Know Your Role and Shut Your Mouth
Talk to pretty much any deconstructed millennial woman about why she left the church and one of the first things she’ll bring up is 1990s and early 2000s “purity culture.” Also known as “modesty culture” or “courtship culture,” an entire generation of girls in the conservative evangelical church were purposefully taught to fear human sexuality—even healthy sexuality—and to see themselves as the primary responsible party, should a boy ever look upon them with lust. “Don’t cause a weaker brother to stumble,” they were told, because men are designed to be aggressors, and it’s the woman’s responsibility to proactively prevent the aggressive, sinful desires of other people. The unhealthy understanding of sex behind this view, in all its ridiculous binary thinking, can be found in Doug Wilson’s now infamous description of the sexual act, in his 2012 book, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man (for which he has a heretical view of authority and submission within the Trinity he uses as support):
In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts… True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.1
Or take John Piper’s legalistic and creepy views on physically fit women from his book with the founder of the Center for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Wayne Grudem, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, released by a premier Reformed publishing house, Crossway. It would be hilarious if Piper wasn’t dead serious:
Consider what is lost when women attempt to assume a more masculine role by appearing physically muscular and aggressive. It is true that there is something sexually stimulating about a muscular, scantily clad young woman pumping iron in a health club. But no woman should be encouraged by this fact. For it probably means the sexual encounter that such an image would lead to is something very hasty and volatile, and in the long run unsatisfying. The image of a masculine musculature may beget arousal in a man, but it does not beget several hours of moonlight walking with significant, caring conversation. The more women can arouse men by doing typically masculine things, the less they can count on receiving from men a sensitivity to typically feminine needs.2
Rejection of purity culture is not solely the domain of the deconstructed; some of its most vocal opponents are theologically conservative outlets, such as Every Woman a Theologian, which offers multiple resources to scripturally counter the purity culture narrative, without compromising on Christian ethics. Such realities are not convenient for those whose bread and butter was the movement, though, so it’s much easier for them to stick their fingers in their ears and continue full steam ahead. This is what Grudem’s successor at CBMW, Denny Burk, did in a recent opinion piece for WORLD, in which he recounts how the former evangelical influencer Jen Hatmaker has now rebranded herself as a deconstruction influencer.
This is not a defense of Hatmaker, who is selling the equally destructive ends of unfettered self-actualization for a profit, after years of selling cultural evangelicalism for a profit (there’s a Venn diagram of an issue there that neither Hatmaker nor Burk want to address, and that I’ll leave for another day). What I take issue with is Burk’s statement, “Hatmaker sneers at the so-called ‘purity culture’ that she was raised in and has now left behind.” The last person who has room to use this dismissive framing is the head of an organization that was one of the most pervasive promoters of purity culture at its height. The quote from Hatmaker that Burk describes as “sneering” is not just an unwarranted, sinful rejection of the Christian sexual ethic, but contains a sentiment that I have heard from multiple conservative Christian women harmed by purity culture:
We were taught there’s zero sex before marriage. Our dads would give us what were called purity rings. They went on our left hands and that was the placeholder for our purity until some man put a wedding ring on it. We all went through this curriculum called True Love Waits. It was abstinence-only, and that instruction was baked in with fear and shame. It was scary to imagine getting on not just the wrong side of our parents, of our faith communities, but on the wrong side of God. ... We were scared to death. A whole generation of us came into marriage absolutely freaked out around sex. We had no idea what the hell we were doing, or what we were supposed to be doing once we could finally have it.
Compare this to conservative Christian writer Phylicia Masonheimer’s description of her short book, Freedom from Legalism:
I too lived in the shadows of purity culture, adhering to rules and judging deviations. But when doubt cast its shadows, I left legalism behind. I know the pain it inflicts, the false sense of security it offers, and the tantalizing temptation of its shortcuts. But in Christ, there is a path to purity and holiness that nurtures relationship over rules.
It’s far easier for personalities from organizations like CBMW to hold up people like Hatmaker as supposed proof that rejection of their legalistic views is solely the domain of Progressive Christians and the deconstructed, rather than have to deal with the messy truth of the hurt their movement continues to leave in its wake. It’s not just people like Hatmaker pulling people towards deconstruction, it’s a loud and aggressive, reactionary and legalistic view of the faith being portrayed as far more normative than it really is pushing people away from healthy Christianity towards deconstruction. A true Christian response to the phenomenon of deconstruction, one that is concerned with showing love for the lost over protecting cultural and institutional comfort, is to genuinely seek to understand where the fallible human beings of American cultural evangelicalism went wrong and to course correct.
Douglas Wilson, Fidelity: How to Be a One-Woman Man, Canon Press, 2012, via https://dougwilsonsays.com/blog/a-man-conquors-a-woman-through-the-sexual-act/
John Piper, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Crossway Books, 2003.