Browsing Tag

theology

Theology

things you should say to a recovering fundamentalist

If you look at the top of this page, you’ll see a single line: “an ongoing journey in overcoming a fundamentalist indoctrination.” That is still a good summation of why I write here, why I write for you all. Because of that, I spend a lot of time critiquing. Criticizing. Rage-stomping. I do everything within my power to stand up for the oppressed, the abused, the silenced. However, although these are some of the reasons why I write, they’re not the only reasons why I write. I do my best to bring a more positive perspective when I can. Anger is healthy, and productive– there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being angry at the way things are some times. However, anger can’t be the end-all, be-all, or I’m going to burn myself out.

So that is what today is about. I got amazing comments yesterday— many of you left behind things you’ve heard that were infuriating, or heartbreaking. Some made me laugh and shake my head, others made me want to throw things. And that, my friends, is good for all of us.

However, there’s something that comes next. What are the things that we desperately want to hear from our friends and our family instead? We get a lot of flack, no matter where we stand as ex-fundamentalists. So, what are some things you’ve always wished people would actually say?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For me, it starts here:

” .”
—sincerely, everyone

That’s where it absolutely must begin, and I think most (if not all) of you would agree with me. It starts with quietness. It starts with listening. Most ex-fundamentalists have spent a lifetime–or most of it– being silenced. Being told to lock away and hide all of our feelings, all the rage at the wrongness of it all, everything. We were told, over and over again, nearly by everyone we knew, that the only option for us was our silence.

And, for many of us, when we finally did start talking, we were told, again, that we should really just remain quiet for all the reasons we talked about yesterday. One reader commented that most of the 15 things from yesterday were really just variations of “shut up,” and he was right. Being told to stay quiet–however I’m told– really makes me want to scream. What I need from you, if you care about me, is to listen. Really listen. It’s more than just hearing my words while simultaneously coming up with all the possible things you could say as either affirmation or rebuttal. At first, I don’t think I need you to say anything. Make me a cup of tea. Offer me a hug. Cuddle with me in a fuzzy blanket. Look me in my eyes. Cry with me. Do everything you can to understand that what I’m coming out of was deeply horrific. It’s left me with serious triggers. It’s left me with scars so bad that sometimes it takes everything I have not to run out of a church auditorium to go vomit.

I’m not making shit up. I’m not crazy. I’m not exaggerating.

And what I really need is for you to believe me.

Believe me when I say that I believe in Jesus– but I have trouble sometimes believing in God. Believe me when I say that I’m desperately searching for answers, but that I have no idea where they’ll take me. And this darkness, the shadows, the not-knowing, the gray, the uncertainty– it’s uncomfortable. It’s hard. It makes me curl up on my bed and weep, sometimes. I’m working through things– and I need to you enter this space with me. To leave your confidence, your unflappability, at the door, and ask the same questions. Maybe you’ll get to a different answer– and that’s ok. But the questions– the quest— is what matters.

“What things could I be looking for in my own church?”

Dear mother in heaven if there’s a question I want asked, it’s this one. Because I’ve been in a lot of churches since I’ve left my fundamentalist one behind, and if there’s one thing that’s been consistent everywhere I’ve gone, it’s that all churches have something about them that could “grow,” in Christian parlance. Maybe it’s no big deal. Maybe it’s a big, big deal. And you don’t have to mimic me– you don’t have to adopt all of my concerns, worries, the things I’m wary or suspicious of. Yesterday, I was talking to a friend and he sent me the doctrinal statement of the church he attends– and they affirm the stance of The Gospel Coalition (of #gagreflex fame, most recently). Which, personally, frightens me. I wouldn’t go anywhere near that church because of it. But, he’s comfortable there, and that’s ok. One of my best, most wonderful friends is much more conservative than I am on pretty much every measurable spectrum, but we love each other because of those differences.

I’m not asking you to be my clone. I’m asking you to take my concerns seriously.

Not every single last church is a hotbed for abusive activity or fundamentalist approaches to faith. But the attitude of “that doesn’t happen at my church“– it’s so common, and you could be wrong. It very well could be happening at your church. And, a lot of the time, it’s not glaringly obvious if it’s there. It could start out as something really small– something so insignificant a lot of people wouldn’t even bother commenting. But then . . . slowly . . . over time . . . it could get worse. The only way to make sure it doesn’t happen at your church is to be aware of what could happen if “good men do nothing.”

“Do you think there are some things in this theology that are harmful?”

This, heads up, will probably not be an easy conversation to have, but it’s a necessary one if the Church universal is going to have any chance of moving forward. My approach to theology is heavily influenced by my background in literary theory. Critical theories are essentially frameworks, ways of approaching and interacting with a text. You can do a Marxist reading of Oliver Twist, analyzing the power struggles and the class warfare in Dickens’ material. Or, you could do a feminist reading of Little Women— how did the patriarchal culture of Alcott’s time influence how she constructed her characters– was a feminist struggle the reason why she gave the principle romantic interest a feminine name? Why is the father absent?

I think there’s similarities between literary theory and systematic theologies. For a simplified example, a Reformed/Calvinist theology searches for God’s sovereignty in the text of the Bible. Because of my training, I’m capable of switching theological “caps”– I can think inside of the different frameworks with help from scholars and commentaries. And something I’ve learned through all of this is that all critical theories– literary or theological– have flaws. There are weaknesses in every argument; that doesn’t automatically make the argument wrong, but the point should be not to eliminate weaknesses but acknowledge the fact that they exist. This week is a syncroblog for queer theology (hint: check it out, it’s awesome)– and there’s other theologies, too. There’s feminist theology. And liberation theology. And all of them– even the neo-Reformed perspective, which makes me itch– have something to offer. Theology, like most things, isn’t a monolith. There isn’t one Supreme, Correct Theory of Everything about God.

And, being willing to admit that there are some things about your average evangelical/Protestant theology that can be incredibly harmful is a really good first step.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now I’m turning it over to you. What are some things you’d like to hear?

September 12, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

15 things not to say to a recovering fundamentalist

There have been plenty of things I’ve heard since I left Christian fundamentalism after spending 14 years (more than half my life) in it, and most of them make me want to tear my hair out. So, I put out a general call for some of the gems you have heard, and here’s a few that I got back.

1. “You just need to work through your bitterness.”– Teryn

Bitterness. It’s a good idea to pretty much never use that word in particular. Bitterness, in fundie-speak, is a tool to silence anyone who is being critical. If you’re accused of “bitterness,” it means that you are incapable of viewing any situation or person “correctly,” that you lack the capacity for love and grace, and what you actually need to work on is yourself. You’re imagining things, nothing bad is happening, and you have a screw loose. This is actually a form of gaslighting– convincing the person who’s being attacked that they’re just crazy– and we’ve been beaten over the head with it for years. Just because we’re saying things about the Church that aren’t pleasant doesn’t make us bitter. Just because we sound angry doesn’t mean we’re bitter.

2. “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” — Lydia

There are a lot of variations on this one, but it all boils down to this idea that Christianity is fine, it’s really just our personal experiences that we have to get over. And, I get why this one comes up a lot. For Christians who haven’t experienced either a) fundamentalism or b) spiritual abuse, their religion is one of the best, most wonderful, spectacular things in their life and they couldn’t imagine living without it. For us, though? It’s not even remotely the same feeling. When Christianity has been the weapon used to beat you, sometimes, throwing the whole thing out is the only healthy thing left to do.

3. “You were never really a Christian.” — Libby Anne

It’s the teachings of “eternal security” and “by their fruits you shall know them” taken one step too far. And, frankly, it’s codswallop. By any measure, people who grew up in Christian fundamentalism, prayed the sinner’s prayer, loved God, loved Jesus . . . they were Christians any way you look at it. Just because they’re not Christians now has absolutely zero bearing on if they were Christians then. The same thing goes if they don’t fit your particular criteria for what you think a “Christian” is.

4. “If you’re not currently attending a church, you have walked away from God.” — KR Taylor

People usually come to me armed with Hebrews 10:25 — “forsake not the assembling of yourselves together,” which is really just code for “real Christians go to church.” Which, seriously, asking some of us to go back to church is like asking a soldier with severe PTSD to go back to the battlefield, or asking a battered wife to go back to her abusive husband. You’re telling us that the only way we can be a “True Christian” is if we go to a building where all the other “True Christians” are once a week, and aside from sounding ridiculous, it’s inconsiderate and displays an astounding lack of compassion. If you’re telling someone who you know has been spiritually abused to get their ass back in church, all it means is that you haven’t been actually listening to us. If you were listening, you’d know exactly how hurtful and dismissive you sound.

5. “You need to work this out with trembling and fear.” — Dani

Also known as, “Are you sure you want to be asking these questions?” Questions, in many arenas of Christianity, make a lot of us uncomfortable. The unfortunate thing that I’ve encountered the most is that I grew up understanding more about the God of the Old Testament than a lot of “typical” Christians I’ve encountered since getting outside of fundamentalism. Questions like “is God really a genocidal megalomaniac?” or “How is it fair or loving to hold millions of people accountable for something they’ve never heard of?” are legitimate, but they’re also not easy. As fundamentalists, we tend to be intimately familiar with an angry, jealous, righteous God, and trying to figure out how that’s the same Person that is also supposed to be Love is hard. Beyond hard, at times. It’s downright impossible for many of us.

6. “I wish people just knew that if they remembered how good Jesus’ love for us is, these things wouldn’t seem so hard!” — Hännah

This one feels . . . empty. I’m super happy for all those people who have had amazing experiences with Jesus in their religion, but how good God or Jesus is doesn’t really change the fact that a lot of people’s lives are hell holes or that a lot of people who claim Jesus’ name have done some heinously evil things. And telling us just to ignore our “hardships” because “Jesus loves you!” is basically meaningless. It’s like splashing orange juice on a bullet wound. Sure, orange juice is awesome, and Vitamin C is good for you, but it’s not going to do anything to help.

7. “Why do you have to criticize the Church? Do you hate Christians?” — Boze

Probably more than a lot of these, this one makes me want to tear my hair out and beat my head against the wall. I think this is another example of the Christian persecution complex gone crazy. There’s this perception that Christianity is under constant, brutal attack on all fronts, and it’s a battle we’re all gloriously and nobly fighting, but it’s going to overwhelm us at some point and then everything will be terrible. This results in any form of criticism whatsoever being perceived as an “attack.” If what we have to say about the Church isn’t all happy-happy-joy-joy, then we should just stay quiet because we’re just making Christianity look bad. To ex-fundamentalists, this is a line we’re more than familiar with. Defending the reputation of the organization at the cost of actual people is a line we know by heart.

8. Quoting Jeremiah 29:11. Or Romans 8:28. Or pretty much any hand-picked verse about God working everything out. — Abi

Proof-texting. If there’s one thing that a lot of Christians, but fundamentalists in particular, are exceedingly good at, it’s this. Most of the pastors and preachers I’ve heard are the Kings of Taking Verses out of Context and Making it Sound Good. First of all, using verses like Jeremiah 29:11 (“I know the plans I have for you”) is bad hermeneutics. Also, throwing single verses at us isn’t very helpful, and is really just frustrating. When Bible verses enter the conversation like this, it usually means that whoever we’re talking to is done listening, and they’ve decided the most helpful thing they can do is use a trite cliché we’ve heard exactly 164,455,795 times before.

9. “You’re hurting the church. We need unity, not division.”

If I had a nickle.

It’s related to the “do you hate Christians?” comment, but this one is specifically an order to shut up and color. Criticisms of Christianity are not sowing division, just to be clear. There are all kinds of things that sow division– like telling the people in Moore, OK that they should be grateful that God deigned to destroy their homes, or covering up child molestation by pastors in your churches for over 30 years– but standing up for the broken isn’t one of them.

10. “I’m a/my church is fundamentalist, and I’m/we’re not anything like what you’re describing.”

I run into this sentiment a lot. In fact, when I put out my request for this on twitter, one of the people who responded said “I’m a fundamentalist. Please don’t throw stones.” Which, was just . . . ironically funny, but also made me sigh. I use the words fundamentalist and fundamentalism to talk about a specific Christian movement, and I use the accepted term to describe it. I know a lot of people who claim the label “fundamentalist”– in fact, one of my best and dearest friends does– who don’t actually fit. There is a difference between traditionalism, religious conservatism, and adhering to “fundamentals,” which is really just Protestant orthodoxy, and fundamentalism. I’m using the term as it is modernly defined.

However, there are a lot of people who are fundamentalist and fit exactly what I’m describing, and still say this. Which, just . . . boggles.

11. “If you are truly seeking God in this time, he will lead you to the Truth.” — Trischa

And if I’m led to believing in universalism? Or atheism? Or neo-paganism? Somehow, I don’t think they’ll believe me, because “Truth” usually means “whatever I think the Bible says.” The catch in this statement is “If you are truly seeking.” And they get to determine what “truly seeking” entails. If I don’t eventually end up agreeing with them, welp, I must not have been truly seeking!

12. “Fundamentalism isn’t really Christianity.”

Oh, boy. I get this one so much, and I’m never entirely sure how to respond to it, because damn. What do they think Christianity is then? It’s a pretty big religion, and it’s got an awful lot of denominations. If believing that Jesus is God, literally came to earth, was crucified and resurrected and now sits on the right hand of the father, and he did all of this to save us from our sins doesn’t qualify you for Christianity, I’d like to see what does. Fundamentalism is an especially pernicious sub-culture in Christianity, but it’s not something totally different. They believe a lot of the exact same stuff that most Christians do– which was a huge shock when I eventually figured that one out. But, they take the hard-edged stance that they’re the only true Christians. So, it’s always funny to me when a non-fundamentalist says the exact same thing a fundamentalist would say about them.

13. “Be careful you don’t lose your faith.” — Hännah

People are genuinely concerned about us, and just want to make sure that we’re ok. However, the concept that we could be “ok” without religion, without Christianity– it’s a little bit too far outside the box for a lot of Christians. To a lot of the people I know, living without their faith would be pretty unthinkable. Thoughts like “I don’t know how people survive without Jesus” (which is a modern remix of “you can do all things through Christ”) are pretty common among Christians– and they mean it. To be honest, I’ve said that sort of thing on more than one occasion. But, let me assure you: we are just fine. For a lot of us, “losing our faith” was the best– and hardest– thing that ever happened to us.

14. “I’ll pray for you.” — Lana

And what they mean by this is “I hope God shows you exactly how wrong you are soon!” (Thanks to Angela). Also, please avoid this one. If there’s a more empty, meaningless phrase in all of Christianity, I’d like to hear it, because I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exist. When someone says something like this, what most recovering fundies hear is “I don’t care about your problems, I want to exit this conversation, and please don’t even mention the fact that you’ve had a bad experience to me ever again.”

15. “Your critiques of Christianity aren’t valid, because you’re just confusing it with your fundamentalist background.”

And, for me, this is the one that makes me want to rage-stomp. Because yes, my background was pretty bad. Yes, the church I grew up in was pretty crazy. Yes, the easiest way I have of describing my experience is by calling the whole thing a cult.

However, fundamentalism is really just a microcosm of Christianity in general. It’s not that there’s anything about fundamentalism that is super off-the-radar crazy that makes it obviously bad. All it is, really, is a concentrated version of Christianity. Think of every single thing you’ve ever run into at your completely normal, run-of-the-mill Protestant churches, and I guarantee you that you’ll find it in a fundamentalist church. They’re not different, really, they’re just intensified. Because of that, my background makes me more qualified to speak about some issues, because I have more experience with more aspects of it than your typical church-goer. I actually know what some of these teachings do when they’re consistently enforced.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And . . . that wraps it up for me. What about you? What are some things you’ve heard that just make you go crazy?

UPDATE: I’ve written two follow-up posts. One is on the things you should say, and the other explains more about fundamentalism as a sub-set of Christianity.

September 11, 2013 by SamanthaField

Feminism

complementarianism and metaphors

This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

The Greek word μυστήριον, which is consistently translated as “mystery,” appears more in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians than it does anywhere else in the New Testament. The way that Paul uses μυστήριον is markedly different from the way that John The Revelator uses it– in the Book of Revelation, μυστήριον is used for its primary meaning: something hidden, something secret, something not understood or seen.

That is not the way Paul uses it in Ephesians, and his use of μυστήριον was startling to me. I’m used to thinking of mystery as being some sort of puzzle, or something to be figured out. Today, when we call something a mystery, it has the connotation of being unknowable. It’s something we don’t have answers for, and probably never will.

That’s not what it means in Ephesians. In fact, it means the exact opposite. He actually defines μυστήριον in two previous passages:

In love he predestined us for adoption as children through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

Eph. 1:5-10

When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.

Eph. 3:4-6

This is how he consistently presents what the μυστήριον is: something that was not previously understood but has now been revealed; in the context of Ephesians, this mystery is intimately connected with a completely revolutionary concept of what it means to be children of God. Paul is revealing something incredibly, almost unbelievably subversive to the church in Ephesus. He’s telling these Gentile Christians that they are part of the Beloved, united in him, and are now fellow heirs to the promise.

He’s telling them what it means to be a part of the universal, catholic Church. They’re a part of a family now– daughters and sons of God, fellow heirs. He spends the first three chapters speaking to them of a sweeping tapestry– a pattern that their Father-Mother had in place from the very beginning, but was only now forming a picture they could see and understand. The last three chapters he devotes to explaining what this means for them in concrete, every day terms; Paul was nothing if not practical.

You’re a part of the family of God, he’s saying. Now, what does that actually look like?

The family is a metaphor, and he uses the pater familia, the sacred institute of Rome as the “family” that everyone in Ephesus is familiar with. And he continually subverts it. You are all aware of what Plato said about the pater familia, but you are not just Roman anymore– you are children of God as well as children of Caesar.

There are many excellent analyses of the Greco-Roman household codes, but that’s not really the purpose of my post today. I’m talking about the metaphor he’s using– which is one metaphor among dozens. In Ephesians, the metaphor for the church is the family– the pater familia. Today, many would argue that Ephesians 5:22-33 is an instruction to the church regarding marriage that must be acted out literally. The part of this passage that receives an undo amount of attention is the description as Christ and the husband as the “head.” This has resulted in the complementarian term headship, which has come to mean something entirely different than how the people of Ephesus would have received it.

The argument centers on what κεφαλή (a feminine noun, just thought I’d mention that) means– does it really mean authority?

Reading hierarchy, authority, and power struggles into Ephesians 5:22-32, from a literary criticism and theory standpoint, is actually a Marxist reading. I imagine complementarians don’t realize that, but identifying passages like this one primarily as conflicts between weak and strong is, from a literary standpoint, not sound exegesis. It’s eisegeses, or reading your presuppositions into the text. It can only be sound hermeneutics if the power struggle is actually there– some say it is, but the first three chapters of this book belie that. This letter is all about unity– in this passage, it’s about becoming one flesh, the same term God used to describe the union between Adam and Eve before the Fall.

By using this terminology, Paul is evoking the imagery of Genesis and paradise– this is what the Church is supposed to be. This is what it’s supposed to look like. This is what it means to be man and wife– so united that you become one flesh as God originally intended.

And, if there is really supposed to be hierarchy in the Church, if the modern concept of headship-leader-authority is really a part of how Christians are supposed to relate to each other; how we, as the universal catholic Church is supposed to relate to Christ– as a top-down hierarchy, then it should show up in the other metaphors for the Church.

But it doesn’t.

Oh, sometimes it does. The Church is described as soldiers, as subjects in a kingdom, as part of a priesthood with Christ as the chief priest. It wouldn’t be fair or honest to remove any semblance of hierarchy from those descriptions.

But, there are many metaphors where this hierarchy is non-existent. Most of these have to do with specifically giving us an image of inter-dependence and unity. We are the body– joined and held together, building each other in love. We are the temple, a building– with Christ as the lynch pin, as the cornerstone, as the beginning.

We are the Vine and the Branches. The vine cannot survive without the branches, and the branches cannot survive without the vine. We need each other in order to live, thrive, and function. We can’t be separated, and we are one.

That is the over-riding image of the Church and Christ: as one flesh— as something so deeply connected, interwoven, that it would be impossible to think of them as separate. To do so would be borderline ridiculous. These metaphors aren’t about building an idea of the Church where there must be determined authorities that enforce their will onto everyone else: that is is the antithesis of what it means to be the Church. Hierarchy isn’t what this metaphor in Ephesians is about. Interpreting head here, as “divinely authorized power” isn’t a fair reading of Ephesians, and it doesn’t accurately represent how head is presented in every other place it appears.

The only way Ephesians 5:22-33 works as an instruction for wives to submit to the power and control of their husbands is if you rip it out of context and isolate it– you have to insulate the meanings of these words even from the letter it’s a part of, much less the Pauline Corpus or the New Testament. You have to remove the beauty of the mystery that Paul is speaking of in such glowing terms. We could no longer be Beloved, the fellow heirs, the daughters and sons. If hierarchy is the principle in Ephesians 5, than it obliterates Paradise. Forcing hierarchy into this passage leads to seeing hierarchy and power struggles everywhere else– in all those passages where we are called to love like no one else, to esteem everyone as equals.

If there’s hierarchy, than there is no bond nor free cannot be true.

If there’s hierarchy, then all those verses that ask us to be one, to be in unity, to ignore all of the boundaries and rules and cultural constructs about who is allowed to socialize with who, who is allowed to speak to who– all those times that Jesus stepped outside those limitations . . . it all evaporates.

What Jesus did was radical, and what the early church did was just as radical– they threw away hierarchy.

Bringing it back, claiming that all of our human relationships are determined by our obedience to husbands, to pastors, to parents . . . it mars the beauty of the Church, the love of the saints. It damages the message and purpose of the Gospel and the act of the Cross.

August 29, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

learning the words: on fire

Today’s guest post is from April, who blogs about “taking back the church” at Revolutionary Faith. “Learning the Words” is a series on the words many of us didn’t have in fundamentalism or overly conservative evangelicalism– and how we got them back. If you would like to be a part of this series, you can find my contact information at the top.

“Are you on fire for God?”

This question became the bane of my spiritual existence in my young adult years–specifically from 2000 to 2008. Every Sunday morning and every Wednesday night youth service, I heard how important it was to be “on fire” for God. Because according to Revelation 3:16, being lukewarm was the worst possible thing for any Christian to be. People cold in their devotion got a pass. Lukewarm believers received the distinct pleasure of being vomited out of God’s mouth.

In my view, Revelation 3:16 is one of the most misunderstood, misinterpreted “clobber verses” in charismatic, Penecostal churches–perhaps even more than Ephesians 5:22-24 (wives submit to husbands). I know that’s a pretty bold claim. But I had this verse shoved down my throat almost weekly, and it proved to be just as damaging, if not more so, to my walk with Christ.

See, according to my church, being “on fire” meant to be enthusiastic in worship. Very enthusiastic. Don’t want to raise your hands? You’re not on fire. Don’t feel like shouting? You’re not on fire. Don’t feel like dancing as King David danced? You’re not on fire. Don’t scream like a “Jesus groupie” whenever the pastor speaks the Savior’s name? You’re not on fire. And, someday, God is going to barf you straight into the Lake of Fire–because you once cheered louder for Michael Jordan than you did for the everlasting Son of God– who died for you!

One can imagine the intense guilt this bred in me over time. I couldn’t worship quietly without feeling judged by my pastor, youth pastor, worship leader, and peers. Nothing I did during worship was ever good enough for them or, I thought, for God. Simply meditating in His presence was not good enough. Folding my hands and bowing my head was not good enough. I had to prove to everyone that I loved God more than anything else, and that meant jumping higher and singing louder than the average tween at a Justin Bieber concert. If ever I showed the slightest reservation in this regard, someone was always there to remind me of my fate as God’s future spew.

Needless to say, worship soon became a miserable experience for me. I often left youth service feeling sick inside. I was stuck on an emotional roller coaster without a way off. I’d come to church desperately wanting to feel the Holy Spirit, spend the whole time participating in a big pep rally, and leave feeling even more empty, guilty and confused than when I showed up. Something seemed terribly wrong with this scenario. I began to suspect I was being manipulated. But how? The verse was right there in black and white, wasn’t it?

No, it wasn’t. Not like my leaders claimed, anyway.

I eventually stumbled upon Revelation 3:16 in my private studies and read it in its proper context. And do you know what I discovered?

“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”

Revelation 3:16 has nothing to do with the outward intensity of one’s worship. Not. a. single. thing. It’s referring to people who know Jesus in name only–who refuse to draw close to him because they find fulfillment in the power of their wealth. They are self-righteous people who have allowed their materialism to blind them to their spiritual shortcomings.

It’s entirely possible for a person to be blind to their spiritual shortcomings while dancing around the front of a church. Dancing, jumping and shouting do not indicate spiritual awareness (as a visit to any night club will clearly demonstrate).

So why did my leaders twist this verse so far out of context? Probably because my jumping around made their ministry look more spiritual than it really was.

Over the past few months, God has been showing me exactly what it means to be “on fire” for Him. And it has nothing to do with how much I jump up and down in the pews. Instead, it’s about how much I’m willing to abide in Him, trust Him, lean upon Him for strength, guidance, and transformation. It doesn’t matter so much how I’m worshiping Him as long as I am worshiping Him, as the Bible says, in Spirit and in truth (John 4:24). And the truth is, God isn’t easily impressed by people’s outward displays. As always, He’s looking into our hearts to determine our true attitude toward Him (1 Samuel 16:7).

Finally, in 2013, I can say with humble assurance that I’m “on fire” for God. No crazy jumping or waving required. And my walk with Him has never been more intense.

August 13, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

it's not the rules that are the problem

When the speaker walked up to the platform, he pulled a piece of fencing behind him. It looked like a Norman Rockwell-style white picket fence, complete with painted grass along the bottom. He set it up where the podium ordinarily was and launched into his chapel message. During the course of his talk, he moved around the white picket fence, moving closer, then farther away, at times knocking it over and jumping over it pell-mell. He was using it as illustration, and it was simple enough, powerful enough, to stick with me. It provided a helpful mental image, especially when coupled with the main thrust of his message:

Fences are there to protect us.

Fences keep us safe– they keep dogs inside the yard, they keep children from running out into the street. Some fences can even keep things out– like the seven-foot-tall chain link fences with barbed wire that surrounded campus. Fences, he said, are good. And not just the literal fences– especially not the actual fences we pin around our yards. No, the most important fences are those we use to protect our hearts, our spirits, our morality, our souls.

It’s not hard to tell what sin actually is, he claimed. Take sex, for example. Obviously, having sex (and by this we all knew he meant heterosexual vaginal intercourse), is a sin. That’s crystal clear, he said, and we all nodded along. But what about everything else? he asked us. What about… kissing? French kissing? Cuddling? Are these things sin, too? And he told us, no, probably not, but shouldn’t we avoid doing them anyway? Remember your fences— they are only there to protect us. To keep us from sin. If we never even cross the fence, there’s no way we can go anywhere close to the sin.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I talk about the way I was raised– which, in real life, is not very often– I get a lot of significant looks. And I’ve found it doesn’t typically matter how brief I try to keep it, or how minimal a detail I reveal. Mouths drop open. Eyebrows disappear into hairlines. They choke, their eyes go wide, and they start sputtering things like “what?!” or “that’s insane!” or “holy shit, how did you survive that?”

And “that” is almost always legalism.

And that? That is nothing.

It’s easy for me to talk about the legalism my childhood, teen years, and college years were absolutely drenched in. Legalism was a huge part of my life, and it affected almost everything I did, almost every choice I made. It determined what I would wear, what I would read, what I would watch, what I would listen to, what I would pay attention to, the people I would believe, the news sources I could trust, the people I chose as my friends. Legalism, in my life, was virtually all-consuming.

But it’s the part of my life that I think is funny.

I tell stories about how the Dean of Student Life at my undergrad college had previously worked as a prison warden– and was proud of it. I joke about people carrying rulers around to make sure that my skirt was exactly three inches below my knee. I bandy around with all the crazy stories– all the ways that my life experience was so horribly different from theirs. About how boys and girls couldn’t sit next to each other, how there always had to be at least an entire chair or a foot of space between them. How we sewed all the kick pleats in our skirt shut, because skirt slits are like playing peek-a-boo with the backs of our calves. How I have five-minute-long songs memorized on why the King James is the only good Bible.

It’s the part of me that rarely ever bothers me at all, really. Living under it was oppressive, don’t get me wrong, but now… it’s mostly just something I can brush off and ignore. It’s fodder for good stories, and that’s about it.

So, when I start trying to talk about my experience, trying to explain what exactly about it that was so horrific, I am eternally frustrated by the fact that the only thing many people seem to hear is the legalism. And they respond with sympathy– “oh my goodness! All you went through was so horrible! I can’t imagine trying to live under the weight of all those rules! How like the Pharisees they were! Legalism is so awful!”

And then they move on, almost completely untouched, and I want to scream and pull my hair out because, to me, it feels like they’ve completely missed the point. Yes, legalism is awful. You won’t get any argument from me.

But legalism isn’t the problem.

Rules– they can be good. Healthy, even. Even when there’s a lot of them. Just because a system has what seems to be the presence of a lot of arbitrary rules doesn’t necessarily make it bad. I can understand why that seems counter-intuitive– to us Westerners, where individuality, autonomy, and independence are some of the most crucial parts of our identity, rules seem innately oppressive. Less rules somehow equals more freedom, and freedom is good. But that’s not always the case. Even though it’s difficult for me to understand Shari’ah law, I can understand that the rules are not what make it oppressive in some places.

It’s the beliefs enforcing the rules.

But I have a much harder time explaining that, and when I start talking about a subject that includes some level of legalism– like “modesty,” for example– it suddenly takes over the conversation and it’s like we can’t focus on anything else. I want to talk about the beliefs, the entire complicated, messy, nuanced system that under-girds all the legalism, but then it all gets de-railed with one aside of “oh, I totally understand what you mean! Aren’t those rules so ridiculous? We just need to get rid of the rules, and then everything will be peachy!”

Or, I’ll read an article, blog, a facebook post, and they’ll build an entire argument around “we have to keep the spirit alive, but just get rid of all these pesky rules. Freedom in Christ, yo!”

And all I want to do is start stomping my feet and shouting “no, no, NO, NO, NO!”

Because the spirit, the beliefs, the ideas, the system that keeps the legalism alive is the problem. There’s nothing there worth protecting, and all of it deserves to be destroyed. Because this system is built on an ugly foundation of power, abuse, domination, and control. The people who perpetuate it aren’t there because they genuinely love people and want to protect them. Legalism gives them the power to wield massive control over entire groups of people– but they can only do that not because of the rules, but because of belief.

Belief in a God whose most dominant, over-riding characteristic is a demand for absolute righteousness, for the acknowledgement of his children that they are completely broken, miserable, worms, barely even worthy of his attention. Belief in a God that is so gracious and loving that he daily overcomes his disgust, his revulsion, to reach out of heaven and show mercy to us. Belief that we, as humans, must exercise all of our resources, all of our attention, in a daily battle to crucify our flesh and take up our cross— but these words mean something different, something harsh and bleak and wretched. Belief that everything about our human experience is tainted, stained, and worthless– that there isn’t anything that can be enjoyed, because all of it is unclean. Our bodies, our music, our entertainments, our world– all of it is is ruthlessly designed to pull us off the straight and narrow, and that if anything feels good, it must be bad, and if we enjoy something, it is only because our hearts are deceitfully wicked and who can know it. We must not ever follow our heart, trust our instincts, go with our gut, because that is only lust and once it has conceived it brings forth death.

That is what is underneath it all– dark, creeping, insidious.

That is what I want to shine a light on and expose. That is what I fight.

Because I believe something different.

I believe in a God whose most all-consuming characteristic is love, and it is that love that drives everything else he does. I believe him when he says that his very existence is that of love, and I trust in him because he loves us so much that he is angry with what we do to ourselves. He hates the oppression, the power systems, everything that exists that allows one person enslave another.

I believe in a God that is so gracious, merciful, and loving, that it compels him to continually create a world where justice and equality will be true of all of us, a place where there will be no fear, no doubt, no pain, and that he works with us, his creation, to build this world.

I believe that we, as humans, must exercise all of our resources, devote all of our attention, to loving our neighbor.

I believe that God looked on everything that he had made and called it good.

August 7, 2013 by SamanthaField

Feminism

Fascinating Womanhood: The Rights of the Leader

Helen really takes the cake in this chapter. Which, if you notice, she pulled a bit of a bait-and-switch on us. In the last chapter, she described one of the masculine roles as the “guide,” but if you notice above, this chapter is called “The Leader.” Which, honestly, I wasn’t too thrilled with “guide,” either, but it’s certainly a sight better than Leader. This chapter is quite long, so I’m going to break it down into at least two posts, maybe as many as three. But, let’s get started.

She opens her argument with several reasons why men are supposed to the leaders, and she starts off with this one:

The first commandment given to mankind was given to the woman: “Thy desire shall be unto thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Evidently our Creator felt it so vitally important that the woman understand this, that He directed the instruction to her.

I’ve already mentioned (twice, now) that it is incredibly bad hermeneutics– almost obviously bad– to make the case that women are required to be subservient to their husbands based purely on the Curse. But, there’s another problem here, because Helen . . . is lying. It would be generous to admit to some sort of genuine confusion or forgetfulness on her part, but that seems unlikely. Because the first command delivered to mankind? The very first one? It’s in chapter one, not three. And, interestingly enough, the command is given to both the man and the woman equally. There’s nothing in this command that separates the sexes: they are given the exact same responsibility.

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

Genesis 1:28

Helen, 0,
The Facts, 1.

After this, she moves into the Ephesians passage. This is one of the Great Complementarian Clobber Verses. My experiences with the uses of this passage have been from those who take a straightforward approach to it– taking it at face value, and usually, quite literally. While I’m sure there are complementarians out there who have done sound research into the historical and cultural background to these verses, I’ve never been exposed to that research when being taught about “husband as the head of the home” (and, as always, if you’ve seen this, please point me in their direction or leave a comment explaining). I think that’s curious, especially since historical and cultural context reveals some interesting things that undermine the traditional complementarian argument.

After Bible-bashing us, she turns to “logic.” She says that since the family is a group of people, and groups of people always need leaders to “maintain order,” that the father should be the leader– and that it is illogical for a woman to lead, because, and this is hysterical, woman are “vacillating“ and indecisive. Women are just not capable of making decisions, and if we interfere with the decision-making process, the only thing that can result is “hours of deliberation,” and, ain’t nobody got time for that. Also, men make the money, and whoever makes the money should be in control.

That is probably why Mary Kassian wrote this pearl-clutching piece in response to the Pew Research survey that revealed that women are becoming the primary breadwinners in many homes. Oh, noes! If women earn more money, we’re going to become “resentful” and “critical,” and even worse, if a woman makes more money– she is going to become dominant and take over The Sex!

No, really. She said that.

Next, we move into the section Helen titles “Rights of the Leader.” Here, she gives us two primary rights: “To Determine Family Rules” and “To Make Decisions.” She’s deliberately clear about what this entails:

A family is not a democracy, where everyone casts his vote. The family is a theocracy, where the father’s word is law (italics hers).

From what I remember of Debi’s Created to be His Help Meet, she danced around this idea the entire book without explicitly saying this (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). She said everything but this, although this is really the idea it seems Debi was actually going for. Helen is a little bit bolder. She just comes right out and says it.

The family is a theocracy.

Meaning, “Rule of God.”

Just a quick note, in case we’re confused: no man, no father, no husband, is God. Debi got close to conflating husband and God as she wrote, mostly because she emphasizes the need for the wife to submit to her husband in obedience to God– women are to obey God indirectly, through submission to their husbands. This results in Debi occasionally implying that, for a wife, her husband represents God to her.

That’s not what Helen argues, though. Her husband is God.

This is one of those times where her LDS background is showing through, although I’m not familiar enough with LDS theology to really analyze it. Also, while I can understand how her theology is affecting her writing, it is problematic here because this book was, and is, not primarily read by Mormon women, but by Protestant women, and this conflation of God and husband is not a claim that Helen ever backs away from.

She also takes the “Right to Make Decisions” to an extreme that boggled me:

Should Jane take her umbrella and walk to school in the rain, or should her father take her? When the father makes the decision, matters are settled at once. And whether Jane gets her feet wet or not is as important as order in the household . . .

Some of these decisions are minor, such as whether to take the dog on a picnic or leave him home. But even though such a decision is small, it must be made, and often quickly. When the husband the wife don’t agree, someone must decide. The final say belongs to the father . . .

Sometimes a man may seek his wife’s support but is reluctant to explain his reasons. He may think she lacks the knowledge to understand. Or, he may be unable to justify his plans or explain his reasons . . . if this is the case, don’t probe too deeply.

Uhm.

Whoah.

Should Jane walk to school in the rain?

Should we take the dog on the picnic?

These are the kinds of decisions that the father must make in order to avoid “hours of deliberation” because of us vacillating, indecisive women? Really? I grew up watching my parents in a complementarian marriage, as well as observing many other complementarian marriages, and this portrayal is unfair, even to complementarian theology. I don’t even know what to do with this. It all seems to imply that women really aren’t capable of making any kind of decision whatsoever, no matter how ridiculously small. I’ve never met any woman that was this pathetic.

However, the last example is the most troublesome for me, and it is deeply personal.

John*, my ex-fiancé and rapist, and I were planning our wedding for December, exactly a week after I graduated. He would not be finished with college yet (interestingly enough, because he was indecisive and couldn’t settle on either a college to attend or a major to study for years). Because of that, we were planning for me to be the primary breadwinner while he finished his degree, which would be paid for by the work-assistance program he was in.

However, in August, he announced that he was quitting the work-assistance program because working through college was just too stressful. This was a problem, because when a student quit the work assistance program during a semester (which was his intention), he or she becomes completely ineligible to enroll in the program again. In short, if he quit, not only would I be paying for daily life, but his education as well (our school did not qualify for student aid, any kind of student loan, and he had no scholarships).

This resulted in the worst fight we ever had, because I had the audacity to insist that this was a very bad idea– unfeasible and impossible, really, given our circumstances. He broke our engagement a few weeks later, citing, hilariously, that I “was not submissive enough.”

However, if I had followed Helen’s teaching, I would have nodded my head like a “perfect follower” (pg 122), and gone along with all of his ideas and plans, even though he had no justification for them and they would have ended in financial disaster. This is not some hypothetical situation that women rarely ever face, as well. It happens all of the time.

Just because men are men does not make them inherently more qualified to make all decisions in isolation. It is not good for man to be alone, and I’m pretty sure God wasn’t just talking about sex.

August 5, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

struggling to find a safe place in church

Every time I walk into a church service, I feel fear.

Every time I listen to a sermon, I wait. Wait for the words to cut and make me bleed again.

Every time I open my Bible, I flinch at the voices in my head.

This is what being a Christian has become for me. I’ve been avoiding writing about this, because anytime I think about it, I feel exposed and raw. But… church, and Christianity itself, rarely feels safe for me anymore. I don’t feel protected, I don’t feel valued, I don’t feel loved.

I am told, by Christian leaders who have followers in the millions, that my existence as a woman is inconvenient for them, these powerful men. My body is distracting to them, merely a temptation. My feelings are unworthy of their attention– the fact that I have emotions and am willing to acknowledge their rightful place makes me week, inferior.

I am told that even though I am a victim of psychological, emotional, physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse, it is within my power to bring healing without their help. They only seek to challenge me to grow outside of my bitterness and hatred. Let it go, they say, in what feels like one voice. You are the one holding yourself back. And when I ask for space, for time, for safety, I am denied. We won’t cater to the lowest common denominator. It’s up to you to bring yourself to our level, not the other way around.

So I run to my Bible, and in the Gospels I find peace. If nothing else, I can cling to Jesus, the man who loved the broken. But every time I start feeling comfortable with a book like Romans, a man in my facebook feed uses chapters 8 and 9 to tell abuse victims that we are not living the life God wants for us. We’re not mature. We’re letting our “Christian depression” get the better of us. Let go and let God they say. Or, I try to find comfort in a book like Galatians, but then I reach chapter 5 and all I want to do is run and cry and scream because all I can hear from those verses is Samantha you are wholly corrupt and doesn’t the fact you desire comfort mean you shouldn’t have it?

And then I read an article, and I spend an entire week digging into yarek naphal, a euphemism for miscarriage, and I go searching, begging for answers. From the Christians, all I receive is silence. I send out letters to famous translators, to the committees that decided to translate it miscarry, asking them why, and all I get back is three lines that mean go away and leave us big, important men alone little girl. So I turn to Judaism, and that’s where the peace begins to come. Because I don’t know what to do, what to think about Numbers 5:27 and God forcing abortions, but they speak calm and comfort. Isn’t it possible that God understood their middle-Eastern Bronze age culture? Isn’t it possible that the Sotah meant protection for innocent wives, protection from jealous husbands who had no cause to be so?

And I struggle. I wrestle with God and his church.

Because I don’t want to leave. I desperately want to stay, but it’s hard when on Sunday morning it’s the men who get a four-week mini-series on how to be epic, on how men have a vision to change the world, but women receive thank you for being our mothers. A man can fight and win against the furies to receive honor, but women, we labor to bring new life into the world, and they give us a rose.

It’s hard when on Tuesday night it seems like no one in that room understands doubt and fear and struggle. If you’re an atheist, it’s because you’re denying God. You are blatantly ignoring mountains of evidence. You are “willfully ignorant,” and look, Peter says so and all I want to do is throw my Bible across the room and scream THAT BOOK WAS PROBABLY NOT EVEN WRITTEN BY PETER.

Some days, I can’t believe in anyone besides Jesus, but I don’t even know what it means to believe. I curl up in a ball and weep, desperately clinging to the last shred of faith it feels that I have left. And then I go to church, and it feels like that last shred is being torn away from me in a cloud of dizzying confidence and practiced ease.

I wonder– am I the only one in this room who doubts? Am I the only one who struggles? I see hands being lifted up, and bodies swaying, people around me sing-shouting about the mercies of God, and I want to know do you know what that means?

I feel like a liar, a cheat, a charlatan. I sit in church, I lead Bible studies, and I realize that I can make-believe, I can pretend. The confidence, the self-assurance? It’s coming from me. I can read Esther and try to find something in it, something worth sharing, and I arrive at Bible study with my neatly-packaged truism about being like Mordecai, who didn’t know what to do, where to turn, but who didn’t spend time agonizing over it– he only did what he thought to be best, and left the rest to God. And that should be us, I say– we can only play the cards we’ve been dealt. But, mostly, I identify with Haman, and I try to say that, but there’s a nervous titter. Haman, the man who wanted to commit genocide? And I think yes, because he’s the only human character in this entire book. Haman is the one who feels real to me.

And I hate that the words of the Bible have been used to damage me, that I can still hear the voice of my cult leader screaming in my head, telling me all I need to know, and I hate that I can listen to someone I know beyond all doubt is a wonderful, loving man, who will say the exact same words. He doesn’t scream them, but he doesn’t have to.

And I hate that walking down the hallway to the auditorium feels like being led to slaughter, that the only thing that’s waiting for me in that darkened room is all my fears. I sit through the song service because of my physical pain, and I know that people probably aren’t staring, but I don’t want to look around, because I’m afraid that they are. Afraid of the people from my childhood that would have seen, and would have told me that the worship of God deserves my respect. I listen to the sermon, barely breathing, because the pastor is a good, good man, a man I know has lived through brutality, but I wait. Wait for him to say the one thing that could start to unravel me. And that won’t be what he wants, I know that, but that doesn’t help. I shrink into my seat and fight with myself just to listen.

I know I’m not alone. I know I’m not the only one struggling. Here, from my readers, I hear the same struggles. I see them played out all over the internet, on twitter, on blogs, in comments. Slowly, I realize that twitter is more my church than anything else has been. I have more communion in talking to friends I’ve never seen than I do in my church building, with people who are looking me in the eye.

I want this from my church: I want a safe place to come, knowing I am not the only one with questions, and walk with people who aren’t more interested in comfortable answers than they with walking in the gray and shadowy place with me, the place where answers come rarely, if at all.

July 26, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

faith of our fathers

The other day, I was listening to a man I deeply admire give an introduction to the book of I Peter, assuming that Peter in fact wrote the book (I Peter is one of the contested books in the canon). As part of his introduction, he included the story of Peter’s martyrdom on an inverted cross. When he told this story, however, he began with the words legend has it.

Legend.

To many evangelicals, and in my experience especially Baptists, legend is frequently used interchangeably with tradition. As Protestants, we have a lineage of people who stood up against the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church– “traditions” like indulgences, which people like Martin Luther railed against. Many Protestant denominations, with this heritage of throwing off the oppression of an heavily institutionalized religion that was equally as political as it was theological have continued in the same vein. Baptists, in particular, are especially averse to any practice of tradition. They tend to be uncomfortable with liturgies, and calendars, and hierarchies, and sacraments. Many evangelicals of all stripes prefer to stay away from habitual or ritualized practices.

While I disagree with that approach, I can understand it.

However, what saddens me is that because of this negative attitude toward anything that’s perceived as “institutional religion,” evangelicals have, by and large, rejected the true concept behind tradition and replaced it with legend.

When we think of Christian legends, we have a whole host of images that can spring to mind. St. Patrick driving out the snakes. St. Valentine performing forbidden wedding ceremonies. Martin Luther driving his knife into a table top and carving out “this is my body.”

Unfortunately, not only do we think of these stories as legend, we have the habit, now, of thinking of anything that has been passed down to us since the time of the Apostles in the same way– that, somehow, that heritage isn’t quite credible. It’s stories, it’s fables, it’s legend. Useful, perhaps, for interesting sermon anecdotes and illustrations, or for sprucing up theology papers with snippets of St. Augustine, but disconnected from today. We’re Protestants, and the tradition of the Catholic Church doesn’t apply to us, after all. If we were going to accept tradition, why did we even bother having a Reformation?

There’s a joke on the Stuff Fundies Like blog– that the older something is, the better, unless it’s really old, and then it’s likely to be Catholic.

I’ve encountered this attitude a lot– I grew up steeped in it. We did our best to completely disassociate from anything that could be perceived as Catholic, and that included some Protestant denominations. Anything I was taught about the early church fathers came to me heavily influenced by this view. The first time I heard anything that talked about Origen favorably, I was deeply shocked and appalled. The only thing I’d been taught about St. Augustine was that he reveled in and glorified his sin. The only thing I knew about Clement was that he was one of the first Popes, and that made him despicably evil. I didn’t understand anything about tradition. I didn’t know anything about church history that wasn’t insanely biased against the whole idea behind tradition.

When we dismiss and belittle tradition, we are doing ourselves a disservice. It’s not just legend– it’s the teachings that have been handed down to us since the time of Christ. The church fathers worked and sacrificed in order for us to have access to those teachings, and when we reduce that sacred effort to the same level as legend, we lose something profound.

We should be attempting to engage with the rich body of tradition that we have; this engagement shouldn’t mean blind acceptance, but a willingness to confront and wrestle with the same ideas that men and women struggled with millennia ago. While the modern church is facing questions not previously encountered, it doesn’t mean that our heritage has nothing left to offer us.

July 11, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

my time as an agnostic

I have briefly touched on the few years I spent as an agnostic before, but I’ve never really explored what happened to me in writing. It’s a hard thing for me to do, because I spent those years experiencing intense cognitive dissonance— which is why I describe what I experienced during these years as agnosticism instead of atheism, although it’s more complicated than that.

But, I want to try to stumble through this story because of something that happened last night. If you follow me on twitter, you probably saw me rant about it for a little bit, and I’m glad I got that out there, but I realized that my story could be important for people– especially those of faith– to understand what it’s like to be an non-believer. There are several common stereotypes about unbelief, and many of them revolve around painting atheists, especially, as immoral monsters who reject an “overwhelming flood of evidence” because they “just can’t stand the Truth of God.” That’s certainly what I believed about non-belief . . . until it happened to me.

When I was 16 years old, I developed tendonitis in my wrists, which prevented me from ‘serving’ my church as the pianist. After my “pastor” openly attacked me from the pulpit and then lied to my parents about what he had done, I mentally absented myself from church. I refused to pay attention to any of the sermons. I stopped listening to or practicing Christian or sacred music. I wrote stories during church. I only participated in church activities when absolutely forced to. At this point, I still believed in God, but anything to do with church– I didn’t want any part of it.

Initially, I thought this reticence to engage with church was simply because of what my “church” was– which I now refer to as a church-cult, and was horribly spiritually abusive. Right before I started my sophomore year in college, my parents were finally able to escape the church-cult, but where they decided to attend . . . made everything worse.

Over the years, our church-cult had hemorrhaged a ridiculous number of members– and many of these families began attending another Independent Fundamental Baptist church half an hour further south. The first Sunday I went with my family, I struggled all that morning with what I can now identify as a mild panic attack, although I had no idea what it was at the time. All I knew was that simply going to church made me feel so physically sick (I would get lightheaded, shaky, nervous, and nauseated) that I just didn’t want to go.

My parents forced me out of bed enough Sundays that I was able to get a reliable feel for the people at church, and what I encountered depressed and horrified me. Because, there had been a part of me that had dared to hope that this church would be better. That it would be different. And while it was different and slightly better –the pastor didn’t scream in people’s faces and directly confront them about “sin” in front of the entire congregation — it was still awful.

The pastor was inexcusably racist; he truly, deeply, believed in racial segregation and that interracial marriage is a sin. He told me this, explicitly, to my face, while simultaneously saying that he would “never preach this from the pulpit, because it would step on people’s toes.” This from a man who claimed, from the pulpit, that he would never be ashamed of preaching what he believed. After this conversation, I blatantly refused to ever go back.
The young people at the church were . . . abhorrent, in general. They behaved unconscionably toward my younger sister, which I have never tolerated well. Only one person in the entire church made any effort to befriend her. The rest mocked and belittled her at nearly every opportunity.
A few specific people –men my age — were exalted in true “preacher boy” fashion. One of them used his position as a police officer to degrade me in front of a huge crowd of people, and even though he was lying, the result was that I was painted as the liar for daring to call the “preacher boy” on his abuse. When I followed Matthew 18 to the letter, I was told by a deacon and the pastor that I was making too big a deal of an innocent remark, that he only meant it in good fun.
Certain people obtained celebrity status in the church because of various circumstances; however, while there were two women with severe medical conditions (one who struggled with cancer, another with osteogenesis imperfecta), the only one who received any attention or help from anyone at church was the woman with cancer, while the other woman was completely ignored, to the point of almost being shunned.

I could list many more examples, but the end result was that I couldn’t stomach church any more, because even in a church that was “better,” it was still intolerable. At this point, my aversion to church spread from just my limited experience with the church-cult I’d grown up in, to churches in general.

This aversion extended to my experiences at my fundamentalist college, but this is where it gets complicated. Because it was during my sophomore year in college that I slipped from belief in God to total doubt.

But I hid it.

I hid it so well, that if you asked anyone who knew me at the time, anyone, they would tell you that I was most definitely still a Christian. I walked the walk, talked the talk, everything. Nothing, on the surface, changed. I even ended up engaged to a man who claimed that he wanted to be a missionary. I went to prayer group, I led devotionals, I prayed with friends, I talked about the Bible– hell, I defended the Bible and Christianity. I even talked about some bizarre re-conversion experience that I had during the early stages of my junior year. Occasionally, I even got excited about Christian discussions and theological discoveries I’d stumbled across in research for my classes.

When I chose a graduate school, I chose Liberty University. It was certainly more liberal than my undergrad college, but it was still a Christian school, and I chose it partly because it was a Christian school (but mostly because I knew they would accept my unaccredited degree without a fight). And during my first year, the first time in my life when I had the freedom not to attend church and I didn’t, I was still at a Christian college. I was still surrounded by believers, and I still looked and talked like one. If you asked the people who I interacted with during grad school, they’d be surprised if they found out I didn’t believe 99% of the things that came out of my mouth (or… maybe not. A lot of the things I said were rather ridiculous).

But, all that time . . . I couldn’t believe.

And while it may have started out as disgust toward my church experiences, it slowly developed into a completely inability to believe in God.

I want to make that perfectly clear, because I think it’s one area that many people skip over, or don’t really understand. It’s not that I went away to college and had some sort of Baptist rumspringa. It’s not that I hadn’t been educated well enough about my faith– I was so well steeped in apologetics and logic that I had a doctoral candidate at Princeton and Duke tell me that I should pursue a career in Philosophy of Religion.

It wasn’t that I was angry at God, although in a small way it started there. I was furiously angry at God for a long time. How could he have let everything happen to me and my family? How did he let evil people exist? How did he let totally evil men lead his churches? How was it that so many people who claimed to believe in Jesus were some of the most awful people I’d ever met?

After a while of being angry, though, the anger just . . . went away. And what replaced it was non-belief. I wasn’t angry at God anymore, because I didn’t even know if he existed. Suddenly, it just . . . didn’t matter to me if he existed or not. Not believing in him wasn’t some conscious decision I made. I didn’t have a sudden epiphany where lightning struck me out of a clear sky and I decided that God’s existence didn’t matter.

I clung, desperately, to my belief. I read Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, where he calls God a “genocidal maniac,” and that passage was horrifying and so powerfully compelling, because it was an image of God I innately understood. But, even in that moment, when horror rose up inside of me so fiercely I wanted to scream and cry and rage and vomit, I wanted to believe. And for a while after that experience, I thought I did believe.

Until, one day, I realized that I couldn’t believe, and that I hadn’t really believed in God for a long time. In some ways, I clutched at my faith by constant debates and discussions and research. I spent a long time searching for a way to believe in God. And I didn’t find one.

He just . . . wasn’t there.

July 10, 2013 by SamanthaField

Feminism

complementariansim and Aphrodite

Aphrodite, goddess of love.

If you’re not familiar with Greek mythology, Aphrodite is probably one of the more important figures in the pantheon. Both Ares and Hephaestus are her lovers, and she is the primary figure involved in many well-known conflicts, such as The Trojan War. By the time that Paul was writing his letters to the Corinthians, Aphrodite was being worshiped as Venus, and there were two major celebrations in her honor in Athens and Corinth. Athens is the patron city of Athena, so the primary celebration was held in Corinth, where there had been a temple dedicated to her (which was destroyed in 44 B.C.). One of the few things we know about Aphrodite’s cult was that worshipers honored her by engaging in sexual intercourse with temple prostitutes. By the time Paul was alive, the temple had been destroyed, but the prostitution continued.

The interesting thing to note about this form of prostitution?

The women shaved their heads.

So, that explains that whole bit about head coverings from I Corinthians 11. Women cutting their hair short, in Corinth, meant identifying with the Aphrodite prostitutes. I’m not exactly sure why this was a problem outside of the general understanding that Corinth was a particularly hedonistic and decadent church. But, it might have been particularly troubling because temple workers — like the Vestal virgins and the Hetaera– were allowed autonomy and independence in Roman society: they did not answer to anyone or anything besides their civic duties. This could explain the connection between “head coverings” and “symbol of authority,” since whose authority a woman was associated with was an important part of her identity in Roman culture.

But, the head covering isn’t really the important part of the passage from I Corinthians 11.

But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God . . . For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man . . . Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman; for as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God.

I Corinthians 11:3-12

Did you catch that?

So man is now born of woman.

Jesus changed everything, and this is a common pattern we see all through Paul’s writing. Paul, as probably one of the best-educated biblical scholars who had converted to Christianity, spent much of his time in his letters re-examining the Law and the Prophets through the advent of Christ. This passage beautifully highlights that transformation. Almost everything people believed and understood about women was based in the idea that men carried anything needed to bear a child (like Aphrodite being born from Uranus’ castrated manhood that was cast into the sea). Women were receptacles. When Jesus was born of a virgin, that changed how anyone understood what God had told the deceiver in Genesis– that there would be enmity between him and the seed of the woman. That was . . . just not possible. Women did not possess seed.

Until Jesus.

And, then suddenly, in the Lord, man is not independent of woman, and that is from God.

Why have we missed exactly how radical a statement this is? Why is it, that so often when we go to this passage, all we see is that “woman was created for man,” and then stop there? Why don’t we keep going to see exactly how Paul is about to completely upend everything? That what he is about to say revolutionizes everything they thought they knew about women? He says that Christ is the head of the man, and the man the head of the woman, but why don’t we think of this as one glorious circle that ends in Nevertheless, so now man, the Christ, is born of woman?

Why don’t we look at how Jesus came to earth, and when he became the leader of his ragtag group of fishermen and tax collectors, that he said that the first shall be last, and that he spent his time washing feet? Why do we look at the word “head” and say commander and not servant?

This passage is beautiful, because it’s really about how much we need each other. In fact, the chapter before it and what follows this passage are a testament to community and people being able to rely on and trust each other. The church in Corinth was neglecting that– when they celebrated communion, some brought enough wine to get drunk when other people in their church were starving, and then did not share with the least of these, their own brothers and sisters. Paul is speaking to an audience that doesn’t seem to understand what it meant to love thy neighbor, and that is what he spends his time focusing on: teaching them what the “unity of the body” should look like. If there’s a word that sums up I Corinthians 11, it’s unity, a body of believers acting as one. He’s teaching them about a place where men cannot be independent of women.

We need each other.

Women are half the people on this planet, and we have diverse gifts, abilities, skills, and talents that we are eager to contribute. Every woman, like every man, has her own unique perspective that can enrich and deepen our communal experiences, especially in our churches. By ignoring, dismissing, and actively silencing half of our church, we are really doing damage to ourselves. There are passages, like those dealing with the spiritual gifts, that make absolutely zero reference to these gifts being limited to genders, and women in the early church were allowed to practice teaching (Priscilla, who taught Apollos), prophesying (all four of Philip’s daughters), generosity (the women who financed Jesus’ ministry), and leadership (women like Junia, who was “outstanding among the apostles”).

Imagine what our Church could look like today without women.

Jesus would not have been born; he would not have been fully human. The Incarnation is one of the most important parts of our theology– what would it be like if Jesus was more mystical, more divine, and less real?

His earthly ministry would not have been as effective. His disciples might have had to keep fishing, and Jesus might have been limited to teaching near Nazareth as he worked with Joseph in carpentry.

The story of his Resurrection would have been highly suspect; his disciples could have been easily accused of protecting their own interests, and the Pharisees would have had an easier time dismissing the Resurrection.

Paul’s letter, one of the best treatises ever composed on the nature of Grace and Law, might not have been delivered to Rome.

Without Priscilla, Apollos might have continued teaching an incorrect approach to the gospel, and the early church would have been deeply and bitterly divided.

Without Lydia, the Gospel might not have spread into Asia Minor and Europe with the swiftness it did, since she was one of the earliest and best-loved converts. Her ministry was so important she was one of only two people raised from the dead in the Book of Acts.

Without Junia, Paul may not have been able to continue his ministry. He needed her to do for him what he could not.

And I could go on.

But yet, that is exactly what we’re trying to do today. Most of our Church is stumbling along without women– outright forbidding them from contributing in any meaningful way. Instead of opening its arms to women, like Jesus did with the woman at the well, or the woman begging for crumbs, or the woman with the issue of blood, or his own mother on the Cross, the Church bars us– slams its doors shut against us.

What happened to the teaching that there is no male nor female?

What happened to man is not independent of woman?

July 9, 2013 by SamanthaField

Older Posts

Newer Posts