Evangelicalism’s Reckoning With Harm Done to Women Is Overdue
Women are more than a spiritual test, a temptation, a tool for resolving oneself against future sin
James Dobson famously told a story: one day he was out driving, and a woman stopped at a light beside him and… smiled. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and Family Talk, didn’t “take the bait.” He didn’t follow her for what the listener is left to assume would have been a steamy tryst.
Dobson’s story is part of a broad mythology within evangelical culture of lady temptresses out there with their bodies — jogging, working reception, driving happily alone — who by virtue of their female physical form present a danger to good (heterosexual) Christian men. Their existence within the sightline of a man can lead to lust, sin, comes the warning.
A recent episode of the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, which tracks the charismatic reach and devastating consequences of spiritually abusive pastor Mark Driscoll, recently highlighted the Dobson story on an episode entitled “The Things We Do to Women.” The same episode included clips of Driscoll detailing how women had invited him over — what he understood as a proposition.
It’s staggering for how many years such stories of rising above temptation were…
