From about 2002 to 2007 at what used to be called Mars
Hill Church there was an idiotic fad. This fad was for courtship. I
regarded it as idiotic while I was there and not because I was particularly
liberal in my theology or my political views. I was friends with people
who did advocate courtship and I argued with them in private and on the Midrash
discussion forum about things from time to time. I argued that the Bible
as a whole shows no particular interest in "how" people meet and
marry and that, in any case, most of the people who would have written or heard
the biblical literature as contemporary literature probably didn't have a
choice about if they would marry or necessarily even have a choice about who
they would marry. The Bible had clear instructions against adultery and
discouraging divorce and discouraging the abuse of spouse and children.
But the courtship fad was full of people who insisted that there were
checklists to be followed and that "God's design" for you was to pair
you off. That seemed foolish.
Another reason I
regarded the courtship fad as dubious was it held up explicitly and implicitly
a model of suburban middle class nuclear family life that I was (and am)
convinced is not plausibly going to last much longer in Western post-industrial
societies. Extended family systems have been more normative, as best I
have been able to tell, in much of the world. A marriage is often not
between the two lovers as it is a union that combines families, networks of
families, even clans. The idea of a marriage as a functionally and
practically autonomous romantic dyad seemed too common in courtship instruction
manuals and I have never been able to shake the impression that as the United
States continues into an economic decline (just bear with me on this part,
okay) that nuclear families were going to be less and less
feasible.
So when I heard
people in the neo-Calvinist scenes bewailing the "epidemic of
singleness" they treated the perceived failure of young men and women to
jump through the hoops and check off the checklist of suburban matrimonial
domesticity that this had to be because Americans were rejecting "God's
design" rather than considering, which is what I've considered all of this
to more likely be, a reflection of the fact that the mid-20th century to late
20th century nuclear family based marriage system has a shelf life in economic
terms and that younger people not buying cars or homes and not officially
marrying was not a sign that they didn't care about sexual fidelity, loyalty
and mutual fulfillment but that the checklists included things they couldn't
afford; they were not buying in for a specific marital script taken for granted
by middle-class American urbanites with upscale ambitions more than they were
rejecting love and marital commitment. Would not the activism for gay
marriage in and of itself prove that the ideal of marriage was still powerfully
appealing enough for those denied those legal options to seek them?
There were plenty of
marriages at Mars Hill and Driscoll used to brag about how many people were
marrying and having kids. I left Mars Hill around the 2007-2009
period. I didn't renew my membership but I still liked to spend time with
my friends there and so I didn't forsake hanging out with them. By about
2007 the courtship fad ended, probably mainly because one of the most prominent
advocates for courtship at Mars Hill decided it was necessary to leave when significant structural changes to
the corporation occurred connected to governance and
... also ... because his highly sought after daughters had already been spoken
for, basically. Suddenly guys who spent years pretending (I'm being
cynical here) they believed in courtship quit pretending when the six foot tall
blonde beauty they had been coveting decided to get married to a man who was
not one of them. Now if you were to go track down people who would admit
they were at Mars Hill they might remember who this blonde is. She and
her husband were held up as the gold standard of how courtship
"worked".
But ... since the
woman and man are beloved friends of mine I was able to learn that the gap
between the public idea and their frustrated and frustrating dating
relationship was large. They made sure to uphold Christian purity but
that turned out to not be nearly as frustrating as navigating the skepticism of
family members and the rules laid down by the dad of the bride. They did
not exactly act like a couple in public settings and so sometimes ambitious
dudes might hit on the woman at Mars Hill social events and the guy learned how
to hold his peace. They had agreed to abide by this ... but they also
considered eloping, they considered it very seriously! They didn't and
are glad they didn't but they shared with me that they were THIS CLOSE to
eloping. When things seemed at their worst the woman sent the man she
loved a card drenched in perfume with lyrics from a Portishead song to
encourage him. I don't have to tell you the name of the song, if you've
heard any Portishead you should know which one. Suffice it to say the
young man took heart! They married quite a few years ago and although
they were touted as the "ideal" their "courtship" period
was one of the most miserable times of their lives, both shared with me.
They also said it was okay if I shared their story.
I've opted to
be general and discreet but in case any readers who were once at Mars Hill
worked out who I'm talking about, yes, I got permission from them to share
this. I used to tease the bride's father by saying: "You say.
`Any Christian guy can take any Christian gal and make the marriage work,"
but the reality is that what you mean is, `Any Christian guy
can take any Christian gal that is not my daughter and
make the marriage work." The man laughed and said I had him dead to
rights but he said, "Surely, since you're friends with my daughters, you can
understand why I feel that way." Oh, yes, definitely. I regard
them all as wonderful friends and understand a father's wish that his daughters
marry good men. That was part of why I made fun of him when he promoted a
paradigm of courtship in which "any" guy and gal ought to be able to
make a marriage work because the truth is different.
I can respect the
desire for self-control, mutual respect, love, care, nurture, dignity and a
desire to make the union of two people not merely about the two people but a
bonding of a network of families. What I don't respect are cheap
self-help books that fraudulently promise that this sort of union of body and
soul and families can be passed through as though we were looking at a
mass-produced car that has rolled off some assembly line. So I didn't
feel any qualms about belittling the courtship fad not because I had no
appreciation for the values of what some call "purity culture" but
because I thought the hoop jumping checklists sold an illusion of respecting those
ideals and were passed off as respecting the relational dynamics the ideals
sought to protect and cultivate. Avoiding sin is not the same thing as
cultivating righteousness, whether love for God or love for
neighbor.
During the peak of
the courtship fad at Mars Hill Church I said to one of my siblings: "I
don't care how many people are getting married at Mars Hill. That doesn't
matter to me. Anybody can start a marriage. I want to
know how many of these people who married at Mars Hill will still be
married, ten, fifteen and twenty years from now. Something tells me that
twenty years from now we'll have just as many divorces as everyone else and
we'll look like fools for it."
That's the best
approximation I can provide of what my statement was. My siblings and I
were sort of known as dissenters from what we regarded as the stupidity of the
courtship craze at Mars Hill Church. Observing, though at some distance, the divorces of what used to be Mars Hill marriages leaves me with the impression that I was, if anything, gently sugar-coating my 2004 era skepticism. Even I didn't want to go so far as to say that these marriages taken up in brand-promoting delusions of grandeur were going to detonate as the sham and shame of the whole thing revealed which people married because they loved each other and which people married out of something like what Girard used to call mimetic desire.
In the years after I
left Mars Hill I was talking to someone who expressed regret that I didn't find
a wife during my time there. I said that although there was nothing wrong
with the women I knew and befriended there I was grateful to God I didn't get
married at Mars Hill. I feel like I dodged a bullet, maybe several
bullets, by not marrying at Mars Hill Church. Here in 2019, about five
years after Mars Hill fell apart, I hear and see enough evidence of marriages
that have fallen apart that I am afraid I have to say that I am still grateful
I never married anyone during my time there. The are marriages even within
those who were once in the leadership orbit of Mars Hill that have broken
apart. In my time at Mars Hill I learned that many of those who espoused
courtship for us had done nothing of the sort themselves.
Perhaps the most
flamboyant such admission was Real Marriage itself, in which
Mark and Grace Driscoll give the impression they were screwing like bunnies
before they got married and then when they both decided they were Christians
stopped having sex and then, to Mark's great dismay, they could not pick up
where they left off after having guiltily turned from all the sex they were
having prior to marriage. It was, as I suspected, a case of Mark Driscoll
grandiosely proclaiming "this is what you should do" on the basis of
"Do what I tell you the Bible says you should do, not as my wife and I
did." That there's an argument to be made that the lovers in Song of
Songs are not even described as married would be something Mark Driscoll would
evade altogether and that a Nadia Bolz-Weber would camp out triumphantly ...
but we'll get to them later. It is with all this in mind that I finally
turn to the man of recent headlines, Joshua Harris.
I was in college in
the early 1990s and heard about some guy named Joshua Harris, who wrote a book
called something about kissing dating goodbye. Eventually I heard about
courtship and I didn't think much about it at the time. I wasn't exactly
on the market or seeing myself as having any reason why I would or should be
dating so what was the point of kissing goodbye something that didn't seem like
a smart life decision at the time?
Then about a decade
later I had ended up at Mars Hill Church and courtship was a confounding and
idiotic fad in the period from roughly 2002 to 2007 that I found was impossible
to not hear about.
The Harris book was
not exactly a prominent part of that fad. I heard of the book and a
friend of mine said she read the Harris books. The first one, she said,
seemed sort of okay but the second one impressed upon her a conviction that
Joshua Harris was a total idiot. It had something to do with how he and his
girlfriend were cuddling in a hammock and they decided she needed to wear pants
or something. I confess I forget details about this since I found it impossible
to take Harris seriously enough to find out for myself from his books. My
friend said that what the man and woman showed was that rather than admit they
were getting too hot and bothered for the sake of their own consciences they
made a point of jumping through some hoops that they thought would ensure they
were acting righteously.
What I began to
notice during the Mars Hill years was that there was a way in which the
official line and how things worked didn't always seem to match up. There
might be a time where a woman's father expressed reservations about a pairing
and if the Mars Hill leadership decided everything was cool the not entirely
thrilled future father-in-law might be told to suck it up and just deal.
Despite lip service to the idea that dad gets veto power within the Mars Hill
scene there were hints that what the leaders of Mars Hill really believed in
practice was that once they decided to give their blessing to a couple of the
objecting parent was not themselves a member of Mars Hill they could stick it
where the sun don't shine.
I can't help thinking
of Mark and Grace Driscoll's Real Marriage in which he claimed
marriage is more like poetry than a math equation. Yet over the years I have
gotten a clear sense from writing about marriage and divorce that many a
divorce happens over things that can be quantified on a spreadsheet, things
like fights over money and fights over income (and how the income is or isn't
obtained). Mark presented himself and his marriage as the ideal to follow
and so when Real Marriage came out and the various revelations
were shared about how bitter he was at his wife and how she was uncomfortable
with sex it began to seem as though most of what Mark had said from the pulpit
from the 2000 to 2007 period might have been a sham, a sales pitch for an
imaginary marriage that didn't exist except in Mark Driscoll's pulpit-based
stand up routines. I confess today what I have said in the past, that by the
time I finished Real Marriage I had concluded that if this was
what real marriage looked like according to Mark and Grace Driscoll that real
celibacy seemed like a healthier alternative.
But whereas Mark
Driscoll sought out and cultivated the celebrity Christian shtick Joshua Harris
was born to it. He was like some kind of legacy
admission/legacy conscript to a kind of already-famous Christian whose job is
to shill stuff for the sake of a larger brand. What I've caught of online
discussion of Harris' divorce and formal announcement that he does not
currently identify himself as what he would identify as a Christian in the last
few weeks has tended to bracket into discussions of 1) "purity
culture" or 2) the topic of Harris' divorce and potential apostasy.
Not all discussion, fortunately. There is a piece by Katelyn Beaty about
how what Joshua Harris had to sell in his somewhat famous book was a sexual
prosperity gospel. I believe that this third area of focus is the more
enlightening path, particularly because, as I hope to suggest, as we consider
what a sexual prosperity gospel might be we can see that it would be mistaken
to think that it's uniquely evangelical or even necessarily conservative.
But first let's consider what Beaty says the sexual prosperity gospel is.
...
It is ironic, then,
that Christians who denounce the prosperity gospel have in recent years touted
its sexier, if subtler, form: the sexual prosperity gospel. This is my term for
a core teaching of the purity culture that erupted in the 1990s, telling young
evangelicals that True Love Waits. It holds that God will reward premarital
chastity with a good Christian spouse, great sex and perpetual marital
fulfillment.
Sexual prosperity theology was supposed to combat the mainstream culture’s
embrace of no-strings-attached sex and sex education in public schools. Purity
culture arose in a time when the traditional sexual ethic looked increasingly
prudish, unrealistic and kind of boring. Writers like Joshua Harris, Josh
McDowell and Eric and Leslie Ludy held out the ultimate one-up to secular
licentiousness: God wants to give you a hot spouse and great sex life, as long
as you wait.
The giveaway of any prosperity teaching is an “if/then” formula: If you do
this, then you will get this. If you put a $100 bill in the offering plate,
then you will get tenfold back. If you stay chaste now, then you will later be
blessed by marriage and children.
...
When prosperity teachings fail to pan out, it not only puts the teaching in
question, it also calls into question the very goodness and faithfulness of
God.
Most of us will never know the details of Harris and Bonne’s separation. The
fact that their marriage is ending is not an occasion to gloat. Nor does it
suggest that chastity itself is bad.
But as a new generation of Christians works out a sexual ethic in the wake of
purity culture, it’s worth recalling that formulas cannot shield us from the
pain, frailty and disappointment of being human in a broken world. Sooner or
later, life catches up with us, and we can either shake our fists at an unfair
God, or recognize that God never promised fairness in the first place. It is
we, not God, who come up with the formulas.
The stated aims of
the purity movement was to avoid heartache. The heartache in mind was,
most likely, the discovery that whomever you partner with has had sexual
partners besides you. The courtship fad and the purity movement struck me
as dubious despite my having been a conservative sort because it was a set of
checklists. In the era in which the biblical texts were written (setting
off to the side all the debates about whether the Old Testament reflects
ancient authorship or more recent theories that it was created and compiled in
the Persian exilic period) it was possibly moot how one went about seeking a
spouse. Whether you were married at all to begin with and who you married might
partly involve your input but might involve more input from your parents and
older relatives. That mutually selected erotic pairing entered into by
the lovers themselves with the approval of their friends and family could be
appreciated as a poetic ideal could seem strongly indicated by Song of
Songs.
Ironically, but not
surprisingly, both Bolz-Weber and Driscoll have insisted on pointing out the
woman does most of the talking in Song of Songs and is sexually aggressive and
expressive and the Church fathers were flummoxed by this sensual poetry and so
invented theological paradigms to explain that all away. Whether you
read Shameless or Real Marriage you'll get
this shared commentary.
Having read
both Shameless and Real Marriage the two
celebrity preachers have real differences, that can be described as blue
state and red state is significant, but they have the same core gimmicks.
Both Bolz-Weber and Driscoll are cussing pastors with folksy styles, a penchant
for attention-getting stunts, and both position themselves within their books
as having gritty teaching on sexuality that they present as healthier than the
sexual baggage and restrictive ideas of the early Church fathers, specifically
Augustine and Origen.
If you want the red
state version of the sexual prosperity gospel you can buy the Mark and Grace
Driscoll book. Should you want the blue state version of the sexual
prosperity gospel you can by the Nadia Bolz-Weber book. In both cases you
part with a small amount of your money to purchase a book that promises that
God wants you to have mind-blowing sex. The sexual prosperity gospel
isn't as overt as some televangelist telling you to send in seed money for a
tenfold blessing in return but the implicit (or maybe explicit?) promise
of Shameless and Real Marriage is that if you
buy the book for a small amount of money you'll get the relational tools and
the Bible verses you may want to get that life of mind-blowing sex you
deserve. Both books sell themselves as giving you the real deal as
written by authors who ... well ... let me just say that I personally would not
trust relationship advice from either Nadia Bolz-Weber or Mark Driscoll at this
point in my life. Just because they both say Augustine and Origen had
hang-ups about sex doesn't really prove anything. To observe that is to
shoot fish in a barrel and it's not even why people keep reading Augustine and
Origen. I've got Augustine's treatise on music on one of my shelves and
plan to get to it, for instance.
Joshua Harris'
version was probably the beta version of a sexual prosperity gospel that has
had time to evolve and to be tailored to more niche markets. The
super-charged steroid driven version of the red-state sexual prosperity gospel,
at least in my experience, was engineered by the likes of Mark Driscoll at Mars
Hill Church. Its apotheosis, at least within the context of Mark
Driscoll's writings, would be in Real Marriage. The chapter
"Can We ______?" signaled that all of the other chapters were
functionally building up by way of steady crescendo to the climax of the
chapter in which Mark and Grace Driscoll would go through a list of things and
declare whether Christian couples in heterosexual marriage could or should do
them. There was a simple range of parameters to each potential activity:
did the Bible forbid it expressly? Was it beneficial? Could it be
enslaving? Those were the core ideas.
The blue state
copycat variation on a sexual prosperity gospel is Nadia Bolz-Weber's Shameless.
Cussing pastor? Check. Ripping on Augustine and Origen?
Check. Insisting that the primary or even only way to understand Song of Songs
is as Hebrew erotica that the Church fathers were too squeamish about?
Check. Slang-laden vernacular rehashings of biblical narratives that
reflect the agendas of the author? Check. There's hardly a thing
in Shameless in terms of literary gimmicks that Nadia
Bolz-Weber uses that weren't fine-tuned by Mark Driscoll in his cussing pastor
younger days. As different as their positions on gay marriage and trans
people may really be, what makes these two peas in a pod for an American sexual
prosperity gospel is that they have the same basic set of gimmicks and they
have the same core message in relationship to earlier theological writing and
biblical interpretation, uptight guys from the early Church fathers period with
hangups about their boners decided the Bible discouraged sex and that Song of
Songs had to be an allegorical but we're here to tell you it's all about wifely
stripteases and holy blow jobs if it's Mark Driscoll and it's all about
passionate holy sex that involves "union" if it's Nadia Bolz-Weber
(Driscoll did that "unity" thing, too). As real as the
differences are between Mark's red-state and Nadia's blue-state messages are,
what makes them purveyors of a sexual prosperity gospel is that they have
deigned to write books that tell us what we are free to do and what we
shouldn't do.
Between Shameless and Real
Marriage from 2019 and 2012 respectively, the sexual prosperity gospel
is easily adapted to whichever American audience wants to buy in. To
suggest that this was something that evolved from evangelicalism, for instance,
could be to miss that there are other ways this range of ideas can be articulated.
There's probably nothing in Bolz-Weber you couldn't find in Matthew Fox, for
instance, in some form. It seems doubtful that a sexual prosperity
teaching has to be defined strictly in Protestant terms ... although Fox did
become Episcopalian ... although not all Episcopalians identify as Protestant a
la the magisterial Reformers but ... anyway, let's set that off to the side.
Having said all of
that it wouldn't do to not actually quote Bolz-Weber and Driscoll to
demonstrate why I'm suggesting they are sexual prosperity gospel
teachers. But one of the interesting ways to get a clearer sense that the
Bolz-Weber and Driscoll teachings about sexuality can be construed as a sexual
prosperity teaching program can be observed from what they make a point of
leaving out. Neither Bolz-Weber nor Driscoll have any real use for
discussing Jesus' cryptic remark about eunuchs and the history of theological
debate and interpretation about that saying. You would not be able to
guess from reading either Bolz-Weber or Driscoll that in the book of Isaiah
there is an oracle given to the eunuchs who served in the court unless you've
made a point of reading Isaiah for yourself.
Isaiah 56: 3-5 (NIV)
Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say,
“The Lord will surely exclude me from his
people.”
And let no eunuch complain,
“I am only a dry tree.”
For this is what the Lord says:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its
walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.
Compare the oracle in
Isaiah to Nadia Bolz-Weber, who admonishes her readers in Shameless to
grieve the years they could have been having sex but didn't because they were
harmed by church teaching.
SHAMELESS: A SEXUAL
REFORMATION
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Copyright (c) 2019 by
Nadia Bolz-Weber
Published in the
United States by Convergent Book, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a
division of Penguin Random House, LLC
ISBN 978-1-60142-758-8
ebook ISBN
978-1-60142-760-1
page 158
As I have talked with
my friends and my spiritual community, I have realized that many of us need a
space where we can grieve lost or twisted sexuality. Do you, too, need
this? If so, I invite you to let the unprocessed trauma that is stored in
our bodies find its way out. Maybe with a trusted friend. Maybe
alone. Maybe in a church. Let's tell the truth about those
scares. Not because they define us, but because we can define them.
Let us grieve that we were not taught to love and respect the inherent dignity
of our own human bodies. Grieve the decades we avoided sex when we could have
been enjoying sex. Grieve the pain. Grieve the abuse. Grieve the loss. Grieve
the harm done to us by the messages of the church. Grieve our own sins and
mistakes.
Grieve for the years in which you weren't getting laid, or the sex you did have was
awkward because church teaching messed up people by saying sex was bad?
Why does that seem familiar? Oh, right. Real Marriage and
also ... :
William
Wallace II
Member
posted 01-18-2001 11:13
AM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Christian
pornography. Christian phone sex. Christian cyber-sex. Christian lap
dances.
Someone
recently asked me about these issues. And, they are quite valid.
The
problem with many unfaithful unmanly unmen is that they have heads filled with
desires and dreams, but they marry a Christian women raised on a steady diet of
gnosticism (so she hates her body) psychology (so she thinks too much before
she climbs into bed) and guilt ridden don't have sex because it's a dirty nasty
thing that God hates and makes you a slut youth group propaganda from
hell/Family Books.
So the
poor guy is like a starving man who is told he can only eat once ever couple
weeks and his restaurant only has one crummy unspiced bland item on the menu
and he either eats it or starves to death.
Bummer
for that guy.
[WtH:
Nadia Bolz-Weber might call it "ethically sourced porn" in 2018-2019
but Driscoll mentioned it in 2001. Even at the level of stunt statements
it's fascinating to observe that Nadia Bolz-Weber can be seen as just a
blue-state variation on a set of gimmicks that Mark Driscoll pioneered for his
red state sexual prosperity gospel about two decades ago, at least two decades
ago if you go all the way back to his 1998 Song of Songs sermons.]
What
the guy wants is to see a stripper, a porno, and have some phone and cyber sex.
What the guy needs is a good Christian woman. The kind of woman who knows that
men like unclothed and sexually aggressive women. Why? Because they are
breathing. As long as a man is alive he is ready for sex every minute of every
day.
Ladies,
listen closely. The guy will never get the big dreams out of his head. He can
either explore them with his wife, become bitter and sexually repressed, or
sneak off to Deja Vu or log on to the net and escape in a moment of adventure.
Birds fly, ducks float, dogs bark, and men think about sex every minute of
every day because they have a magical ability to continually think of two
things at one time, one of which is always sex. Any man who denies this is a
liar or has broken plumbing.
So it would behoove a good godly woman to learn
how to strip for her husband. Some nice music, a couple of drinks, candlight
and a wife who has thrown her youth group devotionals to the wind would be
nice. Most women do not do this because they are uncomfortable with their
bodies. Know that for a man there are two variables with a woman's body. One,
what does she have to work with? Two, how does she use it? Now I will tell you
a secret, number two is the most important.
How about a Christian guy who wants to watch
porno? Maybe his wife should get a Polaroid and snap a few shots of her in
various states of marital undress and bliss and sneak them into his Bible so
that when the guy sits down to eat his lunch at work and read some Scripture he
has reasons to praise God. Or, maybe if the lady would plug in a camcorder and
secretly film herself showering, undressing, making love to her husband etc.
she could give it to him when he's on the road for weeks at a time, or maybe
just so the poor guy can see his wife as some undressed passionate goddess. I
have yet to find a wife take me up on this be rebuked by her husband.
And what guy breaking his stones on the job
every day wouldn't like a hot phone call from his wife now and then telling him
in great detail what awaits him when he gets home. Or how about the occasional
instant explicit message from his wife rolling across his screen giving him
some reasons to expect that dessert will precede dinner that night.
Do you know why the adult entertainment industry
is raking in billions of dollars? Because people like to have sex and have fun.
Does it lead to sin? Yes. Can it lead to worship. Of course. If you resist this
message, please stay single until you get your head straightened out. If you
are married and fully constipated, bummer for you and your upcoming
divorce.
I'm going to quote a
bit more of Mark Driscoll here and I realize it's a big chunk, but I am not the
only person who has written to the effect that Mark Driscoll has shilled a kind
of sexual prosperity gospel (that has elements of what Lutherans would call Law
to it). Jessica Johnson's Biblical Porn discusses Driscoll's approach to
sexuality at some length and I reviewed the book over here.
Bolz-Weber mentions
"asexual" once or twice and then devotes Shameless to those who are
presumed to have a sexual market value and who very much wish to put it to
use. She's not written a book for those who believe they should be
celibate for whatever reason. And to underline my point about Bolz-Weber
and Driscoll having no use for discussing eunuchs, let me quote for you a
punchline Mark Driscoll had about eunuchs from his Esther series:
http://marshill.se/marshill/media/esther/jesus-has-a-better-kingdom
Jesus
Has a Better Kingdom
Pastor Mark Driscoll
Esther 1:10–22
September 21, 2012
about 8:39 into the sermon.
Number two, men are castrated. Men are
castrated. I’ll read it for you. “He commanded—” and these guys got
names. “Mehuman—” That’s kind of a rapper name, I was thinking, like,
ancient Persian hip-hop artist, Mehuman. That’s how it’s spelled.
“Biztha.” Sounds like a sidekick. “Harbona, Bigtha.” That’s my personal
favorite. If I had to pick a Persian name, Bigtha. Definitely not
Littletha. I would totally go with Bigtha. “Abagtha, Zethar and Carkas.” Okay,
a couple things here. The Bible talks about real people, real circumstances,
real history. That’s why they’re facts. It’s not just philosophy. Number
two, if you ever have an opportunity to teach the Bible and you hit some
of the parts with the old, crazy names, read fast and
confident. No one knows how to pronounce them, and they’ll just assume
you do.
Here are these guys. So,
you’ve got seven guys, “the seven eunuchs.” What’s a eunuch? A guy who used to
have a good life, and joy, and hope. That’s the technical definition of a
eunuch. A eunuch is a man who is castrated. [emphasis added] Proceeding with the story before I have to fire
myself.
Never mind what
Isaiah shared with eunuchs as a word from the Lord. Pastor Mark made it
clear that a eunuch was a guy who used to have a good life, and joy, and hope
and that's the technical definition of a eunuch. Forget Isaiah 56 if ever
you read it. Pastor Mark has the real deal about life and sex ... and so
does Nadia Bolz-Weber. Mourning the years of bad or not-had sex and encouraging
people to grieve the years they could have been laid but for the bad teaching
of the church can look different because of a lot of real differences, but
consider the possibility that once you get deeper than those differences a
Nadia Bolz-Weber and a Mark Driscoll may have something more in common than
either of them might be willing to admit. You won't likely see a
book called Real Celibacy from either of these people.
What is fascinating
to observe about Shameless and Real Marriage is
that there can be those who praise one book and condemn the other without
observing the possibility that there is a core underlying message that is
conveyed through the style and persona of the authors. It's more than
just possible for someone who disliked Real Marriage to
praise Shameless, after all--someone could critique the former and
like the latter enough to write an endorsement blurb for it. Your parents
meant well but they steered you wrong. Buy this book, read it, and see
how the earlier church teachings dropped the ball and how you can have much
better sex and a more intimate partner relationship with the help of this
celebrity preacher.
Sure, maybe one of
them found it necessary to develop a way to treat his depression by getting
more sex from his wife, and maybe the other one of them amicably divorced from
her husband of some twenty years but nobody's perfect and both authors assure
us they have counseled a lot of people about issues of sexuality within their
churches. But for their respective fans it might be insulting to suggest
that Bolz-Weber and Driscoll are ultimately selling the same shtick calibrated
to different niches within the market. The possibility, which I
personally endorse, that neither a Bolz-Weber or a Driscoll is really in an
ideal situation to counsel any of "you" on matters of sexuality, may
not be one that either Bolz-Weber or Driscoll have stopped to
consider.
These sorts of
celebrity Christian figures are selling books to those who, if I had to hazard
a guess, have already decided that their sexual market value is high enough
that they should be going out there and finding that special someone.
These are not writers who spend any time discussing practical Christian
instruction or theological traditions dealing with eunuchs. There's
nothing about the Pauline advice that if you aren't already married by now that
you shouldn't be in a rush to marry but that if you do marry you do not sin but
marriage, should you enter it, will be full of challenges.
This may come full
circle to one of the reasons I thought the courtship fad, in all its forms, was
idiotic. It treats the wedding night as the finish line more than it
seems to have reason to. Yes, lip service is paid to communication and
conflict resolution and all of that but the sexual prosperity gospel is mainly
focused on the sexual finish line in every possible sense of that set of
words. You're not going to read anything from those who espouse a sexual
prosperity teaching about what life is like should you and your spouse bring a
child into the world who has an autoimmune disorder or the possibility one of
you could be dismembered through an accident. These peddlers of the
sexual prosperity gospel have nothing to tell you about how to cope with the
death of your child or the emergence of a kind of cancer that could make your
spouse unable to have sex with you for the last years of his or her
life.
Whether in its red
state or blue state forms the sexual prosperity gospel says Jesus wouldn't give
you a sexual market value you're not supposed to use and you are, it is
assumed, someone people want to have sex with. The sexual prosperity
gospel certainly isn't for the incel because the incel is probably some white
guy who can't get laid who hates women in the blue state form and in the red
state form it's some worthless beta cuck who can't get laid because he doesn't
deserve to be. Bolz-Weber can sell this idea by way of saying you could
have been robbed of a great sex life through the bad teachings of the Church.
The Driscollian variation is a bit different and it may be these differences
which make the two seem as if they don't share a few gimmicks in
common--Driscoll used to say that unless God called you to smuggle Bibles into
China or some other life-threatening spiritual ministry then you
"should" go out there and find a spouse and that men are taking wives
and women are given in marriage.
Yes, the blue state
and red state differences are significant but notice, if you would, that even
in Driscoll's version the only reason you should refrain from being in a
relationship where you're getting laid all the time is because God has insisted
that you, and the default "you" here is very probably white in an
Anglo-American context, have been called to go smuggle Bible to people of color
in some not-America place where you are likely to become a martyr for the
faith. Got that? And a Mark Driscoll might invoke someone like the
prophet Jeremiah but let's just see if we can revisit that passage wherein the prophet
Jeremiah describes how he came to understand he was not to marry, or attend any
weddings or attend any funerals.
Jeremiah 16: 1-13
1 Then the word of the Lord came to me: 2 “You must not marry and
have sons or daughters in this place.” 3 For this is what the Lord says about
the sons and daughters born in this land and about the women who are their
mothers and the men who are their fathers: 4 “They will die of deadly diseases.
They will not be mourned or buried but will be like dung lying on the ground.
They will perish by sword and famine, and their dead bodies will become food
for the birds and the wild animals.”
5 For this is what the Lord says: “Do not enter a house where
there is a funeral meal; do not go to mourn or show sympathy, because I have
withdrawn my blessing, my love and my pity from this people,” declares the
Lord. 6 “Both high and low will die in this land. They will not be buried or
mourned, and no one will cut themselves or shave their head for the dead. 7 No
one will offer food to comfort those who mourn for the dead—not even for a
father or a mother—nor will anyone give them a drink to console them.
8 "And do not enter a house where there is feasting and sit
down to eat and drink. 9 For this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel,
says: Before your eyes and in your days I will bring an end to the sounds of
joy and gladness and to the voices of bride and bridegroom in this place.
10 “When you tell these people all this and they ask you, ‘Why
has the Lord decreed such a great disaster against us? What wrong have we done?
What sin have we committed against the Lord our God?’ 11 then say to them, ‘It
is because your ancestors forsook me,’ declares the Lord, ‘and followed other
gods and served and worshiped them. They forsook me and did not keep my law. 12
But you have behaved more wickedly than your ancestors. See how all of you are
following the stubbornness of your evil hearts instead of obeying me. 13 So I
will throw you out of this land into a land neither you nor your ancestors have
known, and there you will serve other gods day and night, for I will show you
no favor.’
Jeremiah wasn't told
to not marry because he had been called to a life-threatening ministry.
He was told not to marry because he understood that there was a disaster
coming, a disaster so great that the sound of wedding parties would cease and
no one would bother to bury the dead.
Neither Driscoll nor
Bolz-Weber have any use for even discussing this kind of biblical
passage. They preach a Jesus who wants you to get laid if you follow the
guidelines they have and Mark has more and Nadia has less rules but ... what if
we consider the possibility that even though these people say "Jesus"
it could just be venerating Hera and Aphrodite? Hera was the goddess of
marriage and domesticity, a jealous goddess who punished the women Zeus took as
lovers. Aphrodite still needs no introduction. Maybe Bolz-Weber
leans a bit more Aphrodite and maybe Driscoll leans a bit between Aphrodite and
Hera ... but to the extent that they avoid dealing with the Jesus who talked
about eunuchs and the Isaiah quoted earlier, they may be selling a sexual
prosperity gospel that's more a song to Hera and Aphrodite than the Galilean
teacher who was crucified and, at least to go by the canonized accounts of him,
never married.
If Joshua Harris has
repudiated his courtship advocacy and indicated he no longer can think of
himself as a Christian that's newsworthy but it remains to be seen whether that
is the same thing as noteworthy. I was too busy looking to find work and
pay rent the year the Harris book was published to know or care what the book
was. It was already useless and irrelevant to me the year it was
published.
One of the things
that has been repeated is the observation that Harris, as a symbol of a sexual
prosperity gospel, was tied to the young restless Reformed movement, of which
Mark Driscoll was also once considered a part. Carl Trueman has written
on Harris as part of the movement recently and I'm going to quote from him at
some length. Trueman points out something I believe is important to
understanding what Joshua Harris became. Trueman makes the observation I
noted earlier on how Joshua Harris was a legacy admission/legacy conscript
within a movement, in contrast to the sort of figure like a Mark Driscoll who
didn't come from a family with preachers, let alone celebrity preachers.
If a Driscoll or a Bolz-Weber chose to endorse a sexual prosperity gospel of
some kind for their red and blue state consumers, the tragedy of Joshua Harris
is that he may have grown up in context in which continuing family brands hung
on him like an albatross.
...
Many Christians were helped by
all this. The YRR theology was at best a diluted form of Calvinism, but it had
a largely positive influence in the pews.
But the movement’s leadership
was often arrogant. In public, critics were derided and then ignored; in
private, they were vilified and bullied. An extensive informal network of
individuals, institutions, and organizations who wanted a slice of the YRR action
was happy to oblige the padrini by keeping critics
on the margins. And one by one big leaders fell from favor: Mark Driscoll,
James MacDonald, Tullian Tchividjian, C. J. Mahaney, now Josh Harris. On Friday
the news broke that The Village Church, home of YRR megastar Matt Chandler, is
being sued over alleged mishandling of sexual abuse.
But at no point has there been
any apparent heart-searching, among those left in the movement, as to whether
such falls indicate a problem in the very culture of the YRR—at best a lack of
judgment in its choice of headline acts, at worst a fundamental lack of
integrity. Sorry, as Elton John sang, seems to be the hardest word. Which is
odd for a religion predicated on repentance.
Early in the movement’s
history, I spoke with a couple of the leaders. One told me that his
organization was “God’s means of doing something great in this day and age.” As
delusional as such a claim obviously was, it did seem to reflect the general
ethos at the time. Another told me that I needed to understand that the
movement was “leveraging celebrity culture to do something for the gospel.”
Boromir tried to do something similar with the ring of power, as I
recall.
Many evangelical Christian
organizations and movements have a similar kind of messianic
self-consciousness. And it eventually leads to great evil. As soon as you
identify God’s purposes with those of yourself or your organization, ordinary
Christian principles—honesty, decency, etc.—quickly disappear. A few years ago,
a minor evangelical arriviste was caught in serious sin. His employer’s
announcement of this might be summarized as follows: “When we are doing so well
for the Kingdom of God, we can expect the Devil to attack our best men.” Maybe.
But the logic was that of every tinhorn cult leader: The evidence that we are
corrupt, or employ seriously corrupt people, is really just evidence of how
important to God’s Kingdom we are. How convenient. It is the Christian
equivalent of Wall Street’s “too big to fail” ethic.
And this brings me back to
Harris. It is sad that his marriage is at an end. It is sad that he has
abandoned the faith. He alone must take final responsibility for his actions.
But he was also the product of, and a major player in, a wider movement
that is proving increasingly problematic. As a product, he was exploited by
those who saw in him a marketing opportunity and consequently gave him far too
much exposure and responsibility far too soon. He was used. I wonder if any of
the leading YRR lights have spent a moment reflecting about whether they and
the culture they created bear any responsibility for this mess. [emphasis
added] Or is Harris’s apostasy merely another of those Satanic attacks
that confirm that they are on the right track and must press
on?
As a player, Harris might be
qualified to do the evangelical church one last favor: He can expose the
behind-the-scenes shenanigans—the money made by at least some of the leading
lights, and the power wielded by an unaccountable few—of Big Evangelicalism. That
would seem a more important contribution than emotive talk of personal
journeys, gobbledygook about repentance detached from any notion of God, and
the continuation of life as performance art.
The body count in the YRR
leadership is already high. Harris might be able to ensure that the leaders who
are left will operate with more humility, transparency, and integrity in the
future.
My friends at Mars Hill, that
young couple held up as the poster children of "courtship" didn't
want to be poster children to justify the courtship fad. They loved each
other and wanted to be married. Thankfully they still are married and
have some wonderful children and and being a fan of animation and a reader of
theology I've had the pleasure of lending them a lot of animation and a few
theology books. May they go the distance. I certainly pray they
do.
Harris was someone who was, as
Trueman put it, a product of the movement he was born into. Perhaps
Harris had time to understand more fully what it has meant to be a product, and
treated like a product, by the movement that spawned him, and is rejecting
that. That is not an easy thing to do. I personally believe the
only way to truly reject that legacy would be to reject being a public figure
altogether and not simply turn around to shill a new kind of sexual prosperity
gospel in which he goes out and tells those whom he feels his old tradition has
abjected should be free to do as they do. Now that's not to say he can't
believe that but to put this another way, in light of what I have been saying
about sexual prosperity gospel 2.0, Joshua Harris does not need to become a
Nadia Bolz-Weber just because he realizes he has been a Mark Driscoll in the
way he formulated and promoted sexual prosperity gospel 1.0. It remains
to be seen whether in walking away from the old sexual prosperity gospel if he
walks away from being a public figure or if he, as so many of these sorts of
people do, he shows that there seems to be nothing else he can do except be the
sort of public figure shilling something like a sexual prosperity
gospel.
I saw a link to a TED
talk in which Harris explained that at one point in his youthful
days. A minute into the video he says he prayed, "God, let me write
a book that will change the world." He immediately quipped, "Be
careful what you pray for." Now the very idea that Harris' book
changed even the United States seems ... dubious. Maybe that is part of
the trouble, that Harris grew up in a milieu in which simply being a normal
moderately well-adjusted person wasn't enough. I'm ex-Pentecostal for a
variety of reasons, though I would not go so far as a variety of Reformed folks
go and declare Pentecostals not Christians at all; but I wearied of a
Pentecostal cultural norm in which people might tell you God had called you to
some powerful ministry.
I resolved that these sorts of
oracles were not going to be how I lived my life. I was not going to feel
obliged to believe I was called to some world-changing prophet ministry just
because any friends or family got that idea about me, however potentially
well-meaning that sort of dream might be thought to be. Instead I made a
point of reading the prophetic literature and reading about prophets and began
to get a sense that prophets were not writing or saying what they were saying
to "make books of the Bible" but to challenge people to live by the
revelation already available. For the times I was told that God was
intending to use me to play some prophetic role in the church I resolved that
"if" that was ever going to happen it had to be an unforeseen
providential side effect of figuring out how to love God and love neighbor, not
because I set out to have such a legacy. Among the young, restless Reformed seeking that world-changing legacy seems to have been the point and you have to be able to see the legacy with your own eyes rather than, say, live in faith that whatever positive legacy you might have would be one you wouldn't see.
That Harris came to a point where
he could think that he should or could have such a legacy and to have it
through writing a book is troubling to me. What about living a life
minding your own business and working quietly with your hands? Is that
not regarded as a virtuous and honorable path by the biblical authors?
Joshua Harris may have wanted to write a book that would change things but that
could speak of a vision of heroic action in which the illuminated special one
comes back with "the boon", something that could easily come from
Joseph Campbell's monomyth rather than having anything to do with a biblical
text.
But I've heard this kind of hope
in the Joshua Harris prayer before, because it is a hope for a world-changing
legacy. It's the kind of hope that emerges in Mark Driscoll sermons not
just for himself but for the sorts of men he has wanted to inspire.
Now there are some who are
noticing that. amidst the discussion of Harris' divorce and distance from
Christianity. the purity culture has come under fire. Matthew Lee
Anderson has a piece up called "Sex Ethics After Purity Culture: what do
the critics want?"
...
It
was by no means perfect—but its flaws were such that a sensible 16-year-old
could easily detect them without too much damage. Most young people inside
evangelicalism were not going to purity balls, and had little problem moving on
from Harris when they left high school. Legalism pre-existed Harris’ book, and
has long endured after it.
At
the same time, people resonated with Harris’ view in part because there was no
meaningful alternative. Parents like David French spoke loudly about the joys of going on dates in
critiquing Harris, without realizing that as a social practice it
had largely died by the late 1990s. A few heroic figures would gamely try to
keep it alive, but that was just the problem: that script for finding a
marriageable partner now required a heroic sort
of virtue, which inherently ruled out many of us.
The
absence of a script for how to
enter marriage was partially a consequence of the loss of a social vision for why one would marry in the first
place—and on those scores, Harris offered a picture of a world that in fact
might have been better than the
Calvinball-like environment surrounding us. It was nostalgic, yes, and was
doomed to be distorted in being implemented. But then, every vision is.
...
Yet to consider what
Harris said of himself and about his prayer in the TED talk we might want to
back up a bit. Which came first, the purity culture that Harris has been
credited as helping to popularize, or the desire to write a book that would
change the world? This is not, of course, really an either/or question, because
it could seem that in Joshua Harris' case the two impulses were potentially
inseparable and, in any case, decades in the past.
If there is something
that we have been seeing about the young, restless and Reformed movement that
starts to stand out after a while, whether it's Joshua Harris' description of
the prayer he prayed about writing a book that would change the world, or the
entire public career of the Mark Driscoll who tells men they should live with a
legacy in mind, a legacy spanning generations from children to grandchildren,
it may be that the young, restless Reformed are obsessed with
legacy-making. They are not necessarily focused on legacy as something to
preserve, that might be more aptly said to be the concerns held by the older sort
of Reformed traditions, whether a Carl Trueman or, if we stretch out the net
very widely indeed, a Robert Schuller or even a Fred Rogers (he was an ordained
Presbyterian minister, correct?). There are men who demonstrate that a
legacy is something we can build together and share together.
More and more the
thought leaders and pioneers of the young, restless Reformed men, if they be a
Mark Driscoll or maybe a James MacDonald or maybe a Joshua Harris, can seem to
reveal themselves as men who are concerned with legacy but of a sort in which
they build the legacy in some way and can witness within their own
lifetimes. A cynic with biblical literacy could say that these are men
who want to build towers on the plain of Shinar so they may see for themselves
the legacy they have created. If providence reveals these towers of Babel are
being destroyed perhaps Harris is showing some wisdom in walking away from the
tower he played a significant role in building, the courtship craze.
But
if he walks away from a Driscollian variant to become a Bolz-Weber champion of
those whom in an earlier career he might have disregarded then there's a danger
that he may remain a peddler of a sexual prosperity gospel but of a more
secular and progressive-minded kind. Seattleites know perfectly well that
there was a blue state sexual prosperity gospel instructor who was opposed to
Mark Driscoll over the last two decades and his name was Dan Savage.
That's the thing about a sexual prosperity gospel, it doesn't really require that
one be religious at all, just that one is willing to make a living off of
telling other people how, how often and with whom they should get
off.
If Harris is walking away from a sexual prosperity gospel, to stick with Beaty's concept, he doesn't need to convert to selling a secularist blue-state alternative because, as those of us in Seattle have known for a while, there's already a Dan Savage and there's little reason to think a Dan Savage would welcome a Joshua Harris to the club. That I know of, Savage hasn't commented on Harris. Neither
Savage nor Driscoll could resist commenting on the fall of Ted Haggard and it
demonstrated how entwined their respective brands and personas were.
It's possible that with Nadia Bolz-Weber we're seeing someone else who can,
less directly, define her brand against a brand like Driscoll's.
These two celebrity
preachers are indebted to the legacy of Joshua Harris, who is a relatively
recent pioneer in shilling a particularly red-state form of sexual prosperity
gospel, but Dan Savage had mastered the blue state variation more or less by
the time Harris wrote his book. There may be all sorts of ways to
venerate Hera and Aphrodite without being official about it and that may
ultimately be what the sexual prosperity gospel turns out to be, but for those
who call themselves Christians, you can't very well sell millions of books
unless you figure out how to hide the sexual prosperity gospel behind some
suitably reverse-engineered version of Jesus, ideally the kind of Jesus who
somehow is a reflection of you.
Adolf Schlatter, a Swiss pietist
theologian, wrote in his commentary on Romans that it is the height of
covetousness to make God in our own image and to make our own lusts God's
will. If he could see the work of a Joshua Harris, a Mark Driscoll and a
Nadia Bolz-Weber he might observe that, for all the apparent differences in red
and blue state trappings and marketing gimmicks of these three, they may, after
all, have been selling the same core thing, venerating Hera and Aphrodite while
disguising that veneration under a version of "Jesus". Thanks
to the political balkanization of our age, people will look at the red state
and blue state distinctions on the surface and miss the underlying
core. What Harris has done, in contrast to his heirs within Christian popular publishing, is express doubts about the quality of the product that made him famous. That is likely more than can be said about what his heirs may say and do.
POSTSCRIPT 8-4-2019
I realize 10,127 words is extravagantly long ... but attempting to do justice to a topic like this, the ways in which popular level Christian publishing has wielded a sexual prosperity gospel across the red state and blue state divides, deserves a treatment that can do some justice to the last twenty years of the gimmick. It didn't quite hit me just how long this single post was while I was writing it. :)
