Last time we met up, we talked about why Christians have such a bizarrely-regressive view of marriage. In essence, rigidly codified relationships help keep their authoritarian vision alive. Today, let’s dive into the rules that get that rigid view ensconced in people’s everyday realities.
Christian leaders push hard to get their flocks to adopt rigid, unworkable rules about marriage. There’s a reason for it, of course.
Some years ago, I ran a series called the Unequally Yoked Club (UYC). It was one of my most popular series–and also one of my longest-running! It was about how Christian couples navigate when one partner deconverts from the religion. Today, let’s return to that topic. Together, we’ll see what’s changed Read more
I’ve been wanting to return to the UYC lately, since I’ve seen new developments on that front in recent months. So today, I want to show you what happened after I deconverted from Christianity, and the ups and downs of how I handled sharing the news of that deconversion with my then-husband Biff. I didn’t do everything perfectly, but then, I reckon almost nobody ever does.
Mark Driscoll’s blog has been a treasure trove lately, as he struggles to resolve one of his religion’s greatest failings: its defective and faulty teachings about marriage. One can see why half his his blog appears to be composed of advice regarding marriage–Christians labor under a divorce rate that screams out the truth about their religion’s poor teachings, and the further right into the religion one progresses the worse marriages get and the more acrimonious and frequent the divorces seem to be. Mark Driscoll happens to stand way to the right in his religion, so one can easily excuse him for being thus concerned. Today Lord Snow Presides…. over Mark Driscoll’s terrible not-good ineffective guaranteed-to-fail marriage advice.
Today I’ll show you what this problem looks like, what the women dealing with the problem make of it, and what it means for the religion as a whole.
The ironic thing is that out of all the made-up, manufactured terrors that Christians burden themselves with, this one actually is a problem. Today I’ll show you why Christian leaders put so much emphasis on never being unequally yoked–and why they should fear it.
That brand of Christianity makes some distinct promises to its adherents. If you do this, then you will get that. But it doesn’t actually follow through on those promises. Indeed, it really can’t. Instead it gives people something totally different. Today I want to talk about promises and Fireproof, and how this viewpoint stands up to reality.
I scared up a copy, got reading, and then went through a second time and made notes. Copious, copious, notes. (Looking back over the notes, I can see I was getting progressively more and more frustrated with the thing – my notes started getting more and more editorial and profane as I went.) I ended up with notes that are almost as long as the book itself. More even than what The Love Dare represents in and of itself, though, it doesn’t actually say anything really new at all regarding relationships or how people should conduct themselves with their romantic prospects and partners.
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.