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.

Rejecting the Premise: Questions of Sex and Sin

When I was in high school, I attended a Bible camp out in the Black Hills every summer. It was always a good, fulfilling, fun time for me. Every year – like in many Bible camps across the country – there’d be one night set aside for the “sex talk.” The content varied from year to year, but the message was the same each time: “sex outside of a marriage is a sin and you must show utmost remorse for it. Forever. And it’ll probably ruin you for life. So don’t do it. Also, you will get pregnant and die.” Okay, that last part is from the movie Mean Girls, but you get the picture.

The narrative never shifted. There was always testimony from someone who had “done it” or come close and regretted it deeply. Usually, it was a guy or girl who got drunk and slept with someone at a party (consent issues were, of course, never addressed). But one year, one of the youth pastors took the mic.

This man was probably twice our age. He had been married since his early 20s. We settled in for his tale of woe, sure that he’d committed some too-early action with a high school girlfriend – that’s usually how these stories go.

But, no. He’d only ever dated his wife, he tearfully told us, and they had gotten engaged a few months into their relationship. After their engagement, they began to struggle with physical boundaries, and, a couple of months before the wedding, committed “the ultimate sin.” They both had been living with guilt and regret and shame for years.

Even at the time – I was in the midst of my purity craze, proudly wearing my ring every day and proclaiming to any who would listen that I was saving myself for my future husband – I thought this was a little weird. They were engaged at the time. They were in love. They’d only ever been with each other and had never strayed.

Surely, all this guilt and shame and regret were…disproportionate? Was sex before marriage seriously that powerful?

It challenged my prefabricated narrative about sex before marriage. These two had had done it – while engaged – and had spent much of their marriage feeling guilty about it. But they hadn’t caught an STD, they hadn’t developed totally unhinged sexual morals (eg, they didn’t start sleeping with everything with a pulse, which we’d been warned was a consequence of premarital sex), and their marriage hadn’t fallen apart.

It seemed like they were beating themselves up over nothing.

Of course, I didn’t allow myself to ask these questions until years later. At the time, I felt a sort of vague discomfort at the story, but didn’t connect it to the disproportionate shame or guilt. I simply didn’t have the tools before me to recognize that my narrative of “how things work” might not reflect reality, even in the face of a story that challenged my ideas of what would happen. I simply didn’t have the tools to recognize that shame and guilt were wreaking havoc, and unnecessarily so.

I have a feeling that the men at The Gospel Coalition are like the teenaged me. They simply don’t have the understanding or the vocabulary to grasp the difference between criticism of shame-filled rhetoric and the green lighting of (what they consider) heresy.

That’s the only explanation I can think of for this piece.

You see, a couple of weeks ago, writers Sarah Bessey and Elizabeth Esther kicked off an impromptu sex week in blogging that started up a firestorm. They discussed the shame that purity teachings had heaped on their heads – one for having sex before marriage, the other for idolizing virginity to the point that crushes were bad. Rachel Held Evans jumped into this and asked “Do we idolize virginity in modern evangelicalism?” Preston Yancey wrote a couple of posts about shame and grace. Emily Maynard discussed how virgin and non-virgin are insufficient categories for whether or not someone is a faithful Christian. Joy Bennett addressed the idea that “marrying a virgin” is probably not going to happen in this world of shifting demographics and "delayed" marriage. Leigh Kramer discussed the problematic nature of sexuality teachings for singles being determined by married folk. Sarah Markley talked about the difference between virginity and purity. Jake Meador talked about virginity as product. And Tony Jones hopped in with a confusing piece that had a provocative title but didn’t necessarily say anything more than a call for a new and different sexual ethic.

This is the narrative of what happened. This is the reality of what they were saying: a big, giant discussion starting with a call to stop shaming people regarding sex and evolving into a multitude of voices, all contributing variations on the theme of “what is a healthy sexual ethic?”

But, The Gospel Coalition decided to invent its own narrative. The piece, written by Bart Gingerich, refers to this collective diversity of voices as “commitment free critics,” and says, “The underlying complaint seems to demand that we accept different decisions without critique or even regret.”

Soon after this was posted, the comment section and Twitter erupted. And I began to see a common refrain from people supporting The Gospel Coalition’s piece: “If you believe that premarital sex is a sin, then why don’t you just say it?” As though one could possibly sum up these issues in a 200-word comment or a 140 character tweet.

The problem here is that the Gospel Coalition is trying to simultaneously cede our point – that the shaming of purity culture is a problem – and hold onto it. They are saying, “sexual ethics aren’t a salvation issue,” while also demanding that we meet their expectations of orthodox.

And that’s the wrong conversation, the wrong questions, the wrong discussion.

Asking “do you believe this is a sin?” is fundamentally the wrong approach. I refuse to answer the question (and I suspect the other authors cited in the piece would agree, though I do not speak for them) because defining whether or not something is a sin is not a conversation I’m interested in having. I reject the premise out of hand. Drawing rules and lines and definitions is not the way one moves toward a healthy sexual ethic.

Now, the Gospel Coalition’s piece also linked (subtly) to a post I made well over a year ago, in which I attempted to address (rather poorly) this question. It didn’t occur to me at the time of writing that the post would be so misread and galvanizing. Do I say in the post that I don’t think premarital sex is a sin? Yes, I do. But my larger point is that the portions of the Bible from which we draw conclusions about modern dating and “fornication” are so steeped in patriarchal and cultural mores that we have to have much more discernment in how we approach the topic.

Basically: I didn’t have the language then that I do now to realize that I was trying to have the wrong conversation.

The damage wreaked by the purity movement is the constant background radiation of my blog. Developing a healthy approach to sexual ethics is my goal. What that means for me, personally and professionally, is that I simply, fundamentally don’t care about the questions The Gospel Coalition is asking. Because when someone is having sex does not matter to me as much as whether or not they are doing so in a manner that is healthy, respectful, consensual, and gracious.

I told my mom on the phone the other day something I think succinctly sums up the issue: We spend so much effort and energy telling people to say “no” that we’ve not equipped them with how to say “yes.”

That is my concern; that is my wheelhouse. Healthy approaches and attitudes to sex first. Then we can talk about whether or not marriage is the ideal (it might just be).

We don’t achieve a healthy conversation by creating lines and drawing rules about what is or is not a sin – despite the Gospel Coalition’s professions, every time they tell us the Scriptures are clear, they are drawing a line in the sand.

We don’t help people by condemning them and saying they should feel shame – despite the professions of Mr. Gingerich, this is the theology of the body he propounds when he says, “For the longing singles among us, we have heard it said that love is patient. So go out there, date, and maybe get married. Just do not make allowance for lustful flesh.”

We don’t move the theology of the body forward when we invoke Gnostic imagery by implying that the flesh is something to be subsumed and tightly controlled.

We don’t create a healthy sexual ethic when we ask the wrong questions about sin.

__________

Graphic by the astoundingly awesome Dani Kelley. You can see more of her portfolio here.

Guest Post: Taking Jesus At His Word

Today's Guest Post in the Account and Countenance Series comes from Ryan, who blogs at Jesus and Venus and can be found on Twitter at @glassblowerscat. _________

My mother has always prayed strangely specific prayers. And I do mean specific. For example, when reselling an item on ebay that she found at a thrift store: “Lord, I would really like to sell this dress for $20 more than I paid for it.” She also prays about everything; no problem or question is too small for God. She prays for cashiers she meets at the grocery store or Goodwill. I’m pretty sure she’s still praying for one of my ex-girlfriends. She’s always done this, as far back as I can remember.

Her theology has plenty of room for that. She thoroughly believes Jesus when he says, “So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him.” She takes this as evidence that God cares about even our tiny problems and concerns and wants to give us what we ask for, and she makes extremely specific requests of him so that when those requests are fulfilled she’ll know it had to be God at work.

Theoreticaly, I agree with her. I can’t deny that God told us to ask him for things; it’s right there in the Bible—ask, seek, knock, bread not stones, fish not snakes, etc. Somehow Mom’s habit of granular, specific prayers never stuck to me, though. Mostly, I blame church.

I grew up in what I imagine to be a fairly typical conservative evangelical congregation. We believed in salvation by grace, through faith; none of your works-based salvation heresy for us, thank you. But we were also wary of “cheap grace.” You didn’t get to run around sinning all the time just because you were saved and had forgiveness for your sins. Unfortunately, you can measure the absence of sin much more objectively than the presence of grace, so everyone in the church lived by a long list of unwritten rules cobbled together from the non-ceremonial Old Testament laws, the parts of the New Testament that didn’t mention taking care of the poor, and movies set in the 1940s and ’50s. As a result, while I believed in grace with my head, I believed in the New Law with my guts.

Augmenting this imbalance, as I got older I began having frequent conversations with my father about the Bible and theology. I’ve always loved these long debates, which continue to this day, but both of us skew analytical and theoretical rather than practical and applicable, and Dad also struggles to truly believe that God wants to be intimately involved in guiding our day-to-day lives. Combining that with a Calvinist theological base meant that I had to grow ever more systematic in reconciling direct statements about prayer and God as a giving father—statements my mother takes at face value—with a more comprehensive view of God’s sovereignty.

“Sovereignty” took center stage in my theology more and more as I entered Christian college (pretty Calvinist) and began attending a new church in my college town (very Calvinist). While not a Bible or Theology major, all students had to take a few Bible courses, and I numbered quite a few of the seminary-bound among my friends. Late-night conversations about theology and hermeneutics presented an attractive alternative to actual work, and being surrounded by Christians kept spiritual questions uppermost in my mental space. As I graduated and accepted a full-time job at my very Calvinist church, I realized that I had realigned all my other concepts of God to fit the constraints of sovereignty.

Oddly enough, working for three years alongside a group of five-pointers showed me how dissatisfying and one-sided systematic Calvinism can be.* Calvinist theology is essentially a series of logical constructs predicated on that one notion of sovereignty, and the more you believe in sovereignty, the more you must believe God is always playing a long game. Everything happens because he wants it to happen—even the bad things—so when something bad happens to me, or something I want to happen doesn’t, I must assume my happiness just does not fit into the plan somehow. It doesn’t make sense to believe God can orchestrate a millenia-long narrative of sin, redemption, and glorification spanning every culture and language that also somehow includes making sure I get that writing gig I wanted.

So, despite my mother’s longstanding practice of taking Jesus’ word for it that God wants to give her the things she asks for, and even though I ditched Calvinism years ago, the God of my imagining—not of my theology—has little interest in my affairs. When he does pay attention to my life, he probably just sees me doing something he doesn’t like, even though I keep that New Law list in my mental back pocket at all times. And if I do manage not to actively displease him, still none of my problems or goals could possibly puzzle into his sovereign plan without disrupting a thousand other events he almost certainly thinks are more important. If not for my mother’s continual anecdotal evidence of his concern for our well-being and even happiness, I’d probably never even pray—and when I did, I would believe even less in the efficacy of my prayers.

By the way, a few months ago, when the renters I had lined up for my house dropped out a few days before the mortgage was due, a pair of new renters manifested themselves rather fortuitously through a chain of events over which I had no control or influence. When the dust had settled, my mother told me she had been praying that I would find renters under circumstances only attributable to divine intervention, and that this would increase my faith in God.

And you know what? It did.

_____________

*For me, at least. I don’t begrudge anyone their Calvinism if they find it compelling and spiritually meaningful.  ↩

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.

The Church is Not a Fight Club

“If only a male janitor had been there to swing a bucket at his knees…” The National Review’s Charlotte Allen erased the heroism of several women in a short, few paragraph opinion piece, suggesting that somehow a male-identified person would have “known what to do.”

Another article, this one from a columnist at Newsweek, suggested that “a husky 12 year old” or a “football player,” or maybe even 8-10 “bodies” could have rushed the shooter. Nevermind the two adult women who did rush the shooter, and paid for it with their lives.

Erase, revise, edit, cut.

The bravery and heroism of women are all but ignored in attempts to keep ourselves from examining a toxic culture of masculinity which breeds wars and pride and anger and hate.

(To be clear: when I refer to a toxic culture of masculinity, I am referring to the Mark Driscoll’s, the Wild at Heart’s, the Doug Giles’, the John Piper’s, even the Donald Miller’s, for whom masculinity and treating people like men means not being kind and decent but instead violent and forceful. I refer not to the idea that men have a tendency to be different from women in how they behave and function, but to poisonous, irrevocably damaging conflation of “masculinity” with violence and guys and power over others.)

Masculinity as defined by violence is toxic.

It eats away at brother and sister, at father and mother, at friends and lovers. The idea that to be a man one must be willing to punch and fight and bleed (usually in "defense" of a weaker-vesseled-woman) pervades our culture. Fight Club is a popular movie not for the anti-consumerist message but for the presentation of masculinity as an untamed savagery - never mind that the main character, in the end, shoots himself to rid his life of the plague of this horrific violence.

We have pastors holding Mixed Martial Arts fights in church sanctuaries, claiming that this is true masculinity.

Religious writers proclaim that violence, fighting, and war – or, at least, the desire to participate in these actions – are inherent, natural desires of man, rather than the evidence of brokenness and sin and things that should grieve us.

Movies give us “badasses” who fight and fuck and are “manly” because they do.

Television shows praise as heroic the nostalgic image of fedora wearing, chain-smoking, alcoholic, philanderers with little self-control.

Since 1982, there have been 62 mass shootings  in the United States. 25 of those were in the last five years. Of those 62 shootings, 61 were done by men. 44 of those were white men.

We have a masculinity problem in America.

Yes, the causes behind these killings are multifaceted, complex, and impossible to pin down on one thing. I’m not saying that the conflation of masculinity and violence is the only cause, or even a main cause. But it is a discussion worth having – an important discussion, as we see more and more pastors preaching that “taking control” “asserting power,” and delighting in violence are part of what it means to be a man.

As a church, we are supposed to be a people of peace. When we preach that violence and power and control are an inherent part of our gospel, and an inherent part of the identity of men – as people like Mark Driscoll do – we cause great harm to the body of Christ.

I don’t have a succinct or neat answer or solution. Men of peace, it is your place to challenge this. It is your duty to push back against this toxic image of masculinity not only in secular society, but in the pulpits of our churches. Being a man is not about getting your own, nor about how many guns you own, nor about who you beat down in your race to the top. It’s not even about vicarious joy in violence – violence should grieve us, as it did Jesus in the Garden the night before his death.

This is a solution that is going to take all of us, and silence gets us nowhere fast. Now is the time to speak up, to be, talk, and do nonviolence, to challenge the assumption that what makes a man is how much he can make another person bleed. Man is not defined by how many people he hurts, but by how he heals.

Mark Driscoll, Violence Against Women, and Missing the Point

Mark Driscoll published a post about violence against women. I’ll be honest, when I saw the post, I rolled my eyes a little because I really don’t trust the word of a man who was able to make his wife cry with just a look, yells “God hates you!” from the pulpit, and runs a church that has resulted in support groups for “survivors.”* But, since violence against women is, y’know, part of my purview, I read through the post to see where he is at on the idea. These are my thoughts. My apologies that this post is long - I couldn't find a good place to chop it. The Good Stuff

I was pleasantly surprised by a few things that seem to indicate growth on his part. He acknowledges, for example, that rape can and does happen within marriage. There’s no nuance beyond the two sentences he dedicates to it, but the fact that he said it is progress.

He also, at one point, acknowledges that men and women are not essentially different when it comes to human emotions. This, too, is good, especially as one of the most grating things about people who insist on gender roles is their repetition of the falsehood that men and women are different on an emotional level. Again, progress.

I like that he affirms a woman’s fear and distrust of men as a thing that exists. Sometimes, getting men to understand that women often live in a world of heightened fear is quite the battle, so I thank him for affirming, in his own way, that this battle exists.

I also appreciate that he does not address his article toward wives – “how you can deal with abuse” or whatever. This could have very easily been much more horrific than what it is.

For what good there is in the article and what progressive statements are made, however, they are entirely overshadowed by gender essentialist, paternalistic muck.

The Bad Stuff

For an article on violence against women, it seems to spend a lot of time not talking about violence against women – not talking about the church’s duty when confronted with an abusive relationships, how to resolve and understand what happens in an abusive relationships, etc. You know, things that would be useful in a conversation about violence against women – there’s not even a link to the domestic violence hotline/signs of an abusive relationship on the page, which would have been useful.

But this isn’t about how I think the article should look. After all, I come at such a thing from a framework of talking with abuse victims (through my blog) on a daily basis, though not a professional one. I’m by no means an expert, but I’m quite familiar with tactics that abusers use, what abuse does to people, and ways women in an abusive relationship can break free from it. And as it stands, many of the “ways to honor your wife” that Driscoll recommends are either abusive tactics in of themselves or encourage abusive thinking.

First, he seems to think that fidelity is the solution for abusive relationships: men must stop their wandering eyes and remain faithful in order to honor their wives and prevent abuse. I wonder that this is listed first, because men who are faithful to their wives are not necessarily ruled out as abusers. Many men who abuse never, ever stray from their marriage and look like perfect, faithful husbands on the outside. This is what makes abuse so hard to spot and to stop. Fidelity, while a good thing, is not a balm or a cure-all for an abusive relationship.

His second point, on honoring her physically, is the only place in the article where we get anything about a physically abusive relationship. But it lacks depth and merely gives us a checklist of types of physical abuse (including rape). This section’s okay, except for the fact that, because of who it is coming from, I have a lot of trouble seeing it as sincere. This is the man who, remember, wrote in a book about marriage that one look from him caused his wife to burst into tears. I am having a lot of trouble not seeing this section as hypocritical, for that reason alone.

Additionally, in this section is an odd assertion that a man who hits his daughter is committing the vilest of abuses. That is problematic because of the gender specificity. Now, I do a lot of talking about violence against women and rape and abuse. I do this because women are vastly more likely to be victims of abuse, but their womanhood is not what makes the abuse innately wrong. The abuse is wrong because it is abuse, not because of who the victim is. Gendering abuse in this manner runs dangerously close to normalizing violence against men – “it’s worse because it’s a girl” is highly problematic compared to “abuse of a child is bad under all circumstances.”

This paternalistic gendering, too, is why it’s very hard to get anyone to care about prison rape or rape that happens to men. It creates a culture in which abuse against a man is viewed as lesser, or somehow less damaging, because the victim is a male. This is highly problematic and functions to silence male victims of abuse because they sense that they will not be affirmed or understood in their testimonies of abuse.

The REALLY Bad Stuff

Because of his simplistic narratives about gender, it becomes impossible for him to affirm strictly conservative complementarian gender roles and avoid recommending things that are abusive in themselves. We’ll see this in a minute.

But first, his third point, about emotion. Now, above, I affirmed Driscoll’s acknowledgement that men and women both experience emotions. This is great! …if you ignore the rest of the paragraph. He affirms the emotional life of men, and then basically says that men need to provide emotional intimacy to their wives because their wives crave it, which completely erases that men need to be emotionally intimate because they are emotional creatures. It devolves into gender essentialist narratives yet again.

And it is here that the article begins to take a dive. With point five, Driscoll declares that it is the man’s duty to provide, and even that the proper family should be a one-income family. He also states that the reason to be a one income family is because the wife should be staying at home with children, which she “naturally” wants to have. This is a complicated mess.

It’s important to know that making a woman have children is a classic way to make her stay in an abusive relationship. This sort of theology that creates opportunities for abuse, even if it not outright abusive in itself. This sort of advice (have kids!) takes away the agency of the woman to have control over her reproduction in a not-so-subtle way – “God says that to honor you we need to have kids.” Because it is gender essentialist in assuming that every woman WANTS kids (regardless of concerns about financial stability, health, or other factors), it easily hands fuel to abusers to guilt their victims into having children, further trapping them in an abusive relationship.

Then we get to what is likely the most problematic section of the piece:

Many men are not generous with their wives. I know one guy who makes decent money, and he’s totally chintzy with his wife. She gets no spending money, can’t go out to coffee with the girls because he’s a total control freak and a tightwad. Honor your wife financially. I’m not saying you have to live a lavish lifestyle. Live within your means, tithe, save, invest, make a spending budget—and include some margin for your wife. I know it’s hard to live on one income. I know it’s particularly difficult in this economic climate, but that's no excuse to be irresponsible, selfish, or stingy. [emphasis original]

I’m going to give Driscoll the benefit of the doubt here and assume he’s never actually researched abusive tactics. Because if he has, and he still gave this advice, that is a horrifically misguided and evil thing to do. In almost every single tale from abuse survivors, an “allowance” of money is the beginning of the abuse and a tactic for keeping the abused person in the relationship. “Allowances,” “letting the wife have a margin of income” is a means of putting control of the money into the hands of the abuser, making it harder for the abused person to separate from a relationship because they do not have means to support themselves. Advising this as a way to honor your wife is well beyond the pale of human decency.

This paragraph alone drowns out any good things in the article. I would rather Driscoll had not written anything at all. And for that reason, my opinion on him has not changed – he is overzealous, misogynist, and unable to recognize abuse because he is an abuser himself (certainly of his congregation and staff).

Gender essentialism is not going to solve abuse. Men aren’t going to be magically better if they follow Driscoll’s steps to “honor their wives.” Indeed, it needs to be recognized that many of the views espoused here open the doors for abuse by painting women as weaker vessels that need to be protected, which encourages isolationism, lack of openness, and an inability to express emotion in healthy ways on the part of men. What is needed is to assure women that they are not alone, that they have the power to leave, that they are not weak. In this way, Driscoll's brand of complementarian theology fails miserably.

____________________

*Pro-tip: If people leaving your church call themselves “survivors,” your church has a problem.