Them Apples

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Background Richard Land Really Should Have Had

I wrote the book Fidelity in 1999. The subtitle is “What It Means to be a One-Woman Man.” As a sort of hors d’oeuvre for the NQN giveaways, an e-version of this book is currently available here for free until October 22. If you avail yourself of this offer, you can hold in your very own hands the context that Richard Land and The Christian Post didn’t think was necessary.

Thirteen years after Fidelity was published, 50 Shades of Grey shot to the top of the NYT best seller list, a book that celebrates all things rapey, and Jared Wilson quoted from my book as a way of explaining that weirdness. Of course, he got swarmed by the harpies of holiness, and that quote of mine acquired what now appears to be its immortal status. I replied with a post that I am republishing here below, a post entitled Cloacina, Goddess of Sewers, and in the course of that same week, I wrote this piece for The Huffington Post. I had reviewed Twilight a few years before, and treated it as a specimen of predatory grooming, and please recall that 50 Shades began its meteoric rise as Twilight fan fiction. So much for the ruckus of 2012.

But the slanderous implications never really disappeared. In my recent appearance on The Young Turks, Cenk asked me where I was on the whole “marital rape” thing. Where did that question come from? In part it came from the dogged affection that some folks have for their lies. They thought they came up with a good one, and were loathe to let it go. The thing that distinguished Cenk from the rabid interlocutors and accusers is that Cenk actually listened to my answer.

But then! Richard Land is the executive editor of the Christian Post. Just last week, he weighed in on this old controversy, describing my views on holy matrimony as “blasphemous.” If you want proof that he actually did that, here you go.

Having performed that bit of drive-by analysis, Land went on to describe Christian marriage in terms that could be duplicated in multiple places in all my books of marriage and family. He thought he was juxtaposing wholesome doctrine over against my “blasphemous parody,” but what he was actually doing was defending a biblical view of marriage by defaming someone for defending that very same view of marriage.

Land explains that he was going off the infamous quotation, as cited in the recent Wall Street Journal article, and who knows where they got it. They may have read my book Fidelity, where it comes from, but I doubt it. Had they done that, they would have read other things. But however it happened, Land clearly does not know the context, and it was a context he had a plain journalistic duty to know.

But because it is never too late to put things right, I would invite Land to peruse them apples.

Our Standing Reply to Such Defamation

As this is not the first time this malignant nonsense has surfaced, I refer you to a letter that was written on our behalf by Clare Locke. If clicking the link would be too much work for the hard-working journalists pursuing this story, I helpfully include some quotes from the Clare Locke letter below. No clicking necessary.

The Content of the Quote

The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. It is a pleasuring party, however, and a true comfort to both husband and wife. Egalitarianism is poison for men and women both. Sex as God designed it is a gift to men and women both. A man penetrates. So, we have had a half century of sex education in the schools, and this is controversial? A man plants. Same here. A man brings the seed and he plants it. Bless me, what do they teach them in these schools? Colonizes. One of the results of this planted seed is that a new reality comes into existence—you know, kind of like Hampshire and New Hampshire. Conquers. Ah, I begin to see the problem. These people don’t understand that 50 Shades was a pathological exaggeration of something normal. The serious weirdness comes in the fact that they are okay with the pathology, but freak out over the prospect of a strong and godly leader who commands his wife’s genuine respect. Erotic necessity. This is something I learned from C.S. Lewis, in that conversation he wrote between Jane and Ransom. Oh, well. Lewis is next, I suppose.

The reason this quote has generated as much ire as it has is not because it targeted women, because it didn’t. The target was egalitarianism, and judging from the sound effects, I hit that target. And will cheerfully continue to do so.

A Brief Segue to My Original Rejoinder

For those who are still puzzled, the argument was not directed at a bunch of people who were enjoying wholesome and mutually affirming sex lives, and then I came along to tell them to make sure that the man was sexually domineering. No. The argument had to do with the perverseness of rape fantasies in men and women both. I was attacking the kink of sexual domineering. And I wrote that prior to phenomenon of millions of women proving my point through going in for the mommy-porn and rape fantasies found in 50 Shades. Precisely because we have denied any place for wholesome authority in marriage, and because we have a built-in need for authority, we gravitate to toxic forms of authority instead. We don’t have fresh water, and we still need to drink, and so we are tempted by the polluted water.

I can certainly understand someone disagreeing with this argument. What is inexcusable is for someone like Land representing it as a defense of toxicity. So now you know. Or at least you should.

Most of the links below were old and bad, so I just deleted them all. Please know that they used to be there.

Cloacina, Goddess of Sewers

So here’s what happened. 50 Shades of Grey went on the NYT bestseller list. For those just joining us, 50 Shades presents a demented view of sexuality, of the women-are-idiots school of thought. Jared Wilson of The Gospel Coalition posted an excerpt from my book Fidelity that he thought helped explain why people go in for this kind of stuff (like him, I think the explanation fits). The comments on that post went nuts, and Jared finally closed them down. Jared has a follow-up post on the ruckus as well. In the meantime, Rachel Held Evans has posted on it here, and I hear (but have not confirmed) that the religion editor of the Washington Post tweeted about it. Scot McKnight has called on The Gospel Coalition to take the post down here. And my daughter Bekah has offered her opinions of this particular movie by throwing her popcorn over here.

And why? Well . . . follow me closely here . . . it was because I am opposed to the degradation of women as represented in the 50 Shades phenomenon, and have been consistently opposed to that kind of thing throughout the course of my entire ministry. Examples would be tedious to multiply, but I am supplying some samples at the bottom of this post for anyone interested in facts. If literature encouraging the abuse of women were the drug, Twilight was like pot, and 50 Shades is the crack cocaine. I wrote an extensive review of Twilight, warning that it was a training manual on how to become an abused woman. And here we are, right on schedule, at the next stop. You see, a train has to run on the tracks the train is actually on. But in this situation, about the only thing the soft evangelical middle can do is attack those who attack the abusers. Sorry, but I am not about to cede the high ground on this one.

Just a few interactions though. Rachel Held Evans says this:

So the problem is not the language I used about penetration or conquest, but rather who is in charge of the whole thing. The objectors have wanted to slander me by pretending that I put the man in charge of it, but I most emphatically do not. What I actually do (as she accidentally acknowledges here) is to say that God is in charge of it.

This means that there are limits, even within marriage, established by God (1 Thess. 4:4). This is a theme that I explored at some length in my interaction with Mark Driscoll’s book Real Marriage. You can follow that thread, starting here.

It also means that I believe that mutually-agreed-upon rape games in marriage are out. Mutual consent is necessary in godly marital sex (1 Cor. 7:4), but mutual consent is not the final authority. Mutual consent is required by God, but mutual consent is not God. God is the final authority, and He says that the marriage bed should be honored by all, the bed undefiled (Heb. 13:4).

If mutual consent were the final authority, then there is no reason why a married couple could not decide to read 50 Shades together. But I believe that if a man and a woman both vote for degrading the woman, the decision to do so is still evil.

So I turn the charge around. Unless a God-ordained pattern of husband/wife interactions is normative, including their sexual lives together, then we have opened the door to all sorts of spousal abuse. And incidentally, the charge that Evans and McKnight make that I ignore 1 Cor. 7:4 is a risible one—it is a point I have made repeatedly, as in over and over.

Some folks out there are acting like my band made a cover of that Kinky Friedman tune . . .

Women’s liberation is going to yer head,
Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed

Here is my point, everybody. I didn’t do that. That was somebody else who recorded that song. Random House published 50 Shades, not Canon Press. Treat women right is a biblical message. Treating them wrong is bad. Oh . . . but here is the problematic part. Right and wrong are defined by God, and not by mutual consent, or by feminine insecurities, or feminist compromises, or by masculine insecurities, or by zeitgeist-riddled cultural observers, or by evangelicals desperate to be accepted with the cool kids, or by chin-stroking, Bible-surrendering academics.

And so I say to the world (and those within the evangelical world who want to accommodate them) that slapping some dame around is your gig, not ours. This particular stink is coming from somewhere else—the dog poo was tracked in here by accommodationist shoes, not holiness shoes. This generation is offering up all their bent yearnings to Cloacina, the goddess of sewers. Some of us, who think that things could be healthier around here, and have said so, have naturally drawn the ire of those who don’t want to recognize where the real problem is.

Here is a short collection of quotes from books I have written over the years that reveals two things about this situation—the first is the fact of the slander, and the second is the lameness of the slander. So try another one, girls.