I did two epic things yesterday. I listened to Sheila Wray Gregoire’s The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How To Recover What God Intended and I cleaned my bedroom. You might think that it’s no big deal to clean an entire room—or rather, three rooms, for, O Best Beloved, rather than being mashed up against our six enormous children on the main level of our lovely old house, I and my caro sposo dwell in the unheated, uninsulated attic, a lovely, crisp, airy apartment comprised of office/bedroom and office/closet and bathroom—but it is if you’ve put it off for weeks and weeks. And the book, likewise, has been sitting in my queue for at least six months, ever since I received that free copy of She Deserves Better. I’m sure you’re longing to know more about both of those things, but there is something more pressing—the Gen Z generation has discovered something crucial to being a human.
That is, taking a nice long walk without any earbuds filtering out the cacophony of your own thoughts and feelings. This discovery is literally blowing their minds:
If there's one thing Gen Z knows how to do, it’s setting trends. We’ve had “everything showers”, “bed rotting”, even “bare minimum Mondays” – which have been adopted to varying degrees of social media fanfare. And now the latest Gen Z “movement” taking the youngest generation by storm is, ironically, not that new at all. They call it “silent walking”, that is: going for a walk without their phones, or without listening to music, podcasts, or any sort of technological distraction. Podcaster Mady Maio takes credit for “unintentionally starting a movement” that, she promises, will “change your life”. In a video on Tiktok, she explains her boyfriend was the one who first challenged her to take a walk without any distractions. “No AirPods, no podcasts, no music. Just me, myself, and I,” she said in the video, which has now gained almost 500,000 views. “And at first I was like f**k no, my anxiety could never – which is probably what you’re thinking – but something within me was like let me just try it.”
But, of course, it was amazing as you already know it was:
“Look, the universe and your intuition comes to you through whispers, so if you’re never alone with your thoughts and you never get quiet you’re gonna miss the whispers,” she said. “And those whispers are the most important to be paying attention to.” Ms Maio said silent walking gave her the “clarity” she had always been looking for. “The brain fog lifted, suddenly all these ideas are flowing into me because I’m giving them space to enter. “Look, if I can do it, you can do it. I promise, just try it out. ... Give yourself the gift of getting quiet and listening to those whispers.”
I don’t want to depress you, but I really don’t think this “trend” will catch on. Even though the opportunities for sarcasm abound:
“Is this real? This is just walking … like how people did it before technology,” one person wrote. “Gen Z just discovered walking,” another wrote. Someone else proposed another idea: “We’ve discovered this new idea called ‘thinking’.”
Honestly, this article is a little bit like how I feel about The Great Sex Rescue. While there’s a lot in the book that’s reasonable and obvious, it is nevertheless depressing that yet another volume of advice about how to have sex better has become so popular. Evangelicals—whatever those are—love their trends and fads. It’s the one cultural trait that persists across ethnicity, age, class, and gender. Obvious things are constantly rediscovered as if they are new and special.
For example, yes, sex should be pleasant for both parties involved. Yes, it’s not just about the pleasure of the man. Yes, sex can’t save a failing marriage. Yes, all coercion is bad. Yes, not all women are the same, and neither are all men. And yes, men should be able to control themselves and not be lusting lugs who wreck everything and blame all the women. But also, though one segment of the population apparently did not know that these things were true, the fact of them being delivered up as of first importance with “scientific evidence,” of a new way of explaining “everything” is something deeply peculiar to being American.
Moreover, as more of the world goes on fire, there is a certain desultory ennui—is that the word I want?—to Christians continually and modishly mimicking secular assumptions about how to have a happier life. Given the character of Americans as a whole, Gregoire can’t help but write the same book that has already been written, while at the same time rejecting the whole body of exhortation that came before her. She complains about other people’s cultural assumptions while at the same time being unable to observe the way her own are baked into the usual cake she’s serving up as if it’s fresh, innovative, and delicious.
Just one last thought—it irritated me months ago and still does, that Gregoire doesn’t appear to be curious about where the so-called harmful narratives that she debunks come from. The rise of the Evangelical sex-help book arose not in a vacuum, but in a culture where personhood began to have only one meaningful characteristic—the sexual one. In a world replete with sexual confusion, well-meaning people, even Evangelicals, didn’t have the tools to build or even retain a robust, fully Christian view of the person. Why they didn’t have those tools has been told a hundred different ways, and so I must ask, with tears in my eyes, what did any of us expect Christians to do when Play Boy and Brittney Spears were the height of “cool?” When pastors, theologians, and philosophers were losing their nerve on one hand, and embracing the zeitgeist on the other? When cultural change was barreling down the mountain and sweeping real people away in its torrent? People not having good sex began to be not one factor among many, but the only morally valuable one that existed. Of course Christians began to say that Christians can have sex too while at the same time trying to persuade those who shouldn’t have it not to.
Every person who wants to castigate and malign the past should ask xerself, what would xe have done—at the time? The Love and Respect and Sheet Music writers—and Focus on the Family for that matter—were playing a rear-guard defensive action doomed to failure. Everything they warned about turned out to be worse than they could have ever imagined. They were doing what made sense then. They were applying the wisdom of the ages to a dumpster fire of vanity. Trying to more fully and affectionately understand the world that gave rise to these writers would do a lot to correct the errors plaguing us now, including the ones Gregoire herself makes.
Which is to say, the word “harm” should be litigated more intensely among Christians. Gregoire and her co-authors claim the messages imbibed by evangelical women through these dated and maligned books have caused them “harm.” They rate the books according to some metrics they developed. I have to get my hands on a physical copy so I can peer at the graphs more closely. In the meantime, I would love for someone to get in touch with me and let me know if their criteria are reasonable. To me, with my headphones plugged in (ironically enough) and my vacuum running (I kid you not) they seemed arbitrary. As if—and, for real, I welcome correction—they knew what they were going to find before they began.
What does it mean to be harmed? The biggest harm for the person is to reject God and end up separated from him forever. Previous generations would have said that the brief life of a Christian—a breath when one considers eternity—is about endurance, about hanging on faithfully to win a crown that never fades away. That sounds morbid and useless to anyone wondering if they can take a walk through the park without a stream of content from the internet. Except that, if you did take a moment to think, to hear some divine whisper from outside yourself, the degree to which you can orgasm is a very small consideration when you stop to think about the nature of God and all his works. All previous Christian generations understood that there was some terrible reckoning coming and that your choices here determined what your life would be like there. Not sinning was, to put it mildly, more important than experiencing pleasure or even “flourishing,” and rightly so.
I’m going to be doing a “deep dive” on Gregoire—listening to her podcasts and so forth—because that is how it’s going to be. While I do that, you might like to take a walk without your phone if you feel like it. Consider being human rather than a cyborg. Or not! I would never presume to tell you what to do. Have a nice day.
I think the re-discovery of the silent walk is a great metaphor for the improved sex life book. Both are subjects so well documented that no book need have been written, and no Tik-Tok recorded.
I don't know that many Evangelicals (whatever that means today) any more, but my sense of it is that the married ones are all having awesome sex.
You wrote:
"The biggest harm for the person is to reject God and end up separated from him forever. Previous generations would have said that the brief life of a Christian—a breath when one considers eternity—is about endurance, about hanging on faithfully to win a crown that never fades away."
Jon Cardwell wrote in his devotional toady:
"Because He is eternal God, Jesus Christ does valiantly at the right hand of the Father (Heb 12:2). He continues to do so as our Mediator (1 Tim 2:5), our Intercessor (Heb 7:25), and our Advocate (1 John 2:1)."
Thank you both.