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Is Mark Driscoll afraid to hold a woman accountable for her own choices?

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Watch this video.

Who is to blame for this woman’s troubles? Well, I agree with Driscoll that her family, the church and other Christians were to blame for not telling her the truth about sex. On that we all agree. Christians do a lousy job of explaining sex to young people, because they don’t want to talk about “dirty” stuff, and they don’t want to use arguments and evidence, and they don’t want to go outside the Bible to give real reasons and evidence. But thumping the Bible is a poor response to peer pressure and pop culture.

But she and Mark Driscoll also seem to think the man is to blame. Is the man to blame?

Well, the man certainly did bad things, but I think that none of these bad things could have happened to this woman in particular if this woman had not first chosen this man from all the other men that she knew, and then given him the opportunity to do these bad things. Without her own free choices, she would never have been harmed. So her own bad choices played a part in her suffering but she didn’t mention her own choices at all. So, let me take a look at how she could have made better choices below.

Can women expect a non-Christian man to act like a Christian man?

Women need to be careful to realize that they should avoid being alone with non-Christian men, especially when they are not even old enough to be dating men at all. That’s what courting is designed to prevent, by the way – the man has to go through the father to get to the woman, and they need to be accompanied by a chaperone at all times. And in any case, a woman can get love without touching a man just by listening to the man’s words, reading his writings, letting him serve her, washing a car together, and accepting gifts from him.

Women: you don’t go to a deserted beach with a non-Christian man. Don’t take risks like that. Especially when you have probably already done a lot with the guy. And don’t drink alcohol, it impairs your judgment. The purpose of men is to marry them, not to have a good time with them. No alcohol is allowed!

Paul says that you cannot expect non-Christians to act like Christians, which is exactly what many Christian women do.

1 Cor 5:9-13:

9I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—

10not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world.

11But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.

12What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?

13God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked man from among you.”

And, 2 Cor 6:14-16:

14Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?

15What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?

16What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be my people.”

Christians should not pursue non-Christians romantically – it’s disrespectful to God to leave him out of your romantic operations.

Women can stop a lot of the bad behavior of men just by choosing authentic Christian men by using rigorous objective criteria to evaluate men. If a woman chooses a non-Christian man, then she cannot complain if he acts like a non-Christian man. And there is more to a man being a Christian than just saying that he is, memorizing Bible verses and singing praise hymns in church. Christianity is a worldview. It has to be applied across the board. Christian women need to study to develop a Christian worldview of their own so they know how to evaluate the worldviews of candidate men.

What else can we learn from the video?

Here are a few more things that stood out to me in the video:

  • She should take more responsibility for their actions, instead of blaming others
  • She should study these things (not just the Bible!) on her own before she starts dating, to know why God puts these boundaries in place to protect her from harm
  • Her parents should have studied these things (not just the Bible!) more, and helped her more by being more convincing, to know why God puts these boundaries in place to protect her from harm
  • The church she grew up in should provide her with extra-biblical arguments and evidence from the objective external world so that she could resist ideologies like atheism, postmodernism, liberalism, feminism, etc. – she can’t act morally unless she believes that God exists and that morality is real

Women should also know that the decision to have sex before marriage with a man who isn’t a Christian doesn’t magically change him into a Christian. Sex isn’t magic. It doesn’t cause a man to like a woman, or to fall under her control.

Women go to school for 4 years to learn a trade and they need to put some effort into studying courtship rules so they can be wise about their own choices with men. Jumping into a car and trying to drive it without lessons is a good way to get killed. And emotions, intuitions, peer-pressure and pop-culture don’t help you to know how to drive a car. Be careful, think for yourself.

I also recommend that young, unmarried women  become informed about anti-family, anti-father policies. If women don’t want to be hurt by men, then vote for stronger families, lower taxes, and policies that promote good husbands and good fathers. Girls need to see love modeled between a husband and wife as they grow up, and they need to have fathers in the home. Good public policies encourage men to marry and stay married.

Women need to get better criteria for choosing men

A while back, I posted on some of the criteria women have for choosing men, and here are a few:

  • Being tall
  • Being aloof and disinterested
  • Playing a musical instrument
  • Well-dressed
  • Stylish shoes
  • A deep voice
  • Handsome face

What do women expect when they choose men based on criteria like that? It makes no sense to blame a bad man for being bad. He’s BAD! Don’t go near him, he’ll be bad to you, too!

Shouldn’t women judge themselves first, before judging a man?

Shouldn’t women begin by removing the plank in their own eye before removing the speck from the man’s eye?

I think an excellent first step would be for Christian women to take a good look at the music they listen to, the movies they watch, and also what they read. Are they listening to Melissa Etheridge, watching “Thelma & Louise”, and reading Margaret Atwood? Are they informing themselves about truth in many areas, like economics and cosmology, so that they can make informed choices of men? Are they building resistance to cultural trends?

UPDATE: Two more things I thought of.

1) Shouldn’t this woman have put some effort into testing out the claims of her parents and the church by reading the Bible itself? I mentioned reading extra-biblical stuff but even the Bible doesn’t ground anything that she was doing or anything the church was telling her to do that was wrong. Driscoll seems to think that women are not obligated to read the Bible, and that if someone in the church tells them a lie, then the church is to blame. But shouldn’t we expect people who attend church to test these things out for themselves? I realize that she wasn’t a Christian, but in order to take responsibility, she could have said “I should have checked things in my Bible and so I share the blame”. She doesn’t say that because she doesn’t blame herself at all for anything that happened. Well, probably she went to church for the singing and never read what the Bible had to say – or didn’t take it as an authority. But she never blames herself for either one of those.

2) I noticed that she claims that if the church tells her something and she does it, then the church is to blame. Well, the church (or at least her parents) undoubtedly told her not to have sex before she was married, but she didn’t mention that in the video. Why not? Well, she only mentions things that other people tell her to blame them. When they tell her the right thing and she doesn’t do it, she doesn’t mention what they told her. Because she won’t blame herself for any reason. And Driscoll has nothing to say about that, either.  Any time the church tells her something bad and she does it… it’s the church’s fault. Any time the church tells her something good and she DOESN’T do it… she just doesn’t mention it because she isn’t responsible for anything she does – it’s always the fault of someone else.

I don’t mind if she explains the circumstances surrounding WHY she made bad choices. I don’t even mind the bad choices, because I make bad choices. I just don’t like her blaming other people, I especially don’t like her blaming bad men. Bad men are bad. Don’t blame them for not being good – it’s your fault for choosing them. There are other men who are good who get no attention from women at all.

We need to learn from Theodore Dalrymple

Remember this post?

Excerpt:

With increasing frequency I am consulted by nurses, who for the most part come from and were themselves traditionally members of (at least after Florence Nightingale) the respectable lower middle class, who have illegitimate children by men who first abuse and then abandon them. This abuse and later abandonment is usually all too predictable from the man’s previous history and character; but the nurses who have been treated in this way say they refrained from making a judgment about him because it is wrong to make judgments.

And again:

Why are the nurses so reluctant to come to the most inescapable of conclusions? Their training tells them, quite rightly, that it is their duty to care for everyone without regard for personal merit or deserts; but for them, there is no difference between suspending judgment for certain restricted purposes and making no judgment at all in any circumstances whatsoever. It is as if they were more afraid of passing an adverse verdict on someone than of getting a punch in the face—a likely enough consequence, incidentally, of their failure of discernment. Since it is scarcely possible to recognize a wife beater without inwardly condemning him, it is safer not to recognize him as one in the first place.

This failure of recognition is almost universal among my violently abused women patients, but its function for them is somewhat different from what it is for the nurses. The nurses need to retain a certain positive regard for their patients in order to do their job. But for the abused women, the failure to perceive in advance the violence of their chosen men serves to absolve them of all responsibility for whatever happens thereafter, allowing them to think of themselves as victims alone rather than the victims and accomplices they are. Moreover, it licenses them to obey their impulses and whims, allowing them to suppose that sexual attractiveness is the measure of all things and that prudence in the selection of a male companion is neither possible nor desirable.

Read the whole thing, you young women. And judge men hard. It’s good to judge them beforehand so that you don’t have to condemn them for being bad later.

Related posts

News

Barack Obama proclaims June as LGBT rights month

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Here’s the proclamation.

Excerpt:

Much work remains to fulfill our Nation’s promise of equal justice under law for LGBT Americans.  That is why we must give committed gay couples the same rights and responsibilities afforded to any married couple, and repeal the Defense of Marriage Act.  We must protect the rights of LGBT families by securing their adoption rights, ending employment discrimination against LGBT Americans, and ensuring Federal employees receive equal benefits.  We must create safer schools so all our children may learn in a supportive environment.  I am also committed to ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” so patriotic LGBT Americans can serve openly in our military, and I am working with the Congress and our military leadership to accomplish that goal.

And of course there is the bill he signed criminalizing speech critical of homosexuality.

And it’s not just gay rights that he is focused on, it’s abortion. If that link doesn’t prove that he is the most pro-abortion president ever to hold the office, then nothing will. Whether intentionally or not, everyone who voted for Obama voted against the rights of the unborn and against the norm of traditional marriage, where children are raised by a mother and a father.

Remember, we Christians helped to elect Obama:

Because we thought that just wars to deter terrorists were expensive, and that we should have more of our neighbor’s money for bailing out Wall Street bankers, unions and failing public schools.

It’s sometimes funny to remember the days when Bush was proclaiming Sanctity of Human Life day. But then he was the most pro-life president ever, and solid on traditional marriage, too.

News

Why parenting is different now than when my parents were growing up

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I had a talk with my parents about what it was like for them growing up in a very very poor country before coming here, and I found out some interesting challenges that I wanted to share with you. My Dad grew up in a small village and he had to walk a mile to his farm which had lots of trees and plants that his family picked to sell the produce in the market. And they hunted for animals at night with a lantern. That’s how they grew up.

So, I wanted to ask them to tell me how things have changed for raising children from that environment compared to here in the affluent West. And below is the list of some of the challenges.

Education

  • My grandparents were not really focused on monitoring my parents education in school, they were more worried about passing on skills that would help them to tend the land so they could pass it on
  • The teachers in that country were mostly males and they were focused on academic achievement and competition, especially since intelligence and scholastic aptitude was a ticket out of poverty
  • There was NO emphasis on self-esteem, compassion, sex education, drug education, leftist politics or other secular leftist ideologies in the schools – and nobody wrote to politicians or attended marches for extra credit
  • The headmaster and the vice principal (both males) lived next door and they would come over to talk to my grandfather about my father, and to play cards while talking about politics in front of the children
  • Teachers were allowed to punish children in class with spankings
  • Teachers would inspect the students for dirty fingernails, messy hair, dirty uniform, or minimum decency clothing standards, etc. and you got rapped on the knuckles with a ruler if you were bad
  • My Dad attended a Presbyterian school and all the teachers attended church on Sundays
  • There was intense competition and last-man-standing contests for prizes, and all the sports were competitive with winners and losers – some people put a lot of effort into contests to get better so they could win
  • The teachers were not unionized and there was a free choice of which school to attend
  • none of the children had money for alcohol, drugs, contraceptives, etc.

Family and Community

  • My Dad grew up with a stay-at-home mother who monitored them, and they came home for lunch
  • There was no TV or video games, so family interaction was more common – like working together on things and doing chores to help make ends meet
  • my Dad’s chore was to fetch water in the morning from half-a mile away (several times)
  • No TV and no video games also means more sports and activities with the neighbor kids
  • Food was scarce, and there was no processed food or fast food – so kids were less obese
  • Neighbors came over more to play cards and discuss things so that children learned about adult stuff by listening and watching them debate and discuss ideas, instead of from watching mainstream news media, which is somewhere to the left of Satan, politically, on social, fiscal and foreign policy
  • My grandfather would make my father volunteer in a store in order for my grandfather to get credit at the store, and he was able to work because there were no regulations on children working to help to support the family as long as they also went to school
  • My father was earning money for the family at an early age – he saw his parents working hard and that was all the motivation he needed to want to contribute – not like today when it is difficult to make children do anything
  • My father used to volunteer to help other neighborhood children learn mathematics (I later did the same thing, but for money)
  • My father learned to hunt and fish so that he could help the family to survive
  • My father had 6 young siblings so he had experience raising children and learning to cook by watching my grandmother cook

If you’re wondering how I got into this long conversation with my parents, it’s because the woman I am performing acts of love on inquired repeatedly about my parents, and I got into a long discussion with them, touching on this topic and many other things related to parenting. The net effect of this on me was to make me a little more tolerant of my parents. They came from a simpler culture where they had more support from teachers and neighbors, while facing fewer challenges from the culture and secular leftist elites. My Dad worked 3 jobs when he got here. My Mom worked too. We were incredibly poor.