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| A church with a rainbow flag and trans flag. Image source. |
Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"
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So, I've been doing this blog series about the book "The Great Sex Rescue," by Sheila Gregoire, Rebecca Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky. These writers also have a site called Bare Marriage, where they have a blog that updates several times per week (most of the posts are from Gregoire). As I've been writing my blog series on their book, I've also been following their blog, and commenting sometimes.
A lot of what they're saying on their blog is very good, and the church needs to hear it. They call out examples of sexism in the church, the ways that evangelical and complementarian teaching is harmful toward women, how the church covers up abuse, and so on. They're doing good work in that area.
But the thing that's glaringly obvious about their blog is the complete absence of queerness. Seriously, article after article after article about how purity culture is harmful, about how evangelical teachings on marriage and gender roles are harmful, and no mention of how these things are harmful toward queer people in uniquely bad ways? Yes, really, no mention at all. It's like the blog exists in a universe where everyone is cisgender and heterosexual.
(Or, rather, it's not true that there's *never* any mention of queerness. Sometimes, for example, they'll be discussing an academic study about marriage, and they'll say "these researchers surveyed heterosexual women"- which does imply that not all women are heterosexual, so, I guess that's something. And I also remember one post that said something like "all people desire sex, except some people who are asexual" so that was nice to have a mention there. So, very very occasionally there's a tiny mention of something that implies that maybe people might exist who are not heterosexual.)
It's just... reading their blog, it's just so obvious. So obvious that if you're talking about this topic, you should bring up the fact that these church teachings are especially harmful toward queer people. But they never do.
Even if they specifically want to focus on cisgender, heterosexual women because that's where they have the most experience and knowledge, that would be fine with me, if they said something like "in this post we're just focusing on how xyz affects heterosexual women, but it also affects queer women in different ways, but we don't have the expertise to talk about those aspects." Or, even better, "and here are a few links to some queer writers who have things to say on this topic." Yeah, if Gregoire and her co-bloggers don't know that much about the specific ways that purity culture is bad for queer people, that's fine, nobody is required to be an expert in everything- but what gets me is there's just no acknowledgement whatsoever that queer people exist in the church and are affected in uniquely bad ways by those same teachings.
I'm an ex-evangelical, and so this reads to me like Gregoire and her team are very deliberately not taking any kind of "stance" on the "issue" of queerness. They're not saying "marriage must be 1 man and 1 woman" and they're not saying "we fully accept and affirm same-sex relationships." They are not taking either "side", and I very much understand this, as a strategy. If they said anything one way or the other, it would become a huge controversy on social media, and everyone would either love them or hate them based on their "stance" on queer acceptance, rather than listening to their actual message about the ways that conservative Christian marriage teachings are harmful to women.
I get that. The final blow that made me quit being evangelical was The World Vision Debacle of 2014, where the evangelical sections of social media totally blew up upon discovering that World Vision, a Christian charity which helps poor children around the world, employs people who are in same-sex marriages. Seriously, it was such a huge internet drama, people were so mad, people were talking about dropping their child sponsorships that they had through World Vision- and then a few days later, World Vision put out a statement that changed their policy, requiring all employees to live in accordance with "marriage is 1 man and 1 woman." World Vision threw queer people under the bus, because evangelicals just couldn't possibly be convinced to help poor children, if a gay person might also be helping those poor children.
And I've seen the same thing happen with Eugene Peterson- he made a statement in support of same-sex marriage and then it was such a huge controversy that he reversed it a few days later. Jen Hatmaker- she made a statement supporting same-sex marriage, and Lifeway immediately stopped selling her books. (To her credit, she did NOT change her position because of this backlash.) InterVarsity Christian Fellowship threw queer people under the bus in 2016. More recently, we saw what Christianity Today had to say about pastor Andy Stanley saying that straight Christians can learn from gay married Christians- even though Andy Stanley still believes marriage is "1 man and 1 woman", his partial acceptance of gay married Christians is just TOO MUCH for Christianity Today (I wrote about that here).
You need to throw queer people under the bus, in order to be seen as a good evangelical. That's just a fact. That's just an undeniable fact. This is how it works.
So I read Gregoire's blog, and it's so glaringly obvious that she should be talking about queer people but she's not, and it reads to me as a very deliberate choice, because she wants to avoid that controversy and instead focus on her specific message, which is about how evangelical teachings are bad for heterosexual women.
I get that. As a queer person, I don't like it- if evangelicals hate queer people so much, why should we play by their rules?- but I understand it as a strategy.
Anyway. So, on October 23, Gregoire published a post called Sex is Important in Marriage, which says things like "Sex is a vital part of a healthy marriage." I'm mad because this post is extremely hostile toward asexuals. What if you have a marriage where both spouses are asexual, and they never have sex- that would be fine if that's what they want. And even in my marriage, I'm asexual but I do have sex, but I don't really view it as a super-important component of a healthy marriage. I view it like, we both decided we wanted this, so, in our marriage, this is a good thing. But it totally makes sense to me that some people would choose differently.
(And she did get pushback in the comment section, not just from me, but also from people saying things like "my husband and I have a good marriage and we have sex less than once a week, and it's fine, why are you saying we have to put pressure on ourselves to do it more often?" Because there was also a section of the post that said statistically, the happiest marriages have sex once per week- and implied that if you're having sex less than that, you should try to increase your frequency to once a week. The post didn't exactly say that directly [and it's a really bad misreading of the statistics] but it said people need to make sex a higher priority.)
I read that post right around the time I was working on my blog post about chapter 8 of "The Great Sex Rescue"- the chapter where it's not okay to be asexual. (I write these posts several weeks in advance.) And... I don't know why, but it really affected me emotionally. Like, why do I bother reading her blog, reading her book, writing a blog series on it... Why am I even engaging with this, when it's so incredibly hostile to queer people? Why did I fool myself into thinking I could engage with Christians who don't accept queer people, without getting burned?
Here's the thing: I agree with a lot of what Gregoire says, about the way the church treats women, etc- but I'm coming at it from a different angle than she is. I'm coming from a queer perspective here, and this is how I define that: "queer" means you are the only one who can know yourself. Your own identity, your own feelings, your own desires, your own priorities- nobody else can waltz into your life and tell you "you feel this and that"- no, that's absolutely ridiculous. And the process of discovering your own identity and what you want, and then building that kind of life for yourself, that is a beautiful thing. As a queer Christian, I also believe that this is what the image of God is about- there is so much diversity among human beings, and God Themself is complex and diverse and reflected in every little unique trait of every one of billions of people, and that's beautiful. Why would you want to make rules to say "everyone has to be this way, everyone has to have these feelings, everyone has to believe that sex is an important part of marriage" etc- why would you want to limit the image of God like that? And just as God is the Creator, and delights in Their creation, we create our own lives the way we want them to be, and the happiness we get from that is a beautiful and godly thing.
(And this is why I believe that even for people who aren't queer, it can be really beneficial to learn from queer people. Being straight because you've thought about it and you know what you want is so much more wonderful and life-giving than being straight because everyone told you "you're straight and here's how straight people are supposed to live," and you just went along with it.)
But when I read "The Great Sex Rescue," and when I read Gregoire's blog, the perspective that she is coming from is more like this: The church teaches these things about what marriage is supposed to be, and what sex is supposed to be, claiming "this is what God says, this is what the bible says" but actually these teachings put men at the top, and harm women, and that's not how God wants it to be. Actually, what the bible actually says is, here's what marriage is supposed to be, and here's what sex is supposed to be, it's supposed to be something which is equally good both for cisgender heterosexual monogamous men and cisgender heterosexual monogamous women.
It still feels so narrow to me. Like, instead of these rules, it's supposed to be these other rules! Instead of "sex is just PIV [penis-in-vagina]" it's "do foreplay first, so the woman can have an orgasm, and then do PIV." It's so narrow. It's not about knowing yourself and knowing what you want.
(I should clarify that there are *some* areas where Gregoire says you should make decisions based on knowing yourself- like how you divide up housework between the husband and wife. She says it shouldn't be based on rules about gender roles, it should be based on what's fair and what works for your marriage. Yes, this is absolutely right.)
So anyway, reading her blog post about why sex always has to be important in everyone's marriage, it really made it clear that she's coming at it from a perspective of "it's not these rules, it's these other rules" rather than "it's not these rules, it's figuring out for yourself what you want." And I guess that's why it affected me so much emotionally- I can see that so many of the things she writes about are important and it's good that she's talking about them, and so I fool myself into thinking her reasons for believing those things are similar to mine, but they're not, they're really not. And... well, like I said, being evangelical means you have to throw queer people under the bus. Don't lose sight of that.
I've mentioned several times throughout my blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue" that I understand that my advice of "figure out what you want and then advocate for yourself" is just not workable for a lot of people coming from an evangelical background (especially women). We were taught that everything we do has to be centered around Jesus, everything we do has to be about serving God, that if we want something just because we want it, that's bad and sinful and selfish. To put it bluntly, growing up evangelical, you're not allowed to have desires. You're not allowed to want things- that's "selfish." And so I understand that "it's not these rules, it's these other rules" can be a lifesaver, a crucial first step away from that anti-self ideology. Because if you're been taught your entire life that it's wrong to want things, then it's just not possible to get any benefit from the advice "it's not these rules, it's figuring out for yourself what you want." At that point, you don't even know how to know what you want. At that point, it's unimaginable to stand up for yourself and say "this is what I want, and my feelings matter"- no, you only know how to make the argument "this is what God wants me to do."
And in my own journey toward accepting queer people, I also had to go through an "it's not these rules, it's these other rules" phase. All my life I had heard "the bible is clear, same-sex relationships are sinful" but then I read some articles from gay Christians, saying "okay let's do a bunch of research on this specific Greek word, let's spend a lot of time discussing how best to translate it, let's learn about how homosexual relationships worked in ancient Roman culture, and if you do all that, then you can make an argument that actually the bible wasn't saying that same-sex relationships are sinful." Very painstakingly going through the process of clarifying what exactly "the rules" are, according to the bible- rather than celebrating the image of God as we see it in a same-sex couple.
So yes, I understand "it's not these rules, it's these other rules" may be a necessary first step for a lot of people coming from that background. I can't fault them for being in that place right now. But I hope that people are able to move on from that. It's very "Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!" There's a whole big queer world out here, come and enjoy it.
And for myself, I'm thinking about when Jesus said to "shake the dust off your feet." Don't keep waiting around for non-queer Christians to change their minds and accept queer people.
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Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"
Related:
It Doesn’t Actually Matter What Jesus Said About Divorce
Go ahead and say I'm not a Christian. I don't care anymore.
Katy Perry's God-Given Freedom
So I Watched Josh Harris's Documentary
So I've Discovered That (For Me) Church Culture Causes Depression
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