A Letter to Three Daughters

Last year for International Women’s Day, I wrote a letter to my three daughters. International Women’s Day was last week, so here is a slightly edited version of that letter.

Dear J, G and H,

This world will tell you lies. It will lie to you about your value, about your appearance, about your place. It is filled with people who will see you as weak, who see you as less valuable – to them and to God – and who see you as an object, all because you are female.

I pray you keep this letter in mind when you hear those things. I am afraid that, though the world is changing, it will not do so fast enough to spare you from the warped wisdom and twisted value system that prioritizes, above all things, the gender of a person.

Because you are more than women, as I am more than a man. We are children of God, three daughters and a son. We are loved, valued, respected, prized by the one who made us – the parent of the entire world, the one who is big enough to breathe life into existence, small enough to weep with us when that life goes awry.

But you are, in fact, women. And you should be proud of that. I pray you never accept the attempts of men to make your gender a cause for shame, embarrassment or pity. You are women. Congratulations!

This is my prayer for you:

What if the Writers of the Bible Were Just … Wrong?

The Bible says some unpopular things – many of them true and important, necessary for us to live better, more Christ-centered lives. Many of them go against the grain of our culture, calling us to reject, for example, materialism and greed and to embrace generosity and compassion. These are difficult, and they are often unwelcome, but they are right and most Christians accept them, even if they do so reluctantly or with personal struggle.

But not every unpopular thing the Bible says is so clear-cut. And this leads to some acrobatics that I feel might not only be unnecessary but may actually be damaging to the way we read these ancient texts we value so highly.

Of course, I speak about two topics much discussed on this blog: women and homosexuality.

A Final Word (for Now) on Abortion

I just finished working on a package of stories for our school’s alumni magazine about integration – a profile of the two men who integrated our college 50 years ago, as well as a sidebar about white students who pushed for integration years before it happened and one about race relations are like on campus now. The whole time I was writing these stories, I couldn’t help but think: “Wow, I have no idea what it’s like – and never will – to be black.”

This is not a new revelation, of course, but it’s made more painfully clear when I write about people in minority groups that I am in no way a member of any minority group. I’m white, I’m straight, and I’m male. And so I try to make it clear when I interview or when I advocate for racial and sexual minorities that I have no idea what it’s like to be in their shoes, so they’re going to need to help me out.

It’s not an overwhelming feeling, just a little tug – a healthy reminder that whatever I write, I’m doing it for others, people whose experiences I can’t ever truly know.

That tug has more recently shown up when I write, as I did last week, about abortion. Because while I often call abortion a human rights issue, it is also an issue that affects women far more than men. After all, who is actually pregnant? And who is going to be caring for the child, more likely than not? The old line is that if men could get pregnant, abortion would no longer be a controversial issue.

Changing How We Approach Abortion

The political world is all atwitter (pun intended) this week with the comments of Senate candidate Richard Mourdock from Indiana, who made the mistake of saying what he really thought on the topic of abortion. Secifically, Mourdock was asked about any cases in which he would allow abortion, and he responded only in the case of the mother’s life being in danger, but not in the case of rape:

I struggled with it myself for a long time. But I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.

Ensue kerfuffle.

There have been a lot of crazy things said about abortion and rape in this election cycle, but this really isn’t one of them. Mourdock’s belief that God “intended” for life to arise out of a horrific event like rape may not be theologically sound, but it’s not something we should be terribly surprised at hearing.

Amy Sullivan, like myself a former conservative evangelical who now has a not-so-passing interest in progressive politics, agrees:

Despite the assertions of many liberal writers I read and otherwise admire, I don’t think that politicians like Mourdock oppose rape exceptions because they hate women or want to control women. I think they’re totally oblivious and insensitive and can’t for a moment place themselves in the shoes of a woman who becomes pregnant from a rape. I think most don’t particularly care that their policy decisions can impact what control a woman does or doesn’t have over her own body. But if Mourdock believes that God creates all life and that to end a life created by God is murder, then all abortion is murder, regardless of the circumstances in which a pregnancy came about.

That last sentence is especially significant for this conversation; Mourdock simply is outspoken and consistent about the natural ramifications of his belief that abortion ends an innocent human life.

But the reaction to this impresses on me that perhaps we need a few more Christians, conservative and progressive, to do on abortion what people like Justin Lee and Rachel Held Evans are doing around the issues of homosexuality and women’s roles in church, respectively – that is, speaking out for a renewed effort to understand each other and foster constructive dialogue.

Because it should be clear by now that our national conversation about abortion is toxic. Both sides are to blame, though one side more than the other, and it’s not helping foster a constructive dialogue about how to fix what both sides agree needs to be solved – the fact that abortions are necessary in the first place.

Here’s how I see the current dialogue failing us.

Summit Days 2-3: Putting Away the Traditional Teachings on Divorce

The final two days of Summit last week, I attended a class given by Barron Jones, whom I’ve mentioned before. The title of this post was the name of the class. Barron presented his material in a way that kept a serious subject light – lest it become too serious – and certainly made me want to study the issue more. He probably needed one more hour (he only had two), as he ran out of time both days, and as such, left me a touch unconvinced.

“This is about people,” he began. “This is not about theology. … It’s about people’s lives, and they get messy.”

The first day he devoted to simple defining the traditional teachings and poking logical holes in them.

“If I can get you to say, ‘I don’t know,’ then we’ve made progress,” he said. “We need to embrace that phrase and understand it does not mean weakness. It means humility. This topic is about pride and humility as much as it is about marriage and divorce.”

One Year and Counting

Today is the first day of class, which means I’ve now been in grad school for a full year. I have no idea how that happened.

It also means I’ve been blogging for more than a year – I started this thing in late July 2011, and here I am, somehow still trucking along. In celebration, here are the top 10 posts by pageviews this blog has had since its inception. If you’re newish, maybe you’ll find something you like; if you’ve been here from the beginning, thanks! Maybe you’ll find something you missed or forgot you liked. Or maybe the fact that these posts are the most viewed here will make you once again wonder why you’ve wasted so much time reading this blog.

Without further ado:

Capitulating to Our Culture

I was doing a quick shopping run the other day for my wife when I ran into this set of books prominently displayed at our favorite grocery store:

I was immediately leery, as book publishers seem to have certain ideas about what boys need to know versus what girls need to know about the same general topics. The covers are fairly innocuous – sailboat versus horse, diving versus jumping rope – nothing too offensive. Of course, inside the books was a different story:

Full disclosure: That’s the first page I opened to in the boys’ book. I flipped around the girls’ book briefly to find a page that corresponded – fun summer idea on one page and an activity on the other.

So boys are told they can skip stones and solve puzzles, and girls are told they can look good … and lie on the beach. Note also the actual text – “a girl has her image to think of” … “be a beautiful beach babe” – and the unnaturally skinny, bikini-clad preteens in the girls’ book, as well. And I would be remiss as a typographic nerd if I didn’t point out that the boys’ book has a strong, bold headline font compared to the girls’ frilly, cutesy font, which along with giving the boys’ book a better design also reinforces the subtle message that boys are to be strong and adventurous while girls should look pretty.

A Radical Feminist Rabbi Named Jesus

Jesus Christ is the true and final Word of God, in relation to whom scripture is God’s secondary, written word of witness and testimony. – Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible

When Rachel Held Evans last put out a call for bloggers to discuss the nature of men and women in the church, I responded with a discussion about the radical femininity of Christ, which was mainly a few observations about the actions of Jesus and the testimony of the early church from a historical perspective.

This week, Evans has proposed a “synchroblog” on the same issue, calling it “Mutuality Week.” Which seems like as good a time as any to look some more at exactly how the gospels record Jesus treating women. Because lost in the big debates over what Paul thought about women is what should be a more important question: What did Jesus think about women?

If You Read One Thing This Week …

… make it this Q&A with Dianna Anderson on Rachel Held Evans’ blog as part of Rachel’s “Ask a …” series. Dianna answered questions as a feminist. Allow me to pull an excerpt, from her answer about the compatibility of feminism with opposition to abortion:

I believe it is possible to be a feminist and pro-life, as long as that pro-life ethic does not come with rhetoric that shames, ignores, or vilifies women for the choices that they may make about a legal procedure. Don’t use your pro-life stance to treat women like morons. Don’t use it to shame women for their sexual choices, because, honestly, you don’t know what led to those choices. Instead, use your pro-life stance to attempt to make a difference in the lives of the women surrounding you by supporting them, by letting them know that you will be there for them if they do have an unwanted pregnancy (and then actually being there for them!), and by working to lower the occurrence of unwanted pregnancies in the first place – which means better sexual health education in schools, funding for birth control measures and education about using that birth control, promoting research into methods of safe male birth control, and creating an environment where the women in your life can come to you to discuss safe sexual choices.

Nothing will turn you into a feminist faster than having daughters. The more I think about what I want them to know about the world and about themselves, the less tenable I find anything but true equality in all aspects of life – including the church. We’ve discussed here before the radical femininity of Christ in response to the erroneous notion that Christianity has “a masculine feel” and shape. Go there if you want an example or two of how Jesus subtly subverted the patriarchal gender norms of his day. Anderson adds another one:

Repairing the Image of the ‘Anti-Homosexual’ Church

Let’s do a “by the numbers”:

• 31,102 – Number of verses in the Protestant Christian Bible
• 6 – Number of verses that explicitly condemn homosexual behavior (Lev 18:22, 20:13; Rom 1:26-27 ; 1 Cor 6:9 ; and 1 Tim 1:10).
• 1,934 – Number of verses in the Gospels directly quoting Christ
• 0 – Number of verses in which Christ condemns homosexual behavior.

For those of you good at math, you’ve already noticed that roughly 0 percent of Jesus’ recorded time was spent worrying about homosexuality. For the Bible as a whole, the percentage is barely larger – six verses out of more than 30,000 works out to .02 percent. So it’s something of a problem, in my view, when Barna’s much-ballyhooed 2007 surveyof young people (ages 16-29 – and I’m still in the group! Woo-hoo!) found more non-churchgoers applies the label “anti-homosexual” to the church than any other label. The breakdown, if I’m interpreting Barna’s results correctly, goes like this:

1. Anti-homosexual – 91 percent
2. Judgmental – 87 percent
3. Hypocritical – 85 percent
4. Same basic ideas as other religions – 82 percent
5. Old-fashioned – 78 percent
6. Good values and principles – 76 percent
7. Too involved in politics – 75 percent
8. Friendly – 71 percent

So that list is full of all sorts of problems, but many of them seem to stem from the very top – the church has turned something that takes up .02 percent of the Bible’s space (and none of Jesus’ time) into something identified as our overriding characteristic by 91 percent of those we’re trying to reach. Whoops. Justin Lee used this alarming survey result to make the case for “Transforming the Conversation,” as he puts it, between Christians and the LGBTQ community. I certainly agree the conversation needs to be transformed. Further, the church’s image needs to be transformed. Because regardless of whether you think active homosexuality as we define it today – a loving committed relationship between two people of the same sex – is wrong, I hope we can surely all agree it’s not good for the church to be identified primarily as anti-gay. The biggest problem is that there is so much positive for the church to grab hold of. The Bible spends much, much more time  talking about helping the poor (a quick Bible Gateway search finds 188 verses talking about them, 30 times more verses than discuss same-sex intercourse). We should be known as the pro-poor church, or the pro-marginalized church, or the pro-compassion church. But it’s hard to be known as pro-marginalized and pro-compassion when we spend an inordinate amount of time condemning the marginalized who overwhelmingly make up the LGBTQ community. So how do we turn this tanker around?