Heavy Words and Co-opted Meanings

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________

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

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

An Unholy Evil: Ignorance, Silence, and Abuse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________

Photo by fotologic. Used under Creative Commons licenses.

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

We Saw Your Sexism: Modesty and Rape Culture

When I was in college, I did a semester abroad in Oxford, England, at the university there. This semester was a life changing one, as most semesters abroad are. I was introduced to many different people with differing life experiences and life views and learned a lot about myself and treasure that time I was there. During this time, I had two roommates. One of them, while on vacation in Florence, Italy, exhibited some rather strange behavior. You see, there’s a lot of art in Italy. There’s a lot of art featuring naked people in Italy. Said roommate was apparently uncomfortable with the idea of seeing boobs and penises in an art museum.

So she carried a spoon.

When she approached pieces of nude art, she would carefully position the spoon to cover up the objectionable parts and view the art that way. It wasn’t that she objected to the art itself, but that, for her, there was no context in which nudity in the public sphere could ever be okay – not even in famous masterpieces of ancient art.

The principle that caused my roommate to carry a spoon into museums and galleries is the same one that produced the sexist ridiculousness that was Seth MacFarlane’s “We Saw Your Boobs” song that opened the Academy Awards this week.

That principle? That nudity is only ever erotic.

That principle is a dangerous one, as Christianity Today and Think Christian* contributor Karen Swallow Prior demonstrated when she tweeted during the ceremony: “Are the actors who showed their boobs really pissed at having a song sung about it? That would be a bit hypocritical?” This was followed quickly by: “If you show your boobs, don't get on your high horse about someone singing about it.”

Prior’s point, as exemplified in the second tweet, is one you've heard before - what amounts of skin you show in public has a bearing on the perception of you as a moral agent. Mainly, the amount of skin you show has a direct inverse relationship to how angry you can be over people disrespecting you.

There are a number of problematic elements at play here and I’d like to try to tease each of them out. So let’s set aside Prior’s tweets for a moment and focus on why McFarlane’s song was sexist and wrong.

The first problematic element of MacFarlane’s work was the male gaze. The Academy that is responsible for the Academy Awards is 77% white men. Most studio executives are men. The majority of directors are men. Movies that fail the Bechdel test are far more prominent and more likely to be backed by major studios than movies that pass it.

Hollywood, and our subsequent movie-going culture, is built around what men want, what men see, and what men desire. Specifically, it is built around what white, cisgender, heterosexual, young men are supposed to see, want and desire, as filtered through the lens of advertising and marketing firms.

It is hard to be taken seriously as a woman in this environment. And it’s a common thread that women who push themselves for their art are often involved in roles that require them to bare some skin. It is, in many parts, the nature of the beast. Insofar as McFarlane’s song was meant to lampoon that part of Hollywood culture, I understand it.

However, MacFarlane is a white cis het man, surrounded by men, singing about how awesome it was that artists at the top of their field showed their boobs. Rather than a lampooning of the male gaze, MacFarlane’s song reinforced it – especially with the titles he chose to cite as titillating examples of showing boobs.

Hilary Swank was mentioned for Boys Don’t Cry, in which she plays a trans man who is violently raped and then murdered. The nudity in that movie occurs within the rape scene.

Charlize Theron was cited for the movie Monster – also a rape scene.

Likewise with The Accused and Monster's Ball.**

Scarlett Johansson was cited not for her art but for phone pictures that were stolen from her hacked phone and disseminated without her permission. She has never actually appeared topless for a movie role.

Instead of satirizing the male gaze, MacFarlane’s song reinforced it, informing women that all that matters in the world of Hollywood is whether or not someone saw their boobs, regardless of context.

By calling out specifically scenes that were depictions of rape (and photos that were not distributed with the consent of the subject), MacFarlane is espousing the idea that all nudity, regardless of context, is erotic – and reinforcing the idea that female bodies exist for the purpose of creating sexual reactions in cis-het men.

A song about seeing penises may have actually functioned to better highlight the satire, but that would have been far too subversive for the creator of Family Guy.

And this severance of instances of nudity and the contexts in which they appear is where we come back to Karen Swallow Prior’s tweets. Rather than challenging his satire, and challenging the male gaze of Hollywood which demands that female bodies be reduced to tits and ass, Prior’s tweets are pointedly directed at the actresses themselves.

Her point seems to be: if you are an actress who shows skin for the purpose of your art, and a man removes the context and focuses on the boobs, it’s your fault and you are not allowed to get mad, because you should have known that would happen.

In other, slightly harsher words: it’s your own damn fault you were objectified. Keep your clothes on.

Rather than respecting the art that these women are putting forward and responding to the sexualization of women’s bodies by attacking the very man who is doing it, Prior’s tweets and her framing of the issue blame the actresses for the way their art is treated. They are, in her words, “giving in to sexism” rather than acting in a subversive manner by treating their bodies as their own property with which they can make good art. (She also implies that these women - many of whom are Academy Award winners! - are not "serious artists.")

A female bodied person who appears nude for a rape scene in order to increase the impact of that devastation? It’s her fault when a man objectifies her.

It’s not a tough leap – indeed, no leap at all – to see the parallel to that within rape culture.

A female bodied person who wears a short skirt to the dance club because damn it gets warm under those lights? It’s her fault when she gets raped.

When we blame women for the reactions of men – whether it is to their art, to their clothing, to their “unladylike” behavior like riding public transit after dark – we reinforce rape culture. Prior’s tweets are a smaller example of it, couched in modesty culture, but they show how much modesty rhetoric – don’t show your skin because MEN – is on the same spectrum as rhetoric that blames victims for their assaults.

More disturbingly, when I challenged Prior on this point, she informed me that the reactions of people like MacFarlane should make these actresses think twice about their art. These actresses’ pieces of art – which included nudity that must and always should be taken in context – are what need to be examined and revised and redone in order that they may not fall into the trap of the male gaze. Once again, the gaze of the patriarchy must be accommodated and bowed to, rather than challenged. If I wear a low cut top and a guy on the street catcalls me for it, I am the one who must change, rather than he.

It is not hypocritical to expect that one’s art be honored within its context - it is the baseline of respect. It is not hypocritical to expect that one’s body is respected regardless of modesty or immodesty. It is the baseline of human dignity.

It is not hypocritical to expect that, because you are a human being, you will be treated like a human being, not as a set of boobs or whatever genitals you sport.

________

*Full disclosure: I write for Think Christian on occasion.

**For more about these scenes, read this excellent piece at Salon.

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.

Purity Culture is Rape Culture: A Case Study

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

Yes, I felt horribly rejected.

[more laughter]

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

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

[more laughter]

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

That’s agape.

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

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

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

_________

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

No Touching: Consent As the First Step

So after Tuesday’s post, I thought it worth examining, in brief (though I’ll definitely return to this topic), what a healthy, holy sexual ethic might look like for the church. As Fred Clark observed this week and as Libby Anne at Love Joy Feminism has observed in the past, we have a very simple sexual ethic in the modern evangelical church. In fact, it might be the only “ethic” that can be summed up in one word: “no.”

There’s a massive discussion in the history of Christianity about what sexual ethics for a Christian are and should be, from celibacy for the most devout to procreation only to sex is fun and holy. But the past 40 years – possibly as a response to the sexual revolution of the mid 20th century – the ethic has simplified into bumper sticker thoughts for much of the modern church.

We have a literal sloganized version of sexual ethics. Here are some oft-repeated ones (contributed by many of you via Twitter!):

“Pet your dog, not your date.”

“Leave room for the Holy Spirit.”

“Boys are blue, girls are red. No making purple.”

“No one buys a cow when he can get the milk for free.”

“Flies spread disease so keep yours closed.”

When I bring this up, I’m often pointed to academic theologians who have been doing a lot of legwork on the issues, and I appreciate their work. However, the fact is that this work is not being translated to the laity. 400 page books discussing the topic do exist, but we’re missing something in the modern church discussion when Purity Bears and balls are what the laity take away. Part of this is the divide between the ivory tower and the peasants in the field, but part of it too is the legalistic desire for black and white, yes and no thoughts, rather than an actual ethic that helps you make good, healthy decisions.

That is, as Clark says, exactly what an ethic is supposed to do. And, as Preston Yancey said on Monday, ethics are not memory verse we can point to. They are a system of guiding beliefs.

Right now, we have rules – labels under which sex is good and sex is bad, and not much variation or grace for the gray areas.

So how do we start developing a new, healthy ethic?

I propose that we start with what consent looks like.

A healthy sexual relationship has much more room to happen when everyone involved is doing so enthusiastically and with full knowledge and agreement about boundaries.

Consent is not “well, he didn’t say no.”

Consent is not “I guess so.”

Consent is not given from someone too drunk to stand.

Consent is not something wrung from someone after weeks of badgering.

Consent is not “giving in.”

Consent is an enthusiastic, unequivocal yes.

Consent is asking at every step "Is this okay? Does this feel good? Can I touch you here?" and getting a unequivocally positive response before proceeding.

Consent is asking permission every, single time because consent given once is not consent given for all of time.

It needs to be assumed that people’s bodies are in a state of “don’t touch” until they give you the green light to do so. This is the first step toward a healthy view of sexuality.

This basic understanding of bodily autonomy is – no surprise – frequently shunted aside in narratives of the purity movement. The fear seems to be that if we teach people how to say yes in a healthy manner, they’ll start doing so outside of the contexts we think are best. But, that’s the thing about education: if you really, truly want people acting of their own free will and owning their decisions, you really, truly have to let them.

We have warped our thinking to the point where we think people are unable to make good decisions if we equip them with the right tools to do so. So we empty their toolbox and tell them no and badger them into being terrified of sex. But teaching consent teaches people that they own their bodies and empowers them to make decisions about what they do with their bodies. It also empowers them to make healthy decisions about how they treat other embodied people.

And that, after all, is what Christianity is centered upon - living with embodied people in a community that reflects the goodness of a loving God. Consent is central to that ethic.

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.

Worth Reading This Week

In a completely unexpected way, the blogging world exploded this week with a discussion of virginity, purity, and the sexism and damage it contains. Thank. God.

For me, these things that are new discussions for a lot of the mainstream blogging world have been the background radiation of this blog for a while. And when I got a comment a couple weeks ago asking why I seemed so okay with premarital sex if this is a faith based blog, I realized it may be time to revisit the topic, which I’ll be doing over the next few weeks.

To kick it off, Worth Reading This Week are a couple barn-burner posts from my friends Sarah Bessey and Emily  Maynard, just in case you missed them.

First, Sarah wrote about shame over at A Deeper Story and broke the internet (emphasis original):

Over the years the messages melded together into the common refrain: “Sarah, your virginity was a gift and you gave it away. You threw away your virtue for a moment of pleasure. You have twisted God’s ideal of sex and love and marriage. You will never be free of your former partners, the boys of your past will haunt your marriage like soul-ties. Your virginity belonged to your future husband. You stole from him. If – if! – you ever get married, you’ll have tremendous baggage to overcome in your marriage, you’ve ruined everything. No one honourable or godly wants to marry you. You are damaged goods, Sarah.”

If true love waits, I heard, then I have been disqualified from true love.

And then Emily posted at Prodigal about losing her v-card and made me yeah “HELL YEAH”:

I’m done standing apart from my brothers and sisters who have been abused or manipulated or coerced or had their ability to choose taken away from them. I’m done adding to a culture that humiliates victims who are walking out healing in their own way. We’re quick to offer platitudes of grace, but oh so slow to engage the individuals or social structures that perpetuate abuse.

I’m done blanketing all sexual experience outside of marriage as sin and never acknowledging that abuse can happen within a marriage. I’m done with Christians enforcing oppression in the name of purity.

I’m unbelievably glad that the mainstream blogging world is beginning to pick up the torch on this topic, not just because it’s a major part of my book project, but because moving toward a conversation about healthy sexuality is massively important if the church really wants to make justice a part of their agenda.

Not My Pastor? Criticism, Controversy, and Authority

Last week was a harried week in the Christian blogging world, as the second inauguration of President Obama and the 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade happened one right after the other (quickly followed by BeyonceGate, which was and is amusing to watch happen). Things followed a fairly predictable cycle for those familiar with the Christian blogging world: Mark Driscoll tweeted something inflammatory about the President on Monday, people got up in arms about it and wrote blog posts, then blog posts responding to the blog posts were written and then responses to the responses, down down down in a recursive ring of angry fire.

I get it. I get being tired and burned out and upset over the latest controversies du jour (thanks, Leigh, for the phrase). Burn out is a real thing, and I’ve had to implement a lot of self-care and mental health strategies into my daily routine in order to keep from burning out on the seemingly endless firestorms on the internet. It can be immensely frustrating to feel like the blogging world is just stuck in the mud, spinning its wheels endlessly, hoping some of that mud eventually ends up on person we’re trying to criticize.

It’s hard to watch and it’s hard to participate in, and I don’t begrudge anyone from bowing out of those discussions – I, for one, have stopped responding to individual tweets and facebook statuses with anything more than, “Wow, what a d-bag,” because I’ve found my own energy is better spent attempting to fight the substance of their poor theology (evident in blog posts and sermons) with the substance of my evidence and experience. To some extent, I have to fight the urge to roll my eyes at the sure-to-come controversy when Mark Driscoll tweets something ridiculously stupid (which is…all the time).

All that is a long way round to saying, I get where this post at A Deeper Church is coming from. I get the tired, frustrated, burned out feeling and desire to say “Sod it, I’m going to concentrate on my ‘real’ life issues at my local church.” And there is time and place and space for those concerns about what is effective and what is helpful to take up our time and discussion power.

But, these discussions need to be had carefully and cogently and without burying our head in the sand or painting large swaths of people with the same brush. The most damaging part of Ferguson’s post was not necessarily her thesis that the local church is all that matters (which Zack Hunt of The American Jesus has handled quite well here), but her defense of that thesis in the comments:

I think it’s worth noting that *many* of the people who cry outrage at people like Driscoll or Bell or other controversal teachers are not covenanted anywhere, not being discipled or discipling, not serving, and not doing anything other than fussing around on twitter or Facebook, inciting digital riots. […]

Most of the inciting content making its way around the internet is not from covenanted people at Driscoll’s church, but instead, disgruntled people who have an ax to grind. I’m interested in the truth, but I’ll be honest, I’m too busy minding the truth at my own church with my own people to get much in arms about the truths at other churches.

When I read that comment last Wednesday, I was…angry is an understatement. There’s a lot going on here, but mainly it’s a commentary that, if you are “unchurched,” then your voice has no space or weight here.

I am “unchurched” in the sense that Ferguson means. Though I work for a large denomination, I currently suffer from anxiety issues that prevent me from going regularly to a local church (I have trouble with crowds of people I don’t know, and that trouble is magnified when religious teachings are thrown into the mix). But church happens in other spaces for me, in Skype calls with a best friend, in Twitter conversations about privilege, in sharing funny pictures with blogging friends, in long conversations with my mother. Church outside the walls, as it goes.

But that’s only a small part of my overall point. If you’re not involved in the ongoing conversations of online criticism and the back and forth of the everyday conversation, the entire thing can look like a giant ball of nasty.

But, in throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as Ferguson did, one ejects legitimate, necessary critical anger from the public sphere just as quickly as harmful, abusive problematic anger.

There is bad criticism out there. It happens. There are people saying crappy, unhelpful things solely for the point of page views. But there are also people saying things that contribute and add to an ongoing discussion about the tension of living out the Christian life, especially when bad theology enters the picture. The problem arises when we lump the latter in with the former simply because they both happen by the same method and are similar in tone.

This is a result of attempting to enter a conversation about which a person is not actually conversant. Entering a critical conversation requires a lot of listening and a lot of patience. It requires a tough skin and deep empathetic skill (empathy is a skill, y’all). It also takes a lot of discernment. Something that may not look productive to you as an outsider to abusive dynamics may be intensely productive to the person saying it. Anger, for example, has a healing, cleansing power.

In interviewing women for my book-in-process, I’ve come across a common theme – that challenging authority in their churches, especially if they were cis-women, was a big fat no-no. Asking controversial questions, wondering if things might not be the way the pastor says they are, was absolutely verboten. Many experienced church discipline at the hands of authoritarian pastors.

And for many of these women, calling a person of authority an asshole can be intensely, extremely freeing. It is a bucking of authority, a learning of one’s own spiritual walk, and a healing expression of anger.

The thing is, to an outsider looking in, that good, healing anger can look exactly like people jumping on the bandwagon of the controversial figure of the day. And it’s really hard to judge which is which without knowing the person.

Getting back to Ferguson’s Deeper Church post, there seems to be a presumption that all criticism made in these cycles of controversies is meant for the person being criticized, and for them alone. But that’s, quite often, not how criticism works. Movie critics don’t critique movies in hopes that directors will listen to what they have to say. Nor do art critics, television critics, literary critics, or basically any other type of professional critic.

No, those critics write for you and for me, so that we can know what’s good and what’s bad and what’s worth spending our time and money on.

Why, then, do we eschew helpful, healing – if angry healing – criticism when it comes from a tweet or a blog in the Christian blogging world? Is it because of a messed up emphasis on the authority of pastors? A perverted world in which “grace” means never rocking the boat? Frustratingly ingrained sexist culture that devalues womanly anger and enables abuse by encouraging silence? Thumper’s mother teaching him that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all?

In a word, yes.

Criticism is a big messy world that sometimes simply needs to spin itself out. But burying our head in the sands, suggesting that any and all criticism is simply illegitimate, and that those who criticize are simply bitter and hurt? This is not the way to do things. We must work to cultivate a space which allows people to be angry, because it is in that space that healing comes.

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.”