In an effort to avoid my own life and to-do list (what am I going to do, run the vacuum?) I’ve been wandering around the internet watching videos of Glennon Doyle, then Melton, talking about her second memoir, Love Warrior, which came out in the far distant past of 2016. Goodness, if I could write a memoir every five years to correct the record of the one before…scratch that, I’m going to wait till the end of my life because I’m lazy.
Anyway, 2016 was a lifetime ago, and it’s interesting to watch these old videos (of Doyle and others) because it was just before the election of Donald Trump, and there was this sort of pervasive feeling that humanity was on an upwardly ascending trajectory towards the pure good of inclusive diversity where everyone was willing and able to find xer true self. The patriarchy had just about been dismantled and glory and honor and dominion and power were just around the corner. Then, of course, everything came apart at the seams. Glennon Doyle saw Abby Wambach across a crowded room during her book launch and Mr. Trump moved into the White House and every exultant and every devastated person in the whole country looked across the internet at each other and recoiled in absolute horror and there we’ve been ever since. Lots and lots of people are concluding they have nothing left to lose and are behaving accordingly.
That little background introduction is by way of saying that I’ve been doing a touch of soul searching on the question of blogging (don’t worry, I’m not about to quit). The blogosphere was how Glennon Doyle, Jen Hatmaker, and others got their start. It was how isolated suburban women gathered at the watering hole of the daily combox to find things like community and sanity, to get help for everything from, “should I take my baby to the doctor or is this weird rash normal?” to, “who is God and should I believe in him?” The conversational tone, the comradery, the “hive mind” that easily rushed over to social media told a story of women who wanted “more,” who were trying to figure it out “all on their own,” who had been to college, perhaps, but were not doing whatever it is they thought they would when they first sallied forth into the world.
I don’t mean to tread on old paths here. This conversation has been going on for ages. But there it was again, as I watched Glennon Doyle then Melton talking to Marie Forleo about her half-baked musings on the divine—the word “ezer” she discovered through an internet search, means “benevolent warrior” which is basically love, so that’s what she called the book; oh, and also, “We’re all trinities, right? We’re all body, mind, and spirit, so…”—I looked into my own soul and wondered, what really happened here?
Because Doyle is a great writer. No question. She is probably the top, and underneath her, as her pillars, are Jen Hatmaker and Rachel Hollis (who was not really a blogger, but big on the self-disclosure as advice shtick). They are the little cadre of women who made their start in “Christian” obscurity and worked their way up, gathering to them their “tribes,” their “people,” the scattered lonely, frustrated, dare I say it mostly white women who didn’t know what to do with themselves or what to think about anything. Glennon, Jen, Rachel, and many others showed up to the page and bared their souls, they let it all hang out (well, some of it). They were funny. They were breezy. They were figuring themselves out and they took what turned out to be millions of readers along for the ride.
A ride that is going right off the cliff as far as I can tell. Why would you get any of your theological beliefs from a person who has to constantly revise her own version of her life? Who in her latest version claims with no apology to be god? Who wants to “burn it all down?” Who says things like,
Destruction is essential to construction. If we want to build the new, we must be willing to let the old burn. We must be committed to holding on to nothing but the truth. We must decide that if the truth inside us can burn a belief, a family structure, a business, a religion, an industry—it should have become ashes yesterday.
In other words, should any of us still be blogging? All of us who persist in wandering around the blogosphere, should we quit in dust and the ashes of Doyle’s marriage and go dig some much more valuable ditches in the ground or bake some more covid bread or something? That’s what I’ve been asking myself. And the words that keep forming themselves in the back of my mind are:
Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body. If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water? Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs? Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water. James 3:1-12
It irritates me that James would mix his metaphors here, that he would be talking about the dumpster fire of the vanities, the person who “burns it all down” and then throw in the line, “staining the whole body.” Stick to a single image, I always want to say, but then I feel the roiling frustration of coping with the aftermath of a person who is determined to ruin everything without considering the implications of all the words flying out of her mouth. Fire, in this sense, is neither cleansing nor holy. It actively destroys in the same way that a deadly poison kills, or some defiling corruption ruins something so that it can no longer be touched, the way mold grows inside a wall so that the whole house has to be torn down. Waving her arms, leaning forward, Doyle’s thoughts and feelings about herself as god should not be followed as advice, as a way to order one’s life by any calculation of truth or even sanity.
If you classify your life and blogging and writing under the category of “novella” or “curiosity” or even, which may perhaps be fine, “memoir,” I think it is fine to keep at it.* But the words that pour off the tip of your mind through your fingers onto the page ought to be circumscribed not only by other people’s greater wisdom but by the church, by the Scriptures themselves. Every thought should be made captive to Christ, to run to another rather shocking image. Rather than running “free,” as Doyle advises, each of us should constrain and inhibit ourselves so entirely by the beautiful thoughts and feelings of Christ that we question every little thing that flashes over the screen to see if it is worthy or unworthy.**
Anyway, of course, we will all continue to blog. But I wish nobody would take any advice from me or my life about how to live. In so far as I can engage in the public sphere of ideas and curiosities, I think this is a profitable pastime for me. The only thing I will ever be willing to tell you to do is to go to church and believe in God. Or perhaps, my own life might serve as a warning to you—don’t do it like me because I am but one person and do not have it all figured out. With the extra admonition that you should not do what Glennon tells you to do either—nor Jen, nor Rachel, nor any other person who managed to scrape up the cash to buy a computer and an internet connection.
*Don’t accuse me of irony. I’m not telling you what to do. Do whatever you want.
**Pretty sure Hannah Anderson has said this much more elegantly in her book, All That’s Good, which is sitting here enticing me, oh my word I wish I were a faster reader.
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