Youth Group Girls

Faith and Feminism Website

2007-04-24T11:24:00.001-04:00

http://www.faithandfeminism.org/

Christian Theater Protest

2007-04-24T01:10:00.000-04:00

Check this out on YouTube. It is In.Tense.

A forward from Mike Daisy:

Thursday night's performance of INVINCIBLE SUMMER was disrupted when eighty seven members of a Christian group walked out of the show en masse, and chose to physically attack my work by pouring water on and destroying the original of the show outline.

You can read about the incident, the aftermath and its consequences, as well as view YouTube footage of the whole thing going down, here:

http://www.mikedais ey.com/2007/ 04/night- to-remember. sht

For Girls, It's Be Yourself, And Be Perfect

2007-04-06T12:32:00.000-04:00

Anybody else identify with this article? (Sent to me by Cam.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/education/01girls.html?ex=1176177600&en=f0e3be7d6da9744f&ei=5070&emc=eta1

This line: "If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything" especially got me. And how is this related (or is it?) to youth group (the featured girl is president of hers)? I am still working through this question...

Certainly many of my interviewees express an intense pressure to be perfect, which is something that I felt growing up as well. I still feel it now, but it was wicked strong then. Why? Your happiness and success is a direct reflection of your kickin' great relationship with Christ. Likewise, if you are depressed and failing, you are being a bad witness for Christ and for that kickin' relationship that should always look as great as possible so that others will want to join the movement. A lesson I certainly learned in youth group was: you gotta sing when it's time to sing and you gotta love it (or at least look like you love it) or else nobody is going to sing with you, so sing, whether you want to or not.

However, secular girls certainly are not immune to this kind of gotta be perfect. Funny how feminism got all twisted up in the bullshit-ism of life pre-it, thereby making girls feel that in order to be the perfect woman they have to be the old stuff (uber-pretty and lovely and happy and positive and supportive and capable of making pretty things) and all the new stuff too (wicked smart, sassy, sporty, competitive, capable, able to support herself, able to support her family) rather than girls feeling like they get to be, wow, just who they are. Gee. Just that. Rather than feeling like that is enough.

Also, anybody know why my blog is coming up weird right now? Hmmm....

Assignment One: What Books Made You Better?

2007-04-04T09:55:00.000-04:00

This morning I woke up happy. I laid in bed 45 minutes after my alarm rang just to take it in: the feel of my sheets, my legs scissoring to the rhythm of the hopeful word that kept flipping through my mind: "feminism." When does one ever wake up with that? With a four syllable word like that flipping by? Like a flip book. Only it's the same image every time. Only it doesn't move. Only it doesn't change. Only it changes everything.

Last night from 6:30 to 9, I sat in a room with 10 women each dedicated to art and social change. We went around the room discussing our influences--what made us, what makes us, why it matters. One woman shared a website that is in cahoots with this kind of sharing:

www.learningtoloveyoumore.com

Here viewers (no, participants!) are invited to do assignments given on the site, and then to post what they come up with for everyone to share in. For example, one such assignment is: Take a photo of your parents kissing. I highly recommend that you check it out, and also click to learn more about Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. This site, and the 10 women in that room, inspired me with ways to make this blog a little bit better. I had promised to share some of my favorite books on gender and sexuality in the evangelical church with you this week. And share I will do. Then, I'd like to list the books that helped move me, personally, into a kind of getting it, a getting me, and a growing me. And then-then, I'd like to give you an assignment, if I may: Share the books that helped you to become who you are. Maybe we'll be able to help one another, huh? Huh.

But first, for those of you who need a starter course, here are a few books and articles that I would recommend on the subject of evangelicalism:

-The Book of Jerry Falwell by Susan Friend Harding (simply the best book on the subject out there—Harding walks the fine line between deeply understanding and otherwise accepting the evangelical framework)
-Righteous by Lauren Sandler (Sandler is one of the secular journalists that I feel to be a mite too content to simply point to the evangelicals and leave it at that, but her picture of the next generation of evangelical Christians is, I feel, accurate and interesting, if not in depth)
-Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory by Randall Balmer (a member of “the Evangelical Mafia,” Balmer surveys a number of evangelical communities here)

And here are a few books and articles I would recommend that specifically address issues of gender and sexuality in the evangelical church are:

-“The Christian Right’s Discourse on Gender and the Bible” by Susanne Scholz, printed in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion Spring 2005 v.21, no.1 (a great summary of the evangelical Christian right’s perspective on gender and sexuality, written by a feminist struggling to get it)
-God’s Daughters by Marie Griffith (about Aglow, an interdenominational, evangelical women's group)
-Born Again Bodies also by Marie Griffith (about evangelical dieting.) (P.S. I heart Marie Griffith)
-Shaking the World for Jesus by Heather Hendershot (a little too antagonist toward the
Christian frame of reference for my taste, though she certainly has some very interesting things to say, and her book is worth reading for sure)
-“The Power of Soft-Sell Style: Building a Multimillion-Dollar Ministry by Subverting Feminism” by Ann Burlein (an interesting article about Dr. Dobson, “the” psychologist of evangelicalism)

As for books that made me better though:

There was a particular time of my life. I was sick. I had been sick for over a year--much of which was spent in hospitals. And in the midst of all those drugs, and all that bedding, of not being allowed to eat for months, and not being able to speak...I emptied out. I was emptied of all that I had been before. Or at least I felt that way. And so when I began to read again, when I began to be able to read, I was reformed, reformed by what I read in a new way. So my reading list is the books that I read at that time.

There are mostly written by white males from the 50s, but for a girl who grew up reading Dr. Dobson and Elizabeth Elliott, these guys, even these misogynistic, white dudes from the 50s, made me feel more alive and more free than I ever had ever felt before. And these guys, these are the ones who opened me up to ideas of becoming a stronger, better woman, and to later reading books with heroines rather than just heroes.

So here goes: Kerouac, especially The Dharma Bums
Sallinger, everything he wrote
Steinbeck, especially The Grapes of Wrath

What books helped you and why?

Response from Edward

2007-04-02T20:04:00.000-04:00

Edward Babinski gave me permission to share this email with you. Take a look, and jot your thoughts!

Edward:
I was concerned about that and so was the publisher. I looked everywhere and
sought women who were former fundamentalists but didn't find any until just
the last few years. In the late 1980s and early 1990s when I was editing
Leaving the Fold there were NOT a lot of women who have composed books or
first person testimonies about leaving the fold, and only a few who cared to
speak with me and be added to the book I was editing at that time.

However in order to redress the gender imbalance I did publish two online
articles concerning females who left the fold or who debunked the
conservative religion of their youth:

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/09/debunking-christianity-women-speak-out.html

and

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/10/debunking-christianity-women-speak-out.html

So but what if it was a REAL site?

2007-03-24T02:54:00.000-04:00

So right, this blog is not the best place for making community. The layout is very Linda-centric. I would prefer something in which folks who visit the site do more than simply respond to what I've got to say (which is inevitably far less interesting that what comes up as a collective). Yet I know little about creating such a site. Blogger is about as extravagant as I get in terms of web environments.

But hey, I've got me some great ideas for creating a real web community for former conservative, evangelical, protestant women, as well as women in the processing of questioning this faith, and unlike my ideas for theatre pieces and academic explorations, I totally want you to steal them. Steal them! Please! Create this community! Or...donate a large sum of money and I'll pay someone who knows more than me to do it for us.

Okay, here's the stealable stuff. A list of things that I personally feel would be fab to have. Please add to my list in the comment section of this posting.

Personal Profiles, including space for:
audio clips
video clips
photos
personal info including a space for testimony about why one left the faith

Areas of the site to which anyone could add information, including:
Discussion Forum
Links
Book Reviews
Film Reviews
List of Pertinent Events
List of Pertinent Articles

A map of the US on which each ex-evangelical girl or woman who visits the site could place a tag beside their place of residence in one color, and each supporter could place a tag in another color

A section of the site dedicated to local Meet-Ups, including:
Info on how to create your own local meet up (eg: use MeetUp.com, put out posters, post on the fabulous site described here)
A section for folks looking to start/join a Meet Up group to post about themselves and where they live
A section for reporting the news from local Meet Ups to the rest of the site's members

And finally, a letter for the "editor" each month

Wait so what? Meet ups? What are they? They are opportunities for you all (and me all) to meet one another. I highly encourage you all to use MeetUp.com, or some other device, to create a group of ex-evangelical girls and women or girls and women currently questioning the evangelical faith, in your area. Hey, we need support too, folks.

Leaving the faith is not easy. I'd say it's just about as tough as entering it. Your world gets flipped-turned upside down (as the Fresh Prince of Bel Air so aptly puts it). You need people, people to say, hey that's okay. There's only one true judge and that's God, so chill, and let the Father do his job. (Ahem, Salt and Pepa).

In the meantime, I'd like to make this blog as little about Linda as possible, and as much about us. That is to say, if there is an "us" who would dig on such a thing. When I talk to folks, they seem to be craving a community of ex-evangelicals, folks with shared experience (certainly I am), but then, why aren't folks posting? Is it because this just isn't the best way to create that community? If so, what is? I am open to suggestion, and not committed to making my blog the way. I just want, you know, A way.

Right, but so in the meantime I would like to post less, and hear from folks more. What do you think? Wanna help me start up some good old fashioned discussion?

We've been quieted for so long, so many of us here. Women in the evangelical church are hardly encouraged to share stories or subversive opinions on things. Why keep it up? It's time our stories were heard. And it begins here, with one another.

Speaking of which, I've been paging through Leaving the Fold this week, and find myself very troubled by the fact that 32 of the 34 testimonies from ex-fundamentalists in the book are from men. What's up with that? Two women? Only two? Why? Where is our voice? Where, once again, again and again, has it gone?

In my next post, I would like to publish a recommended reading list, books that I think represent. And I would love to hear other folks' recommends too, so keep that in mind, yes?

Linda

Babinski

2007-03-24T02:19:00.000-04:00

Edward Babinski, the author of Leaving the Fold, caught my last blog entry and sent me an email. (So great!) He sent me some comics along with his hello. Here are my three favorites.

http://www.thedoormagazine.com/newsletter/010_eternal-damnation.gif

http://russellsteapot.com/images/rsgallery/original/000100000.jpg

http://russellsteapot.com/images/rsgallery/original/000500000.jpg

Still till Sunday!
Linda

New Mission Statement

2007-03-19T23:57:00.000-04:00

I spent the last month considering your suggestions on various ways to keep this little lady alive. And yeah, okay sure. I'll do it.

Because hell folks (I say "hell" on my site now--this is one of the changes I've made) ex-evangelicals don't have a whole lot of community. This here kind of thing is about all we've got going for us just now, and so okay, let's keep it around.

There is shared experience among us. Let us not forget this. You have reminded me that we cannot forget this. That we must remember that we are many and much the same, that we must come together, for there is where our strength lies.

Evangelicals call it "losing your faith" or "backsliding." Both terms imply a kind of powerlessness, a slipping, a falling, a losing of gripping, a fumbling fingers, oops, and it's gone.

I do not hear such terms from an ex-evangelicals.

Ex-evangelicals say to me: "I let go of my faith." They tell me: "I walked away." You see. You see the difference. There is choice there. There is decision. There is often even a moment of conversion out of evangelicalism just as there was upon one's entrance into it. And there is a testimony afterward, a story of why one chose to walk away. And this testimony--no, these many testimonies, for every ex I have ever met has one--have as much depth and meaning to them as any testimony I have ever heard detailing why someone converted to the faith.

Let us not be afraid to share them with one another. Let us not be afraid to--hell! (uh huh) just say "hi" to one another! Start there!

Today, I am turning my blog over to that purpose. Today I stop talking about my ideas for evangelical-inspired plays and academic papers. I leave all that publishable something-or-other aside, and say, so let's just talk then. Yes, we. Please. Comment. I can't tell you what it means to me. Yes I can. It means: you're out there. We're out there.

Today, I am renaming this site to reflect its new mission: to create a community of ex-evangelical girls and women. Of course, everyone is welcome to the site--we need as many supporters as we can get!--and I encourage comments from all.

What do you think?

I also recently joined an international, online discussion forum for ex-fundamentalists entitled Fundamentalists Anonymous (http://www.fundamentalists-anonymous.org/) Some of you may be interested in checking that out as well. The forum’s definition of fundamentalism, and thereby ex-fundamentalism, is of the broadest sort. Not only does the forum welcome everyone who once a "Bible-Believing Protestant," perhaps the broadest definition of fundamentalist I've seen, they even welcomed former Mormons into their Ex-Fundamentalist fold.

Some of you may also want to look into your local Unitarian church in order to see if they have any ex-evangelical groups.

Perhaps also Leaving the Fold by Edward T. Babinski (which arrived from Amazon for me today) will be a place to find community.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this blog's new mission. Also, check out this article on Chastity Balls, sent to me by Becky in Madison, Wisconsin, and tell me your thoughts. Has anyone ever been to such an event?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/20070319/cm_usatoday/adanceforchastity

Till next Sunday,
Linda

Shutting Down

2007-02-17T19:58:00.000-05:00

Hello Everyone,

I am very sad to announce that today I am writing my last post, and that soon "So They Called Us Stumbling Blocks" will be deleted from the web.

I am beginning to see creative types compete for Christians. As it becomes hipper and hipper to write about evangelicalism, as my peers' ideas on the subject are now being stolen by their peers, I realize, mildly terrified and very sad, that I can no longer be the open book that I want to be. I must protect the work that I am doing from the creative plagiarism that appears all too common.

I am so grateful to all of you who have been reading my blog, and am eager to communicate with you in the more private arena of email. So feel free to write me at LindaKayKlein@hotmail.com, and again, thank you thank you thank you.

Yours truly,
Linda

2007-02-10T20:59:00.000-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/us/07haggard.html?ex=1171515600&en=59d2a4127cfb1bfb&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Youth Group: A Puppetry Performance Piece

2007-01-21T21:47:00.000-05:00

And now....Youth Group: A Puppetry Performance Piece! This is my idea for a promenade theatre production based on oral histories collected from females who grew up in evangelical church youth groups. The piece is intended to help its audience members understand evangelical youth groups, girls’ experiences within them, and their experiences after leaving them. It is still in its early stages of development. Perhaps in another year and a half I will be putting it up. Perhaps my artistic direction will have shifted by then. Perhaps I'll be writing a book on the subject, creating a website, or, well really we'll all just have to wait and see. Either way, yes, today, finally today, I am going to tell you all a bit about this puppetry piece.

Note: I've deleted about 10 paragraphs from the middle of this post. I am sorry. I know, it must feel like a bit of a tease. Please see the most recent post to find out why....

Really, I never know what to post on here and what not to. Should my creative ideas be better protected than they are when I post them on this look-at-me, open-to-all blog? I don't know. It is very possible that I would like to put this show on some day and I would be heartbroken if someone else put it on first because they found it here on my blog. And yet, I want my friends and all interested onlookers to have the whole story about what I am doing and how I am thinking about it all.

Oh blog, blog, what shall I do with you?

Meanwhile, this past weekend I moved into a lovely 3rd story apartment with a mechanical horse outside the front door and hot brick oven pizza downstairs. My room is yellow. I cannot decide if this is the most amazing color imaginable or the most obnoxious. Really, the two things are rather similar....

Mad Moving

2007-01-08T01:49:00.000-05:00

As nobody seems to be beating down my door for the long-promised outline of my puppetry performance piece (what up folks? doesn't that sound cool? don't you want to know about it?) I feel that I can justify posting the email that I wrote to MadMoving, a very cool list serve of change-makers in Madison Wisconsin, today instead. There was just so much in that email that was pertinent to my project that I figured it would be good to put it up on the blog. Details on that red hot puppetry performance piece, yes, are still a-comin'. But in the meantime, please enjoy reading about my semi-private life. Email is as follows:

This afternoon I sat down and doggedly attended to my 277 unread emails (as one madmover once mentioned to me, I've got more unread emails than emotions--and frankly folks, that's saying something). I told myself that I should pow through them all, not really even read them per se, not if I ever wanted to get my inbox onto one page. See, there are certain things I've been avoiding for a long while now--my blog, my email, particularly my emails from list serves, really just about anything that even remotely relates to my work as a confused bumbler who wants to make the world a little better. I've just been too confused about it all--what "better" means, what "world" means, and what the hell I have to do with any of it--to take any new information in over the past couple of months.

But here's the part where my email makes the upswing, ready?: about 20 minutes into my inbox, I got to the MadMoving emails, and wow. Wow. I read (yes read) every one of them hungry. The raw, well-here-it-is, confused, concerned, kick ass stories you all made the risk to write were not even remotely stressful to read--on the contrary, they were a comfort. And man oh man, thank you for that.

You all are onto something great here, and I am honored to be a part of it.

This August, I moved from Madison to Brooklyn to begin graduate school at NYU. My degree is self-designed and interdisciplinary, incorporating religious studies, women's studies and creative writing. The degree's design was the result of my slow burning obsession to better understand the gender and sexuality of females who grew up in evangelical church youth groups. Having once been one such a girl, I feel this population is in dire need of 1) a voice 2) someone to put that voice behind a loudspeaker and 3) all kinds of things related to positive social change that other people (that is to say, the evangelical women themselves) ought to decide on, not me. Me, I'll just get the megaphone.

I began interviewing females who grew up in evangelical youth groups a year and a half ago while living in Madison. I was working as an AmeriCorps VISTA at the UW-Madison Morgridge Center for Public Service. As a VISTA, I primarily promoted service-learning as the hip, new teaching methodology that every faculty member ought to consider adopting, giving particular attention to service in visual/performing arts and international affairs. Evenings and weekends, I interviewed 20 former youth group girls across Wisconsin.

My intention was to write their (our) stories and get them out to the public for educational perusal either through the publication of my own creative non-fiction essays/book-of-essays or through the production of a theatrical piece. However, throughout my interviews it became increasingly clear just how much I still had to learn about religion, evangelicalism, feminism, and a whole gambit of other things if I ever wanted to do real justice to any of our stories or experiences. Hence my application to NYU.

So right, and now here I am studying all of those things, working until my head gets heavy and I've got to drop it onto a pillow, stressing about the fact that I haven't got time to sit back and say "okay what? What am I doing again? And why? Why am I doing it again? And am I doing it in the right way? And with respect? And with care? I think so, but do I know?" I don't do well without the room to reflect.

I am also continuing to perform interviews with females who grew up in evangelical youth groups in New York City, while trying to make contact with every knowledgeable kid on the block about the subject (there is a rather small community of academics and other folks who study such things).

Meanwhile, I met this fabulous lecturer at Princeton who is working to build religious/non-religious tolerance and togetherness through theatre. It looks probable that I will be TA-ing a class that she will be teaching with one of the co-authors of the Laramie Project in the Spring of 2008. Each student in the class will interview 2 people with opposing religious/non-religious positions in an effort to gather stories about moments-of-change, that is to say times in which their feelings on religion were either significantly solidified or altered. The students will then work to create a theatre piece out of the interviews. I would LOVE to put on workshops like this in communities across the US, and who knows? Maybe we will. We've talked a little about creating a non-profit that would allow us to do so. Oooh, so good. Tolerance! Togetherness! Love it. Speaking of which, if any of you are interested in religious tolerance type of stuff, well first of all you should contact me, but second of all you should check out Eboo Patel and the Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago. http://www.ifyc.org/ There's interesting stuff going on there.

Meanwhile, I am also a fellow for NYU's Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship. http://www.nyu.edu/reynolds/index.flash.html Social entrepreneurship is the creation of "sustainable and scalable pattern-breaking solutions to society's most intractable problems" (that's straight off the website.) The fellowship is amazing. I am learning so much from it and I am incredibly grateful for all that being a fellow offers me. However, I struggle with the current lack of reflection among our cohort (sound familiar?). Next semester, I would like to create a discussion group for us scholars and fellows to talk about important things like, hey, how do we feel about the fact that we are fighting poverty in a Prada suit?

If any of you are interested in tracking what I am doing, please check out my blog at: youthgroupgirls@blogspot.com or simply pop me an email. I am all about making connections, and now that my inbox has only two (yes, TWO) messages in it, I'll even see what you send me. Also, if anyone is interested in disability awareness, I would love to hook you up with my brother, a fabulous speaker and fighter of the good fight. And lastly, I am hoping to go to New Orleans to see Ryan and do what work needs to be done there this March, and I am eager to take a group of people along with me, so please also contact me about that if you or someone you know is interested in going at the same time.

Now THAT was a long email.

Thank you everyone. I'm really glad that I wound up a part of this community. Sigh.

Yours,
Linda

Microfilm Me

2006-12-24T00:19:00.000-05:00

Happy Holidays all!

I spent the last two weeks tucked into the basement of the New York City Public Library with 15 reels of microfilm chronicling the past 51 years of the Christian Scholars Review. One day I thought, meh, why not be a tourist--I'm here after all, right? Every day. Walking the halls of this gorgeous building along side all these kids with cameras, but I'm being all stuffy and academic-like all the time--why? Why not do what they do for once? So I gave the camera I keep in my purse to a woman with 4 fully stuffed shopping bags and asked her to take a photo of me by the public library's famous-ish Christmas tree. (That's the photo there.)

It was a gorgeous day really. I felt free and happy. I walked around outside for a while and realized that, yeah, okay, I live here afterall, don't I? This is me. In this amazing city. I've got a special key to a special room in the library with the lions outside. Librarians pull books and put them on a shelf that's labled "Linda Kay Klein." Like the city's part mine. And then I went back into the microfilm room and looked at another four hours worth of stuff.

With that, I wish you a very merry Christmas yesterday, an even merrier Kwanza today, and a merry whatever else you've got going on for a good long while, my friends.

For those of you who have been itching for that puppetry performance piece update, it's on the way. There are some interesting notes on the piece in last week's comment section, but the majority of its explanation will come next week.

Today, it feels more appropriate to write a bit about my findings concerning the Christian Scholar's Review's perspective on women. This is one of the primary journals in evangelical scholarship, so what they say matters to folks. And what I say is that there's something the matter with the what they say. I am thinking of writing my findings up in the fashion of a book review, triple checking my findings, and then submitting the review to the very journal I am critiquing. I doubt that they would ever publish it, but perhaps reading it will at least shake them up a bit. And I like the idea of putting class work to use when possible.

Before I begin, I'd like to offer a bit of context to help you sort through the information:

So first of all, feminism and the evangelical church have been like two siblings, annoyed that they consistently wind up in the same classroom in school, since the 1980s. The conservative evangelical Christian Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) was founded in 1987, just as the second wave of feminism was beginning to make headway in evangelical communities. This was no accident.

The vast majority of evangelical publications on the gender are published by powerful, white males who urge evangelical Christians not to address the “gender trouble” of our time. These writers are primarily “complementarians,” as indeed most evangelical Christians are.

Compelmentarians (called by some “hierarchists” or “traditionalists”) believe that men and women are equal in God’s eyes, but have different roles and tasks within the church and society. In the complementarian world view, the ideal man should be a patient, understanding leader, and the ideal woman his grateful, loving follower.

There is also an “egalitarian” contingency within evangelical Christianity—referred to as “feminists” by complimentarians. Egalitarians believe that every human being should be afforded equal honor and opportunity in both the evangelical church and greater society.

Still others go by the title: “moderate evangelicals.” “Moderates” are generally Christian theologians who do not affiliate with either of the two previous positions. That having been said, they tend to be conservative, to put it mildly.

Many complementarian women distrust egalitarian women, and vice versa. Marie Griffith discusses this divide in her book God’s Daughters. On page 203, she writes:

The bitter irony of this distrust, fully reciprocated by feminists toward evangelical women, is that the disappointments and anxieties toward American life and culture that have long motivated each side have so much in common. Both groups of women have developed strategies for dealing with sundry issues facing modern Americans that are as similar in origin as they are distinctive in practice.

That is to say, complementarian women cling to fully formed gender distinctions because they feel that they give them personal value, whereas feminists abandon them for the very same reason.

Now for a few of my findings (not all of them, just incase publishing does become a possibility.)

The first edition of the Gordon Review (the CSR's predecessor) appeared in 1955. In 1970 it became the CSR. The journal did not publish an article with a female author until the year 1969. The first female editor did not appear until the early 1990s.

Over the course of its 51 year life-span (in which the journal published approximately 400-500 articles), the journal published 13 articles that either directly addressed women or feminism, or took a feminist perspective on another issue. Of these 13 articles, eight were safely relegated to the 1988 “Theme Issue on Christianity and Feminism.” These articles were not all about feminism. Many of them were simply about women, indicating that the journal did not draw a distinction between women and feminism. Other CSR “themes” include: “economics” and “bioethics.”

Seven articles were published on issues related to sex and/or reproduction. Of those seven articles, six dealt with contraception and abortion, issues traditionally considered “female” in orientation. The seventh article was on chastity, and encouraged men to “reject the false god of selfish pleasure” found in women, and choose to remain chaste. All seven of these articles were published between 1961 and 1988.

It is interesting to note that the journal only published articles on women and sex during the second wave of feminism. Although the journal most often came down against feminism, it must be said that they did at least acknowledge that it existed during these years. Meanwhile, third-wave feminism, which began in the 1990s, left little to no mark on the CSR. In fact, not one article has been published on either women or women’s issues in eight full years.

These numbers betray an obvious under-representation of the female perspective in evangelical scholarship. They also betray a severe lack of dialogue with feminist scholarship, Christian feminist scholarship, and even evangelical Christian feminist scholarship.

The question is: why does the CSR leave a gaping hole where the female perspective should be?

What do you think the answer is? Write a comment and let me know.

Till next week,
I am yours ever faithfully (especially now that the semester is over),
Linda

Puppetry Performance Piece

2006-12-08T23:07:00.000-05:00

This Thursday I performed a five minute excerpt from Youth Group: A Puppetry Performanc Piece. This is a piece I've been writing and toying around with putting on for the past few weeks. It involves 7 rooms, 30 actresses and the recorded oral histories from at least 30 females who grew up in evangelical church youth group girls. It features puppets puppets puppets, lights, dance breaks and dresses with puffed sleeves--really rather wonderful and fantastical, exactly the kind of show I'd want to go to. Putting it on is a long winding ways down the road, but a few people have suggested theatres around town that may be interested in it once I get a little farther along in the writing process. We'll see. In the meantime, I've attached a couple of photos from the five minute excerpt I performed for my oral history class. I'm the brunette on the left. My classmate, Aileen, is on the right.

More information on the piece is on its way. In the meantime, have you got any specific questions for me about it?

The Silver Ring Thing

2006-12-04T22:26:00.000-05:00

I am going to reference you all over the web again today, as I am mad busy (my semester ends on the 18th) and really, there is so much out there that is both wittier and more interesting than I.

I would like to draw your attention to the links off to your right. I’m not sure if you all keep tabs on this or not, but I add links every couple of weeks. I particularly recommend that you visit Busted Halo, Belief.net, Killing the Buddha and The Revealer. These are hot to hit on a regular basis, as they are always being updated.

But the newest link up is to a pile of information on a documentary film named The Silver Ring Thing.

The Silver Ring Thing concept is more or less identical to the now out of date “True Love Waits.” Both are about abstinence only, but wait. Because the Silver Ring Thing is also…a show! Described by some as: "Saturday Night Live meets MTV meets Jesus Christ.” A show! I just think it is endlessly interesting the way in which morals can be put to music and folks suddenly forget that they’re getting a message--and usually a pretty potent message at that, one that wouldn’t be tolerated well without a really fun chainsaw demonstration in the middle of it. So be sure to check out this hot new link provided to me by my friend Will.

http://www.insideout.org/documentaries/withthisring/

More, so much more, coming when I finish the semester…
Linda

Christian Warfare

2006-11-27T01:55:00.000-05:00

Today I would like to refer you to what someone else wrote. But for real, check this out. I guarantee that it will be worth your time. The website is: http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/5/29/195855/959

Here's what you'll read when you first get there. (Prepare.)

"Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state - especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life."

They ain't joking around no more. There is no. Joking. Here. Browse through the site. There is even a comment section if you'd like to make one there. Or you can make it here.

Thank you to Ryan--a man who knows his video games--for finding this.

Until next Sunday, I am yours most faithfully,
Linda

Youth Group "Girls"

2006-11-20T00:17:00.000-05:00

You may have noticed that my blog is no longer called "Man-Made Women: The Chronicles of Evangelical Youth Group Girls." It was sad to slay that baby, such a witty little title that one was, but really rather offensive of course. And as I've decided to begin writing about issues pertinent to youth group girls, rather than writing about my work with the girls themselves, the title was also no longer accurate.

On the subject of who my subject is and how I have chosen to address him or her, my friend Emily sent me a very astute email a few days ago--(yet another case of interesting and evocative stuff written in response to my blog being emailed to me rather than posted as a comment, but alas.)

With her permission, I am posting what Emily wrote: "I think it's funny that the thing that struck me while reading your blog (this week) is not the turn of politics, but youth group girls. And it's something I've been wondering about for a long time, irrespective of the youth group project. When do females cease being 'girls'? What are the politics of the use of the term, 'girl'?" Ah hah, Emily. You hit something I’ve spent a fair amount of time considering, so here goes.

As I believe I've already written, it is my opinion that the Evangelical church pushes its females to attain a kind of eternal girlhood that is frankly entirely unattainable. For example, females in the church are expected to be innocent and asexual, as well as to accept that God simply did not intend for them to be leaders, but rather intended for them to be “cheerleaders” for men. Oooh boy, the day my pastor put that forth from the pulpit and no one walked out of the church, I thought to myself, oopht, this is it for me.

I also see a kind of fetishization of girls in evangelical church youth groups. For example, when a youth group girl is young, she is showered with attention. A personal story on that: my Freshman year of high school, I dated quite a few Seniors in the youth group and was even asked to Senior Prom. My Sophomore year I didn't go on quite as many dates, but my experience was much the same, Prom and all. Whereas my Junior and Senior year, I watched as the attention turned to the younger girls in the group. I was not asked out once. I didn't go to Prom.

Male youth group leaders and even our church youth pastor fell prey to the fetish. In fact, our youth pastor married his wife right out of high school. That is to say, she was right out of high school. He, on the other hand, had graduated from college already. This same youth pastor was later caught molesting one of his youth group girls in a closet during our church lock in my Senior year of high school. He had done the same thing to other girls when he was the youth pastor at 2 other churches. Both churches chose to “let him go” rather than report him.

So you see, I am sensitive about calling anyone a girl willy-nilly. This is why, when I present my work in more formal settings, I say that I am working to "foster dialogue on issues of gender and sexuality among females who have grown up in evangelical youth groups." (I've got it down pretty tight now.) However, even this I consider to be quite imperfect, as it is important for me to be sensitive not only to girls' potential development into women, but also their potential development into men or somethine else altogether. I do not wish to isolate any population, whether they be transsexual, transgendered or trans-something else I really ought to understand better.

But here's the thing--you've got to say what you've got to say quick, summed up right tight so people get it. When you talk, when you blog, it just ain't an academic paper, you know?

Which is why when it comes to the blog, I decided that I didn't mind saying "youth group girls." For one, it has such delicious alliteration. But more importantly, at one point or another every person to whom I am referring did identify as a youth group girl. So well, there you go. It's a decision I made anyway. I'd be interesting in hearing folks' thoughts on it though. Starting with yours, Emily.

As a side note, the number of songs I personally wrote with a lyric that sounded a lot like “today, I am a woman” is downright embarrassing. One song I remember I wrote while I was still in high school. I was turning 18 soon and everybody knew that was when you had to get up and get on with adulthood. But well, I turned 18 and kept on calling myself a girl anyway. Funny, that. The next song I wrote after I spent a year a half in the hospital with Crohn’s Disease. I was 21 then. I figured maybe I’d suffered enough to get to go by “woman" after that kind of pain. But it still felt weird on me--“woman”—wiggly sort of, and so I insisted that people still call me a girl. Another time was when I was living in Montana, working as librarian. Life wasn’t easy out there; it was obviously no place for a girl and yet it was the place for me, so what was I then? I finally decided I could really go by the name “woman” and feel legit about it. I was 26. 26. Amazing.

I turned 28 a few weeks ago. I feel like it's been a million years since I was a girl....

Till the next,
Linda

The One Where I Talk Just a Very Little Bit of Politics

2006-11-12T16:25:00.000-05:00

The thing that bothers me most about Ted Haggard--the President of the National Association of Evangelicals--isn’t his drug use, his sex escapades or any other such stuff. It isn’t even his extreme right-wing politics, or the hypocrisy of his fighting for a gay marriage ban when he himself is implicated in his own homosexual affair. It’s the fact that this jackass is the guy who gets a weekly audience with the President of the United Sates and his advisors.

In Jesus Camp, Ted glibly says, “If the Evangelicals vote, they determine every election.” Then he gives the camera a wry smile and adds, “It’s a fabulous life!”

Of course, it is unlikely that Ted will be seeing the President quite so often now. And what’s more, “the” Evangelicals have proven Ted’s snarky comment to be flat-out incorrect, because “the” Evangelicals refused to vote--all together now--in exactly the way in which their leaders, such as Ted, insisted that they should and thereby would.

This election, 1/3 of the Evangelical vote was Democrat. Imagine that. As one friend of mine said, “That’s up…well, 1/3.”

Now, just think if Bush were to offer that weekly spot that Ted took up to one of the millions of folks begging to be heard by he and his advisors each week, rather than just putting some other haggard Haggard in his place. Ooopht! Can you even really imagine, I mean, really imagine it?

There is a fabulous (Ted and I both say “fabulous”, ha) little piece of oral history by Johnny Woodward that is rather idealist and beautiful and I think worth sharing.

Yeah, when I was a high school kid, I was a radical. I joined the Vistas, which I guess for that time was a radical bunch; we decided that when the Kennedys came down the path of their trek across the Appalachia and its poverty-ridden communities, we were gonna go over and protest. Which we did. And I was standing there with a little brown bag over my head, I had a couple of little eyeholes cut in it, and we had our little signs, you know, protesting our economic conditions and our education systems. And Robert Kennedy walked up and stuck his hand to me, said, “Son, tell me your problem.” It took everybody by surprise at first. And I finally, I guess, collected myself and we sat down in the lobby and talked. And he wanted to know what the problems were, how he could help, where we were from, and we had a long talk, good long talk.

Now I’m really no good at talking politics, so you won’t see me write this type of stuff much, but it seemed the thing to do today--there having been an election and all and it having been such an important one in terms of talking about evangelicals. That having been said, I do invite all of you to please talk politics in the comment section of this post if you’d like. Xty, if you don’t say “grassroots politics” somewhere, I just don’t know what I’m gonna do. Anybody--grassroots?

Also, you may have noticed that my blog has tended away from talk of my project as of late. I recently decided to separate my interviews with former and current Evangelical youth group girls from my blog so as not to compromise my position with them. Recently, I have focused on using the blog to write about issues that I believe are pertinent to Evangelical youth group girls, rather than writing about the girls themselves.

Though you know, this is all a work in progress. I’m still feeling out what works. Any thoughts on this are, of course, always welcome.

And so until next Sunday,
I am yours,
your Miss one Linda Kay Klein

Ted

2006-11-05T13:22:00.000-05:00

Oh Ted Haggard....
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/
11/03/us/04pastorcnd.html?
hp&ex=1162616400&amp;
en=808cf25dcc9ce1a9&ei=5094
&partner=homepage

Birthday Photo

2006-10-30T02:07:00.000-05:00

Hell House

2006-10-29T17:55:00.000-05:00

I’m stuck everyone.

Halloween is in 2 days, so tonight I was going to write about the Hell House I saw a couple of weeks back. The script for it, written by Pastor Keenan Roberts, is hawked as an outreach tool for Evangelical youth groups across the nation. However, Hell Houses were around for a while before Pastor Roberts created his now popular Hell House Outreach kit (complete with sound effect CDs, DVD footage of scenes and a 263-page instruction manual). In fact, it was Jerry Fallwell who started them in the 1970s, not suprising.

Roberts calls Hell House “a spiritually-based adventure depicting the hell and devastation that Satan and this world can bestow on those who choose not to serve Jesus Christ.” The intent of this play on a the concept of a haunted house is to shock or scare its attendees into becoming Christians. Roberts reports that it has a “33% salvation and re-dedication” decision rate.

Scenes in the Hell House include: a young girl who was molested by her father, and then drugged and raped at a rave, shooting herself in the head and then going to Hell; another young girl having a painful, bloody abortion and then going to Hell; a gay man dying of AIDS, then being ripped from his hospital bed and dragged into Hell; and a virgin having sex with her boyfriend for the first time, and then going to Hell.

“Tramp! Whore! Slut! And the dog you just slept with has HIV!” the demon character yells at the former virgin.

”It’s all my fault; it’s all my fault,” the girl cries. No one corrects her.

I was going to blame the Evangelical scene for these horrific Hell House scenes tonight. I was going to point my finger at the Evangelical movement for pointing its finger at young people in pain and telling them that they will suffer harder and longer, forever even, for breaking their Evangelical ethical code. This abominable example of blame and shame (or as Evangelicals call it, shame and blame) makes me spitting sick. And it isn’t just in Hell Houses. Hell Houses dramatize an attitude that I find pervades the Evangelical church.

But then I thought, maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe. I shouldn’t. And here's why.

For those of you who read last week's post, I recently reassessed my blogged assessment of what went on in the subway. Here's how it sums up:

The angry man said that the girls were wrong to do what they had done.

In turn, the angry woman said that the angry man was wrong to do what he had done.

In turn, the yogi said that the angry woman was wrong to do what she had done.

And in turn, I said that the yogi was wrong to do what he had done.

Although we last 3 characters did come together in the end, our mutual bonding was the result of our mutual blaming. And frankly, I didn’t much like realizing that I was such a central part of this finger pointing circle.

But so where does that leave us? Never pointing? But sometimes you’ve got to point. Sometimes you’ve got to call out. You’ve got to say, “Hey, don’t yell at those young girls just because you’re unhappy.” Sometimes you’ve got to say, “You! Hey you with your hate-based scare tactics! Don’t hurt them like that! Stop ruining people's lives by making them afraid to live!” Sometimes you’ve got to say, “Hey!”

When? How though? I don’t know.

So I’m back at the start: stuck. How do we really go about making things better? With love. With care and kindness, but without ever backing down? Anyone? Please post your thoughts, I'd love to read them.

Till next Sunday then!
Linda

Yogi

2006-10-22T21:41:00.000-04:00

I think that you hit on some important points in your post, Kate. I especially appreciated reading about your experience with Sister Prejean, the moment in which your connectino became more important than your disconnection, as you understood that you both really just wanted to make the world better-- “And even though I didn’t agree with it (her pro-life position), I accepted it. It was the first time I ever felt that illusive sense of being able to accept differences in belief, but come together with someone on the values that we did share.” Last night, I had an experience that I think applies.

It was almost 2am when the second subway I had to take to get home stalled. We stood still on the tracks. The conductor apologized over the loudspeaker—electrical problems, we’d be moving again just as soon as they could get us going. I pulled out my copy of the Anthropological Studies of Religion and tried to read some, but six girls, college freshmen, were giggling and talking so loudly, I could hardly concentrate on Levy-Bruhl. The girls were sweet though—smart, funny and very uncool—so I didn’t mind.

“We live in an apartment on the upper east side,” one girl said to the man sitting next to her in as sophisticated a voice as she could muster. Then they all exploded into laughter. “No no we don’t, we’re in college,” she corrected herself. “We’ve all only been living in New York a couple of months. But I’m going to be a famous Broadway actress some day, so you should keep your eye on me.” The girls exploded into laughter again.

Suddenly, a man on the far left end of the subway car barked out: “Shut the __ up!” He stood up and pointed at them one at a time: “Shut the __ up! Shut the __ up! Shut the __ up!” six times. They quieted. He sat back down. He closed his eyes. Then, ten seconds later he opened his eyes back up and yelled, “Thank you!” He waited a beat. “For shutting, the __, up!”

Half the train ignored it. The other half looked at one another. We laughed under our breath and shook our heads. The girls giggled embarrassedly. They whispered to one another that they didn’t like to be told what to do, but they did what he told them to do anyway. I went back to my book. No one said a thing. A man like that, you don’t want to go up and talk to him, because he might just have a gun or something crazy, something unexpected. He looked normal enough, but you never know. So you sit. You try to keep on reading Levy-Bruhl.

Five minutes later, from the opposite end of the car, I overheard another conversation beginning. A black woman was saying loud enough for the yelling man to overhear her, “Who does he think he is, telling those girls to be quiet? That’s not right!” Then a white man in a white robe and a red head-dress who I had noticed enter the subway with two others, neither or which were the woman, turned and said to the woman, “You have failed your test.”

She turned to him, “What?”

“Don’t you see?” he asked her. “Those girls giggling, that man yelling, it was the universe converging to create a test for you. Which you failed.”

“How did I fail a test? That guy was an—“ she craned her neck and said it loud enough for him to hear “--__.”

Then man who had yelled at the girls got up and left the still stalled subway car.

“Is that him?” the woman said. She hit her hand on the window as he passed by her and glared at him. He looked back at her, but he kept walking.

“Your blood is boiling. You are angry,” the man in the robe continued. “A truly evolved person would not be affected by the world in this way.”

She looked back at him, suddenly flustered. “Sure. But. How many of us are really ‘truly evolved’?”

“There are some who exist on a higher level of consciousness.”

“How many? Two? Who would you hang out with if you were up there on another level of consciousness.”

The man laughed, “There are some.”

The woman paused and considered this. Then she continued,

“But I don’t think I did anything wrong.”

“I didn’t say that you did something wrong,” he answered her. I said that you failed your test, because you became angry.” She paused again. She thought about it. Then,

“No. I’m glad I was angry. It’s rare that young girls are confident enough to act the way that those girls were, and that guy had no right to shut them down. Girls are shut downall the time. They didn’t need him doing that. Especially the black girl. We black girls have got enough to deal with. The fact that she was still proud enough to be loud, that no one had shut her down in life yet--”

The man in the robe looked her deeply in the eye and she began to falter.

“--I don’t. I really don’t think that I failed.” She doubted herself. “I mean, I’ve failed before,” she stuttered. “I feel like God’s tested me before and I’ve failed. So I guess…but I don’t think…”

Their conversation went on this way for some time, the two of them arguing back and forth about whether or not this woman and her reaction to this situation was “right” or “evolved” enough, with her always losing.

Now I was angry. Who was this guy to turn to a stranger on the subway and tell her that she failed some test that the universe had given her? I put the Anthropological Studies of Religion away and watched it. He was a pedant if I ever saw one, I thought, a guy who thought he knew it all when really none of us do, telling her what she should think rather than listening to what she did think. And this woman was floundering, doubting herself, for him!

I picked up my bags and I walked over to their end of the car.

“Maybe she didn’t fail,” I said. I set my bags down and sat next to them. “Maybe she passed the test. She stood up for a group of young girls because she felt that they needed help.”

The woman turned to me. “Yeah!” she said. “That’s right!”

And suddenly I was in on the debate.

“Listen,” I said. “I know that I just came over here unsolicited and joined the conversation, but you talked to this woman unsolicited too, so I think it’s probably okay. You’re talking to her about how wrong she is, and I think that’s wrong. None of us really know how to live; we’re all figuring it out.” The yogi (I learned that he was a yogi then) responded that we must learn to exist on a higher plane, unaffected by the world. I responded with my take on that, a proper rebut. He stopped talking to me. He turned back to the woman and spoke only to her, making her all the more flustered. Ooh I was mad about that. He utterly ignored me though I was his philisophical match (because I was his match?) and kept his concentration on teaching the woman that he was right and she was wrong. Pretty soon, others on the subway car moved over to listen to our argument.

Finally I turned the yogi and spit out, “Maybe we can have a conversation that honors each of our perspectives on the situation rather than focusing on how one person’s perspective is right and another’s is wrong?”

Then the yogi’s friend leaned across the isle and said that he liked that idea, so of course I immediately liked him. He and I agreed that all of us should go home tonight and ask ourselves why we were triggered off the way we were. Why did the woman want to yell at that first man so badly? Why did the yogi want to lecture her about it? And why did I want to stop him?

I said, “But I know the answer to my question. I knew it even before I approached.” The friend asked me what my answer was. I changed seats to sit closer to him so that the yogi wouldn’t overhear me.

I said to him then, “My whole life I’ve had religious leaders, mostly men, disbelieve that I’ve had any valid thoughts in me, especially if what I believed contradicted what they wanted me to believe. So I know what that feels like. And tonight, I felt like I was watching this yogi attack this woman for her reaction, telling her that her values were invalid, unvaluable, and I thought, ‘uh uh, no, I'm not going to watch this happen.”

“So you were fighting for yourself, not for her,” the friend responded.

“No,” I answered him. “I was fighting for both of us.” I paused, “Okay, so for example, there was a time when I found myself getting into dangerous situations with men a lot. One day I realized that if I did not become strong enough to fight the men, I endangered not only myself, but others as well. Because after these men hurt me, they always moved on to a next. When I chose to become stronger, it was for my own good, but more importantly to me, it was for the good of others who may feel like me in the future.”

The friend nodded. “So it was for the collective conscious.”

I nodded. “That’s a way to put it.”

“Your assessment of the situation was correct,” he said. “My friend attempted to teach this woman a lesson, but it is you who taught him a lesson.”

“I don’t think so,” I answered him. “He didn’t seem to hear me at all.”

“Well,” the friend gestured toward the yogi and the woman, “They are having a conversation now.”

I looked. They were.

The friend smiled.

By this time the subway had begun moving again. I don’t know when that happened. But when we arrived at my subway stop, I stood. Then so did the woman. Then so did the yogi and each of his two friends. It was 2:45am. We climbed up the stairs of the subway together. The yogi gave the woman his business card and told her to hug him and call him later. She said that she might call, but she did give him a hug. Was it his dimples or his philosophy, tough to say. The friend turned to me and said that he didn’t have a card. I gave him my email address. Then the yogi and his two friends began to walk away. As they left, their female friend spoke for the first time.

“We are harmless,” she said. “We are yogi.”

Right.

The woman who had stood up for the girls and I walked the other direction. Turns out, she lives around the corner from me. She thanked me for coming over and “saving her”. I said “no” that I’d “advocated” for her though. She laughed. I am so obviously in grad school. We said we’d each have to think out what all just happened, that we hoped that we would run into one another soon, that maybe we could grab a cup of coffee. But it was New York, so we did not exchange numbers. The fact that we did exchange information with the men we met but not with one another is odd. I’ll have to analyze that later. But she did say that she would be the one in the big, silly hat, and that I should keep my eye out for her, and I said that I absolutely would.

Does anyone else out there have a story along these lines?

It felt more pertinent for me to tell today than my going into detail on the Hell House. Maybe I’ll save that for next Sunday, the Sunday before Halloween....

Till then,
Linda

Thank you

2006-10-17T11:58:00.000-04:00

I also wanted to thank you all for your comments. X-ty, the websites that you forwarded were amazing. I will write a whole post about them soon. Thank you!

A Call Out for Interviews

2006-10-15T22:33:00.000-04:00

This Tuesday I will be performing my first official oral history interview with a former evangelical youth group girl. A couple of weeks back I interviewed a famous free-form radio DJ with mad interviewing skills his own self in order to get warmed up, but now's when the real what of it all begins. I am eager to meet with as many people as possible over the course of the next 2 years. It looks as though I will even be meeting with someone who found me here on blogspot!

I'd like to invite other former evangelical youth group girls interested in taking a couple of hours out to give me your life story to contact me at mmwblog@gmail.com. Let me know where you live and we'll see what we can work out. If you were already interviewed in Wisconsin and would like to be part of this larger oral history project, please contact me as well! And if you know a former youth group girl who you feel should be interviewed, please ask her if she would mind my sending her an email.

Oh the web! What communication! What community! What amazing possibilities.

All of the interviews done before mid-December will be stored in the archives of the NYU Bobst Library in order that future historians may access them for research purposes. I hope that I will be able to make the same arrangements for later interviews, though that is yet to be seen. Interviewees may request that historians receive permission before listening to the recording and may even request that the interview be withheld from public listening altogether for a certain period of time (say, 50 years). In addition, I will be in contact with all interviewees whose recordings I intend to include in my masters thesis, and if anyone requests that I withdraw their interview from my project, I will honor their wish.

In other words, please don't be concerned about getting involved--it's only together that we do this.

Heads up: this week I will be attending a secular theatre group's production of a Hell House in DUMBO. Terribly controversial. Check out the link to the article below, sent to me by one Miss Lovely Lydia, for more details. http://www.gawker.com/news/dumbo/hell-house-harshes-hipsters-206269.php If any of you have any thoughts on hell houses in general, on the documentary film made on the phenomenon, on the Hollywood Hell House, or on this particular secular theatre troupe's production of it, please post!

Till then,
Linda

The New York Times

2006-10-07T20:57:00.000-04:00

Thank you to everyone who wrote me both on the blog and over email. Three folks I'd never met even wrote, two of whom are feminists and former youth group girls who happened upon my blog accidentally one day. So it's working then--we're creating a community. This is how change is made. This is how the ground gets to rumbling. Your positive comments convinced me to keep on, so on we keep, eh? But first, you say you couldn't leave a post without creating a blog? Well no more. You say you couldn't post anonymously? Darlings, be as anonymous as you’d like to be. The blog should be tech-fixed. And around for a while, so keep on checking it.

My friend Becky sent me a link to an article from the New York Times today that you should see. The article chronicles mass amounts of evangelical Christian teens leaving the church. Whether or not this is actually happening is debatable. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the hooplah is just another manifestation of the conservative Christian underdog plot. Since I can remember the church has been telling young Christians just how out-numbered we are, what dire danger of extinction we’re in and how much non-evangelicals hate us.

In youth group, we used to be prepped for the day that our liberal science teacher would utter: “Big Bang.” We were told, when this happens, to raise our hands and say: “Creation!” Then the teacher would laugh at us. The students would laugh at us. There would be pointing. But we, martyrs for Christ in the classroom of life, would stand and say again: “Creation! Creation!”

When I was in eighth grade, I waited for the day to prove my dedication to Christ in the face of spitting secular disdain for weeks. I had scanned the text book and found it, there in chapter four…the theory. The day we were to discuss it, I came into class equipped with answers. I had read all of the books on what to say to my teacher if he threw this retort at me or that. I had memorized the fight, the way it would go, the what I would say. I had prayed for the armor of the lord to be on me. (Heads up: this is not hyperbole. This is all true. Even the armor.) I stood at the door of the classroom and entered as if entering a war.

My teacher stood before the busy room. He began the lesson by saying that today we were going to discuss the Big Bang Theory. He said that there were a number of other theories regarding the beginning of the world and that one of them was Creationism. He said that it was up to us what theory we chose to believe, but that today we were going to learn about this particular one.

I grimaced. I growled. Why wasn’t he attacking me? I wanted to fight back! But what he said, it just sounded so…reasonable. Where was his liberal antagonism? Where was his hatred of my faith? The class ended and I left the classroom disappointed. Sad that I had not be more hated, unable to prove my faith, sad that the moment passed in still, in slow, silence.

A few teens in the New York Times article said that their peers made fun of them for being Christians. I used to say that when I was a teen too, but when I think about it, it wasn’t really true. In retrospect, I think that my youth group so often told me that non-Christians were making fun of me that I eventually came to believe it, but in all reality, I remember my non-Christian peers as pretty live and let live. But I digress.

Let’s say it’s true. Let’s say that evangelical teens really are leaving the church in droves. The article asks Christian leaders why they feel that this happening. The leaders blame “divorced parents", "dysfunctional families", and of course, MTV. Not one of them even entertains the possibility that it may be because they are doing something wrong. They say they’ve been “working as hard as (they) know how to work” in order to keep these kids stay in church. I say maybe what they need to do is put down their tools and take up a chair, have a little sit down and listen. Because some of these kids are in pain, and non-Christians are not the only ones to blame for it. We must all ask ourselves how we can make the world a better place on a regular basis, and we must all be open to the most honest answer, even if it means that we’ve been doing it all wrong since we can remember, even if it means that we have to start all over, even if it means telling a group of followers, "I'm sorry. Tell me again where it hurts again. Help me understand. Please help me."

Before going, I’d like to mention that this article also introduces you to Lauren Sandler, the author of Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement. This book is big. Amanda, in response to your saying that I am the only one talking about these things, prepare to see that change. This week. This month. This year. Things are happening. The world is becoming aware that evangelical Christianity has taken hold of our society and has no intention of letting go. Righteous is the first book on the subject to receive serious mainstream attention, but it will open the door for more. (Maybe in a few years, mine will be one of them.)
Here’s the link. Check the article out for yourself and post your thoughts on the blog!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/us
/06evangelical.htmlhp&ex=116019
3600&en=5519ede029c494c4&ei=
5094&partner=homepage

Thank you again for all your positive comments everyone. I feel all loved.

Confessional

2006-10-04T22:11:00.000-04:00

So yes, yes yes, I’ve been avoiding my blog with absolutely everything I’ve got. You may have noticed were you to have, oh what let’s say, looked at it on either of the past two Sundays. (No posts.) And so it is that I come to you now, in what my friend Gary calls true youth group girl fashion, to gulp and confess to you: I am having second thoughts about keeping the blog up. I need your help on this one. Please, any and everyone who takes the time to read the thing, this week also take the time to let me know whether or not you’d like to continue to do so.
I’ve got two reasons for potentially cutting the blog.

One: I want my ideas about evangelical girls to be challenged and changed as often as accuracy necessitates, and I am concerned that publishing my ongoing thoughts/experiences related to the subject may discourage folks who have different ideas than me from discussing them with me.
My friend Christy called me a couple of weeks ago. She told me that she knew number of girls who may like me to speak with me about their experiences in evangelical youth groups. I suggested that she direct them to my blog so they could better make up their minds. She ummed. She paused. Then she said that she didn’t know that she would want to do that. She proposed that my blog may serve to scare them away. I ummed. I paused. I said, that’s a problem.
If my blog may scare them away, it does not accurately show my intentions.
I suppose that I began this project in search of my own past. I wanted to know, what was it that I was a part of? How much of the crazy stuff that I experienced in the decade after youth group only happened to me? How much of it was characteristic of the general human condition? What was particular only to the small group of youth group girls with whom I grew up? What was particular to the much larger group of girls who grew up, and who are still growing up, in a way very similar to the way in which we did all across the nation? I want to publish my search for the answers to these questions in order to get folks talking about them.
Alice Kessler Harris (Envelopes of Sound) says, “The absence of knowledge contributes to maintaining the status quo. Denied a sense of history (and for my part I will add social and political context), people feel individual guilt about problems that may in fact be shared. They rarely, he (Studs Terkel) suggests, stop to say, ‘Wait a minute. Did something go wrong with the machinery?’”
I am suggesting that something is wrong with the evangelical Christian machinery. I have seen girls lose parts of themselves to it. I have been one of them. But I want to discover just what that something wrong is together. I want to wander through the muck of it in mass. Without judgement. Without preconceived notion. And perhaps without a blog.
What do you all think? Will my blog discourage those with thoughts different from mine from talking to me? Do I need to change something about it in order to avoid this? If so, what? Or should I just go forward as I am, hoping that everyone understands that more than anything else, I just really want to understand.

Two: My project will not go into full swing for another year. Right now I am primarily learning, studying, performing a few interviews and putting together some small snippets of preliminary writing. Is that enough to constitute putting out a blog entry each week? I am excited to tell you about the little things, like new, hip films on Evangelical camps, or talks I had with folks in the movement who make things happen, but do you all consider that worth reading about? One person told me recently that he didn’t. Should he just stop checking my blog, or should I stop writing it? Would periodic email updates be more useful? Perhaps I should only post once a month in order to insure that the post is packed full of interesting stuff? Also, how can I involve more of you in discussion on the blog?
Any thoughts/ideas would be helpful. And please, if you ever want me to address something on the blog that I haven’t, or if you feel that I have addressed something incorrectly, please post and let me know.
Thank you everyone.

Sunday Promises

2006-09-28T01:46:00.000-04:00

It has been 3 days since the proposed posting date, and yet even this is not the promised post. I apologize. Writing this week's post has proven to be more difficult than I had imagined. I will have it out to you in the next couple of days. I promise. (Again.)

Me

2006-09-18T01:34:00.000-04:00

Jesus Camp

2006-09-16T18:32:00.000-04:00

This Friday I'll be seeing Jesus Camp at the Angelika. This documentary chronicles Christian children at Kids on Fire Camp in North Dakota. As early as the age of 6, children there begin training to become right-wing political activists. This is the big time. Currently, 25 to 40 percent of Americans identify as born-again Christians. If they vote together, it is very likely they'll win.

The film brings to mind a couple of other movies about kids growing up in Evangelical Christianity. One is Hellhouse, another documentary. My friend Kate made me watch it on New Years Day a couple of years back. She couldn't believe that I hadn't seen it yet. It documents the making of a Hell house outside of Dallas, Texas. Walking through a Hell house is a lot like walking through a haunted house, only the rooms in a Hell house have real life horrors--girls getting raped, girls having abortions, gay men dying of AIDS, teens contemplating suicide--and there is a message of salvation in the end. Behind each horrific scene of terrified teens is a demon dancing and muttering for the teens to keep on sinning.

Another film is Saved! Though not a documentary, this film gave the most accurate portrayal of my own youth group experience that I've yet to see. While Jesus Camp deals with politics and Hell House morality, Saved! faces sexuality. It's a block buster film and totally fun. I absolutely recommend it.

Check out all three when you can. I'd love to hear your thoughts on each of them.

Till next Sunday!
Linda

http://www.jesuscampthemovie.com/
http://www.hellhousemovie.com/
http://www.savedmovie.com/

The Church Report:
Today I attended Riverside Church in Harlem. This church's mission emphasizes equality for all--male, female, black, white, gay, straight, and every other what have you. Its staff is composed of 5 male reverends (one of whom is the head reverend), 2 female reverends and 3 male senior staff memebers. On the pulpit today the pastor said, "Some women ask me why still things like patriarchy are still around. I say, 'We're east of Eden, Sister!"

But who am I?

2006-09-11T15:03:00.000-04:00

It occurs to me that casual readers hardly know a thing about me. What’s up with that? Yes, what is up with that. I am from Wisconsin. I attended Sarah Lawrence College, where I studied creative writing and theatre. I lived in Australia for a year and Italy for another. I spent 2 years working in a library in Montana and 1 as an AmeriCorps VISTA in Wisconsin. Today I sent out my first mass email since moving back to New York. I’ve decided to include some small snippets of it here for you as well.

Snippet: I am living in Park Slope—Brooklyn--with my Freshman year college roommate. Our apartment is gorgeous. She and another close friend of mine shared it not long ago—I am long-term babysitting the place. The neighborhood, though sometimes accused of being a little yoga-mom-much, suits me fine. I miss it when I am in Manhattan and make up reasons to come home. Brownstones and men hanging off garbage trucks hollering at you as they go by. If you can avoid the new-born-baby-and-mom long sing alongs at the coffee shops every morning, you can make a right pretty life for yourself.

Snippet: I started school on Tuesday. This semester I am taking 2 independent studies--one a creative non-fiction workshop, and the other a research study on Christian Feminist Theologians. My third course is Oral History, something I wanted to take because I will be interviewing more evangelical girls and feminist/non-feminist female religious leaders while in school.

Not a snippet: I would like to update this blog every Sunday. My primary purpose for keeping the blog is to update interested parties on my project doings, so please feel free to shop the address around to all curious anyones. My secondary purpose is to begin to gather feedback on how people view what I am doing/thinking. So please post a comment or two! My third purpose, sort of a wouldn’t-that-be-great, is to get into contact with more former and/or present evangelical youth group girls who just may be googling concepts such as the ones found on this site. If you are one such a girl and would not like to post a comment, feel free to email me at MMWBlog@gmail.com.

Till next Sunday!

Broadening

2006-09-03T16:57:00.000-04:00

This week I met with an extraordinary woman from Ashoka--an organization dedicated to bettering the world by investing in folks with what Ashoka identifies as the know-how to better it best. See the link to Ashoka’s site just off to your right. This woman, by some great fate, is also my advisor for the fellowship.

We talked about my project over iced-coffee at 71 Irving Café--a place for writers, readers, actors, dancers and starers into space. At first I talked mad-like, frantic, caffeinated. I flapped both my arms and my jaw at breakneck. Wham—this is what I’m interested in. Bam—this is what I want to do with it. But eventually, we began to have a conversation, and she reminded me to slow down and think broadly.

The subject of Christian feminist theologians came up. Next, the subject of women in Islam, then Judaism, then women of color in any number of religions—all challenged to create space for themselves within religions they respect, but that doesn't always respect them. We also discussed the Concerned Women for America, Focus on the Family's females and other well-groomed, well-spoken groups of Christian women who counter the Christian feminist movement. I am interested in interviewing and better understanding leaders from each of these groups, in really getting them in a way I do not now.

Till next Sunday,
Linda

And so it Went

2006-08-27T13:00:00.000-04:00

...In my adulthood, I began speaking with other women who had grown up in Evangelical youth groups across the United States. Some were married, some single, some remained Evangelical, while others had become devout Pagans. Yet they shared the same unsettling stories, seemingly derived from their early development in youth groups.

Many women broke into guilt-ridden hysterics while in intimate situations, such as kissing their boyfriends or having sex with their husbands. Several could only fantasize about being victimized, violently forced to sexually comply. Some had disabling paranoia--nightmares and waking fears that church members were spying on them and their partners. One took birth control and regular pregnancy tests though she was a virgin. Still others became so frustrated that they gave up on dating, declaring Jesus their exclusive, long-term boyfriend.

A year ago I returned to my hometown in Wisconsin, where I coordinated 2 interviews a piece with twenty former youth group girls and a few of their mothers. I also arranged for the women to complete 2 written exercises. These interviews and exercises served as a kind of test pilot for me. I wanted to know just how many of us girls were having these experiences. The pilot proved, far and away, that the issue needed a great deal more attention.

In January I applied to NYU, where I am continuing my study of gender and sexuality among evangelical youth group girls while obtaining my Masters degree in religious studies, sociology and creative writing. During my time at NYU, I will use qualitative research methods to survey and interview more women with the intention of publishing a collection of their stories. I intend for this collection to foster dialogue on issues of gender and sexuality among evangelical youth group girls. I also recently received a Reynolds Fellowship in Social Entrepreneurship, in large part due to my work in this field. With the help of this fellowship, I hope to eventually develop a space for this discussion to take place on the web.

And so it began. And so it went. And now, so it goes!

And so it Began

2006-08-22T15:33:00.000-04:00

When I was a faint-hearted eleven year old girl, the Evangelical church youth group that met at the end of my suburban block invited me into their close-knit assembly. I was not prepared for the 2 eleven year-old boys who, upon meeting me at my first Bible retreat, advised me to change into a longer skirt. They called me a “stumbling block”, a female held responsible for causing Christian males to fall away from Christ.

Later that same day, I listened to an adult female leader demand that a 12-year old girl in our cabin develop the confidence not to answer every Bible question. The boys did not find this attractive, the woman scoffed, and although the girl was never to make the boys like her, she did want the boys to like her, didn’t she?

These experiences disturbed me, even at the early age of eleven. And yet I began to attend the youth group regularly. I’ve often wondered why. What was it that inspired me to continue my association with this restrictive religious community? I’ve come to the conclusion that it was not the youth group's God, as one might expect; it was its girls. On the retreat I met deep, strong, intelligent girls—one of whom answered all of the Bible questions--and I remember, more than anything, wanting to be one of them.

Over the next 7 years, too many of the girls I admired learned to button up, to shut up and to give up on womanhood, a word that sounded increasingly ugly to us as time when on. The innocent and asexual 14 year-old Virgin Mary was touted to us as the ultra-female. We were encouraged to halt portions of our maturity in order to remain in her nearly perfect state of girlhood. Yet inevitably, we developed into women. Crises ensued, the physical manifestations of which are terrifying...

Feel Free to Post Comments and Email me your Thoughts

2006-08-22T13:54:00.000-04:00

This blog was created to chronicle my study of the sexuality of evangelical youth group girls. The study is a work in progress and the blog a record of its evolution. I invite you all to post comments and email me with your thoughts and/or stories about the issues discussed.

Thank you for taking the time to take a read!

Linda