Well, I guess coronavirus and racism are finally over because the golden days of celebrity ruin are back. Thank Heaven. Yep—Rachel and Dave Hollis are getting a divorce. Here’s someone else’s blog post with all the Instagram posts so that I don’t have to go find them.
The small portion of twitter that cared deeply about this melted down as the night was spent. A portion of tweeters were heartbroken—women who had taken all the Hollis’ marriage advice to heart, one woman who lost a lot of weight and pulled her life together—and a goodly number cruelly rejoiced as with one voice.
The problem, of course, is that Rachel and Dave do, or rather did, dispense a lot marriage advice. They have a podcast called Rise Together to do just that. And they recently held a marriage weekend to the tune of 1000something dollars per couple not including hotel. The weekend sold out, apparently, within minutes. People these days, no matter what anyone might say, really do want to have successful marriages and happy children. They don’t know how, of course, because many of their own parents were unsuccessful in their attempts, and they won’t be able to, because Rachel Hollis, with her message of Put Yourself First, is crippling them with every dollar they hand over. But that doesn’t mean the desire isn’t there. It is.*
And, of course, I’m sure you all remember the plagiarism. Enough of the Hollis Instagram feed is lifted from other sources without attribution that people have noticed, as well as some of the material in Girl, Wash Your Face. The horror, as so many have noticed online, is that the Hollis’ recommend doing the hard thing and pulling your life together, and they attempt to tell you how, which makes it all the more upsetting that they haven’t been honest about their own struggles and are taking the easy way out.
I have several things to say, because of course I do. First, covid has been hard on everyone. Being stuck at home and losing lots and lots of money and opportunities is stressful. If life was complicated before, it is so much more complicated now. Apocalyptic even—that great unveiling wherein the hearts of so many people are revealed—and it isn’t pretty.
Second, I think the anti-intellectual pragmatic loves of so much of American culture is tragical. The thing I kept muttering to myself as I endured Girl, Wash Your Face, and honestly also, Untamed, was “Girl, read a book.” You don’t have to be a scholar to be interested in worlds outside of yourself. It’s like all these poor Christian musicians (I think there was another one last week) who wake up and think, “Oh, goodness, this religion thing is completely at odds with this singular cultural moment, it must therefore be wrong” without stopping for even the length of a YouTube video to read any of the thousands of Christians who have been thinking about Jesus for millennia. Or the thug applying graffiti to a statue of Abraham Lincoln because, well, this is speculation on my part, the existence of any old statue necessarily indicates racism. Glennon Doyle prattled on about the unlived lives of women without reading about, as far as I can tell, any women who lived interesting lives, any complex fictional characters even, nor even a single woman in the Bible.
None of us need to make everything up with each new generation. How to live a good life, how to be married, how to raise children has been going on for a long time. You can find out information about these things in books. Lots of those books are even online. You don’t need to get all your help from YouTube and Instagram. Or even any of your help. Girl, Read A BOOK.
Third, I don’t think crowing schadenfreude is wise—because everyone wants to be famous and influencing right now. That is the most valued kind of life, even for Christians. Any of the women either laughing or heartbroken on social media, if given the chance to build a brand, would drop their whole lives and grab it (well, not all, but a lot). Part of the allure is that, not having one’s life in order, one can nevertheless feel as if one does, because of all the shiny pictures. Ms. Hollis is not lying on her Instagram. She is displaying what she believes to be good and right, and that is to have an awesome life where she is the heroine. She puts forth the image and then strives, by any means necessary, to conform her life to her vision. She sketches out her ideal self and then “rises” to meet and enact that self. When she fails, everyone cries “hypocrite” but she hasn’t been lying, she has been rising. She just fell before she got there.
Fourth, which is where Jesus comes in. Don’t be disappointed, he is the only hope for any of us. In this case, Jesus is a help because he is kind. Going to him feels like it will be the worst thing in the world because you will have to face the truth about yourself. You will have to look at your Instagram feed and see that, unhappily, the person on the screen is not a good representation of the person inside your skin. You don’t have it together. You are wicked. You love yourself more than you love anyone, and that is the first and most appalling wickedness hidden in the human heart. So far from having it together, you and I and Rachel are all in a pit that we have dug for ourselves. We have fallen and we can’t get up. We aren’t rising, we are sinking into Sheol. And yet God, who does not desire the death of the wicked, comes down into the mire himself and pulls out anyone who cries to him. I hope Rachel and Dave take this “human moment” as they call it, and seek out the only one who can wipe away their grief. I hope they reconsider for the sake of their children, for whom this will not be good, no matter what they say about it. And for all the people who thought Rachel could help them, I hope they will go out and seek after the only person who can ever lift them up out of their darkness—that’s Jesus, in case you still aren’t tracking with me.
*I know I should find links for all this stuff but I was scrolling through twitter and reading angry Medium articles and watching videos all through the night and I have a headache as a result. Also, cutting links onto my tiny screen is super hard—is there any suffering like my suffering? I doubt it—so…don’t take my word for it, just google (and remember, google needs all your private information, so do your duty and scroll!).
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