So I was reading Doug Wilson this morning and totally unfair, but I was also reading some of his followers which I shall now proceed to also blame him for.
I actually know a few women who follow Wilson and flat out they are meanspirited, hostile, vicious towards their sisters, unkind, inhospitable, arrogant, and I do not want what they have.
A bit funny, we’re advocating in favor of “truth” here, well there’s some truth for you! Alas, almost no one ever wants to hear the truth as it applies to them personally.
We are to some extent responsible for how our words are subjectively received by complete strangers. For example, a dancing teacup cartoon that never directly comes out and tells small children to embrace assorted perverse cultural norms is not innocently and objectively “just a teacup cartoon.”
So my first truth bomb is, pretending you only traffic in objective reality therefore you are not responsible for others people’s subjective opinions of what you have said, is a lie. There is no such thing as “plausible deniability” in the kingdom of heaven.
Let me begin with the very first sentence, “Evangelical Christians are nice, and so when they lie it is in the interests of keeping things nice.” Everybody always thinks they are so, so, “nice.” Everybody always thinks they are so, so “good.” The Bible actually says “there are none righteous, not one,” but of course that never applies to any of us.
“Nice,” it actually means simple, silly, and insipid. In the church world there are a whole lot of conflict avoidant, people favor seeking complacents, but there are also those who I just call jerks for Jesus.
Wilson continues that thought by saying, “…when they encounter the rare specimen who comes along speaking the truth, they think he is simply working out a new form of being mean and nasty.”
That’s because he is! He is doing precisely that. He is being mean and nasty and trying to pass it off as God endorsed. “Jerks for Jesus” are simply using Jesus as a cover for their jerkyness. I know this on account of the fact that I empathize deeply. There was once this local street preacher and he would just stand on the corner and scream, “go to hell!” I wasn’t offended, I was somewhat amused. I mean, who doesn’t want to just scream at people and tell them to bugger off? But is that Jesus? No, no it is not!
Do not use Jesus as an excuse for the fact that you are a complete asshat. I’ll match your vain imaginings and raise you a few millstones. This is no joke. God is love. Love is patient, love is kind…. It is definitely not sarcastic, cynical, arrogant, proud, insensitive, boastful, judgmental, insecure, and self righteous.
I have to preach this to myself too, quite frequently! Just consider the possibility that you may not be “good” or “nice” or even relationally functional! Just be open to the possibility that you aren’t as kind, loving, or intelligent as you think you are. Also, odds are pretty good you have huge blind spots, since nobody has eyes in the back of their head and a drone giving them an eagle’s eye view of everything going on above and below.
One last thing. Wilson wraps it all up by saying, “Tell me this. Will a society that doesn’t know what a woman is be able to tell us what a child is? And if we don’t know what a child is, then what is pedophilia actually? when all is said and done? Is not pedophilia an artificial social construct? Hmmmm?”
It is. It is a social construct! Civilization is a very thin veneer, a social construct, a mutual contract. “Childhood” itself is a social construct. Kids have been forced to work, forced to provide for their families, forced to go to war, forced into all sorts of slavery all over the world since forever. Protecting them is an ideal, a social construct mostly stemming from Western civilization. It is not really objective or tangible, it is a subjective ideal we attempt to make manifest in the world.
Also, talk is so cheap, beliefs are a dime a dozen. We live in a culture that advocates abortion and just bleeds pornographic pedophilia everywhere, all while pretending to care, even demanding, what about the children? Well, actions speak a lot louder than words. It is a social construct and when we proceed to construct the precise opposite, we simply reap what we sow.
See, there's this thing called biology... 