{I apologize for the length of this, the length of the quotes. But I want people to know what’s in this study, and how pervasive the uncompassionate attitude is. I think if people are going to attend this study, or churches are going to promote it, they should know what they are promoting, because the content in this week’s posts are incredibly offensive to some people.}

The most stunning thing to me about watching many of these videos is the utter lack of compassion and empathy the speakers have.

“But a woman for whom the gospel doesn’t matter or mean anything is going to be self-indulgent. She will have addictive behaviors, substance abuse, eating disorders, live for pleasure, live for senses, medicate emotional pain.”

How can they be so insensitive?

“Feminists argued that patriarchy is what caused all the heartache of woman….It was woven throughout our entire society’s family and social and political and religious structures. It was laced throughout our social etiquette and our customs, our rituals, our traditions and laws, our entire system of education and division of labor, and all of these things were responsible for keeping men in a dominant position and women in a submissive, subservient position…only the demise and the deconstruction of all patriarchal structures would lead to her freedom….

{So women fought for} pay equity, equal pay for work of equal value, changes to financial practices, total and equal integration, affirmative action.

Women began to seek these things with passion and fervor—sexual freedom, changes in adultery and decency laws. Feminists picketed outside New York Times building in opposition to the male-segregated help wanted ads. They organized a splashy protest of the Miss America contest.”

None of this, not even the Miss America protest, was talked about as good, or needed. And it gets even worse.

“I participated in things like Take Back the Night marches, and I just remember we’d go around campus yelling, ‘Take Back the Night’, like night’s not going to happen again. (lots of laughter) I don’t know what our point was, but we were mad about a lot of things. (laughter) (off camera – I think that was the point.) So there I am, trying to connect the dots of the social life, I’m like all angry, yelling take back the night, I’m like, so where are those dinner dates? (laughter)”

I didn’t even really know what Take Back the Night was and I was so angry at this part. People don’t just march and stand up for something, for no reason. And then when I learned what it was?  Words don’t do it justice.

They believed that what motivated Margaret Sanger was bitterness. Talking about Sanger’s reaction to her mother, “who’d had 18 pregnancies, resulting in 11 children. And she believed that her mother was worn-out and ruined, and ultimately died because of being worn-out from childbirth. She had a bitterness about motherhood. She had a bitterness about childbirth.”

Where is the sympathy for a woman who buried 7 children? Is it possible Sanger had a legitimate reaction to what she saw in her mother? Look, I understand if you don’t like the Pill. But can’t we at least empathize with the fact that childbearing can be hard on women? And that many women live now that would have died in the past, because of having babies (myself included)?

“It’s time to pull the plug on pain. If God has forgiven you, you are forgiven. Put it away! And move forward!” – that could be applied to a lot of situations, (and is the wrong attitude, I think), but this is specifically about women who have had abortions. Moving on from that kind of pain isn’t as easy as just putting it away, like it was a load of laundry!

“Are you women who have raised your children…to restrain themselves. They don’t run all over the church. They don’t run on the pews. They don’t stand on people’s furniture. You can teach them and train them….Are you that kind of a woman? Rather than women who abandon their children on the altar of their career? Or before the idol of self?….I don’t believe that God ordained for you to have children and have someone else raise them, including your mother or your in-laws! God gave you a child for you to raise….”

“We ought to be wailing for the condition of the women in the USA, because honestly, and I don’t mean this cruelly, but we are a generation of harlots that are raising harlots and that we are destroying this nation with our harlotry.”

The danger of wrapping up an ideology with Jesus, is that a person can look at this and say, if this is compassionate Christianity, FTS.

When leaders and churches decry societal changes that, from where I sit, look an awful lot like Isaiah 58 in action, how should we act? One of the reasons I started doing this series was because I was shocked by what was in this study.

When we open the church doors only to find the gates of hell, what do we do? When the halls of justice are marked men only, is there room for sacred offense? Can we claim our humanity before our gender? I just don’t understand how the commands to love our neighbor, seek justice, defend the oppressed, break the chains, are limited to men only.

The seemingly lack of compassion and the arrogance required to attain it, is astounding to me, because it appears their ideology is more important than people. They appear so confident they are right, that it doesn’t matter if systems are unjust, because their doctrine will save the day.

“… the world was witnessing an era of revolution…based on the enlightenment idea that all people are equal and no one group has the right to rule over any other group….In the 1940s and 50s, the world witnessed revolutions in India, Korea, China, Hungary, Iraq, Cuba….Revolutionary fervor was in the air, and the fight for rights was in the air, and it spread from political to social structures.

Workers demanded their rights and formed unions.
Students demanded their rights and marched against the oppressive educational structures.
Attention was drawn to racial inequality between blacks and whites. In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, and the Civil Rights movement was born.
During the 1950s, there was a French philosopher, and her name was Simone de Beauvoir, and she proposed that a revolution in gender roles also needed to take place.”

I am not sure what she’s trying to say here. I am really uncomfortable with the implications. Because if all of these movements are treated as equal, and the feminist movement is sin and disparaged so greatly – what does that say about the rest of them? If they are all rooted in the premise of equality, why would feminism be wrong and the rest right? Especially considering how the Bible was used during the Civil Rights movement? Why did she say all of these things without any qualifying statements?

The harshness of their views bothers me, because I don’t want to spend my time watching videos, reading books, and learning beliefs in church, of all places, that encourage me to disdain others. I don’t need any help to settle into my own beliefs.

If I’m going to intentionally form myself in a Jesus-inspired way, I want it to be in a way that brings dialogue, that raises awareness to our own blindness, and that encourages understanding, compassion, and empathy. Church should not be the place where I learn to dehumanize people.

I don’t care that you might not agree with the Pill. Good for you. I don’t care that you think depression is sin. I hope you never have to deal with it.

But I do care when you take to a stage to proclaim your thoughts as truth for all people. I do care when churches advocate for this position. This makes me, a person who loves Jesus, want to run screaming and swearing from the community that bears his name. I care, because I know I am not the only one.

What does this make people who use the Pill or who are depressed or who take medications for it, or who have anorexia, or who have been a victim of rape or abuse or had an abortion feel? What does this make people who’s children run in church (for goodness’ sake!) feel?

“1 Tim 5:6 – She who is self-indulgent is dead, even while she lives. And that is just the theme for our times.”

If I scream and swear my way out of evangelicalism, it will partly be because I looked for compassion and only found condescension.

 

This post is part of a series reviewing and discussing the True Woman 101 Divine Design study, by Mary Kassian and Nancy Leigh Demoss:

Part 1 – True Womanhood – Why Airplanes Aren’t in the Bible

Part 2 – True Womanhood – Death to Certainty

Part 3 – True Womanhood – Affirming Female Ordination?

Part 4 – True Womanhood – June Cleaver as Jesus

Part 5 – True Womanhood – An Offensive Gospel

Part 6 – True Womanhood – Compassionless Christianity

Part 7 – True Womanhood – Oppressing Women since Creation

Part 8 – True Womanhood – Get Abused, Win A Crown!

Part 9 – True Womanhood – Cookies and Chains

Part 10 – True Womanhood – Tension, Cracks, and a Concrete Faith