The Regular Contributors to WIT are participating in a round table series, titled “Haunted.” This series will appear every (or every other) week throughout the Fall 2024 semester. Each current contributor to the blog will spend some time reflecting on what they are “haunted” by in their theological project.
When we talked about doing this roundtable I was immediately on board. I wanted to talk about haunting. My favourite podcast did an episode on Hauntology a few years ago. Taking from them the idea that hauntology is about “absent presences” and talking about “what [we see] at the edges,… what exists within the gaps, propping things up, making things work invisibly, and how are they treated when revealed,” I’ve been returning to the concept again and again since.[1] What ideas and practices prop up the theology I study? What has been invisibly guiding my work?
It has been three and half years since I defended my dissertation, and about 7 years since I first started researching for it. There are a few passages from my research on complementarianism that still haunt me, popping into my brain at unexpected moments, reminding me of the ways that theological systems get spun into supporting some pretty messed up stuff (I think that’s the technical term). As I continue to research in the field of theology and gender history the voices of some of these passages ring in my ears as I see connections between the past and the present, or remember the horrors of things said in the all-too-recent past—particularly in the thread of my research that focuses on evangelical Purity Culture. When I think of things that haunt me these are the first things that come to mind.
Some of what I consider to be the most egregious snippets from books that present purity frameworks as theological absolutes I have already written about on WIT, but given that it was a while ago I’ll rehash them a bit here.
One author, as she encourages her female readers to sleep with their husbands more frequently, frames a wife’s lack of desire for sex as sin, uses language of property and rights to describe the marital relationship, and also suggests that 1) sexual satisfaction helps men be moral people and 2) wives are culpable for lapses in morality that their husbands experience “because” they are sexually unfulfilled. The critiques I could levy on these points are legion, and I find myself responding with a visceral anger.[2] These teachings and similar ideas are found everywhere in evangelical literature, perhaps most especially in the Every Man’s Battle/Every Woman’s Battle books and the various extensions of the multi-Battle-verse (which has sold millions of copies).
From those books I am haunted by the Purity Culture rhetoric that, by being so invested in the duality of male/female, constructs sexual drive & desire as a solely male trait. This not only ends up degrading men by construing them as insatiable sex drones who will inevitably disregard their humanity and their commitments to God and to their partners if they are not able to orgasm at set intervals, but also further perpetuates the disembodying messages women receive. Take this example from Every Young Woman’s Battle, a text aimed at tween and teen girls to help guide them on the path to sacred premarital chastity. In this text the authors muse about Adam and Eve’s different natures and what it would be like if God had created them with more similar natures:
Imagine Adam and Eve in the garden. God gives them the command, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number’ (Genesis 1:28). This was a two-part command: have sex and make babies. Now if Adam was so much like Eve that all he wanted to do was walk in the garden holding hands with his wife, pick flowers, and share his innermost thoughts and feelings, would they have ever gotten around to having sex? Probably not.[3]
I remember reading part of this book in my early 20s. I was working (well, officially, volunteering because we didn’t get paid…) at an evangelical summer camp. At the time I would not have identified as a feminist. Firmly rooted in my evangelical community, I earnestly believed in the general framework of Purity Culture and all of the dangers and rewards the system forecasted and promised. But I still FUMED at this passage at the time I read it. How could these authors say this? Had they ever talked to a girl before? Did they not realize that any girl reading this who had ever had a sexual thought or feeling might now feel as though she was broken? That she was not wired the way God intended her to be? (And, over time, my questions and disbelief grew. What about boys who, also, like to talk about their innermost thoughts and feelings? And do these authors think wlw relationships are all flower crowns and no f#%@ing?)
If we are driven by our ghosts then this excerpt drives me. It drove me to study theology further. It drove me to wonder why, if there had already been a multi-decade (or multi-century, depending when you start counting) feminist theological movement, were none of their ideas present in books written for lay audiences? Why was the local Christian bookstore full of titles telling women to stay home and sleep with their husbands? My professors couldn’t answer these questions, so I began to consider pursuing a PhD where I could find some answers myself. Many years later I find myself in an office at a university on another continent, with a label under my name that reads: “Associate Professor of Feminist Theology and Gender Studies.” Most of this journey I can trace back to one moment on a camp bunk bed feeling very angry about what Stephen Aternburn and Shannon Etheridge put in a book in 2004.
I am haunted by both the rage I felt in that camp bed, and by a sadness I feel for those who are only given these tools to work with when it comes to navigating their sexual/spiritual lives. I grieve when I think of how these systems frame women’s participation in what Sheila Gregoire has labelled “obligation sex” as self-sacrificial heroines. Looking at Every Man’s Battle we can see an example of this, where “Ellen” and her experience is presented, uncritically, as a happy ending:
In relation to your own husband, understanding the seventy-two-hour cycle can help you keep him satisfied. Ellen said, ‘His purity is extremely important to me, so I try to meet his needs so that he goes out each day with his cup full. During the earlier years, with much energy going into childcare and with my monthly cycle, it was a lot more difficult for me to do that. There weren’t too many ‘ideal times’ when everything was just right. But that’s life, and I did it anyway.’[4]
I did it anyway. This phrase haunts me, too. As I am typing this sentence a feel a visceral chill and have goosebumps just like the trope of an encounter with a ghost. I did it anyway. I am haunted by a theological project that lionizes and extols of the virtues of denying one’s own body, preferences, desires, and feelings in perpetuity—in essence praising those who live as ghosts: disembodied presences, only spiritual in nature.
A Bible study teacher I had once tried to get us to think more critically about the idea of idols. She said that idols were, yes, things in life that we gave too much attention or allowed to drive our lives in place of our faith (listing some of the usual suspects in these types of discussions: money, fame, power, sex, etc.). But she also encouraged us to think about how the desire to flee from idols can end up shaping our lives just as drastically as when we centre them. One might, out of a desire to not let thirst for material comfort take hold, decide to live as a modern-day ascetic, and spend their life running away from money. What if, she posited, an idol wasn’t only something we ran towards, but something we ran full-steam-ahead away from? What if we think about idols as something that we give undue power and authority in our lives, either negatively or positively?
In their pursuit of uprightness and sexual morality, the evangelical purity industrial complex still ends up making a negative idol of sex. Fleeing from it makes it present everywhere, but in a haunting, overbearing present absence/absent presence kind of way. It drives the way these communities organize themselves, the way they understand human nature, the way that children should be parented, etc., etc. It props up practices like “the Billy Graham Rule” or makes the idea of sex-segregated elevators and stairwells at strict Christian universities seem necessary.
Complementarian authors frequently point to the pre-martial abstinence and heteromarital faithfulness as a counter to the idol of hypersexuality in the secular world, as well as a defining marker that differentiates them from that world. In Every Man’s Battle Arterburn discusses the importance of boundaries in the workplace to prevent good Christian men from having affairs with their female coworkers. He cautions men to be weary of women that find them attractive, especially if the woman herself isn’t a Christian. He writes: “If she’s a non-Christian, she’s even more dangerous since she has no moral reason not to go to bed with you.”[5] Who is more hypersexual here? The evangelical man assuming all of his female colleagues are an inch & opportunity away from ensnaring him in an affair, or the non-Christian woman just trying to stay awake in a sales meeting? By assuming hypersexuality in all of “the world” Purity Culture ends up replicating what it projects on “the other.” In positing that not adhering to the norms of evangelicalism and Purity Culture means having no morality whatsoever, Arterburn furthers the idea that, outside the boundaries of the system he preaches, there is only chaos and evil.
Undeniably, there is a lot of chaos and evil in the world. Too much. And when we have persistent dehumanizing conflict around the world, and a multitude of other violent and devastating things happening around us, being sad about some sexually dissatisfied evangelical housewives can seem trivial. And it many ways it is. I do see a connection though. The same binarizing impulse found in Purity Culture—pushing people to see the world as sharply divided into pure evil vs. pure good, this group of people being entirely X, while we are entirely Y, that sufferings always lead to rewards—works itself out in wider, deadlier patterns again and again.
What I want to say to my ghost, I think, is this: Keep haunting me. Remind me of the connections between the quotidian sadness of “I did it anyway” and grander, harsher violence. May I never be so confident in my theological convictions that I dismiss the suffering of others as necessary. May I never be so confident in my theological convictions that I force the God of the cosmos and all that they created into inflexible dualities. May I never be so confident in my theological system that I deny the reality of the world we actually live in (where girls can, and often do, have a sex drive).
[1] The podcast is now rebranded as Material Girls and it is still my favourite. The episode reference is as follows: “Book 6, ep. 2: Hauntology,” Witch Please, aired April 5, 2022, https://www.ohwitchplease.ca/witch-please-episodes/book-6-ep-1-slytherin-pedagogy-bksaa
[2] Here’s the full quote: “Although most women recognize that they probably don’t have sex as much as they should, we rarely think about this abstinence as sin. When we refuse our husband’s attentions, we’re actually robbing him… of what we owe him. In addition to stealing from him what’s rightfully his, we’re also exposing him and ourselves to unnecessary temptation. As a wife who’s been called to help her husband, this is one of the major ways I can fulfill that calling. If I ignore Phil’s needs, then I’m answerable for the storm of temptation with which he has to struggle.” Elyse Fitzpatrick, Helper By Design (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2003), 105.
[3] Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn, Every Young Woman’s Battle: Guarding Your Mind, Heart, and Body in a Sex-Saturated World (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook Press, 2004), 18.
[4] Stephen Arterburn, Fred Stoeker, and Mike Yorkey, Every Man’s Battle: Winning the War on Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Time (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2000), 79. Sorry/not sorry about the happy ending pun…
[5] Arterburn, Stoeker, and Yorkey, Every Man’s Battle, 173.
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