Clearing the Air
Introduction
My goal in talking about the roles of men and women is to offer hope and comfort by pointing struggling women to God’s word, so they can see God’s heart for them in the beautiful gospel of Jesus Christ. Since my goal is to be helpful and not sensational, I don’t want any “gotcha” moments. So in this first installment, I will start with sharing a few of my personal experiences, and then dismantle some of the unhelpful rhetoric present in much of the online survivor community, as I have experienced it. Rather than tiptoeing around these ideas, I want to immediately address them, opening up my ability to write and speak freely and clearly moving forward on this contentious topic. Much of what I will touch on briefly here I plan to unfold much more fully in subsequent installments.
My Past Experience
I experienced much abuse and harmful teaching since I was a little girl in various churches, and these experiences have shaped who I am today, and why I care so much about confronting a topic so controversial. To help get me started, here’s a non-exhaustive list, and not even the worst, of the things I experienced over the years:
As a preteen, I was told in youth group not be a Bathsheba because it was her fault that David sinned as he did. It’s hard to explain what this did in my young heart into my adulthood because of the weight of inappropriate responsibility this put on me to feel the blame for the of graphic sexual harassment I subsequently experienced multiple times over the years. I was also constantly scared that I could make a brother stumble without even knowing it.
I was told I had the spirit of Jezebel and that I would never find a godly husband if I were to stay un-submissive.
I was taught that I always needed a spiritual male “covering” over me (controlling me) and without it, I would be outside of God’s will for my life and in danger. (This is similar to the umbrellas of protection idea from Bill Gothard and the IBLP.)
I dated a Bill Gothard influenced guy who told me my calling was to help him with his calling.
In the group I joined after I left the cult, the pastor’s wife told me that I was stumbling block to all women because I had been in law school.
I was told by a pastor and his wife during a “counseling” session that the most important thing God delivered me from when I left the cult was not really the abuse, but a life of being an ungodly woman, and that he was delivering me to a life of biblical womanhood. So I became a “stay-at-home daughter” and was eventually crushed under the weight of it all.
The pastor told me that he had been observing me interacting with the other girls in the church, and that I was different than them, and too expressive. My expressive personality was worldly and I had probably gotten that way from being in a classroom with other men in college and then law school and that I needed to change my personality and become more meek and quiet, like the other women at church.
The pastor warned me about blogging because as a woman, I should not be writing and teaching in that manner, since I wasn’t following Titus 2. By God’s grace, I never stopped writing, but this same pastor met with Steve before we were even dating, and warned him that I had a blog, “You should know, she has a blog.”
I was taught generally taught that all women are submitted to all men and are by nature inferior to them.
I was taught that identity was to be a homemaker and child bearer.
I learned that my home’s cleanliness was a reflection of my godliness and spiritual state.
My pastor told me that my interests in theology and (at the time) politics were masculine.
I was not allowed to ask questions out loud during Sunday School, so if I wanted to ask questions, I had to write them down for a man to read.
My pastor told me that he only spends about 2-3 minutes max talking to the women at church because any longer could be dangerous.
I learned many unhealthy and abusive teachings on what biblical submission looks like in marriage that I will save specifics of for later.
And so much more! ***Gesturing expressively*** (To spite the point above about my “masculine” influenced personality, of course!)
Past and Present Collide
Now that I have proven that I have enough lived experience to discuss this topic, I want to move on to my experience after this.
If you’ve listened to my podcast for a while, you might remember that there was a little series of episodes with this as a theme running through it for a while, and then came the October when I had gotten so triggered that I was reaching a breaking point, especially when I listened to Osbaldo Valdez’s commentary on how he and the late Todd Bordow became egalitarian.
For some context, Todd had become a trusted voice as I was trying to make sense of the things I had experienced in the church as a woman. I listened to his podcast, The Glory Cloud, as he exposited texts that had formerly been used to abuse and control me, and he painted a beautiful picture of men and women in the church, one I still hold to now. He became a friend, too, as I had him on my podcast a couple of times. In our last conversation, just a few weeks before his passing, he spoke kind words of encouragement to me. Just a short time later, his death impacted me greatly. Then finding out from Osbaldo that he had apparently become an egalitarian truly sent me spiraling.
I bring it all up by name because I think it’s important to name things like this, especially because there were quite a few others who were strongly influenced by Todd Bordow. I also do not wish to malign his name or the great impact of his ministry over the years, but to give an idea of the culture in the survivor movement at the time, and why I was so deeply troubled by the podcasts episodes after his death.
There was a kind of chemical reaction between my unprocessed trauma and the many voices in the internet, in books, and podcasts, telling me a formula for just how oppressed women are and how terrible men are to women in general. My algorithm on social media was giving me a lot of material on the way that men are generally emotionally neglectful and possibly abusive, and how they don’t carry the mental load. It is just a symptom of the patriarchal system we are stuck in. Once I had ingested enough of that topic, I was triggered into suspecting (not fully believing, of course) my husband didn’t care about me. Everything he did was a potential act of negligence and lack of love, maybe even abusive because he was simply participating in this culture that caters to and coddles men.
This over-broad mischaracterization of dynamics between men and women can, and for me it did, create a kind of extremely activated thinking, filled with urgency and a frenzy of fear, and a felt need to change the “system.”1 I was in fight or flight mode most of the time, and it was difficult to feel safe anymore anywhere.
I had other trauma triggers during that season as well, and because I was “activated” I could not rationally handle or discuss difficult topics. Because I was so abused in the past and primed to be in self-protection mode, I couldn’t see that I was actually safe and loved. I couldn’t fully see my husband loved me. This all came to a head not long after listening to Osbaldo’s podcast episodes. I was also reading books from an egalitarian perspective on how poorly women have been mistreated in the church and in several Facebook groups that mostly focused on abuse stories and deconstructing from complementarianism.2
In the midst of this, God was so faithful to carry me through. I was praying about everything, and trying to trust that God would lead me to truth in His Word. But things had to come to a breaking point, and that is when my husband and I sought help from our pastor. I have mentioned this moment before in my writing.3 But I don’t know if anyone realizes how close I was to actually physically running out of the room, and out into the rain that January morning.
I was sitting in the room with two men, my husband and my pastor, and strangers on the internet had told me that they didn’t have my best interest at heart because they were men in a conservative church, a system supposedly designed to elevate them. (I did not fully embrace this teaching, but it still scared and impacted me greatly!) My past told me I would be abandoned, abused, and unloved for the rest of my life. My triggers were in my face.
I was terrified. It felt like my worst nightmare, two men against one woman, but I sat there, and said to myself, no, you know your pastor. You are safe. And I knew that my husband wasn’t against me. I willed myself to sit in that chair, mind over panic, a true act of trust, and listened to our pastor’s advice for us. It’s how I ended up in EMDR, which dramatically changed my life. 4
My story is an example of why we cannot coddle our trauma and our trauma stories, but need to safely and healthily face and deal with them head on. What we learned in the abuse and the way our bodies and minds keep the score means that sometimes our brain and emotions are lying to us. Internet experts in 30 second videos were telling me that what my traumatized brain was telling was actually true, and that I would not ever be safe, that it would not be safe for me to let my guard down, and trust. Social media and the online world are not good discipleship or therapy programs. 5
Here’s what I am able to see now in a more emotionally regulated state, after EMDR6: My husband is not neglectful. He is a human being who makes mistakes and sins, but he also cannot read my mind and he thinks differently than I do. So, for example, when I was able to calmly say to him, “I am feeling the weight in my mind because I am having to plan all the little details of the trip you want us to take, and I need help,” he sat down with a notebook and helped me write everything down, even taking on some planning himself. 7 (Turns out he didn’t need a lecture on mental load and how the patriarchy has primed him to not have a mental load.)
Clearing the Air
I am keenly aware that a lot of what I am going to say moving forward goes against much of what is being expressed in the anti-abuse movement. Nevertheless, I will be endeavoring to show women who they are in Christ, image bearers, and beloved children of God, and to do that, we will need to dismantle some error and ruffle some feathers along the way. I’ll with the underlying ideas that ended up hurting me in the story I just shared as I was earnestly and understandably trying to reconstruct my faith in the area of men, women, and the church.
Unresolved Trauma
As I mentioned in the previous section, something that makes it very difficult to handle talking about views on men and women is the pure trauma that some of us have experienced surrounding that whole topic. For me, the unresolved trauma made me so reactive any time anyone brought this up, I really was not able to access the rational parts of my brain and I was terrified most of the time. That is true for a lot of people, and unfortunately, there’s a lot of “therapy culture” on the internet that is simply not a substitute for the real, deep work that is needed to work through trauma.8
Unhelpful Rhetoric
There are people giving false choices on where we should land as we reconstruct our faith after abuse, essentially saying that any view other than a fully egalitarian view is harmful to women. I was under an incredible amount of pressure to end up with an egalitarian view because of this. As a survivor of abuse, this rhetoric affected me because I value being a safe person, and was scared of being called unsafe or even abusive because I didn’t affirm an egalitarian position.
That false choice narrative was part of what got me spiraling out because I was so terrified that potentially my husband, my church, my pastors, my entire denomination were all just blinded by the patriarchal misogynist system, and the only people who were calling out actual abuse that needed to be called out were telling me that also I should probably end up with this theological view because all of the other views, and scripture translations were born our of male oppression.
I now reject this. I don’t have to choose between being anti-abuse/misogyny and taking a position that recognizes what I believe are biblically delineated roles between men and women in the church, especially when it comes to ordination, in particular. (Which I will get to eventually!)
I also found polarizing oppressor/oppressed language in these online conversations, which I think is unhelpful and unbiblical. In my experience, this kind of language used to trigger my hypervigilant response to abuse, since I was always looking out for danger, and this language spelled out to my traumatized self that in no uncertain terms that men were all suspicious, and that even church history was suspicious, since it was largely made up of male oppressors. This kind of language strips away any ability to calmly parse things out with nuance and even compassion for the “other.” Most significantly, it also ignores basics of what is taught in Scripture about sin and the nature of mankind and sets us up to be unable to locate objective truth as a result.
And finally, in our largely egalitarian9 culture, many are allergic to hierarchy and to real or imagined power differentials and unequal outcomes. I’ve heard and read many times that it’s unfair or oppressive for women to be kept from using their gifts freely in the church, and this also stems from a largely individualistic society and culture that the church has adopted. We’ve also got a lot of wrong ideas about what the office of pastor is even all about and often advocates reframe that entire conversation in terms of power and power imbalances, demanding that it now be women’s turn since men have unfairly held all the power. I will come back to this when I write more about ordination.
Moving Forward
There is a difference between being able to speak to and against the way that women have been mistreated in church environments and buying wholesale potentially unhealthy and unbiblical ways of thinking. Certainly there is a lot of wisdom to be found within the survivor and anti-abuse advocacy sphere, but I think we need to ground ourselves first in the truth and beauty of what God’s word says about us as redeemed image bearers, and that is what I am going to endeavor to do here, as I {cautiously} continue to write and talk about this.
By no means am I denying that there are not terrible issues in the way that women have been treated in culture and within the church.
If you think I am blindly defending the whole of complementarianism, just wait for future articles. I also think that there is a helpful place for these online groups because they can help people see they are in an abusive situation.
I realize that not everyone is actually in a safe church with a safe pastor. But I think it’s important to see that being in the body of Christ is vitally important and having people who know us who can speak into our lives is something we must endeavor to find.
Helpful discussion on The White Horse Inn on how TikTok and Instagram are discipling women: https://whitehorseinn.org/resource-library/shows/how-tiktok-and-instagram-are-discipling-women/
I’m not 100% healed and still struggle, but like my therapist says, I’m healed enough, and have the tools to handle things better than I used to.
I fully acknowledge that abusive marriages exist, that they are more common than anyone would like to know, and there are unbiblical teachings within many churches that make this problem worse. I will address that later, too.
Helpful conversation between therapists on this point:
I mean this as a philosophical idea, and not specifically a theological position, and I’ll be defining terms, like this one, more clearly in future installments.