No Vaginas Allowed!
Author Rachel Held Evans from the cover of her book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood
Christian publishers and book stores have a problem with vaginas.
Maybe the owners were all born by Caesarean section or there are a lot more messiahs running around than we ever imagined. We guys who have assisted with the birth of our children know it’s a painful, messy (and awesome) process, which is why immaculate conceptions and virgin births seem to be the preferred dogma.
Anyway, evangelical author Rachel Held Evans faced this problem down and found herself banned by the Christian retail decency police.
And this, even after her publisher made her remove “kick ass” and other horrible expressions from her new book: A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master” (Due out Oct 20).
The vagina issue could be the reason. Or maybe it’s more because Evans has challenged fundamental Christianity’s macho, male-dominated theology and the misogyny and violence against women that it has wrongly institutionalized. Taken to its 10th-century extremes, the attitudes of fundamentalist Christians today are uncomfortably close to today’s Taliban.
Evans is hardly alone. Others find that even crap can get them into trouble. And that’s a load of ….
“[I]f Christian bookstores stuck to their own ridiculous standards, they wouldn’t be able carry the freaking Bible,” says Evans in one of her always entertaining and thought-filled blog posts.
Careful there, author: “Freaking” just might be the f-bomb that gets you banned again!
LIVING THE LIFE
Evans got herself into trouble by living the life. According to her publisher, Evans:
“Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year.
“Pursuing a different virtue each month, Evans learns the hard way that her quest for biblical womanhood requires more than a “gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Peter 3:4). It means growing out her hair, making her own clothes, covering her head, obeying her husband, rising before dawn, abstaining from gossip, remaining silent in church, and even camping out in the front yard during her period.
“See what happens when a thoroughly modern woman starts referring to her husband as “master” and “praises him at the city gate” with a homemade sign. Learn the insights she receives from an ongoing correspondence with an Orthodox Jewish woman, and find out what she discovers from her exchanges with a polygamist wife. Join her as she wrestles with difficult passages of scripture that portray misogyny and violence against women.”
WOMEN: BIBLICAL HOT BUTTONS
The battle Evans is fighting is an old one but still worth fighting.
It runs through every religion since the human concept of God evolved from female to male. There was a time when even talking about God’s transgender evolution could get you killed.
But the transition happened and for some very interesting reasons as human society has changed over the past 50,000 years.
Back in 1999, I wrote one of my best thrillers ever based on what would happen if there were irrefutable proof of a second Messiah and it was a woman.
I caught a lot of flak for my heresies in Daughter of God (I was raised a Southern Presbyterian in Mississippi and my kids were enrolled in Catholic Schools here in California).
I didn’t get banned because I had a mainstream publisher. (But it was good enough to get plagiarized by The Da Vinci Code.)
