Why I Trust Kristin Kobes du Mez as an Historian but Not as a Shepherd

Until today, when people have asked me for my opinion on author and historian Kristin Kobes du Mez, I’ve been pretty hesitant to offer a bold statement of any kind, either endorsing or rejecting her as a credible voice in the Christian world.

Her upcoming documentary “For Our Daughters” is slated for release next week, and I so badly want to enthusiastically champion it in its expressed mission of exposing the abuse of women in the church. But the truth is I have a lot of reservations, and I think the time has come to finally name them.

On the one hand, I actually agree with a lot of what du Mez had to say in her bestseller “Jesus and John Wayne.” I agree with her condemnation of Christian nationalism. I agree with her choice to denounce the distorted militant formulas for masculinity that have been widely embraced in evangelical circles. I agree with her rejection of patriarchy. I agree with her bold defense of women’s voices in the church. I agree with her call to repentance for racism and white male supremacy. And I agree that a lot of the voices working overtime to silence her are the voices of (largely men) who are too egocentric to contend with the idols she invites them to surrender.

But I have reservations, specifically as they relate to her very public opinions on both abortion and LGBT activism. Sexual ethics are the prevailing issue of our age, so it’s actually pretty important that we get this stuff right, especially if we are going to presume to represent God. 

To du Mez, everything in evangelicalism is about power. Maintaining power, acquiring power, lording power over others. Power that’s maintained by stoking fear. She consistently argues that the reason evangelical leaders engage in culture wars is to drum up fear in the largely unthinking masses. When people are afraid that their religious and other freedoms are at stake, they’re much more likely to be mobilized to act in ways that preserve the power of their overlords. I’m paraphrasing, of course, but you can read this sentiment over and over again in her interviews and books and articles. According to du Mez, the outrage that mobilizes evangelicals to the polls is largely manufactured outrage without roots in reality.

In her world, there seems to be no real legitimacy to the urgency in the concerns we express about anything really: abortion, LGBT ideology, immigration policy, you name it. In her view, we just all need to calm the heck down, stop trafficking in fear, love our neighbor, and stop creating anything that could be construed as an “us vs. them” narrative. We’re only afraid of anything because we’re too stupid to realize that we’ve been strategically conditioned to fear by people who benefit from our operating in that headspace.

Her commitment to assuming the worst about the motivations of evangelicals engaged in the culture wars is where she starts to lose me. “You only care about this because you’re a blind and stupid unthinking sheep who’s too oblivious to realize you’re being puppeteered by a male supremacist overlord” is a tough pill to swallow for a great many people like me who are not, in fact, motivated by power but by real life suffering experienced by the victims of the same bad ideas she tacitly sanctions.

I promise I do not gain any power by speaking out against the trans lobby, nor am I at all interested in helping patriarchal men retain control. In fact, every time I speak, I am bombarded with a forcefield of opposition from the very institutional power that seems to prop up du Mez’ work. She’s got the power of the New York Times, the mainstream media, big pharma, and a gazillion other gazillionaire organizations behind her, but it doesn’t seem to occur to her that they could, by chance, be puppeteering her as well. She’s too smart for that possibility.

Conveniently for du Mez, once all conservative warnings can be written off as fearmongering peddled in the service of power preservation, none of them have to be taken seriously. They’re all smoke and mirrors. “The Bible tells us not to fear,” she repeatedly reminds us.

There are layers to the problems with her approach to all this, perhaps the most obvious one being the overt hypocrisy of her stance.

“Don’t live in fear,” says the woman working overtime to convince the world to fear the Christian nationalists. If the warning has to do with LGBT indoctrination, she writes it off as a pearl clutching power grab, but if the warning has to do with Doug Wilson, then it’s a Christian duty, an act of righteousness. “Resist the urge to create ‘us vs them’ thinking,” she admonishes while firmly committing to the othering of evangelicals as a whole. Du Mez crafts the very same story arc she condemns in others: “Ruin is coming unless you repent and listen to me.”

It’s all so mind numbingly hypocritical and honestly a bit offensive. This kind of elitist snobbery exempts her from having to condescend to entertain the grievances of the peasantry. We aren’t academics like her. We’re sequestered in our echo chambers, and she has been sent by God to relieve us of our ignorance. We aren’t on her level. “Most evangelicals don’t know anything about theology,” she joked disdainfully to a group of college students in Colorado.

And any pushback or criticism is immediately discarded on those grounds. Look how she characterizes all evangelical insistence on adherence to orthodox views of sexuality:

“Often, I hear traditionalists claim that LGBTQ inclusion is a slippery slope to abandoning gospel truth. Or that by opening our churches to LGBTQ believers, we have already abandoned the gospel. I’ve heard enough debates on the subject to know where that argument comes from.”

“Where that argument comes from.” Notice the dismissive deflection here. Notice the slippery language: “LGBT believers.” That’s an intentional decision on her part. She knows darn well what she’s doing here. “LGBT believers” is as oxymoronic as “adulterous believers” or “gluttonous believers.” She knows this, of course. If she wanted to argue that Christians struggle against all manner of sins including ones of the sexual variety, that we need to carve out space for those who are working to find God in the midst of their struggle, she could easily do that, but she doesn’t. There’s no hint of a need to struggle or surrender. Instead, she consciously bakes it into the identity.

You might not ever see her come out and brazenly say “I believe God endorses anal sex,” but we are to judge people by their actions, and in this case, we are talking about a woman who very publicly refused to sign her name to her university’s commitment to a biblically orthodox sexual ethic. We are talking about a woman who willingly platformed with actual reprobates like Nadia Bolz-Weber and Rev. Jacqui Lewis who actively champion sexual perversion and call it Christianity. Don’t get me wrong; I’m an ardent supporter of bridge building with the unbelieving world, but the standard is much different and much higher when it comes to working alongside people who claim to represent God. Hell would freeze over before I platformed with Doug Wilson OR Jacqui Lewis. I mean, look at what the woman had to say, for crying out loud.

Come on, lady! Call balls and strikes. You are willing to draw clear lines in the sand on the harms of Christian nationalism. Now apply that same commitment to God’s truth and justice by naming the horrors that accompany a rebellion against God’s design for sex! It’s not hard! Open your eyes and observe the carnage. We have so much evidence!

It couldn’t possibly be that any of us are up to our eyeballs in the horrors wrought by LGBT dogma. It couldn’t be that we’re weary of fielding the stories of disfigured young women who were encouraged to mutilate their healthy body parts. It couldn’t be that we actually care about the female inmates being literally raped by men invading their prisons by appropriating the female sex. It couldn’t actually be that we care about girls’ right to say “no” to naked men. It couldn’t be that we actually know men who have to wear diapers because the copious amounts of anal sex they received in a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness inside rendered them permanently injured. It couldn’t possibly be that we think rebellion against God’s clearly defined parameters for our bodies will always lead to anguish. Nope. She knows better than we do. In fact, she knows better than God does. Our concerns aren’t valid; they’re selfish and self-righteous to the core.

Du Mez is slippery, often choosing to mask her subversion to Biblical truth as a commitment to “nuance” and “dialogue.” ”I’m just asking questions,” she says to avoid any commitment to hardline truth.

As Rod Dreher put it, “We cannot have dialogue on something that, if normalized within Christianity, will destroy it.”

Nuance is important, and I often call for more of it! But nuance is for conversations about race relations or impossible subjects like immigration. It’s not for conversations about whether Christians get to justify killing babies or allow men in dresses to run roughshod over women’s badly needed sex-based protections.

Meanwhile, du Mez intentionally chose a popular transactivist to write one of the endorsements on the cover of her book. How in God’s green earth am I supposed to reconcile a feigned commitment to womankind with a choice to play footsie with the most aggressively misogynistic movement this side of heaven? Why should I trust her to build a better future for my daughter if she won’t even say a word in my daughter’s defense when the trans lobby revokes her basic human right to the word “no” to men in her intimate spaces?

The truth is that I can’t.

Du Mez has similarly inoculated herself against any criticism of her ambiguous and non-committal stance on abortion. “It’s complicated,” she routinely says about ideas that are not, in fact, complicated. When Roe v Wade was finally overturned, she didn’t celebrate; instead she posted a link to an article about how pro-life advocacy is mostly about controlling women’s bodies and how if we really valued women and we were actually pro-life, we would adopt her political positions on everything from healthcare to guns, as though our belief that it’s a sin to kill unborn humans is only valid if we subscribe to all her other progressive beliefs. And we have tweets where she takes snarky, arrogant pot shots at pro-life pregnancy resource centers, implying that they’re woefully inadequate at providing meaningful support to women in need (a very sore spot for me as a woman who found literally life saving support at such a center.) It’s intensely manipulative. We also have clips of her doing her whataboutist obfuscation and waxing eloquent about when “ensoulment” actually happens etc instead of just drawing clear lines in ethical places. She refuses to bite the leftist hand that feeds her, and it’s consistently disappointing.

The Bible is not silent on the topic of abortion as many would have you believe. In Scripture, we see God confer both personhood and purpose to the unborn time and time again. When the unborn John the Baptist entered the presence of the unborn Christ, He leapt in His mother’s womb. Before Jacob or Esau were even born, God had already announced their destinies as the leaders of two nations. We were each created imago dei: in the image of God with a plan and a purpose. The ONLY times we see the destruction of the unborn in the Bible, it is ALWAYS in the context of a curse.

Do I think pro-lifers would do well to focus a lot of our efforts on improving the state of affairs for women? Absolutely. I’ve written about this more than once. Do I think the new wave of self-described “abortion abolitionists” are doing much more harm than good? Yes! But we need both boots-on-the-ground material support for women in need AND legislation that protects the humanity of the unborn, and it shouldn’t be hard for a Christian leader to draw a clear line in the sand on these topics.

But du Mez refuses to do so, and in that refusal, she hamstrings her ability to be trusted by the very people who need to contend with her ideas the most. She creates this bewildering conundrum wherein she wars against sexual abuse in the church while winking and nodding at promoting other forms of sexual immorality that also harm people.

In many ways, I’ve grown to see the horseshoe theory in pretty clear effect where du Mez is concerned. She and Doug Wilson are not so dramatically different from one another. The theobros and the white academic elite progressive “Christian” women are basically the same people in different political camps: they share the same smarty pants superiority complex, the same correct diagnoses of problems in the opposing camp, the same glaring blind spots about the rot in their own camps, same insistence that critique of their ideas is basically just persecution or a failure to apply proper context, and the same unwillingness to contend with the mere possibility that maybe they’re wrong in the solutions they propose to the problems they name.

As I was flushing all this out in my own mind in anticipation of this blog, a funny and powerfully illustrative thing happened to me:

I was trying to explain to a Twitter follower why I do not trust Kristin Kobes du Mez. I said she was dodgy on sexual ethics and abortion, and you can’t afford to play fast and loose on these issues if you’re going to assert yourself as a champion of biblical truth or of women. 

He told me she was not “dodgy.” She was “academic.” 

As previously expressed, this is just the smartypants way of passing off subversion as nuance. I’m not really in the market for that. There are certain things that aren’t really a matter of nuance. It shouldn’t be hard to say that slavery is incompatible with Christianity, and the same is true about abortion and LGBT ideology. 

So this guy continues to insist that I’m wrong, that there’s more gray area than I’m allowing for. And he sends me a link to a movie that’s supposedly going to change my mind. 

Lo and behold it’s a link to a movie produced by the same man who fired me from the Y for my opposition to men in women’s locker rooms—the man who turned around and donated $10,000 of his own money to the local transactivists who were working overtime to strip women of our rights. 

And in his newest venture, this man, a la the Kristin Kobes du Mez persuasion, is trying to subvert biblical truth and wrap his delusion and rebellion (that hurts women, in particular) up in a neat little Jesus bow. 

Hard. Friggin. Pass. 

That’s precisely the type of dodginess I’m warning against.

I’ve been hesitant to join the pile-on of Kristin Kobes du Mez. It is not easy to be a woman with a voice or a platform in the conservative Christian right. I know this from personal experience on a much smaller scale that hers, but I’ve lived the painful truth of it, so I’m generally pretty eager to extend grace to sisters called to similar work. But the truth is that the more acquainted I become with her body of work and her overall worldview, the more I’m reminded of thalidomide. I know that sounds crazy, but hear me out:

In the late 1950s, pregnant women who showed up at their medical appointments complaining of morning sickness were often prescribed a drug called thalidomide as a cure for what ailed them. Conventional wisdom of the day did not yet think to foresee the potential problems of powerful drugs crossing the placental barrier, so when a generation of babies was born with defects, they had to rethink a lot of things. Experts estimate that thalidomide led to the death of approximately 2,000 children and serious birth defects in more than 10,000 children. The drug was eventually taken off the market in 1961 as the result of intense pressure from the public and the media alike, but not before the harm had already been done.

The doctors had quite accurately diagnosed the problem of morning sickness. They weren’t wrong in their understanding of what was ailing these women. It was their proposed solution that caused the harm.

To a certain extent, I trust Kristin Kobes du Mez as a diagnostician but not as a healer. She’s a valuable historian, but I don’t trust her as a shepherd, and it’s distinction that really matters. We need Christian leaders who are willing to call balls and strikes wherever they’re thrown and regardless of who throws them. We need Christian leaders who are as eager to challenge their own blind spots as they are to throw stones at the blind spots of others.

It’s well and good to question the institutional power of the church when that power has been corrupted and allowed to harm others, but if you’re going to do this, you should probably make sure your voice isn’t actually emboldening other institutional powers that are equally hostile to the faith. I want the voices I choose to amplify in defense of my daughter to be voices of people who are willing to confront both right and left wing patriarchy, not voices that subtly imply that her boundaries are bigotry or that vacuuming her offspring out of her womb is something that could ever possibly lead to her health or happiness.

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