Waiting For God

One of the reasons I find it so hard to understand the Christian right is because we really are working from two completely different ways of looking at the world. We may read the same Bible (although we clearly take different passages to heart), but liberal Christians like me see morality and theology and society in such vastly different ways than fundamentalists do, and it can make it hard to relate to one another.

Take marriage, for example. Today I happened to be enjoying, with a kind of horrified delight, the website of the dreadful Duggars, a family of eighteen children (by the way, they're expecting their nineteenth soon). As I browsed their website and the website of their son and daughter-in-law (who recently married and are now expecting a child as well), I found that in many instances I had a really hard time understanding what they were talking about. Like, I don't just mean I didn't understand their political and religious opinions— I mean I literally couldn't understand what they were trying to say when they typed out the words.

Part of the misunderstanding, I think, tends to be due to language; I hate to make a sweeping generalization or anything, but I often find that Christian fundamentalists have difficulty with precision and accuracy of language. They use phrases that sound positive or attractive without actually stopping to think about what they're really saying: "radiant purity," or "purposeful singleness,” or this sentence (an excerpt from a description of a teen book about "staying pure"): “Sarah Mally challenges young ladies to turn to the Lord for fulfillment, to guard their hearts and minds, to identify and avoid the world's thinking, and to shine brightly in this generation.” What the hell does “shine brightly in this generation” even MEAN? Sounds to me like someone wanted to finish off the book description quickly, and was searching for something with a general air of upliftedness without thinking about what the words would mean when they were placed together like that. Generic feel-good sentences may sound wholesome and all, but they don’t really hold a lot of meaning; the problem with clichés is that they lose their value with senseless repetition, and it seems that no one managed to tell this to the Promise Keepers.

But beyond the language issue, I think fundamentalists tend to look at things in a way that is completely outside my realm of experience. Take Pamela’s Prayer, a film suggested by the Duggars, and one that is easily accessible by way of YouTube. The film is basically an episode of Mystery Science Theatre waiting to happen, but beyond the 1980s hair and clothes (the film was made in 1998, by the way) and the absurd dialogue (“Do you know what a Christian film library is?”), the film sets forth some of the more disturbing ways in which fundamentalist Christians think about sex and marriage.

Because, you see, sixteen-year-old Pamela isn’t just being told not to have sex before marriage— her father forbids her from dating, or from kissing, or basically from sharing the same room with a boy alone. Pamela’s job is to listen, unquestioningly and adoringly, to every single thing her father tells her, and to obey his every command (or else bad things will happen to her— like a boy at school will tell everyone she’s a Kiss Slut!) At its heart, Pamela’s Prayer reveals the way in which many fundamentalist Christians view marriage, not as an equal partnership, but as a transfer of responsibilities and authority from father to husband. It’s about keeping the men in control, and really, it relegates hundreds of years of hard-fought gender equality to the No Man’s Land of “evil popular culture.”

When Frederick, the enterprising young man who works for Pamela’s father, wants to ask Pam to come for a drive with him in his car, does he ask HER if she’d like to do that? No, he asks her father— with the careless caveat “if it’s okay with Pamela” thrown in to appease her delicate feminine pride. When Fred wants to marry Pam (neither of whom apparently want to attend college or have rewarding careers after their high school graduation), he seems to barely know her. And in any case, he doesn’t ask her to marry him— he asks her dad if the marriage is okay. And when the proposal is finally made t Pam herself, she can’t even squeak out a “yes, I’d like that very much,” without waiting for daddy’s nod of approval. Even on her wedding night, we see Pam calling her dad up for one last over-the-phone prayer, as though she needs his blessing for the transfer of his power over her to be complete.

Of course, this film is extreme, and I doubt there are too many Christian parents who would truly begrudge their children a little high school smooching. But, as with the abortion law I discussed a few weeks ago, the problem I have is not that this extremism is widely accepted, but that its fundamental values— the values of patriarchal control and sexual subjugation— are the source for many of the religious right’s seemingly milder beliefs. No, not a lot of Christian parents are screening Pamela’s Prayer for their kids— but the recently popular phenomenon of purity balls, which feature young girls in white gowns pledging their purity to their fathers, draw on the same logic and belief system as this amusingly backwards little film. The film's message may seem extreme, but really, it’s a lot like what a world dominated by Christian fundamentalists would look like, if their values were allowed to be carried to their logical conclusions.

And you know, it’s not just about patriarchal control of the family; the ways in which the fundamentalist patriarchy asserts control doesn’t just stop with individual families or even larger societies. To my mind, the issue of allowing oneself to be controlled is something that I think is mirrored in the fundamentalists’ relationships with God, as well. Listening to evangelicals talk, I hear a lot of things like “surrender to God,” “offer it up to Jesus,” or “let God do the talking.”  Reading the story of Joshua and Anna Duggar, I was a little concerned by how often they each talked of waiting for God to tell them who to marry, of remaining static and inactive while God sent them the perfect partner instead of looking for him/her on their own.

But I mean— is that really how God works? Every day, millions of children who think they understand how praying works pray for things they’ll never get: ponies, baby brothers, new parents, PlayStation games. Meanwhile, their parents pray for things they need but don’t know how to find: jobs, food, shelter, health. From a fundamentalist’s perspective: if God doesn’t give us what we ask for, what does that mean? If we “leave it up to God” and pray for the perfect partner, and then God never “sends” us someone to love, is it because we didn’t pray hard enough? Is it because we didn’t deserve it? Is it because God doesn’t want us to be happy— because our need for companionship doesn’t fit in with God’s all-knowing, seemingly perfect plan for the world?

As I’ve said before, I don’t believe praying for things makes them happen. I believe prayer is a means of comfort and understanding, not a way to make things happen, or to even ask them to happen. And part of the reason I think that is this: my relationship to God could never be one in which I simply “submit,” like a kicked dog with a broken spirit, and wait for good things to happen to me. Sometimes, when I’m scared or confused or disappointed, I’ll remind myself that opportunities can be hidden, and many wonderful things can be waiting down a dark and lonely road. But in the end, I can’t just wait for things to happen, because God doesn’t just give you things. As far as I can figure, he doesn’t work that way, and I’m glad, because if this was all a matter of waiting for the inevitable, where’s our free will? And with it, our will to live, and to hope?

Adam is fond of saying, “God doesn’t make things happen— he simply provides the opportunity for things to happen.” God doesn’t save people from plane crashes or send angels into burning buildings, for the same reason he doesn’t kill babies in third world countries or send men out to die in horrible wars. All of these situations, and all of those results, were created by people— the airplanes, the guns, the well-placed fire escape or poorly timed elevator ride. But God gave us our minds, so that we could figure out how to overcome the challenges of our confusing and evolving world, and he gave us our hearts, so we could learn how to help one another instead of waiting for pillars of fire to light our way. And he gave us this universe— its glorious roominess, its solid matter, the wonderful framework of space-time through which we’re all sailing every day— to work out how to do things better, or how to appreciate them more, whether or no we believe in him or even like him.

So I’d say: don't just “offer it up” or “leave it to God” and then forget about it, assuming that it’s resolved. You have two hands, and a voice box, and a heart that, no matter who you are, usually wants to do the right thing, so use them. And use your head, too, because God never just tell us what to do; he gives us some confusing and contradictory hints, and then left us to figure them out ourselves. It may be comforting to believe that we can just leave everything up to God, but it's not practical, and it's not fair to God, either. What you do, whom you love, how you live your life, has everything to do with figuring out your own relationships, and nothing to do with being taught the “right” way to live and executing those directions flawlessly. I need God, but you might not, and that’s okay, because I believe we all have the capacity to find our own happiness, our own contentment, in our own time and through our own methods.

Although really, it might be better for everyone if those methods didn’t include calling your dad on your wedding night. EWWW.