In Which I Said Yes

I’ve been cultivating the suspicion for more than twenty years. The first seeds of it fell from the lips of the women at my church, scattered with their promises that they were praying for my mother and they just knew God was going to heal her. When God didn’t, the seeds sprouted, took root in a heart broken open, grew and wrapped my soul like kudzu. It’s taken years to fight back the vines – some, I had to hack away at until everything in me ached; others fell to dust at the first whisper of a breeze. But even with the stalks pruned back to nothing you can still dig down and find tangled clumps of roots wound into the deep places, waiting to send out new shoots, infecting my heart with suspicion only barely dormant:

God isn’t listening.

It’s a suspicion that sees “I’ll pray for you” as a polite, socially mandated nothing, like the “How are you?” from the cashier at the grocery store. Perhaps you’ll be praying for me, or perhaps not – it doesn’t make any difference, really; the point is merely to say it.

It’s a suspicion that believes in prayer as a discipline to develop, an act of obedience and submission to a God who logs the time like billable hours. Praying because it changes my heart, but not because it changes anything around me. (Scratch a fundamentalist-Christian-school alumna and you’ll still find a Calvinist, I guess.)

It’s a suspicion, especially, of anyone who does the whole laying-on-hands, praying-for-the-sick bit like they actually mean it — they’re setting themselves up for disappointment, I’m positive, playing with fire. (Close my eyes and a decade later I can still feel the panic attack that sent me running for the lobby of the church I visited with a friend, whose pastor asked for those battling illness in the congregation to stand up and those around them to lay on hands while he prayed for them.)

And it’s a suspicion of those who treat a personal relationship with Jesus as something like a conversation — people who say they hear back from God when they pray, that they feel God guiding them or calling them or leading them — even when I say I believe the Holy Spirit works in our lives this way, down deep I’m more inclined to think they’re being dishonest or delusional, falsely attributing to God what’s really just emotion. And the heart is deceitful above all things, after all.

I’m not saying I want to live like this, contaminated by suspicion and cynicism. I’m not saying it’s right. But it’s what’s in me, if you dig deep enough.

Which is why feeling something like a calling has me rattled.

When I hear the words come out of my mouth, I feel called to be a writer, there’s a hard edge in my voice: that’s not really a thing, says the critic. Gifted at writing? Perhaps. (Some days I can answer yes to this; other days it feels presumptuous, who am I to say I’m good at this, prideful.) Can’t think of anything else I’d rather do as a career or a hobby? Certainly. But calling means more than just, This is how God made me. It means, I sense God actively asking and instructing me to do this thing. 

Which is kind of a mouthful.

And yet lately I’m feeling something like an active direction. A lot. And I have to battle the impulse to respond with, Stop being ridiculous. If I say I’m a writer Because God, does it imply that I’m too proud, that I think I’m awesome? Saying that God is calling me to write feels like deflecting.

Am I being dishonest and delusional?

My therapist points out that if God is calling me to write, then to not write would be disobedient. And while I’m not big on framing things as disobedient or sinful these days, she has a point.

Some days I feel like my writing is a waste of internet space, I tell her.

There is plenty of internet space to go around, she says. You’re not going to use it up.

If I say God is calling me to write, then writing badly would reflect poorly on God, I say. The pressure is almost paralyzing.

It’s not up to you to make God look good, she says. Let Him handle that part. You just write.

—-

One of the most powerful things about the Renew and Refine Retreat was something that was never said: What are you doing here? There was a baseline understanding that each of us were there because we are writers — that writing is a calling for each of us; something that will look different for each person, but calling was a given. And in that was the freedom to delve deeper, to talk craft and logistics, to explore the big questions like What does it mean to write Truth? without being bogged down by questions like What makes you think you’re supposed to be a writer? Our conversations all started from the place of I am called to be a writer and were met not with Oh, really? but with How specifically is this going to play out, is this playing out now, in your life?

Lisa Colon DeLay, the retreat’s Spiritual Director, led a devotion the first evening about how we as faith writers called by God have a mission that echoes the words of Isaiah, the same ones Jesus quoted at the beginning of His ministry: The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news. Lisa said, To be a writer is to be a prophet, and the word prophet burned through me like fire, ached like pressing a bruise.

Calling. Prophet. Crazy words, these. Words I’m afraid will fill me up with more than I can hold.

I think of Moses, asked by God to bear His words to Pharaoh, and Moses said, No. I can’t. Please not me. And God, frustrated, respects Moses’s No, uses Aaron instead. I think of Mary, told by an angel that she will bear the Word, given the opportunity to say No, please not me, but instead answers: May your word to me be fulfilled.

I want to respond like Mary, but I am fearful as Moses.

—-

Inside the calling to write is also the calling to stay put, to plant myself in a situation that’s making me unhappy instead of leaving, looking for something better, something easier. Seeing a place where things are unjust and need to be made better and leaning in, using my writing to hold a mirror up to people who need to see their faces etched with privilege and grace; shining the light of a Jesus Whose burden is easy into the margins, the dark places where the everyday injustices cast deep shadows that threaten to choke out the light.

And it is scary and exhausting and sick-making, this calling, and the fear makes me want to say No use someone else please; but I want to be a part of this radical grace, this bearing the Word into the darkness, proclaiming good news in whispers and blog posts.

Calling. Prophet. Word-bearer. Crazy words, words that demand I drop the suspicion and just write, so I released it to the wind and my heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. 

Women Aren’t Cake, Part 3: Fat, Modesty, and Eating Twinkies Naked

On Monday I wrote about rape culture, what Christian culture teaches about modesty, and the ways that those two things overlap. On Wednesday I took apart the women-as-cake analogy to examine its implications. Now this is my third and (probably) final post in response to this piece about modesty, and I want to talk about the way fat bodies intersect with modesty rules, and the ramifications of abandoning a male-gaze-centric understanding of modesty.

Let’s try and put ourselves in a guy’s shoes. I think we can all agree that as girls, exercise is important to us. We want to stay healthy and are often working on getting fit. We work out and stay away from carbs or sweets. We use all of our willpower to not eat the chocolate cake on the counter! Now, let’s pretend that someone picked up that chocolate cake and followed us around all the time, 24/7. We can never get away from the chocolate, it’s always right there, tempting us and even smelling all ooey gooey and chocolate-y. Most of us, myself included, would find it easy to break down and eat the cake. And we would probably continue to break down and eat cake, because it would always be there. Our exercise goals would be long gone in no time.

—-

This week I purchased my first bikini.

It’s this hot pink one with the halter straps and the bottom that can be worn three different ways. I ordered it online, so I haven’t tried it on yet. I hope it fits. I hope when I put it on and look at myself in the mirror I don’t lose my nerve.

Every plus-size bathing suit looks like this one.

When the author of the Cake Post writes, I think we can all agree that the majority of girls wear bikinis at any place involving water, I wonder if she has ever tried to shop for a plus-size bathing suit before. You can walk into Target and be confronted with a women’s clothing department packed with racks and racks of mix-and-match bikinis as far as the eye can see, but head back to the Women’s Plus ghetto and there’s one lonely rack of bathing suits — all one-piece, all black or tropical print, all with some sort of ruffle or skirt or something. Go ahead — try finding a size-24 bikini in a brick-and-mortar store.

Even at online plus-size retailers there are piles of one-piece and tankini styles for every belly-baring suit. This assumption that the majority of girls wear bikinis only applies to thin women, is the thing; for the curvy women, the chubby or plus-sized or fat, there is a different assumption: No one wants to see that. 

When I say I hope I don’t lose my nerve, it’s not only because of feeling self-conscious, but also because there are real risks to being a fat woman in a bikini in public. Researching for this post I googled “fat woman in a bikini” and was rewarded with countless pages of photos of women snapped when they weren’t looking, paired with the same comments, over and over: No one wants to see that. Ew! She should not be wearing that! Where’s the eye bleach?

When a fat woman wears a bathing suit, she isn’t compared to a cake. She is still subject to the male gaze, of course, still judged by her attractiveness to men — only she is shamed for not being attractive enough. A fat woman is expected to cover up, not because men will feel lust towards her body, but because they will feel revulsion. (Of course, it’s not just men who say things like this about fat women; and I think there are a lot of reasons that people judge fat bodies as unfit for public visibility, among them institutionalized Othering and fear of our own mortality. But the male gaze, both from men and from women who have internalized it, certainly plays a major role.)

And so there’s little market for the plus-size bikini (although the rapid sales of GabiFresh’s Fatkini line indicate that the tide may be slowly turning). When the author of the Cake Post writes about the sacrifice she makes by choosing not to wear a bikini, I can’t help but hear the privilege that resonates in her voice. She believes that the girls and women she is writing to all share her experience of being thin (that’s what privilege means, after all – your own experience being so normative you can imagine it’s universal). She believes that every other young woman tries to “work out and stay away from carbs or sweets”, and is “working on getting fit” (she says this even as she insists that she is totally not insecure about her body, you guys).  She calls it a sacrifice when she chooses a one-piece suit over a bikini, but what’s important here is that she has a choice. She has no concept of what it’s like when clothes in your size are hard to find, let alone clothes you can afford, let alone clothes you like. And no understanding of what it’s like to feel you’re not allowed to exist in public in anything less than full coverage, the risk of being told your body is disgusting and should not be seen.

It’s impossible for any woman to win the modesty game. You’re too sexy, or not sexy enough. Either way, your body is for being looked at and judged by men. What you want doesn’t matter.

—-

The thing is, even if I do wear a one-piece suit, my body will still be immodest, inappropriately sexual. There isn’t a bathing suit that exists that will hide the curves of my body, the cleavage, the ass for days. There is no way to de-feminize me; the parts of my body that are read as female don’t disappear just because there’s a layer of fabric on them. It’s impossible to look at my body and not be aware of my shape, my womanhood. And yet, what Christian modesty culture teaches us is that when a woman’s body is too unruly to be hidden away, it’s a sin. All over the internet are stories of women who felt shame and self-loathing because of the curves their bodies developed in adolescence: Sierra who bound her breasts and starved herself to keep from developing, Becca whose pastor’s wife kept her from singing onstage at church because the shape of her body would be a distraction, Dani who internalized the lie that her sexual assault was caused by a body that was too much of a temptation for men to resist.

Switch from a bikini to a one-piece suit and someone else will tell you to add shorts and a t-shirt. There is no modest enough because there is still visibly female. 

Is that what this amounts to? I look at the young woman in the one-piece suit in the Cake Post, and she’s pretty, of course, in the very white blonde young way that we read as “all-American,” but she’s also thin, small-chested, small-hipped. Cover her in fabric and, if you wanted to, you could see her as “woman” without thinking “sexual woman.” For women that are curvy, or fat, or Black or trans* or otherwise don’t fit this mold, the denial of our bodies and our genders is harder. Is this another instance, like John Piper saying he didn’t mind learning from a book written by a woman, as long as he didn’t have to see her there in front of him, with her “female personhood” “in his face” — are the modesty rules just another instance of Christians being unable to deal with the reality of women’s bodies?

—-

So where do we go from here? That’s the question people have been asking me since I started writing this series. I agree that the way we emphasize modesty is a problem, they say, but we still have to be modest, and we still have to think about what effect we’re having on men. We can’t just go around naked all the time.

The opposite of modesty is not nudity, fyi.

I feel about this question the way I feel about the assumption that if we say that we’re allowed to eat what we want, we’ll just eat nothing but Twinkies all the time. This idea that the only thing keeping us from going off the deep end is a list of rules. That in a rule-vacuum, we’ll devolve into anarchy, naked and eating snack foods.

Can’t we, instead, trust people to make good choices for their bodies? Trust women to make good choices for their bodies? Instead of relying on the ever-shifting boundaries born from the fear of how our bodies are seen by men, can we allow a women to make her own decisions, guided by the Holy Spirit at work in her heart? Can we let men take responsibility for their own behaviors without shifting blame to the women around them, and let them work their way toward maturity with the help of the Holy Spirit?

Can we let go of the idea of dangerous women and weak-willed men once and for all, and trust Christ instead? If we can do that, we can let go of the modesty rules.

They’re only hurting us. We can do better.

Women Aren’t Cake, Part 2: The Cake Is a Lie

Earlier this week I wrote a primer on rape culture and Christian modesty teachings and how they overlap; now I want to spend some time deconstructing the analogy used in this post on modesty, in which the author tries to understand how difficult it is for men to be around women in bikinis by comparing women to cake:

Let’s try and put ourselves in a guy’s shoes. I think we can all agree that as girls, exercise is important to us. We want to stay healthy and are often working on getting fit. We work out and stay away from carbs or sweets. We use all of our willpower to not eat the chocolate cake on the counter! Now, let’s pretend that someone picked up that chocolate cake and followed us around all the time, 24/7. We can never get away from the chocolate, it’s always right there, tempting us and even smelling all ooey gooey and chocolate-y. Most of us, myself included, would find it easy to break down and eat the cake. And we would probably continue to break down and eat cake, because it would always be there. Our exercise goals would be long gone in no time.

This is how I imagine it is for guys. Girls are walking around all the time with barely any clothes on at the beach or pool! Guys can never get a break from it, even if they’re trying to see past all the bodies to find the smiles and personalities within the girls.

There are some major problems with this comparison, and while I don’t think the author of the post intended to write an analogy that promotes these problems — I think she was genuinely trying to be empathetic towards her brothers in Christ and exhort young women to do the same — I do think it’s important to examine the issues that are present, intent or not.

First, she’s assigning a moral value to the act of eating chocolate cake, and she’s making the assumption that trying to “stay away from carbs or sweets” and “using all of our willpower to not eat the chocolate cake” is a normal state of being. But eating chocolate cake is not, in itself, a sin. Food doesn’t have a moral value (sometimes the provenance and/or production of food can be a moral issue, but let’s leave that aside for now); kale and yogurt are not more virtuous than cake and ice cream. It’s morally neutral. Food is, in fact, something that all human beings must eat, on a regular basis, or they will die. God made us as biological creatures that can get energy and nutrition and pleasure from a vast variety of foods. And living in a state of constant dieting, of constant self-denial and rationalizing and obsessing — not to mention doing all of this while keeping a chocolate cake on your kitchen counter – is evidence of a disordered relationship with food, not a “normal” one.

Second, chocolate cake is not sentient. It has no wants or desires. It does not have to consent before you eat it. It exists solely to be eaten. While some foods may have a secondary artistic or aesthetic quality, the primary purpose of food is to be consumed. To not consume a food is to allow it to spoil, and thus to invalidate its designed purpose. Women, on the other hand — and more broadly, bodies — are designed for many purposes, none of which is to be consumed without agency. To treat a body as a consumable object, a commodity, is to vitally degrade the personhood of that body, and to dishonor the image of God reflected in that person.

Furthermore,  there is (unfortunately) no universe I’m aware of in which cake chases you around and forces you to eat it. You are in charge of what goes in your mouth. You get to choose whether to eat the cake or not eat the cake. Hunger is an innate biological mechanism that is beyond your conscious control, but — assuming access — you get to choose what food to satisfy your hunger with. Just as you get to choose whether to think lustfully about another person. Sexual attraction is an innate biological mechanism that’s often — usually — beyond our control; but when we use our sexual attraction in order to objectify someone, that’s an active choice we make.

Like this, only cake

Except, of course, this particular chocolate cake isn’t just sitting in a bakery, minding its own business, being chocolate cake in its natural environment, is it? No – it is being a chocolate cake at you. This cake is deliberately, maliciously chasing you around, leaving you no escape, demanding that you succumb to its ooey-gooey deliciousness. This isn’t a cake you can say, “Hey, do you mind, I’m dieting” to, it’s not a cake you can decide you can’t safely be around and retreat to the cakeless confines of your own apartment — it’s a cake that follows you to your house, to the office, to church, a cake that violates your boundaries and harasses you. This cake is personal; this cake is targeting you. Getting this cake to respect your boundaries would take a restraining order. Equating this sort of cake-harassment to women who are wearing bikinis in their natural environment — the beach, the pool — is a tremendously false comparison, one that assumes that if a woman is wearing something “immodest” she is doing it at men, deliberately, in a malicious attempt to sabotage their self-control. 

And sabotage their self-control to — what? Here’s the most insidious thing about the cake analogy. When the author writes about being followed around by chocolate cake, she says that after all that time being tempted, she would “break down and eat the cake.”  In the same way, she implies, when a man is constantly surrounded by the temptation of women in bikinis, he will eventually break down and — do what, exactly? She doesn’t clarify. What is it the girls in bikinis are making the guy break down and do? The implication of the Cake Analogy isn’t that he’ll break down and think about boobs; it’s that he’ll break down and consume the women’s bodies. Not just consume as in lust; consume in a way that has a direct effect on physical body of the cake, er, woman. The implication, in other words, is that he’ll rape them — or not rape, exactly; he’ll have sex with them, and it couldn’t really be nonconsensual sex, will it, when they were making themselves available to be consumed like that, so irresistibly enticing? Cake doesn’t have to give consent to being eaten because cake exists in a state of consent by its very nature. Do girls in bikinis exist in this same state?

That’s the problem the author runs into by creating this parallel between women and cake — she doesn’t fully flesh out (ahem) the analogy to explain what it is a guy who is unable to escape the sight of women’s bodies will be driven to do. She elides attraction into consumption. She leaves it open to interpretation, creating a vacuum in which a woman who wears a bikini is responsible for anything and everything a man might do to her. She drove him to it. You know, it. Whatever unspecified sin it is. The woman you put here with me, God — she made me eat it.

—-

The underlying problem with Christian culture’s modesty rules is that they’re part of a vision of the world in which the male experience is preeminent, and women’s experience is secondary. You can call it patriarchy or kyriarchy, if you want; the bottom line is that even though this seems to be a world that revolves around women’s bodies and sexuality, everything the women do is in relationship to how it will be seen by the men. Men are the central characters in this story. The Cake Post describes a world where a woman’s clothing choices must be dictated not by her own comfort, or her sense of style, or her budget, or whether she likes to feel the sun on her tummy when she’s at the beach — all the ways that our clothing choices can be expressions of our own unique God-given selves — but foremost by how she is seen by the men around her. It idolizes the male gaze.

And at the same time that it does this, it debases men into children who cannot control their thoughts or their bodies, who are powerless against the irresistible temptation of women in bikinis.

And it negates the power of Christ in their lives. The men in this vision of the world are unsupported by Christ against temptation and lust; His grace is not sufficient for them, His power is not made perfect in their weakness, and it turns out He will totally allow them to be overtaken by temptation beyond their ability to bear.* This is a world in which the destructive sexuality of the female body and the helpless attraction of the male viewer are more powerful even than the Holy Spirit.

This is the idolatry of the male gaze. This is rape culture. And this is why the cake analogy is a lie.

—-

Stay tuned for Part 3, coming Friday (probably), about being fat in the face of modesty rules and where we can go from here.

*Thanks to Bethany for these scripture verses and for sending my mind that direction.

Women Aren’t Cake, Part 1: Some Definitions and 101-ing

I just got back from an incredible weekend at the Renew & Refine Retreat for Writers, and I have Things To Say about it and the things I learned and what it was like to be in the woods communing with God and like-minded writer-types and lots of mosquitos, but I can’t do that post justice right now. I’m hoping that my resolution to post on my blog more regularly will stick, and you can expect to see a post about the retreat soon. But for now, I have some indignation that needs to be channeled, and so here I am. (Aren’t you lucky!)

There’s a post going around — one of the myriad of posts that pops up every spring when the sun comes back and women everywhere start shedding their sweaters and baring their knees and upper arms — that is written by a woman who wants to explain why she chooses to wear a one-piece bathing suit instead of a bikini, even though she feels it to be a tremendous sacrifice, and why she believes other women should make a similar sacrifice “for the guys around [them]“. Then she makes this analogy to demonstrate how hard difficult it is for guys during swimsuit season:

I think we can all agree that as girls, exercise is important to us. We want to stay healthy and are often working on getting fit. We work out and stay away from carbs or sweets. We use all of our willpower to not eat the chocolate cake on the counter! Now, let’s pretend that someone picked up that chocolate cake and followed us around all the time, 24/7. We can never get away from the chocolate, it’s always right there, tempting us and even smelling all ooey gooey and chocolate-y. Most of us, myself included, would find it easy to break down and eat the cake. And we would probably continue to break down and eat cake, because it would always be there. Our exercise goals would be long gone in no time.

So, listen. I’ve seen a lot of smart posts lately about Christian modesty culture and how it fuels rape culture, and I was hesitant to write another one; but I decided that (a.) this is an issue that needs to be chipped away at over and over again, by as many voices as possible; (b.) I have an audience and a perspective that is in some ways unique; and (c.) part of the learning process for me involves writing it out, putting it into sentences and taking them apart and looking at the pieces and putting it back together again.

WHEN CAKES ATTACK

So I want to start by defining some of the terms used - modesty doctrine and rape culture and other things as I think of them; then I want to deconstruct the post’s analogy between women’s bodies and chocolate cake; and lastly I want to examine the particular way that fat bodies interact with Christian modesty culture. To keep this from becoming a giant wall of text, I’m going to break it up into three posts.

Please understand that I am neither a theologian nor a women’s studies major. I’m taking this on as a layperson in both fields, but also as a woman who lives in a world that is steeped in rape culture and Christian culture and modesty culture and thin culture, and as someone who identifies herself as a Christian, as body-positive, and as a feminist.

—-

Let’s talk first about rape culture. Rape culture is, per Wikipedia, “a concept which links rape and sexual violence to the culture of a society, and in which prevalent attitudes and practices normalize, excuse, tolerate, or even condone rape.”  Melissa McEwan wrote a tremendously helpful 101 post in response to people asking her to define “rape culture,” and I’d encourage you to read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:

Rape culture is 1 in 6 women being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Rape culture is not even talking about the reality that many women are sexually assaulted multiple times in their lives. Rape culture is the way in which the constant threat of sexual assault affects women’s daily movements. Rape culture is telling girls and women to be careful about what you wear, how you wear it, how you carry yourself, where you walk, when you walk there, with whom you walk, whom you trust, what you do, where you do it, with whom you do it, what you drink, how much you drink, whether you make eye contact, if you’re alone, if you’re with a stranger, if you’re in a group, if you’re in a group of strangers, if it’s dark, if the area is unfamiliar, [...] to always be alert always pay attention always watch your back always be aware of your surroundings and never let your guard down for a moment lest you be sexually assaulted and if you are and didn’t follow all the rules it’s your fault.

Rape culture, put as briefly as possible (which is difficult because rape culture is one of those nefariously multifaceted things that has its fingers in nearly every aspect of our society) is a cultural mindset that “legitimate rape” is only ever violent stranger rape, the kind of rape where a bad man jumps out of the bushes and overpowers a woman who is in no way doing anything (like being intoxicated or wearing revealing clothes or walking alone at night) that could be construed as contributing to his assault of her, and in which she fights back and yells “No” as loudly as possible. Other forms of nonconsensual sex, our culture says, where maybe the woman is drunk or wearing something skimpy or underage or leading him on or she’s had sex with him before or she’s had sex with anyone else before or she’s married to him or she’s trans- or she doesn’t fight back hard enough or she’s coerced into consenting or the victim is a man — those aren’t rape-rape, says rape culture. (Click through to Melissa’s post for links to instances of all of these situations being argued as “not really rape,” if you need proof that this is how our culture really does talk about rape and sexual violence.)

Hear me say this: Any sex that is not with someone who consents fully and without coercion and doesn’t withdraw her or his consent during sex, is rape.

—-

Now let’s talk about how “modesty” is used within Christian culture, and then I’ll circle back around to rape culture and where Christian modesty culture fits into that paradigm.

Evangelical Christian culture centers its modesty doctrines around two key passages: the one where Jesus says that a man who lusts after a woman has committed adultery with her in his heart, and the one where Paul admonishes believers not to cause a fellow believer to stumble. In this context, women are taught that they are responsible for “helping” their brothers in Christ to not think lustfully about them, mainly by dressing in a way that doesn’t cause the men who see them to have lustful or sexual thoughts about them. Men, after all, are visual creatures, says Christian culture; they have little control over the fact that seeing a woman wearing revealing clothes makes them feel lust, and a woman who does so is essentially making a man sin. So it’s up to the woman to cover her body appropriately, or risk causing the men around her to stumble.

There are a few problems with this doctrine. The first is that it conflates sexual attraction with sinful lust. Emily Maynard wrote a brilliant post about this, where she said:

I propose that we’ve lost sight of what lust actually is. In fact, we have confused biological sexual attraction with lust and called it sin. [...]

God created you to desire another person for affection, intimacy, and relationship! Being physically attracted to someone is not lust. [...]

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

Lust is 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 certainly can have a sexual component, but when we reduce it merely to sexual reactions, we miss out on God’s heart for all people: infinite value.

Lust is not a passive thing that happens to a guy who sees a girl’s cleavage. Lust is not a boner. Lust is an active behavior, a choice to use a person’s body or appearance or sexuality for your own selfish pleasure. It is taking something that does not belong to you — someone else’s body, whether the physical thing itself or just the image of it in your mind — and using it for self-gratification, filing it away as something to get off to instead of honoring that person as the image-bearer of God. Lust transforms its focus from person to object.

And as such, the responsibility for lust lies entirely with the luster, not the lustee. No spaghetti straps or tight shorts can make a person lust after another person. And no high necklines or denim jumpers can prevent a person from choosing to objectify someone.

There’s a reason that Jesus addressed his rebuke against the lusters, not the lustees. “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away!” he admonished — not, “If your right eye causes you to stumble, the woman you’re lusting after needs to put on something less revealing!”*

But within Christian modesty culture, the responsibility for men’s lust lies with women and their clothing choices, and it’s completely fair — expected, even — for men to feel angry at and robbed by women who show more of their bodies than men feel is appropriate. Dianna E. Anderson has compiled a list of comments from men who replied to a Christian “modesty survey” — they include things like, “[Women who dress immodestly] are distracting good men, dishonoring God and marriage, and offering themselves cheaply”; “If you flaunt yourself, you have the attention of lots of guys, but you instantly lose their respect and admiration. I would never consider courting a girl that advertises her body like a product”; “It actually really angers me. I find it disrespectful…. Do they realize that they have just caused someone to have sexual thoughts about them in their mind?”; and “It’s not their body to flaunt. It belongs to Christ and their future husband. How dare they flaunt something that God did not permit them to flaunt?”

These comments are not outliers; they represent the backbone of Christian modesty doctrine, the same doctrine that instructs 8- to 12-year-old girls to check their outfits by bending forward in a mirror to make sure no “future cleavage” — seriously – is revealed, thus conditioning them to the male gaze and their own dangerously sexual bodies before they’ve even hit puberty. Christian modesty culture says that women’s bodies are not only inherently sexual, but inherently sexual at men; and that men will sexualize women’s bodies unless women take active steps to mitigate their inherent sexuality by viewing themselves through the male gaze and covering up anything that might entice a man to “stumble.”

—-

So it should be pretty apparent how modesty doctrine fits in with rape culture. It’s simple, really: modesty teachings center on the objectification of women, and say that being objectified is the natural state for a woman’s body unless she takes care to prevent it from happening. It says that men can’t help but objectify and lust after women’s bodies, and that women are responsible for making sure that their bodies are as un-objectifiable as possible.

When women are responsible for how men mentally use their bodies, it’s not a far from there to making women responsible for, or at least complicit in, how men physically use their bodies.

When a man is powerless over what his mind does when he sees a woman’s cleavage, it’s not far from there to making a man powerless over what his body does when he sees a woman’s cleavage.

When woman who wears clothing that the viewer doesn’t perceive as sufficiently modest is thought to be “flaunting” or “advertising” herself, it’s not far from there to saying that “she was asking for it.”

Even if the people who promote modesty doctrine never lay a single finger on a woman, they are still advancing a narrative that feeds rape culture, that says that women’s bodies exist primarily to be looked at by men, that says women are responsible for how men sexualize them. They reinforce objectification. They advance a narrative about sex and relationships in which men use and women are used, a narrative that leaves no place for agency or consent. And this is rape culture.

—-

So those are some basics on rape culture and modesty doctrine, which turned into a much longer post than I’d envisioned but which, I think, lays a necessary foundation for the writing I want to do about the Cake Post and about how fat women fit (or don’t) into modesty doctrine.

I’d love some feedback and discussion about this, especially since I Am Not An Expert and this whole topic is pretty new to me. What do you think of this? Have you encountered modesty teachings before? Do you like cake?

—-

*Women can lust too, of course – both sexually, and also emotionally and mentally and morally, as Emily described above. But the conventional wisdom in Christian culture is that men are sexual and visual, and women are emotional; and when our only definition for lust is “feeling sexually attracted to someone because of the way they look” and we’ve erased the fact that quite a lot of women, too, have sex drives and can be visually stimulated, we only ever talk about lust in the context of the male gaze. So while I don’t want to overlook the fact that women can be just as culpable in this area, the only conversations we have about lust are framed in terms of how men view women, and this is the conversation I want to critique.

Two things about stories

This is a story about how I gave my story to someone who was careless with it. Someone who was offering diet advice that was masquerading as an invitation into a genuine conversation. I mistook concern trolling for a sincere desire for connection; and even though I should have known better — did know better — I made myself vulnerable when I should have protected my story, my Self.

And I knew they weren’t safe, weren’t a trustworthy story-holder. This isn’t the first time this person has put my story into a back pocket and forgotten about it, sent it through the wash with their jeans. Or folded it into a paper airplane and sent it gliding off into goodbye. Or smiled politely and handed it back unread: “Neat.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve said, No, I’m done making myself needlessly vulnerable, done gathering the scraps of myself off the floor and reassembling them with scotch tape in the wake of a person who is careless with my story. And then, sure enough, when they reached out again with the sales pitch for the advice they believed I needed, there I went imagining good intentions where there were none and offering myself up again: grace means giving the benefit of the doubt!

And then, later, again: carefully, gently smoothing the wrinkles and creases out of a story that has been crumpled up and thrown away.

That was not grace; that was poor boundaries, making myself vulnerable to someone who is not safe, who is not capable of holding my story in their hands and seeing the gift, the importance, the weight of it. This was a person who didn’t want to know me; they wanted to change me. They had what they thought would fix me in all the places that seemed, to them, obviously broken; and they weren’t interested in hearing what I had to say about the broken places, or whether I was broken at all.

Grace is saving my story, my me-ness, for when they are ready to listen, to hear. Grace is understanding that even with all the benefit of the doubt and I have stacked around them like sandbags, that person may never be ready to listen at all; may always think I’m broken and damaged. Grace is my knowing I am whole anyway, and resting in the love of the One Who made me so.

Grace is my not giving in to the stab and ache of rejection and throwing my story in a bonfire, but keeping it safe, knowing its worth. Grace is cultivating the relationships with people who will be safe, careful, with the secret, important parts of myself; seeking to know me for who I am, not for who they think I need to be.

——

Diet proselytization is not very different from religious proselytization. (The type of people who are eager to share unsolicited eating and lifestyle advice are often as devoted to their diets as others are to their religions, after all, and see everyone around them as a potential convert.)

At church a woman in my small group was telling us about her new coworker. “I thought she was a Christian, and I was so excited, because there aren’t any other Christians in my office!” But the new coworker soon corrected her, and she was heartbroken at losing a Christian comrade at work; she told us, “I guess we won’t be friends after all; I’ll just have to witness to her instead.”

Another friend, J., was telling us that a friend from college, one he’d lost touch with, has come back into his life. He’s gay, and J. said that he thinks God brought his old friend back into his life so J. could help him turn his life back toward God.

These friends of mine, it’s like they don’t want to deal with the mess and chaos of relationships; they’re not seeing the fact that you don’t just get to dive in and start giving advice on how to fix the other person’s broken places. They don’t understand that you must honor the other person’s story if you want them to hear yours; and that it’s the stories that shape us, not the platitudes and advice. And this is frightening, because the power of stories is that we can be shaped through hearing, and being careful with, another person’s story, when we think we were there to shape them.

Redemption comes from a relationship, not a sales pitch; and sometimes it isn’t the other person’s redemption that happens, but your own.

Reading Real Marriage, Chapter 3: Fake Jesus, Real Man

This post is the third in a series in which I’ll review Mark and Grace Driscoll’s book Real Marriage though a complementarian lens. I myself do not believe that complementarianism is a morally or theologically sound view; but my church does, and it recently hosted Driscoll’s Real Marriage conference. In a recent conversation with my pastor, he said that he believes that Pastor Driscoll’s theology aligns well with our church’s beliefs; so I am trying set aside my own egalitarian beliefs and read Real Marriage in light of what I know my church’s soft-complementarian teachings on gender to be, and to try to understand what Driscoll — and by extension, my church — is teaching about marriage, and whether those views are ones that I can live with in a church. Previous posts: Chapter 1, Chapter 2.

From Real Marriage chapter 3, entitled “Men and Marriage”, page 47: “The key to understanding masculinity is Jesus Christ.” 

Pastor Mark, I’ma stop you right there. The word you’re looking for in that sentence isn’t “masculinity” but “Christianity.“ I’m not going to use this post to deconstruct the problems with gender essentialism as practiced in some camps of Christianity, because I’m trying to be careful to look at the other problems with the book and leave complementarian gender roles alone (although the longer this goes, the more I am questioning my sanity in taking on this project with that restriction, because if I didn’t think complementarianism was bollocks before, Real Marriage has sealed that for me). And that means that I’m not even going to touch most of this chapter.

But this thing Driscoll is doing here, where he warps Jesus into a model of his, Driscoll’s, preconceived notion of manhood? I cannot let that slide.

photo c. 2007 by James Gordon on flickr. Some rights reserved.

Driscoll starts by writing that men should imitate Jesus’s example of being both “tough” and “tender.” As an illustration of Jesus’s “toughness,” he writes, “Jesus was tough enough to go to the cross without shedding a tear” (45). I’m going to go out on a limb and say that even though the gospel writers don’t actually use the word “crying,” when they describe Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane as “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Matthew 26:38) and “in anguish” so much that “his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44), it’s pretty safe to infer that there were some tears happening there, too. And guess what? Facing the prospect of betrayal by those closest to you, horrific torment, and an agonizing death followed by spiritual separation from God, and crying? Weeping, even? Does not constitute a Manliness Fail.

And when Driscoll makes statements like this, what he is doing is erecting a false Christ — an idol; an anti-Christ, even — and pushing people to worship this thing, his own creation. Worse, pushing people to try to emulate this false Christ.

That may sound like I’m being overly harsh with my characterization of what he writes in this chapter. But that’s just the tip of the false-Christ iceberg, and there’s plenty more where that came from.

Next Driscoll spends four pages writing truly asinine caricatures of straw not-real-men with names like Little-Boy Larry, Good-Time Gary, and “I’m the Boss” Bob, all so that he can pick them apart for not being manly enough; and then he writes,

None of these guys are the kind of men Jesus wants us to be. The key to understanding masculinity is Jesus Christ. [ed. note: Then why, given that Jesus is widely assumed to have never had a sexual relationship, does Driscoll spend so much time elsewhere using heterosexual sex as a yardstick for other men's masculinity?] Jesus was tough with religious blockheads, false teachers, the proud, and bullies. Jesus was tender with women, children, and those who were suffering or humble. Additionally, Jesus took responsibility for Himself. He worked a job for the first thirty years of His life, swinging a hammer as a carpenter. He also took responsibility for us on the cross, where He substituted Himself and died in our place for our sins. My sins are my fault, not Jesus’ fault, but Jesus has made them His responsibility. This is the essence of the gospel, the “good news.” If you understand this, it will change how you view masculinity.

You [Mark addresses this chapter specifically to male readers] may not be physically big, strong, or tough. But if you are rightly tough and tender, and you take responsibility for yourself and others, then you are truly a man’s man, a godly man, and by grace you are being conformed into a man like the perfect God-man, Jesus Christ. (47-48)

Here are some things about this little section that are blastingly wrong:

“Jesus took responsibility for Himself. He worked a job for the first thirty years of His life”. Okay, yes, Christian tradition (but not scripture itself) holds that He worked as a carpenter or some kind of craftsman, although it’s unlikely that he was literally working that job for the entire first thirty years of his life. (Pedantry!) But all four gospel stories pick up adult Jesus’s story at the beginning of His public ministry, and none of the accounts talk about Jesus working any kind of day jobs to fund Himself and the disciples. In fact, Jesus’s ministry was funded by some wealthy women who are named in Luke 8:1-3 — Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, “and many others. These women were helping to support them [Jesus and the Twelve] out of their own means.” 

Driscoll is picking and choosing the details from Jesus’s life that he wants to use in order to make his case for a definition of masculinity that equates to taking responsibility for supporting oneself and one’s family (he has elsewhere twisted scripture to say that a man who is not the breadwinner for his family is “worse than an unbeliever”), and the Jesus he describes just isn’t supported by scripture.

Furthermore. Driscoll holds Jesus up as an example for men, but not for women. He’s right about some of Jesus’s traits — the stuff about being “tough” with the leaders who were using religion to oppress people and “tender” with the oppressed? Yep, that’s right on. But that isn’t to suggest that the only people who are supposed to be following Jesus’s lead on this stuff are men. All through the New Testament are instructions given to all believers, not just the male ones, to become like Christ. The fact that a couple of verses in Ephesians and 2 Corinthians compare men to Christ in their relationships with their wives doesn’t somehow nullify all those other instructions that are for everyone.

Chapter 4, entitled “The Respectful Wife,” is the counterpart to this chapter, written for women. Does it uphold Jesus as a model for Christian women as well? Spoiler alert: the only way that Real Marriage says that a woman should look to Jesus is as “the key to growing in respectful submission” (83). None of this other tough-tender stuff, just submitting. Driscoll doesn’t even use the word “submit” when he talks to men about being Christlike — for men, it’s called “taking responsibility”. Never mind that the Apostle Paul called all believers to cultivate an attitude “like that of Christ Jesus, who…made himself nothing…and humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross!” (Phil. 2:5-8). Never mind that Paul writes elsewhere – in the context of marriage roles — that believers are to submit to one another out of reverence to Christ (Eph. 5:21).This is not a gendered instruction. What Driscoll is doing is dissecting the character of Jesus into two distinct pieces and saying that one of those pieces is definitively masculine, and the other definitively feminine – and furthermore, conflating that gender distinction with the message of the gospel itself.

Next Driscoll expounds on his point about how real men take responsibility for others:

Men are like trucks – they drive smoother and straighter with a load. Adolescence delays this load carrying indefinitely. [ed. note: Must...not...make...obvious...joke...] …So load yourself. Take responsibility for yourself, your wife and children, your church, your company, your city. Real men don’t look for other men, organizations, and governments to carry their load. Real men carry their own load. (48)

Setting aside his not-very-veiled criticism of the social safety net, I’m only going to point out that Driscoll is fundamentally misunderstanding how the Church — the family of God, the fellowship of believers, the body of Christ, however you want to call it — is supposed to work, specifically in modeling Christlikeness. Paul writes to the church in Galatians: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (6:2).

It’s as if Driscoll is deliberately neglecting the core messages of the gospel — of unity and mercy and no longer having to live up to arbitrary, externally imposed, legalistic expectations; of following a Savior Whose burden is not heavy like the millstones of the legalists and the teachers of religion, but Whose yoke is easy and Whose burden is light. Driscoll is missing all of this, in favor of adding more rules, more restrictions, more weight to the burden. And he’s relying on dishonesty about Jesus to make his point.

So when Driscoll says that understanding (his own very gendered version of) the gospel “will change how you understand masculinity”? What he’s really doing is demonstrating how his warped understanding of masculinity is shaping his understanding of the gospel into something hideous and restrictive.

———-

There is plenty more problematic content in this chapter. There is a section on “honoring your wife physically” because she is the “weaker vessel” that is full of incredibly disturbing violent language to the point that it reads like abuse erotica, written under the guise of What Not To Do. This is part of a larger section on ways husbands abuse their wives (physically, verbally, emotionally) that goes into graphic detail about hurtful language a man might use to hurt and humiliate his wife, yet never once addresses the possibility of sexual abuse and rape within a marriage — never once mentions, much less examines, the harm that is done by men who assert that their wives’ bodies “belong to them” regardless of their wives’ agency. Another section is full of scarelore about the horrible things that happen to families where the mother works outside the home. There are pages and pages of questionable statistics about how everyone is having unhappy marriages except people who hold to conservative evangelical theology, and there’s a really incredible mischaracterization of the egalitarian model for marriage on page 61.

But frankly, I think I’ve had enough of this book, and of Pastor Driscoll. I’m three chapters in, and I don’t think I can stomach any more of his rotten, sick-making theology. In the previous two chapters, he gives unwise counsel and overestimates his own expertise on marriage without ever humbly, realistically examining his own shortcomings, while exaggerating and over-emphasizing the shortcomings and incompetence of others; he blames abuse victims for being abused and equates being a victim of abuse with committing sins like selfishness, adultery, and porn addiction; he makes sweeping judgments and misrepresentations about other Christians who hold differing views from him.

And in this chapter, Driscoll is doing violence to the gospel. He is willfully reshaping Jesus into something other than who He is, just to make a contrived point about what manhood is supposed to look like. He abuses scripture, and he maligns the Christ I worship and the scriptures I love. 

And I am done with him.

I guess we’ll see what that means for my relationship with my church.

A Good Friday Meditation

There is holiness in the waiting days.

Now, here, we sit back, holding the book full of spoilers, sure that know the way the story will end. But Good Friday means we loosen our grasp on the certainty of the thing we’re promised, and we live in the terrifying space between exhale and inhale.

There is holiness in the waiting and the mourning and the longing.

There is holiness in the darkness, in the long hours before the night is broken by the sound of a newborn baby’s wail, the rumble of a stone rolling away.

We build it into our calendar, the waiting time: the longing of Advent, the grief of Holy Saturday. Immersing ourselves in the fear and the loss and the promise we don’t quite understand.

The empty manger. The sealed tomb. The silence.

God is in the grief, the days of not-yet-new, the ache and dread. God is in the ticking-clock panic of the space after we exhale, waiting to breathe in life, hope, redemption.

We wait.

Reading Real Marriage, Chapter 2: Friends with Acronyms

This post is the second in a series in which I’ll review Mark and Grace Driscoll’s book Real Marriage though a complementarian lens. I myself do not believe that complementarianism is a morally or theologically sound view; but my church does, and it recently hosted Driscoll’s Real Marriage conference. In a recent conversation with my pastor, he said that he believes that Pastor Driscoll’s theology aligns well with our church’s beliefs; so I am trying set aside my own egalitarian beliefs and read Real Marriage in light of what I know my church’s soft-complementarian teachings on gender to be, and to try to understand what Driscoll — and by extension, my church — is teaching about marriage, and whether those views are ones that I can live with in a church. Previous posts: Chapter 1. 

This second chapter, entitled “Friends with Benefits” (because heaven forbid Mark should miss an opportunity to remind the reader that being married means having lots of sex), is on the whole less angry-making than the first chapter was. In it, Mark makes the point that friendship is a foundational part of a marriage relationship, and so discussions of marriage from a Biblical standpoint should not only look at the Bible verses about marriage, but “they should also examine the mountain of Bible verses about friendship because those apply to the most vital human friendship of all with our very best friend, our spouse. The Bible itself weds marriage and friendship. A wife* in Song of Songs says, ‘This is my beloved, and this is my friend’ (5:16)” (25-26).

(*I wasn’t under the impression that Song of Songs actually specifies that the couple is married; can anyone who knows better weigh in on this for me?)

So, okay, I’m with him on this (inasmuch as I think think that the best way to understand the “biblical perspective” on a given topic is to use a cross-reference to look up all the verses about that topic; I rather think that learning the core concepts of the Gospel — loving your neighbor, doing unto others, uplifting the humble and caring for the oppressed, etc., and the trajectory of scripture as moving from strict Law toward ever increasing mercy, grace, and justice — and then studying in light of those concepts is a more useful way to gain a truly “biblical perspective” about life. But I take his point: studying marriage involves studying friendship).

Mark starts the chapter by using as an example the marriage of Martin Luther and Katherine von Bora Luther, who was one of the nuns that Martin Luther helped to escape from a Benedictine cloister. Driscoll writes that “their marriage did not start with love or attraction, as Katherine was not physically attractive” (21), which struck me as a particularly chauvinistic statement — of course Martin wasn’t attracted to her, because she wasn’t objectively attractive, and therefore they couldn’t have been in love; but he goes on to describe all the ways in which they were loving companions to each other throughout their marriage, and the tenderness that he displayed toward her in the last years of his life, and it’s all very sweet, actually. Maybe Mark will continue along these lines….

Nope! Next he goes on to cite statistics that wives and husbands are way more satisfied with the quality of their sex lives when the quality of their friendship is good. See, it’s not really about friendship after all, it’s still about sex.

Mark and Grace Driscoll

Also, friendship is an important part of marriage because it is “a safeguard against emotional adultery,” which Mark defines as “having as your close friend someone of the opposite sex who is not your spouse” (25). This is literally the only thing he says about this concept (I checked the index – yep, that’s it!), leaving the impression that a close friendship between members of the opposite sex is so obviously sinful and adulterous that he doesn’t even need to address it any further. But it’s one of those things I’m having a hard time parsing. Is he saying that being close friends with someone of the opposite sex will inevitably lead to “real” adultery, the physical kind? That being friends with someone is a violation of your spouse’s trust? That men and women simply cannot be friends without romantic feelings developing? That being close friends with someone is the emotional equivalent of getting naked and bumping genitals? Why does this apply only to opposite-sex friendships and not to same-sex ones? Couldn’t I be emotionally cheating on my spouse just as effectively by having a close emotional friendship with another woman? Why is it the genders of the individuals that are important in determining whether emotional adultery is taking place, and not the degree of emotional entanglement?

Also, here is a quote, emphasis mine:

Marital friendship requires both the husband and wife to be willing to invest what it takes to be a good friend. Friendship is costly in everything — time, energy, emotion, and sometimes money. Those who want their spouses to be friends without seeking to be good friends in return are selfish and demanding. And those who want to be good friends but do not help their spouses reciprocate are prone to be taken advantage of, abused, neglected, and suffer from their marriages. (26-27)

Yes, he really did just explicitly say that people who don’t “help their spouses reciprocate” (what does that even mean?? Mark doesn’t bother to explain) are drawing down abuse on themselves. This is transparent victim-blaming, and it’s gross. Shame on you, Mark Driscoll.

Mark goes on to write using a gimmick that I’m guessing he uses all the time in his sermons, saying, “As a fun way to look at the issue, here’s what we believe it means to be married F-R-I-E-N-D-S” (27). I’ll run through his acronym:

F - Fruitful: “The goal, center, and purpose of marriage is not self, spouse, or cildren. The ultimate goal of marriage is and family is the glory of God” (28). He says that in a good marriage, your partner should be “a wise friend used of God to make you more fruitful,” and vice versa. He also says something that made me go WTF?: “It was God Himself who not only created marriage, but also commanded that it ‘be fruitful.’ This explains why Satan did not even show up until Adam and Eve were married” (28). Wait, what?

R – Reciprocal: He includes a list of ways spouses can do things for each other (“She leaves encouraging notes with my keys or on my car steering wheel in the mornings,” “He lovingly makes me coffee every single morning,” that sort of thing). He also criticizes the language people use of “falling in/out of love” — “In using the language of ‘falling,’ they are cleverly avoiding any responsibility [in abandoning one's spouse or committing adultery], as if they were simply required to follow their hearts. but the Bible tells us not to follow our hearts, but rather ‘guard’ them because they are prone to selfishness and sin” (29-30). He goes on to say,

According to the Bible, love does not come from our hearts, but rather through our hearts. This is because “God is love,” and in relationship with God through Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit, we receive God’s love to share with others. It is through the presence of God the Holy Spirit in our lives that we are able to love our spouses. (30)

This must be why non-Christians don’t love their spouses, and why the divorce rate for Christians is so much lower than that of non-Christians, you guys!

Also: one of the examples of spouses reciprocating is a husband who insists on kissing his wife good-bye, even if she doesn’t want to (because she’s running late) and is trying to avoid him; “he will stand in front of my car, and climb in to make sure he does [kiss me]” (31). Because a good model for married love is ignoring your spouse’s protests and overriding their lack of consent so you can get physical with them anyway!

I – Intimate: Mark explains that there are three types of marriages: back-to-back, shoulder-to-shoulder, and face-to-face. “A back-to-back marriage is one in which the couple has turned their backs on each other. As a result, they live separately and do not work together (shoulder-to-shoulder) or draw each other out in friendship (face-to-face). … A shoulder-to-shoulder marriage is one in which the couple works together on tasks and projects…. A face-to-face marriage is one in which, in addition to the shoulder-to-shoulder work, the couple gets a lot of face-to-face time for conversation, friendship, and intimacy” (32).

Makes sense so far. Then he goes on to say that women’s friendships are usually face-to-face and built around intimate conversation, and men’s friendships are usually shoulder-to-shoulder as they bond over a shared activity (at least he said “usually”…). So his advice is that a wife needs to learn to spend time in shared activity with her husband in order to build a good friendship with him; and a husband needs to learn to have deeper and more intimate conversations to be a good friend to his wife. “For her, intimacy means ‘into-me-see,’ which means she wants to know her husband and be known by him” (33). I don’t have a problem with this advice, besides the pervasive gender essentialism, I just wanted to highlight this sentence because “into-me-see” made me roll my eyes so hard they fell out of my face.

E – Enjoyable: Mark says that an important part of friendship is enjoying each other, which, duh? He also says a good spouse should be “someone who knows how to have a good time, relax, go on an adventure, or just toss it all to the side for a holy diversion” (35): spouses with anxiety disorders or depression or who find spontaneity difficult need not apply!

N – Needed: Mark discusses how in the beginning, God as “one God in three persons living in unbroken union and eternal communion” created man and saw that it was not good for him to be alone, so God’s solution was “a friendship in the covenant of marriage.”

Curiously, God made the woman from a rib taken out of the man’s side. Perhaps this was because she belongs at his side as an intimate equal and not in front of him as feminism would teach or behind him as chauvinism would teach. (37)

Facepalm.

Also, ladies need to be needed: “A man needs his wife as his companion and friend. And a wife needs to be helpful by God’s design. The more his need for her and her need to help him are celebrated as gifts from God, the faster oneness and friendship blossom in the marriage” (38). A man needs to have a helpful companion, and woman needs to be a helpful companion! Women don’t actually need anything from their husbands; we just live to serve! (Is it too soon to facepalm again?)

D – Devoted: This acronym is starting to get away from Mark here; he’s basically rehashing points he made already. Sticking together, give and take, yada yada.

S – Sanctifying: “We truly do not know how selfish and sinful we are until we live with someone in marriage. Most of our dating is spent pretending to be people we are not, and after a few years of marriage, our spouses start to discover who we truly are rather than the characters we have been acting like” (40). Mark, you are not making a very good argument against cohabitation here!

Mark says that a good spouse needs to lovingly call us out on our bullshit (I’m paraphrasing a little), because this kind of honesty helps us grow. Which, you know what? I agree with him on this, too. Weird.

***

There are some weird, seemingly contradictory bits laced throughout this chapter in reference to complementarianism and the leadership/submission model Mark endorses, but since I’m trying to avoid going into that right now, I’m going to keep collecting these bits and examine them in a future post.

Other than that – that’s it for Chapter 2, which was relatively painless. I’m sure Chapter 3, “Men and Marriage,” will be just as easy to get through! Right? …Right??

Reading Real Marriage, Chapter 1: Whither the Counselors?

This post is the first in a series in which I’ll review Mark and Grace Driscoll’s book Real Marriage though a complementarian lens. I myself do not believe that complementarianism is a morally or theologically sound view; but my church does, and it recently hosted Driscoll’s Real Marriage conference. In a recent conversation with my pastor, he said that he believes that Pastor Driscoll’s theology aligns well with our church’s beliefs; so I am trying set aside my own egalitarian beliefs and read Real Marriage in light of what I know my church’s soft-complementarian teachings on gender to be, and to try to understand what Driscoll — and by extension, my church — is teaching about marriage, and whether those views are ones that I can live with in a church. 

Because the publishers made the first chapter of the book available online, much has already been written about this section; so I won’t spend a lot of time here. As is customary for Christian how-to books, the Driscolls use this section to try to accomplish three things: 1. Tell their own redemption stories, with heavy emphasis on the sinful lifestyles Jesus saved them from; 2. Demonstrate what makes them experts on the topic and why we should listen to them — in this case, Mark and Grace describe how they went from an unsaved, premarital-sex-having dating relationship to a saved, lonely, unhappy, very-little-sex-having marriage, to a healthy, robust, lots-of-sex-having marriage, and presumably it’s having fixed their own marriage through applying “what God says on the subjects of sex and marriage” (page 4). Because they’ve already written so well about this chapter, I’m going to crib from Rachel Held Evans and Dianna Anderson’s observations about Chapter 1:

1. Mark talks about sex A LOT. The cover of the book says that it’s about “Sex,Friendship, & Life Together,” and apparently that order was intentional, because it seems like everything he has to say about how well a marriage is functioning comes down to sex. From Dianna Anderson:

I’m just going to say it outright: Mark Driscoll is obsessed with sex to a practically unhealthy level. It is almost scary how often sex is mentioned throughout this first chapter – it is as though every thought about marriage and gender has to do with the act of sex and the quality of intimacy between partners.

I fully recognize that sex is a big part of relationships and problems with a sex life can be symptomatic of other relational issues. BUT, I would refrain from going in the opposite direction – as it appears Mark Driscoll has done – and making it seem as though sex is the only thing that matters when it comes to a healthy, functioning relationship.

Here’s what I mean: Driscoll makes sex into a larger issue than it needs to be in discussing marriage. If this first chapter is any indication, the bulk of this book will center on sex, which fails to recognize that sex is only a part of a whole, rather than the whole itself. He interjects sex into a conversation where sex doesn’t necessarily need to be brought up.

Indeed, sex is brought up as a descriptor of a couple’s marriage on the very first page of the Introduction. Mark is telling about a couple who came to him from marriage counseling after their children had grown up and left home, and he writes: “With their children grown and home empty the glue that had once held them together was gone, and they were reduced to life as nearly sexless roommates” (p. xiii, emphasis mine).

Later in Chapter 1, he describes the manly-man pastor of the church he began attending in college: “He had been in the military, had earned a few advanced degrees, and was smart. He was humble. He bow hunted. He had sex with his wife. He knew the Bible. He was not religious” (p. 9, emphasis mine). Everything he writes about the problems he and Grace had in the early years of their marriage is framed in terms of their sex life. And in the introduction, he lists the issues the book intends to address, and four out of the five items are sex-related:

In this book we share biblical truths about some of the marital issues you may face, including how to be your spouse’s best friend, dealing with porn addiction, overcoming sexual assault, how to avoid being a selfish lover, and yes, even those sex questions you’d be too embarrassed to ask anyone, especially your pastor. (xiv, emphasis mine)

Every indication in the introduction and first chapter is that this is a book about sex, with some other marriage stuff thrown in for color.

2. It’s all about Mark. A big selling point of the book is that it’s co-authored by both Mark and Grace Driscoll, ostensibly giving both of their perspectives on issues that have affected their marriage. And Grace does write a few sections of Chapter 1, but most of the words — and seemingly all of the perspective — come from Mark, even in areas where it would be more beneficial to hear Grace’s voice, such as when they dealt with Grace’s past sexual abuse. Dianna Anderson writes (after quoting a section of the book in which, after years of a troubled sex life, Grace discloses to Mark that she is a victim of “physical, spiritual, emotional, and sexual abuse” – only the last of which Mark spends any time on, of course):

Well. Okay. So at least he admits that he has an overbearing personality and had made some mistakes when it comes to handling his obviously “delicate” wife. But look again at how he discusses the assault – “Grace’s problem was that she was an assault victim. The details of her abuse broke me. It hurt deeply [ed. note: keep in mind it's still Mark speaking here]. … In forgiving and walking with Grace….”

Note also that it is still all about him and his reaction. She – even though she is co-authoring this book! – doesn’t even get to discuss her abuse…. And it should be noted: This is all that is mentioned of the abuse. One paragraph that is more about Mark’s reaction to her revelation than how physical, spiritual, sexual, and emotional abuse was hard to recover from and clearly created trust issues. Rather than allowing Grace the grace of being the victim, Mark puts himself in the victim’s shoes, takes on that role, and silences her discussion of it.

Even the way the next paragraph begins is telling: “As Grace began working on her root issues…” It’s not “as we began to work together in helping Grace understand and recover from her past,” it’s Grace doing it on her own. Keep in mind, this is a section following four pages of talking about how Mark and Grace had to work together to get over her sin of indiscretion. Evidently, when it’s an issue that affects Mark in a more direct way (her cheating on him), it takes both of them. Something that affects Grace primarily (and by extension of being her husband, him, however indirectly), it becomes her issue to work through. (all emphasis Dianna’s; I edited somewhat for excerpting purposes)

3. Mark displays a seriously warped attitude about the role of counseling. As he tells the story of his and Grace’s marriage continuing to fall apart as they are hit with major emotional crises and extreme loneliness and despair, on top of which Grace “was suffering from painful stress-related issues caused by her public relations job” (11), the one thing they never do is seek professional counseling. Some excerpts:

A bomb had just dropped, and shrapnel was everywhere! … How could we ever get through this? Mark tried to get counsel from other men, but they didn’t know what to say or do. I (Grace) didn’t think we should tell anyone since we were just planting the church, but that decision only made the pain go on longer for both of us. We should have sought counsel from someone, but we just both felt alone (12).

I (Mark) had been out of touch with my old pastor since graduation and had no one to talk to. Some friends tried to give us counsel, and they meant well and did their best, but ultimately they were of little help. So I put my head down, kept my pants on, and decided not to be the porn or masturbation or adultery guy (13).

We didn’t know how to talk through these extremely hard issues without hurting each other more, so we didn’t talk about them at all. … Occasionally we’d meet a Christian pastor or counselor who was supposed to be an expert in these areas, but we never spoke with them in much detail, because in time we found out they either had marriages as bad as ours or they had been committing adultery and were disqualified for ministry. We felt very alone and stuck (14, all emphasis mine).

So, okay, there were no counselors who were qualified to help Mark and Grace because their marriages were just as bad as the Driscolls’. But this doesn’t stop Mark from counseling hundreds of couples during this same time. Apparently having a bad marriage disqualifies other counselors – trained, professional counselors — from giving marriage counsel, but it doesn’t disqualify Mark:

[Mark preached through the Song of Songs] on the joys of marital intimacy and sex. … My counseling load exploded. … Day after day, for what became years, I spent hours meeting with people, untangling the sexual knots in their lives, reading every  book and section of the Bible I could find that related to their needs. … One particularly low moment occurred when a newly saved married couple came in to meet with me. I prayed, then asked how I could serve them. [The couple asked a lot of very specific questions about whether certain sexual activities were acceptable for them to do as a Christian married couple.] After they left the counseling appointment, … I remember sitting with my head in my hands, just moaning and asking God, ‘Do you really expect me to do this as a new Christian, without a mentor or pastor, in the midst of my marriage, and hold on for the next fifty years?’ Peter walking on water seemed an easier task (14-15).

I’m just dumbfounded by this. I just cannot understand how Mark came to the conclusion that he was qualified to do counseling with his parishioners, “as a new Christian, without a mentor or pastor, in the midst of [his] marriage.” It seems like not only an obvious recipe for disaster, but also a huge violation of the trust of the people who came to him for counsel.

I myself have been seeing a Christian therapist — a woman who has her Psy.D. from an accredited Christian university and is a member of the APA — for six years now, and during that time she has been transparent with me about the things that she does to ensure that she remains objective and well-qualified to counsel her clients. She went through therapy herself when she was in grad school as a requirement for her program, and when she lost a family member a year and a half ago, she began seeing a therapist of her own again; she has two mentors, both fellow psychologists several years older than her who helps make sure she’s meeting her own needs and setting healthy boundaries; and again, she has had years of training in becoming a counselor.

Pastor Driscoll, according to Wikipedia, has his Bachelor’s degree in communications with a minor in philosophy and an M.A in exegetical theology. There is no part of his education that qualifies him to be a counselor, and he was trying to do counseling not only with no training, but with no support network and a clear lack of appropriate boundary-setting.

This is not healthy for him or the people he was counseling. And he describes above that he knew it wasn’t healthy. And yet at no point in this chapter does he indicate that he in any way thinks that he did anything wrong by continuing to counsel. 

Neither does he ever write anything to qualify his statement about how all the Christian counselors he met were, essentially, hacks. And although I haven’t read past the first chapter yet, a search of the index doesn’t indicate that counseling or therapy or psychology or anything along those lines will come up again, except for a section in chapter 4 where Grace talks about how a wife should “respectfully counsel” her husband.

Instead, Mark writes things like, “If it’s rooted in biblical wisdom, keep trying until it works or you die” (xi). And “[I]f you really get into the issues in your marriage, you will likely have seasons of crisis and chaos to overcome before you get to a better place” (xii). And he says these things without ever suggesting that helping people to work out just how to apply “biblical wisdom” to their lives in a way that works is exactly what Christian psychologists are trained to do, and that it is a million times easier and more effective to work through these seasons of crisis and chaos with a trained professional who knows how to help.

This, to me, is a huge, almost unforgivable omission…and it makes this tweet from yesterday rather ironic:

The world isn’t lacking in counsel. It’s lacking in wise counsel. Looking for advice? Make sure you go to a wise source.

— Mark Driscoll (@PastorMark) March 22, 2013

***

There were a few other minor things that bothered me in Chapter 1, but these were the three main threads that stood out. Here is one last observation, from the last paragraph of this chapter as he’s talking about what the book will address:

And if you have unconfessed sin and/or a past of sexual sin, including pornography, fornication, sexual abuse, bitterness, and the like…. (18, emphasis mine)

This list of “sexual sins”? One of these things is not like the others. Being a victim of sexual abuse (I’m assuming that’s what he means here, and not that the reader might be sexually abusing others; in which case, that’s not like the other things in the list, either, because it is a crime) is not a sin that needs to be confessed. Hopefully, in the context of a safe, supportive, and mutually honest relationship, a person who had been abused would be able to tell their spouse about the abuse, and the two of them could work together to help the victim heal. Maybe with a professional counselor.

But for Mark to throw “sexual abuse” in a list of sins his readers may need to address in their marriage does not give me faith in his ability to handle abuse and assault issues well in this book. Instead, it just makes me feel incredibly sad for Grace.

 

So, that’s it for the first chapter, and honestly, it does not leave me feeling optimistic about this book. It certainly hasn’t done anything to establish Mark’s credibility in speaking about marriage issues. I’m hopeful that as we move to Chapter 2, on friendship, things will look up…because if this first chapter is an indication of how the whole book is going to be, I may not make it.

Pastoral Premarriage Counseling and Sex: Incentive to Lie

I’ve been working my way through Real Marriage for my review — the first post of which will be up tomorrow — and, tangentially, I’ve been thinking about pastoral premarriage counseling and the problems it poses. Many evangelical churches, mine included, require that if a couple is going to be married in that church, they undergo premarriage counseling with the pastor who will marry them. And many of these churches, mine included, have a policy that if the couple is already sexually active, they abstain until the wedding; and if they are living together, they do everything possible to make other arrangements and live separately until the wedding.

So. Suppose you’re one half of an engaged couple, and you’re seeing your pastor for premarriage counseling. And you and your fiance have been having sex. And you and your fiance like having sex, and maybe you feel guilty and you’ve tried to stop but it’s too much of a part of your relationship now, and after all, the virginity ship has sailed, and it’s being a virgin on your wedding night that’s the important thing, so you keep having sex with your fiance.

And your wedding invitations have been sent out, and everyone knows you are being married at Church You Grew Up In, by Pastor Who Baptized You When You Were 13, and this is a big deal. And then in your premarriage counseling, your pastor asks, So, are you two, ahem, sexually active?

And you both answer, quickly, No.

Because if you say yes, your pastor will expect you to either stop having sex, or get married somewhere else, by someone else. This is the policy. And you know you’re not going to stop having sex. And you certainly don’t want to have to explain to your parents why the wedding has to be moved to a different venue, and you have to find a different pastor — who will probably require premarriage counseling also, so now you have to explain to your parents why you are being married at the courthouse by a Justice of the Peace.

So you lie. And you move on with your counseling, and you talk about finances and children and communication and all those other things you talk about in premarriage counseling. But you talk about these things with your lie hanging in the air of the pastor’s office, coloring everything you discuss, making it so that you can never quite engage.

And suppose, also, that you have been raised in church, raised to believe sex was the special gift that is only for your future spouse, and that giving that gift away to someone else was a grave sin, a sin that would probably ruin your marriage, because the gift you had for your spouse is gone, and that specialness will always be missing from your marriage. Suppose that all of the shame that you have internalized about sex through those years has shone white-hot every time you and your fiance, then just your boyfriend or girlfriend, has slept together, ever since that first night that making out led past groping and humping and all the way to official, PIV sex.

So the best way to mitigate this guilt that you feel, you both rationalize, is to get married. After all, having sex with your future spouse isn’t nearly as sinful as having sex with someone who isn’t your future spouse; if sex is only for your someday-husband or -wife, then giving it to that person a little early isn’t nearly as bad as giving it to someone else entirely.

So because of the sex, you get engaged. You ignore the warning bells in your brain that say I’m not ready or This relationship isn’t working or I’m too young, and you go ahead with your wedding plans.

What you really need, right now, in this about-to-make-a-huge-mistake moment, is someone objective, someone you can be completely honest with, someone who can help you evaluate whether this relationship is really a good thing for the two of you to commit to. A premarriage counselor.

What you have, instead, is a pastor that you cannot be honest with, because the stakes are too high. A pastor who is not a disinterested, objective third party, because he is both your counselor and your rule-enforcer.

So you go through your premarriage counseling. You get married. Your wedding night, despite all the warnings, turns out not to be any less special just because you’ve seen each other naked before.

But now you’re married. And all the baggage you carried into this relationship doesn’t go away just because you’re no longer having illicit, sinful, unmarried sex. You need help with this relationship, and now the stakes are a million times higher because you’re capital-m Married. And you might have just made a huge, huge mistake.

Maybe we, the church, should stop putting couples into this situation, where the one person they need to be completely honest with to help them evaluate their relationship before they get married is the one person that they have a huge incentive to not be honest with. Maybe we need to rethink how we do premarriage counseling.

 

What do you think? If you married in the church, did you have pastoral counseling before your wedding? How did it go?