Doug Wilson on The Gospel Coalition: How Christian Patriarchy Turns Sex into Rape and Pregnancy into Slavery

Trigger warning for rape and sexual abuse.

Jared Wilson unwittingly set off a flare in the spiritual abuse survivor network on July 13, 2012, when he posted the following quotation from Doug Wilson in a blog post on the Gospel Coalition website:

Because we have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them, we have created a climate in which caricatures of authority and submission intrude upon our lives with violence.

When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.

Abortion, Life and Personhood: A Philosophical Experiment

Creepiest protest photo ever, complete with abstract fetus excised from a woman’s body as though she does not exist. This, fellas, is how you do misogyny: make women invisible except for the contents of their wombs.

A little while ago, Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism posted a link to an article by Valerie Tarico on abortion:

What the Right Gets Right about Abortion and the Left Doesn’t Get

Abortion opponents may be driven by Iron Age sexual scripts, but they are advancing their cause primarily by appealing to universal, secular and –ironically, progressive– ethical principles. If history has a moral arc, the curve has to do with one simple question: Who counts as a person? Who deserves autonomy and opportunity and freedom from unnecessary suffering? Who merits our compassion or respect? In other words, who is morally relevant?

America’s history is one in which generations of our ancestors have asked and answered this question. Time and again they fought and won rights and dignity for those who previously were considered unworthy: the landless poor, religious minorities, Black slaves, workers, First Nations, women. In doing so, they were saying, “These, too, are persons— fully deserving of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Today, when activists fight for rights for gays, immigrants, animals, and once again, women, they are saying the same thing. Battles over who counts as a person have defined the progressive movement for the last two hundred years.

First of all, I’m deeply uncomfortable with a discussion about religious ethics that begins with the founding of America. Immigrants to North America inherited a long tradition of philosophical thought, from the Greeks and Romans to Catholicism. In the sixth century, Catholic philosopher Boethius defined a person as an individuated being possessing both intellect and will. This took place in the context of a debate about the Trinity, defining the personhood of God. The ideas we have inherited about the sacredness of personhood and being come from this original association with the divine.

The idea of the human being, the rational agent, as “created in the image of God,” undergirds secular humanism as well. Our intellect and free will, humanists claim, are what separate us from animals. Separation has thus always been at the center of the personhood debate: whether it was making sense of the Trinity or endowing rights to the Enlightened, white, property-owning male, defining personhood meant giving persons power over non-persons (slaves, wives, children, horses, land). God was above all because he possessed the fullness of the rational nature of which individual human souls took part. The white man, seeing himself as the pinnacle of Creation, likewise saw other human beings as incomplete, lacking the perfection of rationality found in his own person.

An assumption undergirds the history of personhood, which was made explicit early in the Catholic tradition: a person is not just a soul, but also a body. One soul, one body. For Catholics, the joining of soul and body occurs at conception – for Jews, it occurs at quickening. But what’s entirely overlooked in personhood debates is how little abortion disrupts this. Abortion is not, in fact, incompatible with fetal personhood. It’s not even immoral in the light of fetal personhood.

Dear Evangelicals: Stop Talking about a “Culture of Death”

I am pro-choice.

Clearly reprobate, loveless murderers.

I don’t revel in death. I don’t advocate for it. I don’t long for it, idolize it, wait for it, or dwell on it. I have loved people who have died. They are perpetually in my thoughts. But not because of their deaths – because of their lives.

So quit telling me that I’m part of a culture of death.

A Pro-Life Rally that Kills Me Inside

Today, I walked past a rally to take away my rights.

I walk past a group of people – whole families, with toddlers chasing each other and rolling in the grass, with little girls about to get their first periods, with mothers carrying newborns or putting their arms around recent graduates – who have gathered together to declare their hatred for women. They are cheering. They are yelling. “Amen!” holler the husbands. Wives thrust their block-lettered signs in my face with contempt written on theirs. They look ready to spit on me as I climb the stairs to the library

It’s a beautiful day today. This is the kind of day that leads me to worship. It tells me how perfect the creation is, even though I do believe it’s still evolving – ever different, ever changing, always perfect. It makes me grateful that I have eyes, and ears, and skin to feel the earth.  It makes me believe that Eden only disappeared because we stopped looking for it.

Their signs are bright; their robes are black. A young man with a camera phone silently glances at me and then returns to his task. They’re screaming about whores who want other people to pay for them to have sex. Whores who hate children, who hate life. Whores like me.

I’m a graduate student. I use birth control because I can’t afford to buy a bed for my child, let alone food, clothing or toys. I use birth control because religious fundamentalism made me suicidally terrified of pregnancy. I use birth control because I am a loving person, who would never subject a child to a life with a traumatized mother and an empty stomach. I would never bring a child into the world to show her what homelessness feels like. I use birth control because I would never use my example to teach my daughter that being a mother is a curse that truncates her dreams. I use birth control because I like children and I believe they deserve to grow up with freedom and opportunities.

I’ve never seen a Klan meeting, a lynching, a crusade or a Nazi rally. I’m too young to have stumbled upon any of that. If I had, I imagine I’d feel the same way I do today as I pick up my books from the library and try not to look at the frothing crowd as they cry out that my freedoms invalidate theirs.

“YOU WANT US TO PAY FOR YOUR SELFISH LIFESTYLE!”

You don’t know me.

“BABY-KILLING SLUT!”

I used to be one of you.

“YOU SHOULD MAKE A SEX TAPE SO WE CAN SEE WHAT WE PAY FOR!”

If you were dying today, would you record this rally for your children?

“AMERICA IS ABOUT LIBERTY-”

Yes, I grew up believing that, too.

“-AND YOU ARE TRAMPLING ON OUR FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE!”

What about mine?

“LET’S WIN THIS COUNTRY BACK FOR GOD!”

And take it away from women.

I stare at the mothers, wearing their long linen skirts and leaning on their strollers. Has your husband ever denied himself sex to save your health? I wonder. What if that young woman doesn’t really want another child? What then? I can’t see their eyes through their dark sunglasses.

I stare at the children. A cute little boy in a cowboy hat is straddling a railing like a horse.

If I say hello to you, you might tell me I’m dog meat.

He is exploring his world. A world that his parents have made so tiny. I wonder if he will ever tear down the walls and escape.

I’m not wearing a prairie skirt.

I am not a person to you.

I am wearing shorts.

You think I’m going to hell.

I remember the glory of the sun on the day the towers struck 9/11. I remember the birds singing against the odd silence of the downed airplanes. I can feel the hatred bubbling like a fog among the crowd. I look up, away from humanity, and try to breathe in the clear air instead. I try to feel the peace, wondering if the poisonous vapors will choke it all out by the end of my lifetime.

“FREEDOM!” yells the crowd.

They can take our lives.

Christian Fundamentalist Homophobia, Part Two: The Argument is in the Eyebrows

Trigger warning: The following post contains frank descriptions of the hate speech against LGBTQ people that my church used to inculcate fear and contempt in its youth. It’s probably not something you want to read if you’re already having a bad day. I have decided to write about homophobia for two reasons: first, to demonstrate the falsity of fundamentalist rhetoric about “hating the sin and loving the sinner,” and, second, to shed light on the tools fundamentalists use to instill fear of LGBTQ people in their children.

The Unforgivable Sin

Recently, someone stumbled upon my blog while googling this question:

is the unforgivable sin abortion?

I’d forgotten all about worrying about the unforgivable sin. For years, I was filled with anxiety that I might have accidentally “blasphemed the Holy Spirit” by saying something disrespectful, taking communion unworthily, harboring anger against my father, preferring outdoor activities to worship services, etc. There seemed to be infinite ways to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. Why did blasphemy have to be so ambiguous?

My church claimed that the only unforgivable sin was failure to repent. This, of course, only temporarily assuaged the fear and guilt. Time after time, I repented. Time after time, I felt false. I was repenting for all the same things every day! Not cheerfully obeying my mother. Not honoring or loving my father. Not accepting rebuke with a joyful heart. Not pining for the next church service. I began to wonder if I had been really repenting at all.

Why I Don’t Use Bible Verses as Evidence

It has been noted that my writing comes from experience and is secular in nature. This frustrates some of my readers and gratifies others. Here is where I officially stand on the matter.

Bible verses are extremely soft evidence. Fundamentalists have taken them to “inherently” mean something they have made up for themselves. The notion of pledging your virginity to your father? Not in the Bible. The idea that birth control is evil? Not in the Bible. “Abortion is murder”? Even that isn’t in the Bible. If I were to quote Bible verses on these issues, however, I would be instantly dismissed as “misunderstanding” them. That’s because Scripture follows culture in fundamentalist and extreme evangelical circles. You believe something first, and find a Scripture to justify it later. How many evangelicals are allowed to read Paul’s epistles without having certain verses plucked out and spun into elaborate webs of meaning? Abortion, homosexuality, modesty, and submission – they find their way into almost every evangelical-fundamentalist sermon, but it’s a special occasion when preachers decide to expound on 1 Corinthians 13 (the “love” chapter). Interestingly enough, I have never heard an evangelical-fundamentalist sermon that made as big a deal out of giving to the poor (something that was, you know, a big deal for Jesus) as they do out of sexuality and marriage.

I will similarly not be convinced of a moral position with sole reference to Bible verses. This is because I am not so arrogant as to assume that anyone (myself included) has discovered the absolute, ultimate, true meaning of a set of words that have been disputed, dissected, translated, twisted, studied and stretched for two thousand years. Likewise, I am skeptical that most people who have undertaken to explain the Scriptures to me on the internet have read some or any of the centuries of debate that preceded them. I say this not to recommend blindly following Augustine, Aquinas or another father of the Catholic Church (especially as I’m not Catholic), but to cast doubt on the claim that modern American evangelicals can look at the Bible uncritically, through their own cultural lens, and claim that it appears exactly as it is with utter disregard for other interpretations. If you have not weighed other interpretations honestly before choosing yours, you are as objective an observer as a toddler trying to read a book that’s sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool without jumping in.

That said, I am now going to violate my own rule for the purpose of demonstrating that “not dripping with citations from the Bible” does not equal “unchristian”.

What Biblical claim do I have to write about Christianity, and to criticize fundamentalism? I give you two verses. (They’re even in KJV!)

For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this;
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Galatians 5:14

Ye shall know them by their fruits.
Do men gather grapes of thorns,
or figs of thistles?
Matthew 7:16

I do not need to speak Christianese to see the blatant discrepancy between the words of Jesus and the actions of modern American fundamentalists. I also do not need to use Bible verses to demonstrate the disastrous, cruel effects of patriarchy on families and young people of both sexes. I can tell when a person is acting lovingly, and I assure you that “love” exists only in the most perverted way in fundamentalist culture. It exists between individuals in fundamentalism despite, not because of, its theology. Fundamentalist theology makes love so contingent, critical and controlling that it does not really deserve the name of “love” at all. Love is given freely. It is not bound up in ropes made of denim jumper straps. It doesn’t flee to high ground when a woman swallows a pill.

To me, Jesus’ core message was that love should be our moral compass. We don’t need the law to be our conscience for us. We are capable of making decisions that are good for ourselves and help others, based on our own sound intentions and thoughtful observations. Jesus never told anyone to turn off their brains.

The fruits of fundamentalism are crushed souls, mindless obedience, inflated egos, dashed dreams, limited spaces, cumbersome garments, financial ruin, neglected children, and, above all, fear. All of this is done in the name of love, by parents and spouses who usually do love their families. But they are carefully led down the road to believing that you show love by controlling, or by submitting to control, and that the freedom and affection they once had was “of the devil,” their inner voices wrong. If your beliefs are the cause of such cruelty, I assure you that they are as “Biblical” as a ham sandwich. By your fruits, I know you.

When Jesus spoke the truth, he didn’t cite the Torah. When Paul spoke the truth, he didn’t recite what Moses had said. While I am neither Jesus nor Paul, I condemn the idea that only what is said with the label of Scripture attached is moral or valid. Christianese is obfuscating, a masking device used to make abhorrent ideas sound like God’s. If love is written in your heart, your speech will be pure, whether or not your words are plagiarized.

When I write, it is not my desire to convince you to agree with everything I think. It is not to convince you that I’ve found more Truth than anyone else. Compassion is my compass and empathy my exegesis. If you are discerning, you will be able to see through the Christianese to reality, and through my common speech to some of the ideas Jesus gave, which I strive to follow.

So while I will, occasionally, use Scripture to point out the gaping chasm between evangelical-fundamentalist culture and actual things Jesus said, I have no plans to write windy exegetical posts that string together Bible verses only to be told that I “don’t really understand” them anyway, or that my “motives” are “selfish”. I do plan to write about the things I’ve seen, felt, heard and thought – as well as what I’m seeing now, from the other side of the fence.

The Old-School Logic of Abortion in the Message

I recently had a discussion with Libby Anne at Love, Joy Feminism about the logic of anti-abortion beliefs in evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity. I was struck by the difference in our past experiences. Although the Message has grown to look more and more like mainstream evangelical Christian culture by embracing courtship, the Republican party, Vision forum materials, and books by Debi and Michael Pearl, there remain serious differences in emphasis on the issues of abortion and birth control.

There is growing tension within the Message as 21st century cultural values clash with the 1930s-60s lifespan of William Branham’s ministry. Because Message believers make a point of listening to his tapes and reading his sermons several times a week and at church, their faith must negotiate what they believe is the literal truth of Branham’s words with the changing climate of the culture wars. Abortion is a much bigger issue than birth control for most evangelicals. Additionally, evangelical culture is preoccupied with homosexuality. Message believers take anti-gay beliefs on readily, but Branham himself was not as concerned about homosexuality because the gay rights movement simply hadn’t happened yet while he lived.

For Libby Anne, growing up in mainstream evangelical culture, the abortion debate was about three things:

• The soul of the child
• God’s plan for women was to bear and raise children
• The harrowing spiritual and emotional consequences post-abortive women suffer

Only the second of these implicates birth control. The others are about the act of having an abortion, not the effect (not having a child). Incidentally, when I look at Branham’s words, only the second resonates with me.