![\"monty](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/541\/2021\/02\/monty-python-theyve-already-got-a-jesus-centered-sexual-ethic-sheila-wray-gregoire.jpeg\")
<\/a>Everyone, Meet Sheila Wray Gregoire.<\/h2>\n
Evangelicals would say that Sheila Wray Gregoire has a heart for<\/em> sex abuse victims. A Christian who\u00a0has a heart for something,<\/em> in Christianese, focuses intently on that topic and cares deeply about it. Gregoire writes a blog called To Love, Honor, and Vacuum<\/em><\/span><\/a>, which focuses on evangelical relationships.<\/p>\n By our standards, it\u2019s not a bad blog, either. (It speaks Oxford Comma, which is a point in its favor.) Last year, she wrote a good post<\/span><\/a> demanding that Focus on the However, like Rachel Held Evans<\/span><\/a> unfortunately did, Gregoire tends to swing-for-the-trees-and-miss when it comes to figuring out what to\u00a0do\u00a0<\/em>about those traits. Like so many other decent-hearted Christians, she carries this vision in her head of Jesus as the Ultimate Good Guy. So naturally, she assumes that Christians obviously want to make that version of Jesus happy.<\/p>\n She is not reckoning with her hosts, and it gives her writing this strangely surreal feel.<\/p>\n Hopefully, today you\u2019ll see what I mean.<\/strong><\/p>\n The post in question comes to us from\u00a0Religion News Service<\/em><\/span><\/a>\u00a0(RNS). Sheila Wray Gregoire titled it:<\/p>\n Is the evangelical view of sex at the root of our sex scandals?<\/strong><\/p>\n It was not celebrity culture that taught Ravi Zacharias, Carl Lentz and countless other pastors to objectify women. Our evangelical culture primed them for it.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now, Betteridge\u2019s Law of Headlines<\/span><\/a> states that when someone asks a question in a headline, the answer is usually \u201cno.\u201d But in this case, Gregoire is saying an emphatic yes! Evangelicals\u2019 view of sex is, in her opinion, absolutely<\/em> the cause of their sex scandals.<\/p>\n (She\u2019s wrong, I\u2019m afraid, but trust me: we are only just getting started<\/em>. Hang in there.)<\/p>\n After a brief introduction about the latest pair of big-name evangelical sex scandals \u2014 those of Ravi Zacharias and Carl Lentz \u2014 she says evangelicals tend to blame \u201ccelebrity Christian culture\u201d for causing those scandals. She provides no sources for this assertion. I have seen evangelical criticisms of this culture over the years, but usually when evangelicals talk about fixing celebrity-Christian problems they focus on trying to get everyone on board with their flavor of Jesus-ing, not on ending celebrity-pastor culture.<\/p>\n Indeed, in this post, Gregoire takes aim at evangelicals\u2019 entire conceptualization of sex<\/em> itself.<\/strong><\/p>\n Often, I talk about evangelicals pointing to something they\u2019ve identified as The Big Problem Here. They either ignore or can\u2019t even perceive other factors going into the problem they\u2019ve identified. No no,\u00a0this right here\u00a0<\/em>is the problem. Once it\u2019s solved, the rest flows like rum sauce over spice cake.<\/p>\n And almost always, these Christians offer a solution to The Big Problem Here that doesn\u2019t even remotely address that situation. They might as well tell their viewers to burn sage and chant mantras to end national-level conflicts forever. This non-solution has the benefit of being completely ignored<\/span><\/a>, so the person offering it can feel hard-done-by \u2014 like the guy at a Town Hall meeting who enjoys grumbling afterward about their suggestion being rejected.<\/p>\n With respect to Sheila Wray Gregoire, she\u2019s fallen into this trap.<\/p>\n To her, The Big Problem Here is that evangelical men get taught from infancy to see their sex drives as uncontrollable and insatiable \u2014 and to see women as receptacles for that lust. She\u2019s talking about the concept of \u201crape culture<\/a><\/span>,\u201d though I\u2019m not sure she\u2019d\u00a0ever\u00a0<\/em>use a feminist term.\u00a0Rape culture creates an environment that excuses men\u2019s sexual predation of women, and then blames the victims of this predation for their victimization.<\/p>\n And it is this view of victimization and predation as just being \u201ca natural, unavoidable part of being male,\u201d Gregoire asserts, that is causing all these sex scandals.<\/strong><\/p>\n Thus, Sheila Wray Gregoire\u2019s big solution involves moving evangelicals back to what she calls \u201ca Jesus-centered sexual ethic.\u201d She writes:<\/p>\n We want to call the evangelical church to something higher, something better, something more centered on the person and character of Jesus. Until we start talking about a Jesus-centered sexual ethic, rooted in mutuality and intimacy, we will continue to have these scandals on our front pages, because they\u2019re reflecting what\u2019s happening in our bedrooms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ah, okay. So TRUE CHRISTIANITY\u2122 will totally fix this problem. But how? She certainly doesn\u2019t tell us in her post. This suggestion comes almost at the very end of it \u2014 and then it ends by asking evangelical men to \u201csee\u201d women the way Yahweh did in the Old Testament and Jesus totally did in the Gospels.<\/p>\n I can find no other instance of her using the phrase \u201cJesus-centered sexual ethic.\u201d However, I did find hints of how she thought evangelicals could achieve it.<\/p>\n In a blog post addressing evangelicals\u2019 attitudes toward men\u2019s lust<\/span><\/a>, we see that her very first suggestion involves the usual\u00a0omg y\u2019all need to just Jesus harder<\/em> non-solution:<\/p>\n Yes, many men struggle with lust.\u00a0But not all do<\/strong>. And whatever we focus on expands.\u00a0Are we focusing on the sin, or are we focusing on Christ?<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s like the boilerplate piracy warning on DVDs: something obligatory she has to put first so she can get to the real stuff.<\/p>\n Basically, Gregoire wants evangelical men to treat women as actual\u00a0people<\/em>. She wants men to learn to care about their wives\u2019 sexual needs and their feelings \u2014 and to start taking responsibility for their own feelings and behavior. In addition, she suggests that churches appoint more women as group leaders and encourage more mixed-gender activities.<\/p>\n My body is not a democracy. It is an empire and I am its dictator. You do not get a vote. There will be no coup d\u2019etat. Rebel forces will not overthrow me. I am in charge of it forever.<\/p>\n \u2014 Teafly<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Sheila Wray Gregoire is dancing around the concept of\u00a0personal sovereignty,\u00a0<\/em>also called\u00a0self-ownership<\/em>. This is a human right<\/span><\/a> which states that people own their own bodies, and thus can deny anybody else all and any uses of their body. It is this right which informs almost all of our other rights \u2014 like freedom of speech. Most of all, personal sovereignty leads to the right to\u00a0meaningfully consent\u00a0<\/em>to each and every use of our own personal bodies.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s a penis, a fetus, a scalpel, a military force, a feeding tube, or a physician seeking to touch us, confine us, make use of us, or harvest our bodily resources. In all cases, every one of us<\/em> has the right to deny our bodies to anybody seeking to use it for any reason. Governments may violate people\u2019s self-ownership only in the most restricted and carefully-scrutinized ways, and often end up getting a lot of heat for overstepping their bounds.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, we maintain this right, this ultimate, impossible-to-veto ownership of our bodies, even past our deaths<\/a>.<\/p>\n When we talk about slavery and rape and why these are wicked crimes, it\u2019s concepts like personal sovereignty that come into play.<\/p>\n And evangelicals absolutely, positively\u00a0despise\u00a0<\/em>this human right. They have\u00a0never\u00a0<\/em>liked the idea of consent. They have\u00a0never\u00a0<\/em>accepted the notion that all human beings own themselves.<\/p>\n Gregoire thinks she can defang evangelical men\u2019s attitudes about sex \u2014 but without addressing the massive elephant in the room: their entire conceptualization of human rights.<\/strong><\/p>\n In her RNS post, Sheila Wray Gregoire talks longingly of an evangelicalism dominated by \u201ca Jesus-centered sexual ethic,\u201d a \u201chigher\u201d and \u201cbetter\u201d way of engaging with women that is \u201cmore centered on the person and character of Jesus.\u201d<\/p>\n However, any casual reading of the New Testament reveals that Jesus was\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>a good person \u2014 not at all. Like so many other Christians, she\u2019s draped this paper cut-out of Ultimate Good Guy Jesus over what the Bible actually\u00a0says\u00a0<\/em>about the fellow.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s a very, very common shortcoming in Christians \u2014 especially in evangelicals. Jesus was not a good person at all. He knew nothing of human rights, committed all manner of transgressions, cared nothing about \u201cmutuality\u201d or \u201cintimacy\u201d in the context that Gregoire uses the words, and had a very firm and fixed conceptualization of authoritarian chains of command binding all people to him and his god.<\/p>\n In his book\u00a0The Bad Jesus<\/em><\/span><\/a>, Hector Avalos constantly references this truth about Jesus. Despite even Christian scholars\u2019 perception of Jesus as \u201cbenign and paradigmatic,\u201d the reality portrayed in the Gospels constantly contradicts that image. As he writes (p. 9):<\/p>\n Many of the fundamental ethical principles announced or practiced by Jesus actually would be antithetical to those we otherwise describe as \u2018acceptable\u2019 or \u2018good\u2019 by some of the most widely accepted standards of ethics today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Exactly so.<\/p>\n Human rights would have been as foreign a concept to Jesus as gene therapy<\/span><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n Thus, evangelical misogynists are probably closer to the Gospels\u2019 actual depiction of Jesus<\/em> than Gregoire herself is.<\/strong><\/p>\n The fundamental problem here isn\u2019t<\/em> that evangelical men aren\u2019t Jesus-centered enough. The solution, therefore, isn\u2019t<\/em> going to look like them drilling down harder on their Jesus-ing.<\/p>\n Instead, the problem is that evangelical leaders have painstakingly constructed a broken social system that serves their interests at the expense of those they view as inferior human beings: women and BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People of Color), LGBTQIA people, foreigners, and many more.<\/p>\n They\u00a0like\u00a0<\/em>that system. It does exactly what they want it to do.<\/p>\n The male authors Gregoire criticizes (rightly and with justification, yes) in her RNS post\u00a0have huge audiences<\/em>. They got those audiences\u00a0by telling evangelical men exactly what they want to hear<\/em>.<\/p>\n By now, evangelicals have literally built up entire libraries full of books rationalizing what they\u2019re doing as 100% Jesus-flavored. They\u2019ve got mountains of Bible verses that they think justify every single act of complementarian wickedness<\/span><\/a> they want to push onto women.<\/p>\n So they will easily dismiss her calls for even these mild changes to their culture.<\/strong><\/p>\n Without a radical shift to embrace full human rights for\u00a0all people<\/em>, without self-ownership and consent becoming key parts of how evangelicals engage with their relationships, ain\u2019t nothing going to change. And that is never, ever going to happen.<\/p>\n At most, Sheila Wray Gregoire might get a few of those men to harrumph and shift uncomfortably and concede that\u00a0mayyyyybe\u00a0<\/em>evangelical men could stand to be\u00a0nicer\u00a0<\/em>about how they lord it over their miserable, resentful, powerless wives.<\/p>\n Yes.<\/p>\n Nicer.<\/p>\n They\u2019ll set up some more couples\u2019 retreats and publish a bunch more books with busy-work<\/span><\/a> that promise to heal evangelicals\u2019 tattered marriages and make them the envy of heathens once again.<\/p>\n And the gravy train will continue to roll on, and the scandals will continue to flow, and evangelicals\u2019 marriages will still be miserable. You can\u2019t fix a broken system. As we learned from Joshua in the 1983 movie Wargames<\/span><\/a><\/em>, the only way to win some games is not to play \u2019em at all.<\/strong><\/p>\n NEXT UP: A return to Christian Lies<\/span><\/a>, with one that\u2019s got me rolling my eyes<\/span><\/a> lately. See you tomorrow!<\/strong><\/p>\n Come join us on\u00a0Facebook<\/a><\/span>,\u00a0Tumblr<\/a><\/span>,\u00a0Pinterest<\/a><\/span>, and\u00a0Twitter<\/a><\/span>!(Also\u00a0Instagram<\/a>, where I mostly post cat pictures.)<\/em><\/p>\n Also please check out our Graceful Atheist podcast interview<\/a><\/span>!\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n If\u00a0you like what you see, I gratefully welcome your support. Please consider becoming one of my monthly patrons via\u00a0Patreon with Roll to Disbelieve<\/a><\/span>\u00a0for as little as $1\/month! My\u00a0PayPal is captain_cassidy@yahoo.com<\/a><\/span>\u00a0(that\u2019s an underscore in there) for one-time tips. <\/em><\/p>\n You can also support this blog at no extra cost to yourself by beginning your Amazon shopping trips with\u00a0my affiliate link<\/a><\/span>\u00a0\u2014 and, of course, by liking and sharing my posts on social media! <\/em><\/p>\nBigotry<\/del> Family not associate with a particularly odious, toxic fundagelical guy who wrote a particularly odious, toxic fundagelical marriage-advice book. She\u2019s not perfect by any means, but overall she seems to have a good instinct for pinpointing her tribe\u2019s worst traits.<\/p>\nDoes Her Post Reflect Betteridge\u2019s Law of Headlines?<\/h2>\n
The Big Problem Here, to Sheila Wray Gregoire.<\/h2>\n
And The Big Solution.<\/h2>\n
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Stop talking about \u201cevery man\u2019s battle\u201d and start talking about Christ in you<\/h3>\n
And Now: The Actual<\/em> Problem.<\/h2>\n
Jesus Knew Nothing of Human Rights.<\/h2>\n
Evangelical Leaders Don\u2019t Want What Sheila Wray Gregoire is Selling.<\/h2>\n
And Despite It All: Nothing Will Change.<\/h2>\n
\nPlease Support What I Do!<\/em><\/h3>\n