Sorting Through the Moral Grayness of Manhood and Womanhood in an Egalitarian Culture
Some Mostly Rambling Thoughts
In millennial era media, a common trope is the morally gray character, who is forced to choose between two less than ideal outcomes. Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Dexter, and the Sopranos are television shows that each offer prime examples. Video games tend to highlight this phenomenon even more acutely, because you not only make the choice for the character you play as, but the “choose your own adventure” aspect allows for us to see all of the potential outcomes for any given choice. One such example is found in The Witcher III. Set in a fantasy world, you play as a monster hunter for hire. In a poor destitute village, you find that the children of the village will often disappear down a trail of sweets. Upon investigation, you find that this trail of sweets leads to an “orphanage” run by some witches. It becomes pretty apparent that the children are being fattened to eventually be eaten. Do the villagers know? Do they care? Does it matter? The witches are too powerful for the village to rebel against, and residents regularly die of starvation anyway. Later, one of the residents asks you to get rid of a tree spirit that has been killing a few villagers. After finding the tree spirit, you discover that it was trapped there by the witches, and you are now faced with two options. The first is to free the tree spirit and ask it to save the children, which it does. However, it also ends up killing off the entire village. The second is to kill the tree spirit, which results in the children “disappearing” from the witches orphanage. There are also a few other innocent bystanders who will suffer or not depending on the choice that you make.
In media, these sorts of gray choices are plainly contrived by the created setting, and don’t translate neatly to real life. In my life, I have never had to make the choice between killing off a village or an orphanage. However, anyone who has done pastoral work for any length of time, very quickly learns, that there are a whole host of situations where there is no clear morally “good” choice. In difficult marriages, there may come a point at which a choice must be made between doing what is right by the marriage or what is right by the children. Sometimes in financial difficulty, a choice must be made between bills to become delinquent on. Sometimes, as children of divorced parents a choice must be made between honoring your father or honoring your mother. The list can go on and on.
There are two potential ditches in this situation.
One comes when we take the position that there is always a morally good choice to be made. The danger is that we justify our less than righteous actions. For example, in the case of divorce, it is not enough to say that we did our best in a messy situation, despite doing something that God abhors. No, We have to frame it as if it were a completely good and righteous thing. An even worse temptation is to be self-righteous in the worst sense by viewing my own sinful choices as an absolute moral good.
The other ditch, comes when we interpret all (or nearly all) choices as morally gray. Then the temptation is to remain blind to the right choice when it presents itself. For example, the belief - “If I get something out of it, then it can’t be morally good” - Eventually, leads to seeing all actions as corrupt, since all actions give something in return (even if the return is just a positive feeling). Then the conclusion becomes doing whatever makes me feel good, and morals be damned. This too is a problem that we can all intuitively recognize.
Back to marriage
Now what does this have to do with marriage in an egalitarian culture? Well not too long ago I was participating in a conversation of complementarian men bend themselves in knots trying to figure out what it looks like for the husband to be the authority in the home. On the one hand, they all understood their bibles to speak plainly to the issue. But as soon as you get specific on any given issue, that is where the conversation falls apart. It is within the bounds of the husband’s authority to tell his wife to refrain from a specific purchase? Can he demand his wife to not wear something a little too sexy? Is it his job to decide which restaurant to eat at on date night?
The fact that there is such a lack of consensus on application, speaks to a problem that the complementarians are facing. My diagnosis of the problem, is that we have lost the context in which we can do what complementarianism prescribes as “right.” Specifically, complementarianism made sense in a boomer society and is fading away with them1. To use an illustration, marriages used to be ships on the sea, but now they are rowboats in the pond. A ship on the sea has a specific destination and purpose. If the ship capsizes, not only could crewmembers die, but the investors could be severely financially harmed. Some might be thrown into poverty. This is why the kinds of tough love authority expressed in films like Master and Commander make intuitive sense to the watcher. When the stakes are high, there needs to be swift recourse for poor behavior. However, a rowboat in a pond is just a few people out enjoying the view and one another’s company. It is fundamentally about the experience that everyone is having. It literally does not matter which way the boat goes, so long as everyone is having a good time. Obviously, the boat has to go somewhere, and someone has to take the lead on choosing the direction. So, leadership is present, but authority? It would be absurd for a guy to take a gal of his fancy out on a lake, and then when she suggests going to one end of the lake, he forces them to go to the other, because “authority!” It would be even more absurd, if he stood at the brow of the boat and barked orders at her to row in various directions.
This is the situation that we find ourselves in regarding marriages. We talk about “relationships”, but frankly there isn’t any need for authority in relationships. Relationships are about having a shared experience. Sure, there is the occasional need for leadership. Someone has to plan the date, of course. But authority is irrelevant. If she decides, she doesn’t like your date idea, you really going to force her to go, bro? And we see this in complementarian dating advice to young men. “If she is not your wife, she doesn’t have to follow your authority!” which is true, but these same young men quickly realize after they get married that nothing has fundamentally changed. They are still doing the same stuff. Now, it’s just permanent. And it makes absolutely zero sense, to go to your community to enforce consequences on your wife, for not joining you at the specified restaurant.
Marriages used to be ships. A man and woman got married started a family business, had kids, incorporated those kids into the family business, and interacted with the broader society as a family unit. There is a lot more at stake in this situation. There are things that if they don’t get done and don’t get done to an adequate standard, then people go hungry. Once again, in this situation, it makes a lot of sense to exercise authority. It also makes sense in this situation, for the community to be involved in enforcing consequences, because if the horseshoe-producing family falls apart, then everyone in the community loses (and some might even go hungry for a bit).
Going back to my point about the death of boomer society. The boomers entered the world when industrialization was at its peak. Family businesses were increasingly less of a thing. Husbands and wives no longer engaged with their community as a unified family unit. Husbands went off to work with men from separate communities, while wives built their own social lives by either collaborating with other stay-at-home wives, or entering the workforce for themselves. In any case, men and women were now building separate lives under one roof. Contraception changed the dynamic as well. Children were no longer the assumed expectation in a marriage, but a planned choice. These along with other factors all converged and created a new norm of marriage as experience, rather than marriage as grounded reality in society.
Now a significant portion (likely vast majority) of Christian boomers saw in their Bibles a biblical pattern of male authority in the home. And they also brought with them the cultural expectations of their parents and grandparents. Thus, complementarianism was born. One way of looking at complementarianism is to define it as the cultural application of a conservative biblical theology of marriage and gender within Boomer culture. This frames complementarianism as more of a culture, than a strict theology per say. Christian boomers created an evangelical culture in which conservative theology made sense. It allowed for people to live in the new “rowboat” world of marriage, while making sense of biblical topics that describe marriage in “ship-like” terms. The boomers did us all a great service by upholding cultural structures around the biblical theology of marriage. Much of this cultural structure building was intentional and explicit (like supporting families who were hard up, without requiring mom to join the workforce), but other structures were implemented completely unconsciously, due to certain assumed scripts. Like all of us, the boomers had their blind spots, and we are now finding that many of these scripts can’t survive a culture change.
One such script that is culturally disappearing is the myth that human interactions can be reduced down to choices. Morally good choices and morally bad choices can be reduced down to morally good desires and morally bad desires. In a sense, the boomer narrative is “Just do the right thing, until you find yourself wanting to do it.” It is a very simple framework. But like was mentioned earlier, if our environment is not structured to facilitate the “right” thing, we can find ourselves in situations where there is no “right” thing, even if we have good desires. This is particularly true, when it comes to the messiness of marriages.
A man being a provider requires having opportunities to provide - A lot of men, worked as hard as the boomers, and due to social forces, found themselves unable to provide at a culturally acceptable level.
A man being the authority in the home, requires having something in the home where the need for authority makes sense - As mentioned, the only thing that happens in the home is relationship, which doesn’t make a ton of sense to bring authority into.
A women submitting to her husbands direction, requires direction that is capable of being followed - Self explanatory.
The list would keep going, if we got more specific. There are plenty of situations in which we lack the ability to do the “right thing” based on our circumstances.
The issue that I see here, is the script lacks a crucial aspect or our moral dimension.
Our actions, come from our desires. But our desires are not the final cause. Our desires emerge from our perceptions. The way we see the world shapes what we want. And this vision can either be morally good or morally bad. There is a reason why Christ’s salvation involves giving sight to the blind. We do bad things, because we want bad things, because we see the world in a bad way. What we see shapes what we want, which shapes what we do, which shapes what we see. Our moral makeup is a trinitarian echo.
Have you ever been in a situation where someone wasn’t treating you right, but they didn’t actually do anything technically wrong? Maybe it was mean girl behavior, where the poor behavior always had a reasonable justification when confronted. Maybe, it was someone who accused you, and no matter how innocent, everything you said in defense was spun to prove your guilt? In these situations, there often isn’t a morally bad action that you could point to that if it just stopped then the relationship would be fixed. Why? The ultimate problem wasn’t an immoral action, but that you were being seen with immoral eyes.
The internet has absolutely opened the cultural floodgates in this regard. The world of perceptions is front and center in our imaginations.
Yet, this gives us hope. Despite, troublesome situations where there is no “right” action, there is ALWAYS a morally good way to view the situation. And this can help us in our struggle to make our lives make sense, in a world that isn’t conducive to goodness.
You might not be able to wake up tomorrow with a marriage that is a “ship.” No amount of wishful thinking can change the reality, that if the wife doesn’t like her husband’s leadership, then she can just opt out. The only real authority that he has, is what his wife grants him moment to moment. And frankly, that isn’t authority, in any meaningful sense.
The egalitarians see this quite well. Now when it comes to the egalitarians, there are two types. The first is the “I am being an activist within evangelicalism for this position.” Frankly, you all are annoying, and you are particularly annoying to normies. The future will never belong to activists who annoy the normies. The second type of egalitarians are those who are just trying to make their life work. Our entire society is egalitarian. We eat, drink, and breath these cultural waters. This is the same couple, who are sorting through the issues that the aforementioned complementarian bros were working through. The husband and wife both want something good, but they don’t know what that looks like. This is also the church staff team, just trying to make sense of the giftings of their various team members and do what’s best for their congregation. These people I don’t have any issues with. I share their ultimate goal of goodness for their families and community (unlike the activists who are consumed with attention and status).
The vast majority of normie wives, still want their husband to “step up and take the lead, be a man, etc.” and most normie husbands want to have influence in the world and do what is good and noble. We are all trying to address the question, “how can we be Christian men, women, husbands and wives in our current moment?”
The boomer narrative of “what should I do?” is not bad, just incomplete. A better narrative of “what should I see?” is better suited to help us in the current moment.
Some recommended answers:
The beauty of the communion of the saints – A doctrine we (evangelicals) lost but are slowly recovering
The ugliness of a life lived prioritizing the satisfaction of my own lusts – Even if those lusts are socially approved.
The beauty of children – I believe the historic protestant position that contraception is sinful, but I know that’s a bridge too far for many evangelicals. But if we can get passed seeing children as another steppingstone in life, then we will have really made headway. Children are worth sacrificing for.
The realities of what men and women are attracted to in each other – Woman like power. Men like beauty. Slightly oversimplified, but generally anyone who says otherwise, is selling you something.
The realities of how men and women differ in expressing their own sinfulness – When guys sin, they tend to say “Yes, I know it was wrong, but …” (See Saul in 1 Sam 15). When a woman sins, she tends to “eat and wipe her mouth, and she says ‘I haven’t done anything wrong” (Prov. 30:20). Men justify their sin. Women reframe their own personal narrative, so that they never sinned in the first place.
The goodness of male headship in the home – recognizing the goodness of something, is not the same thing as seeing it as current reality. If women do indeed like power, then there is no escaping that this is the normative pattern for homes.
These are just my off-the-cuff thoughts, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. And, I should qualify some of them a bit. But I bring them up, because they are often missing in complementarian rhetoric.
Complementarian discussions tend to be so caught up in the “how-to”, that they never ask “What should I be seeing in this situation?” Complementarianism needs to become more of a biblical moral lens through which we see men, women, and marriage; rather than a simple “how to” prescription for marriage and church. As a millenial, I expect our generation to get passed over, for wielding significant evangelical influence, but I suspect that the Zoomers will actually be the ones that pick up the mantle of the boomers. They will likely be the ones, doing this kind of cultural work. Frankly, I have high hopes for what a Zoomer complementarianism will eventually look like.
