I raced through Louise Perry’s The Case Against The Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century over the weekend while beating back the chaos in my garden. I can’t recommend it enough.
It pairs nicely with Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress—Perry and Harrington quote each other affectionately in both books. In The Case Against The Sexual Revolution, Perry precisely describes the calamity of this dystopic age. Want to be miserable? Indulge every desire and consume other people. Watch a lot of p*rn. Sleep around. Don’t get married. In this way, you will certainly die alone and lonely, bereft of the human companionship that makes life a delight, especially in old age.
I think it would be the right sort of book to read if you wanted to kick an addiction to something destructive, like 50 Shades of Beige and Sadness. I believe one of the ways that people quit smoking is by reading long and exhausting narratives about everything that nicotine does to the human body. This must be the same sort of experience. If you want to leave an enslaving and immiserating behavior in the dust, reading this book will clear your head and incline your heart to keep God’s Law.
While I listened, I couldn’t help but be annoyed, again, by the sheer number of Christians—I suppose some of them are Christians, in one way or another—who don’t know what time it is. At the very moment when the pure light of reason is beginning to break through for so many women, when people are waking up from this long, wretched dream to sift through the rubble trying to discover where they went wrong and if anything can be done about it, a lot of Christian women, instead of offering a cool draught of sanity to the thirsty and perishing, are bent on the manner of life—and the philosophical and theological assumptions that undergird it—of five minutes ago. The biggest problem, they explain, is that women aren’t allowed to be pastors in some denominations. They are literally being oppressed and suppressed. Oh, I keep saying to myself, the humanity.
The problem, or at least one of them, is that you cannot have it both ways:
Go ahead. Try to catch a man who will give you everything and to whom you will owe nothing. You will certainly find the exercise to be shortlived, to understate it. This poor lady wants someone to respect her and open the door and buy the dinner, but she doesn’t want to tell him (I’m just guessing here) that he’s wonderful, that she respects him, that she would be willing to sacrifice any of her autonomy and independence for his happiness. That would be truly unfair…to her. In this way, women for a century have believed a foolish lie about themselves and the men they hoped would take care of them but also never make any demands on them for any reason.
There are all kinds of ways this plays out on Christian Twitter. The latest—I have only watched from afar, not wanting to ride the roller coaster of “the conversation”—is that someone combed through various Southern Baptist church websites and gathered the names of women pastors, and then published the list. The hew and cry were fierce. It was doxing said some. But then others pointed out that the names were public, and that a list had already been compiled a while ago by someone promoting the phenomenon of the Southern Baptist woman pastor.
This, it seems to me, is one side—the one that doesn’t know what time it is—trying to have it both ways. Publishing the names is good in one case, but wicked in the other. It depends on who is doing it. If it is conservative people who are trying to oppress women, it is wicked. If it is progressive people who are trying to promote and liberate all women, it is an act of righteousness.
To have it both ways, though, means you have to slander someone. It means you have to say that the desires of men are inherently bad and that the desires of women are inherently good. You have to say that the churches that don’t think women should be pastors actually hate women. You have to say that the only way for the women to flourish is for them to be the leaders all the time. Taking second place is bad, except when a man does it, which is his proper estate. Furthermore, when a man becomes a pastor he isn’t taking second place, he isn’t becoming a servant to all, he isn’t laying down his life for the good of the women in the church. Playing the game this way is convenient, but it doesn’t make the lives of actual women easier or more comfortable.
Isn’t it ironic that at the moment when women in the West have so much—the privilege, in many cases, of an education and meaningful work and a healthcare industrial complex that means the children they do bear are healthy and living—they would be so unhappy about it all. Is that irony? Or is it the thing the Bible so perfectly describes? The heart is deceitfully wicked above all else. It will devour the mind and soul and body of another before it will ever consider dying to itself. Only the grace of God can bring its addiction and misery to heel.
Have a nice day!
The man that the woman in the video longs for sounds like a pet, who also happens to be a human male.
“Furthermore, when a man becomes a pastor he isn’t taking second place, he isn’t becoming a servant to all, he isn’t laying down his life for the good of the women in the church.”
Part of the problem, I think, is that in a lot, a lot of churches that sentence is an accurate representation.
When I was in school, a long (long) time ago, I attended a Christian school run by a Baptist church. At one point toward the end, the pastor’s daughter referenced something as being bad for her dad’s career, and I’ve never forgotten that. It was my first exposure to the idea of pastoring as a career path rather than a calling to serve.