When my now husband asked what I was looking for in a spouse, I asked him if he thought he could lead me well. I was worried at that point about my own “used goods” coming to the marital bed without my virginity intact, to which I readily and quickly disclosed so he could do what was best for him. These are just two quick anecdotes to add to the beginning of a discussion on complementarianism and purity culture, of which I was fully a part of for over twenty-seven years. I want to acknowledge in this that my roots in evangelicalism are still tangled and don’t care for the shears I have been using on them in my own healing journey, of which you may see portions of below.
Yes, I know, let’s add this to the long list of think-pieces that have come out about Josh Butler’s snippet of his upcoming book, Beautiful Union; but there is something to be said once again about how white evangelicals do things. I mean this in all senses of the word and what is implied here, coming from the roots of J.L. Austin with speech act theory, adding in some affect theory, and always recognizing the political.
First, a discussion of this based on Megan Goodwin’s work, Abusing Religion. While her book is focused on “contraceptive nationalism,” stories that “characterize American religious outsiders as sexual menaces,” what we have here is the flip side in that those stories hide the “regular” abuses that happen in majority religious spaces. We have seen quite a bit of spinning on TGC’s side when it comes to vilifying outsiders for their sexual ethics, of which I do not want to link and give more attention to here. Lisa Corrigan released a twitter thread that also outline this, “the production of conservative sexual expertise in the face of changing norms,” in creating a label of “deviant” for things that are seen to them as non-normative, and how this discomfort slips into disgust, which too easily moves into violence. They add:
Goodwin adds in her conclusion that “the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about religious outsiders since the 1970s have been directly shaped by the sensibilities of the New Christian Right, which targeted sex difference as a, if not the, most pressing threat to the United States.” In moving the shift of attention to “those bad people doing not our-kind-of-right sex” there is a blurring and muddying of what is happening inside their own doors. The rampant anti-LGBTQ laws that are literally being enacted as I type are, as Corrigan’s main point is in her thread, this exact phenomenon. Meanwhile actual abuse is happening in the SBC and other protestant and catholic denominations that simply are not getting the air-time that these “deviant behaviors” receive.
Goodwin does distinguish that “religion does not cause abuse,” but, “religious belonging can make abusive situations and relationships harder to escape… religion can make it harder to recognize abuse as such… religious communities frequently protect abusers while denying and enabling abuse, creating conditions of possibility for abuse, allowing abuse to flourish.” While I do dislike making this distinction, complementarianism does not, itself, cause abuse, but, complementarianism itself does create more explicit conditions of possibility for abuse, it makes it much more difficult to recognize abuse when it is occurring, and clearly creates spaces where abusers are protected, even elevated.
The same author of the post on TGC that said the film Women Talking was an alternate gospel because women fled their abusers calls this book “the protestant Magnum Opus on sexual ethics,” and you don’t have to draw any more correlations because they are explicitly drawn for you. Hello, Brett McCracken. Instead of recognizing that this may be a systemic issue, when they finally took down the piece by Josh Butler, they placed all the blame on him instead of taking time to reckon with their own machinations that brought him to this place. For what it's worth, this take doesn't absolve Butler of the harm he has caused with his words.
On this note, I do want to also discuss another book that I was finishing when this excerpt was dropped, Stained Glass Ceilings by Lisa Weaver Swartz. In looking at two seminaries as case studies, one being Southern Baptist Theological Seminary rooted in complementarianism, and Asbury Theological Seminary, employing “gender-blindness” in mainly egalitarian rhetoric and practice (guess which one many TGC authors and board members are from), she discusses the stories that are used and wielded to “do gender and practice power,” formatively impacting the students and faculty who are a part of these institutions. She succinctly adds about the power of story that, “stories are fashioned by human actors who have a stake in their tellings. As they take shape, religious stories become vehicles of power as much as meaning. They legitimate hierarchies, both overt and subtle, situating them within frames of transcendent meaning and shielding them from critique… it is not an accident that the types of people centered by the stories in this book maintain a firm hold on institutional power.” These stories, in both places, “sustain the advantages of the men they center.” Yes: it’s all about power. Thank you, Rachel Held Evans.
This is the difficult part I feel the need to write. I love that I am seeing Christians push against this article, in effect saying “not my faith.” In both theologies, the bible is being used to perpetuate a set of stories. Swartz, who ends with an extremely hopeful note through the example of Beth Moore, calling for imaginative resistance, which can occur through the use of scripture. However, my pushback is that we need to stop using the Bible to dictate every part and parcel of what we think is moral. Even the calls I’ve seen that add that Jesus’s gospel changes these parts and make us free are slightly problematic. Both parties use the “gospel” as a story to perpetuate a specific ideology. Once again, in recognizing that those communities in the Ancient Near East were also using stories for formative purposes, some work needs to be done in even acknowledging that in evangelical spaces.
I can’t, in good faith, do the work in Hebrew that then disagrees with Butler’s obsession over penetration because it's in the text. When the verb phrase “wayyabo eleha” occurs, does it mean sex? Probably. Once again, always through the male perspective, because it was a patriarchal society. And, when Butler uses that as a way to applaud the penetration that occurs, discussing the differences between male and female bodies, he does not take the time to discuss that sometimes that happens when it shouldn’t. This does not seem to be an issue to Butler here, distinguishing between good sex, bad sex, and even rape that occurs when using this verbal form, because that’s not the story he wants to tell. Does he discuss abuse in the chapter? Sure—at the same time he demonizes sex workers. (Interesting, given the use of the verb form and the story of Judah and Tamar being not but a few chapters after his favorite of Genesis 29)
What are we perpetuating with our stories? Who is being protected, and who is being persecuted with our stories? What do our stories do?