Good Luck With That

The Institute For Family Studies needs to promote marriage. So Alysse ElHage has this blog entry touting a new book that attempts to address marriage problems through churches. [This entry was bumped up.]

A few years ago, I was scrolling through Facebook to catch up with friends and family when I stumbled upon some news that made my heart sink.

As I've said, Facebook is a front row seat to a train wreck.

A married couple from the church my husband and I had attended for about 10 years had apparently split up since we moved away. Both the husband and the wife were popular leaders in our church and seemed to have a vibrant marriage that everyone admired. But now she was building a life with a new man in another state, while he raised their two children alone. As I was trying to digest this news, I discovered that at least five other married couples with kids from the same church had split up over the past few years. Two of the couples had been married for several decades; one couple less than five years. When I asked our pastor what happened, he was as brokenhearted as I was over the news, but he had no answers. He’d tried to counsel with some of the couples, but the spouse who wanted out (most often, the wife) was dead set on divorce.

Pay attention, men.

1. These were supposedly dedicated, churchgoing wives.
2. They seemed to have a vibrant marriage. You have no idea what's going on behind closed doors.
3. Decades of marriage can mean the wife gets set with alimony for life. In California (I don't know how many other states are the same), ten years of marriage sets her up for life.
4. The women are the ones leaving. YOU CAN'T STOP THEM. And, quite often, the more you try to treat them well, the more likely it is they'll walk all over you and leave.
5. The pastor claimed to have no answers. Most likely, he had answers, but doesn't want to say them.

If Enough Churchgoing Men Refuse to Marry, Polygyny Will Be Encouraged

"What's next? Polygamy?"

That was often heard, especially from Religious Right people, during the successful battle to extend, nationally, state marriage licenses to same-sex couples. For a long time, religious conservatives (Evangelical Christians especially) have insisted heterosexual, married monogamy is the ideal and the only acceptable sexual relationship.

The way the marriage-and-family ministries have talked about polygamy, or anything that isn't monogamy, you'd think the Bible emphatically condemns anything that isn't monogamy. 

But it doesn't.

The Biblical case that "monogamy is the only way" is a very weak one. It is based on trying to say that polygamy (polygyny, really) in the Bible led to problems. You won't find any passage in the Bible that actually says monogamy is the only acceptable relationship. On the contrary, many heroes of the Bible had multiple wives (and more). 

I have a prediction.

If more and more men, including churchgoing men, go on a marriage strike, some of these religious organizations that have warned against polygamy will switch to encouraging it. For the LDS church, that would be familiar territory. These organizations will encourage it because they want women to marry and have babies, and lots of babies, and if there aren't enough men, they will break down and encourage women to share husbands. 

Just wait.

Staying a Free Man as a Churchgoer

Some of you attend a church or an equivalent. If you don’t, or you don’t care about staying a Free Man, skip over this entry.

Some of this might be adaptable to you if you attend a synagogue, temple, mosque, stake, Kingdom Hall, or some other congregation, but I’m most familiar with Protestant churches, especially of the “evangelical” variety.

The Reformed Ho

The Rational Male and others have been making much of what appears to be the trend of sex workers or de facto sex workers, and self-identified promiscuous women “finding Jesus” and becoming “born again” church girls.

Let me make something clear right away.

If someone has truly repented and embraced the true Jesus as Lord and Savior, that’s a beautiful thing, whoever they are and whatever they’ve done.

A problem arises in that only the Lord knows for sure what’s going on in someone’s heart. We can only make guesses based on behavior, experience, and time. After all, Judas Iscariot was one of the Twelve Disciples, appearing to be a follower of Jesus.

That a woman has appeared to have repented and is attending church, even been baptized right there in front of everyone, does not obligate any man to wife her up.

By the way, that goes both ways. No man is owed a wife.

I generally discourage men from legally marrying, and almost as strongly discourage men from socially/religiously marrying. But if you’re going to marry, a supposedly reformed “ho” is probably a bad choice, even more so if you’re a virgin or have little experience, or are a lackluster/“vanilla” lover/not well hung.

Consider…

1. Even if she never says it, she’s going to be comparing you to many other men. It is almost certain she has been with many men more skilled, more exciting than you. It’ll be even worse if she ever rubs that in.

2. You’re going to think about that from time to time, and realize she picked you as her retirement plan.

3. You’re going to resent that she had her fun, exciting, passionate, wild, varied experiences and you sacrificed and waited, going without. And you might feel bad for thinking that way.

4. Perhaps frequently, guys will look at her and/or you a certain way, or she will look at them a certain way, or they might look at each other a certain way, and you’ll know that guy has at least seen her naked, maybe he’s been inside her, and he didn’t have to sign away half of his earnings, pledge exclusivity, maybe didn’t even have to romance her or take her on an actual date.

5. If you have kids with her, the kids will likely have to endure taunting from other kids (if she was in erotic media or web camming). I don’t think it’s OK to do that, but it’s likely to happen anyway. Your kids are likely to see some of her old work.

I could go on, but I explained many concerns that apply in general  to “body count” and can apply to the more specific situation of a “reformed ho” here:

Does a Woman’s Body Count Matter?

What the critics and cynics think is that these women have aged out, maybe brushed up against the wall a bit, and are looking for a retirement plan. Women younger and hotter than them have hit the scene, and so it’s harder for these experienced women to get the attention and money they used to.

So the women turn to the reliable, dependable churchgoing guy whose experience with women and their manipulations is scant, who will be happy to be having sex at all no matter how infrequent or restrained, who likely won’t be cheating on her, who will be pressured to accept her as redeemed and forgiven, and who will believe or be told it’s all his fault if anything goes wrong in the marriage because he’s supposed to lead and serve her.

Heck, she never even has to feign a headache. She can brush him off by saying she’s having flashbacks to her past, which, of course involved her being “used and abused” no matter how much it appeared she was enjoying herself and no matter how much she said at the time it was all her choice.

In response to the discussions about these situations, I’ve seen what amounts to “But what about promiscuous men?” Formerly promiscuous men might be better matches for formerly promiscuous women, though such men are more likely to still want a lot of sex. But as far as criticizing such men…  fair or unfair, we can, for the sake of argument agree that men shouldn’t have been promiscuous but also maintain there’s a difference, because of biological and sociological realities. Except in very rare cases, women ingest or absorb more body fluids from men than the other way around. That’s just a part of the biological reality, as is the fact that it’s women who carry pregnancies, not men, making it problematic in the minds of some that she’s had the body parts and fluids of so many men in her.

Just part of the psychological and sociological consideration is her history of being abused, her relationship or lack thereof with her father, and her need for male attention. Those things, if present, can interfere with marital success.

Men who say that her redemption in Christ is what allows him to gladly take her as a bride despite her past likely have limits to that grace, even though Jesus can overcome anything.

“It doesn’t matter if she had hundreds of men.”

OK. But would you still say it doesn’t matter if she…

-had thousands of men

-had many women as lovers

-engaged in group sex

-was with many men married to her friends

-was with otherwise evil men, knowing they were evil

-was with 13 year-old boys

-was with dogs

-was with horses?

And yes, there are many women out there who’ve done one or more of those things.

Likely, there is some point at which the man says “Can’t be with a woman who did that.” Such men shouldn’t wag a finger at men who say they can’t be with a woman who has a three-figure body count, or even “just” a two-figure body count, even more so if those men have a low or zero body count.

Marriage is optional. And there are still men who want to marry (the poor saps!) who don’t want to be married enough to override the turnoff of a woman’s sordid past. That significantly reduces the pool of wife material women.

But if a man is running game instead of looking for a wife, her past is much less significant, other than the requirement she NOT be a virgin and not have children. A promiscuous woman is a good thing to guys running game.

The bottom line here, no pun intended, is that yes, Jesus can bring redemption and healing, but if a man is foolish enough to be looking for a wife, all other things being equal (which rarely happens), he should pick a woman who hasn’t ridden the “carousel” thousands of times; that’s the natural inclination of most men who want a wife.

When The Attention Thirsty Change Tactics

Does a Woman’s Body Count Matter?

Don’t Call Dr. Laura If You’re Doubting Truth Claims of Your Religious Organization

I don’t think Dr. Laura has explicitly stated what her current theological beliefs are other than a few limited statements. She has every right to keep her theology private. Although she'll sometimes work with a caller's tradition, the program isn’t a religious one. But because it isn’t a religious program, she should probably defer some calls. [Bumping this up because it is still relevant.]

From what she has said, she’s either a Deist, Agnostic, or Atheist. It matters, and we can discern this to be so, because she doesn’t believe in miracles and will get snippy with a caller who mentions or implies being saved from a terrible or worse fate by supernatural intervention. Also, because she encourages people to stay with their current religious organization, as if it really doesn’t matter which one they are with. 

I originally felt compelled to write this entry because of a call she took on Tuesday, December 10, 2019, 27 minutes into first podcast hour. But she has subsequently taken other calls reinforcing my point.

“Sarah” or “Sara” was the caller. The caller said hello and started to get emotional, saying she didn't want to get emotional. She was crying.

"I was raised in a very orthodox religion..."

Dr. Laura asked which one. "You were raised in what church?"

"The Mormon church."

Sarah went on to say "Recently, within the last couple of years, I found out a lot of inconsistencies about the church, a lot of things that I was taught that aren't true about the church…”

She started getting emotional again.

Dr. Laura told her she needed to stop crying. "This is not life and death."

Well, actually, for believers, it is. It certainly was for the martyrs.

Faith

This entry is about my faith. If you have no interest in reading about that, then ignore this entry and read whichever entries here look interesting to you. Or, go do something else entirely.

Christian Research Institute President Hank Hanegraaff Goes Eastern Orthodox

It's time to revisit a topic I only write about once every few years. So if unless you're interested in the inside politics of Christian ministries, this entry probably won't interest you. However, I'm getting hits for some of the old entries dealing with the Christian Research Institute (CRI) and the President thereof, Hank Hanegraaff, because of some recent events.

Itches and Scratch

The obsession in Evangelical circles about "porn" makes me cringe, because so many bad arguments are used, which discredit "our" side, and the disproportionate focus on it. I recently sat through a sermon (unfortunately one of my young kids was with me) from someone who was not the church's pastor, but had been doing a sermon series on "first things" when it comes to following Christ. This was supposed to be a sermon on Satan and his tactics. Yes, doctrine holds that Satan is a real, spiritual (not physical) being who interacts with human beings.

Despite supposedly being about Satan, it was more about porn than anything else. One must wonder what Satan was doing before the advent of photography.

Opening the Vent

According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, I, by myself, make a little more than the statewide median family income, which is more than the median household income.  I’m not sure what constitutes a "family" vs. a "household", but there you go. It's even better when comparing to the medians for my city. Aside from a mortgage on my wife's part, neither of us came to the marriage with debt. Yet here we are, struggling financially. What I mean by that is we're not saving as much for retirement as I think we should and we have almost no spare liquid funds unless we want to cash in some of our retirement investments, which I don't think would be a good idea. We're not currently giving to our church. We had a vacation (the first "real" one in quite some time) planned but we had to cancel/postpone it and now we're trying to deal with losing some of the money we already put into it.

So when my wife informed me we were finally, after months of her writing an e-mail to set something up, going to be meeting with someone from our church, I thought back to that e-mail, and due to that I figured this meeting was mostly going to be about finances and what disability aid or programs they knew about, since my wife is disabled (even though she was able to work full-time before we married). I felt kind of silly seeking help from others when I make more the median for our city, but I agreed to go anyway.

I ended up wishing it had been about money.

I should have been tipped off that the meeting wasn't quite going to be what I thought, since the night before, my wife actually gave a slight indication that she was looking forward to sex, and it had only been a week since the last session.

In the meeting were the woman to whom she wrote, and two men. One of the men I recognized as someone who does things like give the "sex talk" session of the church's premarital counseling (which we'd been through), during which he tells the couples considering or planning marriage that marital lovemaking is given to us to enjoy in many ways and many places. Basically, he's there to tell people that sex is allowed once they're married, and it doesn't have to be the missionary position.

But back to the meeting. In the meeting, we focused on:

• That my son loses his temper, like I do, and I should be open to being drugged and having my son drugged.
• That my daughter is a messy hoarder, like I am.
• That our house is a mess and we could use some help having it organized and cleaned.

I felt like I'd been ambushed.

Let's go over each of those.

Frankly Speaking

Frank Pastore is a retired MLB pitcher who went from atheism to devout (and educated) Christianity. He has an afternoon drive talk show on local Christian radio station KKLA 99.5 FM. He calls it "the intersection of faith and reason". I generally like him, how he does his show, and what he says on his show about theology and politics.

But I do have a quibble.

He posts "run sheets" about what happened on his show, with links to websites of the guests or the material he discusses.

According to his run sheet, on Wednesday, July 22, from 6:28pm to 6:38pm, he discussed this:

Single moms, how can we as the church help you? Men's groups, shame on us for allowing their need to go unanswered!

Before I really get going, I want to at least commend Pastore for actually using the word "shame" instead of just the tactic, as is so common in today's culture, including the church, when it comes to men. Also, I did not hear the segment, but I have heard other segments of his show lately on issues of gender. With that said...

Excuse me? Why is it the responsibility of the "men's groups" at a church to take care of single mothers? Yes, I strongly believe it is the role of the church to care for those in need, including showing those in need ethical, moral, and legal ways to get out of being needy so that they, in turn, can help others. I certainly think it is better that people in need get their help from the church instead of the state.

But it is the role of the whole church. Not just the men, not the "men's groups", to take care of those in need. In the instance of single mothers, it should first and foremost be other women in the church who are ministering to their needs. It certainly isn't the role of men's groups to provide single mothers with companionship and attention.

I like that Dr. Laura makes a distinction when it comes to single mothers. When someone identifies themselves as a single mother (or father), she asks if they are "divorced, widowed, or never married". There is a difference. Most single mothers picked the wrong man with whom to make babies, or they made babies with a generally good man but treated him badly and/or divorced him and took custody of the children. These days, there are a few who deliberately used official or de facto (intentional one night stand or casual fling) sperm donation – intentionally depriving their child of a father. There are widows whose husbands were killed by some fluke or unpreventable terminal illness or negligence on the part of others, or in the line of duty, and they have my sympathies. There are also widows who picked a guy prone to violent or self-destructive behavior, which lead to his premature death.

These things are relevant because the church needs to approach these different women differently. A mother whose husband was killed serving his country or community doesn't have the same issues as a mother who keeps getting pregnant outside of marriage with different men.

Just as there should be roles in the home, it does make sense for there to be roles in the church. Men's groups can be tasked with things like security, doing auto repair and handyman and moving for any members of the church in need, or the church itself. Likewise, women's groups can be tasked with baking, shopping, babysitting, etc. When our first child was freshly born, different couples would bring us home cooked meals. In reality, the wives were doing the cooking. (And God bless them for doing it.)

But men's groups should not be tasked with most of the needs of single mothers. It isn't appropriate. If the father of those children is in the church, then the men's groups can lead him in in the direction of being a good father to his children, and possibly towards reconciliation/marriage to the mother of his children. The men's groups can help in the same way they would help any other person in the church. We shouldn't expect, say, a member of the church who is a plumber who gives a discount to other members of the church to do free work for a single mother simply because she is a single mother.

Otherwise, it should be well-grounded women in the church who are meeting the needs of single mothers.

I will not hold my breath waiting for Pastore, or other people in Christian media, to say "Women's groups, shame on you for allowing the needs of single fathers to go unanswered!"

In general, the church should not be asking men to take care of the needs of women without also asking women to take care of the needs of men. Most of all, the church should be teaching people how to rely on God and how to address their own needs (if God has left it to them) before seeking help from others.