The Bag Of Onions For Young Women

Jessica Grose over at The New York Times does a lot of work on the mass exodus from conventional religion. I have embedded her stuff a few times. I think she is supposed to be a “parenting” columnist, and I wouldn’t mind see her write more about, uh, parenting, but most of her stuff is pretty good. Here is a newer one.

Right up top in this article, we get into it:

But even surrounded by believers as a college student, Draut began to question some of the values she was brought up with. Specifically, she took issue “with the sexism, with the purity culture, with being boxed in as a woman.” She couldn’t stomach the notion that “you only have these specific roles of childbearing, taking care of the children, cooking and being submissive to your husband,” she told me. “That was also around the time that Donald Trump was elected president,” she added. “So I didn’t want to associate with that kind of evangelicalism.”

Lot of stuff going on in that paragraph, eh? Crowded house. Definitely I would say religion boxes you in as a woman. That’s kinda the whole thing with Harrison Butker. He was speaking to the right audience because it was a religious one, ya know? But he said the wrong thing for the moment.

The elephant in this discussion, of course, is: are women comfortable by being boxed in? If women are fleeing religion, I would guess the answer is “No.” I live in Texas and most of my wife’s friends are conservative white women. I know some other females beyond that, but not a ton, and all my liberal Northeast women friends dropped me like a radioactive bag of shit in 2017–2018 after I got divorced from their girl, so I don’t know how or where they weigh in on things these days. A lot of women I know want to be a mom, and they talk constantly about being a mom, and in the process they alienate those who are not moms, and it’s a confusing dance that finds me in Scandinavia and Fiji roughly 13 months apart. I digress.

But yea, most pastors, even the truly progressive ones, are gonna tell you at the end of the day that a woman’s job is to crank out kids and be the emotional ballywick of the family. A pastor kinda sorta has to say that, because if parishioners ain’t cranking out kids, the church funds going drier than Las Vegas in August.

I could definitely see how that would be limiting for a woman, though. Absolutely. I’ve danced with all this for about five years now. It’s exhausting.

Alright, as for the other orange elephant (Trump), yea, the most hysterical thing about Trump is he opened the floodgates. Now almost anyone can say anything and it’s OK, because people just say stuff without consequence these days and we move onto the next news cycle. A few days ago, the Colorado GOP sent out an email saying “God hates Pride.” ROFL! You read any of the Bible? Like, the second part? God doesn’t love the gays, no, because they cannot have more children (oh, we’re back to that theme?). But Jesus liked most people. He’d probably wash some homosexual feet. He might even wave a Pride flag. He wouldn’t “hate” anything. But hey, say whatever you want. There’s no consequence and Trump is the bearer of that. We were headed that way before him, but he pushed us into Boost mode.

Check this shit out, from later in the Grose article:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, may be the most glaring example of this tension. As my newsroom colleagues Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham reported last year, an “ultraconservative” wing of the church’s leadership flexed its muscles and voted to bar women from its leadership ranks, ousting several churches that retained female pastors. The final vote on the issue is taking place this week at the denomination’s annual convention.

“The crackdown on women,” Dias and Graham reported, “is, on its face, about biblical interpretation. But it also stems from growing anxieties many evangelicals have about what they see as swiftly changing norms around gender and sexuality in America.”

Yep. And earlier today, those same Southern Baptists just voted against IVF, which is probably the only way to motherhood for 15–30% of their young women congregants. You wonder why women are fleeing religion? I just answered that for you.

That second paragraph above is huge, because basically people are terrified of new gender norms and roles, and they’re trying to clamp down before they think it’s too late. We did that with Roe. We did that with some state-level legislation. We’re doing it with IVF, etc.

Thing is, toothpaste is out of the tube on this one. There’s a lot going on, but women got fed a “Girl Boss” narrative (the problem is “Girl Boss” is cool, but fertility is a specific window, soooo), and #MeToo happened and made boys scared, and everyone went nuts about trans and pronouns instead of actually parenting and discussing things with their children, and we got left in this weird wasteland of “What is gender?” and “What is each role?” and no one knows.

Religion is doing what religion does: trying to control things. Some women don’t like it, and they’re leaving churches. I get it. It makes perfect sense.

A big theme of the last 5–10 years has been “existing world” vs. “encroaching world,” and which one may win out.

Religion is just a tool of control in this discussion, especially on the evangelical side/sense. That’s what we’re seeing, and some women aren’t buying it.

Your take?