Same kind of Christian as me?

Some people are of the opinion that one needs to be a certain age or have a certain amount of “life experience” before they earn the right to write a memoir.

I’m 25 and wrote my first memoir at 22. I’m contemplating writing a second.

The only reason I’m considering this is because the kind of memoir I am interested in reading does not exist. At least not that I know of.

There are a plethora of memoirs out there about finding faith, losing it, and the grueling process of finding it again (see Addie Zierman’s When We Were on Fire, Elizabeth Esther’s Girl at the End of the World, and Rachel Held Evans’ Faith Unraveled for some awesome examples). But one thing these women have in common is their faith journey began in a church from early childhood. If you know me at all, you know that is not my life.

I want to read more books about people who chose Christianity after growing up in an environment that was staunchly against it.

I want to read more books about people who continue to choose Christianity despite the inevitable bumper-car effect of old cultural mores clashing with new ones; of old lingo that doesn’t jell with a new spiritual vocabulary; and the Pariah Syndrome that comes with being one of few people in your church with this particular background, which you are not ashamed of, but refuse to talk about because you are a person who desires to make friends, not some Show and Tell presentation.

If those books exist, I have yet to find them. It is my hope that if I were to write a book like this, it will bring other people with similar experiences out of the woodwork and into my favorite coffee shop to talk to me.

As of now, the people who share or at least relate to these experiences live in my laptop, not in my city. They can be found in organizations like Christians for Biblical Equality, but they live all over the world, not down the street.

The idea of “biblical equality” started with the idea that women can and should be able to lead people as male pastors do. But I want to take this definition further and expand it for people who worship differently than the “mainstream” Christian does: people who find standing during worship songs uncomfortable (and sometimes the lyrics tacky); people who feel squeamish when asked to pray out loud before a group; people who long for community but feel excluded because they aren’t extroverted or “outwardly spiritual” enough.

“Biblical equality” can mean that your worship is as valid and meaningful as my worship. I don’t see this idea expressed often enough.

I’m currently working on a piece that I hope to submit to a popular blogger as a guest post, so it won’t appear on my blog yet. But I hope to use it as a starting point for the maybe-memoir I might write. Because when it comes to improving community and making all members of the body of Christ feel welcome, there’s not enough paper in the world to discuss it.

There's a fly in the soup; there is patriarchy in my religion

As the information under my picture suggests, I am a fan of people who devote their lives to unpopular causes. Perhaps I should add: even if I disagree with them.

I applaud actress Kirsten Dunst for speaking up about femininity and the definition of womanhood (even if I don’t entirely agree with how she defines these things):

I feel like the feminine has been a little undervalued. We all have to get our own jobs and make our own money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking—it's a valuable thing my mom created. And sometimes you need your knight in shining armor. I'm sorry. You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That's why relationships work.

I occasionally read PluggedIn movie reviews. It’s sponsored by Focus on the Family, but the reviews can be snarky and funny. I take issue with their response to Ms. Dunst’s words:

“[Dunst’s] viewpoint is increasingly challenged these days, and it's harder and harder to see the proper path forward while still holding tight to the past, to the traditions God Himself initiated.”

Read their full article here. Some of the comments are excellent.

My head is spinning as I try to remember where in the Bible it states that all women must be stay-at-home mothers and let their husbands be the sole breadwinners. I don’t even recall where it states that all women HAVE to become mothers. As a soon-to-be-married woman who doesn’t want kids (for now), it troubles me to think of the reactions I might face when I try shopping for a new church where my fiancé lives. Any attitude suggesting women have to be this or that is an automatic dealbreaker.

I cannot understand how it’s “unbiblical” for marriages to be treated as partnerships, where each couple makes decisions that are best for them and their families; why it’s considered unreasonable in many conservative circles for men to help out with chores and child-rearing; why a woman choosing to have a career is accused of neglecting her children. I went to daycare as a kid while my mom worked; I think I turned out okay. When my dad got sick and had to retire, mom took over financially. Do ultra-conservatives somehow believe they are above that possibility?

But no matter which path you choose, there is disdain to be met at every turn. The disdain for women who choose to be stay-at-home mothers is also backlash in the face of feminism. It has to stop.

I can’t deny that these attitudes have a direct impact on my faith and the way I relate to Jesus. Even though I firmly believe Jesus valued women (he saved the life of one about to be stoned for adultery, per Old Testament law, after all), if other Christians who claim to represent him cannot allow for equality in their definition of womanhood, then the result is simple: the church will have no women.

Respect, dignify, and above all, listen to individual women and their stories, or we leave the church. Engage with us in discussion and consider the impact of our leadership skills, or we leave the church. Maybe not all of us in droves, but this particular woman will pack her bags if things do not change.

I know this wouldn’t happen on a large enough scale to wake people up. Sadly, there are plenty of women perpetuating anti-feminist viewpoints, because they have never been taught what feminism is supposed to be: a radical notion that women are people; an idea that goes beyond politics, religious differences, and social status.

Ironically, I have met more women lately who actively promote patriarchy (like this woman who told me "We don't need feminism in America!"). They look at me like I’m holding a dead squirrel when I dare to admit I am a feminist. That, too, must stop. 

Always have to wear with a cross. Always.

"We don't need feminism in America"

I was about to have another one of my “Sarahbeth might be closeted liberal” moments earlier today, based on my reaction from this blog a friend of mine shared on Facebook. The blogger describes herself as being “Christian, anti-feminist, pro-patriarchy.”

Oy vey. My heart definitely lurched into my throat when I read that.

But then I stepped away from my laptop for a moment (smart move) and realized my outrage has nothing to do with possibly being “liberal” or not.  Or conservative, really. What do those labels actually mean? My outrage stems from the complete ignorance of what feminism is, based on the ways it’s being perverted in the media. It has an ugly side, like all well-intentioned movements do. We can argue until we’re blue in the face about whether feminists should support abortion, or be stay-at-home moms, what have you. But Christian or atheist, male or female, I cannot understand why it’s so hard for us to agree on the fact that women are people, and as such, they deserve to be dignified.

Intelligent people understand that just because some loudmouth politician who calls himself a Christian is against gay rights (not just marriage, but against a homosexual being fired simply for being homosexual) does not mean all Christians agree with him.

Intelligent people understand that one negative encounter with someone of a different race does not mean all people of that race are bad.

Intelligent people understand that the militant “feminazis” (a term I abhor) do not represent all feminists. We are not out to supplant men, oppress them, or degrade them. Those who do are missing the whole point.

My heart wants to react violently when I hear people say, “We don’t need feminism in America!” I’ll be honest and admit that I’m hesitant to use expressions like “war on women” because life for women in this country is not nearly as oppressive as, say, women in the Middle East who are assaulted with acid for the crime of wanting to be educated. We are so blessed to not have to face that kind of persecution here.

But that doesn’t mean life is ideal for women in America. There are scores of men who are running Congress who make extremely damaging remarks about domestic violence, which influence society’s view of it as a whole. Those attitudes ruin lives. They destroy the dignity of women’s souls. They hurt women, their children, and create an attitude of shame that directly affects the impact they leave on this world. You cannot operate out of shame and expect to live a productive life. Sadly, more often that not, men with the utmost privilege, who cannot fathom what it’s like to be judged by their clothing choices or their decision to work outside the home, are the ones promoting these attitudes.

But it’s not just men. Women like the creator of that blog have also bought the lie that the entire feminist movement is damaging and irrelevant because politics have gotten in the way of simply affirming humanity. Can we please go back to the beginning, when it was decided that a movement was necessary to affirm the humanity of women??

We need feminism in America. We need feminism in churches. We need feminism in every corner of the world where there is even one iota of injustice. We need men who strive to dignify the women in their lives: their wives, mothers, daughters, sisters. We need feminism to teach women that they are more than vaginas. More than sex objects.

We need feminism, period.

On choosing conflicting battles wisely

This is one of the most obvious understatements in the world: human beings are complex and often downright frustrating creatures.

Self-exploration and defining your place in the world is difficult enough without having to deal with unsolicited and misguided opinions thrown in your direction. As multi-faceted people, our internal battles are all over the place.

This is a brief, non-exhaustive list of issues that have made me want to hit my head against a wall on several occasions:

The idea that Jewish background + Christian beliefs automatically = Messianic Jew (it doesn’t. It’s a bit more complicated than that).

That being a Christian, period = hating gays, believing atheists have no morals, forcing beliefs on the nation by turning them into laws.

That feminism = bra-burning, man-hating, always pro-choice, anti-shaving extremist (I’ve had the privilege of meeting a handful of married, stay-at-home, religious, self-described feminists. They are real. I promise. And we all generally want the same thing: to be treated like human beings).

That English major = future English teacher (nope, not me).

That author = famous and made of money (HAHAHAHA…not even close).

That self-published author = not a 'legitimate' author (self-published books are on Amazon like all other “legitimately published” books. If it’s made of paper or downloadable via Kindle and you paid for it from a major distributor, it’s a book, dangit).

That being raped or assaulted always = brutally attacked by a stranger hiding in the bushes, because it can never happen in a relationship with someone you actually know (more on that here)

Your own list may look similar, or completely different. It’s easy for me to lose patience, to write off the people who question me as completely ignorant or even stupid. There are battles, and then there is the battle to pick your battles, because you simply can’t afford to lose it every time someone misunderstands an aspect of your life.

I’ve decided to pick three of the above “battles” as educational fields; my defining markers in life: Being a Christian, because that’s who I am; rape culture awareness/feminist issues, because those have affected me personally; and misconceptions about being an indie author, because that is my chosen profession. Even one of those issues results in a fully loaded plate, and I wish I didn’t have such a random lot to choose from.  I felt like a freak for a while, until one day I realized that no one’s life is lived completely in a vacuum. It’s okay to stand for multiple things, and the best way to stand for something is to be an effective teacher of it.

I’m always curious to learn more about how people deal with ignorance regarding who they are, or what they’ve been through. Now is your chance to educate me: what are your battle fields?

Voices matter

In the last seven days since my Big Speech, I've received a flood of emails and, for the first time in forever, genuine dialogue in my blog comments! Not all of them agree with me, but that's okay; people are talking. There's never a shortage of words, never a true end to the discussion of something as heavy and provocative as rape culture. One week later, the dialogue is still continuing. I'm so grateful. I hope it lasts.

I never thought I'd be comfortable talking about this. Writing a book, and having my words filtered through a fictional character is one thing; talking about rape culture in relation to my own life is quite another. When I think about the bare facts, it's easy to get depressed once again. But if I can't press charges, if my vindictive-laced attempts at justice are failing, then my story is all I have left to fight with.

About 30 people showed up, mostly women I didn't recognize. My friends from my writing group were there, and a handful of classmates. The responses afterward were so incredible. And you know what I realized? I have a definite bias I need to overcome: a bias against men being redeemed. There is nothing to gain by turning the entire male species into an enemy. I have only one enemy, besides the devil -- my greatest enemy is myself. I am my biggest roadblock to recovery. I don't need my ex to apologize, and I don't need to appeal to God with the hope of triggering some kind of spell that will make him repent. That's not what healing is.

Healing is taking my story to a wider audience, because I realize how much it matters. Most importantly, I matter. My voice matters too much to keep silent.

It also helps that the more Josh and I talk about our future as husband and wife, the memory of the person who hurt me fades a bit. His influence matters less. That's not to say that I'll ever be able to forget. But it gets better.

I still struggle to believe these words as I write them. But they came to me somehow, so they must resonate somewhere.

I don't know if I'll end up a rape crisis counselor. I don't need to seek that profession in order to still care. It may have been a grief-motivated decision, not a genuine "calling." Anyone who knows me will tell you I am meant to be a writer. All six copies of Someone You Already Know were autographed and sold, and several business cards given away. So maybe, just maybe, that means something.

A very wise friend of mine told me that we don't get to choose our story sometimes, and we might hate it, but it's ours, and we're stuck with it. We can ignore it, stifle it, or tell it, and see what happens. The first two options made me crazy(er), so let's see what happens with the third.

Christians for Biblical Equality presents: Rape Culture in the Church

The following post is what I talked about during my presentation on rape culture for Christians for Biblical Equality. Delivered the entire message without tearing up, throwing up, or tripping in my heels. AND I got to sign some books. Success!

You may be wondering what is meant by the title “Rape culture in the church.” To start, let me just explain what “rape culture” is, for those who have never heard that term before. Rape culture is living in a society that excuses rape by placing the blame on the victim. Rape culture is perpetuating a cycle of irresponsibility for rapists who are in relationships with their victims, which is more common than you think. We often tell women that because they consented to sex before, they can’t say no, now. We teach men that sex is a right, and one that is theirs for the taking, especially in a marriage where a man is considered the head of the household, according to Christian tradition.

Rape culture is also making jokes about rape. When I was a freshman in college, it was an inside joke in my sorority to say “It’s not rape if you call pin rank” (“Pin rank” referring to the order in which the pledges were initiated). This wasn’t referring to actual rape, but was used as an extreme expression to show the amount of power and authority the older pledges had on the newer ones. To my knowledge, no one thought anything of it, and I laughed along as much as everyone else did.

This topic is very personal to me, because I myself am a statistic of rape. Rather than beat myself up, I channeled my anger and grief into my self-published book, Someone You Already Know, which tells the story of two teenage victims and their efforts to understand each other. One character was raped by her boyfriend; the other by a stranger. It wasn’t written as a Christian book, but I intended for it to be a teaching tool for classrooms and churches.

Now you’re probably wondering, what does this have to do with the church? If you’re active on Facebook and other forms of social media like I am, you may be familiar with a certain blog post regarding female modesty that went viral this summer. It was written by a woman named Kim Hall, and in her post she talks about looking through her sons’ Facebook friends’ lists. She is writing to their female friends asking them to “cover up” so her sons don’t stumble. She writes, “Once my boys see a suggestive photo of you, they can’t un-see it.” To be fair, this woman’s intentions were good: modesty is a forgotten virtue in our culture that must be brought back. But Kim Hall is not the only Christian going about this important subject in a way that shames women. We Christians care a great deal about modesty, but we teach it in a way that is completely backwards.
I want to tell you that it is not a woman’s responsibility to prevent men from lusting. Not to mention, telling women to “cover up” for the sake of helping out their brothers in Christ is demeaning to both sexes.

First, it implies that women’s bodies are shameful and something to be hidden, which they’re not! Remember that Adam and Eve were originally naked in Eden. It was after the Fall that the body was viewed through corrupt lenses; but there is nothing inherently shameful about our bodies to begin with. Secondly, this mindset implies that men are barbaric beasts who are slaves to their hormones. It implies they have no self-control, and need to rely on women to take responsibility for them.

Men, I don’t know about you, but I’m highly offended by the implication that your brain is next to your balls. If men become animals and lose all self-control at the sight of a suggestively-dressed woman, and seemingly have no ‘choice’ but to either lust after her, or assault her, then what we’re saying is that the default status of all men is "rapist."

Think about it this way: we all know better than to take things that don’t belong to us. We know better than to trespass onto someone else’s property. Such actions have serious consequences, and rarely do we tell the person whose car was broken into that it’s their fault for not hiding the GPS under the seat, or in the dash. But when it comes to rape, there is something unique about this crime where it’s easier to excuse the perpetrator. We blame the woman’s skirt. We blame the fact that she was drinking. We insist she should have known better. Why her, and not the rapist?

So now, you may be thinking: okay, rape culture is a problem, but what does this have to do with the church? The answer is simple: the line between “She caused him to stumble” is not a far cry from “She was asking for it.” The reality is, women are just as likely to be raped in burquas as they are in string bikinis. This happens every day in the Middle East, especially right now in Syria.

I’ve had well-intentioned Christian friends preach modesty during Bible study, in a way that suggests “Only you can keep your boyfriends’ minds in check.” Well, my ex-boyfriend raped me when I was wearing sweatpants: not my first choice of ‘asking for it’ clothes. So clearly, sinful behavior is a deliberate choice. It’s not something one ‘stumbles’ into by accident. The relationship began when I was 17, an age where I thought I knew everything, and it ended when I was 22. He was a leader in the young adult group at his church; if you knew him, you probably looked up to him, as I did. He told me he was “making me into a woman,” and because he was a leader in his church, this raised an important question for me: what kind of womanhood is expected of me as a Christian?

It’s time the church starts taking responsibility for one another by changing the way we see each other. We are created in God’s image, meaning we are creatures with inborn dignity. Men AND women should care about modesty out of respect for their own bodies, a vessel that should not be revealed to just anyone. What would it look like if we taught our sons and daughters to view each other as dignified human beings, instead of ‘stumbling blocks’?

When we teach our daughters to cover up to prevent men from lusting, we are telling them that their bodies are shameful. And when we tell men that the control of their hormones are a woman’s responsibility from the way we dress, we are teaching them to view women as temptresses, not human beings. Attitudes like these are further traumatizing for rape victims in particular, who may already blame themselves for what they endured. That’s what society does, but the church is called to be different. The church is called to set an example.

According to RAINN, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, approximately 28% of victims already know the person who raped them. These victims are often sitting next to you in church, and are further shamed into silence by their pastors and fellow congregants, who ignorantly promote a view that modesty is about preventing men from lusting; and should they fail, then rape is not only excusable, but asked for.

How can we better address this issue in the church?