Really delighted to have been introduced to so many new readers yesterday. Welcome to my Substack! Today I want to pick back up with Sheila Wray Gregoire’s new book She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self & Speaking Up. You can read my thoughts about the first chapter here. Today I want to talk about two points I agree with in the next two chapters and one point of significant concern I have for the way she handles the Bible and the faith that flows out of it.
First, I wholeheartedly agree with Gregoire (and her co-authors) that the amorphous mass of Evangelical Youth Group Culture is indeed cringe. I think it is fair to say that the preaching in many churches today is substandard, and when you filter it down to what the youth receive, it is even more anemic. Many beleaguered Christians today think that if they behave properly, God will be happy with them, and everything will basically be ok. It should surprise no one that “Purity Culture,” as such, grew up in a Christian world where the law and the gospel were not properly articulated, where both youth and parents often had no idea what the point of the exercise even was.
When you introduce the question of sex into this already theologically muddled spiritual world, what you get, at the least, is ennui, at the most, bad confusion that makes young people give up their faith. Young women, after hearing yet another long sermon about gender roles, did often go home thinking that just not having sex before they are married was enough and that if they sinned in this matter, purity had forever been spoilt. The spiritual world of the Christian seemed for many to have narrowed down to be about avoiding certain kinds of behaviors. Too many women never encountered the life-transforming message of the saving knowledge of Christ. The gospel might have been preached, but not robustly enough that they heard it. What’s that called? I think the word is “legalism.” And it is a continuing problem in many churches today. Gregoire’s big word cloud, which she includes in chapter 2, is exactly what you would expect it would be in that sort of space. “Sex,” “Love,” and “Jesus” are the biggest words and all the other ones are pretty small and very few of them are theological words like “justification.”
The second thing I agree with unreservedly is that many Christian thought leaders are deeply confused about the question of “feelings.” As the cultural definitions of words like “love” and “kindness” have changed, the church, NGL,* has been caught flat-footed. Just as a reminder, “love” used to be defined by the Scriptures, but now even many Christians think that “loving your neighbor” means having nice feelings about her or being sure not to say anything that might make her not have nice feelings about herself. Rebecca Lindenbach, Gregoire’s daughter and one of her three coauthors, quotes the favorite biblical-text boogeyman of people like Glennon Doyle—Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” Many pastors, she observes, drive a wedge between thinking and feeling and, unwittingly, teach young women to distrust their emotions entirely, which sets them up for a whole range of really bad relational experiences.
The authors discuss something called, “DARVO”—Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. “Deny” is where someone tells you you’re not feeling what you are feeling. “Attack” is when you are blamed for feeling the way you do. And “Reverse Victim and Offender” is where the church tells you that your making a fuss is hurting their witness and that you are not trusting God enough and that you are probably letting Satan have a foothold in your life.
Reading through that section, it seemed to me that DARVO is a pretty neat and tidy way of boiling Gaslighting down to its essential components. Gaslighting is, in case you weren’t sure about it, lying. If you are told that you did not see or hear what you saw or heard or that you don’t feel the way you feel, you are being gaslit. You do feel the way you do. People who want to abuse or manipulate you want you to begin to distrust your sense perceptions so that you will be easier to manipulate and abuse. There’s a reason why “gaslighting” was a favorite word of 2020 and also maybe 2021.
But this discussion of feelings leads me to the real concern I have with Gregoire’s book so far, especially the section on Jeremiah 17:9. I like the ESV translation better:
“The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?”
I will grant that the average Pastor probably doesn’t exegete this well. But Lindenbach (and her two co-authors) do not deal with it well either. In fact, they drive the wedge between thinking and feeling ever deeper, instead of withdrawing the knife and letting the two come back into communion with each other. Your daughter, if you have one (which is probably why you would pick up the book) though she may deserve a lot of things, is a sinner. She should be taught her trust her sense perceptions and run away from predators and bad people, but she should not be taught that what she feels is always trustworthy, nor even what she thinks.
Because, and this is the point, she cannot understand her own heart. The human heart and mind are opaque to the human person who is in possession of them. Why do young women like the rebels instead of the nice boys? Why do men cheat on their wives and blow up their lives? Why do we lie and hurt each other? At the base of it, it is because we are sinners. We do not want to worship God. This being so, we—both individually and corporately, cannot trust our feelings. Your daughter’s feelings should not be made into her moral compass. She shouldn’t ignore them, but she shouldn’t *trust* them either. Rather, she should be taught to evaluate and judge her feelings by the light of the law of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The chief trouble with this life is that we are living it in the Wilderness. There are so many motivations and anguishing hurts that one lifetime is insufficient to tease out and understand even some of them. When I sit down at the end of a long day and burst into tears and my husband—because he’s befuddled when I cry and he hates being befuddled—says, “Why are you crying?” And I say, “I don’t know,” and then he throws up his hands because, being a man, he has no idea how anyone can cry and not know whence cometh the tears, neither of us have enough information to be going on with. Both of us don’t know why I am crying. It could be any number of reasons. Now, it would be stupid of him to say, “You’re not sad, nothing is wrong, stop crying.” Some men and pastors do say that, and they should stop it. But most, actually, don’t. It would be equally stupid for me, once I figure out what or who it is I am crying about, to willy-nilly assign blame or shame or wrongdoing to the person or people who, so my feelings tell me, brought forth the tears.
This is where the law and gospel come to bear, rather than more Purity Culture or more books about how to raise your daughters. The starting point is the law—the heart is deceitful but you only know that by looking at the law, even laws like, “Don’t lust…Don’t have sex before you’re married.” The law may tell me that even though such and such a person may have said the thing that made me feel bad, that doesn’t mean that that person is in the wrong. Maybe I am. Maybe I should feel bad. I won’t know one way or the other, however, if my primary point of reference is the feelings themselves. The only way I will know is if I have a good light for my feet and a lamp for my path showing me such things about my feelings. And when I find that, in fact, I am sad because I have done what is wrong, what, then, do I do? I must run to Jesus—that’s the gospel part. I do not go on sitting in a pool of stupid, saying to myself, “my heart is so wicked.” I go to the Helper and Cure of my wicked heart who forgives all my sins. I go to have my affections reordered by Christ. The authors appeal to John Wesley, who, I am pretty sure, would not agree with their version of what he meant. Yes, your affections and inclinations factor in, but it is their transformation, by the hearing of the Word, by repentance and trust, that makes them into what they should be.
I have one final thought on these two chapters. The process of being saved and transformed into the image of Christ is painful. You’re not going to be able to spare your daughter pain. But also, you should definitely go to a church where she can learn about theology, and the Bible, and the sacraments, and do interesting work, and not have to sit around contemplating her own failures and emotions all the time, because that is a recipe for disaster.
Have a nice day!
*My children say that “NGL” stands for “Not Gonna Lie.” I like it when people explain these acronyms to me because looking them up is annoying and so is trying to remember what they all are.
"Your daughter’s feelings should not be made into her moral compass. She shouldn’t ignore them, but she shouldn’t *trust* them either. Rather, she should be taught to evaluate and judge her feelings by the light of the law of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ."
A thousand times yes. I work with a lot of university age students who are desperately trying to navigate their lives based on feelings vs. feelings placed alongside the Gospel of Jesus.
Most of the problems that Sheila notes are, at root, problems within evangelical pietism generally. Yet she succumbs to similar pitfalls as those she criticizes, because she articulates her whole critique within the evangelical pietist framework. Purity Culture had no law-gospel distinction and made everything law. Sheila also has no law-gospel distinction but makes everything gospel. And thus, each camp makes a whole host of parallel errors downstream from that fundamental misunderstanding.