Good and Bad Fruit
In Which I Begin Reading Sheila Wray Gregoire's Forthcoming Book
As I mentioned yesterday on the pod, Baker Books sent me an advance copy of Sheila Wray Gregoire’s She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teaching on Sex, Self & Speaking Up. I’m not sure why I got this copy. Is it that I am transmogrifying from a “content provider” into an “influencer” so much so that I am just in the way of getting books sent to me,? If so, as they say, I am here for it.
Today, because I managed to snatch a few minutes to read the first chapter, I’m going to divulge my initial thoughts. But first, because the Interweb waits for no person, Gregoire, on Twitter, had a wack at Denny Burk’s piece and I’d just like to make my own comment about that. Here’s her tweet:
If you click through, you can see she is busy in the comments. I understand how she might feel offended that Burk mentioned her book by name, but it seems like she missed one critical phrase—”to the exclusion of.” That means, for those who didn’t get to have a fancy education for some reason, that two things are both true, but someone is trying to pretend like they aren’t both true, or is unwilling to see that one is more important than the other. Gregoire is privileging the sexual satisfaction of women over the other purposes of marriage. It’s not that sexual satisfaction doesn’t matter at all, Burk didn’t say that it didn’t matter, it’s just that—and I know this is super offensive to say—it is not the most important part.
Furthermore, in the way of so many difficult things about life, when you actually spend all your attention on the satisfaction part, like happiness, it proves most elusive and, ironically, not satisfying. It turns out that the other purposes for which marriage was instituted by God are the ones with more long-lasting pleasures. But we will have to come back to this subject later, because I really do want to get to the book.
There is no introduction as yet, and an instruction on the back says that I may not officially quote from it, because they might still make changes. This puts me in a real pickle because I’d love to draw your attention to a couple of lines. Instead, I will attempt to describe how she sets up the project.
Gregoire, and her two co-authors, one of whom is her daughter, begin by looking at how the teaching of various churches (not particular churches, but “churches” in general) have affected the self-esteem, flourishing, marriage satisfaction, and sex lives of women. After that, they make recommendations for how women should raise their daughters, based on their findings. The book is full of graphs and charts. One of the co-authors is a statistician.
So, I know I am not going to like the book from the outset because, in the very first chapter, they announce they will be looking at “the fruit” of church teaching to discover whether it is good or not. They unironically quote Matthew 7:17-20 and then blithely announce that—not to worry—their studies have found that going to church is basically good for women. In fact, across some professions—hospitals, nursing homes, the military—chaplains play an indispensable role. Studies show that “religiosity” is good for human flourishing. Religion helps people in their psychological lives, so it’s ok to go to church. They cite the American Journal of Epidemiology which found out, through a lot of exhausting studies, that it is actually good to pray and attend religious services. Reported happiness rates increase with these sorts of activities.
At the same time, they go on to say, there is a lot of really bad teaching that will actually harm your child if you are not very careful. Bad youth group theology is making its way into Instagram reels and TikTok and so even though the purity culture has been basically debunked, all that harm hasn’t gone away and so you should be super careful about what you’re daughter is being taught.
Even where she is right—you should be really careful about what your daughter is being taught, you almost can’t be too careful—Gregoire isn’t going to be able to solve any of the problems she’s concerned about, because her frame is part of the reason she continues to have them. Purity Culture (TM) however shame-inducing and awful, is a symptom of the wreckage of human relationships that happened with the loss of, in Illich’s word, “vernacular gender.” And, similarly, Fruit Checking (TM) is what happens when you cannot perceive or understand what kind of relationship God has with the world, let alone the Church.
I am so very tired of the Fruit Checking metaphor. Like the misapplication of the word “kindness” as an exegetical rubric that makes one reject the kindness of God, “fruit checking” doesn’t work the way Gregoire thinks it does. While you do look at the fruit to judge the goodness of the tree, you have to use the measures of the scriptures themselves to judge whether it is good or not. If you look at the fruit in the wrong way—employing various measures given by various ideologies—you’ll become confused and think that transing the kids makes them “flourish” or that getting babies out of a catalog is fine because two men deserve to be happy in their “marriage” to each other.
Is the tree a good tree? Is it a tree put there by Jesus? Then it’s ok to eat its fruit. If you look at the numbers—or at least privilege the numbers over something else, like, say, the Bible—you will end up eating off a tree that, though it is a delight to the eyes, and promises to make thee wise, continues to impede your journey to the Tree of Life. This is not a numbers game. This is not a flourishing game. This isn’t about personal choice. This isn’t about whether you want to be an ethical shopper or an attachment parent. The point of the Christian life is to be obedient to Jesus. All the 20,000-person surveys in the world will not tell you the truth if they are measuring something that doesn’t have anything to do with anything.
I see you raising your hand at the back. It’s not about “eating” the fruit of the tree. You’re supposed to peer at it to see what it is saying to you. But you can’t even properly look at the fruit on the tree if you are not connected to the tree itself, or, in the words of Jesus, The Vine. No matter which way you go at it, it is Jesus who determines what is good fruit and what is bad fruit.
When you walk into a church and try to understand if it is a good one or a bad one, you have to first agree that The Church (TM) is the Body of Christ wherever it is faithfully represented on earth. It is a mystical body, meaning that God brings it about according to his purposes and will. However subpar the teaching, however pathetically the people “flourish,” if the Word is preached, the sacraments are administered, and discipline is enacted, it is a church that brings its members into the kingdom of God. Many of the people who go to the church will be saved unto salvation and get to go to heaven first, but then, at Christ’s return, get their bodies back and begin to live happily in the New Heavens and New Earth where sorrow and sighing are no more.
I don’t want to be pedantic, but if you are deciding not to go to church because of the statistics on flourishing and happiness, I’m not sure what to tell you. You’re making, like the Anchorman on a hot California afternoon, a bad choice.
And finally, Purity Culture, that great boogy-person, while it, allegedly, got a lot of stuff wrong, it did get one essential point right—sexual sin is bad sin and it is good to protect children and young people from falling into it. Could they have done a better job? Yes. But satisfying married sex is actually not one of the “fruits” that the Bible talks about. The “fruits” are things like godliness, purity, obedience, forbearance in suffering, selflessness, and so the long day wears on. What is that bit that Peter says in his second letter to the Church that’s so difficult and terrible?
His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins. Therefore, brothers, be all the more diligent to confirm your calling and election, for if you practice these qualities you will never fall. For in this way there will be richly provided for you an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Which is to say, going to church is essential. Suffering along in a church is the way that Christians go together toward the Land of Rest. It is a difficult journey, full of troubles and trials and disappointment. Rarely does it look or feel like “flourishing” which is not actually a biblical concept, but something invented by Christians rather recently, loitering under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, chattering merrily with Satan like it’s no big deal at all.
So anyway, more on this book as I get to it! Have a nice day.
Hey Anne – I want to lovingly push back on some of the things you’ve mentioned in this blog post. First, looking at the comment from Denny Burk and Sheila Gregoire’s response to it, you state that Sheila misses “one critical phrase – ‘to the exclusion of.’” But that is clearly not what Sheila meant – she states that she is “not sure why [Denny Burk] seems to frame [sex] as an either/or thing,” that either you can focus on procreation or on pleasure. Sheila never argues against sex for procreation. What she does focus on in her book The Great Sex Rescue is that when sex is seen as an obligation for wives only and not their husbands, when Christian men are taught to treat sex as something that is owed to them, and when these beliefs combine to create marriages where there is no mutuality (or, in the words of The Great Sex Rescue, where there is intercourse in which one party (the husband) is physically satisfied while the other party (the wife) is left not only physically unsatisfied but often also emotionally hurt (pp. 12-13)), many, though of course not all, Christian women are stranded in unhealthy marriages where they not only feel unloved, but also can feel attacked by their spouse. Sheila is not “privileging the sexual satisfaction of women over the other purposes of marriage” – she’s saying that the mutuality of sexual satisfaction in Christian marriages has been so lost that some Christian sex teachings are actually harming women. Her goal is not to examine all the purposes of marriage – she is examining the sexual part of marriage, and she has found that there are teachings rampant in the church (and, yes, she uses the term “churches” because these teachings cross denominational divides – see her website baremarriage.com for further information) that produce Christian marriages with wives who are broken and husbands who either don’t understand how to help or don’t care about helping the women they are commanded to love. Sheila never says that other parts of marriage aren’t important – she just argues that privileging one party’s happiness to not only the exclusion but also the damage of the other party is not fulfilling the Biblical imagery of marriage.
Second, you take issue with what you see as Sheila’s “Fruit Picking” and privileging a “numbers game” over using “the measures of the scriptures themselves to judge whether [the fruit] is good or not.” I understand how frustrating this can be – when people throw around the phrase, “well, what fruit is it producing?!” willy-nilly, as if as soon as something is “godly” it immediately starts producing The Shining Golden Apples of Holiness, the phrase loses all meaning, doesn’t it? But that is not what Sheila is trying to do here, and this is why she and her coauthors based their books on statistics (for The Great Sex Rescue, they used a professionally-developed and -studied survey of 20,000 women). They clearly demonstrate not only the relationship, but also the causative effect, between certain unfortunately common church teachings and harm to women in Christian marriages. As Sheila says, “Christians, as a whole, do tend to have better sex and happier marriages than people who are not religious. But . . . just because something is better for the group does not mean you as an individual think it’s anything to write home about” (The Great Sex Rescue, 10). When people like this group of women demonstrate, not anecdotally but statistically, that some common church teachings harm women, I would strongly disagree that this is fruit picking or privileging numbers over scriptures. Rather, it is revealing truth, and all truth is from God. You state that “the point of the Christian life is to be obedient to Jesus.” Jesus says to love one another as he loved us (John 13:34). If that is true, where is the love in creating marriages where women feel used, degraded, and often are in pain? Jesus loves women just as much as he loves men. Therefore, there is no reason I can conceive of that he would promote marriages based on teachings that damage women, and the teachings Sheila examines in The Great Sex Rescue do harm women. That’s a demonstrated fact. And when churches teach false doctrines that harm any part of the population to which they minister, that church is not preaching the Word. So, no, don’t leave a church because you don’t see your particular variety of fruit growing on that bough – but do leave if you see rottenness at the core.
I am really looking forward to reading She Deserves Better – I know I deserved better when I was learning about sex in a “Christian” purity-culture context, and I hope that the damage I sustained will not be transmitted to the next generation.