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.

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.

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.

Women's Bodies as Public Domain: What Jezebel and Is This Modest Have in Common

Last Tuesday, my twitter friend Emily Maynard asked me if I’d seen a site – “Is This Modest?” This is a fairly typical thing for me, and usually I look at a site, get angry for a few minutes at the ridiculous thing, maybe write a few tweets, and move on. This routine has helped me deal with a lot of jerks-on-the-internet things in recent years, and is a good way to keep from burning out. This site, however, was different. When I ventured onto the site - titled "Is This Modest?" - I discovered a wealth of senior photos of teenagers, coupled with short critiques of their modesty, saying things like:

I have no idea what she's wearing under the blanket, but the heels aren't high.  The top is a bit concerning.  First, it's rather tight.  Second, the fact that the outer layer is so opened up means that it looks like we're getting a peak at her underthings-and they aren't very high.

I believe this is a piece that's trying to show a contrast between childhood and adulthood-I get that.  I also think that you don't have to show yourself like this to convey womanhood.

Scrolling down revealed that the poster is a 36-year-old married man.

I had to do something.

I tweeted about it late Tuesday and spoke to a few friends, including Rachel Held Evans, who noticed that it was likely the photos were in violation of US copyright law. We spoke to copyright experts, and I emailed one of the photographers, who told me, in no uncertain terms, that he had not given permission for the site to use his photos. Maynard, my friend who had sent me the site, tweeted at one of the other photographers, and this photographer also hadn’t given her permission.

We began to build a two pronged campaign: a negative reaction via Twitter and other social media, letting this guy know that what he was doing was exploitative and creepy. And we contacted photographers, letting them know that this site was violating their copyright and the privacy of the subjects of the photos.

The copyright law case was a conduit toward a more idealistic endeavor: letting the people who run this site know that women are not public property. Women are not open for comment merely by existing, despite that being the heart and life of every modesty code – that women are open season because they are objects upon which cis-hetero-men cast their lusts and aspersions. This is the mindset against which I fight every single day, and the mindset which was on wide open display on the Is This Modest website.

If women are not seen as merely property by this modesty movement, why then, did a 36-year-old man feel it was okay to comment on them?

That’s what makes it creepy: it is objectification, plain and simple – an analysis that breaks a woman into parts and examines them in relation to an arbitrary standard.

But here, too, is where this narrative takes a frustrating turn.

After I tweeted about it through the morning on Wednesday, feminist writer and co-founder of Feministing, Jessica Valenti, picked it up that afternoon and tweeted it to her followers, crediting me in the process. By Thursday morning, Gawker Media offshoot, Jezebel, had posted an article on it.

One would think I’d be cheering that large feminist websites were picking up on this thing my friends and I brought to light. Unfortunately, Jezebel’s article bungled the campaign we were working on and short-circuited any legal action the girls could have taken – not to mention continued the exploitation of these young women.

It is this last that most concerns me.

You see, Jezebel’s article reproduced a couple of the very same photos that were problematic in the first place. Though they pointed out the creepy nature of the site and drew attention to that part of it, they also continued and engaged in the creepy exploitation by reproducing these photos. Now some poor unsuspecting girl has her senior photo blasted across Gawker Media’s networks, open for public comment by any of Gawker’s readers, not all of which (or even, not many of which) are going to realize the creepiness of the situation.

In doing an article on the Is This Modest? Site, Jezebel brought the site down permanently – the site, their twitter, and their FB page no longer exist. But in reproducing the very photos that led the site to be creepy in the first place, Jezebel is re-engaging the exploitation – this time for many more clicks and advertising dollars because it’s “salacious” and “provocative.”

If you can’t do feminist writing without exploiting women, you’re doing it wrong.

Of course, this sort of exploitative “journalism” is par for the course for Jezebel – last year, they posted screenshots from a video in which a woman was being raped, and didn’t blur out her face or get her permission to post the video. So I don’t hold out much hope that Jezebel will take any heed of the fact that they just violated the privacy of yet another woman.

Caring for the people who are being hurt needs to be a larger part of modern feminism. We cannot say that we care for the marginalized and the weak, and then exploit their images and their life stories for page clicks and advertising.*

If we willingly engage in the exploitation and public comment of women ourselves, we are no better than the “creepers” we criticize.

In the end, I’m glad the site has been taken down, but I wish it had happened in a different way. I don’t believe that the ends justify the means and I think we make ourselves hypocrites when we exploit the marginalized in the name of justice. We can all do better than that.

___________

*This is the main reason my site has a tip-jar instead of advertising. I want you to make the decision yourself about whether or not to give me money, not be forced to make money for me by giving me clicks.

Notes from my...: Further Thoughts on Modesty

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

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

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

Lust dehumanizes a person in your own heart and mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

___________

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

People as Moral Agents

On Christmas Eve, my friend Preston tweeted an article at me, with an accompanying joke about how some blogs seem to try to sneak their controversial-yet-terrible articles in on December 24^th. This piece was no exception – it’s a terrible amalgamation of every bad argument against feminism. It’s so bad that I half-asked myself, “Is this a parody?” Nope, it’s not. And in that regard, I think it’s worth examining the arguments as they represent a lot of what people say about feminism and about humanity.

The article appears on Thought Catalog, an online magazine of sorts aimed at white, 20 something hipsters, and is titled “Why We Don’t Need Feminism.”

You see why Preston sent it to me.

The piece is shallow, jumping from one argument to the next, as though the whole of a multi-century movement  can be brought to its knees by 2,000 words of survey-class-level arguments on the internet (spoiler alert: it can’t, and it devolves into transphobic reductionism on its way down).

In the first point, the author – Emily Matters – starts out by talking about male apes who violently rape as part of their chimp tribes. No, seriously. That’s her argument – that apes show us that violence, aggression, and yes, rape, are hardwired into male humans because TESTOSTERONE and that fighting it with feminism is useless because misogyny isn’t the whole cause.

You balk, but this is an actual argument people make.

If you’re a cis-man reading this, you should be insulted by Ms. Matters’ argument – she is literally comparing you to an ape. What a low, base view of men* – that they can’t help but rape, that they are slaves to their testosterone and “natural” aggression, that violence is an inherent part of the masculine being, rather than an aberration. Not to mention that this is a rather horrific view of what makes someone a man or a woman – as though gender is biological sex, which it is not, and once again defines masculinity in violent terms.

But even if violence is “natural” in apes, it does not begin to excuse it in humans, because – again – that basically says that human people don’t have brains with which to make decisions, that they are unable to reason things out and become moral agents in their own lives.

Matters’ argument is based in an incredibly low and narrow view of masculine identity. She glosses this over by talking about male on male violence, and how this is evidence that cis-men are just inherently violent. But rather than say that this is a masculinity problem that emerges from a desire to prove that a man is defined by that which is not womanly, she chalks it up to biology and a shrug.

We need feminism because people are moral agents with a conscience, not slaves to questionable biological instincts.

Matters’ second point is a confusing mess that is a prime example of how not to read statistics and studies. She cites the wage gap, and says that it’s not discrimination that cis-women are paid lower than cis-men because they choose fields that are naturally low-paying, as though it’s simply coincidence that fields historically dominated by cis-women – like education or nursing – are also some of the lowest paid career choices. She also ignores that the studies on the wage gap account for career choices, benefits, children, education and other factors. Even with all those things accounted for, for cis white men and cis white women working in the same job with the same skill level and education, the men are still paid more than women. There is a gap that is not explained by anything but systematic discrimination.

And it’s important to note that this applies to cis white men and women. Once you factor in race, the gap increases even more. White women don’t make a lot compared to the white man’s dollar, but they’re still more likely to make more than a cis black man, and it’s almost assured that a white woman will make more than a cis black woman for the same work. And all of them likely make more than trans* people.

Socialization seems to mean nothing here – on the one hand, cis-men are driven by their “natural” aggression to commit terrible violent acts, and on the other hand, this “testosterone driven” aggression is a good thing because it makes them good at business and innovation. Social conditioning isn’t even acknowledged – the idea that workplaces are socialized to reward male aggression and punish female acts of the same isn’t even in the thought catalog here.

It is here that Matters says something utterly baffling: “The answer here isn’t that we need more feminism or coddling, it’s that women must learn to embrace more conventionally male traits of assertiveness and dominance (and to try to produce more testosterone?) if they really care about making more money.”

I’m so confused. Feminism is coddling? Not the gender roles that call women weaker vessels and tells them not to worry their pretty little heads about things like finances?

We need feminism because people are individuals and need to be embraced and viewed on the merits of their individual characteristics, not on their conformity to some larger ideas of aggression and submission or masculinity and femininity – however the larger culture defines it.

I am a feminist because I believe people are better moral agents than apes, because I believe we, as a society, can rise above deterministic, transphobic, crap that passes for social argument. I believe that people are people and men and women can both be better than the “roles” society hands us.

_____________

*It should be noted, too, that this kind of biological reductionism is quite transphobic – people who identify as men are men regardless of the level of testosterone in their body and women who identify as women are women regardless of the level of testosterone in their body.

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.

On Anger and Injustice

An underage girl passes out at a party, and members of the high school football team rape her. Pictures are taken and shared around the internet via social media. The girl finds out about her rape the next day from these photos. The attorney for the defense calls social media “a gift” because the girl was already in the habit of exposing herself and thus had no reason to object to  non-consensual photos of her being taken and distributed. And people wonder that I’m angry.

A woman comes to terms with the idea that she has been raped, that her rapist called it rape, and that this rape has ruined her approach to sexuality for a good chunk of her life. When she tells her story, she is told that it wasn’t really rape, that she should take some responsibility for what happened, that it’s useless to drag his name through the mud – despite her not using it or any identifying features.

And people wonder that I’m angry.

An 11 year old girl is raped by 18 men, and a town excuses it by saying that “she dressed older than her age” and “brought it on herself.”

And people wonder that I’m angry.

I find myself, day after day, wondering why I seem to be alone in my anger about these things, why so much of the world seems to find my anger more offensive than those events at which I am angry.

Christian culture doesn’t do a good job of handling anger. Such emotion scares us and make us uncomfortable, and if there’s one thing American Christians don’t want to be, it’s uncomfortable. Discomfiture and angry words are unwelcome, upsetting, and somehow a moral wrong. Often, the offense of being angry is weighed as more important than the cause of the anger itself.

And I see this happen most often in cases of sexual assault and rape. The survivor is told that they must give up their anger, that being angry at how a sexual assault case is handled is refusing to let God work, that anger is somehow a deficiency in personality or grace.

But I’m beginning to wonder if the person who is deficient is not the person who is angry, but the person who seeks to erase the anger.

How is it that, when people can hear of sexual assaults, of people who were violated and made to feel less than, that they can brush it off without anger or even explain it away?

I find myself asking, more and more, “Why aren’t you angry?”

When I am told that I need to “tone it down” and “not be so angry,” I find myself asking, “No, why aren’t YOU angry about this?”

Anger is good. Anger is important. Anger is valid. Feeling angry in the face of injustice is how things should be, not a deviance from the norm. And yet, somehow, those of us who get outraged are “bitter angry feminists” and “clouded by emotion.”

But again I ask, “Why aren’t you angry?”

The only conclusion I have is the old adage, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”

So here is my request: start paying attention. Read the stories of survivors, listen to the ones that are surely in your midst. Find out why they are angry.

And then, get angry. Be angry with us. Allow yourself to understand that anger is helpful, it is clarifying. That sometimes, anger is the only valid response.

So tell me, in the face of all this injustice, why aren't you angry?