Tag Archives: Christianity

Issues, Theology

End the silence covering up sexual abuse in Evangelical churches

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My Monday morning reads brought me to this article about the tenacious women blogging about sexual abuse in SBC and other conservative Evangelical churches.  It is a must read.

The crusading bloggers exposing sexual assault in Protestant churches – The Washington Post

 

I have many thoughts, but I’ll boil it down to just these at the moment:

Women (and children) (and anyone marginalized) are in danger anywhere women are shut out of the power structures in an organization.

I have a post halfway written about the problem Evangelicalism faces from institutionalized, theologically-justified patriarchy. Despite OT and NT examples of women in leadership positions, conservative theology does not make room for women to hold power and exercise authority outside of very narrow realms.  As a result, leadership within conservative churches are blind to how abuse happens (and many women are themselves complicit in protecting abusers and shaming victims).

I applaud the brave women who have stepped up to review, investigate, and record stories of (mostly) women who were raped or abused by pastors (usually as children, but not always) and have lived traumatized lives while the pastors moved on to greater glory and continued employment in the ministry.  The loose denominational structures of many Evangelical groups allows predators to flourish, but they run unchecked because they are protected and apologized for by leadership in those churches. In fact, it’s far more likely for the women telling the stories (or recording them, as these bloggers do) to get shoved out than for their abusers to be brought to justice.

Both men and women of the Church need to arise and say No to sexual abuse in churches. That the SBC refuses to even allow supporters of victims to rally at their convention this month shows how far leadership within the conservative church will go to refuse acknowledgement of the problem.

You can’t impose enough church policies to prevent sexual predation. In fact, without opening the power structure to women as equals, I don’t think the conservative church will be able to eradicate this problem from its institutions.

In addition to leadership failure and lack of oversight and accountability, Evangelicalism perpetuates a victim-blaming tendency baked into its theology about sex. This article is a great overview of the destructive impact of purity theology on young women:  Naked and Ashamed: Women and Evangelical Purity Culture – The Other Journal

But leaders could at least choose to listen, acknowledge, repent for harboring abuse, and change policies to support victims.

We’ve got a long way to go on this one, folks.

Life, Politics, Theology

Exit: Voting

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This is a short entry in the series I’m writing about my breakup with Evangelicalism.  You can find the first entry here. 

Yesterday I posted a Voter’s Manifesto – mine.  You can read it here.

Morning after in America

It’s the morning after an election in America, and the pundits have only just begun to wag their jaws about the implications of yesterday’s voting. Blue wave? Red wave? Referendum on Trump?

I’m not here to discuss it, y’all. I’m done.

I’m at the stage in the breakup with Evangelicalism where all the ways in which my former lover acts like an ass confront me. Especially when I’m trying not to think about it.

It’s like when you run into the friend of an ex, and he tries to make the argument that “Bobby is a great guy, you know?” as if that made Bobby’s douchey behavior toward you irrelevant. “I mean, he’s trying, ok?”

As if rampant nationalism, racism, xenophobia, a lust for power, and idolatry of individualism and the “self-made man” and capitalism weren’t warts on the face of the Gospel.  “Evangelical” literally derives from the Greek word that we translate “Gospel,” euangelion. What’s sad is that I see the clear connection between evangelicals’ theology and their actions at the voting booth, arising from deep-seated racial and cultural fears, and from long-standing racism that’s buried so deep into evangelical culture that it’s hard to notice unless you tune your eyes to see it.

I’ve realized that I’m well and truly over this breakup.  I have nothing against “Bobby’s” friends. I’m not severing ties with anybody.  I don’t need other people to agree with me or follow me out. You do you, and stand before God with a clear conscience for your own actions.

I’m still puzzled, though I’ve given up trying to understand.

Like how the hell Evangelical women can feel like this for a man who belittles and demeans women almost  non-stop:

White Evangelical women Republican vote November 2018
From NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/card/nbc-news-exit-poll-white-evangelical-women-stand-squarely-republicans-0n933236

I don’t need my Evangelical friends to explain why they picked the side of the “culture war” that makes as its goal the disenfranchisement of non-cisgender, non-heterosexual people….. or rejection of people seeking asylum and respite from oppressive regimes whose origin is closely tied to over-zealous American foreign policy…. or an absolute loyalty to an anti-abortion stance above actual policies that reduce abortion.

Or how the combination of these Culture War factors drive intense support for a president whose “base” is energized by race-baiting and xenophobia.

Vox headline Evangelicals
From Vox
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/29/18015400/2018-midterm-elections-evangelical-christians-trump-approval

Fear is ugly

“There is no fear in Love, for perfect love casts out fear,” as the Apostle John wrote.  I can’t sanction refusing to see beyond apparent moral infractions to take care of people in need.

“Who is my neighbor?” Jesus shut down that sanctimonious shit from the Pharisees. You can’t play games with the great commandments. Love God and Love your neighbor.  You don’t get to choose not to love because you’re afraid of who they are, because they got pregnant without being married first, because you don’t approve of gay love, because you don’t like their atheism or Islam, because you think they’re lazy and unmotivated.

"Is your neighbor worth loving?" ~ Fred Rogers
When asked about hate crimes, Fred Rogers asked this question.

The quote above comes from a great interview with a National Geographic photographer who was asked to document the Squirrel Hill synagogue shooting last week. She’s from Pittsburgh, so she had initially resisted the assignment to work in her hometown. But she went out anyway and captured powerful images.

Her graduate thesis focused on hate crimes, and she interviewed Fred Rogers as part of her research.  He asked her this question: “Is your neighbor worth loving?”

Cuts to the heart of the issue, methinks.

I live in one of the reddest states in the South. South Carolina Republicans won nearly every race yesterday, with only a couple exceptions.  (Article)

It’s hard to believe in change when the momentum around uniting Jesus with the GOP is like digging something out of cured concrete.

But I have faith.

My faith in the core tenets of Christianity informs my priorities, and voting is actually about priorities rather than moral absolutes.  I believe that many Americans can learn to see a way to vote for priorities that don’t disenfranchise others in our nation.

Maybe I’m a fool, I don’t know. One can hope.

Issues

Good Read:  This is Not The Story I Wanted—But It’s My Story of Rape – Rewire

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It takes a lot of courage to write out your story of rape. It also takes a lot of courage to tell people you don’t want to be a Christian anymore. I’ve long appreciated Dani’s honesty and willingness to continue dialogue with people whose worldview perspectives are opposed to hers.

I encourage you to read her latest essay thoughtfully, and be willing to learn from her critiques of purity culture and religious moralism which feed a tolerance for rape culture. I don’t personally believe that Christianity must necessarily produce the warped views of sex, purity, and gender that Dani experienced in her early years, but I’ve seen these views in every church / organization I’ve been a part of, and it needs to be addressed. 

Writer Dani Kelley thought she had shed the patriarchal and self-denying lessons of her conservative religious childhood. But those teachings blocked her from initially admitting that an encounter with a man she met online was not a “date” that proved her sexual liberation, but an extended sexual assault.

Source: This is Not The Story I Wanted—But It’s My Story of Rape – Rewire

***

And I also highly recommend Dani’s series of posts “for the well-meaning Christian.”  Some of my dearest friends are atheist or agnostic, and I trust that my love and care for them has improved since reading Dani’s series.

Theology

Article: Why are Christian movies so painfully bad? – Vox

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This is a great article. I’m so tired of Christians being satisfied with bad, “preachy” movies and books and music because those feel “Christian enough” while truly Christian, challenging art shoots over the head of the average person.

It’s a childish view of the work of the artist, grounded in our Protestant failure to value story and image as highly as we love propositional, systematic statements. And while we are certainly People of the Book, we need to realize that God is telling a single, amazing, vast, nuanced Story of Redemption, one that encompasses within itself everything from erotic poetry (the Song) to apocryphal visions.

Recognize that “Christian art” finds its Christian-ness down in the bones, not on the surface. LikeTo End All Wars is one of the most “Christian” films I’ve ever seen, but it’s rated R.

Let’s support better art.

A couple great quotes from the article – please do read the whole thing:

Any person even vaguely familiar with Evangelical subcultures will recognize the trend of copying and sanitizing whatever pop culture is doing. This trend belies a certain impulse within Evangelical Christians to separate the entire world into two categories: sheep and goats, wheat and chaff.

A good deal of contemporary Christian art is predicated on the sacred/secular divide: As Christian film critic Alissa Wilkinson noted, “Christians, and evangelicals in particular, have been really, really prolific in making pop culture products that parallel what’s going on in mainstream cultural production.”
…
The end result is that the Christian product seems like a knock-off, a cheap alternative.
…
Even if Hollywood films do contain embodied messages, they’re not always as explicitly drawn out as they are in Christian movies. That’s because, says Godawa, many Evangelical Christians, who are people of the Good Book, have come to value words over images. “They don’t know how to embody their messages in the story,” he says. “They have to hear the literal words [of the Gospel].”

As with the bifurcation between sacred and secular, so, too, do contemporary Christian artists divide form and content, believing that what a piece of art says is of infinitely more importance than how it says it. The thing communicated is more urgent than how it’s communicated.

Of course, this perspective overlooks the fact that how a thing is communicated is the thing that’s being communicated. To put it in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, “The medium is the message.” That is, when you communicate an idea through the medium of film, the aesthetic quality of the film subsumes the idea, fundamentally altering its narrative shape.

via Why are Christian movies so painfully bad? – Vox.

Reviews, Theology

Questions, Doubt, and Faith: Reading Faith Unraveled by Rachel Held Evans

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Held Evans is a bit of a controversy in Evangelicalism these days.  She’s on Christian-world radar because of her posts that challenge commonly held opinions about gender roles in the church, Christian responses to homosexuality, the creation-evolution debates, and universalism.  I’m pretty sure I could go type her name into my status Facebook status bar right now and spawn about 15 comments.  I’d guess that at least half would be negative, and of those, 2 or 3 would be downright derogatory and dismissive without even considering whatever point I was bringing up.

RHE is a lightning rod.  No argument from me.  So I picked up her 2010 spiritual memoir Faith Unraveled and read it today. Straight through, one sitting.

I may not agree with everything Evans believes. I strongly doubt that I do.  But I applaud her journey through doubt, her willingness to ask hard questions without accepting pat answers, her desire to seek faith in the midst of ambiguity.

Faith Unraveled is a book about doubt and a book about faith.  Both-and, not one supplanting the other.  Her narrative about leaving the intellectually-driven Evangelical world-view Christianity and wandering in a desert of uncertainty doesn’t match my story, but it resonates with me.  We’ve asked many of the same questions; it’s just that mine came in a different order.

Rachel’s Christian faith unraveled when she smacked hard into the Problem of Evil but couldn’t swallow the easy answers — that we should overlook hard questions about genocide in the Old Testament, about hell and the afterlife, about the horrors of war or rape or abuse because God’s plan turns evil to good.   It’s easy to flip out that answer as if it makes rape not rape, or genocide not genocide, or Hurricane Katrina not horrible. (I created my own dust-up about this topic after reading N D Wilson’s book Notes from a Tilt-a-whirl.)

And Evans’s doubt-story centers in the heart of the painful, terrifying question — what kind of God does Evangelical Christianity offer if He destroys 200,000 humans in a tsunami or entire Canaanite cities without a pang of sorrow?  “They were going to Hell anyway” is hardly an appropriate response, but it’s what Evans heard from many of her Christian friends. And I’ve heard it too.

And all of my years of seminary coursework taught me there’s more nuance and ambiguity in the biblical texts than many of the hot Christian authors or preachers are willing to live with.

I could hand Rachel Held Evans’s book to my friends who are searching, doubting, agnostic, uncertain, wounded, or even hostile and I believe her words would open doors to good conversations about the difficult spaces within my Christian faith.

I’ll leave you with a few passages that stuck out to me, and a recommendation to read for yourself, whether the book or the controversial blog.

From Faith Unraveled (I read on Kindle, so I don’t have page numbers):

My friend Adele describes fundamentalism as holding so tightly to your beliefs that your fingernails leave imprints on the palm of your hand.

We would all like to believe that had we lived in the days of the early church or the Protestant Reformation, we would have chosen the side of truth, but in nearly every case, this would have required a deep questioning of the fundamental teachings of the time. It would have required a willingness to change. We must be wary of imitating the Pharisees, who bragged that had they lived during the time of the prophets, they would have protected the innocent (see Matt. 23:30), but who then plotted against Jesus and persecuted his disciples.

Evolution [as a believer] means letting go of our false fundamentals so that God can get into those shadowy places we’re not sure we want him to be. It means being okay with being wrong, okay with not having all the answers, okay with never being finished.

To Jesus, “by faith alone” did not mean “by belief alone.” To Jesus, faith was invariably linked to obedience.

Some Christians are more offended by the idea of everyone going to heaven than by the idea of everyone going to hell.

What if I’m wrong? It was a question loaded with uncertainty, possibility, and hope, and it was a question to which I often would return. To be wrong about God is the condition of humanity, for better or for worse.

In the end, it was doubt that saved my faith.

God’s ways are higher than our ways not because he is less compassionate than we are but because he is more compassionate than we can ever imagine.

I can never open my Bible without being aware of my own presence beside it. It reminds me that I’m always there, that I cannot read a word of this glorious, God-breathed book without bringing myself along, baggage and all.

Perhaps our love for the Bible should be measured not by how valiantly we fight to convince others of our interpretations but by how diligently we work to preserve a diversity of opinion.

I am convinced that what drives most people away from Christianity is not the cost of discipleship but rather the cost of false fundamentals.

Taking on the yoke of Jesus is not about signing a doctrinal statement or making an intellectual commitment to a set of propositions. It isn’t about being right or getting our facts straight. It is about loving God and loving other people.

Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue

Sometimes Christians worry that if we don’t provide bullet-point answers to all of life’s questions, people will assume that our faith is unreasonable. In reaction to very loud atheists like Richard Dawkins, we have become a bit too loud ourselves. Faith in Jesus has been recast as a position in a debate, not a way of life.

Most of the people I’ve encountered are looking not for a religion to answer all their questions but for a community of faith in which they can feel safe asking them.

Yes.  The Truth is big enough to handle your questions. Your hard, agonizing, terrifying doubts and what-if’s about God and the Universe and How Things Work.

*****
Get a copy of Rachel’s book on Amazon (affiliate)