{"id":28269,"date":"2016-02-08T05:00:22","date_gmt":"2016-02-08T09:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?p=28269"},"modified":"2016-02-08T16:05:34","modified_gmt":"2016-02-08T20:05:34","slug":"puncturing-declension-narratives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2016\/02\/puncturing-declension-narratives.html","title":{"rendered":"Puncturing Declension Narratives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Last week Homeschoolers Anonymous posted this photo<\/a>,\u00a0\u201can actual graph Reb Bradley created for his mental health curriculum.\u201d\u00a0You can see it here:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"12654126_1015168265205956_327130378208914015_n\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So you know what\u2019s strange? A lot of Protestants argue that before the Protestant Reformation, most people were duped by the Catholic Church into believing they could work their way to heaven. These individuals weren\u2019t really saved and weren\u2019t really following the Bible, the argument goes, and the priests and monks\u2014the ones who did read the Bible\u2014were corrupt wolves who took advantage of the people. I\u2019m wondering how this sort of chronology\u2014which I imagine Bradley himself holds, given his other writings<\/a>\u2014squares with the graph in the image above.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something else I find most people don\u2019t know. During the middle ages, most Europeans\u00a0were much more pagan and much less Christian than people today realize. People used charms, spells, and old folklore and ideas that the Catholic Church had never been able to fully root out, and that Protestant Reformers weren\u2019t able to root out either. In fact, some historians<\/a> have argued that early European settlers to the U.S. were more\u00a0pagan than they were Christian, and more apathetic than they were churchgoers, and that it took until the mid-1800s for the American people to be fully \u201cChristianized.\u201d In other words, the idea that people before the mid-1800s were \u201crelying strictly on the Bible for wisdom for life\u201d is utter bullshit.<\/p>\n

As for the idea that children were obedient before the mid-1800s, I\u2019d say two things. First, there were disobedient children. Anyone who has read Romeo and Juliet knows that. It was also wasn\u2019t that uncommon for children to run away from home during adolescence. But second, before the mid-1800s it was both legal and socially acceptable to beat one\u2019s children if they didn\u2019t obey. In fact, child abuse was not recognized as a thing<\/a> until the mid-1800s. It\u2019s not that it didn\u2019t happen\u2014it did\u2014it\u2019s just that before this, it was considered normative. So maybe we can stop saying how awesome it was back then, because children obeyed their parents in fear of a beating?<\/p>\n

As for the divorce rate, t\u2019s worth noting during\u00a0the middle ages priests struggled a great deal to prevent spousal desertion and bigamy, things that did happen and were in fact surprisingly\u00a0common. Many people practiced\u00a0\u201ccommon law\u201d marriages, and the church was\u00a0often hard put as to how to regulate marriage. I mean gracious, priests spent centuries working to eliminate concubinage, and initially allowed it<\/a> (provided a man did not also have a wife) because of its prevalence. Similarly, the\u00a0church was so concerned by the amount of sex taking place outside of wedlock that they ultimately decided that<\/a>\u00a0a verbal promise to marry at some point in the future (no witnesses required), when followed by\u00a0sexual intercourse, instantaneously created\u00a0a binding marriage. That in itself created problems, because there were plenty of cases where a pregnant woman a man had promised to marry her before they had sex, and he said he hadn\u2019t\u2014in those cases, the courts had to figure out whether or not the couple was already married. This didn\u2019t change until the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s.<\/p>\n

In other words, marriage and sexual relations\u00a0during the middle ages were complicated, <\/em>and the church didn\u2019t have near as firm a grasp on the issue as people like Bradley appear to think. Domestic violence or other disturbances were\u00a0common, and in some cases wife-beating was legally sanctioned. Even where\u00a0divorce was banned, and couples were typically allowed to legally separate if they did not remarry, and they could also seek annulments in some circumstances. In many cases couples simply moved out and moved in with new partners, the church be damned. In a way, the\u00a0middle ages is the story of the Catholic Church attempting to control and regulate an unruly mass of people who were more interested in simply living their lives than in following a list of rules.<\/p>\n

The suicide rate is a bit more difficult to speak to, as statistics are nearly impossible to find.\u00a0We do know, however, that murder rates were extraordinarily high<\/a>, and that the common people consumed alcohol<\/a> in rates that would be considered excessive to the extreme today. And that\u2019s not even touching child mortality.<\/p>\n

History is complicated, and fascinating, and profoundly messy. The narrative Reb Bradley tells in his graph above could hardly\u00a0be<\/em> more ahistorical. The same is true about just about every declension narrative I hear today. Did you know that one study of marriage and birth records in the colonial Americans found that one in three women who married was\u00a0pregnant at the altar? Listening to conservatives, you\u2019d think having sex before marriage was just invented yesterday. For their part, narratives about increasing crime rates after removing prayer from school ignore the reality that crime rates today are at a historical low. I am extremely skeptical of declension narratives as a genre, because history isn\u2019t this simple, one-dimensional story just waiting to be plugged into your\u00a0talking point.\u00a0This shit\u2019s complicated.
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Love, Joy, Feminism <\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History is complicated, and fascinating, and profoundly messy. The narrative Reb Bradley tells in his graph above could hardly be more ahistorical. The same is true about just about every declension narrative I hear today. Did you know that one study of marriage and birth records in the colonial Americans found that one in three women who married was pregnant at the altar? Listening to conservatives, you’d think having sex before marriage was just invented yesterday. For their part, narratives about increasing crime rates after removing prayer from school ignore the reality that crime rates today are at a historical low. I am extremely skeptical of declension narratives as a genre, because history isn’t this simple, one-dimensional story just waiting to be plugged into your talking point. This shit’s complicated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":28277,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[183],"class_list":["post-28269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-evangelicalism-fundamentalism","tag-history"],"yoast_head":"\nPuncturing Declension Narratives<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"History is complicated, and fascinating, and profoundly messy. The narrative Reb Bradley tells in his graph above could hardly be more ahistorical. The same is true about just about every declension narrative I hear today. Did you know that one study of marriage and birth records in the colonial Americans found that one in three women who married was pregnant at the altar? Listening to conservatives, you'd think having sex before marriage was just invented yesterday. For their part, narratives about increasing crime rates after removing prayer from school ignore the reality that crime rates today are at a historical low. I am extremely skeptical of declension narratives as a genre, because history isn't this simple, one-dimensional story just waiting to be plugged into your talking point. This shit's complicated.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2016\/02\/puncturing-declension-narratives.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Puncturing Declension Narratives\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"History is complicated, and fascinating, and profoundly messy. The narrative Reb Bradley tells in his graph above could hardly be more ahistorical. 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