Recently, The Gospel Coalition (TGC) ran a post about how evangelical churches should deal with a member’s infertility struggles. It really brought home for me just how poorly evangelicals deal with anything that runs counter to their party lies lines. Infertility might just reveal the worst dissonance between evangelicals’ dogma and their reality. However, evangelicals’ response to this heartbreaking situation certainly reveals even deeper differences between their self-perception and how they really treat anybody who doesn’t fit into their pre-set life scripts.
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(This post first went live on Patreon on 4/18/2023. Its audio ‘cast lives there too, and they should be available by the time you read this!)
Infertility: Making women invisible in evangelical churches for nearly four centuries now
In a 2020 paper, Donna Paulsen describes a gut-wrenching medical error that permanently sterilized her near the beginning of her fertile years. Having been raised in what sounds like a conservative Christian tradition, she felt especially ashamed of losing her capacity to bear children.
Before her return to church that Sunday, her pastor visited her. And he gave her advice that might sound downright mystifying to anybody who hasn’t tangled with that end of Christianity (p. 12 of the PDF):
During our conversation, he encouraged me to exercise caution when sharing about what had happened. He was worried that the members of our faith community might respond poorly and say hurtful things. He counselled me to tell no one. Looking back, I know that he was trying to protect me from the insensitive comments or misguided advice that people can be prone to offer in moments of discomfort.
Naturally, she obeyed him even though keeping silence hurt her as well. He had, in effect, demanded that she “bear [her] pain alone—to paint on a smile and pretend that nothing had changed.”
Gradually, over time, she confided in some of the women in her church. After being hurt a few times by their reactions, she learned to be very careful about who she chose for these confidences. As well, she began to notice the other invisible women in her church. By accident or design, these women were like her. They stood outside the evangelical script for women.
I can easily understand how she didn’t notice those women before her own infertility heartbreak. And I can also easily understand why her well-meaning pastor gave her that counsel, as well as why her church was not, as a whole, a safe harbor for discussing her situation.
Infertility is one of the deepest and most devastating disconnects between evangelicals’ marketing press and the actual reality of how they actually behave. Evangelicals might have only formally existed since the 1700s, but I’m betting that from the get-go they mistreated women facing infertility. In modern days, with evangelicals getting more polarized by the hour, infertile women find themselves even more hard-done-by.
The Cult of Family gets thwarted all too often
For years now, I’ve been talking about the evangelical Cult of Family. Evangelical leaders indoctrinate their followers with a tribalistic mandate for childbearing and parenting. The more hardline the group of evangelicals, the harder its leaders push this mandate on women in particular. Motherhood, then, is meant to be the primary focus for women.
As I learned myself while I was Pentecostal, women who vocally reject that life script face shocking mistreatment from their peers. I did it innocently, not realizing that TRUE CHRISTIANS™ rarely live up to their own hype. But once I crossed the Rubicon, the die was cast. I could never return from it, at least not without capitulating utterly—and that, I refused to do.
My tribe’s reaction was, in retrospect, utterly predictable. I will never forget some friends’ attempt at a childbearing intervention with me that was performed at high speed down a Houston highway. Imagine two fundamentalists screaming in each ear in the backseat while I was trapped between them, with two up front chiming in! It was a scary and stressful situation. However, I never stopped pushing back when a church member divinely foretold my future as a mother-of-many.
(Joke’s on Jesus, I suppose. I never had children at all.)
But I’m a weirdo. Even back then, my evangelical peers regarded me as a weirdo. I mean, I didn’t even speak in tongues every time I prayed! Quelle horreur!
Now that I’m older, I understand perfectly why many women would know better than to open that same can of worms. As a convert, I hadn’t yet learned the truth of fundagelicals. Most of my peers had been raised in the tribe, so they knew all too well what would happen—even if, maybe especially if their failure to fit into the script wasn’t their choice at all.
Infertility: Not their fault… or is it?
Evangelicals tend to react poorly to women who don’t have husbands and children by a certain young age. They’re all too aware that as Americans’ fertility has declined in recent years, so too have evangelicals‘. As of 2018, Statista tells us, almost half of American women had no children.
As a 2021 Pew Research study found, probably a bit less than half of those women are childless by choice, which implies that just over half want children but haven’t been able to have any.
Only about 14% of Americans identify as white evangelicals. Still, that paints the poignant picture of over a million evangelical women who either can’t or don’t want to have children. And a good number of those women simply can’t find husbands—which, in evangelicalism, must precede motherhood.
But their leaders have been drilling down hard on the Cult of Family for decades now. As Cristina Richie wrote in her 2013 paper (p. 9 of the PDF):
Indeed, such a high standard is set that if a [Catholic or evangelical] couple does not have children, their union is typically seen as immature, selfish, a sexual bawdy relationship, or just plain sinful.
These leaders uniformly insist that women’s primary role in life is motherhood. Open rejection of that role becomes, then, risky.
However, being unable to fulfill it isn’t much less risky. Thanks to evangelicals’ prosperity gospel beliefs, they’re programmed to find fault in anyone who doesn’t fit into their life-scripts. In a 2017 TGC post, for example, Maralee Bradley positions her “intermittent infertility” as her god’s way of “refining my character and conforming me to the image of Christ.” (I guess all those abusive evangelical mothers were Jesus-ing just fine, then.)
How prosperity gospel leads to victim blaming—even in infertility
Prosperity gospel simply means that Yahweh blesses the obedient. Likewise, he curses the disobedient—or he decides not to protect them from harm (same diff, I think). Almost all evangelicals hold this belief to at least some extent. Some take it much further than others, obviously!
Thus, if an evangelical experiences misfortune of any kind, their fellow evangelicals take it as divine punishment for disobedience. Likewise, if having oodles of children is a mark of divine favor, then having none despite expressing a desire for them must be a mark of disfavor. Indeed, in the Bible “a barren womb” is usually positioned in exactly this way.
Over at Got Questions, a large evangelical site, their writer positions fertility as an explicit sign of divine favor. But that writer’s god certainly cares about infertility, which he shows through magically “open[ing] the womb” of favored women. I can’t think of a single good woman in the Bible who experiences infertility without subsequently being (divinely) cured of it.
(That writer goes on to refer to this attitude toward fertility and infertility as being part of “the Old Covenant.” Somehow, they forget to tell us what the “New” one thinks of women’s physical fertility. Indeed, the few verses they use from the New Testament all refer to farming, not childbearing.)
In prosperity gospel, the most common cause for divine disfavor is offending Yahweh. Christians call those offenses sin.
So it’s quite common in evangelical circles for the victims of misfortune to be blamed for their situation. People who are suffering might face questions about what sins they might have committed to earn divine disfavor—or speculation about Yahweh’s motivations.
In between, the sufferers blame themselves.
Evangelicals have no clue how to react to an evangelical who is suffering
Evangelicals can cope with tribe-approved suffering that resolves fairly quickly in ways they like. However, suffering that continues for years on end just flummoxes them. They’re not terribly compassionate or supportive people in the best of times. At these worst of times, they completely lose the plot.
When Donna Paulsen’s pastor advised her not to discuss her catastrophic sterilization, he clearly sought to protect her from her own tribe’s reaction. I’m sure he’d seen some dreadful reactions in his time there. Indeed, her paper describes how evangelical church families tend to react to learning that a female member of the church is experiencing infertility. In her paper (relink), she often describes this mistreatment:
Because she only heard messages about the victorious Christian life, Ruth felt as though she could not reveal any weakness, lack of faith, or doubt in the midst of her struggle. If she disclosed her pregnancy loss, she risked the double stigma of infertile woman and bad Christian. [p. 83 of PDF]
Although some disclosures have the potential to lead to a supportive connection, many more taught the women who participated in this study that they should be exceptionally cautious when approaching the subject of their infertility or pregnancy loss. [p. 86 of PDF]
When confronted with infertility and pregnancy loss, faith community members were routinely dismissive, silent, or insensitive. [p. 94 of PDF]
“I don’t know why the church doesn’t talk about infertility more,” Hope wondered, “maybe because it’s uncomfortable and sad?” [p. 95 of PDF]
Well, it is uncomfortable and sad, yes. But it’s also a flagrant contradiction to evangelicals’ beliefs about themselves. Suffering that lasts too long and doesn’t resolve, but which isn’t the sufferer’s fault somehow, wouldn’t exist if those beliefs were true. And yet, such suffering does exist.
Suggested response options for couples facing infertility woes
Overall, the advice I see in the Christ-o-sphere asks evangelicals to notice their invisible women and to consider how their life-script alienates and hurts those women who’d love to become mothers, but can’t. In other words, they want evangelicals to please become completely different people.
At the Crossroads Church website, Lindsey Himmler asks evangelicals to view infertility through the lens of the Bible. Alas, she forgets that the women in her own Bible stories got cured of their infertility through Yahweh’s magic. (She also implies that at least one infertile woman in the Bible wasn’t granted children. But she doesn’t name any—and I sure can’t think of any.)
Author Jen Oshman admonishes readers, “So when we say out loud that a woman’s highest calling is motherhood, what we’re actually communicating to our sisters who are either single or childless is that they haven’t really arrived, that they’re not really mature enough yet, they’re not really sanctified enough yet.” And yes, evangelicals often say that out loud to childless women!
Meanwhile, Rachel Cain has had to “rethink the call to mothering” due to her own inability to attract a husband. She lands on spiritual motherhood as well: “Being a spiritual mother instead of a mom with children (biological or adopted) is not playing on the JV team of Christian womanhood. It is just as valuable. [. . .] Marriage and motherhood are good things but terrible gods. “
However, one of Donna Paulsen’s subjects, Elizabeth, explicitly and vehemently rejects the substitute of spiritual motherhood:
“You get all the people that say things like, ‘Oh, you can be a mother in other ways.’ Well no, I’m not a mother. I never will be a mother. I’m not going to go turn around and go volunteer in the kid’s ministry so I can be a surrogate mom.” [. . . ]
[A]ttached to this easy solution, was a disregard for her unique identity as well as her grief. [p. 97 in PDF]
I’m not sure evangelicals even recognize any “unique identity” for an evangelical woman. And they sure aren’t very patient with long-lasting or particularly-intense grief.
A recent 2023 TGC post by Jean Hesse lists five suggested responses churches should have for couples struggling with infertility. It reads more like a list of what evangelicals rarely, if ever do. If they were reliably doing that stuff, Hesse wouldn’t need to offer pointers.
Why evangelicals can’t be compassionate toward people facing infertility
TGC has waded into the infertility waters a few times in recent years. In 2017, they ran Jeff Cavanaugh’s story:
We felt left behind by the constant stream of pregnancy and birth announcements in the church, and felt an acute sting when members would jokingly speculate that “there must be something in the water!”
Between the lines, we learn why evangelicals have so much trouble with infertility:
- Pregnancy involves sex, which evangelicals can’t discuss like adults
- Evangelicals are tightly bound up in stereotypical gender roles, which makes infertility a source of deep shame for men and women alike
- Evangelical relationships tend to follow scripted lines, which can throw an infertile couple into chaos when they can’t hit required milestones
- The deep emotional pain of repeated failed infertility treatments can destroy followers’ faith when their tribe’s usual advice fails to resolve it
But he reveals even more than that.
Evangelicalism is about authoritarian power-grabs
In his post, Cavanaugh also advises that evangelicals be ready to chide and judge infertile couples if they stray into “malignant” levels of sin. He wants his fellow evangelicals to practice compassion, but to be on guard for too much off-limits sin.
It’s a strange off-note, perhaps. But only if you don’t know much about evangelicals.
Nowadays, most evangelicals embrace authoritarianism. In authoritarianism, the group’s stated ideals are subverted. Whatever those stated ideals might be, the group’s members now seek only the acquisition and guarding of personal power. Successful power-grabbers all know how to fake it till they make it. They construct careful facades to seem like they’re following the tribe’s prescribed roadmaps to a tee, then give the credit for their success to a roadmap they didn’t even use. They fit their facades into the tribe’s life-scripts, play along with the tribe’s stereotyped expectations. And then, they insist that anybody could find similar success the same way.
Admissions of weakness in these groups are like blood in the water to sharks. And infertility can be so, so metaphorically bloody.
That’s why so many evangelicals we’ve seen today talk about shame and feeling invisible. It’s why their fellow evangelicals often seem judgmental toward them. In a lot of ways, invisibility is the best-case scenario infertile couples could have—though it flies in the face of evangelicals’ hype about themselves as much as their cruelty is the point behavior.
We don’t witness the truth of a group when everyone is doing great. Rather, we witness it when its members encounter someone in great need of compassion. And here, perhaps more than anywhere else, we can see the hateful, cruel truth of evangelicalism itself.
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