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Mark Driscoll

Feminism

so, are you a feminist?

[Taylor Swift, Gina Rodriguez, Shailene Woodley]

It’s become almost de riguer for red-carpet journalists (and others) to confront a female celebrity and demand to know whether or not she considers herself a feminist.

This bothers me.

From what I’ve seen, most of the time the publication asking doesn’t have any vested interest in their answer (see, a Time magazine writer asking Shailene this question, and then another turning right around and putting “feminist” on their “words to ban” poll). This leads me to believe that these people aren’t confronting these women because they care about feminism, or want to help overturn some of the misconceptions about feminism– they just want headlines and clicks and shares, and they don’t really care how it happens.

Unfortunately, throwing “are you a feminist, huh, huh?” in a woman’s face seems to work for the whole “getting page views” thing that drives the capitalist internet—especially if she answers the question “badly”—if she says no. Things become even more interesting if she explains why she’s not a feminist, because it usually has something to do with misconceptions about feminism (“I don’t hate men” being one of the most common reactions).

And the reporter and the editor chuckle gleefully together and they take it to the presses and the misconceptions are reinforced and feminists have to waste more time explaining that no, that’s not what feminism is. I swear, we don’t hate men …

This bothers me because it’s not fair to do this to anyone, especially women whose entire lives are in the public eye and if they say “Yes, absolutely I’m a feminist!” they’ll be vilified and hated by some very disgusting people who are willing to harass and attack them for years, and if they say “no, I’m not,” a bunch of people (who, personally, I think are being a little bit ridiculous) get all upset with their sputtering “well, why not? DON’T YOU BELIEVE IN EQUALITY?!”

And that is exactly the problem, because anyone who isn’t an outspoken misogynist is going to respond with “well, of course I believe in equality!” At this point in our culture, I think it’s pretty rare for a person to consciously choose to believe that men and women should be treated unequally.

And while, at its most absolutely basic articulation, feminism is “the belief that the genders should be treated equally,” I feel that this definition is woefully unhelpful.

For example, complementarianism is a methodology espoused by many, probably most, conservative Christians leaders. Complementarianism is sexist, and cannot be divorced from its extremely misogynistic roots—both from the original texts that biblical scholars pull from and from the way it’s been disseminated throughout Christendom. Complementarianism is based on the idea that men and women have been given “different roles,” with men being leaders, teachers, pastors, elders, and kings, and women being submissive, obedient, silent and completely barred from any form of leadership. The point of complementarianism is to treat men and women unequally.

However, every single complementarian teacher will shout until they are blue in the face that what they teach has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not men and women are equal. Of course men and women are equal, they’ll say—they are ontologically equal, and everyone is equally cherished by God. We’re just given different roles. That’s not a statement about which one is worthier than the other, or more valuable, they’ll argue. Pay no attention to the fact that men are the only ones qualified to be in charge of anything. That’s not inequality. That’s just our purpose.

To any feminist, that argument is nonsensical, but if you ask John Piper or Mark Driscoll if men and women should be treated “equally” they’ll say “of course!” but then saying well, that means you’re a feminist in response would be absurd because they are not.

There’s a really big idea shoved into the Merriam-Webster definition that rarely gets unpacked in conversations about whether or not such-and-such female celebrity says she is one or not.

Feminism is the belief that all genders should have equal rights and opportunities.

Inside of those words is a dizzying world of academic and social discussion, intersections of injustice and oppressions, conversations about race and gender and toxic masculinity and benevolent sexism and ableism and heteronormativity. Feminism is more than just the belief that men and women are equal, but how men and women and other genders live.

Feminists are dedicated to dismantling the systemic oppressions that affect women, especially the ones that we all tend to be unconscious of. We fight against internalized misogyny and the need many women feel not to be “One of Those Girls,” whatever those girls might be. We point to ways that whole career fields are hostile to women. We examine how gender roles and stereotypes affect all of us, no matter our gender, and how our communities police these things in sometimes brutal ways.

I don’t think it’s fair to demand that everyone self-identify as a feminist. To me, being a feminist is big work. It’s a commitment. Being a feminist means that when any one of my friends says or does something sexist, I am willing to say something about it, right then, on the spot, no matter the blowback and pressure I might face from others to “not make such a big deal out of it.” It’s a promise to constantly be educating to myself, to always listen to the experiences of women, especially women who experience a different set of intersectional oppressions.

I don’t want to appoint myself as some sort of feminist gatekeeper. Feminism is not a monolith. Feminism is an awfully big tent, filled with many people who can vociferously disagree because we are human beings and that’s inevitably going to happen. I, however, do wish everyone in the world would listen to feminists and think “hey, that makes a lot of sense!” and I’m hopeful that someday that dream will be a reality.

But, for now, there’s a big, uphill battle in front of all of us, and I don’t think handing over a note on the red carpet that asks “are you a feminist? check yes or no” is really helping anybody.

December 22, 2014 by
Feminism

Real Marriage review: 207-22, "Reverse-Engineering Your Life and Marriage"

Well, folks, we finally did it. We managed to make it all the way through to the very bitter end of Mark and Grace Driscoll’s Real Marriage. Usually I’m excited about wrapping up one of these review series, but all I can manage to feel about finishing this one is … relief. I’m not entirely sure why reading Real Marriage was so much more draining than Fascinating Womanhood or Captivating, but it has been.

And, thankfully, the last chapter is mercifully brief. It’s not really a chapter so much as it is a homework assignment: pages 211 through 222 are a list of questions that the married couple reading this book are supposed to answer separately and then discuss.

The one thing that stood out to me about this chapter is how patronizing it is. Mark has been a lot of things through this book—a lying manipulative asshole, primarily—but his need to openly patronize women hasn’t been as glaringly obvious.

But then we get to stuff like this:

“During the vacation, I kept a legal-size yellow pad handy and started writing out a length homework assignment for Grace.”

A homework assignment. Right. If my partner came home from vacation and handed me a legal pad filled with the questions on 211-222, I’d shove it up his ass. Thankfully, my partner is a decent human being who respects me.

Honestly, most of the questions are fairly bland—like ones that talk about furniture and kitchen appliances– but some take on a super-special patriarchal flavor:

  • What church will you attend? Will it be a church with strong men leading so that the husband is motivated, engaged, and committed? (214)
  • Husbands, how will you wash her in the Word? (215)
  • What is your job? Will the wife be working? (215)
  • Who will be the primary caregiver of your child(ren)? (216)

It’s interesting that the whole list seems to be written entirely by Mark (the book has usually noted when an idea came from Grace or when she’s writing. Surprisingly, she’s participated less in Real Marriage than John Eldredge did in Captivating), and the whole thing is targeted toward men. It’s not specifically any one question that makes me think that as much as how most of the questions are phrased. If any of you have access to this chapter and had a different thought, I’d appreciate another perspective on that. But it struck me as odd that questions like “Husbands, how will you wash her in the Word?” had no feminine-gendered counterpart.

Another thing to note is the classism that’s been hinted at in other places but came out of the woodwork this week. I haven’t really commented on it before because I spent so much time focusing on the classism and white supremacy happening in Captivating, but there’s a heavy dose of it here:

Quarterly—go for a romantic and fun overnight getaway together …
Annually—if finances allow, take a planned vacation that you are both excited about. (213)

List all of the things you can hand off to someone else (for example, ordering groceries online and having them delivered, mowing your lawn, doing your taxes, running errands, outsourcing dry cleaning and ironing …) (222)

I don’t know about you but “romantic and fun overnight getaways” four times a year is beyond ridiculous, and I’m a solidly middle-class white person. Between the price of gas, dinner, hotel, and traveling food, around where I live that’s a minimum of $300. I’m sorry, but doing that every couple of months isn’t something we can afford, and I don’t think people who aren’t drawing down the income of an extremely wealthy mega-church pastor can do that, either.

And that other bit about “handing off” things? Have you ever looked up what it costs to have groceries delivered to your house? Or what it would cost to have someone do all of your laundry? He’s practically talking about hiring a maid and it just boggles me because he’s not meeting his readers where they actually live. It must be really nice to live in a world where “handing off things” is simple and affordable, but for the vast majority of us it doesn’t work that way and we could really use some advice about simplifying our lives that don’t involve spending more money.

Anyway, this chapter wasn’t really rage-inducing like many of the others, but it sort of reminded me of “The Hollow Men” because the book finished not with a bang but a whimper.

~~~~~~~~

In conclusion, there’s been a few consistent problems that put this book into the “actively harmful” category.

First, I cannot stress enough the danger and harm of minimizing abusive behaviors, which Mark and Grace repeatedly do in their own ways. Mark dismisses his habits of verbally and emotionally abusing the people around him, and Grace paints abusive and hurtful actions—like boundary violations, entitlement attitudes toward sex, verbal and emotional abuse—as “normal” and “expected.”

They also go out of their way to reinforce traditional gender roles, and like Fascinating Womanhood and Captivating, place a horrible burden on people who don’t naturally fit them, condemning their inability to conform to a ridiculous construct as sinful and anti-God.

Mark, like most other evangelicals, also accepts the idea that the female-gendered body is inherently sexualized. He sees no problem with viewing women as sexual objects meant to service men—the only change he makes from mainstream American culture is that women are supposed to be sex toys for their husbands and no one else, and that it is supposedly a good thing for men to treat the women married to them like objects.

Grace implies pretty much every single time she opens her mouth on the topic that being an abuse survivor is sinful. Not that what happened to an abuse survivor was a sin committed by the abuser, but that abuse survivors need to “repent” and “be cleansed.” Not only that, but much of the advice given in this book fits right into abusive narratives, and abusers will use what they say in order to gaslight and further abuse their victim.

Anyway, I’m just happy I’m done with this and I won’t have to touch it again for the foreseeable future.

December 17, 2014 by
Feminism

"Real Marriage" Review: 177-206, "Can We _____?"

I knew before I sat down to read today’s chapter that it had been the one that people found controversial, but I wasn’t familiar with why it had upset some—and I have to admit that even after reading it I still wasn’t sure why it had apparently caused a hubbub. To me, it seemed as though Mark was toeing the conservative evangelical line pretty well. I mean, he was clearly “being Mark,” but he didn’t say anything that I wouldn’t have expected from a lot of other evangelical leaders.

So, after reading it, I went and read a few reviews that focused on chapter ten—Denny Burk, Tim Challies, and Rachel Held Evans, who are all writers I’m familiar with, and represent different positions on the theological spectrum. And, honestly, I was surprised by what upset people like Burk. Primarily, they seemed to have a problem with Mark endorsing anal sex, which everyone I read referred to exclusively as “sodomy” (which … problems).

No one had a good argument for why they thought that Mark should have condemned heterosexual married couples doing that sort of thing, but it was all rooted in homophobia—“but but but what if his wife stimulates his prostate and gasp he turns into a gay?!” seems to be the only thing these people have against it. Those reviews would have made me laugh if they weren’t so pathetic—seriously, I swear, that is not how sexual orientation works.

Those sorts of reviews had some secondary problems, like being against “cybersex” and the purchase of sex toys (it seemed they didn’t usually have a problem using sex toys, but how could you buy them without looking at teh pornz? To those people I say: you should go look up Adam & Eve).

Anyway, I came out on the other side of this chapter frustrated. Me and Mark have completely different guides for figuring out the answer to “can we _____?” but that should shock absolutely no one. His rule-of-thumb is “does the Bible explicitly forbid this? No? You’re good!”—and that did surprise me, because it doesn’t seem like the sort of argument an evangelical typically makes. There’s a lot of things the Bible doesn’t ever mention, but plenty of evangelicals extrapolate rules based on what they identify as “biblical principles.”

On a big-picture level, there are two glaring problems: the condemnation of all pain, and no real mention of consent.

I’ve already talked about the difference between pain and abuse, and why consent plays such an important role in that. But, one of the things that Mark does when he mentions pain is to conflate it with harm. In a way, I can see why people mix these two up, but it doesn’t actually make much sense. A really simple example is surgery: it hurts, recovering sucks, and the whole thing is pretty miserable. But, the doctor performing the surgery isn’t harming you. They’re actually helping. Pain with sex isn’t the same thing (there’s nothing like “if I don’t do this you could die” going on), but there isn’t a 1-to-1 correlation between pain and harm like a lot of people think.

He does get closer to talking about consent than he has in any other chapter, though—but it’s odd to me the way he decided to talk about it. This chapter is structured around a few supposedly “taboo” sex acts, like mutual masturbation and oral, and the one thing he repeatedly says is talk to each other about whether or not it might violate your conscience. That’s a very wrong-headed way of talking about it because of what it does.

The question shouldn’t be “does this violate your conscience?” but “are you into this?”

Arranging the conversation around the “does this violate your conscience” question implies that it would be the only acceptable reason to say no to a particular sex act, that if you don’t have a moral problem with something than, well, you should be willing to do it if your partner wants it, and that’s just ridiculous.

For example, there are very few things that involve sex with my partner that would violate my conscience, but there are many things that I have zero interest in whatsoever, and that is enough for him. He doesn’t need any reason beside “yup, not really into that, sorry”—and neither do I. Because sex for us is about having fun, and about making each other happy. If my partner doesn’t want me to do something to him, well, everything changes because if he doesn’t want it, than neither do I. The second I know he’s not interested, it’s not like I’m sitting there going “oh, I wish he liked this thing, because I really want to do the thing,” because sex is about us. There is no “him” and “me” during sex.

If he doesn’t like something, it means that I also don’t want it anymore, because what I really want is to bring him pleasure—and this is one of the biggest reasons why sexual compatibility is so important. There will always be these sorts of compromises during sex, but if you are going to be consistently disappointed because you want or need something that your partner doesn’t like … that’s inevitably going to be a problem. Not necessarily an insurmountable one, but I think it’s helpful to understand these things about yourself before you commit to one person for the rest of forever.

It’s a little ironic that Mark seems to have missed that train, since a big part of what he talks about is “becoming one.” I don’t know how it would be possible to have the mindset he presents all the way through this book and still “cleave together and become one flesh.”

Another thing that bothers me is how Mark seems completely and utterly blind to misogyny. I shouldn’t be surprised by how often that comes up, but it was obvious in this chapter when he talked about anal sex. I don’t have any problems with anal sex per se, but when you spend a couple paragraphs talking about how anal sex is probably becoming more popular because of porn without even glancing over how sexism might play a part in that, you’re missing something huge.

But, Mark can un-ironically talk about “the sexualization of our culture” without bothering to even challenge it, and I think it’s because Mark likes it. At the very least, he needs it to be that way, since he became an incredibly popular speaker after preaching through Song of Solomon in the most lewd and crass ways imaginable. Without the objectification and sexualization of women, Mark would still be a nobody.

December 2, 2014 by
Feminism

"Real Marriage" review: 156-176, "Selfish Lovers and Servant Lovers"

[note: this post inspired some swearing]

This chapter seems to be laying all the necessary groundwork for the last chapter in the “Sex” section of the book, and from the title (“Can We ____?”) I’m guessing that’s the one that caused some of the firestorm around it. Honestly, unless he does something drastic in that last chapter, I’m going to be a little confused as to why people were so bothered, since he hasn’t said too much at this point that I haven’t heard echoed in plenty of other corners.

But, I think “Can We ___?” Is going to finally define what Mark means by “having sex freely,” since this chapter focuses on the “frequency” half of his definition of a healthy sex life. If you’re having sex a lot, and you’re having it “freely,” you’re golden in Mark’s book.

There are two over-arching problems with this chapter: he does not address communication in any form until he’s nine pages into the chapter, and then he only really talks about it for a single paragraph. The second problem is that while he’s couched most of the discussion in this chapter in gender-neutral terms (you, spouse, they, him or her, etc), the vast majority of the potential bars to a “healthy” sex life he address are typically considered female problems, and his attempt to make it seem as though he’s being “gender neutral” falls flat.

Obviously I don’t agree with the gendered way most evangelicals talk about sex. Women are just as visual as men. Women can want sex more often than their male partners. Gender and sex don’t matter anywhere near as much as the people in the relationship and what they want– which is a fantastic reason for why communication is so important. Evangelicals like to assume a lot of things based on nothing more than their Western, American, White Supremacist conceptualizations of gender.

However, while Mark is superficially trying to get away from that by using gender-neutral terms, he can’t get away from the fact that he really hates women:

She was a virgin on her wedding night and had grown up in a fairly religious home … She had some anxiety regarding their first night together that made her body tense up … As a result, they were unable to experience intercourse and without putting in too much effort to overcome their obstacle, she instead gave him a helping hand …

He felt embarrassed … that they had intercourse so infrequently that she usually experienced discomfort, as her body had not adjusted to being sexually active. (156)

See what happens? That she’s having problems overcoming the messages of purity culture is all her fault. It’s not “their” problem– it’s her problem. Also, Mark is working under one of the worst lies of our culture: that people with vaginas will experience pain during penetration until they get used to it, which is total bullshit.

The rest of the chapter has a similar focus; for example, in a list of “Ways we are Selfish Lovers,” six out of the nine ways are typically associated with women– like “letting ourselves go” (165-66). Considering that Mark blamed Gayle Haggard for her husband’s adultery because of this very reason, he’s made it clear that he thinks this is something that women struggle with.

So those are the two big over-arching problems of this chapter, so now I’d like to address some of the more particular ones.

On page 160, we run into yet another way that they minimize abuse:

Foxes in our vineyard for me (Grace [referring to Mark’s behavior]) include name-calling, strong language … using discouraging words …

This really breaks my heart for Grace. She’s been married to an abuser for so long and has been taught to see his abuse as normal. Not necessarily acceptable, but normal. Another problem with this whole section is that Grace gets six lines to talk about Mark’s verbal abuse while they dedicate twenty-two to Mark ranting about how he hates it that Grace isn’t as punctual as he is, and Grace acknowledging that this was a “sin issue.”

Because verbal abuse and different perspectives of “being on time” are totally the same thing. By the way, Mark has not once referred to any of his abuse as a “sin issue.” He’s exclusively talked about other people having sin issues, or Grace has talked about her own.

Another big problem is when Mark uses I Corinthians 7:3-5 (the “you don’t have authority over your own body” passage) to support the argument of this chapter. I don’t have the space to talk about why this way of thinking is a problem, so instead I’ll direct you to these resources:

“A World Without Consent” by Jeff Eaton.
“I Belong to Me: Learning Agency and Consent Outside Christianity” by Dani Kelley
Sarah Moon‘s series You Are not Your Own.

Honestly, passages like that one are the biggest reasons why I have problems with the “high view of Scripture” perspective, because I read things like “The wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; and likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does” and everything inside of me starts screaming run away. Also fuck this bullshit starts repeating on an endless loop. I’ve read the arguments that this is a passage about mutuality and such, but I don’t find that a compelling enough explanation to get around “you do not have authority over your own body.” Because to me, there’s no way for this not to be incredibly harmful and dangerous.

Anyway, I’d appreciate all ya’ll thoughts on that passage, cause I got nothin.

The last and most glaring problem with this chapter is that there is not a single word about consent. Not a single one. In fact, he does something worse than not talking about it:

People have explained this [referring to putting in “too little effort”] as a gross feeling, where their spouses simply lie there, looking away disinterested and disconnected, making them feel as if they are basically using their spouses’ bodies.

Aish. I’m writing this in a Starbucks, or the book would have gone flying. Instead I just sat and stared into space while the red faded from my vision.

People: if you are having sex with someone and this is their reaction, you are probably having sex with someone who is disassociating. There are many reasons why someone might respond that way, but the biggest one would be you are raping them. And these people fucking know that— they feel “gross” and like they’re doing something wrong. Because they are. Because we know that having sex with an unresponsive person is a fucking bad idea.

Anyway. This chapter was bad. I don’t have high hopes for the next one.

November 24, 2014 by
Feminism

"Real Marriage" review: 139-155, "The Porn Path"

Ok, so the last time I talked about porn, a lot of people seemed to think that I don’t have any problems with porn, or that I think that porn is always ok and having negative thoughts/feelings about porn makes you a prude or something. So let me clarify something up front: I have a problem with a lot of porn, but I do my best to limit my discussions about porn to arguments that are reliable in the sense that I have more than anecdotal evidence to back me up.

Many people have reported having “addictive” reactions to viewing pornography; however, hard-science researchers don’t have much (if anything) to substantiate that. Sociological researchers can speculate about such definitions as “it’s an addiction when it starts interfering in relationships,” for example, but for every researcher saying stuff like that I can find one that argues that porn is awesome because it lowers rape rates (not that I personally find that at all compelling).

What Mark Driscoll does in this chapter– and what basically every evangelical I’ve ever heard talk about this does– is create an argument based on scare tactics. I’ve found that those arguments just don’t work because if you go to a ridiculous and unsubstantiated level of rhetoric, eventually someone (like me, ha) is going to investigate your claims and find out that they’re mostly bunk, and there goes your argument.

The biggest thing I have against this chapter is the way that Mark Driscoll (and many other evangelical leaders) define porn:

We do include as pornography such things as porno movies, magazines, Web sites, online sexual chat, romance novels, phone sex with paid operators, explicit movies, lingerie catalogs, and even the swimsuit issues of sports magazines, and the increasingly base men’s and women’s magazines. (142)

He goes on to talk about how they only have one computer in the kitchen and the TV is in the most visible part of the house, and how they have Nanny net and never watch a movie with nudity in it. So, basically anything where people (and probably just women, let’s be honest) are showing an amount of skin that Mark thinks is “nudity” is porn. This is what I see as the primary problem: women’s bodies are sexualized to the point where we’re not seen as fully human beings, but a collection of sexual parts. To Mark, though, a woman’s body is inherently sexualized, and seeing us undressed can always be porn, because that’s “just the way it is.” Instead of attacking the problem of sexualization, Mark thinks that sexualization is natural: we are just limited to sexualizing (his phrase: “lusting after”) our spouses.

Another problem with this definition is that it’s incomprehensibly large: literally anything that could be considered “immodest” (so pretty much every single cover of Shape) all the way up through hardcore porn counts (which he says is called “gonzo porn” but that doesn’t seem to reflect reality). When your definition is that big, it seems almost inevitable that you’re going to have to go to fundamentalist extremes to avoid it.

But then he gets into the arguments. And this is where we take the train to crazy town.

Argument #1: porn creates neural pathways and mirror neurons. (140-144)

His presentation is rooted in a layman’s understanding of nueroplasticity, and he builds upon the argument made by William Struthers in Wired for Intimacy, a book I’m familiar with because it’s mostly horseshit. Struthers doesn’t say anything the entire book that doesn’t conflate correlation with causation (which, seriously?), so I have my doubts about this argument, especially when every variation of “porn neural pathways” I could Google got me exclusively Christian pages as a result. So I’m … skeptical. I suppose it’s possible, but I’m not a neuroscientist, so I don’t have a definitive way of evaluating this claim.

Argument #2: watching/reading/seeing porn will result in All of the Most Awful Bad Things. (144-152)

Examples include:

  • You will always want sex that degrades women. (145)
  • You are guaranteed to “act out in extreme, dangerous, and self-destructive behavior.” (146)
  • You will never care about your wife’s sexual pleasure. (147)
  • You could become a serial killer, like Ted Bundy. (148)
  • You will do nothing but objectify women always. (148)
  • You will become lazy and selfish in your sex life. (149)
  • Porn is prostitution, and prostitution is the always the same thing as sex trafficking. (150)
  • You will form incestuous desires and fantasize about raping your daughters. (151)
  • You will inevitably end up watching children being raped. (151)
  • You will also probably become a child rapist. (151) (Based on an unsubstantiated claim Gail Dines has made, which… bleh)

See what I mean about scare tactics? None of these things are even realistic.

I do agree with Mark about the basic facts: a lot of porn– an overwhelming amount of porn– depicts violence against women, or shows them being humiliated or degraded, or expects the women to have an anything goes attitude. Porn tends not to center the necessity of consent– in fact, a lot of it actively fights that. That is a problem, and I understand the concern that porn is serving as a form of sexual education for people. If a person thinks that most porn is what sex should be like, then yeah… problems. However, in the conversations that I’ve had about this, most people seem to be happily aware that a lot of porn (there are things like MakeLoveNotPorn, as an exception) isn’t what healthy sex looks like, that it’s a performance.

I’ve talked to the girlfriends and wives of men who have struggled with porn, and I’ve heard a variety of things– it hasn’t really affected their sex life, to their sex-life is now non-existent, to they started expecting them to act like porn stars. That last one I’ve personally experienced, and it’s extremely unpleasant. So I get why there are a lot of really heated emotions about porn.

But, at the same time, I don’t think talking about porn this way is really helpful. I’ve watched marriages fall apart because one spouse discovered the other’s porn habit, and part of me has always wondered– was it the porn, or was it the lies? Was it that one felt that they had to hide something so big, that they felt trapped and like they couldn’t communicate honestly? I’ve never been sure, but I lean toward the latter. Making porn into this ominous boogie man to where it is so horrifically awful how could a good person ever struggle with this seems like it’s just going to make the problem worse.

Anyway … I don’t have any really settled opinions about porn at the moment, but I honestly don’t think I have to. I don’t think we sexualize and degrade women because porn exists: I think most porn sexualizes and degrades women because that’s what our culture does. I think I can talk about those broader problems without committing to either “all porn is bad” or “porn is fine.”

November 17, 2014 by
Feminism

"Real Marriage" review: 123-138, "Disgrace and Grace"

[content note: sexual violence and victim blaming]

This chapter was a … struggle. I’ve known it was coming for a while, but I wasn’t certain how bad it would be. It deeply concerns me because if this is how Mark and Grace Driscoll and the pastoral staff of Mars Hill has been counseling sexual abuse survivors I’m horrified, and I’m grieving for all the men and women who have been harmed by their teachings.

There was one section that I didn’t have a problem with, and was encouraged to see– the one headed “Serving and Protecting your Children” on 136-37. She recommends giving children the words they need to describe their abuse, about the difference between good and bad secrets (surprise parties vs. “this will be our little secret”), and assuring them they won’t get in trouble if they relate something that happened to them. She also makes it clear how important it is to believe your children, no matter who they tell you harmed them, and I was grateful for that.

The rest of the chapter, though, was a nightmarish trainwreck and in my opinion is totally irredeemable. Everything she says is not just wrong but actively harmful.

I also think it will be helpful for me to simply allow what she says to speak for itself. Often I get asked why I’m reviewing this book, and this chapter is a perfect example. Grace says some horrific things, but Grace is not alone. She is one evangelical Christian woman among thousands of others and “biblical” counselors who will all tell sexual abuse survivors the exact same thing, and they’ll probably say it in similar ways.

Before we get to that, though, I want to highlight something that I think is revealing:

Was Mark really safe to talk to about it, or would his response cause more pain (123)?

What will happen to our church and our life if they know about my abuse (128)?

The first time I told Handsome about my rape and abuse, it never once occurred to me to wonder if he was a “safe” person. There was not a single second that I was worried if his reaction would hurt me. I was nervous about telling him, but not because I thought he would possibly think of me differently. And this breaks my heart for Grace because her gut knew that Mark’s reaction wasn’t going to be the right one (“Sometimes his responses caused fear all over again” 132); she makes casual references all through this chapter about how Mark had to learn and adapt in order to respond “appropriately,” and she talks about that as if it’s normal.

That is not normal. That is disturbing.

Also, the fact that she was worried about what the congregation at Mars Hill might think tells me that they had not been building a church that was safe for survivors. If a church hears “your pastor’s wife was in an abusive relationship” and reacts with judgment and condemnation, you have not been responsible leaders. Unfortunately, this is a failing endemic to evangelical churches everywhere.

Anyway, I want to spend the rest of the post showing how evangelicals use Christian-ese in order to victim blame survivors.

We wondered if it was really possible to trust each other again … (126) [implying that she had done something by being abused/telling him she’d been abused to be untrustworthy]

I had lived a double life, a pastor’s daughter and wife filled with deception and fear. (127)

That meant asking the Holy Spirit to restore any memories that needed to be brought into the light so I could be cleansed … and it meant Jesus’ righteousness alone had to replace all my old identity of abused, neglected, dirty, and worthless [sic]. (127)

We quickly realized there were large numbers of abuse victims attending our church … Mutual, honest accountability had always felt too vulnerable but it was part of the process I needed to prayerfully participate in. (128) [“accountability” is a term used among Christians that is intrinsically linked to sinfulness; men who struggle with porn have “accountability partners,” many small groups have “accountability times” where they confess sin to each other.]

I finally wanted to put my own sin and shame to death, through Jesus’ death on the cross. (128)

God gave me a few trustworthy women to encourage and exhort me and love me, despite knowing the truth about me. (129)

I never thought [healing] was possible, but that is what repentance and redemption feel like. (129)

To cope with the pain, I initially pretended to be a “good girl,” … without true repentance. (130)

It was an identity crisis [referring to different common coping mechanisms experienced by many survivors] because I wasn’t rooted in Christ. (131)

But we each need a new identity so that we don’t feel condemned by our sin. (132)

I sobbed off and on for hours over the pain of abuse and the conviction of my own sin. (133)

I could give many other examples, but the others need more surrounding context and I’m trying to keep the length of this manageable.

Survivors of abuse– any form of abuse– have not sinned. I don’t know how to stress that any more emphatically. The only person responsible for sin is the one doing the abusing, not the victim. Trusting someone not to hurt you? Not a sin. Expecting someone to be a decent human being? Not a sin. Hoping that your abuser is capable of change and growth? Not a sin.

There is a common argument among evangelicals, especially “biblical counselors,” that it is important to claim “responsibility for your choices”; very often they frame this in terms of “autonomy,” appropriating feminist vocabulary in order to cloak what they actually mean. In reality, what they’re doing is a logical fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc, more commonly known as “false cause.” Grace argues that because she chose to date her abuser and chose to have sex with him willingly, she is partly at fault for what happened. If she had not chosen to date him, or chosen to have sex with him, the abuse would not have happened.

And, in a ridiculously literal way, that’s true. However, just because the abuse happened after she started dating him does not mean that she was abused because she dated him. It happened because he was an abuser.

In my opinion, there are few “counseling” ideas more poisonous. I spent so many years trying to do this, trying to be “responsible by recognizing what I had done wrong,” not allowing myself to have a “victim mentality,” and all it did was cause agony.

There’s a secondary problem going on in this chapter, most clearly seen in this:

My judgment was clouded once I had sex with someone outside a marriage relationship. The abuse made me feel dirty and defiled, and the lie that I had no value became even more believable. (136)

This is what purity culture does to sexual abuse survivors. I don’t want to say that without purity culture no victim would ever feel “dirty” or “defiled” after being abused. Abuse is intrinsically a deep spiritual, emotional and physical violation and it will cause pain and suffering, regardless of whether or not purity culture exists. However, Grace feels that because she’d consented to sex that her abuse was inescapable (“I was filled with my own guilt from fornicating and told myself if I married him it would cover my sin somehow” 124), and she felt that way because purity culture teaches women that sex– even rape– makes women dirty and defiled.

And she’s clueless that the “lie that I had no value” comes from purity culture, the exact same lie she’s promoting all the way through this chapter.

November 10, 2014 by
Feminism

"Real Marriage" review: 107-122, "Sex: God, Gross, or Gift?"

This chapter seems to be Mark and Grace’s attempt at establishing a historical context for arguments they’ll make later; it’s basically nothing more than an extremely truncated and condensed version of how sex has been viewed in Ancient Near Eastern (“biblical”) and Christian cultures. The unfortunate thing is that their history lesson is … well, I think it’s deceptive. Mark seems principally in control of this chapter, and he makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims, or he makes claims based on debunked arguments, or he omits relevant information because it would destroy his argument.

Perhaps most of this is due to inept research and ignorance, but … I don’t think so.

Ideologically, the biggest problem I have with this chapter is that Mark is demonstrating a concerning lack of empathy.

He dismisses whole groups of people who approach human relationships more analytically. I’m a hopeless romantic in pretty much every way that term applies, but I’ve had many friends who interact with their significant others primarily on a rational level, and who aren’t overly given to emotional displays, who don’t have the “sense of poetry and passion” which Mark says is “required” for people to “be any good at [marriage]” (108).

He talks a lot about people who view “sex as gross” for a variety of reasons (including referencing sexual abuse as a possibility multiple times), and then he says stuff like “Are either of you prone to view sex as god [meaning idolatry] or gross? If so, you are in danger” (121). He repeats this sentiment all the way through this chapter– if you don’t have sex frequently enough, or “freely” enough (I’m guessing his definition of “freely” is where some of the controversy around this book comes from), your marriage is in terrible danger to all sorts of outside threats– adultery, pornography … the usual boogie men of conservative screeds on marital “responsibilities.”

In short, the message seems to be: “have sex as often as I think is ‘often’ and as uninhibited as I think counts as ‘freely enough,’ or one of you is going to cheat or end up addicted to porn. I don’t really care if you’re an abuse victim. You need to get over it in order to protect your marriage” (120).

~~~~~~~~~

I’m going to take the time to examine where I think Mark has either omitted or misrepresented key facts as I think this re-envisioning of history is going to play a part in arguments he makes later. I can’t address every single claim he makes without support or with misleading support, though, because there were just too many. I’ll keep it to what I think were the biggies.

Claim 1: Porneia means “sexual immorality” and encompasses all sorts of sexual sins. It is a “junk drawer term.” (109)

According to pretty much every concordance American protestants use, Mark’s not wrong. However, he doesn’t even address the full meaning of the term– porneia can also mean “the worship of idols, especially animal sacrifice,” and its principal historical meaning is prostitution. This linguistic history is even evidenced in the Bible; many times when the word porneia appears, the surrounding context references prostitution or idol worship either singularly or principally (Acts 15 and 21, I Corinthians 6 and 10, Ephesians 5 …). Considering that prostitution as usually practiced in the ancient world is much more like sex trafficking than it is modern consensual prostitution, it seems obvious why biblical writers might have had a problem with it.

However, if Mark admits to this linguistic history in porneia, he might have to start talking about concepts like consent, and he doesn’t want to go anywhere near that because he needs to maintain the belief that sex acts are right or wrong because God Said So and not because there’s any holistic ethic surrounding sex.

Claim (by omission) 2: Sexual incompatibility does not exist. (110)

He describes a husband who wanted certain “sexual experiences” that his wife was not interested in because it “violated her conscience.” This husband cheated, a choice he rationalized because the other woman was willing to engage in those activities. I have absolute zero judgment for the wife in this situation: if she wasn’t interested in certain sex acts, that is her decision and her husband should have respected that.

I believe that many couples through communication and research and love and trust can overcome some issues surrounding sexual incompatibilities– two people who got married not really understanding what they wanted out of sex (so, pretty much every Christian person who “saved themselves”) will probably encounter some unexpected hiccups, and that’s ok. A lot of those can be worked through with graciousness and understanding.

Some of them can’t.

I’ve known women who cannot have PIV sex with their husbands because his penis is just too big and no matter how slowly they go or how aroused she is intercourse is excruciating for them. I’ve known women who needed certain stimulation (anything from oral to kink) to orgasm and even after trying to work it out for over a decade their husbands were totally unwilling to provide it, preferring to think of their wives as crazy, broken, deranged, or sick. Some of these couples have remained married and chose to focus on building strong lives together based on friendship, some have given up on vaginal intercourse, and some have gotten divorced. They all chose the best path for their lives, but it’s sad that sexual incompatibility played a part.

In Mark’s wold, though, concerns like this don’t seem to exist.

Claim 3: Adultery is wrong because God Said So. (111).

Adultery is wrong because it is a violation of consent. When people marry with the understanding that they will remain romantically and sexually exclusive, violating that expectation without the consent or their partner is wrong. It is a breach of trust, a betrayal.

However, if Mark were to say that instead “adultery happens because of idolatry,” he’d have to address things like polyamory more honestly instead of just dismissing it in a gigantic list of evil things (109).

Claim 4: Porn addiction is real. (113)

No research exists to support this claim. Researchers have noticed that some people experience problems with “excessive use,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case with the vast majority of people who watch pornography. I have issues with some porn– namely, the kind that features rape, non-consensual pain, degradation, and humiliation. That many women in the porn industry face contract and verbal agreement violations near constantly is also a problem. However, Mark doesn’t talk about that at all– and I’m wondering if it’s because of where he’s going to go with the “freely” definition.

Claim 5: Church Fathers got their “sex is gross” idea from Plato. (115-16)

Well, yes. Also, they got it from the Bible: I Corinthians 7:8. Pro-tip, Mark: if it’s in the Bible, you shouldn’t ignore it.

Through these pages he also grossly misrepresents modern Catholic teachings about marital intimacy. I have my own problems with Catholic teachings about contraception, but you can’t assert that the Catholic ethic surrounding intimacy is completely and totally wrong without explaining what it actually is. Straw men do no good, and that’s all he builds up.

He also pissed me off when he said that the clerical practice of celibacy “has, at least in part, resulted in a global scandal.” This is why I believe that feminists think better of men than anti-feminists do: I believe that men can be celibate without resorting to rape or pedophilia.

There were a lot of other claims– about Hinduism, about the temple prostitution at Corinth, about connections between the sexual revolution and porn … all of which were made with absolutely no support whatsoever. He just said them like we were supposed to believe him, but he was almost always just baldly wrong.

That should be concerning, because a man who can’t be trusted to get that many basic facts straight shouldn’t be trusted with your sex life.

November 3, 2014 by
Feminism

"Real Marriage" review: 86-106, "Taking out the Trash"

I wish you all could read the entirely of this chapter because it is ironic. One of these days I’ll have to create a whole series of posts dedicated to page 89, where Mark defines repentance, comparing that to his actual real-life behavior, because it is hysterical. Not only does he fail his own list of “pastoral requirements,” he also bombs at his own definition of repentance– and you can read the whole thing here.

Interestingly enough, I actually agree with Mark on almost everything from 88-90. His definition of repentance is pretty comprehensive, and I only disagree with two of the points– that repentance is not “worldly sorrow” and not “grieving the consequences of sin but hating the evil of the sin itself,” but that’s probably because a) I don’t think Christians are better at everything than everyone else and b) I don’t have the same definition of sin.

To me, I don’t have a problem with arrogance in and of itself but because of the consequences that being arrogant can have– it can make me blind to things I’ve done wrong, it can cause me to belittle people I don’t understand . . . and I think this is where Christians can get it backwards. If we focus on an abstract list of things we consider to be “Sin,” it seems like it would be inevitable for us to forget how much damage our actions can cause. As long as we’re not “Sinning,” it’ll be easy for us to ignore how we’re hurting people. That is how Christians can claim to “love gay people” and yet hold and express beliefs that are directly responsible for emotional and physical harm in the LGBTQ+ community, including the deaths of many queer people. We haven’t “Sinned” by talking about how perverted gay people are, so we can ignore that our actions and words have consequences.

After page 90, though, Mark and I start having problems. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to sections on “Forgiveness” and “Bitterness,” and I imagine most of you just felt your hackles go up. So did mine. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to hear the word “bitter” without being mildly triggered or angry because of how that word is thrown at me all of the time. I have never heard someone use the word “bitter” without it appearing in the middle of a demand for silence. Bitter is the evangelical version of “shut the fuck up.”

We’ll get to how Mark uses it in a bit. First, let’s cover his approach to forgiveness.

He starts off with this statement: “When we sin against our spouses, we cause them to suffer.” This is an excellent example of how backwards the whole “hating the sin itself” concept can make us. Causing our spouses to suffer is a sin against them. I cannot stress how important I think this concept is, because it revolutionized my life. When I stopped worrying about “how much sin I had in my life” and started focusing on “how do my words, actions, and inaction hurt people?” everything changed.

The next few pages I have mixed feelings about, mostly because I’m still wrestling with what forgiveness is. Personally, I think there’s a difference between personal healing and forgiveness, but those two seem conflated in Christian conversations. It’s also possible that I have forgiveness and absolution and reconciliation all mixed up inside of my head, and I’m trying to straighten that out.

The one part I do have unequivocal feelings about is this:

Forgiveness is not dying emotionally and no longer feeling the pain of the transgression.
Rather, forgiveness allows us to feel the appropriate depth of grievous pain but choose by grace not to be continually paralyzed or defined by it.

This irritated me because I do not think it is ok for someone that isn’t me to tell me that there is an “appropriate depth” that I can feel my pain at. Healing looks different for every single person, and healing from trauma and abuse isn’t ever pretty. I spent three years trying to experience pain “appropriately” because nearly everyone I encountered had some sort of yardstick for what healing should look like, and the one I heard all of the time was “you’ll know you’re over it when you’re not talking about him anymore.”

Well, I wanted to be “over it,” so I stopped talking about it. For three years. Until I realized that it wasn’t helping, and I was actually getting worse. I’d refused to actually heal from the abuse and the rapes, and my body wouldn’t let me go on that way.

And guess what– I’m still talking about it. I talk about spiritual abuse. I talk about child abuse. I talk about sexual violence and rape. I talk about sex-based oppression in Christianity. My professional life is “defined” by my status as an abuse survivor, and that is not just completely appropriate: it is a good thing. I will never stop being “defined” by this because that is how I help others.

But … moving on to the section on bitterness, and this is where I threw the book.

In order to illustrate what bitterness looks like in a marriage, Mark uses John and Molly Wesley. I’ve been doing off-and-on research on John Wesley, and I think when it comes to his wife at least he was an unmitigated ass. Mark sets this illustration up by talking about how Molly didn’t like it that John traveled so much and John’s justification that he did it because God.

But then we get this:

“I took you first by the arm, and afterward by your shoulder, and shook you twice or thrice … and might have made you black and blue. I bless God, that I did not do this fifty times and that I did nothing worse.” [edited for ease of reading]

That sentence from one of John’s letters to Molly is immediately followed by this:

Her bitterness, made worse by John’s extensive ongoing letter writing to multiple women, caused Molly to become insanely jealous … Their final years were spent apart, as she never once set foot in his personal residence.

What in the ever living fuck is this. John Wesley admits that he could have made his wife “black and blue” (“thank God I did nothing worse”) and the fact that Molly decides she’s not going to put up with his abuse any more makes her bitter?! She couldn’t even divorce him– at the time (this “time” extending to 1923 in England), women could only divorce their husbands if they could prove adultery and could also afford the £1,500 fee. She didn’t have any options, and she was married to someone who ignored her, ignored her requests, disrespected her continuously, and was willing to hurt her. A domestic violence victim is not bitter when they decide that they’re never going to step foot back in their abuser’s house.

So, once again, Mark is making it perfectly clear what he thinks about abuse, and it’s terrifying.

October 28, 2014 by
Theology

Mark Driscoll’s resignation letter

You might have heard the news that broke just a little while ago– Mark Driscoll has officially resigned from being a pastor and elder of Mars Hill. This is exceedingly good news, and while I was not exactly joyful to hear it, I am hopeful that those who have been abused by Mark and the Mars Hill leadership can gain some hope and comfort from this. Mark Driscoll wasn’t the only problem at Mars Hill– no one becomes a spiritual abuser of thousands all by themselves– but he was the most visible example of misogynistic, abusive Christianity and I’m glad he’s gone.

For the moment.

Because he’ll be back.

However, that’s not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about a few things happening in Mark’s resignation letter that hopefully won’t be ignored in the flood of “see, everyone, now we need to forgive him and NEVER SPEAK OF THIS EVER AGAIN” posts that are probably coming. You can read the entire letter here, if you’d like, but there’s a few things about this letter that I think it’s important to highlight.

This appears in the third paragraph:

You have also shared with me that many of those making charges against me declined to meet with you or participate in the review process at all. Consequently, those conducting the review of charges against me began to interview people who had not even been a party to the charges.

The “You” there is “Board of Advisers and Accountability.” When I got to this section, at first I was a little puzzled why this was coming up in the middle of what was supposed to be a resignation letter, and then I remembered that this is not so much a resignation letter as much as it is a PR move on Mark’s part. It’s his attempt to continue controlling the narrative and what gets talked about as he leaves, and “these people who have forced me into this are cowards whose stories aren’t credible” is supposed to be one of the things he wants us all to bicker about.

Except most of the people who have “made charges against him” have done so publicly, with their names attached, and they have put an overwhelming amount of proof out there for anyone to review, including memos and e-mails. That whoever Mark is talking about didn’t feel particularly inclined to talk to a “Board of Advisers” isn’t at all surprising, especially when people like Paul Tripp resigned from it because it was incapable of actually addressing the issues at hand. Why would anyone abused by not just Mark Driscoll but an entire system set up to keep him in power ever want to talk to these people?

This is not a failure on the part of those who “declined to meet.” They’ve done more than their fair share of suffering in order to expose Driscoll and Mars Hill leadership, and “declining to meet” was probably the only option they had to protect their mental and spiritual well-being.

Prior to and during this process there have been no charges of criminal activity, immorality or heresy, any of which could clearly be grounds for disqualification from pastoral ministry.

This line made me laugh– a bitter and cynical and rueful laugh, because oh it’s just so … sad. What this line actually means is: well, nothing I did was actually ILLEGAL. If the best thing you have to say about your behavior is “well, I wouldn’t go to prison for it,” you have a problem.

But let’s talk about how he says he didn’t commit “heresy.” The fact that he doesn’t think his abusive behavior– and his plagiarism– is immoral is a problem all on its own, but that the Board decided he’d never taught anything heretical is revealing. Granted, I’m not one to bandy around the word “heresy”– but Mark’s tribe is. I mean, they pull out the “heretic!” when someone uses a feminine pronoun to describe God in a poem.

But Mark gets to call women “penis homes” and preach entire sermon series on how women should basically be nothing more than sex slaves to their husbands and … crickets.

And, to be blunt, that Mark’s and the Board’s standard is “don’t be convicted of anything illegal and don’t do anything heretical or immoral” is more than just a touch horrifying. It’s also troubling, because the “standard” that these people claim to adhere to doesn’t have “don’t do something illegal” as its baseline. The Acts 29 Network even has a whole article dedicated to the “Biblical Qualifications of a Pastor” (posted March 2010, when Mark was still in charge) and these items jumped out at me:

4. A Pastor must be humble – not arrogant (Titus 1:7)
5. A Pastor must be gentle – not quick-tempered (Titus 1:7; 1 Tim 3:3)
7. A Pastor must be peaceful – not violent (Titus 1:7; 1 Tim 3:3)
16. A Pastor must be respectable (1 Tim 3:7)
17. A Pastor must be an example to the flock (1 Peter 5:3)

The Board of Advisers and Mark himself admitted to all the different ways Mark has not been any of these things– and some of these he even admitted to in the letter. He says that ” I have confessed to past pride, anger and a domineering spirit.” The Board of Advisers said this:

We concluded that Pastor Mark has, at times, been guilty of arrogance, responding to conflict with a quick temper and harsh speech, and leading the staff and elders in a domineering manner.

Mark is quite clearly saying my own articulation of the rules do not apply to me.

One of the last things he says in this letter, though, made me angry:

Recent months have proven unhealthy for our family—even physically unsafe at times—and we believe the time has now come for the elders to choose new pastoral leadership for Mars Hill.

I am not in Seattle, and I do not personally know the Driscolls. It is entirely possible that his family has received threats, even threats of physical violence. That would not surprise me at all, considering the things that Mark has done in an incredibly public way. Threats against his family are completely inexcusable and I will not justify them if they happened.

However, there is absolutely nothing in this letter that says “I am resigning as pastor because I have sinned against the people I was supposed to shepherd.” He never says that. He says a bunch of stuff about how the Board didn’t say he was disqualified to lead, and how the people accusing him are a bunch of untrusthworthy cowards, and how he’s leaving because it’s just not the best thing for him. This letter is dedicated to creating this image of a man who was persecuted out of being a pastor, and it makes me sick because that’s not what happened.

Mark is a misogynistic abuser who has spent well over a decade creating a church and staff that would enable his behavior, and this letter is nothing more than a continuation of that. It is insurance so that one day he can start another ministry and do it all over again.

Photo by Barret Anspach
October 15, 2014 by
Feminism

"Real Marriage" review: 65-85, "The Respectful Wife"

With a chapter title like that, you just know how much I loved it. I probably should have expected this chapter to be more infuriating than the one devoted to men, but I didn’t. My marginalia has a lot more “WTF” and “BS” (which stands for both bullshit and benevolent sexism; nice how that one worked out) than the last chapter did– and I wish I could talk about a lot more than I have the space for.

But, today, we’re going to start of with Significant Problem #1:

Mark and Grace twist Scripture to the point of deceit. Or they proof text in order to mislead. Or they use footnotes as if the verses they’re referencing have anything at all to do with their argument. In short: Mark and Grace use the Bible to lie, and it pisses me off. What they’re doing isn’t at all unusual in complementarian circles, because the “biblical” argument for complementarianism is incredibly weak so they are forced to rely on manipulative tactics like these. Unfortunately, these deceptions work on far too many people.

The first time I threw the book today was when I got to page 71, and Grace quotes 1 Cor. 11:7-9 in order to support her argument that women need to be “companions” and “helpers” in the complementarian sense. I have actually written about this exact problem, in a post I’m particularly proud of.

Grace quotes this:

“Man is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man is not from woman, but woman from man. Nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man.”

And then she stops. Because, if she kept going, she’d eventually run into this:

Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman, For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman.

Grace purposely omits this part of the passage, even though from a grammatical stand point the passage climaxes here. Stopping where she stops would be a bit like me stopping a sentence right before a but. After what she quotes is nevertheless. Nevertheless, (πλήν) as in, “in spite of what has just been said” or “but rather, except.” Quoting a passage in order to prove your point when the author himself says “but” right after the section you’re quoting is … well, I threw the book across the room. Now I just want to type out curse words. It’s wrong and misleading and dishonest and she’s doing this to the Bible, a book they both claim to live their lives by. This isn’t the only instance (she does something similar at least four times), but I have to keep going.

On to Significant Problem #2!

Grace and Mark put all of the responsibility for a healthy marriage and productive life onto wives. In the chapter Mark addressed to men, all he basically said was “don’t be a monster”; he never once uses the word “abuse” even though he describes emotional, verbal, and physical abuse. He didn’t even really take it beyond that into “here’s how to be a decent human being”– he just talks a lot about all the ways men can abuse their wives and then says “don’t be that guy.”

In this chapter, though, Grace has got a lot to say about all the things that a woman has to do.

  • She prays for her husband about every single thing he has to do all day long.
  • She touches him affectionately, romantically, and sexually.
  • She texts him through the day.
  • She makes sure the prepare healthful meals.
  • She takes up his interests.
  • She reads the Bible (71-75).

And while when she’s talking about learning to communicate she indicates this is something husbands and wives have to learn how to do together, “dudes, talk to your wife about what you think a problem is” is something Mark never tells husbands to do. Communication is a two-way street, but they’ve missed that.

And, lastly, Significant Problem #3:

Grace uses the “except if you’re being abused” line.

I wish I could tell you how much I hate that line. I hate it. I hate it more than any other single phrase I’ve ever heard come out of a spiritual leader’s mouth. I have gotten up and left church services because of it, and at this point if I hear it uttered in a sermon and I talk to the pastor afterward and their reaction is nonchalance, I’m never going back to that church. I am done with this phrase.

It is worse than useless. It is dangerous.

It is especially dangerous because of the context of this book. Chapter three spent a lot of time describing abusive behaviors– and not just verbal and emotional abuse, but physical coercion and violence as well. But, Mark never once says “this is what abuse looks like.” He spends the entire chapter minimizing it– personally, I think he has a vested interest in minimizing abuse, because he’s an abuser. There’s no way in hell Grace isn’t going through at home what Mark has been putting his church and staff through for years.

He gets away with it, though, because hardly anyone in our culture understands what abuse actually is. We have the vague thought that it’s black eyes, broken arms, women who “fall down stairs.” But the reality is that my abuser called me Goddamn fucking bitch every single day for almost three years and I never thought it was abuse because he wasn’t hitting me. He would pinch me and twist my fingers like he was playing “Uncle,” and I never thought it was abuse because there were never any bruises.

It is extraordinarily rare for a person in an abusive relationship to understand that’s what is happening. When someone says “oh, if you’re in an abusive relationship, none of this applies to you,” there is basically not a single fucking person who’s going to hear that and think “oh, that means me.”

If you’re about to say something that you think needs to have that disclaimer slapped onto it, then you need to think about it really, really hard. If you know that something you believe could be twisted by an abuser or a victim in order to trap them, then that belief must be re-evaluated, period. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit.

But, Real Marriage makes it so much more worse than that. She tells women that they are commanded to submit to their husbands, even if he makes an irresponsible decision that could be detrimental to both of them (80). She compares a woman submitting to her husband to a child obeying their parents (82). She says that “if your husband isn’t working on his part of loving, you are still called to work on your part of submitting” (84).

But, worst of all, she says this:

If your husband is verbally or physically abusing you, he is not loving or respecting you. If this is an ongoing issue, it should be addressed and stopped immediately by a pastor or trustworthy leader who will listen to you both.

…

There is so much wrong with this. First of all, if you realize that you are in an abusive situation, leaving should be your end goal. Not reconciliation. Not redemption. Not forgiveness. Getting yourself (and children if you have them) safe is your first and only priority, however you need to go about doing that.

Second, Grace’s idea that someone in an abusive marriage should go to a leader “who will listen to you both” is beyond wrong. It is worse than wrong. That “advice” can, has, and will kill people. Anyone who is willing to listen to both a victim and their abuser is an unwise person who should not be sought out or listened to. If they are willing to “listen” to the abuser, if they want to “hear both sides,” they will be used by the abuser to further ensnare their victim. A wise and properly trained counselor who hears “my husband hits me” will not be interested in hearing from the person willing to hit their spouse.

That Grace (and, presumably Mark), think this is a good idea is horrifying.

October 6, 2014 by