It's a God Thing
Looks like the main thing Carla thinks Joshua got wrong is that he's male. She doesn't get around to saying what he got wrong, other than maleness and perhaps youth or a desire to revive his money-making opportunities. She disparages his self-examination, but at least he is self-examining. Carla could use some of that too.
So what is wrong with avoiding romantic situations outside of marriage? I can understand that some may not have like the book by Joshua Harris, but Carla certainly doesn't offer any help either. Joshua's central premise was no sex before marriage, and how to make it easier to resist. It is written from the male perspective because, duh, he's male. Carla's point seems to be that sex outside of marriage is okay, and the male viewpoint is, well, male. Carla is twice wrong, but God is right and Joshua is okay.
I'd be willing to bet that part of the reason Adam ate the fruit too is because of bitching like this. We don't know for sure, but given that men have had to listen to stuff like "give shape to the oppression by naming it so that we can all envision change and move toward a polycentric approach in which all voices have place and centrality" for centuries, I know I would've said, "Just gimme the damn fruit already."
If you grew up in Evangelical purity culture during the 1980s and ’90s, the name Joshua Harris is likely familiar. Harris’ first book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, was a best-selling part of the abstinence movement.
Harris was 21 when he wrote the book. It sold 1.5 million copies.
Recently, a woman negatively impacted by his writing confronted Harris on Twitter. The conversation set him on an odyssey of sorts. He’s started filming a documentary to explore the impact of his book.
Last November, he did a TEDx talk about the process titled, “Strong Enough to be Wrong.” In his opening remarks, Harris wonders what it means to admit you’re wrong “when the stakes are high; when what you’ve got wrong could affect …”
I expected the next phrase to be, “so many people’s lives and wellbeing.” As a woman who was taught that my primary role in Christian culture was to protect the men around me by being sexually modest and chaste and personally non-threatening—gentle and quiet, I have been deeply impacted by purity culture and voices like Harris’. My experience and the experiences of those like me are ostensibly why he’s reconsidering his stance.
Instead Harris says, “When what you’ve got wrong could affect your livelihood or your involvement in a community or even your sense of identity.” It seems Harris is primarily interested in exploring the impact of his mistake on himself.
Harris’ book, the impact of that book, his documentary, his TEDx talk and the responses to those are all part of a larger cultural conversation about power, accountability and patriarchy, particularly in the Christian sphere. Harris is not the problem. His reaction, however, can be instructive in naming the problem
Harris’ concern over his platform as the primary point of his investigation is indicative of a deeper issue. The centering of his own experience in his TEDx talk, even his using the word “strong” to define his shift in perspective in the title, reasserts patriarchal norms.
This is a moment when Harris could reflect on the systems that put an inexperienced male voice into the world as an expert on relationships and sexuality. Where he could highlight other voices articulating the impact of the movement he was swept into—of whom there are plenty, many of them female—and begin to articulate what exactly the shift in his perspective has been. Instead he seems mostly concerned with figuring out how to hold onto a platform that seems to be slipping, how to make his growth the story.
It’s worth noting again that Harris was 21 when he wrote this book. Changing one’s mind about an opinion one held at 21 is hardly notable. Harris was a part of a bigger patriarchal ideal that used his young, charismatic voice as a bullhorn to his contemporaries. That he rode that wave to Evangelical stardom isn’t exactly shocking. What 21-year-old, hoping to gain influence, wouldn’t have?
Harris’ mistake is not that he changed his mind. It is only partly that when he was 21, he parroted the thinking of the time in ways that negatively impacted lives of thousands of people. His primary mistake is that even when he’s addressing a necessary evolution in thinking, he doesn’t move himself out of the center, which makes me wonder how much his thinking really has evolved.
We are at a moment of change in which patriarchal oppression is beginning to shift. To make any change like this, we must gain observational power over the patterns that have felt like givens by naming those patterns and seeing where change is possible. In Christian culture particularly, the centrality of the male voice has been viewed as a given rather than a pattern, and we now have an opportunity to name that and see it clearly.
This sexism in Christian culture is so ingrained it is almost invisible. It is the idea that the male identity is the fulcrum on which all things, especially female identity, pivot. Without the male center, all is unhinged and purposeless. It is this centering of the male voice and experience that creates the level of obtuseness that allows Harris to be as concerned with his platform as he is with those impacted by his work.
In this case, platform is a male birthright. It is a given that a man should maintain voice and speak to the issue—even when he is the issue. It is the assumption of centrality that allows Harris and others, who have done far more damage than he, to be more interested in holding onto power and platform than in truly understanding why they were wrong by deferring to the voices of women who can tell them.
In this case, it is time for the female voice to speak—to give shape to the oppression by naming it so that we can all envision change and move toward a polycentric approach in which all voices have place and centrality—not to pull the male center down but to center more voices.
It is polycentrism, the elevation of all voices, that creates accountability and perspective. The phrase, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” (John Dalberg-Acton) is almost a truism at this point but it is also true. As long as power is centered in the male it is likely to corrupt. That is not to say that every man is corrupt; it is to say that when power has a single center it is likely to become power over rather than power with. Power with requires a spreading of influence so that power over becomes unlikely if not impossible.
It is this shared power that makes abuse and exclusion unlikely and is, I believe, the evolution in thinking necessary for Harris and others like him to participate in the undoing of the abusive power of sexism in Christianity.
Have you ever read an article by a woman and thought, "This sounds like it could have been said by Eve?"
I clicked on the link because I had read Joshua's book a long time ago and he made a lot of sense. I disagreed with him on some of the points though. For instance, it is hard not to actually date in our modern culture. However I thought it was a good idea to modify the dating idea with avoiding too much alone time and minimizing romantic interludes. So I was hoping to hear from a woman's viewpoint what else Joshua got wrong.
My hopes were dashed. Apparently what Carla thought Joshua got wrong was that a) he's male and b) he was 21 when he wrote the book. Maybe there's a c) in there too because she thinks Joshua is just trying to revive his money-making opportunities or "figuring out how to hold onto a platform that seems to be slipping, how to make his growth the story."
As with many articles published in Relevant, Scripture was conspicuously absent. Not that there is a great deal of Scripture that comes to bear on dating. But there is quite a bit on male-female rolls and relationships, which it seems Carla is ignoring. What I get from her writing is that she wants to elevate the woman's power and voice by using males as a stepladder.
Eve was deceived. Carla seems to be a chip off the old block. We don't know where her ideas are coming from, except we can see they don't come from the Bible. There's no support. All of us will individually answer for our sin, but men will also have to answer for their leadership or lack of it. That's why we have a "patriarchy." It has privilege. It has authority. And it has a great deal of responsibility and accountability. I have frequently said that when I have to answer for my life's choices to God, the first question I can imagine Him asking is, "So Bruce. How's the wife and kids?" I will have to answer for what I did or didn't do to bring them closer to God. They may not have followed, but that doesn't give me an excuse for not doing what God told me to do in teaching His Word and ways.
This is absent in the feminist (Christian or otherwise) whining about the patriarchy.
Oh sure. There are many males who abuse their authority. There are many who simply abuse women. But the existence of failures does not make success any less desirable or attainable. Changes need to be made. They won't, however, be made on the basis of feminist verbiage. The only way any changes will be made is by taking in the whole of God's Word and allowing the Spirit to write it on a heart of flesh.
I could hear Eve as if she was the one writing the article. "Your male patriarchy is oppressing me." "It is polycentrisim, the elevation of all voices, that creates accountability and perspective." "You have to listen to me because I'm a woman and you are a sexist." "You don't respect my opinions because I'm a woman." Apparently her voice should be heard because she's a woman. Not because she makes sense or because she is reminding us of things that God said. Not even because she has something to say. She should talk "to give shape to the oppression by naming it so that we can all envision change and move toward a polycentric approach in which all voices have place and centrality-not to pull the male center down but to center more voices."
If I was Adam, and Eve came at me with this kind of long-winded carping, I would've eaten the fruit just to get her to shut up.
Shalom
Bruce
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Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
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