Purity Rings, John MacArthur, and That Wretched TGC Article

On my 13th birthday, my well-intended parents took me out to a fancy waterfront restaurant, where they announced that I was becoming a young lady, and it was time for “the talk.” It was a super awkward affair that essentially boiled down to “Don’t have sex until you get married.”

As we waited for our food to arrive, they handed me a small black box, and I opened it in eager anticipation. Inside I found a delicate gold ring with an opal stone. This, they told me, was a purity ring, to be worn as a reminder of my commitment to God to remain sexually pure for my future husband.

It was a stunning ring with a stunning problem; my parents had purchased it from the man who had spent the first 10 years of my life sexually abusing me. When I wore it, I didn’t experience resolve; I experienced cognitive dissonance. It didn’t remind me that I was pure; it reminded me that I was already damaged, that whatever my future husband was interested in was already gone. And nobody knew about it.

I put on a front and played the part of the good Christian girl. I was the girls’ Bible study leader and the captain of my high school basketball team. Everything I did was a desperate performance designed to convince myself that if I worked hard enough, I could regain some of the worth that ring was supposed to represent. I wore my performative virtue like a suit of armor, even choosing “Good Girl” as my moniker on our team’s personalized sweatshirts.

I attended a staunchly complementarian church where the women were largely silent. We entered each Sunday to see a wall full of charcoal drawings of the great church fathers, but no church mothers. If we heard a woman’s voice during the service, it was either coming from the choir loft or the narthex, where the moms wielded wooden spoons to wrangle uncompliant children. My concept of what women were designed for was shaped by submission theology enacted in a million subliminal ways in my entire childhood experience.

At youth group, the pastor would routinely read us excerpts from books like “Passion and Purity” that, to me, seemed to reiterate that women’s value on the marriage market was directly tied to our chastity. I remember a particular chapter where Elisabeth Elliott recounted being gripped with extreme guilt for laying her head in her fiance’s lap before they were officially married. I remember going home and thinking, “Man, if that’s a mortal sin, then I’m really in trouble.”

I lived with the ultimate imposter syndrome, terrified that someone would find out I was secretly damaged goods and that no one would ever want me.

Eventually the dissonance won. I lost my purity ring on the softball field during a game one day and returned to the field the next day frantically scouring each blade of grass on my hands and knees during a thunderstorm trying to find it. I threw away my virginity to the first guy who would have me, and I remember feeling such an overwhelming mixture of both grief and relief- for once my actions matched the way I had long felt about my worth.

It didn’t really improve from there. I drank to excess at parties in hopes that some scoundrel would take advantage of me so I would feel wanted. I’m not talking once or twice. I’m talking years’ worth of self-harm and self-sabotage to the degree that, on more than one occasion, I found myself wandering drunk and barefoot around the streets of Seattle in the wee hours of the morning after having left some other guy’s hotel room. I got pregnant out of wedlock, which made me feel even less worthy of love, and then I married an abuser, in part, to try to punish myself. Inside, I was still a lost, profoundly lonely little girl who genuinely believed her worth was directly tied to her sexual capacities. I mean, it kind of makes sense. It was the only way I had ever known to elicit what I thought was love from the time I was in diapers. It was a deep, dark, demonic cycle of agony and self-loathing from which, by the grace of God (after a ton of therapy, prayer, and layers of repentance), I’ve been redeemed and set free.

I don’t spend much time in the space anymore. I’ve got an amazing, faithful, godly husband, three beautiful children, and a life I love living every day. But when I encountered last week’s fateful TGC article about marital sex and the ensuing defense of demonstrably abusive men like John MacArthur, all that trauma came screaming back to the surface for the first time in over a decade, and I’ve spent the majority of the past week trying to figure out exactly why.

I think in many ways, Josh Butler, the article’s author, reminds me of my well-intended parents. He wrote the article in an attempt to guide and bless, but his lack of awareness and discernment ended up triggering old injuries for countless women in the church, injuries no one with power ever really seems to care enough to see. Butler’s wonky theology wasn’t novel; it echoed an inadvertently chauvinistic refrain familiar to thousands of women who grew up submitted to its debilitating authority. Butler reminded us womenfolk that we are largely viewed as passive recipients in our own salvation love story. He informed us that our bodies are receptacles for men’s advances, and that our “holy” place is not our brain or our heart, but our vagina. He reminded us, through omission, that our pleasure is optional as our primary function is procreation. He told us that we are expected to yield fruit without intimacy. In short, he reduced us to sex objects and breeders, a message we hear too often in a lot more sophisticated ways in the church.

It’s messaging that’s driven thousands and thousands of women straight out of the church and into the open arms of the very ideologies we rail against. Most women don’t leave the church because they were rebellious; they leave because they were badly harmed, and no one gave a damn about their suffering. I’m a women’s advocate by vocation. This is my wheelhouse. I live in these spaces and interact with these people. I’ve catalogued story after story after gut-wrenching story. The trends are always the same.

But when women who’ve dedicated their entire lives’ work to binding these specific wounds speak up to address the injuries and invite a long-overdue conversation about the trends, the theobros generally choose to heap contempt on them. I’m talking about women like Sheila Wray Gregoire and Beth Moore and Aimee Byrd and Julie Roys and Rachel Denhollander, who’ve all ventured bravely into the abyss to try to speak truth to the theobro power only to be aggressively mistreated and dismissed by an all-too-familiar tune: “Your thoughts and insights don’t matter because you’re a woman, and we cannot, will not, learn from you.” Or, in the words of John MacArthur, “Go home.”

These women are labeled threats. They’re accused of Marxism. They’re told they’re divisive. They’re categorized as “false teachers.” They’re scrutinized for their appearances. There are entire online forums designated to the sole purpose of heaping contempt upon them. Church, we NEED these women. They edify us. They make us better. Their work is what it looks like to remove the planks from our own eyes. But no one wants to listen because they are women.

Sorry, brothers, but God created women to bring balance in all areas of life, including the church. In the Bible, wisdom is personified in the feminine. We are not, as a sex, “more easily deceived.” You are not, as a sex, called to be our saviors. If your masculinity is threatened by our ability to see things outside your purview, then you’ve got an identity problem that won’t be resolved by stomping on our necks and reminding us who’s boss. We see things you can’t because we’ve lived through experiences you haven’t.

He didn’t create us to be passive receptacles. He created us to be living vessels, actively engaged in our own stories. And because we, like you, have a vested interest in advancing the Kingdom and seeing marriages flourish, we insist on speaking up about the threats to both. For the love of mercy, have enough humility to listen to the lessons so many of us have learned the hard way.