Blogaround

1. Mandisa, Grammy-winning singer and 'American Idol' alum, has died at 47 (April 19) Oh my goodness, very shocked to hear this. Here's my favorite song from her:

2. Surprising No One, All 3,878 of Elon Musk’s Cybertrucks Are Being Recalled (April 20) "The brake pedal was still functioning and would override the accelerator if it became stuck. However, lifting one’s foot briefly off the pedal would result in the car instantly rising to dangerous speeds. That was particularly dangerous because the Cybertruck can go from 0 mph to 60 mph in 2.6 seconds." Holy crap.

3. The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat (April 16, via) "Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks."

4. Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, 82, Dies (April 19) 

5. This SMBC comic [via]. "Come to think of it, why are we even having this specific conversation when we're never going to have this exact conversation again later!?"

6. The Cass Review: Hey, What Does UK NHS Trans Report Mean? (April 18) "The Cass Review is a wonky, sciencey, jargony document that gives every appearance of being a Tory project intended to justify cracking down on medical care for trans people in the name of non-trans people who feel icky when forced to think repeatedly for weeks on end about surgeons coming for their genitals — but it nonetheless contains a few good things."

7. NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth (April 22, via) "The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth."

8. The ‘Progressive Evangelical’ Two-Step (April 23) "So Slaves, Women & Homosexuals starts with slavery because that establishes the possibility that clobber-texts may not be quite so indisputably authoritative after all. And then, as perfectnumber notes, it ends with an abstract discussion of the 'issue of homosexuality' as a way saying yesbutofcourse some such clobber-texts are still authoritative so, fear not, we’re not just saying that anything goes." The Slacktivist responds to my post on the book "Slaves, Women & Homosexuals" and connects it to the history of the organization Christians for Biblical Equality.

9. FTC bans contracts that keep workers from jumping to rival employers (April 23, via) "The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday banned noncompete agreements for most U.S. workers, a move that will affect an estimated 30 million employees bound by contracts that restrict workers from switching employers within their industry." Wow this sounds like a big deal! When I first read this, I thought, but isn't there an important business reason for non-compete agreements? Surely you can't just ban them- yeah they're a problem for workers, but solving it should be more complicated than that... right? But the article says, "Noncompete agreements have been prohibited in three states — California, North Dakota and Oklahoma — for more than a century. In recent years, 11 states and D.C. have passed laws that prohibit the agreements for hourly wage workers or those who fall below a salary threshold." 

"Slaves, Women & Homosexuals" (What is this book actually about?)

Book cover for "Slaves, Women & Homosexuals"

Back when I was an evangelical college student, I heard about this book: Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis [affiliate link], by William J. Webb. People in evangelical circles were recommending it, mainly in the context of studying "what does the bible say about homosexuality?" I never ended up reading it back then, but I recently came across it and decided to read it. Since it had been so recommended, ya know.

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Here's what I expected

I had heard that the basic point of this book was that, as we interpret the bible and apply it to issues in our modern world, we should look at the overall trajectory of the bible. For example, even though in the bible, slavery is accepted, there is a pattern of biblical commands which give more and more rights to slaves, and in the New Testament there's stuff like the book of Philemon and the "there is no slave or free in Christ" verse. All of this points to the idea that ultimately, if we follow what the bible is telling us, slavery should be abolished. It's not about obeying the specific commands (following the "letter of the law"); it's about seeing which direction the bible was trying to move society toward, and continuing along in that direction. The book refers to this as a "redemptive-movement hermeneutic."

What I had heard about this book is that it applied this idea to three big issues: slavery, women, and homosexuality. And what I had heard is, the book's conclusions were as follows:

1. Slavery: The bible points us in the direction of giving more and more rights to slaves, and ultimately this leads to abolishing slavery
2. Women: The bible points us in the direction of giving more and more rights to women.
3. Homosexuality: No, this issue is different. The bible is ALWAYS negative toward the idea of same-sex relationships. There's no "trajectory." We still can't accept same-sex relationships.

So, since I'm queer, I already knew I was going to disagree with the third point there. But anyway, I wanted to at least read this book and see what it said. Since it was so recommended back when I was a little evangelical college student. (It was published in 2001.)

And... when I heard about this book, back then, my own opinions were along these lines: "Yeah, obviously slavery is wrong even though the bible allows it- hmm, it would be really good to have a solid biblical argument to explain how that can be. Also, there are a lot of very sexist and bad biblical commands about women, which of course we don't follow today- very cool to have an explanation for that too. And homosexuality, well obviously we know that's wrong." (Like I said, I was evangelical. I had bad opinions on queer issues.)

So I expected the book to present this perspective on how to interpret the bible, and then apply it to the three issues: slavery, women's rights, and homosexuality. I expected it to spend an equal amount of time on each one.

(Spoiler: It did not spend an equal amount of time on each one!)

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Full disclosure: The bible is not in charge of me

The whole premise of this book is that it's very important for Christians to read the bible and carefully analyze its commands to determine how they should apply to us today. Some commands apply basically exactly the same as they did back when the bible was written- "love one another" for example- these are transcultural. And for other commands, we can't apply them directly because our cultural context is totally different than that of the original audience. We have to figure out what higher-level principle is behind the biblical command, and apply that (the book says we have to move up the "ladder of abstraction"). 

So, it's a very very big deal to figure out which biblical commands apply to us and which don't. And this book spends a lot of time going into a lot of details about what indicators might tell us that a command is "transcultural" or "culture-bound." Webb's logic makes a lot of sense, too. If you believe you have to obey the bible, and that you have to do the work of figuring out which commands apply to modern Christians and which don't, the criteria in this book are extremely helpful. When I was evangelical, of course there were things in the bible where we said "oh we don't have to follow that now, that was just related to their culture back then" but I didn't ever have a whole overarching framework like what's presented in this book. So, very useful, if you're coming from that mindset.

But anyway, I just want to say up front that, uh, none of this actually matters to me at all. I don't view the bible that way anymore. The bible is not an authority over me, that I need to obey. I love the bible and I think it's super-interesting to study, but I don't *obey* it. I don't view it like "here's what God said, and I need to follow it whether I like it or not, and I have to put a lot of work into understanding *exactly* what it means, in order to follow it correctly." Obviously when I was evangelical, I believed that, but now I don't.

So when I read this, it's just about my own curiosity. I'm not reading it to find out if, like, I'm allowed to have rights or not. But for evangelicals, that is very much what it's about. (And please note, the author of this book is a man, presumably a straight man. Evangelicals are always debating what the bible says on this or that "issue"- and it's a very different thing if you are the "issue.") 

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What the book is actually about

So I started reading this book, and it starts out by explaining the "redemptive-movement hermeneutic." The culture of the bible's original audience is point X, the biblical command is point Y, and we draw a line from there toward the ultimate ethic, point Z. This "ultimate ethic" is what we should actually follow. Not the culturally-bound biblical commands themselves.

I'm reading this, thinking... I have heard queer Christians using this exact argument to say that the bible supports same-sex marriage and other queer rights. So I was kind of confused... how is this book going to argue that it doesn't?

Well. Let me tell you how. It turns out the parts about "the homosexual issue" are extremely shallow.

Oh MY GOODNESS. So the book goes through a whole bunch of different "criteria" for determining if a command is "transcultural" or not (sorted from most persuasive to least persuasive). Criterion 1 "Preliminary movement" (how much the biblical command differed from the culture it was written in) spends 3 pages on slavery, 5 pages on women, and 2 pages on homosexuality. Actually less than 2. Like 1 and a half. 

It spends all this time talking about how the bible was progressive on women's rights, and then it gets to homosexuality and it's like, eh not really anything to say here.

Really? Nothing? You couldn't think of anything?

I mean, I also don't have an example on same-sex relationships specifically, but I have A LOT of examples which generally apply to queerness. The first one off the top of my head is, Deuteronomy 23:1 says, "No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord." But then Isaiah 56:4-5 says, "To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant— to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever." Doesn't that seem kind of like a trajectory? Doesn't that seem like it points in the direction of full acceptance for trans people in modern times? 

(I will write a follow-up post with more details on how the "redemptive-movement hermeneutic" can apply to same-sex relationships and queerness in general.)

"Slaves, Women & Homosexuals" just says the bible has an absolute prohibition on same-sex sexual relationships, and actually that's more restrictive than the ancient cultures at that time, so, that's that.

This book was published in 2001- maybe back then, we didn't have so much work from queer Christians developing these biblical arguments. (And I had a lot of bad opinions on queerness in 2001, so, I don't hold that against anyone.) 

I was reading this, trying to figure out whether Webb was just ignoring the existence of these queer arguments, or if he really hadn't heard of them. The thing is, there are some parts of the book which do engage with queer arguments. For example, the book talks about the distinction between "casual homosexuality" and "covenant homosexuality"; probably the main queer Christian argument I've heard is that when the bible condemns same-sex relationships, it's always in the context of something that's immoral anyway, like rape, or an adult man having sex with a boy, and the bible doesn't really say anything about a consensual same-sex relationship where the two partners are equals. So, yes, the book does address this, and some other queer Christian arguments. So I don't think Webb is deliberately ignoring biblical arguments in support of queer acceptance; I think in 2001 most of those arguments weren't really well-known.

So I'm reading along, continuously surprised at how shallow the "homosexuality" sections of this book are, while the parts about women's rights go into a lot of very good solid detail. And- get this- the "slavery" parts are grouped under "neutral examples." Yeah, for every criterion the book presents, first the criterion is explained, then there are some "neutral examples" to show how to apply it, then it talks about how it applies to women, then how it applies to homosexuality. For some of these criteria, the book doesn't talk about slavery at all. It uses lots of other "neutral examples" instead.

At this point, I became SO FASCINATED by this book. It's totally different than I expected! I am OBSESSED with trying to figure out what this book is actually about! I really thought it was going to spend an equal amount of time on these 3 topics, and apply a really robust biblical argument to each one, but, no!

So here's my theory: I think the main point is that Webb wanted to write a book to support egalitarianism (equal rights for men and women). And, good for him! Yes, I totally support equal rights for all genders! And yes, this is definitely an issue that evangelicals need to talk about, because so many evangelicals are teaching complementarianism instead. (Complementarianism means that men and women are "equal" but have different roles, so in practical terms it means arguing about if women can be pastors or not, if women can be leaders or not, if women are allowed to teach men, if women are allowed to sing in front of the church or does that count as "teaching", how does an abused wife make sure she's "submitting" to her husband properly, etc, a lot of nasty patriarchy nonsense.) When I was evangelical, I had NO IDEA that egalitarianism was an option. I totally believed the bible taught that, to some extent, God doesn't want women to have leadership positions over men. And the husband has to be the "spiritual leader" of the marriage, and the wife has to "submit" to him. 

So I'm glad to see that Webb is egalitarian and wrote a book with a very solid biblical argument to support that.

The book is not about 3 things. The book is about 1 thing. Equal rights for women.

That's nice, but I always heard this book recommended in the context of "learning what the bible says about homosexuality" and oh man, no, nobody should be recommending it on that basis.

And I'm going to speculate some more about the author's motivations... The way it reads to me is, he wants to write a book to make a biblical argument supporting egalitarianism. And it helps if he also discusses what the bible says about slavery- because we all agree slavery is wrong, and yet the bible allows it- so this is a good example to demonstrate that it's valid to *not* agree with the "letter of the law" but to look for the "movement" behind it. Slavery is a "neutral example" which can prove to Christian patriarchists that hey, you guys don't literally follow everything in the bible either, so you can't just say "well the bible says" and automatically dismiss our arguments for women's equality. And, if any of those patriarchists want to bring the criticism "well if we allow women and men to be equal, it's a slippery slope to accepting homosexuality, and oh wouldn't that be terrible if Christians accepted homosexuality"- that's why the book also addresses "the homosexual issue", and if to say "don't worry, good evangelicals, equal rights for women DOESN'T mean we have to accept homosexuality." It gives the egalitarian arguments in the book a lot more credibility, from an evangelical perspective, if the author also shows why those same arguments do NOT support gay rights.

It's not about 3 things; it's about 1 thing.

And at the end of the book, there's a chapter titled "What If I Am Wrong?" which gives away the game. In this chapter, Webb discusses what he believes to be the weakest points of his argument for equality between men and women. He does NOT talk about the possibility of being wrong about slavery. He does NOT talk about the possibility of being wrong about homosexuality.

FASCINATING!

Wow!

This is amazing. I am like, SO INTERESTED in this book! Figuring out what it's actually about! It's not about "slaves, women, and homosexuals"; it's about how the bible can be used to support equality between men and women, and then to give it more evangelical cred, we throw in these 2 other issues which evangelicals all agree about. Like see, the slavery issue proves that sometimes the bible says something, but we don't follow it in modern times, and that's valid. And the homosexuality issue proves that this way of reading the bible doesn't lead to just throwing away the whole "authority of Scripture"; see, don't worry, we still read the bible as condemning same-sex relationships, of course.

I'm just so surprised by this, because when I was evangelical I heard this book recommended as a good resource for "what the bible says about homosexuality" and wowwww it is NOT. 

The parts on homosexuality are extremely shallow, oh my GOODNESS. 

There's a criterion called "Purpose/ Intent Statements" which says that if the purpose the bible gives for a command would no longer be fulfilled by following the command in modern times, that's a sign the command is culturally-bound and we shouldn't follow it today. (For example, the bible says women should "be busy at home... and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God." If Christians teach that nowadays, non-Christians will point out how obviously sexist it is, and malign the word of God, doncha think? So we shouldn't force this command on women.) For the "homosexuality" section under this criteria, it's simply about how the purpose of the biblical commands against same-sex relationships was to "affirm the distinctiveness of the male-and-female sexual union" and that purpose still applies now. Uh... that's all you have to say on that? You couldn't think of anything else? You couldn't think of Genesis 2:18, where God says "It is not good for the man to be alone" and then creates the first woman? And that maybe when modern Christians force gay people to remain single, they're going against the purpose of that verse?

And there's another criterion called "Scientific and Social-Scientific Evidence" which goes into a lot of detail about how nowadays we know there's no scientific evidence that women are worse leaders than men, or that women are more easily deceived than men. Then it gets to the "homosexuality issue" and it's just 2 and a half pages discussing "born this way"- like, oh now there's some scientific evidence that there may be genetic or hormonal causes for homosexuality, but even if that's true, that doesn't mean the behavior is acceptable- there are plenty of bad behaviors that people may be genetically more susceptible to (alcoholism, etc). And that's it, that's all the book has to say on the scientific evidence we have now, which the writers of the bible didn't have. Really? That's it? You don't have anything to say about rates of depression and suicide in the queer community, and how those things are directly caused by society's lack of acceptance, and if queer people are allowed to accept ourselves, life is SO MUCH BETTER? Really? Nothing about that? Only a rehash of "born this way"? Really?

I mean, maybe in 2001 no one was talking about that? But anyway, even when I was a college student around 2010ish, I don't think people should have been recommending this book as a resource about the bible and same-sex relationships. 

I don't know... Matthew Vines's video arguing a biblical case for same-sex relationships went viral in 2012 (according to this link), and before that, I really hadn't heard most of the arguments he made in the video. (I had heard some from Justin Lee; that was basically around the same time.) Maybe nobody really was talking about these things before that. I don't know. (I know there were queer Christians doing this work, way before that, but I personally don't know what their specific arguments were, and if they're similar to the arguments that queer Christians use now.)

The sections in the book about equality for women are good. Lots of detail, lots of bible verses. But the sections on slavery and homosexuality aren't really about learning what the bible says on those things- they're about proving to evangelicals that it's acceptable to talk about the women's issue in these terms.

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A few more comments I have

Let me just quickly run through a few other things that I want to say about this book:

• The book says that sometimes Christians take the "slavery" bible verses and try to apply them to our lives by saying they apply to employee/employer relationships- and the book points out how COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS this is. Slavery is a totally different thing than being an employee with a job. For example, the bible says it's fine to beat your slaves as long as they recover after a day or so- you really want to apply that to employers now? Really? THANK YOU, I am SO GLAD to see someone pointing out how ABSURD that is.
• Even though Webb believes in the abolition of slavery, and believes in egalitarianism (full equality between men and women, no restrictions on the roles that women are allowed to have), he says that the "redemptive-movement hermeneutic" doesn't necessarily have to go that far. It would also be logically consistent to say that the "ultimate ethic" is "ultra-soft slavery" rather than abolition, or "ultra-soft patriarchy" rather than egalitarianism. He explains that "ultra-soft patriarchy" would mean in all practical aspects, men and women are equal, but in some situations men are given a little bit more symbolic honor. (He says this is similar to how parents often write wills which divide up their money equally among all their children- even though the bible says the firstborn should get a greater share- but the firstborn has a place of honor by being the executioner of the will or something.)
  To be clear, Webb says he doesn't know of anybody actually promoting "ultra-soft patriarchy"- he calls out complementarians like John Piper and Wayne Grudem, and says their brand of patriarchy is NOT following the trajectory of Scripture. Webb says that Christian patriarchists/ complementarians should promote "ultra-soft patriarchy" instead of whatever it is they're doing. If they really can't accept egalitarianism.
  I would say... I understand how theoretically, "ultra-soft slavery" or "ultra-soft patriarchy" could make sense. To still have something of a hierarchy, but have a lot of rules to protect the rights of the lower-status people, so they're not exploited. But in actual reality, I don't think this works. A power dynamic like that will inevitably lead to abuse. 
  It reads like something you would say if you're just thinking about it in theoretical terms, and it doesn't actually affect you.
• Some of the "neutral examples" were very insightful! The book gave lots of detail about why the firstborn son would get so many more benefits than the other siblings, in ancient times. Why it made sense back then to do it that way. So even though the bible says this, it doesn't apply to us now because our situation is totally different. (Also, in the bible there are plenty of examples of choosing a younger sibling over the firstborn, and this being portrayed as a good thing.) Also, being right-handed was a "neutral example" that the book looked at. Bible verses about God doing things with God's "right hand"- does this mean that being left-handed is bad? No. So just because God is described with certain characteristics doesn't mean that it's good when people have those characteristics, and bad when we don't.
• Years ago, I had heard a Christian say that the bible's "vice lists" transcend culture and apply for all time. "Vice lists" are the bible passages that have a whole list of sins. And oh, look at that, some "vice lists" include homosexuality. So, there's the answer, same-sex relationships are always wrong.
  I remember hearing this line of reasoning and thinking... why do the vice lists apply for all time? Like did you just make that up? Where is this premise coming from? Well perhaps it comes from this book. There is a section in here on vice lists, and it says for the most part, they are transcultural. The book gives it much more nuance than what this person at my church was saying though!
  (So yeah I think it's ridiculous to claim that the vice lists apply for all time, as if that's just a tautologically true principle of bible interpretation.)

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Conclusion

I read this book recently because I never read it back when I was evangelical, but I heard a lot of people recommend it. They were recommending it as a book about "what the bible says about homosexuality" but oh goodness, no, don't recommend it for that. The parts on homosexuality are extremely shallow. It reads like the author wanted to write a book about how the bible supports equality for women, and then also added a few other issues that weren't going to be "controversial" to evangelicals, to prove that his approach to bible interpretation is legit. Good for him, writing a book about equality for women. But it's not a useful book for studying what the bible says about queerness.

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Related:

We Need Queer Theology

I Wish I Was This Angry About Slavery in the Bible 

The Bible, Trans People, and Names

Men have no idea what it's like for women in complementarian churches 

Queer Theology (is not about being right) 

What do we do with Christians who are never going to accept queer people?

Update: The Slacktivist (Fred Clark) featured this post on his blog- The ‘Progressive Evangelical’ Two-Step. Very cool!

Blogaround

1. The Zone of Interest is about the danger of ignoring atrocities – including in Gaza (March 14, via) [content note: genocide, the Holocaust] "The film follows Höss’s idyllic domestic life with his wife and children, which unfolds in a stately home and garden immediately adjacent to the concentration camp."

2. What Republicans Want (March 25) "But the report is 180 pages, and you can’t really appreciate the steady drumbeat of wrongheadedness until you read the whole thing (which I did)."

3. Pastor’s wife-turned-activist Beverly LaHaye dies at 94, helped defeat Equal Rights Amendment (April 16)

4. So uh there was a Christian men's conference, and there was some *drama* there. First of all, everything about this event screams toxic masculinity, there's a tank driving around, Mark Driscoll was one of the speakers (eww how will I explain Mark Driscoll to my children?). And the event opened with a sword swallowing performance, and Driscoll was mad because he felt it was kinda like a stripper pole dance, and Driscoll said some things about it on stage, and got kicked out.

You may be saying, "what." Yeah, same.

What happened when Mark Driscoll and Josh Howerton showed up at the Stronger Men’s Conference this weekend (April 15) My FAVORITE part of this is how the conference organizer brings up Matthew 18. 

(See also, the Slacktivist's 2014 post on Matthew 18 [via]. "The problem here is not with the passage itself, but with how it is used and abused. Christians who have treated others badly — who have, in fact, sinned against their brothers and sisters — treat this text like it’s their Miranda rights.")

Also love Hemant Mehta's post: Christian Men's Conference descends into chaos over sword-swallowing acrobat (April 15) Especially this bit, which is spot-on, about the things that Driscoll *should* have been criticizing the conference for: "He could have condemned the conference’s other poor decisions, like inviting a guy like him to speak there at all."

5. In Year Of Our Lord 2024, White-Sounding Names *Still* More Likely To Get Called Back For Job Interviews (April 12) "Remember that very famous study from 20 years ago, in which researchers submitted practically identical resumés to various want-ads — with the only difference being that the names attached were either especially Black-sounding names or especially white sounding names? Well, it was replicated again and once again researchers found that those with white-sounding names were more likely to be hired than those with Black-sounding names. An average of nine percent higher, across the board."

6. The Scholar Bringing Marco Polo Back to China (April 19) "Yet despite Marco Polo’s widespread recognition in China, there exists only one rigorous Chinese translation of 'The Travels of Marco Polo.'"

7. Hidden 3D Pictures (April 18) Wow this is fantastic. Telling an AI to generate magic eye pictures, and, well, "How do you end up with a result that sounds so confident and yet is so completely wrong?"

Forgiveness for Sins You Don't Know You've Committed

There's a person on one side, the word "God" on the opposite side, and a chasm between them labelled "sin." Image source.

I read this blog post by Sildarmillion, Reflecting on the Act of Praying after Learning to Submit, where she talks about her view of prayer (coming from a Muslim perspective). Here's one part that struck me, and I want to talk about it:

On a different but related note, I also notice that people are constantly praying for forgiveness. I often wonder for what sins they are asking for forgiveness. More often than not, people are seeking forgiveness just in case they unconsciously made any mistakes. But they are not taking the time to reflect and think about whether they really made mistakes, and what mistakes those were. If they made mistakes, they just want God to forgive them for it, without engaging in the difficult task of actually thinking about it. They might make the same mistake every day, and they’ll keep asking for forgiveness every day, without ever learning what that mistake was. This just does not feel right to me. If God keeps forgiving them for it everyday, isn’t that like being given a free pass?

Of course I believe in praying for forgiveness for something I know that I have done wrong. Praying for forgiveness is an important part of healing, repentance, and atonement. But, I take issue with asking for forgiveness for mistakes I may have made unconsciously. I am not saying I should ignore mistakes I have made unconsciously. I am saying the opposite. I am saying I should try to become conscious of mistakes I have made unconsciously. I can understand praying to become conscious of those mistakes so I can properly rectify them. But I cannot support the idea of asking for forgiveness without me having to do any reflection or introspection on what it is that I have done wrong. I don’t like the idea of asking for forgiveness for my unconscious mistakes, so that it’s just taken care off, taken off my books, and I never have to do the difficult work of dealing with it. Yet, we are encouraged to always ask for forgiveness for unconscious mistakes. I can’t get behind it.

!!!!! This is such a good point!

I grew up evangelical; here's what I believed about sin, as an evangelical Christian: Sin is a problem because it separates us from God, and ultimately the result is going to hell. All of us sin, so we are disgusting to God and we all deserve to go to hell. (Only perfect sinless people go to heaven- but there aren't any, except Jesus.)

So, in the ideology, if Person A hurts Person B, we should be concerned for Person A because now they have committed a sin and they're going to hell, oh no! This is, uh, so incredibly backwards and messed-up... Like how about we care about Person B, the victim? Doesn't the victim deserve our compassion more than the perpetrator? But in this kind of evangelical ideology, when people talk about sin, it's like the victims don't even exist at all. 

An extreme example would be when a pastor sexually abuses a child, and then a lot of Christians come to the pastor's defense, saying it's not a big deal and we need to forgive him because "we all sin" and "there but for the grace of God go I" (meaning, "it's only because of God's grace that I didn't end up sexually abusing a child", uh, WTF?). They see the abuser and they say "that could have been me" and so they want to forgive him quickly. Very interesting that they don't look at the victim and say "that could have been me" and prioritize helping the victim. Very interesting. 

This ideology doesn't care about victims. You have to care about the one who sinned, because they're in danger of going to hell, poor thing.

So when I was a child, I prayed for Jesus to forgive my sins so I wouldn't go to hell- and yes, I sometimes did pray for forgiveness for sins I had committed without being aware of it. I wasn't taught that you literally have to pray for forgiveness for each specific sin after it's committed or else you go to hell- like if you die at the wrong point in the sin/forgiveness cycle then you go to hell. Going to hell because of a timing issue. No, my church didn't teach that, but I think there are some branches of Christianity which do. (For example, some Christians teach that you go to hell if you commit suicide- because there's no opportunity to ask for forgiveness in between the "sin" and when you die.) But still, even though I didn't believe I was at risk of going to hell for any sins I committed unaware, I was still worried that God would hold it against me. (Who knows what kind of little things God would hold against me? That was the kind of god I believed in back then.) So sometimes I did pray to be forgiven for sins I didn't even know about.

(And I'm curious about how Muslims think about these concepts- there are likely some big differences.)

I'm ex-evangelical now. I don't pray, and I'm suspicious of the general concept of forgiveness. (I believe the person who did something wrong should try to make it right- but also the victim is NOT obligated to forgive them. But if it's some small run-of-the-mill sin, the kind of thing where Person A and Person B both occasionally sin against each other because no one's perfect, then they should forgive each other.) And I no longer define "sin" as "things God says are bad" but as "things that hurt people." So it's been a long time since I've thought about the idea of praying for God to forgive you for sins you don't know you've committed.

But what Sildarmillion says makes perfect sense, and I can't believe I've never heard anyone put it that way before. If sin actually matters- if it actually hurts people- then wouldn't it be very important to find out when you've done something wrong, and learn from it so you can make it right and not do it again? If you believe that you can just ask God for forgiveness for sins you don't even know about, and They forgive you, and it's fine, well that only makes sense if you believe sin is something God arbitrarily decided to be mad at you about, for no real reason. (And yes, when I was evangelical, that is the kind of god I believed in.) I submit to you that this is kind of messed-up.

And, I have an example: Racism. 

So, I'm white, I'm from the US- I have benefitted from white privilege and systemic racism. And I didn't know about it. In school we learned that slavery and Jim Crow were very bad but fortunately Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr solved those problems and now everyone is equal. And of course I did my best to treat everyone the same. But that's not enough. Systemic racism is very real, and harms people, and if you just wander through life unaware of it, benefitting from it, well, that's a sin. Now, I don't blame white people for that, and I don't think it means we deserve to go to hell or anything like that- but we need to learn about the reality of it, and do what we can to change society so people really do have equal rights. So no, it wouldn't be helpful at all if God just "forgives" you and lets you keep on going, completely unaware.

So it doesn't make sense, this belief that you need God to forgive you for sins you don't know you've committed, without any belief that it actually matters what those sins were and maybe you need to learn from them and not commit them again. What good does it do, if you don't even know what you did wrong? That would only make sense if you believe sin is just some random technicality that God holds against you.

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Related:

My Racist Personal Relationship with God

"Christians Aren't Perfect" When It's Convenient 

Yes, I Want Justice (A post about white evangelicals and #BlackLivesMatter)

Blogaround

1. Psychology of a Hero: MOON KNIGHT and Dissociative Identity Disorder (2022) "And so many systems saw 'Moon Knight' and said I feel seen. This is what it's like." (29-minute video)

2. 2024 Total Eclipse: Where & When (via) 

And more on the eclipse:

Satellite views of solar eclipse 2024: See the moon's shadow race across North America (video, photos) (April 10) This photo is incredible!

Photo of the earth, with a huge dark spot on it where the eclipse is.

And from xkcd: Types of Eclipse Photo (April 8) Love this!

3. Bootlicking Calvinism Is The Unfunny Kind Of Calvin + Hobbes (April 8) "You might expect, then, that good Calvinists would agree with that latter sentiment. They might not appreciate the punks and anarchists who spray paint “ACAB” on subway walls but, logically, it is a statement that they must regard as true. If all people are sinful bastards, and police are a subset within “all people,” then all police, as people, must also be sinful bastards. If all people cannot be trusted to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God, then it would be foolish to claim that police officers are somehow, inexplicably, an exception to this universal rule."

4. Censorship: How Does It Work? (January 27, via) "Every Chinese person I know seems to have a lot of skill in reading the news between the lines to figure out what’s actually happening through the bullshit."

5. O.J. Simpson dies of cancer at age 76, his family says (April 11)

6. What I’ve Learned as the First Out Trans Division 1 Men’s Athlete (2023, via) "'It saved my life,' he said after a few heavy breaths. 'You saved my life. And I needed you to know.'"

7. What LakePointe Church and Pastor Josh Howerton Think about Women (April 12) This will only be of interest if you know who Josh Howerton is. He's a pastor who recently got a lot of attention on social media for making a "joke" about how a wife should do whatever her husband wants sexually on "his" wedding night. Well I'm sure you will be *shocked* to find out that it's not the first time he's said disrespectful things about women. Sheila Gregoire has the receipts.

The Great Sex Rescue: Pain

Image text: "El Roi, The God Who Sees." Image source.

Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"

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[content note: sexual coercion, pain, spiritual abuse]

We are still in chapter 10 of The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended [affiliate link]. I've decided to divide this chapter into 3 parts. This post will cover the second part, pages 187-196. 

We're still in the chapter on being coerced into sex. This section is about when women experience pain during sex (typically from vaginismus) but feel they are forced to have sex anyway. (Usually it's not their husbands forcing them- usually the husband doesn't realize how bad it is for his wife. It's the ideology that these women were taught about Christianity and marriage, which is forcing them to have painful sex.) This is really bad, because as a woman continues to have sex despite the pain, psychologically she will associate pain with sex, and that will make her body even more resistant to having sex, which will make it more painful, and so on. 

Here are the statistics that "The Great Sex Rescue" presents about women's sexual pain:

And we found that sexual pain is very widespread in the Christian community. As we first discussed in chapter 3, 32.3% of women have experienced sexual pain. When we break it down,

• 26.7% of women have experienced postpartum sexual pain.
• 22.6% of women have experienced vaginismus or some other form of primary sexual dysfunction that makes penetration painful.
• Overall, 6.8% of women have had such bad sexual pain that penetration was impossible.

As we have stated before, but we must reiterate, it's long been known that sexual pain rates (unrelated to childbirth) are higher in the Christian community.

Yeah. I used to have vaginismus. And what "The Great Sex Rescue" is saying in this section is very true- Christian marriage resources tell wives they need to have sex anyway, and so, that's what Christian women do, despite being in terrible pain. Which just makes the situation worse.

And then there's this comparison with abuse:

When women believe before they are married the message that a wife is obligated to give her husband sex when he wants it, vaginismus/dyspareunia rates go up by 37%. To understand the gravity of this, 37% is only barely statistically different from the effect we found of abuse on vaginismus/dyspareunia. Our bodies interpret the obligation-sex message in similar ways to trauma, likely because obligation sex and trauma have so much in common. Both say, "What you need doesn't matter." Both say, "Others can use you without your consent." Both say, "You are unimportant." What often makes this even worse for Christian women is that we feel like God condones our pain because we're told the Bible says we can't say no. When we feel unseen, unimportant, and used, not just by our husbands but also by God, that causes trauma. It feels threatening on a subconscious level, so the body freezes in order to protect itself-- in a way that says, "Keep out!"

I'm not sure their conclusion about the statistics is right- the footnote says the odds ratio for abuse is 1.60 (ie, women who have been abused are 1.60 times more likely to have vaginismus/dyspareunia) with a confidence interval of 1.49-1.72, and the odds ratio for obligation sex is 1.37 (ie, women who believe that wives are obligated to have unwanted sex with their husbands are 1.37 times more likely to have vaginismus/dyspareunia) with a confidence interval of 1.26-1.48. The book says that because these confidence intervals overlap, they are "only barely statistically different." But I'm looking at these numbers and, uh, these don't overlap??? 1.48 is smaller than 1.49........ right......? Is this a mistake in how the authors are analyzing their data, or is this something I'm not understanding about confidence intervals?

So I *don't* think the effect of the obligation-sex message is as bad as abuse (in terms of how likely it is to lead to vaginismus and other sexual pain problems), but I do agree that there are similarities. The idea that someone else can use your body, and what you want doesn't matter. That's... yeah that's more or less what Christian marriage resources tell women. It fits right in with evangelical Christian anti-self ideology, where it's "selfish" and sinful to want things, or to expect that people should treat you right.

Continuing on in "The Great Sex Rescue":

Think of the implications of this for a moment: believing this obligation-sex message makes women more vulnerable to sexual pain, but if they believe this message, they're also more likely to force themselves to muscle through. Forcing themselves to have frequent, painful sex makes treatment so much more difficult because it strengthens the association between sex and pain. Indeed, the group most likely to suffer from vaginismus is women who are pushing themselves to have sex despite not ever orgasming and not feeling close to their husbands. These women are twice (2.02 times) as likely to have vaginismus than other women who are married and are actively having sex. 

This is spot-on.

Next, the book mentions Deborah Feldman's autobiography "Unorthodox", which is about her background as a Jewish woman, her arranged marriage, and experiencing incredibly painful vaginismus when trying to have sex with her husband:

The Netflix series based on the book depicts the heartbreaking scene when they finally manage penetration. Covering her mouth with her hand, she grits her teeth and cries through the ordeal. Afterward, he rolls over and declares how amazing it felt. 

No one should ever take pleasure in something that causes another pain. That causes trauma, and it reinforces trauma already present. 

Yeah... I have to say, based on my background being a good Christian girl who read all those books on marriage, I wouldn't have known this "gritting your teeth through the pain while having sex" was a sign that something was wrong. I definitely didn't know that "No one should ever take pleasure in something that causes another pain." No, Christian marriage resources teach the EXACT OPPOSITE: They teach that love means sacrificing yourself for your husband. They teach that life/ marriage/ the Christian lifestyle is full of situations where you don't want to do something, but you have to do it anyway because it's the right thing to do. (Doing laundry! Waking up in the middle of the night to take care of your baby! Going to work!) And yes, they directly say that sex is one of those situations.

Those books also said that even if sex is painful, wives have to do it anyway. They said it's not that bad, it doesn't take that long. They said it's so important for men, surely you can endure a few minutes of pain for your husband's sake. And I believed that, and that's the perspective I was coming from when I started having sex.

It's good that "The Great Sex Rescue" is calling out how harmful this is.

Here's another thing "The Great Sex Rescue" says in this section:

While the go-to treatment for sexual pain is pelvic floor physiotherapy-- which we highly recommend-- what our survey results tell us is that it's not only pelvic floor physiotherapy that we need. If rates of sexual pain are higher when people believe certain things, then part of the treatment has to be challenging those beliefs.

This is a good point! I have written before about how I'm glad I didn't get treatment from a doctor for vaginismus, because the doctor would have been coming from the perspective of "I need to change my body to fit my heteronormative role and be good enough for my husband" and that was really NOT what I needed. What I needed was information about asexuality and queerness, so I'm glad that's what I found, instead of going to a doctor for treatment. (But if your situation is different, and you *do* know what you need, and you feel that treatment from a doctor could be a useful resource for you in accomplishing your goals, then yeah go ahead and do that.)

The authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" are saying that pelvic floor therapy by itself isn't enough- women also need to challenge and reject the ideology they've internalized about being obligated to have unwanted sex. Yes! I agree with this! However, I kind of side-eye it, because "The Great Sex Rescue" said in chapter 8 that if you have vaginismus, you are obligated to get treatment for it, and you are obligated to fix the problem so that you can have PIV [penis-in-vagina] sex with your husband like you're supposed to. So, even though they say that wives shouldn't be forced to have painful sex, they still say that in the long run, you can't just not consent to PIV forever. I very much disagree with this.

So... authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" are talking about changing from the belief "I have to have PIV sex with my husband whenever he wants it" to "in the long-term, I need to get to a place where I'm able to have PIV sex with my husband (not 'whenever he wants it'- I can say no sometimes- but it should at least be fairly frequent), but right now since it's painful I don't have to consent to it."

Or, okay let me frame this in a more charitable way, maybe it's more like, changing from the belief "my husband has the right to use me for sex whenever he wants, even if it's painful for me and I don't want it" to "my husband genuinely cares about how I feel, and he definitely doesn't want to push me into having sex which I don't want."

And, okay, that still is a meaningful change, so maybe I shouldn't be so negative toward what "The Great Sex Rescue" is saying here. And in my own life, I never even was able to believe that I'm allowed to just never consent to PIV, as a straight-married woman. So. Not sure how much I'm really able to advocate for that.

For me, this change from believing "my husband can use me" to "my husband cares about how I feel" happened when I was pregnant. I felt so sick all the time, I couldn't stand the thought of anyone touching me, let alone having sex. It was the first time I just totally refused, the first time I was too sick to be guilted into it by thoughts of "but men need it"/ "I'm not a good wife"/ etc. And my husband was totally fine with that. And he was actually even more loving and affectionate than before- because I was so sick, and so he was doing a bunch of extra things to take care of me. I was so shocked, because Christians had taught me that a husband is just not capable of being a decent human being toward his wife, if she is not giving him enough sex. Turns out men are capable of being better than that- and should be held to that standard.

So yes, I agree it's not just pelvic floor therapy that's needed- it's also about changing one's beliefs about what sex is and who it's for and what your obligations are. For me, finding out about asexuality and queerness was much MORE important than the physical aspects of treating vaginismus, and that's why I keep saying I'm glad I didn't get treatment from a doctor. If I had, I still would have been caught in this "I have to change my body so I can have sex correctly because men need it, otherwise I'm failing at being a good wife" ideology. And even if the treatment had "worked" and I was able to have PIV sex, I still would have had no idea about how my own body works, or that sex should be about what I want and should feel good for me, or that me and my partner should be equals, rather than only me being required to make sure sex is good enough for him to meet his "needs." 

It would have given me nothing more than a shaky hope that maybe now I'm good enough for him. Instead, asexuality gave me confidence. I know what I want, and I know what I don't want, and I absolutely should expect my partner to care about that.

Basically, I agree with "The Great Sex Rescue" when it says that it's not just the pelvic floor therapy that's needed, but you also need to challenge those beliefs about obligation sex. But I disagree about where we end up after challenging them.

Next, "The Great Sex Rescue" talks about the story of Hagar from the bible. The short version is: God promised Abraham that he would have a son, but he and his wife Sarah were unable to have children. So Sarah said Abraham should take Hagar (who was Sarah's slave) and get Hagar pregnant. They did that, and Hagar had a son named Ishmael. Later, Sarah got pregnant and had a son named Isaac, and there was *drama* between Hagar/Ishmael and Sarah/Isaac. 

Anyway, the part that's highlighted in this book is this, which happens when Hagar is pregnant, and Sarah is jealous and mistreats her, and sends Hagar into the desert:

While she is in the desert, God provides for her. And here's where things get interesting. Hagar is the first person in Scripture who is given the honor of bestowing a name upon God. And the name she chooses? "The God who sees me." After being sexually assaulted, forced to carry a baby, and then abandoned, never having her needs or wishes taken into account, being invisible and used to meet other people's needs, God sees her.

And being seen makes all the difference.

God sees women. God does not say to women, "Your experience doesn't matter compared to your husband's tremendous need." God does not tell women, "Let your husband ejaculate inside you, no matter how you feel, because otherwise you are in disobedience." No, God says, "I designed sex to be a deep knowing of two people. And that, my child, means that both of you matter."

If we were to talk about sex like that, we believe there would be fewer cases of vaginismus. We believe fewer women would give up on sex because it's so emotionally damaging. We believe more women would be excited about sex, enjoy sex, and feel freedom in the bedroom.

Love this take on the story of Hagar. Anytime someone wants to read the story of Hagar and care about how she felt, rather than just seeing her as a mistake that Bible Hero Abraham made as he struggled to trust in God's promise, I am SO HERE FOR IT.

And... yeah, this stuff about God not wanting women to be used... this really is different from what I was taught by evangelicals. The idea that God does not want people to mistreat you- I mean, whoa, no, I don't think I heard that in the evangelical church. Instead it was about how we should continue to trust God, even through suffering, even when people mistreat us- and eventually God will use those bad experiences for good, and suffering will bring us closer to God and make us better people.

(Or, rather, it *is* true that when evangelicals are talking about human trafficking victims, for example, they say "God's heart breaks for them." So, when it's some big societal problem that's so terrible we can't relate to it at all, and we view the victims as one-dimensional beacons of innocence rather than actual people, *then* we believe that God doesn't want them to be mistreated. But when something bad happens to you personally, then it's "part of God's plan" and "God will use it for good" and all that.)

So yes, I believe that God sees us. This is what I believe about incarnation: that when we feel pain, God feels it too. Whatever emotions we feel, They feel too. God is with us.

All right, one last thing from this section of "The Great Sex Rescue": The authors say that perhaps at this point, some readers may be concerned that if women aren't taught this "obligation sex" message, then they will have sex less, and oh wouldn't that be so terrible for their poor husbands. And, yes, statistically it is true that wives who believe they are required to have unwanted sex do have sex more frequently than wives who believe in consent.

Here's how "The Great Sex Rescue" responds to this concern:

The fear that men may not have as much sex as they want should not supersede women's need to feel safe.

Yes. Exactly.

In summary: This section of the book is about sexual pain, and how the "obligation sex" message makes things worse, because as women continue to force themselves to have painful sex, their bodies will resist more and more, and it becomes an even worse and more painful experience. Yes, that makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Christian leaders out there explicitly telling wives that they need to have sex even if it's painful. The farther I get from that ideology, the more I see how messed-up it is.

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A footnote here about the idea that eventually you have to consent to sex: It brings to mind this post from Queenie, Mapping the grey area of sexual experience: consent, compulsory sexuality, and sex normativity.

When I first started dating, I made a list of all the reasons I shouldn’t have sex with my boyfriend.  I hadn’t known him long enough (I figured I had to wait at least a year).  I was underage (and he was over 18).  I didn’t have access to birth control.  The list went on and on, but nowhere on the list was “I genuinely do not want to have sex with him.”  Spoiler alert: I genuinely did not want to have sex with him.  But that wasn’t good enough! “I don’t want to” wasn’t a reason not to have sex, because everyone wants to have sex under the proper conditions.  I could say no if I wasn’t ready, but there would come a day when the stars would align and all my necessary conditions would be met and I would be ready.  I was terrified of that inevitable star alignment, because I knew that when it happened I would have to have sex.  Unfortunately, this particularly story ended in trauma, but I’m sure there is some alternate universe out there where I broke down and consented to sex I genuinely did not want because I couldn’t think of a “real” reason to say no.

As an asexual, I feel it's very important to say this: Yes, you do have the right to just NEVER CONSENT TO SEX, even if you're dating, even if you're married. 

This should definitely be something you discuss before marriage. Not cool if you just suddenly tell your partner it's never going to happen, after you've been together for a long time. But also, there are asexuals who only figure out they're asexual *after* getting married. (In my case, I was not able to figure out I was asexual until after I had had sex- fortunately, I had sex before marriage.) This is really not ideal, but if it happens, both people should be treated like they are equally important, rather than the ace partner being treated like they're the one who needs to change. And it may be the case that because of it, they're not compatible and they end up breaking up. And I realize that the possibility of it being a dealbreaker is inherently coercive... even though their partner is not standing there saying directly "if you don't have sex with me, I'll break up with you," that is the reality of it. So... it's tricky for me to say "you have the right to not consent to sex FOREVER" because I can't tell you "you have the right to not consent to sex FOREVER and the relationship will just keep on going the way you want it" because that is very much NOT TRUE.

Anyway, my point is, I don't like the way "The Great Sex Rescue" says that the partner who is experiencing painful sex is REQUIRED to get treatment for it. No, there's another option: Never have PIV sex. Yes, I know this is not ideal, because their partner is likely not a fan of the idea of never having PIV sex- but that should not be treated as *more important* than the pain and inconvenience of getting treatment for vaginismus. I'm not saying it's what you *should* do, but it should definitely at least be considered as an option.

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Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"

Related:

The Great Sex Rescue: Wives Are the Ones Being "Deprived"

He Just Loves Me (a post about Sex, Pregnancy, and My "Wifely Duty") 

How Pregnancy and Childbirth Changed My Asexuality (or, actually, A Post About Vaginismus)

Vaginismus Is Not A Problem, In And Of Itself

Blogaround

1. Our Most Emotional Video (March 29) A sudoku inspired by a Tracy Chapman song. Who knew that sudoku could teach us about the history of systemic racism? This is very well done. (1-hour-6-minute sudoku solve video)

2. The Problem With Vulgar Racism Is Not The Vulgarity (March 28) "One is a cartoon character who embodies the essence and ethos of white evangelicalism in America. The other one is Ned Flanders."

Also from the Slacktivist: Holy Saturday (March 30) "We can believe in Easter Sunday, but we can’t be sure. We can’t know for sure."

3. Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores (April 2, via) "Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts."

4. Google to delete search data of millions who used 'incognito' mode (April 1, via) "The suit revealed that Google saved the standard and incognito browsing history of users in the same profile."

5. Banality and bigotry (April 6) This is so bizarre. Richard Dawkins says, "I'm a cultural Christian." ????? What is going on?

He is Risen

 Happy Easter everyone!

 

What Does God Do When You Pray For An Anonymized Patient By Bed Number?

Hospital bed. Image source.

I read this article from Rebecca Watson, Study: Prayer Doesn’t Cure COVID. Jury Still Out on “Thoughts”. Those of you who have read my blog for a long time may know that I am SO FASCINATED by questions like: How would it even work, if God really did act in response to prayer? What kind of data would we expect to see, if that were true? What would be the most effective way to harness this phenomenon in order to benefit society? (Some of the posts I have written on this: Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk, I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches, On believing that "prayer works")

I very much do NOT believe that God acts in response to prayer- because if you actually spend any time thinking about the implications of it (or worse, if you're evangelical and you twist yourself in knots trying to make sure you're doing everything right so God will answer your prayers), it leads to a lot of very bad implications about God's nature.

I am a Christian though, so I'm coming at this from a different angle than Watson is; she is an atheist and is writing for an atheist audience, so she takes it as obvious that prayer doesn't cause "God" to do anything. For me, it wasn't obvious. I had to think through a lot of things. Most Christians do pray, and do believe "prayer works", but I don't.

Watson is discussing a study on "remote intercessory prayer" - researchers had participants pray for strangers in the hospital who had COVID.

The study was conducted in Brazil, with only 199 patients instead of 300, a few weeks’ duration instead of six months, the exact prayers weren’t specifically scripted out, and the protocols changed halfway through the study when data protection laws changed and the people who were praying could no longer know the initials of the people they were praying for, so they switched to bed numbers.

The result was still the same as every other halfway sane study on intercessory prayer: no difference between the control group and the people who were prayed for, in terms of death, ventilation, hospital time, or anything else. So what did we learn? Nothing. Nothing at all.

!!!! Oh man, that mention of patients' initials vs bed numbers is FASCINATING to me! Does God handle it differently depending on which way you anonymize the study? What if there are multiple patients with the same initials- would it be like, the researchers assign Prayer Volunteer 1 to pray for patient C. D., and there is another patient C. D. in the control group not getting prayed for (different person but same initials) and God uses Their omniscient knowledge of the researchers' methods to figure out which is which and make sure the prayers get allocated correctly? Or would the researchers need to add an additional indicator to pass along to the prayer volunteer, to pass along to God, to make sure God knew who they were talking about?

Or would God hear the prayer from Prayer Volunteer 1 and apply it to both patients with initials C. D.? Would the prayer then only be half as effective for each individual patient? What if there's another patient in the hospital also with initials C. D. but they aren't part of the study, does God allocate some of the prayer power (???) to them too?

Since the prayer volunteer doesn't know the patient personally anyway, how much does it matter who the specific patient is? Maybe God just averages their prayer out over all patients in a similar situation- which would be all patients in the study, including the control group- which would explain why the results found no difference between the control group and test group.

What if the researchers made a mistake, and got a patient's initials wrong? What if the researchers told a prayer volunteer to pray for patient C. B. but actually that's wrong and the patient's actual initials are C. D.? Would God be like "I have no idea who you're talking about" and just do nothing with that prayer? Would God check the researchers' notes and find out who the correct patient is? (What if the researchers told the prayer volunteer the correct initials, but the prayer volunteer is the one who made a mistake and prayed for the wrong initials- would God handle that differently than if it was the researchers' mistake? What if the prayer volunteer prays for the wrong initials on purpose???)

Do the researchers even need to tell the prayer volunteers any identifiers about the patients they are praying for? Surely the researchers can just write up a document on who is praying for whom, and then not show it to anybody, and the prayer volunteers can just pray "God please help whoever it is I'm assigned to pray for, I don't know who, but you know", that should work just the same as if they used initials or bed numbers, right? But what if there's a miscommunication between the researchers and actually 2 completely different versions of this document exist- which one does God use to look up whom your prayers are for?

Maybe they should do a study where they intentionally make 2 different versions of the who-is-praying-for-whom assignments, and the results from the study can be used to figure out which version God was working from!

All of this is, uh, ridiculous, and like I said, I don't believe prayer actually causes God to do anything. So I'm not asking these questions because I think there are actual answers- it's because I'm just so fascinated by imagining how this magical prayer system would even work. (Call it worldbuilding.)

But the biggest reason I don't believe "prayer works" is expressed very well in this bit of Watson's article:

Who will be convinced by this? No one. Every rational person on the planet who thinks about this issue for more than a few minutes already understands that if an omniscient, benevolent god exists, she’s not just watching a child die of leukemia because she’s waiting for you to ask her directly for her intervention.

YES! This! Exactly!

This should be obvious, right? It makes no sense that God, who is apparently all-loving and wants to heal people, refuses to intervene unless someone prays in a very specific, correct way. I say it should be obvious, but when I was evangelical, that's literally what I believed. I believed God was so powerful, God was so near, God could do anything, God could immediately heal any sickness or solve any problem, God could do it and it wouldn't be difficult at all- but *I* was the problem because I wasn't praying in the right way. Yes, when prayer doesn't "work", Christians have all sorts of reasons to explain why it's because you didn't pray correctly. Maybe you didn't have enough faith. Maybe you prayed for the wrong reasons. Maybe you have some sin in your life that you need to repent of, before God will listen to your prayers. Maybe you prayed for something that wasn't "in God's will."

It's ridiculous, the belief that God has all this incredible power, and They love people SO MUCH and They want to help SO MUCH, but They're being held back by these little technicalities. They're being held back because even though I tried as hard as I could to pray in the exact right way, with the right motives, trusting God, and so on, somehow I still got it slightly wrong, and therefore God just does nothing.

(Maybe Christians shouldn't say "prayer works" if what they actually mean is "prayer works if you do it in the exact correct way, which the vast majority of people aren't able to do, the vast majority of the time, so basically how it shakes out is that prayer overwhelmingly doesn't do anything at all.")

And, related to that, Watson lists these possible explanations that religious people might give, to explain why a study found no evidence that prayer made a difference:

My deity doesn’t like to be tested and so he purposely did nothing, because proving He exists makes faith pointless

My deity will only listen if the plea is made by someone who knows and loves the patient, not from a stranger hoping to prove something to scientists

Protestant?? PROTESTANT???? You’re lucky my Catholic god didn’t smite everyone in the treatment group. He’s like that, you know.

It’s part of god’s plan for the people in that treatment group to die.

What exact words were in the prayers? My deity needs certain magic words, like “in the name of the father,” “amen,” and also “please.”

Her wording here is kinda snarky, but these are actually very real... like, people will really legitimately give reasons just like these to explain why prayer didn't "work."

And this has me thinking about back when I believed that "prayer works," and I read articles about studies which found no difference in outcomes for people who were prayed for or not prayed for. How did I explain that to myself, back then?

Well, basically, I believed there were a whole lot of conditions that you needed to satisfy, in order for your prayers to "work." You had to be a Christian- and not just that, but a real Christian- because evangelicals totally believe that most people who "claim" to be Christian aren't "real" Christians. You had to pray with the right faith and the right motives. And, honestly, these criteria were impossible to fully define- honestly, I would have given anything to know what the exact criteria were, because I prayed desperately for SO MANY things, and I wanted so bad to know what I needed to do to get my prayers to "work." *I* don't even know how to get my prayers to work- the idea that researchers can simply set up an experimental group of people who are praying "correctly" was unbelievable to me.

So when I heard about studies that found that prayer made no difference, I imagined it went something like this: In the test group (the group of patients who are being prayed for by the prayer volunteers) most of the prayers are worthless because the prayer volunteers aren't the correct kind of Christian, or don't have the right motivations or trust in God when they are praying. And, on top of that, let's talk about the control group- the patients who are not being prayed for. How do we know they're not being prayed for? We just know that the participants in the study are not praying for them- but it's likely that other people are praying for them. Maybe their relatives, maybe some random overeager college student who's like "God, please help everyone who's in the hospital" and God takes that to mean all patients in all hospitals in the entire world. The amount of *noise* that's constantly occurring on communication channels between humans and God... It's likely that the amount of *effective* (however that's defined) prayer received by the control group is not meaningfully different from the amount of effective prayer received by the treatment group. And that's why the results of the study don't show a difference.

(Okay now I'm fascinated by that too- if that is the reason that studies on prayer don't find any difference, then how would one go about designing a study which would avoid those problems? Maybe the control group could only consist of patients who did not tell any of their family/friends they were sick? And maybe they have such an obscure problem that no random stranger in the world is going to accidentally say a prayer that includes them? [I guess it shouldn't be about praying for them to be healed from sickness, then- it should be something much more unusual than that.] Any more suggestions? Leave them in the comments section!)

For what it's worth, the explanation that says a study didn't find any difference because "you're not supposed to test God" never made any sense to me, even when I was evangelical. It assumes there's a very clear distinction between situations where we can collect data that we can analyze with statistics, and situations where we can't- and that God behaves differently in these 2 different types of situations- and I just could not believe that it was possible to really make such a distinction. Christians would say we "know" prayer works because we've experienced it (and I also believed that, back then) but apparently we can only "know" it in a vibes-based way, not from actual data. This makes no sense; if the phenomenon is real and we're really experiencing it all the time, then surely there must be plenty of cases where someone can easily come in after the fact and do some investigating and write down some concrete numbers which can then be analyzed. Even if it wasn't a formal study being done in real time, the data exists and there must be cases where somebody can do some investigative work and get that data.

Anyway. I just want to know how it would even work, if it's true that "God answers prayer." If you're praying for someone you don't even know personally, how does God handle that? (This happens when participating in research studies on prayer, but there are plenty of other situations where it happens too. Christians who have a relative who is sick, and they share this prayer request with as many other Christians as possible- so you end up with a lot of people praying for something even though they know very few actual details about the situation.) How does God determine the specific person that your prayers should be applied to? Or do They kind of average the prayers out over every person who generally fits the description you gave in your prayer? What if your prayer request is based on misinformation- does God make corrections to it Themself so They can interpret your prayer in a way that would make sense? What if you pray for something that's not even wrong? How does it work? I mean, I don't believe any of this, but these are the things I think about.

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The questions in this post are mainly about the little logistical details about prayer- it's hypothetically possible that there are answers to all of these questions, and God *does* have a system that's fair and logical for prayer. (Romans 8:26 comes to mind- we may not know how to pray for things that actually make sense, but God interprets our prayers in a way that makes sense.) My other posts on prayer, though, are more serious and ask much more uncomfortable questions about prayer, which don't go anywhere good no matter how you answer them...

Related:

Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk

I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches

On believing that "prayer works"

I'm SO HAPPY I Won't Be Praying During Childbirth 

An Invisible Virus and an Omniscient God 

Also I've linked to this study before, but here it is again, because the questions it asks in the "Discussion" section are THE BEST questions, like, these are the things we really need to know, if it's true that "prayer works": Prayer and healing: A medical and scientific perspective on randomized controlled trials

Blogaround

1. A branch of the flu family tree has died and won't be included in future US vaccines (March 7, via) "A type of flu virus that used to sicken people every year hasn't been spotted anywhere on Earth since March 2020. As such, experts have advised that the apparently extinct viruses be removed from next year's flu vaccines." Cool!

2. Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent (March 20, via) "Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week."

3. Therapist Reacts to THE LION KING (2023) "When adults tell us things when we're children, and we internalize those messages, and we have a hard time challenging them once we're adults." (28-minute video from Cinema Therapy)

4. What Biden Would Do if He Were Serious About Ending the War in Gaza (March 19, via) "This was about as weak of a position as could be imagined: The President had definitely thought about maybe doing something."

5. Is It Possible To Solve This? (March 22) 1-hour-2-minute sudoku solve video. I like this one because you have to spend a lot of time thinking through the overall nature of the puzzle first, before you can even begin to think about which digit can go in which cell.

6. Omelas, Je T'Aime (2022, via) "Confronted with the choice to give up your entire way of life or allow someone else to suffer, what do you do? Do you stay and enjoy the fruits of their pain? Or do you reject this devil’s compromise at your own expense, even knowing that it may not even help? And through implication, we are then forced to consider whether we are—at this very moment!—already in exactly this situation."

7. “What Can I Even Say Without Having to Go to Jail?” (February 22, via) "Across the country, domestic and sexual violence treatment and prevention programs are run by state-led, federally funded coalitions tasked with overseeing organizations in their state. These groups, in theory, should be grappling with how to incorporate information about state abortion bans into advocates’ daily work."

8. Apple Jing’an now open in Shanghai (March 21) Tim Cook came to Shanghai for the opening of Asia's biggest Apple store.

9. Trump is selling ‘God Bless the USA’ Bibles for $59.99 as he faces mounting legal bills (March 27) "Besides a King James Version translation, it includes copies of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as a handwritten chorus of the famous Greenwood song." Eww, gross, how will I explain this to my children? This reads like he's viewing the bible as a symbol of being a good American, instead of actually understanding anything about what the bible is. 

Tell me you've never read the bible without telling me.