Tag: Christianity

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Pat Robertson: bad, Frederick Douglass: good

So, something terrible happened in Haiti and supposed Christian Pat Robertson did what he always does in the case of a terrible tragedy.  He blamed the victims and suggested that God was punishing them for their sins (or their blackness, which may or may not be a sin to Pat Robertson, though I’m leaning towards “may”).  I would be all up in arms about how Pat Robertson is ruining my religion, except it should be pretty obvious that Pat Robertson and I don’t love and serve the same God.  Because the God I love and serve?  That God is on the side of the Haitians.  Even the ones who practice voodoo.  Maybe even especially the ones who practice voodoo, though I wouldn’t be so bold as to make that kind of statement.  Unlike ol Pat, I still have a healthy fear about making claims about what God says or whose side God is on.  Anyway, the God I love and serve is the God who hears the cry of the oppressed, who listens to those who suffer, who comforts those who mourn. So that’s why I’m pretty sure there’s no way Pat and I refer to the same person when we’re talking about God.

But in reading about Pat Robertson’s latest bout of hate speech, I came across this post by Adam Serwer of The American Prospect.  And I loved this quote he included by Frederick Douglass so much that I knew I had to include it here:

Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest, possible difference–so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.

It kind of reminds me of what Ghandi said about loving Christ but not so much Christians. It’s people like Pat Robertson that give Frederick Douglass and Ghandi reasons to say things like that.

Today, Jon and I made a donation to World Vision, through whom we sponsor two children, to go toward Haitian earthquake relief (friends not comfortable making a donation to such an expressly Christian organization might consider Partners in Health instead). Today I am praying for everyone affected by the earthquake. Today I am sorry that anyone would dare use the name of God to cause even further hurt to hurting people.

Updated to include: there is actually plenty of evidence that the “deal with the devil” Pat Robertson was referring to didn’t even happen. Or at least, it wasn’t a deal with the devil at all.

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God is not enough?

One of the most exiting things for me in the past year has been that Jon and I have both been excited by and interested in some new (for us) thinking, particularly around the issues of sustainable food (mostly thanks to Michael Pollan) and the emerging church movement (mostly thanks to Rob Bell and Brian McLaren).  We’ve been reading books passed back and forth, and talking about new ideas, and bouncing thoughts off of each other, and it’s just been really fun.  Maybe that’s one of the cool things about getting to live with my best friend: we can geek out over the same things.

All of this to say that I’ve been reading Brian McLaren’s The Story We Find Ourselves In.  It’s the sequel to his book A New Kind of Christian and I highly recommend both.  They’re sort of fictionalized dialogues between characters, and through their conversations, McLaren introduces a whole lot of just mind-blowing stuff. I just wanted to share one small snippet that struck me while I was reading yesterday, made me wonder why I’d never thought of it before.

There’s one other surprising thing that the second creation story in Genesis suggests to me. It’s something shocking, maybe put best when it’s put in a way that borders on heresy: God is not enough, the story says. That has nothing to do with any deficiency in God; it has to do with the storyline God had in mind for us. God doesn’t want to be the only reality in our lives, the only relationship in our network, the only message on our screen…This is the story we find ourselves in, isn’t it? Caught between two dangers: a hyperspiritual danger that says ‘It is good enough for human beings to be alone, so all they need is God,’ and a hypersecular danger that says, ‘It is good enough for human beings to be with the other created beings; forget about the Supreme Being from whom all being and blessing flow.’ Neither of those options is good enough. The only viable option in our story is for us human beings to enjoy the company both of our Creator and of our fellow creatures: our brother sun and sister moon, our brother fox and sister fruit bat, and especially of our mates–either sexual mates or mates in the Australian sense of the term, our friends–in whom we find a lost part of ourselves restored to us again.

I’ve heard well-meaning people, even myself, say things like “God is all I need.” But even in Eden, God saw that there was something “not good” in paradise, something that needed fixing: the human being was alone. The human being NEEDED more than just God and nature. The human being needed companionship. And God creates a companion, and then everything is good.

Which brings me to something else the book pointed out that I hadn’t noticed before.  This is what my ESV Bible says in Genesis 1:26: Continue reading “God is not enough?”

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the best Christmas present ever?

Image via Flickr user Muffet under a Creative Commons License.

I swear I’m not a Grinch.

Yeah, this is another one of those posts where I have to begin with a disclaimer assuring my readers that I really, really don’t hate Christmas. Here are some things I’m looking forward to over the next month: baking cookies with my mom and little sister, spending time with my littlest sister, drinking Russian Tea, staring at Christmas trees in dark rooms, taking a trip to downtown Hot Springs AR in order to see Christmas lights and a giant gingerbread house, the local prosthetic shop that has the best Christmas window displays ever, reading “The Gift of the Magi” and “Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” nativity sets, advent wreaths, making gingerbread houses that involve hot glue guns, playing board games with family, seeing our niece, meeting a brand new baby cousin, watching “Elf,” Christmas Eve church service, seeing some snow in Colorado, watching my dad tear up while watching “It’s a Wonderful Life,” having semi-shouted conversations with my hard-of-hearing grandmother, hugging necks, and kissing cheeks.  There is a lot to love about Christmas.

You may notice that I didn’t mention gifts anywhere in that list.  Because when I start to think about all the things that make Christmas special to me, most of them are free.  They are not about things. They are about love.  And yet, every single year, starting around Halloween, loved ones start demanding wish lists, the expectation to buy Things begins to mount, and I begin to get overwhelmed and stressed and wonder why we’re really doing all this.  My dad loves to say that Jesus is the Reason for the Season (I swear he’s not one of those types to get worked up about the “War on Christmas,” he just really likes to remind us, Tiny Tim style, what it’s all about), and yet, as I venture out into stores, I don’t see Jesus anywhere, and not just because the greeters say “Happy Holidays,” because really, only jerks have a problem with that.

Just getting out to holiday shop is stressful, the opposite of peace and joy and goodwill to all people.  Drivers act like jerks, everyone’s in a hurry, stores are crowded and clerks are testy.  Money is tight, no one knows what they want, we don’t know what to buy, and yet we feel pressured to buy buy buy, give give give.

And it’s not that I don’t love giving a thoughtful gift. I do. I’ve been known to agonize over birthday gifts, and I really do enjoy giving them, mostly because with birthdays I only have to focus on one present and can make it something really special and thoughtful and expressive of love and care.  But Christmas really just becomes overwhelming– no one has the time to buy unique and special thoughtful gifts for every single person on their list, at least, no one I know does. And so even people like me, otherwise completely committed to buying local and fair trade, end up hitting outlet malls and completely forsaking our values in order to get gifts for everyone we’re expected to buy for.

And so I’m left wondering why we do it.  Just getting to spend time with family and loved ones is a gift, a huge one.  We don’t need any THING beyond that.  Why can’t we just celebrate that we have time together, that we have so many blessings, that we are not in need? If we weren’t pressured to buy buy buy, give give give, we could give to charity and then just enjoy each other’s company.

I’ve tried for two years now to convince the rest of my family of my vision of a gift-free Christmas. It hasn’t worked.  So I’ve made a decision.  Next Halloween I’m going to make an announcement.  I’m going to say: Dear family members, I love you so very much.   I love Christmas, and I love celebrating Jesus’ birth with you.  Because of my deep love for Christmas and all that it means, we will not be participating in gifts for anyone who is not a child.  We hope to focus on spending time together, making memories, and donating time and money to charity.  We hope that you will respect this decision, and encourage you to join us in our pursuit of a pared-down but more deeply meaningful holiday, though we will respect and love your choice if you don’t. We love you and we want to focus on our love for each other and our love for Christ this year.

I’m getting excited just thinking about it. Perhaps a gift-free Christmas could be the second-best Christmas present ever.

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Reviewing “Fireproof”

Last night we watched “Fireproof” because Jon Netflixed it after countless friends and family members told us we just had to see it.  Now, I spent a summer working in Family Christian Bookstore, and to say it made me cynical about “Christian” “art” would be an understatement, so I went into the movie fully expecting to mock and hate it. Jon knew this and was fully expecting my running commentary.

The basic plot of the film is that a married couple is on the brink of divorce, mostly because the husband is a borderline emotionally abusive, anger-freak, porn-loving, workaholic, layabout who disrespects his wife at every turn.  Meanwhile the wife is dealing with her aging parents and a mother who just had a stroke, so she is emotionally stressed and in need of support and encouragement, which she keeps finding in the form of a nice doctor at work instead of in her husband. One of the biggest points of contention is that the husband has saved up around $20k and wants to spend it on a boat, refusing to use that money to help his stroke-victim mother-in-law get a new wheelchair and bed. (Warning, some spoilers ahead, but if you don’t know how this one is going to turn out before you see it, then you don’t know jack about “Christian” fiction.) Continue reading “Reviewing “Fireproof””

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wild things and kings

I’m putting this entire post behind a jump, because I hate having things spoiled. However, I wanted to write about seeing Where the Wild Things Are last night, so click on through if you’ve seen it or if you don’t mind being spoiled. Continue reading “wild things and kings”

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still haven’t found what i’m looking for

Today my boss took me out to lunch.  It’s something he does every month or so, because he says I’m underpaid, and he wants me to know how much he appreciates me and all that I do for the department.  It’s just another way in which he’s awesome, one of the kindest and most genuine people I’ve ever worked with or known.  Because of his kindness, and also because of a GK Chesterton book I spied on his desk, I have pretty much always suspected that my boss is a Christian, something that’s been slowly confirmed as he’s remarked on books he’s seen me reading, or in our conversations about current events, or as I see him interact with students and colleagues.  I really respect that he’s a man who lives up to the saying, “Preach the gospel at all times; use words if necessary.”  I respect the kind of person who doesn’t have to give you a manifesto on what they believe in order for you to know what they stand for.  They just…stand for it.

Anyway, over lunch we were talking about the South and churches and South Carolina and C-Street.  I wanted to be like OMG YES I’VE BEEN BLOGGING ABOUT THAT STUFF, but I didn’t really want to tell my boss all about my blog.  Anyway, long story short, my boss is almost as obsessed with The Family as I am, and said he really has no idea what Bible these guys are reading.  Which is really how I feel about the whole thing– I can get how, from the Old Testament, you might get the idea that it’s OK to do whatever you want to do as long as you are a powerful man and feel called by God, but I’m not sure you could ever get from Jesus the idea that he sides with the powerful over the powerless, the wealthy over the poor.  We both agreed that while these people may claim to follow Jesus, they do not follow the teachings of the Jesus of the Bible–at least not any Bible we’ve ever read.

However, the truly sad part is that in my experience, these people who so loudly proclaim their faith but don’t live it out are far more common than they should be.  I told my boss about the summer I spent working in a Christian bookstore, and what a soul-killing experience it was.  I was hit on men who were there to pick out devotionals for their wives.  I was treated like an imbecile by people buying Bibles, simply because at the time I was operating a cash register for a living.  I was berated by old women who cared more about a coupon than how they spoke to the person behind the counter.  I was informed by one lady that she didn’t listen to Amy Grant anymore, because Amy had been divorced– as if we carried the music of any sinless artists in the store.  And perhaps the worst part of all was experiencing the culture of a business that claimed to be Christian but in reality cared about nothing other than the bottom line.

One day, a particularly hot, humid, Arkansas day, a homeless guy who spoke very little English asked me if it would be OK for him to sit at a table in the airconditioning and read the Bible and maybe have a glass of water.  I didn’t really think it took a Bible scholar to decide that the human thing to do in such a situation is to give the man a glass of water and a quiet place to cool off.  Not to mention the entire concept of “What Would Jesus Do?” that I was selling printed on bracelets and t-shirts and candy bars.  But I got into trouble with management for letting this man hang out in our store because he might “scare” the regular customers.  As if the kind of people shopping for devotionals and Thomas Kincaid paintings wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if confronted with one of the “least of these” in a Bible bookstore.  Perhaps there is an episode of “Veggie Tales” to address this kind of predicament?

I guess all of this is part of why I’m sort of without a church at this point.  We sporadically attend Bible Studies and Community Groups, but have not really been regular church attenders in a while.  And I could very easily blame this on Jon’s schedule and say that he works a lot of Sundays, and how that’s made it very difficult for us to find a church to call home.  And I could point to the church we attended for about a year, whose services we LOVED, but where, even after a year, we still hadn’t made any friends or found any sort of community.  So we spent six months looking for a church, a year attending one that turned out not to be right, and another year halfheartedly attending another church that seems to be about like the one before it.

But the weird thing is that my churchless season has also been one of the most spiritually rich of my life.  After a dark period sparked by my grandfather’s death, in which I felt far from God and clung fitfully to my faith, and after a rough first few months in a new city in which I can say pretty confidently in retrospect that I was depressed, I’m actually feeling closer to God than ever before.  I’ve been reading books about faith, reading my Bible, and listening eagerly to sermons via podcast.  I’ve been spending a lot of time talking with my husband about faith, working out what we think about things together.  We’ve both been going through this sort of revival together, and it’s really brought us closer.  Strangely, this is perhaps the most spiritually active time I’ve had since high school, and yet it’s all taking place outside the context of a church.

And as someone who grew up in church, this seriously distresses me.  The problem is, I’m looking for a group of people like me, like Jon, and aside from a few dear friends (who unfortunately live far away), I’m having trouble finding it.  I’m tired of church sermons that don’t touch on the realities of modern life, or respect their audience as a group of people who don’t need to be told what to think, but need to be taught how to wrestle with the moral contradictions of modern life.  I’m tired of a church that exploits hot button political issues but fails to feed the hungry and comfort the grieving.  I’m looking for a church that challenges my privilege and wealth, that makes me uncomfortable with the things I own, that urges me to give more of myself away.  I’m looking for a church that tells me that I’m not guaranteed safety, or comfort, or even happiness in this life, but urges me to live like crazy anyway.  I want a group of people to sit around on porches and drink wine and go deep with.  A group of people who see my passion and tell me they want to join me in it, rather than suggesting that maybe Jesus died to take away my personality.  A group of people to really live out a faith with, to preach the gospel at all times with, to sometimes use words.

Basically I’m fed up with Pharisees.  I’m tired of slogans and bumper stickers and the things you buy at Bible bookstores.  I want to get active in the renewal of all things.

And I have no idea where to start.

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More Focus on “The Family”

C Street Band

I wasn’t intending to do any blogging today or this week, but I like to watch the video from the most recent Rachel Maddow Show on my lunch break, and when I saw that she was covering The Family again, I knew I had to do a post.  You can see my previous post on the subject here.  You can watch the video clip I’m discussing here (I would embed it but MSNBC isn’t playing nice with WordPress).  All quotes from The Rachel Maddow Show taken from this transcript.

In the wake of the Sanford and Ensign sex scandals, the C Street house/Bible Study/group looms large, as does The Family, the organization behind it.

One of the more interesting bits was clips of sermons from the leader of The Family from original reporting by Andrea Mitchell.  In one of the clips, the leader of The Family, Douglas Coe, says:

DOUGLAS COE, “THE FAMILY” LEADER: I‘ve seen pictures of the young men in the Red Guard. They would bring in this young man‘s mother. He would take an ax and cut her head off. They have to put the purposes of the Red Guard ahead of their father, mother, brother, sister, and their own life. That was a covenant, a pledge. That‘s what Jesus said.
COE: Jesus said, you have to put me before other people. And you have to put me before yourself. Hitler, that was a demand to be in the Nazi party. You have to put the Nazi party and its objectives ahead of your own life and ahead of other people.
COE: One of the things [Jesus] said is “If any man comes to me, and does not hate his father, mother, brother, sister, his own life, he can‘t be a disciple.” So I don‘t care what other qualifications you have, if you don‘t do that, you can‘t be a disciple of Christ.

So basically this guy sees a lot of parallels between following Jesus and being a member of the Red Guard or Nazi Party? I’m already terrified.

During the show, Rachel also interviewed Jeff Sharlet of Harper’s Magazine, who infiltrated The Family and lived at C Street before writing a book on The Family.  Here’s one of the things Sharlet said about The Family:

They believe in something called “biblical capitalism,” and biblical capitalism is the way they‘re going to bring the gospel to the already powerful. Where the money goes they believe God goes.

“Biblical Capitalism? Wonder how they’d square that with this vision of the early church, from the Book of Acts:

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. Acts 2:45-47

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and much grace was upon them all. There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need. Acts 4:32-35

Nevermind their downright unbiblical fetishization of capitalism, according to Sharlet, the group has been involved in shady dealings with brutal dictators:

SHARLET: Well, you know, we heard in that clip, we heard Coe talking about Mao‘s China and so on. And we also hear him again and again using the model of Hitler as an ideal of strength. And I‘ve heard him—this is really boilerplate sermon for Doug Coe.

It‘s not that he‘s a neo Nazi of some sort. It‘s that they fetishize strength. They look for the leader who they believe is chosen by God. Evidence is his power, his wealth, and his willingness to align himself with their version of American power.

The dictator Suharto in Indonesia was one such. They organized meetings for him with American defense contractors, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the secretary of defense, and most notably, since Indonesia is a major oil producing company with American oil executives, who described their meetings in memos of Congress as great moments of spiritual honesty between themselves and the dictator.

Finally, Maddow asks Sharlet, if, since religion is a private matter in this country (ha! Yeah, the Values Voters and people who are convinced Obama is somehow a secret Muslim, as if that disqualified him from office, really believe in religion as a private matter.), if he believes the members of Congress who are affiliated with C Street and the Family should disclose their involvement in the group. Sharlet responds:

I think when you have—when you have members of Congress who are looking to a particular religious group for a sense of authority, which is explicitly antidemocratic, that explicitly fetishizes strength and dictatorial power, if they want to do that, that it‘s their choice. But I think they owe it to their constituents to say, “Here is why I have chosen to leave the mainstreams of American religion and affiliate myself with this sect that is so unorthodox and so really brutal in its theology.”

I bolded the parts above because, based on everything I know of Jesus, I feel quite confident in saying that the theology of this group is NOT “Christian.” It is extremist, it is unorthodox, and true Christians should point out groups like this and say, THEY DO NOT REPRESENT US, OUR GOSPEL, OR OUR GOD.

Personally, I do think these men, Sens. Ensign and Coburn and Gov. Sanford, should be asked some really hard questions about their involvement with this group, and whether or not they feel its views conform to biblical orthodoxy and the teachings of Jesus Christ.

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Focus on “The Family”

C Street Band

In the wake of the Sanford “crying in Argentina” affair and Sen. John Ensign’s ongoing saga of sex with a subordinate and payoffs and other favors to the subordinate’s family, much is being made about the secretive C-Street house/Bible study/organization that Sanford, John Ensign, and Sen. Ted Coburn (a major player in the Ensign scandal) belonged to. C-Street supposedly provides accountability, counseling, and Bible studies to powerful men in politics. Of course their credibility is somewhat in question now that it turns out that so many of their members have had such public moral failings, and as Jon said to me last night, “Maybe they need to re-think their mission.”

But what if it turns out that keeping flawed powerful men in power is exactly their mission? Not to help these men lead moral lives, but to help these men wield power? That’s the distinct impression I got watching last night’s Rachel Maddow show. You can see the clip I’m going to discuss here. All quotes are taken from the transcript.

On her show last night, Maddow interviewed Jeff Sharlet of Harper’s magazine, who has written a book on “The Family,” the “Christian” (you’ll understand those quotes in a second) organization behind C-Street, the house/Bible Study group which connects Sen. Ensign, Sen. Coburn, and Mark Sanford. From what Sharlet said of the organization, I’m terrified AND outraged. Sharlet first hand heard the leader of C-Street describing their goals and objectives:

He said it‘s sort of a totalitarian idea of Christianity and he gave his examples of men who he believed, understood the way power should wielded. He actually gave his examples, Hitler, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden and Lenin.

Maddow summarized the ideas of The Family thusly:

Its role is promoting American power worldwide, unfettered capitalism, no unions, no programs to help poor people—all with this idea that godly, powerful rich men should get at many resources as possible personally and they should just privately help everyone else. That was the impression that I was left with. Was I close?

SHARLET: That‘s dead on the money.

HOW THESE PEOPLE CAN GET THIS FROM JESUS, I HAVE NO IDEA. THIS IS NOT THE JESUS I KNOW AND LOVE, THAT’S FOR SURE. And this “theology” goes back 70 years to the founder of The Family who

believed God came to him one night in April of 1935 and said, what Christianity should really be about is building more power for the already powerful and that these powerful men who are chosen by God can then—if they want to dispense blessings to the rest of us, through a kind of trickle down fundamentalism.

I know I’m quoting a lot here, but really, this is ghastly stuff and you have to read it. Sharlet says he was living with The Family when

one of the leaders in the Family was explaining why King David was important. And he says, it‘s not because he was good man, it‘s because he‘s a bad man. You know, seduced another man‘s wife. He actually had the husband murdered.

And he wants to explain why this was a model—and he says to one of the men in the group, he says, “Suppose I heard you raped three little girls. What would I think of you?” And this guy, being a human being, says, “You would think I was a monster.” Well, the leader of the Family says, “No, not at all, because you‘re chosen. You‘re chosen by God for leadership, and so the normal rules don‘t apply.”

I’d say this certainly makes clear why it seems only Democrats resign when caught in affairs.  And perhaps even why these men are not ashamed by their hypocrisy: these are “family values” guys.  Guys who flaunt their status as Promise Keepers, who called for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, who think that homosexuals are the moral problem of our society, and yet, when they engage in the very activities they condemn in others, they think they are above the consequences.  They think they don’t have to resign.  Because they think they are “chosen.”

This goes against everything I know and love about the gospel.  The idea that Jesus came to save the least and the lost.  The idea that the first shall be last and the last shall be first.  The idea that we are all equal in the eyes of God, both equally culpable for our sins, and equally bestowed with crazy abounding grace.  The idea that one of the worst things you can possibly be is a Pharisee– one who loudly proclaims his righteousness, without having the heart-condition to back it up.  These men make me SICK, not just because of their actions, but because of the damage their witness does to the real, true gospel.

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the sanfords, spiritual leadership, and submission

Image via the Washington Post
Image via the Washington Post

I’m with PunditMom: I LIKE Jenny Sanford. Reading this Washington Post piece on Jenny, after her eloquent and, I believe, genuine press statement about her husband’s oh-so-public failing, I get the feeling that she is smart, strong, and looking out for herself and her family. I also get the feeling she’s a genuine Christian, and her example stands in stark contrast to the hypocrisies of men like her husband, particularly this, from The American Prospect’s Tapped blog:

Sanford advised spending more time with one’s family (ahem) and praying together. “I don’t want to be old-fashioned here,” he added, “but I think the father has the responsibility of being the spiritual leader of the house, and there are some lessons on a daily, nightly, morning basis that need to go from the father to the little ones in talking about how shall we then live. And I think that particular responsibility is on the backs of fathers.”

Seems to me that Jenny Sanford is the true spiritual leader in that household.  And that her husband abdicated this role when he disappeared to be with another woman ON FATHER’S DAY.

And here’s the part that I’m really thinking about, pondering, and questioning: doesn’t this traditional gender role, male-as-spiritual-leader system really set a marriage up for failure?

Here’s where I’m going with this.  So the Sanfords believe that, despite having an equal education and career experience, despite an equal role in running her husband’s campaigns and PR strategies, despite keeping the home fires burning in such a way that Mark was even able to sustain his political ambitions, Jenny is spiritually inferior to her husband, in need of his leadership, headship, and “covering.”  She is the one expected (I’m fine if it’s just her freely-made choice, as someone who hopes to be a SAHM someday) to give up her Wall Street VP job to raise kids and bake oatmeal chocolate chip cookies for staffers and reporters.  She’s the one who disappears into home life, to the extent that I’m willing to bet that she wasn’t even the same person Mark Sanford fell in love with in the first place.  And then we act surprised when Mark Sanford, bored with this rigid assignment of roles, perhaps even with his no-longer high-powered wife, decides that a fling with an Argentinian is more exciting?  The entire system is unfair to both Mark AND Jenny.

I’m not excusing Mark Sanford’s actions.  I believe that there is no excuse for cheating on a spouse, and at the VERY least, he should have gotten a divorce before pursuing another woman, preferably not one who is also married (his mistress was apparently “separated” at the time that they met).  However, what I am saying is, this religiously-motivated gender-based spiritual hierarchy that its adherents believe protects marriage and ensures spiritual order actually creates a system in which both spouses are doomed to failure. The woman is left at home with the kids, deferring to her husband constantly, trying not to question him and his spiritual “headship,” and is expected all the same to remain attractive and attracted to her husband.  It’s like asking her to fight with one hand behind her back– how can she still be interesting and challenging and compelling to her husband if, after getting married and having kids, she’s no longer allowed to be the hard-working, high-powered, highly-intelligent person who first attracted him?

And the man is put on a spiritual pedestal, where, instead of answering to his wife, conversing with his wife, being challenged spiritually “as iron sharpens iron” by his wife, he meets with groups of men like C-Street or this Cubby character Mark Sanford seemed to be more broken up about disappointing than he was about disappointing his wife and kids.  And these men, I believe, often feed the very beast they are supposedly trying to tame.

This is why I don’t go in for this “headship” stuff.  I wasn’t looking for a leader, I was looking for a partner.  I wanted someone who can call me on my BS, and who I can call on his.  I wanted someone who would be just as devastated as I would be if I had kids and suddenly lost myself, my biggest fear about parenthood.  And that’s what I have in my marriage.  We see it as “iron sharpening iron,” not one of us inferior to the other.  When I talk about my desire to stay home with our children, my husband asks me if I would really be happy in such a role.  He knows me well enough to know I need challenges and mental stimulation, that I need to feel like I’m being productive and contributing to the world in a meaningful way, using my mind and my talents.  We will raise our children the same way we currently go through life– holding hands and picking up each other’s slack and doing the best we can.  But we’re certainly not going to handicap ourselves with outdated ideas of patriarchal leadership and one-sided submission that set us both up for failure and disappointment.

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jon and kate disintegrate

I’m about to write something that may seem a little radical to many I know.   So consider yourself warned.

On the one hand, the whole world has Jon & Kate + 8 fever, and it seems that their big announcement tonight is that they’re getting divorced, as People Magazine reports that papers have already been filed in Pennsylvania.  I firmly believe that being on TV is not a good thing for families, but I don’t think it’s just the quest for the spotlight that doomed this family.  Even from early episodes, it was apparent from the way they spoke to each other that Jon and Kate did not respect each other.  And though Kate often goes on church speaking tours, I did not see a lot of Christian love and grace between them.  Of course I’m just an armchair quarterback, but I calls ’em like I sees ’em.

And so, I’m faced with a sort of bipolar response to this, as a committed, happily married woman, and also as a child of divorce.  You see, I believe that divorce is sad and tragic and to be avoided whenever possible.  MY Jon and I both  agree that it is simply not on the table for us.  Based on the experiences of family and friends, I do believe that any marriage can be healed with love and grace by the power of God.

But. Continue reading “jon and kate disintegrate”