This is a joke. Rachel Evans, whose claim to fame has been chastising Mark Driscoll for being a bully (the horror!), is writing a new book. It’s tentatively titled “The Quest for Biblical Womanhood.” Evans explains below:
Starting October 1, 2010, I will commit one year of my life to following all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible. From the Old Testament to the New Testament, from Genesis to Revelation, from the Levitical code to the letters of Paul, there’s no picking and choosing. (Well, except for polygamy…and a few other things that I’ll tell you about later.)
This means, among other things, rising before dawn each day (Proverbs 31:15), submitting to my husband (Colossians 3:18), growing out my hair (1 Corinthians 11:15), making my own clothes, (Proverbs 31:22), learning how to cook (Titus 2:3-5), covering my head when in prayer (1 Corinthians 11:5), calling Dan “master” (1 Peter 3:5-6), caring for the poor (Proverbs 31:25), nurturing a gentle and quiet spirit (1 Peter 3:4), and camping out in the backyard for the duration of my monthly period (Leviticus 15:19-33).
This looks brilliant. Just what we need: another evangelical masochist parading her doubts and embarrassment of Scripture before a watching world. Maybe if she’s lucky the Huffington Post will let her write a blog post from time to time about what she hates about the religious right! Ooooh, how missional! But this isn’t even what burns me up the most about Evans. Does this project sound familiar in anyway? Hmmmm …. oh right. This is an exact rip off of A.J. Jacob’s A Year of Living Biblically. If you’re not familiar with Jacobs, he spent a year trying to follow the Bible as literally as possible. That sounds eerily familiar to Evans “womanhood project.” Evans realizes this when she writes:
Think of it as John Piper meets Martha Stewart meets Julie & Julia meets A Year of Living Biblically. Just enough crazy to interest everyone.
Julia & Julia meets A Year of Living Biblically? This is A Year of Living Biblically. Elsewhere, Evans realizes this and says she wanted to “comment on the contemporary biblical womanhood movement in a fresh way.” A fresh way? No, dear. This was fresh when Jacobs did it. What Evans has done is the equivalent of what the dumbasses at Cactus Game Design Co. did when they copied the award winning board game, Settlers of Cataan with their Christianized Settlers of Canaan. Way to go Rachel. You’re up there with Testamints and other great episodes in evangelical kitsch.
To paraphrase Doug Wilson, evangelicals (even those on the left) are desperate to imitate what the secular world does. But the problem is that the secularists are pretty far down the road and are going pretty fast. And so we chase after them, our fat little evangelical thighs chafing together, whining under our breath because they don’t wait up.
Well I’ve got to go. I’m working on a Christian version of Youtube called …… oh wait …. dammit.
Ugh … one bad stunt does not deserve another. I’m sure she will avoid grabbing the testicles of a man fighting with her husband so that her hand is not cut off and it becomes easier to write the book.
I read David Plotz’ (sic) Blogging the Bible series through much of its length and I seriously doubt there’s anything Evans could add that didn’t get said in a book by either Jacobs or Plotz in, oh, the last decade.
She did recognize Plotz site (I believe) on her site … or at least it was someone else doing something similar. Regardless, she’s convinced herself she’s doing something unique.
It is depressing that she seems to begin with the assumption that anyone who doesn’t approach the Bible in a tone-deaf and naively literal fashion must be ‘picking and choosing’. It just seems to be a project weighted in a way that lead to it becoming a way of taking potshots at fundamentalists. Given her own fundamentalist background, this doesn’t surprise me. Her thought on the subject will most likely be framed against this background.
A far more interesting and worthwhile project would be to spend a few years immersing oneself in particular communities in which different visions of biblical womenhood are lived out and seeking to understand and describe each from within and without, rather than trying to be the ‘straw-woman’ for a year. There is an important conversation to be had here, but I don’t think that this is the best way to go about it.
On the other hand, Rachel Held Evans /is/ seeking to start a conversation, and in the various posts and articles of hers that I have read, she does seem to have a degree of receptivity and a recognition of the degree to which a reaction against her own background shapes her thinking. She asks interesting questions on various issues. Perhaps it is worthwhile for us to engage with such people. I believe that her project, no matter how derivative it may initially appear, has its own value. ‘Biblical womanhood’ is always a very live issue. While I may disagree with her views on ‘biblical womanhood’ as strongly as I often disagree with Mark Driscoll’s views on ‘biblical masculinity’, perhaps we should welcome the conversation that such a piece may start, thoughtfully responding to it, rather than just reacting.
Good points. I feel as if a dialogue in the comments on her blog would be pointless as we (I’d) be eaten alive by all the self hating evangelical trolls there but that doesn’t rule out a blog to blog interaction. That’d be worthwhile.
I must say I didn’t realize how aggressive this post was until Andrew read it. I am trying to be more irenic, but I’m a work in progress.
I don’t know Keith, this post was really ?????? in the flesh. But then I think blogging is for real men.
Those question marks are the greek word eirene (peace). Your blog doesn’t accept unicode.
It doesn’t accept Greek anymore? That’s weird, because I remember a few discussions about Greek here where it used to, or was that on the older formats?
And yes we’re having some coding issues . I’ll email our webmaster and see if we can get him to fix it.
Thanks for the heads up Wenatchee.