Nice Guys, Bad Girls and God: Some Thoughts on a Post by Mark Braivo

Women sometimes do terrible things, and Mark Braivo recently posted a story of one such feminine failing.

In this post,  Mark tells the story of a young evangelical Christian couple. They are devoted to one another. Their love is real, or so it seems.

Mark quotes Jake, the guy in the marriage, telling the story:

We were both virgins when we got married… We both come from very conservative, religious families in the South. Neither of us has ever lived away from home. We have been dating for a couple of years but rarely spent time alone, barely making to second base prior to the wedding.

It was a beautiful, big wedding. I thought I had won the lottery. I had a beautiful young virgin (think farmer’s daughter type) to spend the rest of my life with. She was a good girl. We had plans for a big family in a big home in the country. The wedding and honeymoon were incredible.

More:

Then last night she sits me down and says, “there’s something I need to tell you.” My first thought was happiness, perhaps she was pregnant! She seemed a little too down though, so then my thoughts went to health, maybe something was wrong.

It seemed like an eternity before she finally started to speak.

“I am so scared to tell you because I don’t want ruin what we have,” she said to me.

As you might expect, what she wanted to tell him was not that she had won a trip to Hawaii in the Women’s Christian Relief Association raffle.

Nope, she had cheated on him. A couple of weeks before the wedding, she had sneaked out of her house and slinked off to bang the local Alpha stud in the back of his pickup.

The details are excruciating. Read Mark’s post to see them.

Long story short, Jake hung around for a while after the revelation and then divorced her when he found out she was STILL getting it on with Mike the Makeout Machine.

As rough as that story is, what I really want to do is expand on something Mark said in response.

Mark writes:

I bring this story up because so many guys think the answer to their problems with women is to marry up the sweet, traditional virgin. Let this be a story of caution that even these girls are susceptible to the pressures of hypergamy and the YOLO culture.

I have two or three responses to this. Before I lay them out, let me talk about myself a little bit.

Though I am not an evangelical now, I grew up attending an evangelical church in a small Midwestern town.  I have spent decades visiting evangelical churches and hanging around their institutions. I know personally a number of evangelical leaders.  All this to say that I know whereof I speak.

Reading this story about a sweet Christian girl who threw away her integrity and a good guy in a flight of hpergamic lust, a lot of people will ask, how did this happen?

To answer that question, I have to say something about women and something about God. Or at least about evangelical Christianity.

First, let me expand on what I think Mark is saying in the above comment.  It is indeed easy for some guys to think all they need to do to protect themselves and their families from this kind of behavior is find a nice, religious virgin.  Of course, some guys are pretty simple minded.

Truth is, It takes more than that, not that you would learn that within evangelical Christianity.

When I read this story, a couple of truths about the evangelical subculture come to mind.

1. In spite of what you might hear in the media about how terrible and retrograde evangelicals are, the entire movement, even the “conservative” end is thoroughly feminized.

The central Christian teaching that ALL people are sinners gets glossed over. Instead, the notion that men are somehow worse by nature than women is everywhere, sometimes stated overtly, often in the subtext.

At the same time, women are elevated to a position of moral and spiritual superiority. Women’s sin is often excused in light of a man’s failings. I remember hearing a very well known evangelical leader tell a story about how his wife freaked out and started smashing all their dishes. What was his point? That she did this because he had been neglecting her.  See, she is not an adult beholden to practice self-control, but rather an innocent, sweet victim driven to outlandish behavior by his shortcomings.

I am certain that Jake came up in this environment. Had he not, he might have been less clueless about the wickedness women are capable of. He might have been on the lookout. He might have taken some precautions, upped his Alpha and held her to a standard.

(Much has been written about how could have kept her attention and attraction focused on him. I won’t go into it here)

2. If she came from an evangelical background, she probably really was a “nice girl.” The evangelical subculture values niceness over goodness any day. Think about what a “nice girl” is in the context of rural, Southern life: she’s polite, she gets good grades, she probably plays sports. She tries not to be mean to people. I mean, except when she breaks their hearts through her sexual incontinence.

Obviously none of this has to anything to do with developing the kind of character necessary to resist the intense impulses of the flesh. In retrospect, it’s clear that this girl missed that part of her Christian education. Why? In large part, it is because she is female, and in evangelical contexts, women are assumed to have fewer dark urges and men, so why talk about them?

This is particularly odd for a Christian movement.  Look at Jesus. In John Chapter 8, some religious leaders bring to him a woman caught in the act of adultery. They know Jesus takes a dim view of this kind of thing. They remind him that Jewish law demands she be stoned from her crime.

Jesus lets her live, but lays out for her the wrongness of her behavior and tells her to cut it out.

Now, is this story just there by accident? Is this adulteress just a one off, a single case that stands for nothing beyond herself? Of course not, because AWALT.  All women are like that. All women have the potential to become serial adulteresses.

Had either the guy or the girl in Mark’s story been told this, the outcome of their marriage might have been different. But, someone, somewhere along the line failed them, passed on a blue-pill sermon to a heart desperate for a red pill gospel.

3. Picking up on Mark’s point about YOLO culture, it’s clear this girl had not been taught that the culture around her is no friend of chastity, faithfulness and family. Instead, the people responsible for her moral and spiritual development, especially her father, had slacked on the job, entrusting a collapsing culture to teach his daughter to restrain her passions, to control her body and value honesty.  Maybe her dad had other things to do. YOLO, indeed.

What, then, should Jake have done when he learned the news?

I don’t see how he could do anything but dump her as soon as he learned the truth.

I say this as someone whose views on divorce most people would describe as “very conservative” to say the least.

Of course, he should forgive her, but forgiveness doesn’t require that he stay married to her. She allowed him to enter into a marriage on false pretenses. That fraud invalidates the contract.

The fact that Jake stuck around to be cheated on even more, tells you much about him. He was a nice guy evangelical struggling to find a nice guy solution to bad girl problem.

I think we can all see how that worked out.

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