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.

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.

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.

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??

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.

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?

But I am frustrated by the lack — the intentional lack — of women in leadership positions in my church. I long to hear a female voice from the stage on Sunday morning who isn’t relegated only to singing with the worship band. I am heartbroken that all of our trustees (which is Evangelical for “elders”), all of our pastors, the heads of every department, and the second-in-command people who report to the department heads, are all men; not only are the church leaders missing out on hearing from the gender that makes up at least half of our congregation, but they’re also contributing to our country’s ongoing income inequality between men and women.

Furthermore, I believe that a complementarian doctrine of marriage (that is, one that teaches that the man is to be the loving head of the marriage, and the wife is to respectfully submit to his leadership) can, when taken to its logical extreme, lead to abuse; and even when implemented lovingly, has the effect of suppressing the uniqueness and individual gifts of the husband and wife, depriving both the couple and the world around them of the full potential of their partnership.

And this makes me — a woman who loves Jesus and wants to serve Him fully, a fifteen-year member of my church, a wife who was married there, a mother who is raising her sons there — really, really sad.

Then, a few weeks ago, my church announced that we’ll be hosting a video simulcast of Mark Driscoll’s Real Marriage Conference.

I haven’t followed Driscoll and Mars Hill Church closely, but what I know of them sent up some serious red flags. The snippets I’ve seen of his teachings and excerpts of his book Real Marriage, on which the conference is based, have given me the impression that he is not only a deeply authoritarian complementarian, but also has some very unhealthy views about sexuality. I sat on my feelings for a few days, unsure of whether this was another concern I needed to file away under Nope, I Don’t Always Agree With My Church; but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was really, really worried about this conference and what Pastor Driscoll might tell our members about marriage and sex — streaming live to our auditorium, with no way to pre-screen the video for problematic content.

So I emailed my pastor with my concerns. I shared with him some of the things I was aware of Pastor Driscoll teaching that are troubling to me, and I asked him to please be watchful for parts of Driscoll’s message at the conference that may be contrary to our church’s beliefs, things that may reflect a warped view of marriage and sex.

To my pastor’s credit, he replied my email, thanking me for voicing my concerns to him and asking me to attend the conference and participate in being vigilant for things Pastor Driscoll teaches that could be misunderstood or misinterpreted, so that he (my church’s pastor) can address them on the spot. I’m gratified that he’s taking my fears seriously, and that he’s committed to watching out for problematic content at the conference, and…I wish I could help, but I’m already engaged to be out of town that weekend. Rats.

So instead of participating in the conference, I’m going to read Real Marriage and give it a thorough review here, on the blog. My understanding is that the bulk of the Real Marriage Conference’s content is coming from the Driscolls’ book anyway, so I’m hoping it will give me a good sense of what he will be teaching. And because my pastor said that he believes that Pastor Driscoll “aligns well with [my church] on doctrine and theology”**, I’m going to try to set aside my preconceptions of Driscoll and give the book an honest, thoughtful reading and do my best to engage the content humbly and optimistically. I’ll do my best to set aside whatever objections I have that are based out of disagreements with complementarianism (and there have been plenty of things written by other writers addressing the fundamental problems of complementarian doctrine, so I don’t have too much guilt over not engaging those parts of his teaching; on the other hand, I’ve seen very few reviews from complementarians who are critical of the book) and review the book through “complementarian eyes,” framing my response based on what my church teaches on marriage. Perhaps I’ll find that some of my preconceived opinions about Pastor Driscoll are unfairly negative; or perhaps I’ll find that what he has to say about marriage and sex are still problematic even in the context of complementarianism. Either way, I’ll be able to weigh whether this is someone I’m comfortable having teach at my church, even via simulcast, or whether his virtual presence there adds to my growing feeling of unease.

Wish me luck; I’m going in.

———-

*For instance: We have longstanding supportive relationships with a few villages in Mozambique — we’ve worked with them to establish permanent supplies of clean drinking water and to create a healthy long-term economic system for the villages. A few weeks ago a different village nearby flooded, destroying homes and farmland and the limited water supply, and in the space of two weeks our congregation raised nearly $100,000 for disaster relief. That’s a Good Thing.

**I find this statement pretty disconcerting, and a big part of why I’m trying to get a more thorough understanding of what Driscoll teaches is that I’m really hoping I’m wrong about how awful he is. The possible outcomes of this experiment, as far as I can see, are: (a.) I’ll find that his positions are not as problematic as I’d thought, and I’m comfortable with my pastor identifying him as someone aligned with our church’s beliefs; (b.) I’ll find that his positions are truly problematic, take these concerns to my pastor, and he’ll say, You’re right, this does disagree with what we believe; or (c.) I’ll find that his positions are truly problematic, take these concerns to my pastor, and he’ll say, Yep, we agree with those things, and then I’ll know that my church is not a good place for me to stay. I’m really hoping for (a.) or (b.).

Smith’s book, in fact, is one of only two books from my armload that I actually made it through; I was overzealous at the library it turns out, forgot that while I won’t have school to contend with over break, neither will my children. So, no increase in my available reading time; but at the last minute before spring semester started back, I plowed through Justin Lee’s TORN: Rescuing the Bible from the Gays -vs.-Christians Debate, and oh, I am so glad I did. In it Justin tells his story of growing up devoutly Christian, secure in his relationships with God and his parents, and then realizing as a teenager that he is gay. He is honest and transparent about the struggles he went through as he dealt with his identity – the things he tried in order to rid himself of his same-sex attractions: the support groups, the fervent prayers, the war between two unchangeable parts of himself. It is thoroughly worth reading for anyone who wrestles with the problem of the discord between the Church and people who are gay.

Justin spends a few chapters dealing with the problems of “ex-gay” ministries, which chapters Rachel Held Evans (the eternal Rachel Held Evans! I love her so) reviews here so I won’t rehash, but the short version is: 1. they don’t “cure” homosexuality in the sense of removing attractions to the same gender, much less replacing them with attractions for the opposite gender; 2. they often base their therapies on the roundly-disproven theory that homosexuality is caused by an inability to form healthy bonds with members of the same gender, due to a dysfunctional relationship with one’s parents, and that learning how to be more masculine/feminine and forming close friendships with members of the same gender will make one’s homosexuality disappear; and 3. they provide the church the plausible deniability to believe that anyone who is gay can be reformed by sufficient devotion to Christ (thus reinforcing the belief that a gay person isn’t really a Christian, and a true Christian can’t be gay), and the satisfaction of knowing that the church as an institution is dealing with any gay people within its walls, and so the individual members of the church have no need to see them as individuals, form relationships, and hear their stories.

Reading these chapters made me sad for Justin and for the many gay and lesbian people that we, the church, have insisted on seeing only as a sinful homogeneous monolith and not as the infinitely unique people they are, image-bearers of God instead of problems to be corrected. And then it made me go digging into the recesses of my church’s website to see if we have an ex-gay ministry of our own.

We have two.

One of the groups appears to be an arm of Exodus International, and lists no information except an email contact. The other group has several pages of resources hosted on our church website, where it declares that homosexuality is caused by “a deficiency in the boy’s relationship with the father or father-figure,” thus leading him to “isolate himself from the world of men and masculinity and consequently believe the lie that he is different from other men.” To counteract this deficiency and “diminish SSA,” the support group pairs each man with a male mentor, because “In joining with a male mentor non-sexually, the struggler will be challenged to his very core that he is not different, and in fact, has many commonalities with straight men. … Healing [from homosexuality, presumably] will manifest itself through relationships with straight, godly men and a commitment to Jesus Christ through a prolific prayer life and by devotion to God’s Word.”

This is so problematic.

And now that I have this information, now that I know about this thing that my church is doing that is not just something I disagree with on theological grounds, but is actively wrong and harmful, what do I do? Because I do not want to be a part of supporting this “ministry,” not even tacitly. Do I leave my church? Bring my concerns to a pastor, someone in leadership? Uh, write about it semi-anonymously on the internet?

I don’t know what to do now. I am determined to be an ally to LGBT people, both Christians and non-. And I am committed to my church, although that commitment has been wavering lately, something I intend to write more about soon.

What do I do now?

I had a great friend named Jack, who has since passed, who was all but destroyed by the Catholic Church. So when he began a new, sober life, he turned in prayer to our local mountain Tamalpais, the sleeping Indian maiden whom the coastal Miwok worshipped. I love the memory of this plump salesman from St. Louis worshipping a sacred mountain, beseeching and praising and turning to God in Her distressing guise as a forested landmass.

I have a brilliant friend with a master’s degree who experiences God as a low-seated easy chair whose arms are very long and upholstered and actually hold her. I know a person with a Ph.D. who goes to a church based on Star Wars: May the force be with you.

A year or two ago I would’ve raised my eyebrows at this – new-age relativist hippie crap — but rereading the nativity stories from the Bible and talking them over with my kids have me seeing anew the way God gathered the broken threads of humanity’s utter misunderstanding of God, drew them into something better. I don’t think the Old Testament Israelites had a much better notion of God than the mountain-worshipping guy or the easy chair woman, honestly, given all the genocides and oppressions they committed in God’s name; reading through the Old Testament I can see Him trying to reveal Himself, glimmers of the Divine, but mostly it seems to me to be the story, unreliably narrated, of how humanity’s understanding of their Holy One slowly grew and evolved as God gently brought them closer and closer to Him.

And but so, a couple of different things have had me thinking about how God takes our imperfect, flawed understanding and makes it more perfect. One is this blog post discussing how the medieval Church piggybacked on winter solstice celebrations to celebrate Christ’s birth:

It’s no coincidence that Christmas occurs so closely to the winter solstice, the shortest and darkest day of the year. In premodern rural cultures, the lengthening of the days (i.e., the “rebirth” of the sun) was a significant sign of hope for the coming spring and reason to celebrate. The parallels between the rebirth of the sun and the birth of the Son were simply too easy for the church to ignore them. . . . Why not use an already existent holiday that celebrates hope and light to celebrate the birth of the true Hope and Light of the world? It makes perfect sense.

Further, it’s an example of some of the ways in which the early medieval church surprises us in its progressivity. It did not reject the celebrations and feasts of its surrounding culture (though there were certainly factions calling for that); rather, it adapted them, understanding that condemnation wins fewer converts than a measure of accommodation on non-essential issues.

I do agree with what he’s saying here about conversion-via-accommodation, and the whole post is worth a read; but what really interested me about this post was that it’s another instance in a long history of God taking humanity’s beliefs and practices and reshaping them into something that points toward Himself. Not unlike the way He shaped the Ancient Near Eastern creation myths into an account that revealed Yahweh to the children of Abraham (which we now know as the book of Genesis). And not unlike the way God worked within the belief system of the Magi – who were Persians, probably followers of Zoroastrianism, and whose beliefs had nothing to do with Judaism – and gave them a sign in a way they could understand it, i.e. astrology, to tell them about Christ.

This is a God who, rather than condemning us for our limited understanding, works within it, reshapes it, redeems it. And when that, too, fails, reveals Himself to us in a tangible way: Jesus Christ, the image of the invisible God. I find that beautiful.

Dear God,
Why do you allow such violence in our schools?
-A Concerned Student

Dear Student,
I’m not allowed in schools.
-God

This idea that by making public schools a place where Christianity is not endorsed, we’ve nullified God’s ability to work in them makes me deeply uncomfortable. (I’ll save the tangent about how refusing to institutionally endorse the hegemonic religion is not the same as persecution for another time.) I find this notion that we’ve somehow “disinvited” God from our schools or our culture or our country to be on pretty shaky ground, theologically. It makes God into something like a vampire who has to be invited in before he can enter, or a genie who has to be summoned with just the right incantation before he can do anything, rather than what He is — the omnipotent, omnipresent God. Is He so puny that if we fail to invoke Him properly, He won’t show up? Is He so petty that if we don’t all pray to Him at the start of the school day, He’ll flounce out of the building? Certainly not — He is Emmanuel, God with us, whose love is so tremendous that nothing can separate us from it.

Also, speaking statistically rather than theologically, open endorsement of Christianity does little to deter violence or crime. The US has a much higher number of professing Christians than most European nations, and also a much higher incidence of mass shootings like the one in CT, and of violent crime in general. And as James McGrath wrote, ”Consider all the places where God is formally recognized, invoked, and addressed in prayer, while people within the congregation, in some instances even a pastor or priest or other member of the church’s staff, engages in sexual or other forms of abuse against children.”

The tragedy in Newtown certainly says something about us as a society, although it’s almost impossible to get any two people to agree on what that something is. But what it does not do is prove that we’ve somehow tied God’s hands against intervening in our schools or our culture or our lives. His light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it.

***

Rachel Held Evans wrote beautifully, as always, on this same topic here. You should pretty much just read everything she writes, ever.