I’m reading this book, Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome by Reba Riley, and I wanted to talk about something that really sprang out at me about it that I thought y’all would find interesting.
At first it seemed like a pretty open-and-shut case. As the New York Times told it, a young Mississippi couple got caught trying to fly to Syria to join ISIS. One of them was a 19-year-old pre-medicine student named Jaelyn Young, the other a newly-graduated 22-year-old lifelong-Islamic man named Muhammad Dakhlalla with a degree in psychology who was set to go to graduate school in the fall. They were newly married and using their honeymoon as the pretext for their trip, but got arrested on the way to the airport in Columbus on what would have been the first leg of a very long journey. Somehow, the two of them had fallen in with terrorists.
This movie echoes something I myself was taught as a young fundamentalist: that by doing loving things, one can create loving feelings in oneself and inspire loving feelings in a target. In other words, just like the old song by Air Supply put it, we were taught that we could make love out of nothing at all.
You can’t really talk about Fireproof without talking about the Love Dare, and vice versa. Today I found out why that is.
Considering the overweening and galactic-level hubris they’re displaying by daring to offer serious advice to people in real need of real help, we shouldn’t be surprised at all that they’re just as misguided and erroneous in their presentation of a typical non-Christian marriage as they are in how Christians should conduct their marriages. Today I want to talk about what the movie’s creators think they’re saying about how non-Christians’ marriages work.
Considering the overweening and galactic-level hubris they’re displaying by daring to offer serious advice to people in real need of real help, we shouldn’t be surprised at all that they’re just as misguided and erroneous in their presentation of a typical non-Christian marriage as they are in how Christians should conduct their marriages. Today I want to talk about what the movie’s creators think they’re saying about how non-Christians’ marriages work.
We’ve got a full post planned for tomorrow, but for now, I saw this and my eyes almost popped out of my head because this goes way way way past the normal bizarre WTFery one sees out of the Christian Right. Yes, it managed to shock me.
(This is part of our Fireproof review week–here’s the review itself and here’s where I talk about how the movie assumes that only Christians can make marriage work. Consider this, like all my movie posts, full of ALL THE SPOILERS. Also, I’m popping this into our Unequally Yoked Club series Read more
While someone might see this movie and assume–as I did repeatedly–that it was hawking a particular marriage advice manual, The Love Dare, that’s not entirely true. The characters repeatedly reference the book and laud how amazing it is and how much it’s helped their marriages, but the movie is quite clear about exactly what really saved Kirk’s marriage in the movie.
Whenever you hear about any institution or group that specifically singles out one group to hold all the power and exalts the voices of that group while stripping other groups of power and voices, abuse and scandals not only become more likely, but they become inevitable. There isn’t some other way that can work. Today we’ll talk about why and how that is.