in orthodoxy and yet heterodox to the way much of the American Christian church operates. And it is worth discussion.

Guest Post: God in Reeboks

Through the Account and Countenance Series, I'll be featuring (via guest posts) the stories of various people and the images of God their churches left with them. Today's post comes from Sarah Moon. Sarah is a Women's and Gender Studies student and she blogs at Sarah Over The Moon. ___________

[Trigger warning: domestic violence, verbal abuse]

I’ve heard Christians say before that Jesus was just “God with sandals.” If this is true, then Jesus, for me in 2006, was an 18 year old, 6’4” football player who could bench press about 250. The Jesus of the Bible didn’t exactly line up with the God I had been raised to worship in my fundamentalist churches. Don (not his real name), on the other hand, did.

Don loved me, and he loved me like God did.

In God’s eyes, I was a worthless sinner. Any good I might do was nothing more than filthy rags to God. God’s spokesmen (Baptist church pastors, of course) were constantly reminding me of this. If I were truly humble, I’d realize the wickedness of my own heart and stop trusting myself, my emotions, my thoughts. I’d stop trying to be independent and I’d put my future in God’s loving hands.

But that God was so great, He loved me despite my worthlessness. As long as I stayed close to Him, I could have value—not in who I was, but in who He was.

Don thought the same of me. Much like God, Don saw all my sin as alike, so my tiny sins like taking a shower when Don asked me not to, or accidently drawing the attention of other men to myself were enough to make him want to spew me out of his mouth. He told me so, constantly. He told me what a whore I was, how stupid I was, how worthless, how helpless…

But Don was great. He loved me anyway. He reminded me of how grateful I should be for that—how I should never question his goodness because I deserved far worse. But if I stayed with him, I could have value.

Both had ultimate control over my life. If God (through his spokesmen) told me to do or not to do something, I didn’t get to ask why. My money, my property, my time and even my life belonged to Him. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.

Don too. He took the little bit of money that I made teaching piano lessons because I was his property and therefore it was his money too. He threw my makeup bag out of his car window when I told him I didn’t want to stop wearing the eyeliner that he thought made me look “too sexy.” He kept me on the phone for hours, even when I begged him to let me go so I could do my homework. I was his property and anything I had was his, too.

The wrath of one could send horrible diseases, car wrecks, natural disasters, and school shootings. The wrath of the other just a storm of angry words and hand-shaped bruises in places where clothes would always cover them.

One told me “Love me, or I’ll send you to be tortured for all of eternity.” The other told me “Love me, or I’ll blackmail you, yell at you, hurt you, kill you.”

This was my God and Don was just God in Reeboks.

Don was abusive. It took me several months to break up with him and several more years to fully admit the extent of the abuse.

Why was it so hard for me to admit that such an obvious case of domestic terrorism was abuse and not love?

Maybe it’s because admitting that Don was abusive and unloving meant admitting that the God I worshipped was abusive too.

I look around me, years later, and I see a Church that is terrified to look its theology in the face. I see a Church that is somehow okay with having two drastically different definitions of love—one for humans and one for God. I see a Church that holds God to a different standard than they hold human beings.

I see a Church that thinks it can do this and still speak out against abuse and to me, it will never make sense. I can no longer listen to a pastor call abusers evil and then turn around and sing a hymn to the wrathful, jealous God who can save even a helpless, hopeless, worthless wretch like me.

These dueling definitions of love have to end. God doesn’t get God’s own definition. God doesn’t get to do whatever God wants and call it love.

Reading All About Love by bell hooks has helped me expose the lie of a God (or a human) that can be both loving and abusive. In this book, hooks states that “love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of [love].” Hooks goes on to say that many of us are afraid to embrace a definition of love that does not allow abusive behavior, because confronting lovelessness is too painful.

Is that why the Church is afraid to examine the ways that our theologies let God get away with abuse? Have we so entwined love and abuse that we cannot imagine the implications of separating them? Are we afraid that holding God to the same standard of love that we would hold a human partner to will kill our faith?

Coming to a place where I admitted that the God I worshiped wasn’t a loving God was painful. Maybe even more painful than coming to a place where I admitted to myself that Don never loved me, either.

But in admitting the absence of love I’ve learned (and am still learning) to recognize true love wherever it exists.

If the Church wants to know a God who is love, the Church cannot continue to worship a God who abuses. An image of God that looks just like the Dons of the world can never teach us to love, can never be love.

Let us echo the words of bell hooks over, and over, and over as we seek the God of love.

“Love and abuse cannot coexist.”

The Case For Early Marriage?: Confusing Is and Ought

In doing some research this past week, I came across an old article from Christianity Today. I remember reading it when it came out and being frustrated by the poor argument – and that was before I had my feminist framework in place. Reading it again as a nearly 27 year old still single person with years of research into feminist ideology and theory under my belt, I’m even more incensed by the proposals and ideas within the article. I thought it might be good to examine some of the ideas which undergird the framework for this piece. The piece is "The Case for Early Marriage," written by Mark Regnerus, for a 2009 issue of Christianity Today. It’s the cover story for that particular issue, and therefore is quite long.

But the article can be summed up in a few points:

1. Good family structure is good for society. Family, in the Biblical sense, consists of a mother, father, and kids (multiple, of course).
2. Secular society is delaying marriage further in people’s twenties, which turns the abstinence only dictate from evangelicalism into hogwash.
3. The problem, however, is not that abstinence only is a fundamentally bad idea, but that we haven’t done enough to promote marriage at younger ages – ages which would skirt that troublesome mid-20s sex drive and fertility push.
4. Delayed marriage is bad because people are having sex before marriage because of it (why this is bad is never fully explained). Delayed marriage also, evidently, encourages extended adolescence in men, resulting in women having to “marry down” if they want to marry at all.
5. Solution: we encourage people to marry young and work out their problems within a marriage relationship, rather than dating around. This way we can encourage the family structure as well, keep people from having premarital sex, and bolster society because … family’s the cornerstone and stuff.

There are several premises that go unquestioned throughout this piece. The first is that a family structure consists of man, woman, kids. The second is that extramarital or premarital sex is a society-destroying problem. The third is that marriage is less about right people than about right practices and hard work. And the fourth is that marriage is, of course, for the sole purpose of procreation.

All of these are tied up in a concept of marriage as a salvation tool, as The Thing that the church needs to be relevant and helpful to a dying society.

There’s a lot of hoopla that Regnerus makes here about women waiting to marry until they are past their prime years of fertility. Technically, prime years of fertility are a woman’s teens, but since that’s not socially acceptable (despite its undisputed place as the Biblical model), Regnerus has given a little ground and now advises that a good age for marriage is in the early 20s. 20-22, that range.

Now, before I get angry comments about how “I married at 20 and we’re 11 years strong!” (good for you!), I am not talking about your marriages or the marriages of those who decided to marry young and it’s still working. What I am discussing is the harmful teaching from the church that says people should marry at that age. It’s the universal rule that I’m challenging, not the individual cases.

Regnerus’ advice is harmful precisely because he imposes an “ought” onto a “maybe.” He makes the mistake of moving from the specific (in many examples, his own young marriage) into the general. This is an incredibly common error in logic, and unbelievably common when it comes to church relationship/dating teachings. I see people who made mistakes in their dating relationships – having sex before they were ready for it, to take one very common example – take that personal error and turn it into a rule, a black and white comment about when other people should or ought to do something.

This is most clear when he discusses objections to early marriage. He says of the idea of poor matches in early marriages:

There is no right answer to such questions, because successful marriages are less about the right personalities than about the right practices, like persistent communication and conflict resolution, along with the ability to handle the cyclical nature of so much about marriage, and a bedrock commitment to its sacred unity. Indeed, marriage research confirms that couples who view their marriages as sacred covenants are far better off than those who don't. [emphasis mine]

Oof.

While it’s true that couples who view their marriage in a way that takes divorce off the table will probably not get divorced, I hesitate to use the language the author does in calling this “better off," because that's an unquantifiable, vague idea. However, that’s small potatoes compared to the idea that a marriage is less about “right personalities” and more about “right practices.”

This is legalism. This is rules-based Christianity. This is blaming the problem not on the actual causes but on the victims of those problems. You’re encouraged by the church to marry your first boyfriend and to do so quickly and you discover the relationship was a bad idea because of fundamental personality clashes? You’re just not doing marriage right – there’s nothing wrong with the institution or with the push to marry early – it’s all on YOU, the person on the ground, for not performing it right.

It’s a version of the No True Scotsman logical fallacy – it conveniently pushes off the failure of numerous early marriages on those who divorced, conveniently implying that they just didn’t have the right practices for their marriage, rather than admitting a fault in the doctrine of early marriage itself. It's the "if your [x thing you were praying for] didn't work, you're just not right with God" approach.

But "right" practices mean nothing if you don’t have a person you’re willing to invest time and energy in. And while day to day feelings change and fade, there’s always a basis of love for the other person. If you don’t have the right person in your match, all of your "right" practices are going to mean diddly squat.

And this is the ultimate problem – Regnerus refuses to recognize the diversity of human beings and human relationships and seems to think that if a couple is having problems in their marriage because they married before realizing fundamental personality differences (differences that may only arise after both people have had chances and time to discover who they really are, which happens at different ages for literally everyone), then the problem is with them simply not trying hard enough. He doesn’t realize that it’s like trying to shove an elephant into a sweater meant for a cat – sometimes there is no right solution and no right way to fix a marriage that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. But instead of acknowledging that, yeah, people need time to mature and know themselves outside of a relationship and on their own, he proposes that people simply need to work harder – as though pushing really hard will somehow make the elephant's head fit into the sweater's neck.

Life doesn’t work that way. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for marriage. Marrying at 20 works for some people. Marrying at 40 works for others. We all mature in different ways and the opening up of choices for women in terms of careers and who they have the ability to say “yes” to has shifted the demographics and that is not de facto bad.

This doesn’t even touch on the extremely utilitarian view of marriage that Regnerus is pushing – early marriage is necessary because of fertility and Christians marrying earlier gives them the chance to have more kids, giving them a demographic advantage. This view, in fact, devalues marriage (and women) because it turns marriage into a means by which the next generation of (hopefully Christian conservatives!) is produced, rather than a glorious celebration of love and hope for renewal and desire to dedicate a life to working with a partner.

Perhaps it is not society’s view that is dishonoring marriage, but Regnerus’ utilitarian, baby factory one that erases the beautiful bright diversity of love within humanity in favor of brutal, cold demographic sustenance. I’d rather never get married than experience a marriage that has all the right practices but none of the right person.

Account and Countenance: My Own Story

Before we get into the deeper theological waters of examining the image of God as presented to us in American evangelical Christianity, we must examine what our individual images of God are. So today, mine is on display. When I sat down to think about what my image of God had been through my formative years, I realized that the picture of God I had was not one of love and grace, but a God who keeps records of all my sins, who sits back and judges, and who is waiting for me to screw up. Luckily, through intentional study and relationship, that image has shifted in the past few years, but it still influences a lot of what I see in various theologies and beliefs. Growing up, my God – the God of my Baptist church – was white, and American. I remember when I was five or six years old, the preacher talked about the Rapture, and I was very concerned that Jesus would forget about the United States, his “natural” home. How could go cover the whole world and still be here?

My father patiently explained that everything would be okay if I just asked Jesus into my heart. So I did. That was the first of many times I prayed that prayer.

But by the time I hit twelve, my God had shifted. He was now intimately concerned with my development as a woman – I knew I shouldn’t be wearing v-neck shirts before I even had discernible cleavage and that men were different, alien. My task was to guard them and myself from an as yet unknown threat.

This God – the all powerful, all knowing, all sovereign God – was infinitely concerned with not only the state of my soul, but the state of my dress. I read the Left Behind series around this time, and the God who knew my soul was just as concerned with how women tempted men (I mean, Rayford wouldn’t have been thinking about cheating on his wife if that flight attendant didn’t wear such short skirts, right? Maybe he could have gone to heaven if she’d been a better steward).

I could still be considered a strong, brave woman if I kept myself pure, though. I took a pledge at 14 and was given a diamond ring my parents bought for me at WalMart the day before. I pledged before my entire congregation and before God that I’d wait to do anything until marriage – despite never having considered kissing anyone at that point in my life.

I would wear loose fitting clothing that could tempt no one, because I didn’t want anyone else to get left behind, as I was sure I was going to be because I was too much of a sinner. I yelled at my debate partners in high school, I had crushes on boys, I swore, out loud, when I got angry.

These were the sins that would keep me from Jesus.

So I prayed. A lot. I prayed that Jesus could forgive me for thinking about wanting to kiss that boy I liked. I prayed Jesus would forgive me for saying “shit” when I dropped that portfolio full of research. I prayed that He would cleanse my mind of liking that one song by Eminem my debate partner forced me to listen to when he gave me a ride to the tournament that one time.

I prayed without ceasing, but every Sunday, I’d sit in church and be scared that I wasn’t doing enough. My best friend was still an atheist, after all, and I made her my personal project for evangelism. I remember spending an agonizing night trying to fall asleep, racked by guilt over neglecting my eternal duty to bring her soul to God. When I got to school the next morning, I told my mom to pray for me during the day because I was finally going to talk to her about Jesus. I went straight to her locker and nervously explained that I was concerned about her soul and that if I didn’t say something then I was guilty too. Through the day, I kept pushing, eventually shutting up when she turned to me and yelled, “No, fuck you, I don’t want to hear it!”

I was devastated. Not only had I failed in what God wanted me to do, but I had alienated my best friend.

This was my life. Sunday and Wednesday, I’d feel close to God during worship at youth group, and then do something during the week – forget to read my Bible, forget to take that opportunity to witness, not be careful about how I sat down when hanging out with my guy friends, think about kissing my crush of the week for a moment too long – these were the things my spiritual walk was made of.

God, to me, was someone who I could push away with my sin at any moment. Because Paul had told us that free grace didn’t mean we could keep on sinning, I thought that I had to do my best not to sin so that I could be with God. Everything came back to whether or not I was sinning.

What’s more, God was especially concerned about potential sexual sin.

I literally had none aside from my own thoughts. In an effort to keep pure, I avoided movies with sex scenes, and wore the most modest clothing I could find without appearing Hutterite – though I still had the sense to avoid the denim skirts that would have been social suicide at my high school. But, I was, for all intents and purposes asexual and androgynous. I shopped in the men’s section at Old Navy and wore clothing that hid my shape.

And it was in this place that I lived for years – fearful of a God who watched my every thought, who judged my femaleness and my treatment of the men in my life, who would, at the end of my life, play back all these moments of sin for an audience of my peers and regard the state of my soul.

This judgmental, vengeful God and the loving, glorious Jesus were one and the same, of course. It was the face of the white, European Jesus, sadden and burdened by my sin that I pictured alongside an amorphous Father God in heaven – God the Father was merely two large hands in my imagination, nothing more.

Putting my nose to the grindstone was the only way out, the only way through. I had to at least show that I was putting forth effort in keeping myself from sin or God would not consider me – I never would and never had done enough.

In my freshman year of college, Calvinism became very attractive to me – not because of the depravity and sin, but because of the doctrine of perseverance of the saints. Here, finally, was something that said I was always and would always be saved. Here was an element of comfort that I didn’t have to keep trying, that I could try being womanly for once.

But this doctrine came with a God who elected some to heaven and some to hell. The idea that I could be one of the non-elect needled at me, until I rejected Calvinism altogether. Surely, I was too depraved, too sinful, too much for the sovereign God of the Calvinists – surely, if I was Elect, this whole spiritual walk would be easier?

Relief would not come for years yet.

We’ll return in two weeks with how I began to see God in a new light, in a new way, when the Account and Countenance series continues.

Notes from my...: Further Thoughts on Modesty

This last Saturday, Rachel Held Evans tweeted out a link to an older blog post of mine, and quoted the line “Lust is not about sexuality, but about power and control.” Evidently, this struck a chord with a whole lot of cisgendered, heterosexual men in her audience, because no fewer than six of them decided to explain to me what lust ACTUALLY is about. Three of them even wrote blog posts (one of which called me a Mrs. and said in no uncertain terms that I want men to burn in hell, which was fun). Needless to say, since this one sentence is getting me called an apostate, repulsive, and proselytized to (evidently one’s doctrine on lust is salvation issue, who knew?), I’m guessing it needs a little clarification.

It's important to remember context here. The line about lust came from my friend Emily Maynard's article about modesty, which prompted the whole discussion. Maynard says:

Don’t get me wrong. Lust is serious, and lust is a sin. But lust is about control, not just sex.

Lust dehumanizes a person in your own heart and mind.

It is the ritual taking, obsessing and using someone else for your own benefit rather than valuing that person as an equal image-bearer of God.

Lust is forming people in your own image, for your own purposes, whether for sexual pleasure, emotional security or moral superiority.

In lusting, you are creating a world where every other person exists for your approval or dismissal. Lust reduces the complexity of each individual and their story to something you get to manage.

Lust – sexual lust, financial lust, emotional lust, whatever kind of lust one has – is about the desire to use and control other people for your own benefit. That is what I meant, plain and simple. When you make someone else an unwilling participant in your ongoing fantasies, that’s much more about using another person so you can get off than it is about “unbridled sexual attraction.”

The problem – and this is where modesty codes and church teaching enter the conversation – is when men view the world as a minefield in which a bodily reaction to an attractive person is mistaken for lust, rather than the normal biological reaction it is.

Are you taking the memory of that fleeting glimpse and filing it away for a spank bank later? That’s lust.

Are you just getting a boner when you see an attractive lady? That’s a biological reaction.

Lust is a deliberate act, a deliberate desire to use another person for one’s own benefit, to dehumanize them so that – even if in your fantasies they are consenting - they are still existing for your pleasure, to, yes, overpower and control them for your own satisfaction. It is this desire that Jesus is speaking to, not your boner.

No matter the source of this desire to dehumanize through sexual lust – whether it’s social conditioning or cultural training or “sex sells” advertising – the sin is still fundamentally your responsibility. And it is your responsibility because no one else can control or speak to your thought life.

This is why we say that modesty codes objectify in the same way hyper sexualization does – it is the mindset that says “other people exist for me” that is the problem. Is the fight a bit harder because of cultural norms? Yes, but that’s no excuse for it. And the fight isn’t a struggle only men have, and it isn’t a solely sexual desire. We are a culture of users, yes, but that doesn’t mean we lack the ability to see each other as human.

And this is why modesty codes don’t work. Because asking me to cover up so you don’t make me a player in your sexual fantasy doesn’t even begin to get the root of the issue, which is that you don’t view me as fully human.

I’m going to get real with you: lust isn’t a solely male issue and the idea that men struggle with it more because they’re more “visually stimulated” (or “prone to polygamy,” which is apparently a thing now) is utter, complete bollocks. Male fantasy is both expected and sanctioned in culture – it’s also called “the male gaze” in feminist theory.

But, your friendly neighborhood Christian feminist struggles with it too, and is hella visually stimulated. And you know how I stop myself? I remind myself that that person is a human being, not an object for my consumption. And I recognize that some reactions are perfectly normal biological process.

That’s why we need to shift the conversation about lust away from solely sexual behavior and attraction, because it blurs the bright line between unhealthy dehumanization and healthy sexual attraction.

The discussion about the commodification of women’s bodies in culture is an important one to have, but we need to recognize the nature of what lust is and why it is important before we can tackle that problem. Until we do that – until we recognize that lust is about the desire to use another person and that modesty codes actually reinforce this commodification of female bodies – we will forever be treading the waters of a rape culture in which a man can rail against the porn industry and then ask women not to wear spaghetti straps in his presence. They are two parts of the same objectification standard, and it is the objectification that causes us to see other people as things rather than human beings that is the problem.

Thus, making lust about a problem that is sexual in nature is intensely problematic and cannot begin to cover the issue. The issue is not the sex. The issue is the commodification of bodies for our own uses – the issue is power and control.

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Admin Note: The Account and Countenance series will begin next Monday and run every other Monday through the year. If you're interested in being interviewed/guest posting, there is still room on the schedule. Send me an email!

A Monstrous God

[Trigger Warning: graphic description of rape, really godawful rape apologia] We don't know her name or even that much about her.

What we do know is that she was twenty-three years old.

What we do know is that she is a young woman who was simply trying to get home.

What we do know is that she died, sedated but not in peace, in a hospital in Singapore, after a group of men bashed her in the head and shoved an iron rod inside her.

What we do know is that it took this monstrously disastrous event to compel a government to take action, not the thousands of women and children raped on a daily basis through the sex trafficking trade that is rampant in New Dehli, Mumbai, and Kolkata.

A couple of days after this woman's death, I received an anonymous comment on this blog (that was trashed and banned the second I comprehended what it was saying) that did not just imply  but outright stated that rape exists as a corrective to female sin, and that "maybe more women should be raped so they can get good with God."

This unknown woman on a bus in New Dehli was raped because six men decided to rape her. They saw her as a woman out of her sphere, yes; at the heart of it, they hated the fact that she could exist in the same space as them. They hated her.

What possible sin could this woman have committed? In her attackers' minds, her existence was sin enough.

Rape is not the will of some sky-Being to teach us a lesson. I cannot even use "God" in that sentence, because one cannot call such a monstrous creature God. God does not ordain this pain. God does not will that people suffer. God does not hate women. And God does not punish women merely for existing.

It's the rapists who do that.

It's the men who support and apologize for the rapists by mansplaining that "oh, that wasn't rape; it was just sex you didn't want."

It's the journalists who hem and haw and talk about how an 11 year old gang rape victim "acted like she was 20."

It's the mothers who tell nine year old rape victims that no one will want to marry them now.

It's the magazines that plead for us to "hear the rapist's stories" while ignoring the cries of their victims.

It's the culture that gives women ways to "protect themselves" but refuses to teach men that "yes and only yes mean yes."

Evil is not a corrective from God to teach us a lesson. To believe so is to worship a devil.