The Kingdom of Children: Communion and Baptism

Communion cracker and small cup of juice. Image source.

I've been reading R. L. Stollar's book, "The Kingdom of Children." Here's a part of the book that talks about including children in communion. From pages 167-168:

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. That "Pending PayPal Charge" Email Is a Scam — Even Though It Really Came From PayPal (April 28, via) "Don't call the number. Don't reply."

2. The hard problem of AI therapy (February 26, via) "Suppose you’re a high-functioning person with anxiety who discovers that the chatbot can always soothe you on the spot. You ask one question—Do you think I handled that email wrong?—and feel relief. Ten minutes later: But what if she’s actually mad? Then: Can you rewrite my follow-up? Then: List ten reasons I’m not a bad person for sending it."

3. How China’s Deaf Delivery Riders Find a New Life in Gig Work (April 20) "By contrast, most deaf interviewees described becoming delivery riders as turning a new page, one of less discrimination and greater autonomy. Delivery platforms offer features that make interacting with restaurants and customers easier, such as voice-to-text conversion, pre-written messages, and digital badges that will alert users that the rider is deaf."

Also from Sixth Tone: Nine Months After Cloning Its First Yak, China Has 10 More (April 30) "To date, the team has generated over 200 cloned Tibetan yak embryos. By the end of 2028, they aim to build a core herd of over 100 cloned yaks, develop a new high-altitude yak breed, and establish standard breeding protocols."

4. 1 Corinthians 13 in the news (April 27) "Read the Beatitudes from Luke’s Gospel you cowards!"

Also from the Slacktivist: The literary puzzle of Isaiah 1 (April 29) "The current form of our Bibles tricks us into reading Isaiah 1 and Amos 5 as critiques of the religious observance prescribed in the Books of Moses, but actually what we have is the Books of Moses configuring their religious commandments, in part, as a response to and a defense against those critiques in Isaiah and Amos."

5. Soniferous Aether (April 27) From xkcd.

6. Women Have Agency: You Don’t Have to Obey Churches or Husbands Who Want to Control You (April 29) Posting this here because it's important to get the word out about this: If you are a woman who has decided to divorce your abusive husband, and now your church leaders are requiring you to come to a meeting so they can decide if you're allowed to do that, you can just not go. !!! Yes, really! You can just not go! Say no! They can't do anything to you! Even if you signed a "church covenant"- those things are not legally binding. It will not hold up in court. You can say no!

A lot of us spend our whole lives with the mindset "I need to be a good girl" which means when some authority figure says "you have to" do something, then you have to do it. We might not even realize there's another option: NOT doing it.

I'm so glad I learned about boundaries- I really had no idea about any of this before I learned about boundaries.

7. This week in "what Chinese songs is my toddler listening to": 蹦蹦跳跳 沒煩惱 李昕融 舞蹈完整版 簡單舞蹈 律動 廣場舞 洗腦歌 幼兒律動 幼兒舞蹈 兒童舞蹈 兒童律動 抖音舞蹈 動態歌詞 TIKTOK KidsDance【#波波星球泡泡哥哥bobopopo】

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Trump’s cruel plan for Afghan refugees, briefly explained (April 23, via) "Many of the 1,100 Afghans now stuck in limbo in Qatar aided the US over nearly two decades of war as interpreters working with US troops or served as members of the Afghan special forces. Some, the Times reports, are family members of American soldiers, and more than 400 are children."

2. Texas Tech Issues Ban On Students Writing On LGBTQ+ Topics (April 24) "The implications are profound—and at times border on absurd. In core and lower-level courses, there are no exceptions at all. A history professor course could not allocate instructional time to the Stonewall riots or the gay rights movement. If a U.S. history textbook includes a chapter on the AIDS crisis, the professor must skip it."

3. White House posted photo of Trump, King Charles III with 'TWO KINGS' caption (April 29)

4. James Comey posted a picture of seashells by the seashore. Trump's DOJ indicted him for it. (April 29) "The most embarrassing 24 hours (yet) of the Justice Department in President Donald Trump’s second administration continued apace on Tuesday, when Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced another indictment of James Comey, the former FBI director. This time, Comey — targeted by President Donald Trump as a political enemy — was indicted in North Carolina in connection with his since-deleted Instagram post showing a photo of seashells laid out in the shape of the numbers '8647.'"

Also from Law Dork: SCOTUS guts what remained of the Voting Rights Act before taking on TPS termination case (April 30) "The decision in Louisiana v. Callais upended the pivotal civil rights era voting law that Congress initially passed in 1965 and reauthorized several times since, leaving the section at issue “all but a dead letter,” as Justice Elena Kagan said with a somber voice, nearly stone faced, as she announced the dissent from the bench."

I don't really understand this Voting Rights Act case- all the articles I've read say it's so terrible that the Supreme Court has ruled this way, because it allows states to draw districts in a way that racial minority voters are always grouped together with a population of white voters which outnumbers them, and therefore the racial minority voters don't have any meaningful representation. This is confusing to me- it seems to rely on the assumptions that all people of color vote the same way, all white people vote the same way, and white people wouldn't vote for a candidate who would take minorities' needs seriously. Probably this is me being naive about how racism works, and missing some key facts about the history of racist voter suppression. If anyone has an article that explains this, post it in the comment section~

5. U.S. to issue commemorative passports with Trump's picture for America's 250th birthday (April 29) Fortunately it's only the Washington DC office that's doing this, and if you apply for a passport at any other location, you will just get a regular one without the mark of the beast.

6. The Trump team is quietly eliminating U.S. support for birth control abroad (April 29) This makes me so mad. Having penis-in-vagina sex is really common, and for women who are doing that, they *need* to have some kind of birth control, otherwise their lives will be completely dominated by the huge burdens of pregnancy and caring for babies. Those MAGAs claim they are "helping women" by being mean to trans people, while ending the programs that *actually* help women.

Excluding People In Case God Wants Us To

At the moment of Jesus' death, "the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom." (Matthew 27:51) Image source. 

In some churches, women aren't allowed to volunteer as ushers, or to serve communion, or to read Scripture to the congregation. Because, the bible says women should not speak in church, and a woman must not have authority over a man.

There are also churches that believe men and women are fully equal, and women can have all the same leadership positions that men can. They interpret those bible verses as only applicable to the first-century churches they were written to, and not absolute rules for all time.

Suppose you don't know which side of this debate to believe. It certainly seems sexist and wrong to put restrictions on women, but at the same time, it's right there in the bible, so maybe God really does want us to do it?

Maybe it would be wise to err on the side of caution, and not allow women to do things. It's difficult- it's difficult to obey God in this way- everyone will call you a sexist, and also if you exclude all the women volunteers, maybe you don't even have enough men volunteers to run your church service. One could argue that obedience to God is in fact supposed to be difficult like this. It's so hard, it's a sacrifice, look how we are sacrificing so much for God. Much more righteous than taking the easy way out and just letting women have all the same roles that men can have, right?

The problem with this framework is, it has God above us, and we are down here trying to please him, trying to follow the rules correctly, for him. God has high standards, and we have to work really hard, exclude people just in case God wants them excluded, the narrower the better, no sacrifice is too great if we are doing it for God.

But God is not up there, waiting for us to present our carefully-screened representatives to perform worship in our best attempt to follow Their rules. God is here. God is in us. All humans bear the image of God. If your church excludes women from volunteer/leadership roles, you are excluding God.

If you restrict women, you're not "erring on the side of caution." You're cutting off part of the body of Christ. You're cutting off God.

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Gay Christians face a similar debate. The traditional interpretation of the bible says only hetero relationships are allowed, and sex is only for one-man-one-woman marriage. On the other side, you have gay Christians making the argument that those bible verses were written for the people in the ancient Near East, and they don't apply to us now.

But if you're not sure who to believe, what do you do? Maybe don't ever date a same-sex partner, just in case it's a sin. Maybe a church should not do same-sex weddings, or have queer people in leadership. High standards, for God.

But again, you're cutting off God. God is in queer people, queer joy, the way that we thrive when we're able to accept ourselves for who we are. Don't ask people to repress themselves for God- you're repressing God. All the diversity and beauty of the image of God, living in so many different people with so many different experiences and perspectives, and we're trying to cut it down, fit it in a box, make it fit the straight and narrow "rules."

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Another example is that time in college that we brought a friend to church, and he said he was a Christian, but we "knew" he wasn't a "real" Christian. I wrote about this in my post The Worst Bible Story:

On another occasion, a friend of mine, let’s call him Hector, brought another friend, let’s call him Carl, to church. Carl claimed to be a Christian, but he hadn’t been attending church or anything, and Hector and I knew that he didn’t have a real “relationship with God”, you know, because evangelical Christians are all about judging who is and who isn’t a “real Christian.”

So Carl came to church. And that week, we had communion, and Hector stopped him and explained, you know, honestly, you’re not a real Christian, so you shouldn’t take communion. And Carl was really hurt by it (can you imagine), but I admired Hector for taking a stand like that. Defending the wafers and grape juice from those who don’t have the “correct” view on Jesus.

I would never have done what Hector did, because I was not confident enough in my understanding of 1 Corinthians 11 and I had never seen anyone stopped from taking communion before. ...

I would never have done that, but I really admired Hector for the way he stepped out in faith and took a stand for God, even though other people didn't accept it.

Excluding Christians from communion because we think they're not "really" Christians. Because we believed God was above us, judging whether we stayed in the lines or not, and God was offended by anyone who came forward and ate a little wafer but didn't meet the standards of how to believe in Jesus the "correct" way.

We thought that if someone felt hurt by being blocked from taking communion, well, that was a small price to pay to keep up the highest standards of respect for God. Making sure that only people who were definitely the right kind of Christian were allowed to participate.

We were actually excluding God.

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Matthew 1 contains [one version of] Jesus' genealogy. It traces his ancestry from father to son, through Abraham, down through David and the kings of ancient Judah, down to Joseph, the husband of Mary. I've often heard Christians point out how interesting it is that this genealogy mentions some women. I mean, it's a typical patriarchal genealogy in that it's all about "so-and-so was the father of so-and-so," but at a few points in the list of fathers and sons, it also mentions who someone's mother was.

Specifically, the women included in the Matthew 1 genealogy are: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary.

Tamar, whose first husband Er was wicked, so the Lord put him to death. Then she was required to marry his brother, Onan, who was also wicked and the Lord put him to death. Then she was supposed to marry the remaining brother, but her father-in-law Judah didn't let her, so she disguised herself as a prostitute to get Judah to have sex with her, and she became pregnant that way. 

Rahab, a prostitute and foreigner, a resident of Jericho, whose city was attacked and the people killed by Joshua and his army.

Ruth, a widow and foreigner from Moab, which was one of Israel's enemies.

Bathsheba, who was raped by King David. She became pregnant, so David murdered her husband Uriah, and married her.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, who was a virgin but probably had people judging her for being unmarried and pregnant.

This is not exactly the dream team that you would assemble if you wanted good, respectable, uncomplicated role models. So why did Matthew go out of his way to point out that these women were part of Jesus' family line? 

One way I've heard this explained is, this is great because it shows that even if we're not perfect, we can still be part of God's work. God can still use us to do amazing things, despite our flaws.

I want to spin it a little bit differently, though: God lives in the women that society rejects. The widows, the immigrants, the sex workers, the women in bad marriages, the rape victims. To exclude them, to say Jesus needs a perfect pure genealogy... you're excluding God.

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Christian missionaries go to different parts of the world, encounter diverse and interesting cultures, where God is already there and alive, and tell the people to stop doing all that and follow the missionaries' religion instead.

God was already there, before any Christians came. The people have the image of God, and they have their own culture and religion, which is important and meaningful to them. The missionaries tell them to cut it off, to repress it, that it's *bad* because it's worshipping the wrong gods- you're cutting off God.

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Deuteronomy 23:1 says, "No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord."

Hundreds of years later, an Ethiopian eunuch met Philip, one of the early Christians. Philip told him about Jesus, and he believed, and said, "Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?" Is this legit? Can he be baptized? Can he be welcomed and included?

Philip didn't think it was an issue at all. Philip baptized him.

Throughout the bible, there are some passages about excluding people who have some kind of imperfection and therefore don't meet the standards and can't enter God's presence. And then there are other passages about God's radical inclusiveness, about marginalized people who were accepted and approved of by God. Slaves, people from the wrong nations, people from the wrong religions. 

I don't think this is a simple Old Testament/ New Testament split- it's common for Christians to claim that the Old Testament was about rules and the New Testament is about God's love- but the verse that says women can't speak in church is from the New Testament. And the Old Testament has stories about welcoming immigrants, which stand in contrast to its laws about killing everyone in every city you conquer. 

The bible has all of these threads running through it; we use our own beliefs about the nature of God to decide which bible passages to emphasize and which to disagree with.

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1 Corinthians 12 says that we are the body of Christ.

Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.

Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

This passage is about diversity. About how we need diversity, or else we are actually excluding parts of Christ.

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The Christians who want to exclude people... well, God is in them too. We can't cut them off either. 

In practice, that means thinking about how to get people who disagree to coexist in a church. You can't just say we all accept each other even if we disagree, because these issues are about one group's basic rights on one side, vs another group's bigoted opinions on the other side. 

So you need to make sure you set up a system where people who want to exclude and restrict others are not given the power to do that. And okay that sounds complicated- but really, you have to do that anyway. All the groups of people I've mentioned in this post, as examples of people who bear the image of God and shouldn't be excluded- well, they are all imperfect people who have conflicts sometimes. We all are.

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Is God above us, waiting to see if we are good enough to meet Their standards, requiring us to restrict and ban people who aren't good enough to participate in worshipping Them? More restrictions, higher standards, the eye saying to the hand, "I don't need you."

No, God is with us, in us, and when we exclude people, we are excluding God.

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Related:

What kind of God will judge how we treat immigrants?

Don't Protect God

"The Only Moral Virgin Birth Is My Virgin Birth"

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

Cartoon by Naked Pastor (David Hayward) which shows 3 women and a large group of men. The men say, "So ladies, thanks for being the first to witness and report the Resurrection. And we'll take it from here." Image source.

I read this post, Life under Patriarchy: Death by a Thousand Cuts, which has a bunch of anecdotes about what it's like to be a woman in a conservative/complementarian church. This one in particular stuck out to me:

When I was alone as a woman in a meeting with the all-male eldership of my church, I explained how difficult it was as a woman to discern how to have both a gentle and quiet spirit and also have a voice in the church. One of the male elders, the NT greek “expert”, interrupted me to soften the meaning of 1 Timothy 2:12. I was referencing 1 Peter 3:4. His interruption (mansplaining) and my confusion about his confusion began the whole meeting badly. Afterwards, as I contemplated his mistake, I realized he had no idea of the burden women carry from these verses. No woman who takes her bible seriously in the conservative church world would confuse these two passages with one another. I’ve been processing the realization that men in the church don’t sit with the call to a “gentle and quiet spirit” the way women do ever since that terrible meeting when I tried to use my voice in a room full of aggressive men.

This struck me because it shows how Christian women who believe in complementarianism have to struggle with it because it just makes no sense. And Christian men who believe in complementarianism aren't experiencing that struggle. Maybe they aren't even aware of it at all! 

This has inspired me to write a few of my own anecdotes, here in this post. (Important background information: I'm a woman.) But first, let me define "complementarianism": So, "complementarian" Christians believe that God created men and women to be equal in worth, but to have different roles. In marriage, the wife has to submit to the husband, and the husband has to love the wife as Christ loves the church. Also, women are restricted in what leadership roles they can have in the church. This plays out differently in different churches, but basically, the senior pastor of the church has to be a man. Maybe a woman can be an "associate pastor" or a "children's director" or "women's pastor" or some other jargon. And in some churches, women can't teach adult men- they can only teach women or children. The details of this differ- is a woman allowed to read a bible passage out loud in front of the church? Does that count as "teaching"? Is a woman allowed to sing in front of the church? Sometimes when a woman talks from the pulpit, these churches have to call it "sharing" instead of "teaching." And some churches don't allow women to speak in front of the church at all.

(Trying to understand how this is "equal in worth" is always left as an exercise to the reader.)

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When I was growing up, I believed in complementarian because I was taught that's what all Christians have to believe. That's what the bible said, supposedly. I was told that there were some Christians who didn't believe in complementarianism, but that's because they were rejecting the bible, they are bad Christians, they've been influenced by the evils of feminism, they think they know better than God, who made this perfect plan about gender.

So yes, I believed in complementarianism because I didn't know there were other options.

But, the thing is, complementarianism simply makes no sense. Why wouldn't a woman be allowed to do everything a man can do in the church? That sounds sexist and wrong. And what does it mean that a wife has to "submit" to her husband? So like, the husband can control her and tell her what to do? What? That sounds so wrong. Or, when they can't agree on something, the tiebreaker is gender? What? What on earth, that makes no sense.

So, the issue is, I believed I was required to believe in this. But, it makes no sense. So I needed to convince myself that it made sense.

And really, that's what all of Christian apologetics is. That's the problem with apologetics. It's not about following logic and changing your beliefs accordingly, as you search for the truth. It's about "I know I am supposed to believe this, please help me force myself to believe it." 

And yes, there are loads of ways that Christians try to argue that complementarianism isn't as sexist and wrong as it sounds. The wife has to submit to the husband, but they husband has to love the wife, even to the point of laying down his life for her, so actually the husband has the more difficult role. And, it's a lot of responsibility for the husband, to be the leader and have to make the decisions for the family, so the wife should be glad she doesn't have to worry her pretty little head about any of that. Also, she knows he loves her, and she trusts that he will make decisions that are best for their family, because he's such a great guy, so actually it's easy for her to submit to him.

And, they said, this doesn't apply to abusive situations. Some people hate these "wives submit to your husbands" passages because they've been used to justify abuse- but that's wrong! The husband should NOT abuse the wife! And if he is, she has the right to get away from him.

And, they said, normally the husband and wife should discuss things as equals, and agree on their decision together! It's only when they really really can't agree, that's the only time that "submit to your husband" comes into play. If they really really really can't agree, then the husband can make the final decision. But that would happen very rarely- in some people's marriages it never even happens at all!!!

Yeah, I don't buy any of this.

I used to. Because I believed this is what Christians had to believe.

But really, all it adds up to is, trying to make "wives submit to your husbands" mean something different than "wives submit to your husbands." Like... Don't worry! It's not what it sounds like!

How about instead, we just reject the entire thing, rather than concocting these elaborate rationalizations where we basically treat women and men as equals while claiming we totally believe that the women are "submitting" to the men?

Sheila Wray Gregoire has pointed out, the majority of Christians who say they believe in complementarianism don't actually practice it. In their actual, practical, day-to-day lives, they DON'T have situations where the husband and wife simply can't agree, so the husband pulls rank. In actual reality, they live like they are equals. 

They claim they are complementarian, but in practice they are egalitarian. Egalitarian is the alternative, the ideology which I was told Christians are not allowed to believe in. Egalitarian means equality between men and woman, and you don't make rules to restrict people based on their gender. (Please note, though, that many egalitarians don't support queer rights unfortunately. It's equality between straight cis men and straight cis women, and doesn't necessarily go any farther than that.)

And it's a good thing that most complementarians don't actually put it into practice. When people actually live that way, it is sexist, and harmful to women, and abusive.

So how about we just reject the whole thing, instead of pretending we're following it?

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One time, at church, when I was in high school, I heard someone mention an organization called CBE- Christians for Biblical Equality. This is an egalitarian organization, whose mission is to promote the idea that women shouldn't be restricted from being leaders in the church, etc. Equality.

I was very surprised to hear about this, and my reaction was "... is that... legit?" And somebody at church told me, yes.

I couldn't make sense of it at the time. I guess I thought, surely if that's a legitimate interpretation of the bible, then of course that's what we should all believe. If Christians are truly allowed to be egalitarian, then why on earth would anybody be complementarian? Complementarianism just makes no sense at all, just so clearly makes no sense at all. Surely we believe in complementarianism because there aren't any other options, right? If this CBE stuff really is an option, well... of course I would believe it. Of course all of us would immediately believe it. ...Right?

I guess at the time, I knew very little about it, and didn't really believe it was legit. Because, surely if it was legit, if Christians were allowed to believe in it, well then how do you explain all the complementarian pastors I had met?

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I used to have such faith that this was right, that when the bible said wives must submit to their husbands, or that women are more easily deceived, or women can't speak in church, I believed somehow it was right and good. I didn't understand how it was right, because obviously it sounds so wrong, but I had complete faith that if we just understood the bible correctly, and followed it, there would be no problems.

I remember one time, when I was in college, and I was with a group of friends driving home from a Christian conference. And we were discussing the bible passages that restrict women. I think there were a few boys and a few girls in this discussion. And, the way we were talking about it was very direct and blunt and not necessarily the sorts of things we would say in front of other people, because they would take it the wrong way because it sounded sexist.

And one of my friends, let's call him Edward, said, "I'm glad I can talk about this with you all, because I know that you're not going to think the bible is sexist. We know the apostle Paul wasn't sexist, and we are just trying to understand how."

Wow, I had so much faith.

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The big change for me came when I found Rachel Held Evans's blog. That was where I first learned that Christians don't have to believe in complementarianism. Like I said, I had heard there are Christians who don't believe in complementarianism, but they are bad Christians, they are obviously wrong. Well, I read Rachel's blog, and she wasn't a bad Christian. She was the same as me. She was a bible nerd. She was asking all the questions I had always wanted to ask but couldn't put into words.

That's where I learned that we can just reject the whole thing. We don't have to tie ourselves in knots trying to explain how we believe wives have to submit to their husbands, but not like, in a sexist way. Rachel wrote about academic research about ancient Roman society, and how there were reasons that the writers of the bible wrote things that way, in that culture. But in our culture, it's completely different, so we don't have to believe in complementarianism.

Before, I thought I had to believe that there was at least something to it. When the bible says women shouldn't speak in church, in some sense that is true and right, it's just a matter of understanding how. Well, no. We don't have to believe there's anything to it. We can reject it entirely. It's an interesting historical exercise, to research the reasons why the biblical writers wrote that, and what it meant in their culture, but for our own situation now, it means nothing.

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And that's also when I started reading ex-evangelical blogs, and there were so many stories about how complementarianism and patriarchy lead to abuse. Before, I had heard that there were some bad Christians who used this ideology to justify abuse, but I thought it happens very rarely, and those bad Christians are obviously wrong, so no need to really think about that too much. Well. No. In patriarchal churches, women are constantly mistreated. From small ways like assuming the women will do all the cooking and childcare for church events, to big ways like making a rape victim stand up in front of the church and "confess" her "sin."

Before, I had faith that good Christian leaders- whether they were men or women- were just trying to follow the bible to the best of their ability. I never thought about leaders who are protecting their own power. I never thought about who benefits from this ideology. I never thought about how the debate is different depending on whether you have skin in the game. I trusted that we all just wanted to obey what the bible said, even if it's hard.

Well. Not anymore.

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I remember there were a few times, back when I was "on fire for God", when I prayed alone in my room, and I covered my head with a towel. Because the bible says women need to cover their heads when they pray. And I had never given it a thought before- I had never met any Christians who actually took that seriously. I think maybe 1 time in my life, I've heard of or met a Christian woman who wears a head covering to church because of those verses, but she said it was just her personal belief and she wasn't trying to tell other women what to do. (Some really conservative churches do require it, though, I have heard.) I was taught it was just a cultural thing and didn't apply to us in modern times.

But, sometimes, when I prayed, I was so desperate, trying to figure out how to get God to do what I wanted him to do. (The God I believed in back then was a he/him.) Like, I wanted my friends to "get saved" (ie, to convert to Christianity), and I wanted it SO MUCH, I was SO WORRIED about how terrible their lives must be without Jesus, I just wanted God to get them to change their beliefs, and I prayed so hard, why wasn't it working? Was there some cheat code I needed to figure out, in order to get my prayers to actually work? The bible says women need to cover their heads when they pray, maybe I should try that. Maybe that's what will get God to finally do it. Sounds ridiculous and sexist, but, worth a shot.

I never told any other Christians about this, because how would I even begin to explain it? The idea that we should actually believe that women are required to cover their heads when they pray- it just sounds absurd. All of my Christian friends would surely think it was absurd and sexist, right? But there it is, in the bible.

(And, if you're wondering, no, my friends still didn't "get saved" after that.)

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In church, there was a discussion about "wives submit to your husbands," and I started asking for examples.

Because, when I said I just totally don't believe in "wives submit to your husbands," tons of women jumped up with the familiar talking points- "I know my husband loves me, and I trust him, so it's easy to submit to a man like that", etc. Yeah, I've heard it all before. I started asking for examples.

Examples. Asking these women, have there been any situations in your marriage, where you and your husband weren't able to agree, so in the end he just made the decision and you had to submit to him?

I only remember getting an actual answer from 1 woman. I think it was something about, they couldn't agree on what school to send their kid to, and in the end she just went with what her husband wanted. And, when she told me about it, I felt bad for asking. Because it seemed really emotional for her, really difficult for her to talk about. That was probably a bad time in her marriage, they probably argued about it, and there were strong emotions on both sides, and eventually she just reasoned that God wanted her to give up and let her husband do what he wanted, so she forced herself to submit.

That's what we're actually talking about here, when Christians say the husband has the "tiebreaker" vote. We're talking about something that was actually important to her, important enough to fight, to make a case, lay out the reasons to support her point of view, and in the end her god made her just give all that up, like it didn't matter. Because she's a woman and her husband is a man.

F all of that.

---

I posted a link on social media, and I described it as a blog post about "the equality of women in the church."

And one of my friends, let's call him Marvin, replied and said, "Women aren't equal! Some are short, some are tall, [and so on, a bunch of different adjectives describing different subgroups of women]"

And I thought, what on earth? Why is he pretending he doesn't understand what I'm talking about? He's acting like he thinks I said "all women are exactly the same" when actually what I meant was "equality between men and woman."

This anecdote is the first thing that came to mind, when I read that blog post I linked to at the top. Oh my goodness, what if he actually didn't understand what I meant? I thought he was acting clueless on purpose, but what if he wasn't? What if he hadn't spent a lifetime trying to make it make sense, when the bible says women can't do all the things men can do? What if he never really thought about it? What if he had no sense of the amazing freedom I experienced, when I found out I really can be a Christian and not be complementarian- that I can just believe men and women are equal, and not do this whole dance about how the bible says this or that?

Men have no idea.

---

But maybe I shouldn't judge the Christian men for having no idea, because I have committed a similar sin.

I'm straight, and back then, when I read the anti-gay passages in the bible, I just nodded along like there was no problem. If a man lies with a man, it is an abomination. Homosexuals will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. Same-sex relationships are unnatural, sinful, shameful, driven by lust. And I just nodded along, like, ah yes, disgusting.

Years later, I started reading blogs written by gay Christians. They wrote about how hard they struggled, trying to be good enough to be accepted by God, trying to repress themselves, reading the anti-gay passages of the bible and trying to make it make sense. They wrote about how much time they spent, tracking down ancient Greek words, trying to figure out what exactly these passages meant.

And of course, when I first started reading these blogs, I didn't agree with them if their conclusion was accepting themselves as gay. I cared about their struggles, but I couldn't believe that it was okay to accept yourself and go ahead and date people of the same gender. I thought Christians weren't allowed to believe that- only bad Christians who rejected the bible would say that same-sex relationships were okay. Rejecting God's perfect plan for gender, as if you know better than God.

But the more I read, the more I saw that they weren't bad Christians. They were bible nerds like me. They were trying their best to follow God.

And I changed my position, and now I support all queer rights. My God is genderqueer, They/Them. (And I'm asexual.)

It's funny, when someone on the internet talks about being queer and Christian, and then some rando posts a bible verse in reply, as if the queer Christian has never heard of Romans 1. Bro, queer Christians know those passages so much better than you do. Queer Christians have spent so much time, way too much time, parsing the minutiae of ancient Roman perspectives on sexuality.

Straight people have no idea.

And isn't it terrible, how Christians are expected to read bible passages which dehumanize entire demographics of people, and just accept that- because the bible says it, so it must be true? Best-case scenario for a good Christian, I suppose, is you read a bible passage that dehumanizes an entire demographic of people, and you just nod along and don't notice anything wrong. But what if you have personal experience that tells you something's wrong with what you just read in the bible? What if you yourself are a member of that demographic, or you have close friends who are? Then, as a good Christian who believes the bible, you have to force yourself to believe it, even when it sounds so wrong. You struggle to make it make sense, because you believe there are no other options.

How about we just reject the whole thing? 

If your God wants you to discriminate against other people, maybe find a new God. Every day you continue to believe in that kind of God, that's on you. What does it say about you, that you choose to worship a God like that?

---

There's one more thing I need to talk about: What does "faith" mean?

Because I read one blog post after another after another about how complementarianism is harmful, how it makes no sense, how it is used to cover up and perpetuate abuse. 

But... did that mean it was actually wrong? What if God commanded this for a reason? What if there's some really amazing reason why women shouldn't have the same rights as men, and as humans we just can't understand what it is? We're not God, what do we know?

Complementarianism obviously makes no sense- but I was taught that faith is doing things that appear to be ridiculous and foolish, because God commands us to, and somehow to God it makes sense. I was taught that's an important component of being a Christian: sometimes God will tell you to do something completely absurd, and you have to do it.

I don't believe that any more. Instead, I believe what Jesus said: A good tree cannot bear bad fruit. You can look at the results of following a certain ideology, and if those results are bad, you know the ideology itself is bad.

Reject the entire thing.

---

Related:

She was the first (Thank you, Rachel) 

It Doesn’t Actually Matter What Jesus Said About Divorce

They Prayed About It (a post about the #NashvilleStatement) 

I'm a woman, and God created me to do math and build robots

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

Image shows some roses and white towels on a bed, with the text "The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. 1 Corinthians 7:3 NIV". This is a very cringey verse to put on a pretty background, like an inspirational meme, but I found LOTS of people on Google image search who have done just that. Uh, okay. Image source.

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

---

So, now we're in the second part of chapter 3 of The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended [affiliate link] (p 50-60).

This section starts out talking about 1 Corinthians 7, which has that line about "The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband." ("Marital duty" means sex.) Some bible translations say the husband and wife should not "deprive" each other, so that's why this section of the book uses the term "deprive."

Anyway, the point is, the bible says the husband should not deprive the wife, and the wife should not deprive the husband. It's equal. It's symmetric. But you wouldn't know it from popular evangelical teachings on marriage, which always talk about how the wife needs to have sex even when she doesn't want to, otherwise she's "depriving" him, which would be just terrible- and then nothing is mentioned about the husband's responsibility toward the wife's sexual needs. (Typically, those kinds of evangelical marriage resources will say the husband has to care for the wife's emotional needs, or something along those lines.)

Gregoire and her co-authors are making the point here that if a married woman is having sex regularly but not having orgasms, then she is the one being "deprived." Interpreting this 1 Corinthians 7 passage to say it's not just about making sure your spouse gets *sex* but it's about *sex that feels good for them* and/or *orgasms*.

This is HUGE. This is GROUNDBREAKING. I'm, seriously, this is blowing my mind.

See, the way I always heard this passage interpreted was, yeah, it says the husband owes the wife sex, and the wife owes the husband sex, but actually in practical terms, women don't really want sex, so in real life you're not really going to have a situation where the "husband owes the wife sex" aspect would be important. In practical terms, we only really care about the part where the wife owes the husband sex.

But, wow, viewing it as "each spouse has a responsibility to give the other spouse sex that feels good" instead of just "sex", that is a GAME CHANGER. Like, !!! I cannot even begin to describe how much of a big deal this is.

But, wait, let me stop for a second to add this: So, I'm writing this blog series specifically from an ace perspective, so I do have to point out the idea that you're required to have sex with your spouse... is not really great for aces. I'm not sure that making it symmetric really helps. In my case, I am a sex-favorable ace, so I do want to have sex, but for aces who are sex-indifferent or sex-repulsed, this would play out differently.

Anyway. So the point of this section is, suppose you have a husband and wife, and they've been married for years and the wife has never had an orgasm, but she makes sure to have sex with her husband a few times a week, so he won't be "deprived", and he has an orgasm every time- in this situation, there is so much concern over whether or not the husband is "deprived", but actually, IT'S THE WIFE WHO IS "DEPRIVED."

!!!!!

YES!

Because it's not just about *sex*; it's about *sex that feels good*. Which is a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THING.

Here's an idea I've been thinking about: Sex is not just one thing... it doesn't exactly make sense to say you "like sex." It depends hugely on the extent to which your partner cares about listening to you and making it a good experience for you.

Some examples:

Example 1: There's a short film called "Ace and Anxious" (video is here, via this blog post), where an asexual woman does some research about the health benefits of sex, and decides that she should try sex to help with her anxiety issues. She posts an ad on Craigslist and starts interviewing men who respond to it. Now, here's my main issue with this: The sex that one might have with strange men who respond to a Craigslist ad is very much NOT... like... how to say this... it's not the ideal of what sex is supposed to be. When she read medical papers about the health benefits of sex, that doesn't mean all sex is good for you- it would only apply to sex that is consensual, enjoyable, feels good, you know what you're getting into, etc.

I have my doubts about whether random men from Craigslist would come into this with the expectation that their priority is to make it a good experience for her.

Example 2: Let's say there's a female sex worker and a male customer. People describe this situation as the man "paying for sex" but I think there's something a bit off about that. He's not paying for "sex" in the general sense of what sex is, he's paying for the experience of having someone have sex with him in a way that makes it all about him, and he doesn't have any responsibility to care about if it feels good for her.

(And honestly, this is basically the view of sex I internalized from Christian marriage advice. Like, a wife doesn't really like sex, but she does it for transactional reasons- she gets a lot of benefits from the marriage, and the sex is the price she pays for those benefits.)

Example 3: Two people choose to have sex with each other, and their main motivation is that they really like to have sex. In this situation, of course they will each have the expectation that it's going to feel good for them, and that they need to make sure it feels good for their partner. They are equals, and there aren't any external "transactional" aspects of it, therefore they know that the sex itself is meant to be a good experience for them and for their partner.

Example 4: It occurs to me that, in an earlier section of "The Great Sex Rescue", when it mentioned the problem of husbands having a mindset that's influenced by porn, maybe this is what it's talking about. I think (?) in porn videos, sex is portrayed like every single part of it is enjoyable- if the viewer doesn't enjoy watching it, they can skip that part, or change to a different video. It doesn't really give a realistic sense of "you need to care about what your partner wants, and sometimes it's going to be something that feels boring or inconvenient for you." So then you have men who think their wife is asking for something completely unreasonable and abnormal when she wants him to do things that feel good for her, if they're things he's not really interested in himself. He expects that sex is just going to be what he wants, and she will also automatically love all those same things.

(Hmm, I've heard A LOT of evangelical warnings about how porn is the worst thing ever... I thought it was because having knowledge of a wide range of extreme ways to have sex/ BDSM/ etc might make your own partner seem "boring"... or something about being able to see what naked people look like, and then comparing your partner to them... Okay but this explanation, about how porn doesn't give a realistic depiction of the extent to which you should listen to what your partner wants, this explanation makes the most sense to me.)

So, there are my 4 examples. My point is, there could be huge variations in people's thinking about the extent to which sex is about their own pleasure, and the extent to which it's about making it a good experience for their partner- and those will yield COMPLETELY different results. So the idea of "sex" as a concept that one can make generalizations about doesn't really make sense, because the experience is so dependent on one's partner's attitude. Perhaps if someone "likes sex" we should take that to mean "I am able to get pleasure from it even if my partner only puts a little bit of effort into making it feel good for me", or perhaps it means "I'm very good about setting boundaries about only having sex with people who make my pleasure a priority" (and they are able to attract enough potential partners that even after this screening process, they still have plenty of opportunities to have sex).

(Or, wait, lol, something else just occurred to me- usually when people say they "like sex" that means they have a high sex drive. I feel very ace right now.) 

(Another thing I wonder about is, how many people do you have to have sex with to get enough data to make generalizations about how you feel about "sex" as an abstract concept? If you've only had sex with 1 person, I don't think you really know anything about how you feel about "sex" in general, you only know how you feel about "sex with this specific person." Please note that I have no interest in gathering such data for myself, so I will just never know how I feel about "sex as an abstract concept.")

This is all speculation... I don't know if this really makes sense to anyone else- maybe I'm missing something important. I just want to write it here because I haven't seen people talking about sex in this way, but this is how I think about it.

And, honestly, straight women have it the worst in terms of how likely we are to have a partner who believes there's some "default" way to have sex, and doesn't believe he needs to care about whether that works for her, surely it will work for her because that's what sex *is*, and then this "default" way doesn't work for her and she doesn't even realize she could demand better. I worry about the straights.

So. The point is. 1 Corinthians 7. It's not just about giving your partner "sex", it's about giving them sex *that feels good for them*. And that is a HUGE difference.

(Full disclosure: "The Great Sex Rescue" is targeting an evangelical audience that takes bible verses very seriously, with the mindset that if we read something in the bible, and we interpret it as the author and/or God intended, it's true and we should live our lives in accordance with it. I do not believe that. I do not believe the bible is inerrant. So I love this book's interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7, but at the end of the day, 1 Corinthians 7 does not have any power over my life. See: It Doesn’t Actually Matter What Jesus Said About Divorce and "The Author of Leviticus Would Have Been Cool With It".)

The next section of "The Great Sex Rescue" is about how a lot of Christian marriage books say that women's sexual pleasure is important, but they actually mean it's important that the husband thinks the wife is having a good time, so the husband feels like he is good at sex. (Specifically, the books "For Women Only" and "The Act of Marriage" are mentioned here.) In other words, these Christian marriage books- which "The Great Sex Rescue" is criticizing- say that not only is a wife required to regularly have sex with her husband, she is also required to pretend she loves it. Otherwise it would destroy her husband's manly self-confidence, or something.

Yeah, even when conservative Christians talk about women enjoying sex, they still need to make it all about men.

Gregoire and her co-authors say this:

We find it problematic to tell a woman she must enjoy something without also telling her that she can expect him to make it enjoyable.

Dayyyyyyaaammm. Good point.

This kind of teaching would make a woman very hesitant to speak up during sex if she doesn't like something, or if something is painful. Yes, I've been there. Like, trying to come up with the most polite way to say "I don't like that" because I've internalized the idea that if a man feels "rejected", that would be the WORST THING EVER. Ughhh, let me tell you, it just doesn't work. The only way to figure out how to have sex that feels good for both of you is HONEST COMMUNICATION. But sex advice from conservative Christians says wives shouldn't be honest if they're unhappy about something during sex, because men are so fragile and can't handle it, or whatever. (See: If A Wife Is Required To Have Sex, That's Not "Intimacy".)

Then Gregoire and her co-authors give us these useful guidelines:

Rules about Speaking Up during Intercourse

How to speak up:

1. If it hurts, say something-- even if you're just "a little uncomfortable." You deserve pain-free sex.
2. If something is keeping you from getting aroused (more on how to "get there" in the next chapter), say, "Let's stop for a moment and try something else."
3. Want more of something-- or less of something? Tell your spouse when something is feeling good (even if it's just by moaning). If something isn't feeling good, take your spouse's hand and put it where you'd like it to be.
4. Don't fake it-- orgasm, arousal, anything.

How to help your spouse speak up:

1. When you're not sure if your spouse is ready for penetrative sex yet, ask!
2. If you sense your spouse is not enjoying things, stop and go back to kissing and touching for a while.
3. Watch your spouse's cues. If it's obviously not enjoyable, be the one to pull back and say, "Let's take a rain check." Show your spouse sex can stop without you getting angry.

When I read this, I'm like YES! This is so good! Christians should all be talking about these rules, instead of telling women "yeah sometimes sex hurts, but it doesn't take very long, so just do it- men really need it." [This is not a quote from anywhere, this is my paraphrase- but yes, that's what they say.]

But on the other hand, I read these guidelines from Gregoire et al, and I'm like, THE BAR IS ON THE FLOOR. If something hurts, of course you should say "stop." Isn't that obvious? Why do we even need to tell people this?

But unfortunately, yes, Christian women do need books that tell us "You deserve pain-free sex" because we have been told the EXACT OPPOSITE, many many times. The first time I ever believed that I had the right to COMPLETELY REFUSE to have painful sex was when I was pregnant, because the information I read about pregnancy said that if sex is painful, that could be a sign that something is wrong and could harm the baby. That was the first time I ever felt I had a "good enough reason" to draw the line there and absolutely refuse to have painful sex. Before this, I tried to get out of having painful sex, but I was always weighing my feelings against this idea that "men need it" and trying to find what level of pain I could tolerate that could satisfy his "needs." I hate how badly I've internalized that. 

In my experience, I've found that secular sex-ed resources are pretty good about emphasizing the importance of honest communication during sex, to give each other feedback on what works and what doesn't. I've read many secular sex-ed resources that emphasize how each person's body works differently, so there's not really any specific sexual technique that will always "work"- the only way to figure it out is to listen to your partner when they tell you what works for them.

Also that bit about "Show your spouse sex can stop without you getting angry", the bar is IN HELL, you guys. But, YES, it definitely is necessary for Gregoire to say this, because in conservative Christian culture, if a wife withdraws consent, she is "depriving" her husband, and of course you can understand that a good godly Christian man would be angry about that, right?

In my experience reading secular sex-ed materials, however, they are good about emphasizing that consent can be withdrawn at any time, and if somebody gets mad about that and acts like you owe them sex, that is a forest of red flags.

Later in this section, Gregoire and her co-authors say this:

And that pain matters. Having someone derive pleasure from something that causes you pain compounds the hurt.

This is huge. This is so important. This is completely the opposite of what I was taught that marriage is supposed to be.

I always heard Christians talk about how marriage is hard. Marriage is about self-sacrifice. Marriage is about giving up what you want, because you have to consider your spouse first. Marriage isn't about making us happy, it's about making us holy. Kids these days don't want to get married because they're selfish and don't want to give up their self-centered lifestyle. Marriage is about dying to self. Sacrificial love. It's hard but it's so worth it.

The example that comes to mind is that wives are required to endure pain during sex, to satisfy their husband's "needs." I was taught that this follows the basic characteristic of what marriage is- it's normal to suffer in order to please your spouse, that's just what marriage is. You're willing to go through pain because you love your husband.

I remember I heard one Christian speaker give another example once- she said that sometimes in the middle of the night, if she wants to drink water, she asks her husband to get out of bed and go get her some water. And, she said, he has to do it, because the bible says husbands have to love their wives as Christ loved the church and sacrificed his life for her. (LOL, if I tried that on my husband, he would say "go get it yourself." Unless there was like, a real reason that I couldn't get up and get it, like if I was sick, pregnant, etc.)

Captain Cassidy has also written a lot about the Christian expectation that you should "die to self" in marriage. And about how, when she was with her ex-husband, he seemed to have an attitude like "last time I went somewhere with you that I didn't want to go, so now this time you have to go to church with me even though you don't want to." (I can't find the specific post of hers that talked about that- if anyone has the link, please share in the comments.)

Basically, the idea that marriage is about forcing your spouse to do things they don't want. And being forced to do things you don't want, for their sake. There's totally a cultural phenomenon where Christian girls, age 21ish, married for less than a year, make posts on social media to say "marriage is so HARD and sometimes I hate my husband because he is so annoying, but God has been teaching me so much about how to love my husband, I'm so lucky to be his wife, marriage is hard but it's SO WORTH IT" just dropping red flags EVERYWHERE, but they think this is normal. Like this is what marriage is.

When I was in college, our campus Christian group brought in a married couple to talk to us about marriage- the wife talked to the girls, and the husband talked to the boys- and she just kept saying the important thing in marriage was "dying to self" which meant "you have to have sex even if you don't want to." And I thought that was totally normal, back then. You do it because you love your husband so much, so the pain is worth it if it makes him happy. Now, years later, the more I think about it, the more disturbing it is. This was the role model couple that came to teach us. Teaching us that marriage is about doing things that make you unhappy. Forcing yourself to have sex that you don't want.

I remember about a year or so after Hendrix and I got married, I was thinking about how surprised I was that our marriage is so fun and I still love him. Like, every day, I get to live with him, I get to see his cute face, and it's just wonderful. It was totally unexpected that I would feel this good, when Christians always told me "marriage is hard."

So no, I don't believe "marriage is hard." I think life can be hard, and the thing about marriage is that when your spouse is going through a hard time, their problems become your problems. But the marriage should be a source of safety and support to help you get through life's problems. It shouldn't be that the marriage itself is the source of the problems.

It's harmful to teach kids that "marriage is hard" because then if they get into a bad marriage, they won't realize that it shouldn't be that way. 

(See: "Marriage Is Hard" and What My Marriage Is Actually About (It's Not Sex And It's Not Jesus))

And... even now, as I'm thinking about this, it feels a little surprising to me as I consider the idea, "Wait, so, in a healthy marriage, would there ever be any times that you're forced to do something you hate, for your spouse's pleasure? ... No? I can't think of any?" It's shocking to me to actually ask this question and realize the answer should be "NO", because that was such an essential part of what I was taught marriage is. That's the definition of marriage, I thought. That's what it means. Being forced to do things you don't want. Having someone derive pleasure from your pain. Being willing to do that because you love them so much.

(Like I said, I worry about the straights...)

Yes, in marriage, there will be some times that your spouse gets sick and throws up, and you have to clean it up, for example, and obviously nobody likes doing that, but that's a very practical thing, and like, a very normal way of showing compassion, to take care of someone who's sick, which could apply in a lot of relationships, not just marriage. I'm not talking about that- I'm talking about when Spouse A wants to do something that Spouse B hates, and Spouse B believes they need to force themself to do it, because that's what marriage is about.

No. Eww, no. WTF?

The last thing I want to talk about in this chapter of "The Great Sex Rescue" is the section about how society cares about men's sexual medical issues more than women's. First, there's this about medical papers in a secular context:

While PubMed (the National Institutes of Health online database for scientific journal articles) has 41,473 articles for the keywords "erectile dysfunction," it only has 4,809 for "dyspareunia" (aka painful sex). Similarly, there were 1,796 studies on "premature ejaculation" but only 401 for "vaginismus." 

And then this, about the conservative Christian world:

It's long been known in medical circles that conservative religious women experience more pain with sex than the general population. Yet if scholars are doing poorly on this topic, the church is doing worse. Both The Gospel Coalition and Focus on the Family have online articles on erectile dysfunction while failing to provide any information on vaginismus, sexual pain, or post-partum pain.

Well... I mean... I have heard lots of Christians talking about women's sexual pain- talking about it like it's normal, and wives need to continue to have sex with their husbands anyway, and that's just the way it is. I don't think I've ever heard it talked about like it's a medical issue, or that you can DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT so that you don't have to have painful sex any more.

Then there's this:

Intended for Pleasure acknowledges the problem [vaginismus] but then totally bungs things up with this claim: "Vaginismus can usually be eliminated in about one week with the following procedure." The book then describes the use of dilators.

LOLOLOLOLOL.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL. ONE WEEK! WAS THIS WRITTEN BY A MAN?

I (Sheila) had severe vaginismus, and I tried that. Did it by the book; got the T-shirt. Recovery still took years. And that's not unusual, because research shows that vaginismus can be very resistant to treatment.

I also had vaginismus, and that's one of the reasons I was interested in "The Great Sex Rescue"- because it talks about vaginismus, and how women with this kind of conservative Christian background are more at risk for vaginismus. I think the next chapter of the book talks about this more.

I can't speak to the use of dilators as treatment for vaginismus, because I was never actually diagnosed, never had any doctors do anything helpful, even when I told them "sex is painful"- and actually, I'm glad I had to figure it out myself, instead of viewing doctors as the authority to tell me how my own body is supposed to work, and what I need to do to change my body to be good enough for a man. I'm glad I found out about asexuality, instead of that.

Anyway, the point is, these are real medical conditions, and conservative Christian teaching about sex doesn't do anything to actually help, but instead tells women they just need to have sex anyway, because men need it.

But, here's something that ace readers will want to note, in the section about medical issues related to sexual dysfunction: There is a list of such issues, here in this chapter, and one of the ones listed is:

Hypoactive sexual desire disorder: A clinically low libido.

I point this out because a lot of aces argue that viewing HSDD as a medical problem that needs to be solved is basically saying that there's something wrong with being asexual, and that asexuals need to get treatment and stop being asexual. (Similar to "reparative therapy" for homosexuality.) We don't like this. (See these blog posts from other aces: Journal Club: Why is absent/low sexual desire a mental disorder? and Drug Watch: New Addyi Marketing Campaign, “Find My Spark” and a brief primer on hsdd & flibanserin)

Later chapters of this book talk more about HSDD. I'll be interested to see what they say, and whether aces fit into it. 

Okay, so to sum up this section of "The Great Sex Rescue": If wives are required to have sex that doesn't feel good, then wives are the ones being "deprived." My mind is blown by this, seriously. Also, it's messed-up to require wives to act like they are enjoying sex, without requiring husbands to actually do anything to make sex enjoyable. Not cool! Instead of faking it, in order to protect your husband's fragile manly confidence, you should speak up if you don't like something. Communicate! And if you're in pain, definitely speak up! It's really NOT OKAY that conservative Christians say wives are required to have sex even if it's painful. Pain is a sign that something is very wrong, and you shouldn't tolerate that.

So, overall, wow, yes, I'll say I agree with what Gregoire and her co-authors are saying in this section of the book. They make some extremely good points here. And they make some points which are like, bare-minimum-of-human-decency level, but yes, unfortunately those things need to be said too, because conservative teaching on sex and marriage really is that bad.

---

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

Related:

If A Wife Is Required To Have Sex, That's Not "Intimacy"

6 Ways Purity Culture Did NOT Teach Me About Consent 

"Marriage Is Hard" 

Vaginismus Is Not A Problem, In And Of Itself

Blogaround

1. My 2023 Reader Survey is still open- go take it if you haven't done it yet. (Survey will be open until June 19.)

2. Only ONE Person Has Solved This Puzzle... (May 12) 2-hours-13-minutes sudoku solve video. My favorite part was, at 1 hour and 30 minutes in, with only 2 digits placed in the puzzle, Simon says, "Maybe this is why people have found this difficult, because they get to this point and then get stuck."

3. Optimum tic-tac-toe (May 26) "[Chat GPT] very strongly prefers to place its marks in the corners, longwindedly explaining how its corner move is a superior strategy, all while I win game after game by placing my marks in the center rows and columns."

4. Journal Club: Why is absent/low sexual desire a mental disorder? (May 24) "The author criticizes the classification of absent/low desire as a mental disorder from three primary angles: first that it doesn’t make sense to have a different diagnostic setup depending on whether someone identifies as asexual; second, that this diagnosis is disproportionately assigned to women, reflecting sexist values; finally, the distress criterion is insufficient."

5. Rare all-white panda spotted in SW China's Sichuan Province (May 27)

6. China's first homegrown large passenger jet took its maiden flight after 16 years in the making — check it out (May 29) Great!

7. Shanghai Metro on the right track after 30 years (May 28) "Meanwhile, the overall length of the city's Metro network, has increased to 831 kilometers, becoming the largest metro system among all the cities in the world, according to Shanghai's Metro operator, Shanghai Shentong Metro Group." The Shanghai metro system has been operating for 30 years. I can confirm, yes, subways in China are very nice. (My photos here and here.)

Sixth Tone also has a series of articles on the 30th anniversary of the construction of the Shanghai subway system:
Shanghai, in Motion (May 28) "'Compared with walking on the street, we feel safer and more relieved after entering the metro station. There, everything is standardized and traceable,' he said, adding that the better tactile paving in stations and along the platform edges is a crucial accessibility feature, particularly for the visually impaired."
Beyond the Midnight Hour (May 29) "Maintenance crews take over to keep the Shanghai Metro running like clockwork for the 10 million passengers who ride it every day."
Building Shanghai’s Deepest Station (May 30) "With the deepest foundation piles reaching as far as 48 meters underground, Chen and his team had no choice but to build the new station at a record depth of 36 meters so that incoming trains could make it to the station after diving under the piles. For safety and energy consumption reasons, official regulations limit subway inclination to a maximum gradient of 3%."

8. Pentecost, Resurrection, and the Chasm of History (May 25) "In terms of early sources, the only vague candidate for such a mass appearance is the Pentecost scene in Acts 2, which as we know it today is not explicitly cited as a Resurrection appearance. But as I will suggest, that is what it was originally."

9. Return of the Jedi (1983) - Ace Mini-Review (May 25) "This leads to an ending that, in its own understated way, is remarkably ace-friendly.  Cinematic and storytelling conventions tell us that the hero’s happy ending should include heterosexual marriage.  And yet Luke, the quintessential hero, ends his story single and without a romantic prospect in sight."

10. China sends first civilian astronaut to space as Shenzhou-16 blasts off (May 29) "It is China’s fifth manned mission to the space station since 2021." Cool!

If God Metaphorically Made the World in 6 Days, What Does That Even Mean?

Gif of Jonathan Frakes saying "We made it up." Image source.

The first chapter of the bible, Genesis 1, says that God made everything in 6 days. On day 1, he made light. (I'll use "he/him" pronouns for God here because Genesis 1 does.) On day 2, he made the sky. On day 3, he made the land, the seas, and plants. On day 4, he made the sun, moon, and stars. On day 5, he made birds and water animals. On day 6, he made land animals and people. On day 7, he rested.

This is not a true story. None of this actually happened.

(I used to be a young-earth creationist, and really believed this story was true. If you ever want to hear about all the fan theories that creationists have come up with to explain how this story is true and set in the same universe we live in, I can tell you all about it.)

I've been thinking about this ever since I read the book "Inspired." (My review of "Inspired" is here.) There's a section in "Inspired" about creation stories, and comparing the creation story from the bible with the creation stories from other ancient cultures. The point of the creation story in Genesis 1 was to teach people to view the world as having a purpose and an order- it was made by God on purpose, in an organized way. To teach people to view God as being the One in control of everything- God speaks, and the creation bursts into existence. To teach people to view themselves as special, the crowning act of creation, with power over the earth and a responsibility to care for it. And to teach people that it's important to take time to rest.

From what I've read about these kinds of religious myths, ancient people weren't thinking in terms of what's literally true, but they used stories as a way to create their identity. In the case of Genesis 1, they wanted to be people who believe that the world has a purpose and an order, and God is in control. (This is contrasted with creation stories from other ancient religions, which had the world being formed as a result of gods fighting with each other, for example.)

So when modern Christians say it's not literally true, but it's metaphorically true, that's apparently what they're saying. 

But let's go a little further- what does that mean? So, we want to be the sort of people who believe in the sort of God who would create the universe in an organized way over the course of 6 days. Not that God actually did do that- we know They didn't, because the universe is way older than that- but They're the sort of God who would. That's the God we want to believe in. Or, taking it a step farther, maybe it's not important whether this God exists at all- it's just about us seeing ourselves as the sort of people who believe in a God who is the sort of God who would create the universe in 6 days.

I don't know, kind of sounds like a mess. I feel like the idea of believing something is "metaphorically" true but not "literally" true just doesn't make sense. So my position is, I don't think Genesis 1 is literally true or metaphorically true, but I like it as a story. (If I said Genesis 1 is metaphorically true, I would also have to say Star Wars is metaphorically true. That seems to me to be straining the definition of "true" way too far.)

Or... actually, it's more like, people believe in some story as sort of a shortcut to believing in a more abstract idea, and this more abstract idea is a beneficial thing for people to believe in. Is it important that the abstract idea is literally true? For example, maybe the abstract idea is about having hope that things will turn out okay, and you can make an argument that even if people are in a bad situation and will end up failing, it's still beneficial for them to have that hope. (But you could also make the argument that it's not good to have false hope, and that the "abstract idea" is only any good if it's literally true.)

The danger, though, is when the story teaches us an "abstract idea" which is harmful. For example, Adam was created before Eve, therefore it is argued that men have to be the leaders, and women can't be trusted because they are easily deceived, like Eve was deceived by the snake. (Or, if you ever read stories in the bible about how this or that shady character was the ancestor of one of the nations we don't like, well, that's not true, it was just made up as a way to justify their prejudice against the neighboring nations.)

Or there might even be an "abstract idea" that modern readers are getting from the story, which has no relation at all to what the author was trying to say, or how ancient readers would have read it. So these "abstract ideas" have to be judged on their own merits; it can't just be "it comes from a bible story, therefore it must be right." I love reading feminist/queer/liberation/trauma-informed readings of the bible, and these definitely view the text in new ways that the author did not intend. The bible is living and active, and we can interact with it and make it into something new; I love that. But it's not about "I interpret this bible story to argue my point, and since it comes from a bible story, my conclusion is automatically true and you have to accept it." It's about "I have a whole ideology that I believe in [for example, feminism], and I have logical reasons to back it up (and if you disagree with me, those 'logical reasons' are the place we should work on hashing out where we agree or disagree), and I am using this bible story as a convenient tool to help people connect emotionally with the point I am making."

And actually, if people believe the story is literally true, then everyone is welcome to pull out whatever idea logically follows from the story. They would all be literally true too, if the logic works. But if the story is not literally true, then the intention is only for one specific idea to be communicated by the story, and if you say it means something different, then you're "taking it the wrong way" and "the metaphor breaks down."

Here's a related example: I remember reading an article once, about a study where American children were surveyed to see what percentage of them wanted to be the president someday. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was found that a much higher percentage of boys than girls planned on being president. Like 60% of boys and 40% of girls, or something like that. And the article was presenting this like it was a bad thing- specifically, that the percentage of girls was too low, and this was an indication of society's sexism.

When I read that article, I was SO CONFUSED. I was like... okay, you realize that only ONE PERSON becomes president EVERY FOUR YEARS, right? (Ballpark figure of 1 president every 4 years, though sometimes it's 8 years and sometimes it's less than 4 years.) 60% of little boys and 40% of little girls think they're gonna be the president? That's just patently absurd right there. Probably none of them are going to be the president. Like why do you want more girls to have this unrealistic belief? Why would that be a good thing?

Maybe a higher percentage of girls understand the realities of politics and the pressures of being in the public eye, how many years it takes working as a politician/senator/governor/whatever before running for president, what specific personality traits are required for the role of president, other influential leadership roles that may match her own personality better, etc. Maybe instead of being concerned that too few girls want to be president, we should be concerned that too many boys don't seem to have a realistic idea of what being president actually entails, and how to judge if that's something that's really a good match for one's own personality and skills.

What's actually going on here is, it's not literally about being the president at all. That's just being used as a symbol for being ambitious and believing you can reach your goals and be a successful important person. Believing that you can follow your dreams and not be restricted to certain types of jobs based on your gender. It really has nothing to do with actually becoming the president in reality; it's about this more abstract idea. And that abstract idea is a good thing for children to believe (regardless of gender).

Believing in these stories as sort of a shorthand for believing in these bigger ideas about your own identity and how you fit into this world.

(Suddenly, it occurs to me that adults asking children "what do you want to be when you grow up?" is ALWAYS about how the child views their identity and their place in the world, rather than about what they're actually going to be when they grow up. Huh. I guess I've been "taking it too literally" my entire life.)

Here's another example: People are always saying "representation matters"- ie, it's important that fictional stories contain a diverse array of characters. For example, people might say it's important that there are some female superheroes, because it conveys the message that women can be strong and clever and be leaders and save the world. If all superheroes were men, people might believe that only men can be strong and heroic like that, and women can't. But, let's dig into this a little bit- superheroes are actually not real at all, so why does it matter what specific demographics they come from? And if a movie shows a woman being strong and a good leader... well that's not real, it's just a fictional story, but in actual reality it is literally true that women can be strong and good leaders, and the movie conveys this implicit message. But how does a fictional story make its audience believe in a related claim about the nature of reality? How does that make sense?

And really, this is also why people criticize stereotypes and cliches in movies- even though everyone knows it's fiction, there's still some aspect of it that people are going to take as a true portrayal of how reality works. (For example, movies where stalking is romantic.)

Very interesting, how the human mind creates a connection between stories and truth, in a way that isn't necessarily right.

Anyway. Getting back to the question of the creation of the world. Well, what actually happened was the big bang, and then billions of years of star formation and rocks just kinda floating in space, and then the earliest life on earth appeared 3.7 billion years ago, and from there it was natural selection and animals being vicious to each other so that the weak ones died and the beneficial mutations were passed to the next generation, etc etc, and now here we are. There is evidence for this. (Like I said, I used to be a young-earth creationist, so I know all about arguing about the evidence, but that's off-topic for this post.)

But if you want to take this actual literal reality and pull out the abstract background ideas that tell us about our identity and purpose, it's, uh, kinda depressing? All of human existence is just this tiny blip compared to the time scales of the whole universe. We are just on one planet, out of all the millions of planets in the cold expanse of space. And survival of the fittest means the universe doesn't care who lives or dies. God- if any god exists- doesn't step in and stop the strong from taking advantage of the weak.

Aren't those things literally true, since they come from a story that's literally true?

Well... Yes, it's literally true that human history is just one tiny tiny thing in a vast universe with billions of years of existence, rather than humans being the pinnacle of God's creation. But if you go from there and then make a statement like "therefore our lives are not important" that's a bit of a logical leap. (What's the definition of "important"?) And if you take "survival of the fittest" and then say that it's right for the strong to take advantage of the weak, and that we should do more of that, well, that's also a logical leap. (And actually there's a lot of game theory stuff about why it's beneficial for people to cooperate with each other. Being heartless toward others isn't the optimal evolutionary strategy anyway.)

It doesn't have to be "depressing." I've read some really good articles from humanists/atheists about finding meaning and purpose in life, without religion. (Captain Cassidy and Bart Campolo come to mind. If you have more links about this, go ahead and share in the comment section- I'm really interested in this.) Generally it's along the lines of, we have to value this life because it's all we have. And being in awe at the sheer statistical improbability that you even exist- to even exist at all is so amazing. And the ability to create meaning ourselves is way better than a god assigning your life's meaning.

As for me, I'm a Christian. I literally believe in God. But, uh... if God exists, or if God is just a concept that we project our own ideas onto... does it make a difference? I don't believe that God intervenes in the world. Is there really much of a difference between God being literally real and not intervening in the world, or God being just an idea...?

Uh. Well I don't have an answer to that. I do literally believe in God, though.

And I literally believe in the resurrection of Jesus. And that someday the whole world will be literally resurrected. My feeling is that, for the idea of resurrection, there is a difference between "this is literally true" and "this is maybe not literally true but I want to be the kind of person who believes in it." I really believe what the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15, "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith."

It really matters to me whether that's true. We need resurrection. We need real justice. We need it to be literally true that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." It's not enough, to me, to be the sort of person who believes in the sort of God who would raise Jesus from the dead. To believe that it's something They would do- no, I believe it's something They did.

(Here's a thorny question, though: Isn't it a bit inconsistent that I don't believe Genesis 1 is literally true, but I believe the resurrection of Jesus is literally true? Is it just because believing in the resurrection is scientifically more convenient- like, it's just a one-off miracle, not something we'd expect to have scientific evidence for, whereas the evidence for the history of the universe and how it's billions of years old is EVERYWHERE, and you really have to put a lot of work into your fan theories if you want to argue for a young earth...? So I just believe in a literal resurrection because I feel like I can get away with it, in a way I can't get away with believing the universe was created in 6 days...? Uh yeah that's a question.)

So, in summary: When people talk about religious stories being not "literally" true, but "metaphorically" true, they mean that the story itself did not happen, but there's an abstract idea that the story is meant to represent, and that abstract idea is literally true- or perhaps even if it's not true, it [supposedly] makes us into better people if we believe it. In the ancient world, their stories weren't about what actually happened, but about understanding their identity. What kind of people are we? We are the kind of people who believe in this kind of God.

I wonder whether this makes sense at all, though. It feels very human, to use stories as proxies for communicating more abstract ideas. People will always do this, and it's beautiful, but at the same time, we should be aware we are doing it, otherwise we can easily fall into believing wrong ideas.

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Related:

Sure Of What We Hope For 

An Ex-Evangelical Mom Review of "When God Made The World"

No One Can Take The Bible From Me

Animals Screw Over Other Animals and Get Away With It

"The Author of Leviticus Would Have Been Cool With It"