Welcome! I wanted to know what nobody told me when I was growing up Evangelical. This is a place for highly researched articles about religion and sex. Not âchurch factsââbutâŠ
The Bible is against it! Thatâs the thinking, but what happens, in reality, is endlessly sexually strangeâas âqueerâ as could be! Consider the career of Amy Grant.
Her dadâs side of the family had a knack for producing straight women with mannish features. Amyâs memoir recalls her Aunt Jean:
âShe was beautiful in a rugged, tomboy sort of way, with thick, short hair, twinkling eyes, and a mischievous smile. My dad told me she had been a good athlete, a decent golfer and tennis player.â
Amy recalls her teenage years: âI was still playing neighborhood football and doing all myâŠ
Ernest Clineâs narrator, Wade Watts, scorns all religion. He says: âThe whole God thing is actually an ancient fairy tale that people have been telling one another for thousands of years.â
But I started to think Cline ditched one religionâto find another?
He doesnât specify what religion it was, but the details are unmistakable. He recalls that his mother forbade the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. This is vintage Evangelicalism! In the 1980s, the religion was gripped by panic about demonism manifesting in rock music and fantasy.
The key narrative was the tragic tale of Patricia Pulling, whose sonâŠ
Max Lucado, the bestselling Christian author, wasnât controversial in 2004 when arguing against gay marriage as akin to pedophilia, incest and bestiality, while putting in a good word for reparative therapy.
It was just being Evangelical?
It was a video sermon hosted by Washington National Cathedral, and not that big of a deal? Except now, there was a Change.org petition to cancel the dateâowing to his earlier anti-gay comments.
The Episcopal clergy at the church did a dance over the matter, agonizing over the speech, and allowing it.
Lucado issued a letter that backtracks from his previous self.
âLGBTQ individualsâŠ
Consider Billy Grahamâs finger.
His finger accused the world of sin! But it was godlike. So many thousands came to âmake a decision for Christâ at his famous rallies because they had been fingered.
Billyâs Christian story began with a traveling evangelist named Mordecai Ham pointing a finger. Itâs in all the biographies. Iâm reading a 1993 young adult biography, Billy Graham by Nathan Aaseng:
âHe felt as though the finger of God was singling him out in front of all those people. Desperate to escape that terrible, accusing finger, he ducked behind a womanâs hat.â
A womanâs hat?
Come to find out, that was absurdly inaccurate. But I love learning about the history of Christians dealing with Bible manuscripts that are âdifferentâ.
Back in church, they didnât tell me about that either.
Sheâs called the âmotherâ of Evangelicalism, and recalled on occasion, mostly in reference to her âboysâ as she called them. There was Billy Graham, who credited her âremarkable influenceâ on him, as Bill Bright said âno one has influenced my life more than Dr. Mears.â
If the faith was to become more associated with these guys, it seems the beehive had a queen.
But scholars recalled an unusual woman had presided over a shift in American Protestantism after World War IIâthe time when the common identity of âEvangelicalâ was forming.
Despite its usual public hostility to female leadership, as JohnâŠ
In church, one tends to get a G-rated version. But Bible scholars evoke a text alive with sexual details. Hereâs ten that got my attention.
In the Bible, humans resemble God. This is the meaning of the line in Genesis: âmade in the image of Godâ (1:26â28; 5:1â3; 9:6).
Christian tradition often explains this as meaning humans can reason or think. Except the âimageâ language, as David J.A. Clines notes, refers to âa three-dimensional object.â
Being the âimage of Godâ means we look like God.
As Benjamin Sommer notes in a study of the subject: âThe God of the HebrewâŠ
At age fourteen she had âbadâ friends, especially a woman from whom, she wrote, âI learnt every kind of evil.â Alarmed at the relationship, her father forced her into a conventâa place for âgirls like myself,â as she puts it, âalthough there were none there as depraved as I.â
Teresa of Ăvila a.k.a. âTeresa of Jesusâ, the Catholic saint who died in 1582, remains a global icon of sacred character, beloved across all Christianity. Her sexuality, for some reason, is not often discussed.
A 2019 academic biography by Carlos Eire has this:
âTeresa provides no details about these sins ofâŠ
Iâm putting together whatâs known of the love story of Carl Lentz and Ranin Karim. A man falls in love with a beautiful Palestinian woman. Except for the part about him being white â itâs nearly biblical.
So whatâs the problem? That heâs married? That sheâs Muslim?
He didnât tell her he was a famous pastor at Hillsong, the well-known âhipâ megachurch. He was known throughout the usually stodgy Evangelical world for his unique appeal â sexy, fashion-conscious, Jesus-centered.
He told her he was a sports agent. He didnât tell her he was married.
They began texting and FaceTiming, andâŠ
Real facts, not âchurch facts.â