I’ve seen some guys expressing big feelings about my comments on the effortless Christianity of many white evangelical men in the US—particularly as it pertains to marriage and gender.
If I were to take every single statement about marriage and gender in that thread and reduce it to the basic proposition it expresses, I guarantee you that I could find an identical proposition endorsed in one or more best-selling evangelical books on marriage and sexuality.
(In fact, I don’t even need to do any finding—@sheilagregoire has already done the work. She lays out all the receipts.)
So if you have a problem with the substance of the views I describe, take it up with the authors of those books and the publishers and evangelical influencers who promote them.
On the other hand, if you agree with the substance of the views in question, and you just dislike the terms in which I describe your views, I don’t really know what to tell you.
Your complaint seems to be that you’d rather I describe your misogyny in the kind of sanitized language you prefer.
But I refuse to do that. And I’m not sorry.
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What’s striking about large swaths of the American evangelical church is that if you’re a white American man with conventional tastes and modest abilities, being an evangelical Christian is just. so. easy.
In fact, if you’re a white male in the US just looking out for your own personal interests, you’d be crazy to choose any other way of life.
To start with, you get to just show up and start theologizing from your own point of view, that just counts as ‘theology’.
You get married and then you never have to make your bed or do laundry or cook ever again.
I saw some folks on this website today having big feelings about Christians who note the hypocrisy of the sort of “pro-life” position that favors legal protection for the unborn while opposing measures that would, e.g., expand access to healthcare for children.
The complaint is roughly that Christians (like me) who worry about this kind of hypocrisy have drawn a false moral equivalence between permitting the active termination of unborn life and, e.g., permitting a child to perish in the natural course of some untreated infirmity.
But as far as my own views are concerned, moral equivalence is totally beside the point.
In my view, the salient point is *integrity*. Before elaborating, I think it will be helpful to clarify exactly what integrity means and why it's important.
There are a number of moving parts here, so it's important to be clear about the relevant contrast class. I think 'willful taking of human life' is suitable.
But 'espousing an economic policy' obscures what's at stake.
The salient point is that we know certain policies will result in avoidable human death.
So the relevant contrast class is:
willful taking of human life v. knowingly allowing avoidable human death
Nowhere is the moral fragmentation of American evangelicalism more apparent than in many white evangelicals’ frail embrace of the right to life.
According to the pro-life position, all persons—including both born and unborn persons—have a “right to life,” and that right should be protected by the force of law.
But many evangelical Christians who self-identify as “pro-life” are also healthcare libertarians.
According to healthcare libertarians, we shouldn’t have laws that ensure widespread access to healthcare—or the taxes and administrative burdens that would follow upon such laws.
According to Scripture, false teachers dwell in the political or religious establishment. They misrepresent God to the people of God in order to fortify their own position of power or influence, often at the expense of vulnerable people.
So the notion that those who expose oppression are false teachers isn’t just wrong.
It lacks a basic grasp of the currency in which it trades, not unlike the sentence: “The quarterback of the Yankees scored a hat trick in the Final Four.”
Since men are equally capable of performing ≥99% of the tasks that “biblical patriarchy” reserves for women, the term ‘redundancy’ is undoubtedly a more accurate euphemism for the view than ‘complementarity’.
The ideology revolves around the notion that life is about marriage, and marriage is about a man doubling the labor capacity he commands—at which point he’s free to apply his labor as he pleases and instruct his wife to carry out basic adult tasks he’d rather not bother with.
Men and women are equally capable of doing laundry, cooking, parenting and earning a living.
So the capacities that patriarchists ascribe to men and women, respectively, are not in fact complementary—they’re redundant.