Anabaptism, Cancel Culture, Sexual Ethics, and Disagreeing with People You Love

Responding to your hardest questions from yesterday's Ask Me Anything!

I did a Spring Clean last week and had to document!

Yesterday, I posted an AMA on my Instagram Stories. Here are some (of the hardest!) questions you asked and a few thoughts in response.

Question: Curious where you’ve landed in regards to your present Theo/Denom affiliation if any?

I grew up in a Pentecostal/non-denominational church, had a conversion experience in high school that sent me headfirst into the Reformed tradition, then I joined a Church of Christ in college, worked at a Bible Church for my first “big girl” job, led worship at a megachurch when I got married, and topped it off with a nice deconstruction in my mid-20s. I’ve been around the block in terms of denominational and theological affiliations, and each chapter has positively shaped me. When my faith was unraveling and it felt like I was hanging on by a thread, I was introduced to Anabaptism through folks like Greg Boyd. Greg taught at Northern Seminary which is why I enrolled there to get my Master’s degree in Anabaptist Studies.

Anabaptism has been around since the Reformation (early 1500s) but Anabaptists split with Martin Luther and company over issues like violence, adult baptism, and the connection between Church and State. Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin advocated for something called the Magisterial Reformation. Meaning, they believed the church and magistrate should be interdependent. Lutheranism actually became the state religion in Germany and other parts of Northern Europe during the Reformation period because of this conviction. Anabaptists disagreed and started something called the Radical Reformation. They supported reform but didn’t think Luther took it far enough. It was not sufficient to just separate from the Catholic Church. They also wanted to separate from the quickly expanding authority of the government. They got their name because they re-baptized each other as adults since they didn’t believe infant baptism was valid. Anabaptist means rebaptizer. This act of adult baptism ended up getting a lot of them killed by their Magisterial Reformer counterparts, but they persisted and multiplied.

Learning about Anabaptist history and their long-held convictions around (1) Non-violence and (2) The separation of church and state truly saved my faith from sinking. So in the Anabaptist stream I gladly float!

Question: What does it mean to give grace for someone to grow and heal that doesn’t go to extremes of enabling abuse OR creating ex-communications/cancel culture?

In general, I think cancel culture is the easy way out. It feels good for the cancellers, but it’s ineffective. Think of someone who was famously cancelled — did they change? Did they really get “cancelled” or did they just disappear until the news focused on something else?

I think about Mark Driscoll, co-founder of Mars Hill Church, who was (rightly) the center of attention for bullying, intimidation, lying, and spiritual abuse. Tons of news articles were written about him. Employees and church attendees came forward to share their traumatic experiences. He was removed from leadership at his church and it dissolved soon after. The church network he co-founded kicked him out.

He was, for all intents and purposes, cancelled. And yet….two years later, he started another church in an entirely different city and continues to exhibit the same behavior.

In my experience, this is the fruit of cancel culture. It doesn’t foster change. It doesn’t actually hold people to account. It just muzzles the problem until we get distracted by something different. It allows abusive people to continue abusing people. The work of repentance and repair is much more strenuous and communal. It requires humility, focus, and a long-term vision.

People are allowed to be people. People are allowed to make mistakes. People are allowed to hurt other people (I have, you have, we all have). But there is a difference between being “human” and being abusive. And when a person’s behavior is patterned by abuse, they need to be removed from any position of power and be held accountable for their actions, with the goal of repentance and repair. This should all be done while centering victims, which is where things get tricky, isn’t it? How do we help abusive people repent while unquestionably standing in solidarity with those they have abused? This is why discerning in the context of community is so important. There is not a one-size-fits-all approach for complicated abuse situations. It requires staying in step with the Spirit and communicating with one another in love.

Question: Have your thoughts changed on premarital sex/purity culture since diving deeper into school?

I desperately wanted answer all my sexual ethic questions in grad school, but it didn’t happen.

Jesus didn’t teach about premarital sex or American purity culture. He didn’t talk much about sex in general. He talked about adultery and fornication/sexual immorality (“porneia”), but even adultery is complicated because, at the time of Jesus’ teaching, adultery was a big deal for women and not so big for men. Men could have more than one wife (Deuteronomy 21:15) and married men could sleep with unmarried women as long as he married her and paid a dowry after (see Exodus 22:16-17, Deuteronomy 22:28-29). Women, on the other hand, were expected to be virgins upon marriage and stay faithful to their husbands…otherwise they would be dragged to their father’s house and get stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:13-21). It’s worth noting that some scholars believe these laws could have existed to protect women and put them under the financial and familial protection of a man if he had sex with her. But my point is, whenever people say the Bible is “clear” about sexual ethics, I like to think of these passages. Surely they do not mean the Bible is clear that it’s okay for married men to have sex with lots of women as long as he forks over some cash and marries her, too? Or that we should stone women to death who have affairs?

The New Testament is interesting, too. Jesus brings up adultery in Mark 10 and says, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” This is a hard stance against divorce in our earliest Gospel. Hard stop. Divorce and remarriage is adultery. Period. In Matthew 19, though, Jesus makes an exception for divorce if “porneia” is involved: “I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” It’s worth noting Jesus does not say the same for women divorcing men. If taken at face value, Jesus only offers an exception for a man divorcing his wife if the woman is sexually immoral.

Is the Bible actually clear here? Go read Matthew 19 and Mark 10. One says divorce is not an option for men or women. One says divorce is okay if sexual immorality is involved, but this exception is only clearly made for men divorcing their wives, not women divorcing their husbands. And what does “sexual immorality” include? This is a broad statement. We do not have clarity on what Jesus exactly meant. Some suggest that Jesus is referring to Leviticus 18 where laws about unlawful sexual relations are discussed. If so, why don’t we equally condemn husbands having sex with their wives while they’re on their periods (Leviticus 18:19)? Why would Jesus refer to Leviticus 18, citing an exception for adultery, when adultery itself is condemned in Leviticus 18:20?

I’m not at all suggesting that God has zero opinions about sexuality. What I’m trying to demonstrate is how murky sexual ethics are in the Bible. Despite what book-selling preachers want to tell you, there aren’t any slam-dunk passages that say, “This is exactly how God wants sexual ethics to work in 2024 in America.”

That being said, I lean traditional in the area of sex. Not because I think the Bible clearly says so… but because sex is more vulnerable, spiritual, emotional, bonding, powerful, and magical than going to a cycle class or something. I think it should be handled with seriousness and care. At the same time, I have lots of Christian friends who disagree and my undies are not in a wad about it. This is another example of why communal discernment matters. Jesus ought to shape our sexual ethics and we need to have respectful conversations with each other about important things like sex. The way Christians interact with sex (and money and our neighbors and work and family) should be distinct. To me, that distinctness does not come from "purity culture” but from radical, mutual, self-giving love.

On a related bunny trail, I’ve been thinking a lot about why self-control is a fruit of the Spirit. Self-control is not very exciting, is it? How rarely do we abstain from something we want, from food to sex to Netflix to social media to shopping? We’ve been trained to gratify every single desire immediately. But in my experience, and from what I’ve witnessed in our culture, I don’t think it produces great fruit. It trains us to have a short-term, self-obsessed vision that lacks endurance and grit.¹

There is something good about seeing something you want and not doing it, eating it, watching it, or buying it.

Growing up in the height of purity culture, shame was used as a primary motivator for such living: “Don’t have sex because then you’ll be dirty and God will be mad at you!” Which is just silly. It’s like diet culture for sex which has been shown, time and time again, to be ineffective. Purity culture also supposes that marriage suddenly makes sex safe, which is not true for many women who were trained to fear our own desire/pleasure/bodies (for more of this, read Sheila Gregoire’s work).

To be clear, I am in no way saying that self-control equals a shame-induced-abstinence from pleasure. But part of me wonders if there is a way to reframe sexual ethics around healthy love and healthy self-control? A self-control that does not demonize desire and a love that promotes self-giving, mutual human flourishing?

That’s my very long answer to how my views on sex and purity culture have changed. I’m kind of traditional but extremely open to being wrong, and I’m not bossing around the people in my life. You’re welcome to disagree in either direction. I totally get it and have probably held your belief in the last five years, too!

Question: How do you navigate theological differences with friends/family?

I’ve come to a place where I recognize I’m not going to change any of my friends or family’s beliefs by arguing with them. I honestly don’t even want to. I don’t want to prove a point anymore. If anything will impact the people in my life, it will be the way I live. If I am consistently loving, kind, truthful, and full of integrity… the fruit of my life will speak for itself.

There are people in my life who genuinely think I’m not a Christian. That used to destroy me because I desperately wanted to prove I wasn’t going to hell. But with maturity, I’ve come to terms with reality which is that God loves me, I love God, and if people think I’m not saved because I don’t love their politician/tradition/theology of choice or because I welcome people to God’s table that they think should be ostracized, that’s okay.

Practically, I just don’t engage anymore. I literally leave group threads when they get toxic, political, or argumentative. I don’t take the bait. When inflammatory comments are made, I simply sit in the silence or respond with “Maybe!” Sometimes I’ll also say, “I haven’t really followed that story” which shuts down an unproductive conversation, too.

Luckily, God has not commanded me to change the minds of my family or friends. But God has commanded me to love them. And that means staying humble, kind, patient, and gentle, even when we disagree. For me, that is way easier with intense boundaries around conversation topics.

Question: WHERE IS KATE MIDDLETON?

I truly have no idea but I am, alongside the whole internet, actively waiting for her to appear. Why does every single picture/video look like it came from the 1800s? Even the Windsor farm video is bizarre to me— nobody seemed to care their missing princess was out and about? Something seems fishy to me. But knowing the Palace, my guess is we’ll never know the full story unless someone from The Crown gets insider access.

This is the longest newsletter I’ve ever written. It might be the longest newsletter anyone has ever written. Sorry if I didn’t get to your question- I know there was one about friendship breakups but I think that deserves its own post! I will do another one soon!

-Savannah

1. Huberman has an episode on dopamine where he talks about the science of delaying gratification which sort of relates to this!