Earlier this week, one of my children walked in the door after school visibly upset. Immediately, they launched into the events of the day, narrating several instances where they were reprimanded for something they either hadn’t done or that was misinterpreted by the teacher. This is a child who never has behavior issues at school. Feeling wronged, they couldn’t see past the injustice of it.
I felt for them. But I thought this might be a necessary moment of growth for them too. A few of my kids are high achievers, who tend towards perfectionism… which tends towards self-righteousness. There’s a lot of good to that first quality and it usually elicits outward praise and personal satisfaction, but it also means it can be difficult to accept correction. Or to see oneself as in need of reproof. Ever.
Though I sympathized with the frustration of being misunderstood or possibly wrongly accused, I reminded this child that they are in fact not “perfect.” Maybe it was good for them to be corrected, even if the teacher didn’t see the whole picture. It was worth reflecting, “Did I listen as well as I could have? Did I make the wisest choice even if I wasn’t explicitly given an instruction?” Sometimes you get it wrong(sometimes the teacher gets it wrong too— as do parents). It can be worthwhile to accept correction and explore it even if it’s tainted by unjust accusation.
The reason I share this is not so much to debate whether or not my child was in the wrong, but to point to a larger issue I raised last week about whether our assumptions about ourselves or our world can be corrected at all. Whether or not they were wrongly accused— here was an opportunity to learn to be reflective and not reactive.
In last week’s post, I shared three reflective questions and asked for your feedback. The questions may have seemed disconnected and random, but they were based on conversations I’ve seen happening in the public sphere. My underlying interest in these conversations is they way we as a culture, both widely and more specifically as a Christian culture, assume that our latest take on these issues is the more informed and better way. Or, the flip side— maybe we assume our long held stance is correct and any challenge to that is an affront to true morality and right thinking.
The three conversations I want to look at are:
Men and Women as Friends- do we need to “normalize deep friendships” between men and women? Is it possible and is it the remedy to current trends in leadership scandals and the negative effects of purity culture?
Shame— a good thing or a bad thing? The Brené Brown following is strong these days and yet our culture both thrives on public shaming while at the same perpetuating a strong belief in abolishing any sense of personal shame.
Identity— sexual identity being the most prolific and in our current climate, often the core of how we define who we are. Where does our sense of identity come from— within ourselves or mediated to us from outside sources?
I so appreciated the thoughtful responses I’ve already received and am happy to read more if you still want to reply in the comments or with an email. The experiences you shared were varied and added depth and nuance to my own thoughts. I’m not sure if I’ve opened up a can of worms or a helpful dialogue, but I’m going to attempt to take each of these “conversations” one at a time over the next few weeks.
Let’s dive in.
Conversation #1: Men and Women and Friendship and Sex
The scandals that have swept through the church this past year (not to mention decade… or decades) have led many to ask what is underneath this phenomenon of male leadership falling prey to sexual sin? Lately, there has been a landslide of critique specifically against the Billy Graham Rule and the purity culture movement as misguided methods that have fed this monster of male prowess.
As a result, some are saying that what is needed in the church is to “normalize deep male and female friendships.” The thinking is that we have overly sexualized the natural interactions between men and women, so that men view women as “temptresses” to be avoided if they want to remain morally pure. Instead, some are advocating that the way forward is to “normalize deep friendship” between men and women by de-sexualizing our view of one another, instead learning to see each other primarily as brothers and sisters.
*One point to note is that boundaries and intimacy in friendship is not just a male/female thing but something that same-sex attracted folks deal with too. I realize this is another facet to the friendship dynamic we’re talking about, but for the sake of brevity I’m only addressing the issue from the male/female perspective.*
Obviously, there is a lot to unpack here. The criticisms of the Billy Graham Rule and purity culture are not without merit. While I have not experienced personal harm as a result of either of these, I have heard the stories and seen the fallout in the lives of others. The BGR easily leads to women being ostracized and left out of leadership positions or fair treatment as equals in the workplace. In many “purity culture” circles, the teaching left young Christians with an unhealthy expectation of sex within marriage and a myopic view of what it meant to be “pure” as well as who was responsible for that purity.
There have been needed critiques of both these movements that have revealed some of the harms and pitfalls we want to avoid as we move forward. It’s the moving forward part that leaves me wondering. If the church has fallen prey to reducing people to sexual objects alone by this focus on extra-biblical boundaries and barriers, can we simply re-wire our interactions to resemble brother/sister relationships without the sexual pitfalls?
In my own history, I haven’t seen this play out well. I’ve seen spouses become devoted to friendship outside their marriage that became hurtful and devastating in the end. Deep friendships that developed along spiritual lines seemed to turn into something more potent and powerful than either party was willing to admit. Some of you shared similar stories. I’ve had single friends who thought their friendship with a married person was completely above board, but later found out that their “good friend” was missing events like their own anniversary in order to have dinner with this single friend. At the same time, some of you shared about unique times in your life when a healthy and deep friendship with the opposite sex was provided for a season, and the gift it was to both you and your spouse.
Listening to these different stories feels a little like qualitative versus quantitative research. I can’t come up with statistics or data to make a case in either direction. But the stories are powerful and not without merit. I’m not sure we can ignore the reality that in friendship, deep bonds form— and often lead to depths of attachment that are harmful outside of marriage.
I heard an interview with Russel Moore this week (found here near the 1:05:35 mark) where he talked about something he observed after years of pastoral counseling. He shared how he used to think those who committed sexual sin did so as a result of sexual desire. But over time he began to see why the Apostle Paul often pairs sexual immorality with an unhealthy desire for controversy, a pairing that seems odd at first. But Moore observed that they both come from the same place: “a bored person who is overwhelmed with a sense of responsibility and wants an escape. And the escape that person finds is [an experience that] gives that jolt of a feeling of life.” Moore compares it to how we’ve seen an uptick in a penchant for quarrelsome and outrage behavior online during the pandemic. It’s an interesting observation, and one that points away from the argument that it’s the way we frame male/female relationships (with either rigid boundaries or depth and openness) that leads to sexual sin.
Whatever the layers of causality, it’s hard to get away from the fact that the culture we live and breathe in is a sexualized one. Can we escape it? It’s the water we swim in— so much so that we don’t even notice it. It’s the filter through which so much of our media, advertising, even our view of ourselves and our identity is constantly shaped.
So this is where I currently land. Opposite sex friendship is complicated. It just is. It plays out in varied shades of grey. And how these friendships should be stewarded is not something we can solve either with rules and boundaries or total freedom and openness.
I was working on a project with my husband this month on discernment, and one of the things he said was that the world is not black and white. Discernment enters the picture because our lives are varied and people are all over the spectrum between “mature” and “total mess.” I don’t think we can “normalize” cross-sex friendships because the inescapable truth is, they are ripe for abnormality. Start reading just a few biographies of renowned historical figures in the church and we see that this is the case down through the centuries, not just in our current cultural moment. This is not to say that deep male/female friendships aren’t possible or even given to some of us for certain seasons, but if we turn them into some kind of new rule of engagement that says boundaries are unnecessary and relating like brother and sister is the norm— I fear we are asking more of ourselves than we know.
Perhaps any of us making claims on how relationships should look between men and women is more based on our own experience than we realize. And we need to be wary of making that prescriptive for all. Some of us may have strong, healthy opposite sex relationships outside of marriage that are viable. But the fact that it went well in our circumstance does not a new ethic make. And for those of us who have seen it go all awry, we shouldn’t rely on rigid rules or boundaries to protect us or shut down the opportunity for relationships that could be necessary and beneficial. We need discerning spirits that are careful but open, listening to our spouses and/or other friends, our conscience and the the voice of the Holy Spirit. If we are guided by an ethic of love and laying down our own lives for one another, we will take into account how our friendships are affecting those around us.
I’m not ready to jump on the bandwagon of “normalizing” deep male/female friendship. Perhaps that’s in part because I haven’t seen a clear explanation of what that could realistically look like. But neither do I think we should cut ourselves off from the work of learning to see one another in a more wholistic light, as fellow family members who are more than just bodies to be avoided or guarded against. Perhaps the true experience of this kind of filial love between us all will only be realized fully someday, when even marriage is taken off the table and we dive deep into fellowship of a kind we can barely glimpse now. In the meantime, we can aim to grow in discernment while letting down our defenses, to reflect and stand corrected when and where we need it.
I love this and I love how you handled a hard topic.
As a single female I have had and do have strong friendships with both married and unmarried men. I have a few hard rules I follow and if I answer no to any of them it's time to reevaluate.
1) Am I also friends with their wife/girlfriend even if we aren't as close?
2) Do I hang out with this guy and their wife/girlfriend as much as or more than we do things alone?
3)Would I do this same activity if their wife/girlfriend/mom were there?
4) Does their wife/girlfriend/mom know where we are and are they okay with it?
5) No situations where we're completely alone. Stay above reproach even if we would never.
6) No secrets. If I can't tell others what we did or what we talked about we need to back up.