For What It's Worth

Last night, this blog post and the social media response I've seen to it so far were bugging me so much that I couldn't sleep. So I sat down with some graph paper and charted out everything in the original blog post into four different categories:

1. Important Truths
2. Unimportant/Unnecessary/Distracting Commentary
3. Important things that were left out
4. Falsehoods

Now, one thing needs to be gotten out of my system at the very beginning and I won't talk about it again.

Y'all, that was an extremely poorly written blog post. I couldn't even make it through the first time I read it, but when I began to see all these responses appearing, I realised I needed to read it all the way through, so I did. Honestly, though, it was so poorly written that I'm not 100 percent sure I understand where she stands on some things. I believe there may have been times (not many, but at least two) where she was disagreeing with a point made by someone else, but her writing and/or punctuation usage was just so poorly chosen that it wasn't evident. Let's be careful not to vilify her without fully understanding where she stands.

In any case, the blog post (and social media response) is something I've decided I want to talk about, so here we go.

Many of the responses I've seen come evidently out of a sense of personal injury or insecurity. I realize our personal experience does inform the way we view our world. That can't be avoided. I'm not saying we shouldn't share personal experience in response to this blog post - I'm sure I will base some of what I say upon my own life - but we should never let our personal lives guide whether or not we believe the scripture is true.

As to the blog post itself, first, let's address the title, intro, and conclusion, which comprise the majority of the second category on my graph paper (Unimportant/Unnecessary/Distracting Commentary).

The blog post begins with a question (meant to be rhetorical, I think) "Do you know how much more attractive debt-free virgins (without tattoos) are to young men?"

And it ends with "Stay virgins until marriage, out of debt, and don't get tattoos!"

Between these two sentences, there is a sprinkling of discussion about sexuality and debt, not another word about tattoos, and a whole bunch of talk about why young women should not go to college.

I could go on a rant about how this is very poor writing and would receive a C or lower in any basic college writing class, but I'm not here to do that.

I'll start off by stating the obvious: Christian or otherwise, if you're living your life based on what is attractive to the opposite sex, you're doing everything for the wrong reason.
Living for the good opinion of others is a dead end street and will never satisfy.

But what I really want to talk about is this: toward the end of that opening paragraph there is a beautiful sentence, completely overshadowed by the awful introduction, which I would urge upon everyone alike - young, old, man, or woman: "As believers in Jesus Christ, we need to live in a way that is pleasing to Him because His ways are the best."

That sentence was true and good. Living to please Christ is exactly what we are called to do as Christians, and it is the only satisfying way to live. 

The first sentence may or may not be true, but was certainly not good or scriptural.

What saddens me more than anything is that, in all the responses I've seen to this blog post, I haven't seen a single person acknowledge the good (though hard) truths that she pointed out.

Here are several of the other truths I found in her blog post as well as scripture references where applicable:

(By the way, my "Important Truths" category was by far the longest, and I haven't included all of them here)

1. Debt is a burden (Proverbs 22:7 and Romans 13:8)
2. God urges [commands] sexual purity (Hebrews 13:4)
3. Secular universities teach against the God of the Bible and His ways (This is obvious to anyone who has gone to college at a secular university)
4. Most young Christian women have not been taught to live in submission to their husbands (The biblical passage referenced here is most likely Ephesians 5, specifically verse 22. I think many young Christian women are aware of this verse, but have been taught to ignore it or misapply it. I'm also not positive I would agree with this particular blogger on what it means. I'll go into this in a little more detail later on.)
5. Older women are called to teach younger women biblical womanhood (Titus 2:3-5 is referenced here, but I'm not sure I agree with her main definition of biblical womanhood - also something I'll discuss in more depth shortly.)

These are all good, healthy, biblical truths, and if she'd stuck with these ideas and fleshed them out more in the context of living a life pleasing to the Lord, it would have been a great blog post.

Unfortunately, she chose to run off on a tangent against young women going to college, and I take issue with almost everything she said there.

Several of her reasons (and my arguments against them) are below:

She says women who go to college are unlikely to stay home raising their children.
There are any number of reasons why staying at home would be preferable for a Christian mother, so if this were true, I might agree with it, but I don't believe it is. I haven't seen statistics on this specifically, but I do know the number of stay at home moms in the U.S. has been trending upward in the last decade or more, and, as far as I know, there has not been a corresponding downturn in women deciding to attend college.

She also says the husband of a woman who went to college will need to take years to teach his wife the correct way to think since college will have taught her all the wrong ways.
(To be fair, this is one of those places where I'm not absolutely sure whether she's agreeing or disagreeing with this statement which was actually made by someone else.)
Here's what she's completely ignoring though - godly young women who go to college are not just sitting there with their mouths open, willingly swallowing whatever is placed inside. Perhaps some are, but most are weighing what is told them against the scripture, taking their questions to those who are older and wiser, and listening to the Holy Spirit within them, who teaches them to resist false teaching.

Next, she says "They will start having babies later in life. That is if they can still conceive naturally."

*Picture the laughing crying emoji dancing across this entire line*

What?

How long does she think it takes to get through college? Most young women who go to college will graduate by the time they're 22 or 23. For me, it was 24.
All I'll say here is if they're having trouble conceiving at that time, it has nothing to do with having gone to college.
An important thing to note here is that college does not equal career. If you want to talk about women putting careers before children, that's a different thing entirely. The argument she is putting forth is against women going to college, and that's what I'm speaking about here.
It may also be that she is equating going to college with accruing debt, in which case I could understand a concern that women would feel the need to work in order to pay off that debt and so put off having children. But the fact is, college does not equal debt either. I made it through a 4-year degree from a State University without any debt, and no, I didn't have a rich uncle who paid for it!

Next, she says "'They lost a handful of years of experience learning to cook large meals and learning how to work in the garden...' (Young women learn nothing about biblical womanhood or what it takes to run a home when they go to college. They don't learn to serve others either. They learn the ways of the world instead.)"

I'll admit I never saw a college course offered on "Biblical Womanhood" or "How to Run a Home and Cook Large Meals" and I definitely did learn a lot about the ways of the world when I went to college.

But you know what else I learned? Here's a sample list:
Take the trash out when it needs to be taken out
Inviting 5 people over when you live in a house with 4 other people means you need to cook a lot of food
You need spiritual mentors who will not only talk about scripture, but will enter into your daily life and tell you when you're neglecting things - it they don't find you, go find them

If that doesn't fit those requirements, I don't know what does, but let's take a closer look at Titus 2:3-5 to see if this is actually what biblical womanhood is about: "...train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands..."
That, my friends, is biblical womanhood, and it is a shaping of the heart and mental attitudes that neither years of experience cooking large meals and working in a garden nor a college education will ever teach. We only learn biblical womanhood from the influence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, being an active part of a biblical church, and being willing to learn from wise older women.

This brings me to another quibble I have with this blog post - I'm not positive, but it seems to me that she is disappointed in churches who "support college kids" - I'm assuming she is referring to college ministries and the like here. Goodness gracious! As we've just established, church is the only way most of us are going to learn biblical womanhood, college students or otherwise. Please, churches, keep supporting those college kids! (And also (which may be more her point) include the ones of college age who have chosen not to attend college - we all need to learn how to be God-honoring adults - it is not something that comes naturally for any of us.)

One last thing I want to say, and then I'll close. There is a lot of talk throughout this blog post about young women who want to be wives and mothers one day and how they should behave "until they get married."

Oh friends, I have talked about this before, and I'll say it again briefly. We do not know whether the Lord intends marriage for people or not. We cannot assume that all young women who want to be married will be married!

Let's focus on the truths found in scripture and allow them to shape our lives. Let's even follow the sound advice offered by the second to last sentence in that original blog post:

"Trust God with your life, study the Word, and take the narrow path that leads to life."

And I would add, ignore all the other stuff!