Jennifer Wright Knust - Unprotected Texts

Why the Bible Is Not a Sexual Guidebook

J ust before I turned twelve, my dad got a promotion at work. Moving up in the company meant moving in general, so off we went, from Warren, New Jersey, to Evanston, Illinois. At the time, Warren was a rural town. I had spent my days playing in the forest behind our house and building forts with my friend Nancy. My mom made my dresses, I took horseback-riding lessons, and my brother and I rode a yellow school bus to school. Evanston is the first suburb north of Chicago, a small city really, and the kids there took the L (Chicagos subway system), wore jeans to school (only particular brands, of course), and hung out at fast-food joints. I was doomed, a total misfit with no hope of making friends, at least not initially. I did okay for the first month or so, but then some of the popular girls noticed my existence. Soon the taunting started. Slut! was whispered in the hall. Or, Jenny, Jenny, shes a slut. Look at how she can switch that butt. And this toward a girl whose mother made her dresses and who hadnt attended a boy-girl party since she was five years old.

As studies of the slut phenomenon in American high schools have shown, when it comes to being called a slut, the story is pretty much the same: A girl who is a misfit for one reason or another is selected (shes the new girl, she develops breasts earlier than the other girls, her hair is differentwhatever). Then the stories start, irrespective of what this girl has or has not done. She gives blowjobs in the boys bathroom for cigarettes, is one common myth. Shell do the whole football team if given the chance, is another. In any case, the rumors imply, she wants it all the time. As a twelve-year-old slut with loving parents, I was lucky. My mom told me to hold my head high, keep walking straight on to class, and remember that I am not a slut. I am her daughter. My dad bought me some new jeans, let me get the cool but expensive shoes all the kids were wearing, and signed me up for more ballet classes; by eighth grade, all was forgotten. I had settled in to become the hardworking nerd I remain to this day. The popular girls had moved on to someone else.

Still, every time I hear people accuse one another of sexual misdeeds, I have to wonder: what is really going on here? My experience at twelve taught me that, when it comes to sex, people never simply report what others are doing or even what they themselves are doing. Those girls called me slut not because I was onewhatever that might meanbut because they were afraid of being labeled the slut themselves or, worse, of being asked to become one too.

At twelve, however, my Christian upbringing did little to help me handle the shame of being the designated slut. If anything, I had learned to hate sluts as much as the popular seventh-grade girls hated me. I was doing all I could to please God and my parents. I went to church on Sunday and sang in the choir. On Sunday nights I went to youth group and read the Bible, praying that Jesus might help me and the other girls in my class. But no one stood up for the slut in these contexts, not even when we read about how Jesus hung out with tax collectors and prostitutes. We all understood exactly what this biblical passage meant: we were supposed to be nice to tax collectors and prostitutes if we had the misfortune to run into one, but, for Gods sake, we were never to become one ourselves. We might feel sorry for prostitutesthat was our Christian dutybut we should avoid them at all costs.

The real sluts in the Bible, we learned, were women like Jezebel, the evil wife of King Ahab of Israel and rival of the prophet Elijah. I knew this story well. King Ahab made the mistake of taking Jezebel, daughter of King Ethbaal of the Sidonians, as his wife. Following her lead, he went and served Baal, her idolatrous god (see 1 Kgs. 16:31). Seduced by the foreign queen, Ahab abandoned the one true God, Yhwh, for Baal, the perverse god of the Canaanites, and pretty soon both Israel and Ahabs morals were on their way down a slippery slope from which it would not be easy to recover. Ruthlessly persecuting Elijah and other legitimate prophets of Yhwh, Jezebel invited 450 prophets of Baal and 400 prophets of the goddess Asherah to join the royal court. But, the Bible assured us, she would not succeed forever. As Yhwh promised, she would eventually be overthrowntossed over the palace walls, her flesh to be eaten by dogs. Even so, when the day of her demise finally arrived, she flaunted her slutty ways one more time. Hearing that the royal family had been massacred by Yhwhs choice prince Jehu, she painted her eyes, and adorned her head, and looked out of the window (2 Kgs. 9:30), taunting the new claimant to the throne. Unluckily for her, however, the palace eunuchs had changed sides, and they pushed her out this very window. She was trampled to death by horses and then left for the dogs. By the time the dogs were done with her, only her skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands remained. Sluts, the Bible taught us, deserved what they got.

Good Christian Girls

As I recently discovered, the teachings presented to American Protestant teenagers as both biblical and Christian havent changed much since I was a kid. In 2007, while teaching my class on the history of the Christian Bible, my student Kathryn asked if I had heard about Revolve, a Biblezine (Bible magazine) published by Thomas Nelson. (Since it is a zine, there is a new edition published each year.) As the mother of boys, I had missed this hot new product, which is marketed to conservative Christian girls and their families. Kathryn had sources back home and brought one in to show me. Can you believe it? she said. Beauty advice and Jesus in the same book! A New Testament filled with glossy images and tips on what guys really think (emphasis in the original), Revolve is a Bible-focused version of Seventeen, a complete New Century Version New Testament accompanied by stories about girls and guys who make it their biggest priority to know God in the margins of every page.

Looking through Revolve together, Kathryn and I reminisced about what it had been like to grow up female and Baptist. The advice given to girls in the margins of Revolve was pretty close to what the both of us had learned. Sexually active girls are nearly three times more likely to attempt suicide than girls who are not sexually active, Revolve warns in the margins of Luke 12:4613:24. From the perspective of the editors of Revolve, then, a good girl serves God by being beautiful, but not sexy. She is pleasing to boys, but she never tempts them to sin. Filled with Christian love, she is ready to give away everything to others but her body. A girl like this succeeds at being the good Christian that God wants her to be, Revolve insists. If she fails, however, perhaps she, too, will find herself tossed over a wall and eaten by dogs.

The Bible and the Good Girl

Grounding an impossible double standard in the New Testament, Revolve pretends that the Bible speaks with one voice about what God wants from teenage girls. But as an adult and a Bible scholar, I say that clearly Revolve is wrong. The Bible fails to offer girlsor anyonea consistent message regarding sexual morals and Gods priorities. Instead of learning about Jezebel, for example, girls could be taught about the woman in the Song of Songs, a love poem attributed to King Solomon. The lovers in this poem are not married, yet they eagerly seek one another out, uniting in gardens and reveling in the splendor of one anothers bodies. Open to me, my sister, my love (5:2), the man pleads. My beloved thrust his hand into the opening, and my inmost being yearned for him (v. 4), she replies. This girl, at least, does not hesitate to announce her desires for her man, and she does not wait until marriage to fulfill them. Still, the Song never condemns her. Instead of calling her a slut, the daughters of Jerusalem, who play the role of a backup chorus, encourage her decisions, urging her on by asking for a full description of her beloveds beauty. The woman is happy to comply: My beloved is all radiant and ruddy, distinguished among ten thousand (v. 10), she gushes. Can the Bible be used to support premarital sex, even for girls? The answer, I have now discovered, is yes.