Laura Robinson Profile picture
@NTReviewPod. Also on BlueSky (same handle). PhD New Testament, Duke. Follow for New Testament, theology, crochet, pop culture, excessive cat documentation.
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Mar 13 9 tweets 2 min read
So, the fact that doing childcare and housework ricochets back and forth from being a burdensome task no man should do to being a comfy gig that men slave away to make available to their wives makes way more sense when you remember sexism is about owedness, not work.
Pull out your copies of Down Girl by Kate Manne, everybody.
Manne's theory of patriarchy is that patriarchy works by framing women as owing service and support to men and leaving men to compete for public honors with each other. Misogyny happens when a woman breaks those rules. Most
Mar 7 7 tweets 2 min read
So, when it comes to evangelicalism in the United States, which tends to be a unifying religious idea in the US, there's been a real push in the last 10 years or so to replace the idea of "right and wrong" with "masculine and feminine."
Have you ever heard the phrase "toxic empathy?" Same idea.
It's generally wrong to kill civilians or to kill them for money and then leave them to starve. That makes Christians feel bad.
So, change the conversation. Killing women and children isn't "wrong." It's "masculine."
Cool slight of hand, right?
Mar 3 10 tweets 2 min read
Matt Walsh is having the “oh my gosh, I’m the only evangelical in this room who believes any of this” moment that everyone goes through.
The first time you watch everyone just stop believing one thing and start believing another because someone important told them to is wild. But it’s also a core part of being an evangelical. Evangelicals have hierarchy and aesthetics and mascots, but they don’t have beliefs or ethics. There’s no such thing as good or bad or right or wrong, it’s just who does it.
A pastor who commits adultery is not the same as a liberal
Feb 1 7 tweets 2 min read
Okay, let's just think about this.
From the 1990s to 2019, spanning one criminal case, plenty of women come forward to accuse Jeffrey Epstein of sexual assault and trafficking. None of them have any problem remembering him and his circle committing these crimes.
Then in 2019 Epstein is arrested for trafficking and this becomes a national news story.
Then all of a sudden people start calling the FBI saying that they've seen Jeffrey Epstein et al commit cannibalism, sacrificing animals, drinking blood, etc., etc.
And all the women who had accused him
Jan 24 5 tweets 1 min read
If an ICE agent can come in your house without a warrant, then a protestor can come in your church without your permission, and civilians can go into ICE agents’ hotel rooms, and I can break into your house.
People keep wanting a third way between “we have a norm” or “we don’t have a norm.”
Everyone wants “I don’t want to follow the norm, but I like the norm so I want you to keep it for me.”
And everyone stands around shocked like a dumbass when the designated norm keeper says “pass.”
It’s real simple. Either private property is a thing or it isn’t.
Dec 19, 2025 8 tweets 2 min read
I know I say this all the time but it will never stop being weird to me that, when I first started looking into this, I thought I was telling people, "Guess what? Kids aren't getting kidnapped and trafficked in the US!" that I thought I was telling people great news and I wasn't. On the whole, people get *absolutely furious* if you tell them that no one is after their children.
I think it's probably a natural outgrowth of the shock of cognitive dissonance or the fear that someone with paradigm-breaking information is trying to get one over on you,
Dec 15, 2025 19 tweets 4 min read
Last thought on this.
I think there is a difference between victim blaming and discussing empowerment that can help prevent abuse.
If you tell someone who has been a victim of a romance scam, "here are some tools that you can use to reverse-image lookup, here are some common tactics and stories that scammers use to take advantage of people, if you're going to date online, this is how you do it" -- this is not victim blaming.
In the same way, setting a norm that you absolutely can and should say no to your pastor sometimes, that a woman who submits
Dec 15, 2025 16 tweets 3 min read
Okay, let’s actually break this apart.
First: the idea that consent cannot exist across authority lines is not unique to the church. It also exists at your therapist or doctor’s office. It also exists at your workplace.
So if we say that actually people can freely consent to sex with their pastors, we’re actually making an exception for clergy. It’s not controversial that your psychiatrist should lose his license if he tries to have sex with you.
Second, the analogy of a crime is flawed for two reasons.
One reason is that there is a meaningful
Dec 14, 2025 16 tweets 3 min read
So, I want to be really careful how I put this, because the thing I actually do have empathy for is the fact that facing wrongdoing done by a close friend or family member is incredibly difficult and it's of course a traumatizing experience. I don't blame someone for struggling with that.
Second, I want to really reframe the question that's posed here. "If what my dad did was understood as abuse, that would have been devastating for our family."
The obvious thing to say here is that even if that's true, there's more than one family impacted here and
Nov 30, 2025 6 tweets 2 min read
In the end the only real argument TPUSA has about this essay is that "religious freedom" means that Christians should have a special privilege to opt out of any assignment and write a Bible study instead.
Which is what this student did.
She didn't answer the prompt, she didn't use any relevant sources, and she didn't write an academic essay.
Which is why she failed.
The knock on effects of arguing that Christians should not be expected to follow rubrics, syllabi, assignment instructions, and so on if they feel led to turn in a
Nov 10, 2025 19 tweets 3 min read
The Baby Formula Challenge: Laura’s Version.
I recreated the test on my lunch. This is what I got.
The standards of the test were the same as the church formula challenge. The person on the phone must have a plan for how to get me a can of baby formula by the end of the conversation. They cannot hang up, ask how I got this number or why I am calling, refer me to any other organizations (even if they support them), or explain that they need to talk to their supervisors. A passing grade is one conversation,
Nov 6, 2025 13 tweets 3 min read
There is a widespread belief in evangelical churches that women can buy male character and leadership on layaway.
Let me explain what I mean.
When men are being hateful, rude, lazy, passive, nutty, and generally awful and particularly to women, you might hear women say “hey, when Image you do that you drive women away. Stop it.”
Then the response is, “if women would stop taking leadership roles, stop being in public, stop being in charge, stop having jobs, marry and have babies and stay home with kids, then men wouldn’t be like this!”
And this is psychotic.
Nov 5, 2025 10 tweets 2 min read
Not to overpronounce based on one election, but I think some reasonable internet-versus-election hypotheses.
Here are some things I don't believe turn out midterm voters and probablynot even four-year voters.
1) "We can't exclude the groypers/redpill/manosphere/Nazis/etc." Sure you can. They're creepy freaks and they don't have any friends in real life. You can totally ignore them. There's not even that many and the ones that exist are useless.
2) "People want to see politicians getting along." No, they don't. You might, if you work in DC.
Nov 3, 2025 9 tweets 2 min read
So, my read on the Allie Beth Stuckey TPSUSA thing, if anyone saw her getting chewed out.
I think this is where the evangelical movement trying to get men in the door at all costs has gotten us. The new ideal of the evangelical man is a little boy.
The problem with audience chasing and specifically chasing a young male audience is pretty clear now. If you look at the landscape of right wing and evangelical media for men right now, it's increasingly looking like a race to the bottom. People have figured out you can get more listeners than the other
Oct 29, 2025 22 tweets 4 min read
Okay, here's why I don't like A Little Life.
I think it is incredibly frustrating when a book set in contemporary America shows a distinct lack of awareness of "how things work."
Especially if you're going to be telling a graphic, ostensibly believable story.
There's a lot of sequences in A Little Life that sound like the author had a vague awareness of how things work but didn't bother to look stuff up.
That's lazy at best, but if you're trying to portray real social problems it almost gets cruel.
For example:
Yanagihara knows that kids in foster
Oct 13, 2025 12 tweets 3 min read
I’m not even saying this in a mean way, I’m just saying this in a cultural way.
This is not what retired evangelicals are like.
White American evangelical culture highly values self reliance and independence, or at least the performance of it.
White evangelical grandmas didn’t grow up with other women in church taking care of their kids. They would balk at the idea they should start now.
Go to any big white evangelical church in the US and start asking the retirees if they will regularly drop in and provide cleaning and childcare to
Sep 14, 2025 4 tweets 1 min read
You know, one positive things I actually can say about Kirk is I can't imagine that he would want a database of people to track people who failed to praise him effusively enough after his death on pain of losing their livelihoods. I actually don't think threatening people into complimenting him was the kind of thing he invested his time in.
The witch hunt, if you look at the posts, has fully moved into trying to get people fired for insufficient grief or suspected insincerity when they say things
Sep 11, 2025 8 tweets 2 min read
I don’t like bringing this up because we don’t know who did it and it doesn’t excuse violence either way.
But Kirk got his start by making a list of private citizens for supports to harass.
Remember the professor watch list?
I strongly favor civil dialogue but I truly am struggling to think of a single person who has consistently modeled it.
I think the fantasy is much more along the lines of “monopolized chaos.” The dream of the day where WE are doing the attacking, but no defending.
That’s not peace. That’s not civility.
Sep 6, 2025 13 tweets 3 min read
1/So, thinking about the economic news/price increases, and how this will impact how people see Trump.
My honest answer is "it won't."
I was definitely one of those people who followed all the NYT think pieces about trying to get out of my bubble and build bridges in 2016. It's been ten years. At this point, I think there's only three kinds of people who still really like Trump.
I’m not talking about low information, low participation voters who voted for him in Arkansas and didn’t really think about it because they didn’t think it mattered.
Aug 19, 2025 10 tweets 2 min read
I think one odd aspect of Christian apologia for passages about wives in the NT that rankle is that we actually really overplay the oppression of women in the first century outside of Christian contexts.
It's obviously not entirely wrong but there's still a fair amount of data showing women doing things like initiating divorces, arranging their own marriages, and managing their own financial affairs.
In my last article I tried to not overly play the role of the "Rome apologist" but I do think a flattening narrative doesn't really serve anyone well.
Aug 14, 2025 10 tweets 2 min read
So, two things to note.
1) When you look at the full context, there's a curtain in front of her. The guys don't know what she looks like. That's not a variable here either way.
2) The comments of "women have been lied to their whole life about what men want, we don't care about their hobbies or interests" are, I really hope, representative of Twitter guys only, because that is grim.
If you aren't interested in your girlfriend's hobbies, job, or interests... then what do you care about?
"Does it vagina?" Yes, I'm sure she vaginas, but also if your plan