The men of the ‘Gospel Coalition’ really, really hate women

The men of the ‘Gospel Coalition’ really, really hate women July 18, 2012

What in the name of all that is holy is wrong with these people?

Before we go on I should note that much of what follows could be triggering — because apparently in order to discuss something called “The Gospel Coalition,” we’re also going to need to discuss rape and rape culture and what these strange, cruel men refer to as sexual conquering in the name of their strange, cruel God.

Because, sweet Jesus, these men have issues. The Gospel Coalition is really bad news.

For some reason this Gospel Coalition bunch — neo-Calvinist patriarchal types in the John Piper/Mark Driscoll/T.J. Mackey mold — decided to weigh in on the current popularity of 50 Shades of Grey.

Rachel Held Evans summarizes:

In a post on the GC Web site entitled “The Polluted Waters of 50 Shades of Grey, etc,” Jared Wilson argues that the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey simply reflects a perversion of the proper, God-ordained relationship of authority and submission between men and women. To support his point, he quotes from Douglas Wilson’s book, Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man:

Because we have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them, we have created a climate in which caricatures of authority and submission intrude upon our lives with violence.

When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.

But … our banished authority and submission comes back to us in pathological forms. This is what lies behind sexual “bondage and submission games,” along with very common rape fantasies. Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the “soon to be made willing” heroine. Those who deny they have any need for water at all will soon find themselves lusting after polluted water, but water nonetheless.

This man is unwell, unwhole and unhinged. God have mercy on Mrs. Wilson, and on all her daughters.

Evans responds:

There is so much about this passage that I, as a woman, find inaccurate, degrading, and harmful that it’s hard to know where to begin. That Wilson blames egalitarianism for the presence of rape and sexual violence in the world is ludicrous and unsubstantiated. His characterization of sex as an act of conquering and colonization is disturbing, and his notion that women are little more than the passive recipients of this colonization, who simply “accept” penetration, is as ignorant as it is degrading.

She goes on, at great length, to conquer the Wilsons’ hateful assertions with a penetrating argument. Read the whole thing.

J.R. Daniel Kirk points out that in Jesus’ name no, this is not a healthy view of sex and gender, or a biblical view, or a Christian view:

When you sexually conquer someone, this is rape. … I am embarrassed for Christianity that such an advocacy of rape (marital or otherwise) could find itself onto a websites that boasts of being one of a “Gospel” coalition.

Scot McKnight is just as blunt, writing “Take it down” and calling on the group to remove it’s cruel, degrading and “woefully ignorant” post.

Grace at Are Women Human? has a long and thoughtful response: “Doug Wilson, The Gospel Coalition, and Sanctified Rape Culture“:

Wilson goes much farther than any rape apologist Christian writer I’ve ever read, and that’s a lot of people. His notion of godly sex is little more than sanctified rape. In the name of Jesus.

He also says (as Jared Wilson states in a comment defending this filth) that “rape is judgment upon a culture that does not cherish and protect women.” We should be OK with this, according to Jared, because Doug Wilson isn’t blaming rape survivors for being raped. He’s only blaming all women who want to be treated equally and all of our allies. That’s all.

So just who is this twisted “Doug Wilson” creature, anyway? Glad you asked. Grace provides some more background on this horrible trainwreck of a human being:

Doug Wilson is not only a rape apologist; he’s also a slavery apologist. And contrary to Jared Wilson’s dismissal of commenters who repeatedly tried to point this out, this is absolutely relevant to Wilson’s teachings about obligatory female submission in sex.

Wilson is the co-author with Steve Wilkins, a white supremacist, of a pamphlet called Southern Slavery as it Was, which claims that Southern slavery “was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity” but a relationship between “friends and often intimates.”

Jesus wept.


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