We Can Certainly Be Friends

I have, as I said last week, been doggedly pursuing the goal of actually reading books this year and my task has been eminently rewarding. Amongst my favorites is Aimee Byrd’s Why Can’t We Be Friends.

It was only fairly recently that I heard of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood—probably because of the Nashville Statement—and the Billy Graham Rule. I’m not Baptist. I’ve swum shallowly and uncomfortably in that pool because of life circumstances, but my soul has always been Anglican, and the gender wars in other parts of the Christian sphere never encumbered me in any meaningful way. When at school, for example, I was always bemused by the dress code and the labyrinthine dating rules. But in that context they made some sense. You can’t jumble 200 kids together without serious anxiety for their behavior and well being. What confused me was coming back to America and finding that ordinary evangelicals were sorting themselves out exactly the same way.

On the other hand, the Episcopalian world where I lived in basic comfort, had its own theological troubles. In seminary, the question presented itself in opposite form. Are men are allowed to be men? Or are they children? Do they have any responsibility? If they bow and scrape low enough, mouthing all the correct enlightened ideals, can they then do whatever they want? I rebelled by marrying a real man, shocking all my friends to my own great satisfaction.

Of course we can all be friends, I have ever believed, however naively. The key is to let people be who they are, without 1. making them think about it all the time, and 2. forcing a kind of play acting onto every single poor Christian. The less you focus on being something someone else insists on, the more interesting the human experience is.

Because who you are is who you are. When you try to be a certain thing, you will most assuredly fail. Trying, in some sense, means adopting some sort of alien category for yourself. This is not the same as trying very hard to be obedient, of slowly and painfully aligning your inclinations and desires and actions with what the Bible commands, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

If you take your eyes off of Jesus and spend all your time measuring the length of your skirt and considering your “role,” you are not very different from the person in the world who can’t go five minutes without checking an emotional pulse, whose feelings are the measure and rule of reality itself. Men and women are different. That is the most boring and obvious thing that anyone could ever say. They are different no matter what they do or who they attempt to be.

As I’ve tried to make sense of phenomena like the Nashville Statement—which my husband loves, by the way, probably because he is a man, whereas my first question is, ‘Why?’ and ‘To what end?’—I’ve found that most of things I read from that realm are basically unobjectionable. If you jumble a lot of bible verses together, what’s to be upset about? And yet as I’ve looked at the way men and women sort themselves out in other Christian cultures, I have felt a deep unease. The picture looks off, like cubism when you’re not Picasso.

You thought I was going to talk about Aimee’s book—I feel sure she won’t mind me calling her Aimee because, were we ever to meet, we would absolutely be friends—and I am. In Why Can’t We be Friends she untangles for me, clearly and perfectly, what is so objectionable about the vision of men and women cast by those for whom Role Distinction is the only conversation that can ever be had.

And truly, men and women can’t be friends if the only interesting thing about them, as she so persuasively elucidates, is their sexuality and gender. How is it that the church is essentially mucking around in the mire into which our culture has descended? The world has reduced the human person to his or her enslaving sexuality. That is the measure of the person. The sex doesn’t just get in the way, it is the only category that matters. Why, then, have various sectors of evangelicalism bought into this secular vision of gender and sexuality? Why are these faulty and useless categories being used in the church? Baptizing them, but never questioning the prior assumptions that made them possible, does not make them biblical.

There is every reason to walk backward from such an aesthetically unappealing vision of the Christian life. And it is possible to do it without being naive or foolish.

I can see why there has been such an outcry over Aimee’s work. If Christians were to think seriously about the Kingdom of God, the Church, in the biblical categories she articulates—and her exegesis is fantastic—of sibling friendships, there might be hope for evangelism in such a broken and terrifying age. The most basic facts about human existence are under assault. Isolation, loneliness, and confusion are the dregs of our common lot. Do we even have a choice?

Imagine being confused about who you are, of having to think about your identity every moment, of being lonely, of being burdened by having to carry yourself along alone, expressing every feeling and desire in all its confused and enslaving fullness. And then imagine walking into a church where human people are friends, where God is the one who is worshipped and adored and not all the people, where men and women work cheerfully along for the sake of the one who took on human identity and trouble in order to redeem and restore it. Does the first question need to be, ‘Are you living out your biblical role?’ Because that is an aesthetically boring question, besides being a terrible place to start—and to end.

Aimee Byrd in Why Can’t We Be Friends is systematic, clear, and thoughtful in a way I only dream of. And her reading of scripture is not only painstaking, but, to coin my own new word, church-changing. If you are unsatisfied with the way the conversation is had in so many places, read her book, and then go out and be a friend—for the man that hath friends must show himself friendly, and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.