{"id":59743,"date":"2022-07-18T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-18T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=59743"},"modified":"2022-07-18T04:01:51","modified_gmt":"2022-07-18T08:01:51","slug":"7-18-flashback-conquers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2022\/07\/18\/7-18-flashback-conquers\/","title":{"rendered":"7\/18 Flashback: ‘Conquers’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

From July 18, 2012, \u201cThe men of the \u2018Gospel Coalition\u2019 really, really hate women<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

What in the name of all that is holy is\u00a0wrong<\/em>\u00a0with these people?<\/p>\n

Before we go on I should note that much of what follows could be triggering \u2014 because apparently in order to discuss something called \u201cThe Gospel Coalition,\u201d we\u2019re also going to need to discuss rape and rape culture and what these strange, cruel men refer to as sexual conquering in the name of their strange, cruel God.<\/p>\n

Because, sweet Jesus, these men have\u00a0issues<\/em>. The Gospel Coalition is really bad news.<\/p>\n

For some reason this Gospel Coalition bunch \u2014 neo-Calvinist patriarchal types in the John Piper\/Mark Driscoll\/T.J. Mackey mold \u2014 decided to weigh in on the current popularity of\u00a050 Shades of Grey<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Rachel Held Evans summarizes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In a post on the GC Web site entitled \u201cThe Polluted Waters of 50 Shades of Grey, etc,\u201d Jared Wilson argues that the popularity of\u00a050 Shades of Grey<\/em>\u00a0simply reflects a perversion of the proper, God-ordained relationship of authority and submission between men and women. To support his point, he quotes from Douglas Wilson\u2019s book,\u00a0Fidelity: What it Means to be a One-Woman Man<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Because we have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them, we have created a climate in which caricatures of authority and submission intrude upon our lives with violence.<\/p>\n

When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.<\/p>\n

But \u2026 our banished authority and submission comes back to us in pathological forms. This is what lies behind sexual \u201cbondage and submission games,\u201d along with very common rape fantasies. Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the \u201csoon to be made willing\u201d heroine. Those who deny they have any need for water at all will soon find themselves lusting after polluted water, but water nonetheless.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This man is unwell, unwhole and unhinged. God have mercy on Mrs. Wilson, and on all her daughters.<\/p>\n

Evans responds:<\/p>\n

There is so much about this passage that I, as a woman, find inaccurate, degrading, and harmful that it\u2019s hard to know where to begin. That Wilson blames egalitarianism for the presence of rape and sexual violence in the world is ludicrous and unsubstantiated. His characterization of sex as an act of conquering and colonization is disturbing, and his notion that women are little more than the passive recipients of this colonization, who simply \u201caccept\u201d penetration, is as ignorant as it is degrading.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She goes on, at great length, to conquer the Wilsons\u2019 hateful assertions with a penetrating argument.\u00a0Read the whole thing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

J.R. Daniel Kirk\u00a0points out that in Jesus\u2019 name\u00a0no,<\/em>\u00a0this is not a healthy view of sex and gender, or a biblical view, or a Christian view:<\/p>\n

When you sexually conquer someone, this is rape. \u2026 I am embarrassed for Christianity that such an advocacy of rape (marital or otherwise) could find itself onto a websites that boasts of being one of a \u201cGospel\u201d coalition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scot McKnight is just as blunt, writing \u201cTake it down<\/a>\u201d and calling on the group to remove it\u2019s cruel, degrading and \u201cwoefully ignorant\u201d post.<\/p>\n

Grace at Are Women Human? has a long and thoughtful response: \u201cDoug Wilson, The Gospel Coalition, and Sanctified Rape Culture\u201c:<\/p>\n

Wilson goes much farther than any rape apologist Christian writer I\u2019ve ever read, and that\u2019s a lot of people. His notion of godly sex is little more than sanctified rape. In the name of Jesus.<\/p>\n

He also says (as Jared Wilson states in a comment defending this filth) that \u201crape is judgment upon a culture that does not cherish and protect women.\u201d We should be OK with this, according to Jared, because Doug Wilson isn\u2019t blaming rape survivors for being raped. He\u2019s only blaming all women who want to be treated equally and all of our allies. That\u2019s all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So just who\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0this twisted \u201cDoug Wilson\u201d creature, anyway? Glad you asked. Grace provides some more background on this horrible trainwreck of a human being:<\/p>\n

Doug Wilson is not only a rape apologist; he\u2019s also a slavery apologist. And contrary to Jared Wilson\u2019s dismissal of commenters who repeatedly tried to point this out, this is absolutely relevant to Wilson\u2019s teachings about obligatory female submission in sex.<\/p>\n

Wilson is the co-author with Steve Wilkins, a white supremacist, of a pamphlet called\u00a0Southern Slavery as it Was,<\/em>\u00a0which claims that Southern slavery \u201cwas not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity\u201d but a relationship between \u201cfriends and often intimates.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jesus wept.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From July 18, 2012, \u201cThe men of the \u2018Gospel Coalition\u2019 really, really hate women.\u201d What in the name of all that is holy is\u00a0wrong\u00a0with these people? Before we go on I should note that much of what follows could be triggering \u2014 because apparently in order to discuss something called \u201cThe Gospel Coalition,\u201d we\u2019re also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n7\/18 Flashback: 'Conquers'<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"From July 18, 2012, "The men of the 'Gospel Coalition' really, really hate women." What in the name of all that is holy is\u00a0wrong\u00a0with these people? 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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