Today I’m not talking about Driscoll, as I expected, but about this fun news about the notorious drug cartel La Familia Michoacana making “required reading” of John Eldredge’s Wild At Heart. (H/T Audentia) Alternet had the best title for their coverage of the piece : Christian Book Touting Manly Aggression Inspires Violent Fundamentalist Meth Trafficking Cult.  Really, you can’t make this up!

         John Eldredge, of course, is angry about the abuse of his book as an endorsement to perpetuate the violence La Familia has done.  How could Eldredge imagine his content would be so co-opted! Content that claims (WaH 117):

" 'The kingdom of heaven suffers violence,' Jesus said,  and violent men take it by force.” (Matt 11:12 NASB) Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Hopefully by now you see the deep and holy goodness of masculine aggression and that will help you understand what Christ is saying. "

         Eldredge’s thesis, as I wrote in my first post, is that man must have “a battle to fight, a beauty to rescue and an adventure to live.”  I’m missing how that thesis necessarily requires Jesus.  La Familia is missing how that doesn’t endorse (really, how it requires) violence.

          Eldredge wrote Wild at Heart so men would be submissive to God in their aggressive masculinity, and therefore La Familia is totally misunderstanding him.  I can see how La Familia missed it.  I missed it too!  Eldredge’s focus on violence, weapon play, and aggression as a healthy Christian masculinity is so extreme that many believe Cartel leader “The Craziest” Nazario Gonzalez Moreno’s book Thoughts is somehow “more in tune with the classic spirit of Christianity”.    

         The Alternet story gets this right as well: despite all the talk of “Writers can’t control how their words are used”, I have yet to see La Familia make required reading from the works of progressive Christian Jim Wallis.  Of course, Wallis probably disagrees with Eldredge that William Wallace is more like Jesus than Mother Theresa (p.22, WAH).

         The response I’ve so far heard on the right is that this is the most extreme example in the world concerning what this type of rhetoric about a “Muscular Christianity” can lead to.  This is reality, and extreme examples are still real situations, not hypothetical.  I didn’t have to make it up or prepare hyperbolic statements about the damage possible through this “aggressive biblical manhood” mandate.  It’s something a journalist for the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote about when Wild at Heart showed up 4 times in a Mexican Intelligence Report concerning La Familia. 

         Driscoll, Eldredge, Piper and the gender essentialists lead to a reality that not only requires women to “always be rescued” and subservient to men, but a reality in which murder is defended as “divine justice”, and our “culture war” becomes an actual war.  That’s not a world I’m prepared to accept, from the false premise of their biblically mandated masculinity to the “pro-family” cartel beheadings of fathers, brothers, and sons. 

 Tuesday night, my new radio show, Civil Discourse officially launched.  What stared as an offhand idea about a fun podcast a friend and I could create to talk about politics from a youth perspective somehow got picked up by a professional radio station, and I now have a producer, a sound guy, and a live Ustream videocast.   The show is an attempt to stop the real-world meme of “Whoever Yells Loudest Is Right!”  and the violent rhetoric that has so distracted politicians of their goal of, you know, helping solve the problems faced by people of the US and through our involvement in the world.  Kat, my very Conservative Republican friend who is highly involved with the party and president of our County’s Young Republicans Chapter is my co-host.  I, of course, am this progressive democrat inspired by liberation theology and Marxist critiques of commercialism. Somehow, despite our inability to agree on anything, we’re pretty good friends.  But we do agree on how we should treat each other, and that is with respect.   Civil Discourse is a rebuke to the Tea Party (which, while Kat was originally involved with, has since left due to the personal ugliness involved as well as the political haziness) and it’s a rebuke to some of the Liberal Bloggers or Media who think it’s okay to respond to hate with hate.

            So last night we talked about education reform, a big issue in Texas considering our State Board of Education, the Race to the Top funding, and well, the honest problems we’re facing.  While far from thorough, we hit on some interesting problems.  Kat and I have different beliefs about what education should do.  I failed at articulating convincingly why I was opposed to her on air, so I blogged about it yesterday in an order to sort through my thoughts. To summarize: Kat believes education is primarily about producing skills, specifically those that aid employment opportunities.  While I agree that employable skills are a part of education, I believe education is about teaching the whole person.  Education also involves character development through our culturally shared morals and values as well skill development.

            The problem I see with Kat’s attempt to create a morally neutral-value education centered on economically productive skill development can really be fleshed out using the example of sexual education.  Her sex-ed involves learning the parts of your body in order to keep yourself physically healthy, and depending on local community approval, teaching of contraceptives in order to prevent teen pregnancy, which has a negative correlation for economic gains.  If abstinence all your community wants, then keep kids abstinent using any program that shows it prevents sexual behaviors that cause harm to productivity.  There is however, not to be any discussion of values or morals, especially federally mandated ones that  “instill one set of morals into all children”.  Kat is logically consistent and against any possible disenfranchisement by teaching the viewpoint of one group of people in an attempt to delegitimize others.  She may be more afraid of “Obama Socialists” than she is the Religious Right, but she’s intellectually honest enough to know it goes both ways.

            But here’s my problem: Students are not value-neutral robots meant to be filled with “productive” skills and sent on their merry hard-working ways. When we teach something so integral to ourselves as values and morals to our youth, it’s a lot more than simply telling someone to do something.  As youth, we question and talk back.  The many times I’ve told my younger siblings to share and heard them quickly respond “but you’re not sharing!” is just one of the many proofs that values are shaped by our experiences and how we see others act.  Those actions may simply be putting on a seatbelt or throwing away trash in a bin, or something more damaging like witnessing domestic abuse.  The way we hear about and experience these things in our daily lives impacts how we think about them, and we cannot simply pretend that certain values aren’t being taught in schools simply by because we cannot qualitatively measure them.  Comprehensive sex-ed is filled with values: respect for the autonomy, personhood and dignity of others, self-discovery, self-respect and integrity by teaching healthy relationships, individuality through the expectation of individual autonomy in making sexual choices, and personal responsibility by giving students all the possible tools they can have while figuring out their limits.  In a skill-focused education, it is impossible to quantify these values and therefore they have no way to be taught or measured.  We cannot measure a “Yes Means Yes” approach to intimacy the same way we measure typing skills.

            In my original post, I used the example of honesty, which very much applies to every part of comprehensive education reform.  While we may believe in honesty (we say), how do we teach that as a “skill”?  If the end goal is employable skills, then what do we say about plagiarism and cheating?  “Congrats, you technically got the assignment done, good job for working the system to your immediate individual advantage”?  We’ve seen a lot of ugly examples of that mentality in our commercial society: Enron, the greedy and indefensible mortgage practices and the housing market collapse.  In our homes, we have divorces due to adultery, a culture of gossip, juicycampus, and online bullying.  What lesson plans create “integrity” or “respect”?  Or are these our shared values anymore? 

            I’ll agree with Kat that when it is age appropriate, every teenager needs to know where and how to find contraceptives and how to properly use a condom.  But if that’s it, we’ve not taught youth how to decide when they need to do this.  We’ve not taught them that they are whole human beings deserving of that same respect no matter what their choices or their mistakes.  That is what is so desperately important about comprehensive sexual education.  It teaches that all of us are equally capable of making healthy life, relationship, and sexual choices given the right coaching and tools.  That capability means that healthy life choices do not have to be the same for everyone, an equally affirming belief of autonomy and relational responsibility. 

Good News Texan* Sex-Ed Advocates! We're not as alone as the religious right would have us believe! The Texas Freedom Network recently released new poll results with some amazingly encouraging statistics for when we approach our state legislative body and our school boards.

Among my favorite of the statistics? 80 percent of likely voters in Texas agree that high school classes on sex education should teach "about contraception, such as condoms and other birth control, along with abstinence." TFN's blog post on the study segregates the findings further between different religious, political and racial/ethnic groups.

I'm going to savor that for a moment. It's nearly opposite of how Texas Sex Education works. While 9 in 10 school districts teach abstinence-only, 8 in 10 Texans want comprehensive sexual education reform. Not only is the will of an extreme majority of Texans being denied, but they are supported by peer-reviewed research that points out comprehensive sexual education makes teens safer and creates a more responsible and educated adult society.

Likely Texas voters respond even more strongly when it comes to LGBTQ youth and "non-traditional" relationships. TFN's report also shares that 88 percent of likely Texas voters think public schools should be required "to protect all children from bullying, harassment, and discrimination in school, including the children of gay and lesbian parents or teenagers who are gay." The hateful and perverse rhetoric continually shouted by anti-LGBTQ groups is falling increasingly on barren ground. This reaffirms the reality that a majority of Americans, including a majority of conservative Americans, are not as spiteful or prejudiced as their leaders or unofficial spokespeople. The Rick Perrys, Sarah Palins and Glenn Becks of the world are speaking to an ever increasing minority.

Unfortunately, this loud, manipulative, and powerful minority must be reminded of reality. These statistics need to be continually in front of them. These statistics also need to be in front of our school districts, School Health Advisory Committees (SHACs), school principals, and teachers as they face down a diminishing and vocal minority unable to accept the dignity of youth and of "others."

Please, contact your representatives and tell them to you agree with the Majority of Texans that Comprehensive Sexual Education is necessary for teens to become responsible adults.

*To be fair, if this is what Texan voters believe, it's good news for everybody. When a (moderate) majority conservative state believes so strongly for comprehensive sexual education, I wouldn't be surprised to see even more extreme numbers in the more liberal states.

crossposted to http://lklouise.com

 Growing up, I always knew I wanted to be inside the church.  More specifically, I wanted to be a priest.  When I was younger and had not yet realized my sex meant I could not fulfill this vocation, I was 100% sure of my calling to ministry.

Reading the New York Times yesterday, I came across a Patient Voices article titled “A ‘Forest Fire of Hair Loss,’ and Its Scars” about one man’s auto-immune hair loss from alopecia areata.  He isn’t alone.  I also have alopecia.

A few years ago, I noticed a round loss of hair on my scalp.  I assumed I had somehow burned myself with a curling iron.  Moreover, the way I styled my hair hid the bald spot, and that it would eventually grow back.  A routine haircut led my hairdresser to ask about the hair loss and hypothesized about its origins, only to be proven correct when I went to the dermatologist.  I was diagnosed with alopecia areata, a disease with no predictability.  I am at the mercy of my body.

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This is an introductory post to Mark Driscoll’s theology, and in the coming weeks I will be covering him more in depth both from a masculinities standpoint and a theological one.  This is about the core of his masculinity: misogyny, inerrant scripture, and Calvinism.  Driscoll is a “shock jock” preacher who thrives on argument and the attention that gives him.  Controversial remarks concerning biological sex and gender roles reverberate loudly in today’s society, giving Driscoll the attention he craves. 

Mark Driscoll is the pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington.  While this seems an unlikely place for a conservative Calvinist to take up shop, he’s a popular guy.  7,500+ people flow into his church (at various locations) each Sunday.  Over 100,000 folks download his sermons on iTunes each week.  The New York Times Magazine published “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?  Mark Driscoll, a pastor with a Macho Conception of Christ” last year.  Driscoll got his start working with the emergent church movement, although he has since decided most preachers were too “sissified” and has distanced himself.

I do no use the word misogyny lightly.  I think it’s powerful word, and I think it speaks to more than just ignorance.  There are plenty of men and women, even “traditional relationship” complementarians, I do not think are misogynistic.  Nevertheless, there certainly are misogynists in the world, and Mark Driscoll is among them.  He holds deep contempt for women.  Even those who self-avowedly hate the “overwhelming femininity” in the church think he “blurs the line between masculinity and misogyny.”

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 An article in the Killeen Daily Herald out of Killeen, TX painted the picture of everything wrong in Texas Education.  In the Killeen school district there is an alternative school known as “Pathways” that has traditionally been the home of high school aged mothers due to its childcare center (run by non-profit CIS) on campus.  The program is “updating” itself in order to promote the by-choice alternative school to more students in the district.  Part of the update?  Removing the on-campus childcare, leaving an entire district that covers 400+ square miles and has over 31,000 students (which includes all youth who live on Fort Hood Military Base) without a home for single mothers.

This post is a continuation of a series on different understandings of Christian Masculinities, and the implications they create in sexual education reform and youth advocacy. It originally appeared at lklouise.com. The last post concerned Gender Hierarchies in Creation. Today's post deals with "complementation" relationship views, which believe that the man should be the "leader" in any relationship, and that the woman is a biblically designed "helper" who finds her fulfillment in submission to that male leadership. This post deals with the implications of conservative christian language on gender politics.

Whenever I’m searching for sources about different Christian masculinities, I generally use the term “masculinity”. Unfortunately, what I’ve noticed is that the viewpoints I’m trying to find don’t use that term about themselves. They talk about Christian manliness or (Protestants) biblical manhood. It is a telling distinction that is telling about the nature of the group, and speaks to the power of language influencing ideas.

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I wrote Spirituality and Sex Ed: The easy agreements before I began writing about different ideas of Christian Masculinity, and since then, I realize the idea that we could all agree on teaching healthy relationships is a bit more complicated than I thought it was. What I believed as progressive principles to healthy relationships are apparently not without a lot of challenge from the extreme right. Originally, I stated that youth should learn how to compromise without compromising themselves, and that, as teens grow older, this means teaching a “yes means yes” approach to all aspects of a physical/sexual relationship.

Unfortunately, according to the “Wild at Heart” masculinity, these aren’t the parameters of a healthy relationship. Gender roles mean real differences in the way men and women should respond in a relationship.

Case in point: one of the interviews that brought up “Wild At Heart” for a volunteer position at my previous job. A man who came to volunteer at our ministry began talking about his life and mentioned that while he was jobless, he still thought it was more important to “be the man” and have his wife quit her job (that she enjoyed and through which she was making enough money to support them).  The family was currently on state benefits because of this man’s belief that a woman should not work outside the home, especially if “male headship” was threatened.  At the end of the conversation, he mentioned that they weren’t actually married yet, but that he felt married in the eyes of God and so they began to live like they were.  He made it explicit that Wild at Heart had influenced his views, influencing his decision to force his (not) wife to leave her job.  She sat in their truck outside the entire time he was in the office, which always personally bothered me.

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Today is seven years to the day that I left Provo Canyon School (PCS).  Human dignity, especially the dignity of youth, is an issue that I have only been able to speak about starting this year.  Previously I could only speak about issues that impacted my friends and community, I am beginning to confront the ideas that allow “gulag schools” such as PCS to exist. That is not to say PCS has nothing to do with comprehensive sexual education or reproductive autonomy, but sex-ed reform wasn’t a traumatic issue for me to speak about.

There are many voices sharing the indignity to which youth are subjected at these schools, and there are even more voices silent about abuses that happened in their youth at these facilities.  Our society does not attribute to our youth this inherent dignity.

The front page story in the Dallas Morning News yesterday mentioned this: a teenager named Byron with a comprehensive history of violence brought on by paranoid mental illness was shuffled around 10 times, between punitive corrections institutions, mental institutions, and community schools, in the year and a half before he stabbed and killed his special education teacher.  He was not stabilized on any medical regimen, and at one point after refusing the medication, psychiatrists at the corrections institute withheld the drugs that provided him an anchor in reality for weeks at a time. Doctors believed it was an appropriate punishment to stop medication for  a teenager with violent paranoid schizophrenia. This wasn’t “prohibiting him to attend classes with other inmates”, this was taking away his ability to be present, to have control over his own mind. Apparently, there is not a right, but only a privilege to one's own mind as a teenager. No one, of course, has been fired in the incident.

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