Two Narratives Collided In A Wood

A brief look at the two stories being told about Christians and by them

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

I made some dear (IRL) friends upset yesterday who have been helped by Gregoire’s previous book. The day was also one of unrelenting frustration whereby I spent the whole of it in the car driving people around instead of doing what I planned. I was not able to respond to anything, nor even beat back my own sink full of dishes, nor walk the dog, nor keep up online. I did manage to read a second chapter of Gregoire’s new book but I’d like to do two chapters in one post, so I’m going to pick that up tomorrow. Instead, I want to try to put words to something that I think is swirling around in the cultural air. This will be hard because I prefer to have a tweet or an article to bounce off of, but, it’s International Women’s Day—so let’s celebrate with a listicle.

One. An alluring and powerful narrative has formed about the plight of women and the reasons things are so bad today. It goes something like this: Christians have irreparably damaged their witness, the Christian faith, and the lives of women by their unacceptable view of marriage and sex; and Christians have damaged the Christian faith by their view of the Bible.

Where did this narrative come from? How did it form? It has two or three sources. The first source, I think, is the culture itself which, in a short time, radically shifted from one view of what it means to be human, to another. It took a whole century for the new view to become entrenched, but I really think contraception was the millstone that sunk a “biblical view of the family” under the sea for most people. Even if they had some idea with their heads about human relationships, what they knew with their bodies radically contradicted that view. In a world where women can control if and when they have children, the biological reality of being a woman is not meaningful or substantive enough to undergird and support a society.

The second source of this narrative was the Christian reaction to this change. Christians reacted strongly, as they should have. But, in many cases, wildly and with a hint of hysteria. As the western world shifted from a positive to a neutral to a negative view of Christianity, it is not surprising that those people who refused to shift away from “traditional” and biblical norms became the bad ones. Moreover, as the defacto conscience of the whole, they are discovering that they ought to be quiet, but that they may not go away. In family systems theory, the “biblical view of the family” is the trap that holds all the toxic fumes of the larger system. The western family needs Christianity as its scapegoat. It needs Christians to occasionally react in sorrow and outrage. But secular culture cannot absolutely get rid of Christianity or it will have to face who it is, and that’s not pretty, so of course it won’t do that.

In the usual way of these sorts of cultural shifts, the outside assault on the “biblical view of the family” was helped by the inside repudiation of it. Many “Christians” now unreservedly accept a secular view of what it means to be a self. Assumptions about the needs and requirements of this new kind of humanity, though largely, I would say (after reading just two chapters of Gregoire) unexamined, drive the internal “culture war” that Christians are enduring. Health—both physical and emotional—are at the center of these assumptions.

It is hard for me to overstate how deeply I feel this shift myself. That is because I came in and out of American culture at key moments and was able to observe how it was changing. Christians through time and space have not had this new assumption of “health” at the heart of their faith. And not just Christians either. Most cultures around the world continue not to pursue this idea of “health.”

What do I mean by that word? Because, of course, everyone wants to be “healthy.” It is always better, as everyone in the whole world knows, to be rich and healthy than poor and sick. The human experience is to try to escape grinding poverty and not to be ill and unhappy. No, this is a new kind of “health.” This is a way of “health” whereby the external world must unrelentingly correspond to an internal sensibility.

Two. There is the possibility of a different narrative for Christians to adopt about what has happened in the last 50, 75, and 500 years. It could go something like this: the rise of technology and changing assumptions about the self have rocked humanity as a whole and Christians are even now trying to figure out how to “be Christian” in response to those changes. What they see in the Bible in more and more cases is contrary to the new idea of the self. They have strange commands to cope with like “be fruitful and multiply” and “do not deprive each other” and “let her ask her husband at home.” If you can’t see how these scriptural admonitions do not set the Christian at complete odds with modern self-dom, well, I would like to be on your side, I would prefer to go down and eat a bucket of chocolate and stare into the middle distance.

Three. The way I’m hearing the foremost women influencers of today—du Mez, Barr, Gregoire, Denhollender, etc.—is that they are trying to explain away the second narrative by blaming Christians for ever having believed those things at all. Even though most people believed them until the beginning of the 2000s. Sure, Wild at Heart, Love and Respect, and I Kissed Dating Goodbye are super cringe—they always were cringe—but the evangelical world both loved and were helped by them until it became embarrassing to admit that.

Four. I haven’t said anything astonishing. But now I want to ask a new bright question that I haven’t heard very many people ask (anyone—please dm me if you have heard someone ask this question):

Why?

Why were Elizabeth Elliot and the Promise Keepers so helpful to so many people through the Sexual Revolution? Why did so many people read the Love and Respect book? Why did Focus on the Family have so many daily listeners?

Was it really because Christians are misogynists? Was it really because men don’t care about the happiness and health of their wives? Was it really because Evangelicals hated black people?

Or is it because they—like the rest of the world—are staring into a genderless, plastic abyss wherein women and men are not who God says they are, whereby they must, the cultural law says they must, enact their desires or they will not be whole and healthy?

I think it’s the second answer. I don’t believe that Christians conspiratorially have tried to repress women for the last hundred years. I believe Christians are, this moment, reading the Bible and trying to figure out what to do about it. I think they have not irreparably damaged the self by not accepting the cries of the loudest voices about what is good for women. I think women and men still need space to figure out how to live complementary, gendered lives in a world that hates women so much it will do the ugliest possible things to destroy their lives and their happiness.

It is in that light that I am reading Gregoire’s book. I’m looking for her, in the midst of all her data, to articulate a robust and Christian view of the person. She’s right—she does “deserve better.” But the way to get that better is very much the issue. A lot of what those awful purity culture books articulated was correct. It comes right from the Bible itself. Should it have been written in those ways in books? We can certainly debate that. Did a lot of the implications of what the Bible says not get properly worked out? For Sure. Do you have to get your view of human sexuality from Elizabeth Elliot? Not if you don’t want to. But if she has helped you, you are not wicked, nor damaged.

Sorry to cut this short. Gotta get back in the car. Have a nice day!