On an episode from fall of 2018 Brad and Dan share stories from their experiences with purity culture and provide a primer on gender and sexuality in Evangelicalism. They then interview Reverend Sarah Buteux about her journey from Evangelicalism (where she was told women couldn't be pastors) to ministering at an LGBT+ affirming church. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/straightwhiteamericanjesu/message
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I am Associate Professor of Religion, Skidmore College, and I'm here with my co-host.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm an Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
And today our focus, we're calling the episode Dating Jesus.
It's kind of a weird Weird title.
And I'm going to start with a story, a little embarrassing story, about once upon a time as an undergrad.
And as a reminder, as an undergrad I was a dyed-in-the-wool, hardcore evangelical Christian.
I was at an evangelical undergraduate institution and I was crushing pretty hard on this girl there.
And I asked her out one time and she said, she shot me down.
And the reason she shot me down is that right now she said, I'm dating Jesus.
Now, That's going to sound weird, and you'll have stories like this too, but within the evangelical context, certainly at the time, that was not a weird notion.
And it was a euphemism for, in evangelical parlance, focusing on their relationship with God as opposed to dating.
But it was also a broader euphemism for the purity movement and culture within evangelicalism.
And what we want to talk about today is a little bit about that movement, but more importantly, what that movement has to tell us about evangelicals and politics and broader culture.
I mean, first of all, it's hard to be mad.
If someone's dating Jesus, OK, look, I mean, that's just like, OK, you I mean, you can't compete with that.
And you got to just say, well, you know, that's you got to leave it there.
I mean, anyone who's God and human simultaneously literally walks on water.
I mean, yeah, that's just sorry.
Just go.
Just walk away.
More seriously, though, Dan, I think some people have heard a lot about purity culture.
I think people are aware that evangelicals are very into the idea of sexual purity, right?
But it's kind of hard sometimes to understand what that means.
Like, why would someone in college say, I'm dating Jesus?
Like, what kind of culture of mores does that come from?
Yeah, so the language of purity, right?
It's essentially a movement that says that one has to remain a virgin.
Until marriage.
And we should be really clear here, marriage means heterosexual, monogamous marriage, right?
And we're interested today in some issues on gender roles, as they're understood with evangelicalism.
We're going to get into some LGBTQ issues in subsequent episodes, but this would be relevant to that as well.
But the idea is that you are somehow defiled or sinful if you engage in inappropriate sexual contact, including sexual intercourse, Before marriage and there's this this whole booming industry within evangelicalism movements like true love weights the silver ring thing pure freedom There's a well-known book by a guy named Joshua Harris called I kiss dating goodbye.
So there's this whole culture built up around this conception of sexual purity And one of the things that's interesting about it, and this is what interests us, and you're going to have a couple really useful anecdotes about this, I think, in a few minutes, is that on one hand, this is a movement that's supposed to be about all people.
All people, men and women, are called to be sexually pure until and unless they get married, right?
In which case, sex becomes okay.
But, these movements are also structured around really different conceptions of male sexuality and female sexuality.
And this is really crucial because men or boys are, on this discourse, by nature, they're sexually aggressive, they have a voracious sexual appetite, they are driven by physical desire rather than emotional connection.
They're essentially these sort of libidinous creatures that have to be controlled.
Women, by nature, are sexually vulnerable.
They're sort of naturally modest.
They're emotionally rather than physically oriented.
Chastity is kind of their essential state.
And so you get a double standard, right?
To be sexually quote-unquote pure, if you're a man, means that you're going against your nature.
You're fighting against your natural tendencies.
Whereas for women, their natural state is Purity and chastity and so forth and what results in this is that when somebody fails to maintain that purity if it's a man That's unfortunate and that's bad.
And yes, it's sin.
They shouldn't have done that.
But you know kind of what do you expect?
It's it's it's their nature.
They're gonna have shortcomings.
We need to be compassionate when women fail to maintain purity and so forth, it means that they have violated their nature.
They've gone against what they most naturally are.
So there's a sense that to stick with this language of purity or defilement, their defilement or impurity is greater than that of men.
And you, from your ministry days, have a great example of this, an illustration of this.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I was an evangelical youth minister for seven years.
And I remember so clearly this time that we were at summer camp and often at summer camp, students would sort of renew their faith and, In evangelical language, they would say they would recommit themselves to Jesus.
And oftentimes that meant that they would share things that were considered sinful, that they would sort of confess things to counselors or to other people.
I remember so clearly one counselor being so disturbed because she was a female counselor and she'd spoken with a young woman who was 14 or 15, and she was so disturbed because this young woman had confessed, and mind you this is in the late 90s, early aughts, There was really no internet then in the ways there are now.
She had confessed that she had found her way to reading dirty stories at night, right?
That she had somehow gained access to what we consider X-rated... Erotica kind of writing.
Totally, right?
And what resulted there was this, I remember this so vividly, this conversation about the psychological Stability of that woman.
Now, mind you, there were so many of our boys, teenage boys from those days in our ministry, who would confess, oh, I found my dad's Playboys or I, you know, went on this nascent internet thing and I found some dirty pictures or whatever.
We never blinked.
I mean, we said, hey, you know, it's great that you're confessing that.
Recommit your life to the Lord.
Repent from those sins.
But, you know, we're so proud of you for being, you know, coming clean from that.
When this young woman asserted, or let me say it this way, when she admitted that she had sort of asserted her sexuality in some way, It was like, not that we were questioning her commitment to Jesus.
It was like we were questioning her psychological stability.
And, you know, that's the kind of thing that, as someone now who's an ex-evangelical, keeps you up at night.
It keeps you up at night feeling guilty about the kinds of ways you helped to reinforce some of these standards.
But more importantly for our conversation today, it really sort of hits home the two conceptions of sexuality between men and women as they're envisioned in evangelical communities.
Yeah, so this young woman who comes to you, she's that much more of a problematic case because she's violating sort of her nature.
And I was looking in some of the materials about some of these groups, and another telling point is one of these organizations that emphasizes sexual purity, they do kind of workshops for men and for women.
Really different curriculum, right?
The men, it's all topics about how to avoid the temptations of pornography and Issues of masturbation and lust and things like that.
And for the women, it involves things like the teaching of, and this is a quote, refusal skills, right?
Their role is to protect their virginity from voracious men.
The nature of voracious men is to seek to exercise their sexuality against women.
Yeah, and this, I mean again, so just going back to my ministry days, this issue was clear and present whenever we would get to the summer and our youth group would have things like Beach Day or go to have a swimming party or something.
There was fierce debates about what bathing suits the girls could wear, right?
Young women, junior high, high school.
The debates were about, well, should we have a strict policy about girls needing to wear a shirt over their bathing suit or only wear a one-piece bathing suit, et cetera, right?
And, you know, you'd always have someone say, well, we always want new kids to come and some of these kids aren't really familiar with the church.
And so we might have a 15 or 16-year-old girl who comes and only has a bikini to swim in.
Do we really want to make her feel uncomfortable or bad about that or tell her, oh, you can't swim?
And so that was kind of persuasive, but there would always be someone who would say, okay, that's great, but what's more important, allowing this new person to swim or protecting our boys from the temptation of lust?
And, you know, more often than not, it was that argument that would win.
The onus was placed on the young women to dress in a way that would not tempt the boys into lust or sexual temptations.
Yeah, and I think this brings us to our point, right?
Because some of you might be listening to me like, that's great, that's interesting about evangelicals, sexual mores, whatever, but so what, right?
If you're not in that world.
But it's that point, because part of what we would suggest is that This double standard and this, the technical term would be sort of this gender essentialism, this notion that these fixed, immutable genders have these completely different biological tendencies, is actually reflected in broader culture, right?
In a culture that still legitimizes predatory male sexuality and excuses male sexual assault.
That, on the one hand, clearly that's reflected within, I think, this evangelical ethos to some extent, right?
But it also then lends religious legitimation to that ongoing cultural structuring, and it legitimates that culture.
And one of the questions that we've considered, that we've been looking at, is why does it seem like evangelicals are willing to give a free pass to powerful white men who behave badly?
Who assault women, who commit sexual assault, and so forth.
And this has been on really clear display recently.
And I think that this is one of the connections.
I think that conception of these fixed gender roles is a central cultural figure.
And it shows this further entanglement with evangelicalism and broader, in particular, conservative and republican culture.
Yeah, I mean, this podcast is called Straight White American Jesus.
We're trying to figure out and explain how white evangelicals have pretty much remained Donald Trump's most vehement religious supporters.
I mean, one of the things that's implicit in the title is that Jesus is male.
And so, you know, one of the things we should say here is that somehow Donald Trump appears More like Jesus to white evangelicals than Barack Obama or anyone else, really.
Well, how is that so?
And, I mean, we've talked about that at length for many episodes now.
One of the things we're trying to get at today is this.
There is a categorical understanding of men as sexually aggressive and a categorical understanding of women as sexually passive.
Women are the protectors of purity.
Men are those who are trying to restrain themselves in order to keep pure.
So, when there is something like allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, a Supreme Court Justice, there's a chance that white evangelicals, including white evangelical women, are going to see that not as a clear-cut case of Kavanaugh's Yes, that's bad, but it fits the categories, and therefore it can be forgiven.
but as a sort of a new attack, a new set of lies from what might be a sexually assertive woman.
Anytime there is a male who is the purveyor or aggressor in a sexual assault, yes, that's bad, but it fits the categories and therefore it can be forgiven.
It's part of the system of sin and repentance. - It fits into the, and we saw this with Kavanaugh, right?
The boys will be boys logic.
And this gets exactly to what you're talking about, this notion, and there's sort of an irony there, that on the one hand, men within evangelicalism are presented as the sexual aggressors, and yet they're sort of somehow passive to their passions or whatever, so the role of women is to not lead into temptation.
Well, I guess, for lack of a better term, the secular version of that are the questions of, well, yeah, but what did she wear?
Or did she choose to be alone with him?
How much had she had to drink?
Did they initiate some sort of sexual encounter and then she says stop?
And this notion that, well, you just can't expect a man to be held responsible in those circumstances, right?
It's their nature to do this.
So much so that you get Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council who says, and this is a quote, that Trump gets a mulligan for extramarital affairs, right?
It's just it's simply a double standard, and it's not just that it's a double standard.
It's that it's so dangerous and pernicious, and you see it in this also just this broader cultural backlash against the Me Too movement.
Well, so I've brought this up when I'm playing Devil's Advocate these days with some of my evangelical friends.
You know, part of the story I've told on this podcast is not only that I was an evangelical growing up and that I was an evangelical minister, but that I actually was married quite young to my high school sweetheart.
We eventually got divorced, and that's a whole other story.
We remained friends, and everything's good there.
But one of the things I bring up with my evangelical friends is, it's very probable that if I walked into your church, And I said, I'm a straight man, and I'm now married to a heterosexual woman.
We'd like to attend your church.
You wouldn't blink.
And then, even if I said, well, just so you know, I'm divorced.
And I didn't get divorced for any other reason except for the fact that, you know, we dated from age 14 and were married until age 24, 25, and we just grew apart.
That's why you wouldn't blink.
Come on in, Brad.
You're in the fold.
You can sing in the choir or do whatever you want.
If I walked in and said, well, I'm here and I'm a gay man, right?
The response would be, well, if you're willing to not be gay, if you're willing to not manifest that sexual identity, then you can join.
If you're willing to be celibate, right?
Identify that way, maybe, if you're quiet about it.
But as long as you're celibate, you don't express that in any concrete, physical way.
So why is that?
And for me, right, what I'm trying to do with that sort of playing devil's advocate with the evangelical friend is to say, categorically you're saying, my sin of divorce is not great, but it makes sense within the theological system.
Whereas, one, a person who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, etc., they are categorically, they are qualitatively Right?
Outside of that system.
So until they're willing to come into the logic of Christian sexuality, then they're excluded.
They cannot be part of the group.
I had a student ask me about the Duggars.
I don't know if you're familiar with the Duggars, but they're the reality television family.
I don't know how many kids there are.
A lot.
Maybe 18 kids.
But, you know, one of the kids was sort of accused and proven to have sexually assaulted his sister.
Siblings.
Yeah, a number of his sisters.
And was quickly forgiven and brought back into the fold.
And I had students just so angry about this.
And I, you know, they were saying, Onishi, I don't get it.
How can this person be brought back into the fold so quickly, and then all of this vitriol be aimed at those in the LGBTQ community?
And my answer was, yes, what he did was wrong.
What he did from the evangelical perspective is sinful.
But he's a male.
He's attracted to females.
He's the aggressor.
And so, yes, it's not okay.
But it makes sense within the system.
Whereas the LGBTQ identity, any non-heterosexual identity, it is excised categorically from the Christian sexuality.
And so, by nature, it is not allowed.
Again, I mean, we're just trying to bring this back, and I'll just throw it over to you, Dan, as we conclude here.
This, I think, helps us make sense of not only the staunch evangelical support after the Kavanaugh hearings, but the ongoing support for Donald Trump, who we've named several times on this podcast.
He's an adulterer, had an affair with an adult performer while his third wife was sort of recovering from giving birth to their son, etc.
I mean, this is not somebody who seems to represent Christian sexual mores, and yet everything, every transgression he's committed makes sense within the Christian sexuality system of ethics.
Yeah, and so I want to make sort of two points.
The first is, bringing this even broader than Trump, I think it's no accident that then evangelicals overwhelmingly support the political party that seeks to roll back women's access to contraception, access to abortion, that basically women who want to control their own sexuality, express that freely, control their bodies, that the party that seems to sort of oppose that is what draws evangelicals.
Or that white evangelicals are disproportionately represented among legislators, right?
There are far more legislators who are evangelical than the general U.S.
population, so it's a really widespread association.
And the final point I would make, and it's worth noting, is that we should say that these issues are also making really interesting conversations happen within majority white evangelicalism at present.
There is The Church Too movement that has started within evangelicalism that has really started to question, in a way that I don't think has really happened before, these categories of gender essentialism that have posed, from within the evangelical community itself, questions about whether or not this form of evangelical theology doesn't plant the seeds and lay the groundwork for these kinds of abuses.
So I want to be really clear, we see that that's going on as well.
As always, it's not a monolithic group, but there is still this pervasive logic at work.
Well, but what you're saying, what you're pointing to, and I think we'll get to this in the next two episodes, is the fact that there has been pretty strong resistance to the Me Too movement in white evangelical camps.
However, the Me Too movement has brought to bear issues of sexual assault to the white evangelical church, and so we are seeing those discussions, right?
However, on the whole, Our hope is that our discussion today will help our listeners understand not only white evangelical support for someone like Trump, who is seemingly a sexual predator, not only the ongoing support for someone like Brett Kavanaugh, after the credible accusations made by Dr. Ford and other women, but also the resistance of white evangelicals to something like the Me Too movement.
And so, in our mind, This all sadly makes sense from within the kind of Christian sexual ethics that we've outlined today and as I think you can tell that we've both experienced as young people.
I think we'll leave it there and we will go to our interview.
Thanks Dan.
Thank you Brad.
All right, so we are here talking with the Rev.
Sarah Butteau.
She is the pastor of the sort of storied and historic First Churches of Northampton, Massachusetts.
For those who don't know, it's kind of a weird name, but it was a union of First Baptist Church and First United Church of Christ.
And so first, what I want to say is I'm going to introduce Sarah.
And Sarah, like Brad and myself, has a background coming from an evangelical context, is now a minister in a progressive church, in a progressive denomination.
And so I'll bounce it over.
Sarah, if you'd introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about how you went from evangelical as a youth to where you're at now in your ministry.
Okay.
Well, I did grow up in New York, and I just want to say that growing up as an Evangelical Christian in New York is very different, I think, from growing up in the Bible Belt as an Evangelical Christian.
Because I think if you grow up in the South, pretty much everybody you know is part of some sort of Evangelical Church.
Where I grew up, I was in a high school of 2,000 students.
There were 12 Protestant students in that high school.
Wow!
Most of my classmates were Jewish or Catholic, and what that meant was that according to what I was being taught, most if not all of them were not saved.
Oh, right.
So I grew up feeling like there were maybe 12 of us that were saved, and of those 12, I was pretty sure 8 really were.
So we're probably the last.
I grew up feeling very much like a minority, actually, as an evangelical, which is interesting, because that plays into that narrative of evangelicals feeling like they're on the margins, even though most of them grow up in places where they are very much the majority.
Right.
So anyway, I grew up, and I think in some ways that really forged my faith as something very, very strong, because I had to be able to articulate why I believed what I believed.
And I took it really, really seriously, and I think I took it so seriously that I actually sort of was hard to handle in my own church context, because here was this young woman who was being taught to be submissive and silent and just kind of toe the line and hopefully grow up to get married someday.
And I was, I really engaged with the ideas, and I really engaged with the narrative, and I took it very seriously, and so seriously that my now brother-in-law says that the nickname for me amongst the kids was Robo-Christian.
Like, I was just so into it, and I carried my Bible everywhere.
I would be, when they did the see with the pole thing, I don't know if you know that.
Yeah, I remember that.
I'm the only kid out of the flagpole on that day at my public high school with my youth pastor in his beat-up little Chevy by the sidewalk, like, go Sarah, you can do this!
Anyway, so I grew up in that context and I didn't get my call to ministry until I went off to college, and I'll just say that I ended up going to Smith College here in Northampton, which is a very, very progressive, liberal college.
It's not exactly an evangelical hotbed, right?
No, no.
When I got into college, what everybody said when I told them at church was that they would pray for me.
They were very concerned, especially that I would become gay.
That would happen.
And I think it was getting to Smith and meeting people outside of that little bubble that really opened my eyes to there being another way to do things.
And another way to think.
And meeting all of these Libyans who don't have horns and tails and they're wonderful people.
And I really just began to question things.
And I think the biggest question for me growing up in my context going to a place like Smith was actually the question of eternal salvation and who is saved.
And I was at a campus crusade retreat, and I was talking about this, and I was just very concerned, because it just didn't make sense to me.
Because, like I said, if you grew up in the South, pretty much everybody you know is saved.
Where I grew up, pretty much everybody I knew was going to hell.
And that just didn't jive with my understanding of God.
And then you grow up singing all of these praise and worship songs.
I was saying to Dan before that Jesus Is My Boyfriend songs, God Is Love songs, all these songs that really, really touch your heart and bring you into this space where God is the most loving thing you could possibly imagine.
But then everybody around me is going to suffer eternal conscious torment because they don't believe in Jesus the way I believe in Jesus.
That just didn't work for me.
So I brought this up again at my Campus Crusade retreat, and one of the leaders took me outside, and she said, Sarah, do you know what your problem is?
And I said, What's my problem?
And she said, You love people more than you love God.
You've got to get on the same page here.
God will take care of it.
You've just got to trust God.
And if all those people are going to hell, all those people are going to hell.
Just stick with God.
You'll learn to love God.
And so I went back to my dorm room, and I got down on my knees, and I actually renounced my salvation.
And I said to God, I can't go to Heaven until these Elvis people go to Hell, so I'm going to hang out here on the outside.
You know I love you, but I just cannot go to Heaven on those terms, knowing that that many people are not going to make it, so I'm going to stay with those people.
And so I renounced my salvation.
I just can't be saved, but that's what it means.
And that's when my call to ministry came.
Wow.
And my call to ministry was to go to all of those people who have been told, for whatever That they are not loved, they're not worthy, that they have a place in the heart of God.
And so the next day, I had never seen a woman pastor.
I didn't know this was a possibility.
I applied to Divinity Schools, and it kind of took off from there.
And when I told my pastor back home that I felt called to ministry and was going to go to Divinity Schools, He absolutely saw that in me, and he couldn't deny that that was there, and he said, you go, but you can never come back.
You'll have to leave us to follow that call.
But he said, you go with my blessings.
He could just see that those gifts were there and there was no way to hold me back Wow No, and it's I mean I can tell you it's a very powerful story sitting here listening to it You touched on a number of really moving things there that would be worth pursuing, but our focus is specifically gender and gender roles within evangelicalism.
You're getting into that, right?
This notion of a kind of fixed gender differences that, in terms of church practice, mean that for many evangelicals women can't be pastors.
But we've also been talking about how this also plays out in terms of sexuality and sort of embodied identity.
This relates, I think, to your experience with LGBTQ people in college.
These very specific notions that women are one kind of sexual being and men are another, and there really isn't within evangelical culture a place for people that don't fit into that heterosexist binary.
But one of the things we talked about in this episode is that there's this sense that men are kind of sexually aggressive by nature.
Women are sexually passive.
And we suggest that this sort of reflects dominant culture in a lot of really problematic ways, but also impacts it.
And I'm just wondering if you'd be willing to share, how does that play out in your ministry?
Your ministry, particularly with women who struggle with fitting into that model of sexuality or this notion that the sort of natural role of women is to fend off men and the way that that can legitimate sort of violent actions and so on.
I'm wondering, do you encounter that in your ministry?
Do you encounter that in particular in your ministries with women?
Well, I've encountered it very much in my life as a woman growing up in the church and then moving on and moving to the world.
One of the things that became pretty clear to me as I sort of grew out of the evangelical subculture and into the larger culture is that we absolutely, within the church I think as a whole, need to develop a new sexual ethic, some new way of doing things.
Because the whole idea of waiting until you're married to have sex in a culture where people don't marry until their mid to late twenties is really unrealistic.
But also really damaging when you do things like you take teenagers in at a very young age, make them covenant, make them promise and swear before God and their family and everybody they care about that they're not going to engage in sex, and then send them out into the world with these messages.
That's the thing, that's like the most important thing, that you don't break that promise.
How anybody can make it all the way to the finish line without breaking that promise Almost impossible.
So I saw over and over again, you know, people breaking this promise that they made.
And that part made me really angry because it felt like it lacked such integrity.
It was putting way too much pressure on these kids, myself included.
And also, I'll tell you one story about a young woman I was talking with who did wait until she was married to have sex.
And then called me about six months after she got married and I said, how's it going?
And she said, she was really depressed.
And, and I said, well, what do you think it is?
And she said, well, I've been thinking a lot about it.
And I feel like there was something really special about me before I got married.
There was something almost magical.
Like I had this power that there was something desirable about me because I was still a virgin and all of those things.
And that, that, that was my thing.
Like I was holding onto that.
And then I got married and now, now that's gone.
It's like all my power's gone.
I have nothing.
What am I anymore?
I'm just a wife.
And it made me think, you know, what we were doing back then, or is still being done, is that we fetishize virginity.
We give it all of this power and this, I don't know, this cachet that doesn't make sense.
And then once that's taken away, whether it's taken away before marriage or after marriage, If that was the most important thing, then what's left?
Where does that leave you as a woman?
And I thought, wow, it's such a strange place to place so much worth for a person. - And tell me if I'm wrong about this.
I mean, because you're touching on this, and we talked about this earlier as well, I think there's a real double standard in that discourse.
I feel like it's there in what you're talking about, that the purity, quote-unquote purity, is for both men and women, but there's a sense in which it cuts more deeply for women, right?
I feel like there's this Often the sense that a woman who doesn't make it to marriage, as you say, or in the case of this woman you're talking about, even after, that they're sort of, I don't know, defiled or broken in a way that is not true for men in the same way.
Am I right in that, do you think?
I think that's absolutely true, and I don't know why that is.
I don't understand how that works, but in all my years of marrying couples, I have met a few women who have made it to marriage, but I've never met a man.
Oh, wow.
Ever.
Ever.
And also, there was such a focus on this growing up in my youth group.
And Brad, you were a youth pastor, so I don't know if you found yourself having a focus on it.
But I felt like all we ever talked about in youth group was how we weren't supposed to be having sex.
And I finally blew up one day.
And I just said, could we just stop talking about it if you don't want us to do it?
I mean, can we talk about something else?
But this is all we talk about!
You cram all these teenagers into a basement, you know, sitting them all next to each other, and then just lecture them for 45 minutes a Sunday about not having sex.
It's like, all we can think about anyway, and it's all you talk about.
So, it's just the most bizarre, bizarre combination.
If you're serious about this, it's like, I don't know.
Let's go run a mile or something, but let's not sit here on top of each other just talking about it all the time.
Well, it's funny because I went to an evangelical university and we had chapel three times a week.
And my roommate, my first year, was actually a guy who was not really an evangelical, but he'd come to the school to play baseball.
And he looked at me after the first semester, you know, we're on our way to chapel, and he's like, why?
I'm so tired of going to these chapels and hearing about how I'm not supposed to have sex.
Like, I really don't want to talk about this anymore.
And it was the same thing.
You know, he just didn't get it.
He's like, I don't want to do this in terms of, I just don't want to hear about it anymore.
You know, it really points to this preoccupation with that which is prohibited in some way, and that which is, you know, that which is not allowed.
Yeah, go ahead.
And that preoccupation, I mean, when male voices are the only voices being heard, right?
Because the women aren't allowed to speak.
And that's all they're talking about.
And what they're saying is that that sort of missionary position Straight up intercourse is the thing you cannot do.
That's really interesting to me, because I was thinking about this from a female perspective.
That's probably the least interesting form of sex you can have.
And yet, amongst all of the youth I was growing up with, that was the one thing you couldn't do, but you could pretty much get away with everything else and still on a technicality, you know, still be a virgin.
So I think Probably all of us were sexually active to some extent, but we were thinking that wasn't really sex.
And then you get married and you actually have sex.
It's like, oh, that was that.
That's what we were waiting for.
Whatever.
Yeah.
One of the things we've.
No, that's I mean, and that's some of where you're going with that is is something we've talked about a little bit today, which has been The idea that, right, yes, you're supposed to refrain from any sort of lustful interactions, and that could be any number of things.
However, it's kind of an open secret in church youth groups that teenagers are going to somehow slip up, and hopefully, right, you don't slip up, but if you do, we're hoping that you do so in a way that technically you remain a virgin.
And for me, one of the components there is that We have a system, right, that grades kind of the severity of sexual sin.
And as long as you're in that system, we know how to punish you, we know how to shame you, we know how to forgive you.
And yet, and this goes to some of the things you talked about when you about your interactions with fellow students when you got to Smith, is if you step outside of that system, We will shame you, and we will exclude you, but we have no means of understanding the cycle of forgiveness and repentance.
If you fall out of the heterosexual system of sexual sinfulness, You're just qualitatively excluded from this whole idea of repentance and forgiveness, and it's not until you agree to enter into the system that we can understand you.
And I guess for Dan and I, that helps to explain some of the ongoing evangelical support for powerful men who are sexual predators and accused of sexual assault, people like Donald Trump and people like now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
I mean, does that make sense in terms of your Yeah, because I think what it comes down to is power and control.
That if you can control people, you have power over them.
And if you have power over them, you can control them.
It's sort of this vicious cycle.
And so when you have, like, women falling in love with women, all of a sudden Well, men have no place in that, and men aren't necessary, and that's very threatening.
And, you know, it just seems like lesbianism is so outside what they can control that it must be wrong.
There's just this really intense desire to control and manipulate police, especially women's bodies.
And I think it just comes down to this The patriarchal need to keep everybody in line and keep that hierarchy in line and keep women in their place.
And women who don't need men at all.
Women who need men the way fish need a bicycle are probably the most dangerous women of all.
Yeah, and jumping back in here, and this is Dan again, obviously.
You know, you mentioned earlier, tying in with what Brad said, this notion of only men's voices, right?
Which is, I think, present within evangelicalism to an extent.
But as you're indicating, I think it's also been a part of broader cultural conceptions, right?
Which is why every time there are these accusations, there are those questions of of what she was wearing or how much she drank or whatever.
And so I guess my question is, you know, from within your ministry context, within your context, I know you just sort of plugged in broadly, you know, culturally, what has been the effect of the Me Too movement as you've experienced it as a minister, as a woman, as somebody who is concerned about women's issues for all women?
What do you think has been the most notable effects of that as you've experienced it?
From a pastoral standpoint and just my own personal standpoint, I think the biggest effect has been women realizing that almost all of us can say me too on some level.
Almost all of us have had to deal with something we shouldn't have had to deal with.
And for various reasons, we've just pushed it down and moved forward.
From a pastoral standpoint, the amount of pastoral care I've had to do and the stories I've been listening to from men and women.
Men confessing, women just saying, I've been carrying this and for so long I don't even know what to do with it anymore.
So I think the positive effect is that the stories are coming to light so that they can be dealt with.
The confessions are coming to light so they can be repented of.
But this is, I guess it's just the pervasiveness of it.
I have, I don't think I know any women who don't have a story to share.
Wow.
One of the things I think some of our listeners might be wondering, you know, and if we have listeners out there who are not Christians, who have wondered for a long time, why do I have to, every time I think about politics in my country, confront an evangelical, every time I think about politics in my country, confront an evangelical, usually a And then more broadly, you know, I'm not a Christian person.
Maybe I'm not a religious person.
Maybe I am.
But every time I have to sort of reckon with my own culture, I have to deal with usually Protestants and Christians in general.
So there may be those folks out there.
There's also those folks out there who are likely on the margins of evangelicalism and sort of wondering about its, you know, tenability for their own lives.
And I guess one question I'd love to ask For those folks out there, what are the resources from your view, Sarah, in the Christian tradition for a healthy and vibrant and progressive sexual ethic?
You know, like, can you tell us a story about how Christianity is not just about sexual repression and sexual kind of patriarchal systems?
You know, does that make sense?
Yes, it does.
Well, this is going to sound really ironic.
But I think Scripture.
I think if you go back in Scripture and look at it, not through the lens you were raised in, but through a different lens, you begin to see that, wow, this is a lot more egalitarian than hierarchical.
I mean, we're taught, most of us growing up in a tradition, we're taught that, you know, women submit to men and men are the head of the household and all that stuff.
But when you go back to those verses, especially in the epistles, you see that That what they're doing, the whole patriarchy was the system of the day.
And they're saying, you know, wives submit to your husbands, or slaves submit to your masters.
But they're saying, do it freely.
And then husbands, you submit to your wives.
You love your wives the way Christ loved the Church.
Remember that you have a master in heaven when you're dealing with your slaves.
It's this profound way of turning this patriarchal hierarchical system on its head and saying that we all need to submit to one another.
In Christ there is no male or female, slave or free, Jew or Greek, that we are, whether we are masters or slaves, husbands or wives, we are all to basically give our lives for one another.
And that's right there.
And somehow, somehow, Christianity for eons has just held on to the idea that, oh, okay, well, we're just going to keep doing it the way it was always done, and men are in charge, and masters are in charge, but that's not what those verses are saying at all.
They're saying the exact opposite, actually.
It's not about who's in charge.
It's about how you can use all of your power to serve one another.
And that empowers women, and that empowers this place, and that empowers anybody on the underside to say, oh, I am a human being.
I am made in the image of God.
I have dignity.
And I have agency, and I can use that agency to willingly be kind, to willingly be helpful, to willingly be part of the system.
So, I think Scripture's a great resource.
And there are wonderful writers out there, people like Rachel Held Evans, who I would recommend, you know, go get her latest book, Inspired, and read through that.
Sarah Bessie.
There's a lot of wonderful people right now doing this work.
Who take Scripture very seriously, and I think those answers are right there.
They're right there.
Well, Sarah, I think we're going to wind it down.
I want to thank you for your time, and for a different perspective, right?
Somebody who is in this world and doing this, and is not just the ivory tower academic like my friend Brad and I. I also will say, I feel like growing up with an evangelicalism, I didn't really, outside of Catholicism, I didn't have a view that there were I feel like you're giving us a fresh perspective for some of our listeners who may not know that, right?
it meant that they weren't really Christians, right?
They didn't really believe things and so on.
And so I just wanna, I feel like you're giving us a fresh perspective for some of our listeners who may not know that, right?
When they look at the American religious landscape, they can get a pretty sort of limited view of what that entails.
And so I really wanna thank you for giving us a very different kind of perspective and sharing so freely with your experiences.
So thank you so much!
You're welcome, and I guess as we're reflecting on this, I just say that I think that's the importance of having other voices interpreting Scripture, having female voices, having GLBTQ voices, having voices across the racial spectrum.
If you just are hearing white, heterosexual, cisgender men interpret Scripture, you're going to get a particular read on it.
But when you bring other voices into it, I think that's when Scripture really comes alive.
And I don't think we have to be afraid of Scripture.
I think it has beautiful things, but it takes multiple voices and multiple eyes and interpretations to really bring it to life.
So I would encourage you, if you're out there thinking that it's there's no place for you in the church or it's time to walk away, find some of those other voices.
There are other churches and other voices and there is a home for you.
So I hope you find it. - Well, and that's a great piece of insight and it leads me back to the very first thing Dan said Dan mentioned that you are in ministry at a historic church in Northampton, but we never really got the story of what makes it historic.
So, just on that last note, would you mind just sort of closing with telling us a little bit about the history of your church and how it's up?
It's pretty wonderful that you get to be in ministry there?
It's pretty amazing.
My church is over 350 years old.
I believe our first pastor was Solomon Stoddard, who was kind of blacklisted by the other Protestant ministers in Massachusetts because he believed in a more open communion table and welcoming more people to the table.
That got reversed by his son-in-law, who is Jonathan Edwards, who was one of the instigators of the Great Awakening in New England.
The foremost intellectual of that time, and that's probably what most people would associate with First Churches, is Jonathan Edwards.
But we've been in this church, and we've been believing that there is more light and truth to break forth from the Word of God for 350 years, and that has brought us to a very, very progressive place.
So progressive that if you cross the street to get to our church, you're going to cross over a rainbow crosswalk, which is a tribute to the GLBP community.
And we're a very progressive congregation.
Now, I don't know what Jonathan Edwards would make of us, but I think we're actually very true to his legacy because we really are mining Scripture, continuing to go back to it, seeing it as a living Word, and using it to minister to the people in our community and in our midst.
That's a little bit about who we are.
I just love that story, because I no longer identify as a Christian person, but when I think of your community, I love it.
It makes me smile every time, because I just love the idea that Jonathan Edwards' most famous sermon is, And now, if one wants to enter your church, they cross the rainbow sidewalk and they are greeted by a female minister.
To me, that is wonderful.
Yes.
Sarah, thank you so much.
I just want to say there's two pastors, a man and a woman, and we are co-pastors.
