Hello and welcome to Reclaiming My Theology, a podcast seeking to take our theology back from ideas and systems at a press. I'm your host Brandi Miller, and we are just a few weeks away from finishing out this series on purity culture, and I'm so excited to be joined by Allison Sanders to talk about tradwives.
We dive deep into the history of this broader cultural phenomenon and idea, and the ways that it reinforces the binary's roles and expectations that build what we know to be purity culture. This conversation feels important to me, particularly in this political season, because as the religious rights seeks to normalize its theologies and policies, our ability to name the reality and history behind these so-called niceties and traditionalisms will be really important.
I also want to thank all of you who support this show. You really do help make it happen. If you want to support in any way you already do by listening, but can also leave us a review or rating, tell us or the podcast, or join us on Patreon. And if you have questions about purity culture, sex, relationships, or for some reason, want advice on a question related to these things for me,
please don't hesitate to send those to recliningmytheology at gmail.com. We would love to read your questions or hear them in voice demos. So, with all of that, as we continue this journey, please enjoy this conversation with Allison Sanders. Well, Allison, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. This is a really, really interesting episode that is important,
even as we think about politics and the future and how many of us experience purity culture and Christianity in the present. So, I'm so glad to have you on. Hey, yeah, I think it will be interesting and fun, but I am so honored to be here. I really enjoy this podcast and so honored that you would have me here. Of course, I know some of the episodes I call a doozy. This one could be, as I say, a doozy.
So, but before we get into talking today about tradwives, I want folks to get to know you who don't know you already. So, yeah, as you know, this is coming for folks who don't know you. Allison, what does it mean to be you? Big question. I knew it was coming, but I am a biracial Chinese and white American woman.
Currently, what it means to be me is to be holding a lot of balance in things in life, both in the goodness and the joy of things, but also in grief and confusion and just kind of how those two-hold hands throughout life and so a lot of who I am right now is figuring out how to hold that balance well.
But in my day to day, I work in children's television and so I'm thinking a lot about education and preschool kids specifically, but a lot about what it means to think about the next generation and think about how to create a whole new world. How to create a world that we see with wonder and curiosity and that's a really nice way to spend my brain time for the most part.
I love that so much, particularly those words, wonder and curiosity, because I feel like after almost four years of doing this podcast, those are some of the things that many of us are trying to come back to. And so I love that there are ways that you're going to be thoughtful about how that's being given to kids and how opportunities are being given to kids to be able to develop those things early.
And I would hope that things like evangelical Christianity wouldn't be stripping those things away from those kids as they get older like it has for many of us. Yes, totally. I think that's been so many of our journeys over the last few years in our faith walks is figuring out how to approach our lives and the Bible with wonder and curiosity. And that's been a really redeeming thing, I think, and thinking about faith.
It's part of how I fall in love with scripture again is applying those two values. And so I'm really grateful for opportunities to get to talk to folks like you who have not just hold those values, but have some of the skills to help people develop those values in real time.
And it feels particularly important as we talk in this series on purity culture because so much a purity culture gave us binary ways to think and ways of being in the world that completely eliminate wonder and awe and curiosity. About our bodies, about our desires, about our gender, sexualities, all of those things. And so I do want to hear a little bit before we get into the conversation on tribewides about your history with purity culture. Yeah, how has that intersected your life and faith?
Oh, wow. Yes, you say before you said before that purity culture worked on you. I would say the same thing for me. I grew up in a Christian family, grew up going to church. And I think very much wanted to be good both in earning God's love, but also just like in the rules that we are given and the both spoken and unspoken, I think purity culture sometimes feels like an extra credit for that goodness.
And I want to say as I'm looking back that there's also so much earnestness in it, like wanting to be holy, wanting to be righteous and figuring out what those things were. But yeah, like I got a purity ring for myself and my parents were confused by it.
And yeah, I think there were a lot of things that I probably had some pride around of being like, these are things that I can hold to, maybe because I wasn't dating at all or there were just a lot of things where I was like, yep, that's not too hard, that's not too bad. It makes sense that we would do this. And so I think those were really helpful guidelines for me or it felt like safe to be within the bubble of all the rules that I could find.
And now I see, yeah, what a constricting thing that was that I wasn't thinking very much for myself, even though I want to really still hold that earnestness and that desire to be good. Yeah, there are many of us who are still learning how to do that, how to hold the earnestness of who we are alongside all of the chaotic things that we believed and that were offered to us in time for.
We couldn't really consent to what we were being given or not given or how our minds were being shaped or how our formation was happening. And so I really appreciate that.
And some of what you were talking about even in being a young person who is this is good. And I don't see why this is so hard. There's like kind of this movement or of course I see why we're doing those things reminds me of my conversation recently with Dr. Sarah Mazwin or where she was talking about how purity culture relies on a youth movement to sustain its energy.
And it feels like even when that's not political or super intense outwardly, some of that still seems to seep into a lot of the messaging that we receive about how we can be like so much better or bigger or more holy somehow. And as we talk today about tradwives, I think there's just like a little bit of that in there that if you live your life in a certain way that's not that hard, then you can have this holy righteous God ordained living in God's order kind of life.
And so this conversation to me could feel like it's one of those ones I've been a little nervous about because it can feel very easy just to be like tradwives, boo! And to make fun of it is just like an archetypal internet phenomenon, but it's much much deeper than that. And so I wanted to do surface level and go deeper and we have some space to do that.
And so can you help folks who don't know what a tradwife is or just need some refresher on that? What is a tradwife? And I'm going to have you do this two different ways. First, I would love if you could describe first. If I go to TikTok or Instagram right now and I type in hashtag tradwife, what am I going to see when I pull that up? Yeah, I think when you search that, first of all potentially dangerous for your algorithm or a lot of things big change in your algorithm.
If you search for that quickly as my Instagram feed has now shown me. But you'll probably find you know a white conventionally attractive cis woman. And there's a couple of different buckets that you may see and so I can paint you some pictures of some of the videos that you might see. So imagine Frank Sinatra playing in the background and you have a woman who's wearing some red lipstick, wearing a fancy dress, cleaning up her kitchen, which is already spotless.
But she's telling you that you know her husband's coming back from work and one of the things that she likes to do in order to care for her husband, care for the home is to have it sparkling clean and specifically for her to look a little extra fresh for the time that he comes home because that's the best way to treat your man.
Another side you may see something like kind of similar but the more homesteadie vibe and so maybe we won't see the same kind of makeup. You're going to get like a natural no makeup makeup. You're going to see some aprons probably but like more baking your own bread and like working with animals and classical music playing in the background.
And you make your own butter which is made from raw milk or you know various things like that. Yes for sure. I think so what I've seen is like fit like whatever the tradwiper's of a fit check is there was one video I saw that was like a woman being like here all the modest outfits I wear to the gym so that I can honor my husband and I don't go to the gym without him and it's like her walking on like a standing place treadmill and just showing modest outfits.
And so there's the aesthetic of the tradwife which usually involves honestly what I think is hard about tradwife stuff is that what I see is beauty I see conventional. Yes. Yes beauty I see like beautiful apple crisp and bread and I see fantasy I see a little bit of oh if I didn't work and I could just sit at home and make like a raspberry tart all day that would be amazing or I see. Yes.
Close lines of laundry or obedient children but who are never heard speaking like I see a lot of the kind of. Yes stereotyping of what a beautiful life looks like being performed in some way in those images that you're describing. Yes. Yeah and I think that's one of the things that can be so appealing about it right is that.
We want to make an apple pie with the spare time that we have and wow wouldn't it be amazing if we could mill the flower and also make the butter ourselves like why stop at making a pie from scratch when you can grow the apples as well. I mean similar to what you said with beauty you may see this lady in her dress but what you'll also see is tagged somewhere the dress itself and it's a 300 dollar dress or there's some weird things around it where there's a there's all.
There's also a monetizing of the things that are in the video there's something that's I think there are messages that are both there are both messages being sold and then explicit products being sold sometimes to. Well yeah let's talk about that because we're saying what a track life looks like and there's a reason we're talking about it in this way because if you just say what is a track wife you end up in all of these kinds of spaces that are. Yeah.
Pretty hard to extrapolate well without being confusing so we have this image of home steady or kind of 50 style housewife who's performing some degree of house keeping home making. Patriarchal heteroreal relationship that performance is happening but what messages are we hearing or are we ingesting as we engage with this idea or these images.
Yeah so like I said there's both the like the implicit and the explicit I think some of the explicit messages that we might get often come from and again we see tradwives in kind of a range of spiritual places whether they're evangelical and talking about things explicitly and so there will be like a Bible verse that's put up about submission or wives taking care of the home and we see like that explicit messaging like the best place for me to be.
As a woman is to both be a wife a mother the care of my home and that is where I should be that's where women should be and then I think that is the implicit message to even when we're not saying it explicitly through quoting scripture or something like that we're seeing like what you said before what a beautiful thing this is everybody should want this life or if you give your life in this particular way this is the outcome that you will get.
Yes yeah and behind a lot of it as you're describing in some ways is fundamentalism at its core we'll talk about the theology in a moment but part of why I wanted to talk about tradwives as a thing is because of that kind of explicit implicit messaging where you say okay I'm like the the hook is a loaf of bread but the like wine and sinker moment is oh a bio line that says my identity is I love my husband.
My kids and Jesus and so there's this back and proselytizing toward a more pure or like traditional society and I think you can interchange those words pretty effectively that is connected to all of these other ideas around national security around cultural stability around the risk to the inherent goodness of God's quote unquote created order for gender and gender expression and marriage and so all of those messages get tied up in this way.
What I'm going to call beautiful beautified fundamentalism and so it has a bunch of different categories can we name some of the like some of the categories that we've seen in tradwives like I can start even just by saying that for me a lot of the stuff that I see that's on my algorithm now because I've been researching all of this is the fundamentalist Christian tradwife where it's the nice white woman who's like every day it's like she sets up a shot of the
her husband sitting on the like a chair right after he gets off of work and she like goes and sits in his lap and strokes his hair and then there's a little quote about how she does what she can so that he can provide and do his like manly duty or his like God given duty to provide for their family and so it's this image of sweetness with this backdrop of unquestioned patriarchy and so I think a lot of that fundamentalism then says and God blesses our marriage.
Because we live within our roles and so there's this proselytizing of a God blessed life that comes from this particular type of submission self giving to the point of maybe not knowing your own feelings or lots like all of that happens in fundamentalist in the softest version of fundamentalist but can you talk a little bit about that version of a tradwife. Yes, yeah, and this I mean I think you'll be able to speak to to some of this in a different way than I can.
And that again most of the tradwives that we're going to see are white women this specific nighttime fellowship tradwife that we're seeing and she marks you know she marks her posts as tradwife is kind of like a maybe like a sexier fun version of this where she talks about yes I take care of my household but like the main way that I can do is to see my wife and I can see her husband.
But like the main way that I serve I mean I guess her maybe her ministry is talking about how wives should make sure to give their husbands nighttime fellowship and it's super fun.
Here the rules for it you know within marriage between a man a woman like here these things but like a lot of her posts are like her in a little well actually like a like a granny night gown like joking about this and the comments are flooded with your right like I need to be offering that to my husband like you're right sometimes I don't want to but that is the way I'm going to do it. And I want to but that is how we honor God and honor our relationship.
Yes which is so wild because the images that gives is that she is the center of her content but but her husband is the center of her world. And so you end up with this like really interesting displacement where you have these really well known figures proselytizing a life that they're not even at the center of.
And I will I think some of the interesting things that come out with those is that we have tradwives who were never in the workforce which again is yeah is a path that people take that's not an inherently bad thing but I will say that there are some specifically this nighttime fellowship woman who will say things like I used to work before and now I have the glory and the honor of not working in the way that I repay or the way that I help my household is in this way. Specifically.
Through having sex there has been a guess which is so wild and it is this interesting framing of a particular domestic life and I think that's why. The Harrison but her stuff has been for those of you who aren't aware did a commencement speech where he.
Spent a lot of die tribes but a lot of things but one of the clip that's gone the most viral is him being specifically to women and saying that they believe the diabolical lie that they should chase titles and promotions rather than the true thing that would be like best for them which is being home makers. And the way that he describes that is by saying that his wife I think almost a direct quote is that.
My wife would be the first to tell you that her life start like truly started when she became a wife and a parent or a mother specifically. And yes. Then he encourages women to not give up the gift of home making and so. You have like nighttime fellowship lady who's I keep my man satisfied and that's how I play this traditional wife role and then there's this soft patriarchy version of it that says oh there's an inherent desire in women to live this.
God ordained ordered life and then he goes on to say that he can't be who he is without her but it's not really because of who she is. It's because of the function that she performs in his life and so I've been thinking about this. Yeah Sarah Marshall quote for a while that's like this idea she says because as we all know sex is between one man and one object and that's a lot of what tradwife. At least domestic and sexual content sounds like to me is.
I make myself available as this object who is receiving and I don't think they're they feel that way like I think they feel like they're receiving love with the world you create. It's inherent objectification that maintains a patriarchal social order toward a purity culture.
Yeah yeah and I think that one specifically is a really interesting one to watch because he tears up like there's something very there's an emotional backing to it where you're like oh wow he cares about his wife so much but the words that are coming out of his mouth as he's speaking to like college graduate. Is okay you just this thing but but don't worry or the place for you is not doing something with your degree in this particular way. It's really rough and it's an old story.
When I think about tradwife stuff the thing that's been most alarming to me is that it feels incredibly familiar. It feels really familiar to how I watch black church work how I watch like women do all of this hard labor to then elevate a man to just do the part that looks like leadership.
I've seen it in my white youth pastors wives who take the greatest pride in staying at home and raising their kids to serve their husbands and I want to make that distinction first because I think that sometimes tradwife content can get the critiques of it can get mixed up with people who choose to stay at home and parent their kids.
And I have no issue with that. I think the broader issue with a tradwife as an archetype of womanhood is that it has a political agenda that builds patriarchy out of submissive gender roles toward a particular reality.
There's a deep history behind this that I know you're really familiar with. Can you talk to me about the history of a tradwife before we get into the theology of it because the images, the history and the theology all kind of morphed together in a way that I think having some of the history will help really ground us around.
Yes, and I do want to echo and reinforce what you're saying that stay at home parenting is parenting. Like that is real work. That is something that we honor and see many of us were raised by stay at home parents. A tradwife, which stands for traditional wife, is like you said, a performance the way to influence a particular lifestyle. I don't even know if I would say lifestyle but a picture and imagery of what a wife and a woman should be in a family structure.
So it's that performance that's being sold with like motives behind it in an attempt to influence. And so yeah, historical, I'm going to go back kind of far to maybe pre-industrial revolution. Hell yeah, get it out. Yeah, history, I'll do my best with this but to give a condensed version in some way, but that we have this like a wave of where we see women contributing in society and in economy.
And again, I think it's helpful. It's necessary in this conversation to root it mostly with white women just because throughout the history that we're going to see women of color are going to be working throughout this. And so there's not necessarily the the ability to just stay at home and work in a particular way. So like pre-industrial revolution, men might be the heads of the household but everyone is kind of working with each other.
The household is where production happens and so everyone's making goods and in the industrial revolution, now we're seeing factories and it's labor that's being sold instead of goods. And so we see like a split of what's happening in the house and that men are going to work more and women are staying.
Even though they're doing the same jobs that they were doing before because they aren't creating money in the same way, we see a division of what labor is. Labor is now making money whereas unpaid work is not seen as labor anymore, even though it's still necessary to keep things going in the household. And so we start to see a shift in that and also making textiles and stuff is now just seen as embroidery or something frivolous.
So there's like a demeaning of some of the household work that was being done by women already. And so we see some shifts there and then we're going to jump to like 1940s and 1950s. And so when men are at war, I think a lot of people know this story that like a lot of women are now being put into the factories and into the place where men were working.
And they're realizing like we can do these jobs, we are doing these things. And then when the war is over, a bunch of men come back, want their jobs back and then women are pushed back into the homes. And the interesting thing with that is that we're starting to see some of the influencing done that we see now. And we don't have it on like Instagram or whatever, but it is coming out in like women's magazines and things like that.
And so in like women's lifestyle magazines and various things, we see what does it mean to be a good wife. How do you care for your husband while he's working all day. The most important place for you to be like this is where the like social center for women is becoming now. And see we see this push back to the house is where or the home and the kitchen where a woman's supposed to be working.
And so it's an interesting thing now to see this coming back as women go back into we see more women in the workforce. Obviously women who are taking control of their lives in particular ways. I think both with work, but also with when they can have babies, when they want to get married. Like we see women getting married later and later or having children later and later.
And I think that all of the times that we've seen a picture of of this traditional wife come back in an influencing way in a particular in this particular way. It's in response to that being threatened. And so right now when maybe the image of what doesn't mean to be a woman is threatened. We're seeing again this rise of influencing of how to be a traditional woman, how to be a biblical pure like God or God ordained.
And I think that what is interesting and this can lead us into the theological a bit is that the history stuff that I feel most familiar with is how in times of war in general, Christians have very consistently capitalized on the shifting norms post war to gain social control in general, but that generally involves controlling women or controlling cultural sexuality.
And so even as we look at what's happening in our culture in the US right now with right broader acceptance of LGBTQ plus folks, women holding more space in society and not being and being increasingly not getting married, increasingly marrying other women.
We have this backlash that's coming from the right that says that in schools, you're indoctrinating our kids into gain is something like that. You know, like there's these there's these big kind of epic proportion good and evil wars that are happening that are centered around the family unit. And so we see this with the Cold War right like 1917 you have the red scare and they start to connect communism to the changing norms in the US.
And so you have this external esoteric far away force that's ruining the fabric of society that's rooted in the family.
And so in the 1950s, the thing that I think is so interesting is that you end up with media like the Donna Reed show, I think is probably the most iconic where you have this snatched waste white woman who's always dressed like in the most stereotypical 50s housewife, high pitched voice inviting her husband home every day and taking his briefcase and giving him a massage, but not being too sexy and like making him food and having perfectly raised kids in all these particular ways.
And it's this image that Christians have clung on to to say, oh yeah, that's the right thing. That's the traditional thing. That's the orthodox thing. And so I find that Christians are evangelical Christians in the US have been particularly uncreative and have generally just followed, they follow a scare and then add an injection of patriarchy and homophobia to it and then call it normal good or traditional.
And so as I see tradwights now, it looks really familiar because those never look as nefarious as the context that they come from. And so it's hard because with tradwife content right now, you can look at it and critique it and be like, it kind of makes you feel like a dick like when you critique tradwife content because you're like, you're just critiquing a lady who like loves her kids and loves her husband. And it's like none of your business what she does.
Meanwhile, she's indirectly or directly proselytizing even jolk will Christian purity culture or white right one of my guests called it positive due to deal may failed call that positive eugenics is like promoting this particularly troubling world view through the normalization of tradition or norm.
Yeah, yes, exactly. And I think, yeah, I think one of the reasons that we have trouble or that we feel bad about criticizing in a certain way is because we do want to say live your life as you live it. And also some of these values are not bad values or you know, I encourage you to love your children. I encourage you to love your spouse and it's a nice thing to be able to cook food.
Those things are great. And when we only see them as surface level things doesn't see the full picture. We don't see even that the reason that some of these lifestyles are possible is because there's a ton of money behind it. Both that the money that they are making from it, but also the family money that is required to sustain a lifestyle like that is often going to fund things that are against the things that they're against.
Yeah. Yes. And there's so many political aspects behind that. One of the things that you that you and I've talked about before is how a lot of these tradwives have connection to turning point USA or other types of far right conservative evangelical political movements that are seeking to influence elections that are seeking to build political coalitions toward the demonization of people that fall outside of their lifestyle norms.
Yes. Yeah. We haven't mentioned one of one of my personal entry points into a tread wiffery content. But yeah, I think like I started looking at some of this content through an influencer named Ballerina Farm who is like a Mormon influencer who doesn't honestly talk about her faith that much on her platform. But you know, Bakes a lot of bread and you know has a farm and you know promotes a lot of I guess we'll call it like a natural lifestyle with a lot of things.
I'm like, oh, these things are lovely. It's so great that she can do this and her husband's father owns an airline and is one of the 10th richest Mormons in the United States. And so when we don't see the connections there or look at the money behind things, that's not seeing the folder and it's not seeing what does what is she promoting and who's now seeing her influence.
I think she has nine million followers like just on Instagram. I'm sure she has more on TikTok. So it's a pretty it's a pretty wide audience, which which is so troubling and particular because I think there's this like handshaking between even jokal Christian norms and this kind of viewed like a
what I've heard called by somebody the estetisization of care where even jokal Christians will say this order this husband at the head wife like we've talked before about the umbrella model where Christ is the head of the man man is the head of the wife wife is the head of the child and in that model.
You end up with a this is a norm and therefore it's easy and God will bless you with it. And so there's this way that tradwife content says because God has blessed me I don't have feelings about this life that I live and if I do I shove them under this language of God's blessing I don't have feelings about my own life for the things that I'm doing and it is complex to me because you have this like blessing language for thing you have more generic tradwife language that just says.
You know I get to live a particular life because my husband does all the work and I just play my part and in neither of those situations is community support generally at the center of that world I've never seen a tradwife who's like oh my sister came to help me with the kids are to make a meal or whatever it is this holy independent.
Caracature of care that says that you don't need anybody else to raise your kids and then evangelical Christians will speak back to that yeah because you are the only one who is reliable to teach your kids as part of the Christian homeschool movement is to say that anyone outside of you is an unreliable narrator of reality to your kids and so there's a slippery slope from something like ballerina farms to these conservative violent evangelical Christian world views and values
that makes care seem easy and blessed by God and therefore creating more isolation and individualism and that's been true it was true in the 50s in the creation of the nuclear family it was true in the 1920s in how we were being told to establish our family units and it continues to be the same way now in this presentation of tradwife life even if that's not the reality of how these people are living.
Yes totally in some ways tradwife life I don't know why I can't say that now is a different version of a woman can have it all type of situation or a woman can do it all and so the implication is that you can do all of these things on your own because the family unit is meant to be in this particular way then you have the skills to raise seven children on your own you can homeschool all of them they will all receive enough care and food
and you can make two hour meals for each of them and do all these various things plus look attractive plus like care for yourself in this way and your husband and the moat like you are fulfilled by those things you don't really maybe going back to that language of being an object you can do all of this stuff and that's who you are there's not really a tending to who the person is just as a person as a human who exists.
So again not everybody is this explicit and some people are in talking about one of the joys of having your partner having having your husband as head of the household is that you can turn your brain off you don't have to know anything in the news because I don't know I'm sure you've heard this before you don't want your votes to cancel each other out and so why would you come to a different place than he does if he knows the things then you'll just both amplify his vote I guess and there's like a lot of things like that oh my gosh light up.
Oh my gosh life is so difficult and hard and painful my husband shields me from all of that and what a joy that is and what that means for me is that I don't have to consider the outside world I don't have to consider anything except for my home and my children.
And it's so scary to me because I can imagine a world in which this worldview deadens women to knowing what they feel or want and that's part of why this conversation around purity culture and this is in this connection to how these how try wise think about sex with their husbands as like a obligation or as an in maybe I think they would say it more like an inherent part of their role as a wife.
And when there is an obligation there cannot be as proactive consent there can't be as much room for her pleasure there can't be as much room for or any room for knowing what she wants or what she needs because the center is this fulfilling a role to please her husband and there's this like joke out in the world that's like where Christian men will say something to the effect of I just wish I had a wife.
And it's not like in a love way to perform these particular functions sexually or not and I'm like oh in that joke there is this I want a person who will do all the things I don't want to do and do all of the things for me that I want to be done for me and to me.
And so I feel concerned because it feels really similar to me to evangelical Christian views of submission not just that's not just giving to women but saying your role as a Christian is to obey Christ to conform yourself to his will to become less of yourself so that Jesus can become more and so if you combine the values of patriarchy that are inherent in tradwife content with evangelical purity culture what you end up with is women who.
Are not given agency or permission to have agency over their own bodies and. I think we would call that a lot of other things if it wasn't in a Christian context. Yeah and I think maybe even thinking about my own experience with purity culture was and I'll give I want to give the benefit of the doubt that people have earnest intentions in this right but in that pursue and in that desire there was a distrust of my own body there was a very small sense of self like you said less.
And so when you feel like your main purpose is as an object or is to be as small of yourself as possible then that deadens the voice of yourself. It means that the only voices that you're listening to are the people around you and your husband instead of having some sense of what you might want and what you might not want and also just places things within like whether something is done out of obedience or done out of obedience like hard stop is the good thing. And that's scary and that's sad.
Yes it really is and. Let's get into some of the theology a little bit because I don't think a lot I give you to ask a bunch of Christian men do you think tradwives are gods will for women I think a bunch of like moderate to progressive men would be like no. But when I look at how they treat their partners or the assumptions that they hold in their marriages or the ways they haven't analyzed patriarchy in their relationships the ways that they don't think about who carries mental load.
I think a lot of these men would be really comfortable with tradwives and would be really comfortable with like and again I can't always speak to my own community in some ways but I watch a lot of black men who are really comfortable with white traditional wife acting Christian women because there is this.
Image that is given of all women are or a huge part of what women are in the church is a pre wife it's the Harrison but Chris of it's that your life really starts when you become a wife that you really find your purpose when I believe this growing up the message I was given was. You are trying to find a man whose mission you can come alongside and support and so what you're looking for is someone not who has.
Yeah compatible relationship with you and who got has made you to be but it's that you need to come alongside a man and become you know you're taken from his living you're being put back together as one and so your agency your desire to find yourself doesn't matter as much as your agency to find a husband and then let everything else be. Divy out to him and that's how I grew up.
Yeah yeah and I think we see that to maybe in like a light version of this where the questions that are being asked are like the men is saying I want to be a missionary can I find a wife who is willing to travel I want to be a pastor can I find a wife who's willing to be a pastor's wife and the questions that women are asking themselves in these contexts are am I willing to move am I willing to the first lady and show up in those particular ways and that's what alignment looks like.
I don't know why this kind of reminds me of the joke that people have where it's like on dating apps or something where when men when women say that they're looking for someone with a sense of humor they're like looking for someone is it that what they're looking for someone who will make them laugh and men are looking for someone who will laugh at their own jokes and it feels something similar to that in a particular way.
And I think it's it's interesting that you bring in people are age into this because that's what we're seeing a lot of the influencing and I think you know at the beginning of this conversation you talked about it needing to be a movement like that's that's what we're seeing in this and it just might have different packaging like they may say oh I won't call it a tradwife but yeah I found I found this article that someone wrote in biblical gender roles dot com about why God cares he does the dishes.
Yeah and so basically saying like a Christian woman's primary service or primary mission from God is to serve the needs of her husband children her home and if she's distracted by activities outside her home then she's failed the primary mission but then he goes on to look at Christ washing the feet of the disciples and is that supposed to say that men should be washing dishes and he says no what we're learning is that those under authority should allow but not expect.
But not expect those in authority to help them with tasks like Jesus didn't need to wash their feet he chose to. Oh my gosh and so I think there's something of that to where if you help out with chores you're helping out and putting that in quotes and that's like a good thing as opposed to this is our equal labor that we're sharing yes it's like when men say that they're babysitting their kids and you're like that's called being a father and I hear that.
I hear that with Christian men all the time. Oh I'm watching my I'm babysitting my kids tonight and I'm like you have to make even even semantically you have to make engagement in time with your children without your partner a job like you have to think about that as labor because like labor is the thing to contribute and so I think it's interesting because when I think about tradwives I'm always thinking about what are women who are tradwives losing even if they don't necessarily feel that way.
But what I think I've been trying to think of more lately is what do men gain from having a tradwives I just keep thinking like I know women who want to be tradwives or who have become traditional wives. And then I'm like and what do I think about the men that they date and the men that they marry and what those men gain and what I think it is is like men in that world gain their own little kingdom.
A place where they are the king where they are on the throne of their own lives where they have subjects their women and their kids who do the things that are at their bidding with or without those people needing to be asked to do so and I think you and I've talked about this some even the romanticization of not needing to ask for what you need because there is someone who is prepared to without your asking to attend to your needs.
And so I find it to be very ironic that those folks same folks will talk about like the kingdom of God or Jesus being on the throne when these men are either proactively creating or allowing a situation in their households that makes them act like little gods.
There's the high level version of that which is the esoteric part that's be like little gods but the way that plays out in the practical day today is that you know a lot of tradwives talk about like how they do their hair the way their husband likes it or how they will never be seen in public or private with another man or how they get allowance from their partner because he works and they just get like money in return you know like as a as a gift from their husband and him like basically.
Like giving services to his subjects and so I think there's something interesting about there's the high level bit but then there's the low level bit that reinforces it all the time that you're always trying to obey or create a world where you're bringing honor glory pleasure to this person who is the head of your household.
Yeah and maybe there's some what feels a mark, Driscoll vibes to some of this of what does it mean yeah I guess if we're asking what does it mean to be a woman then hand and hand because this is about a heterosexual marriage what does it mean to be a man and like in order to interact with a woman as an object or your wife as an object then you must be the subject and anything that that goes outside of that threatens your sense of being a man.
It's your sense of self, your masculinity, your ability to be Christ to the church which that's a lot to put I mean there's like a lot a lot that's going on there so there's a lot of instability with an image that's placed in that particular way. Yes for sure it makes me think differently about that Colossians passage that is imploring husbands to be gentle to their wives and I'm like why is that a proactively needed sentiment.
I think it's because when men build their own little kingdoms where they're being consistently served in the only way we see kingdoms working is being enforced through violence that there is a proactive call for men who are building these like little kingdoms to need to be gentle proactively.
And so I think the market risk of stuff feels like a good example of the ways that that's not inherent in what things are because there's like a certain level of entitlement that comes from this type of lifestyle or world view and again that requires a consistent taking of agency from women and then I think what makes try by content so hard for me is that it glorifies all of this stuff in a way that gets into us I've met before I've been using is that try to live content is a little bit like shoots and ladders where you may end up you're not like trying to get to try to get a job.
I end up you're not like trying to get to try to live content but suddenly as I look at wedding stuff for whatever now I'm finding Christian influencers as I'm looking at baking bread I'm finding tradwives as I'm looking at how to space my lettuce appropriately I'm ending up in tradwife content and it makes it all seem very appealing and so I think for people who are feeling unsatisfied relationally or unsatisfied in their spirituality.
I think the tradwife content can feel like a really quick theological fix that says oh if I only did this God would bless me and so I want to talk a little bit about some of the theological that sits behind us I know it took us a long time to get to the theological but I think it matters because it's so intertwined. We talk a little bit about where people go in scripture to get to this kind of nefarious but beautiful place that we found ourselves in.
I think probably a lot of the scriptures around household household codes and household rules are where people will find that or will you know cherry pick and and see yeah we'll have like a first Peter three wives be subject to your husbands we have a fusions and submitting and let's not talk too much about what mutual submission is let's focus mostly on why submitting to your husbands and we'll focus a lot on husbands and we'll be able to do that.
We'll have a couple of times when husbands as Christ and those will be kind of the things that will pull from those pictures yes well and even like passages like Ephesians 5 where you get those codes the call that you get is right it's a first call to me truly submit like submit you know to one another and then it's wife submit to your husbands because he's your head and wife should submit to their husbands in everything so there's this kind of overarching situation but the call to husbands is so interesting because the wives are called to submit and husbands are called to love.
As Christ love the church and gave him some self up for her to make her holy cleansing her by the washing of water and the word and so there's this idea of the inherent impurity of womanhood or of women sexuality and I think that's part of I think the inherent impurity of women sexuality plays out in trot wife content by a stetisizing or shine a spotlight on how this particular lifestyle makes you more pure and so while it has less to do with we didn't have sex to do.
We didn't have sex to wear married or we didn't kiss until we were married there is a lot of that in trot wife content it is more the this lifestyle makes up for all this other impurity that exists in your life because you're being cleansed through the love of your leaderly husband.
Yeah and a lot of that being like what you inherently hold as a woman because being a woman is inherently less pure than a man. So there will be some of that kind of language and then maybe more in more evangelical spaces you'll get a lot of how to be a good like the Ephesians passages we're seeing more this is why we are doing it and then you'll get like a how to be a good biblical wife
and there we'll see a lot of proverbs 31 how to be a proverbs 31 wife how is this prescriptive list for our life when that's not how it was originally read and this is something that we want to live up to that none of us may be able to live up to but you know is is this reading of the biblical woman who does it all.
Yes or you end up with this kind of I feel like a lot of tradwives I see use content of be fruitful and multiply live out the original original call in scriptures so it's this this idea that you don't use contracept contraception or you you don't you are like anti-vax because it's a lot of
this type of content will slip you into QAnon paths really really quickly because you end up in these anti-vax non contraceptive political lobbying for education anti-queer because it's against this pure thing even if these folks are homeschooling their kids and aren't in the public school system and so what try
content has created in many ways is the normalization of a political force that says that it's rooted in God's created order and so a lot of the theology isn't necessarily rooted in scripture it's rooted in an assumption that this heteronormative nuclear family is so normal and so strong but
also so fragile that it needs to be so institutionally protected and it's a very confusing dynamic to engage with what is something that I see Christians do all the time and it requires that well I mean okay I have so many thoughts about it but it's it's it's be where a lot of us kind of learned tradwife content is from things like the Dougers and the quiverful movement and have as many kids as possible so that you can produce more Christian tool then go and save the world
and it becomes very ironic and tradwife content because the same people would have been conservatives in the 70s when Reagan was calling black and brown women welfare queens and say they were monetizing their kids to make money from the government when tradwives are literally in many of the cases of these huge tradwife influencer content spaces making a bunch of money off of the cough of content built on their kids
and there's these horrible statistics that are like engagement for these folks goes up astronomically between the between birth and the first six months of their child's life and so there is a financial incentive to not use contraception and then you call those kids blessings and so all this language gets just thrown into a little tornado of evangelical Christian purity culture chaos that I find very hard to comprehend.
Yes, yeah, I think a tornado is probably an apt word because there's so many concepts being thrown around around all of it and maybe even around the monetization. They're not thinking of ethical ways to pay their children for the content that they provide I think even with the Dougers they like had to fight for some of the children had to fight for any money that was coming from the series and so yeah there's some there's some really insidious stuff that happens on the back end of the content.
Not to mention just like some of the ethical things of how do people show their children online and what are the questions around that and yeah there's a lot of things to consider in that. Yeah, and one of the other theological things I'll say in it is that it falls into a particular like in that lack of choice it falls into a particular type of hard complementarianism.
So there's soft complementarianism that says that like women can lead or can be in the workforce can lead in some ways can lead in politics but can't be deacon's elders pastures of the church. Hard complementarianism would say that if God created men to be like Christ and to lead then women in any level of leadership political or otherwise and a company and a corporation is in kind of is a derived deriding of God's character and created order.
So what it ends up doing is making so people are saying they're choosing to be a tradwife but what really is happening is that in evangelical Christianity you're giving a you are given a very narrow menu of options of who you can be and in hard complementarianism if you can't be in the workforce if you can't be a person who is single for your whole life if you cannot be a person who works if you can't do any of those things.
The options that are given to you are find a husband who you think is going to be gentle with you and build a kind of beautiful life around that and it's part of why I'm so suspicious about any kind of like HGTV sort of like Christian couple like I think I'm shipping Joanna gains or whatever.
The aesthetic of a tradwife really mirrors a lot of this kind of we did it ourselves built a thing as a couple but it looks really Christian and we're blessed to be I'm kind of losing the train a little bit.
I do feel like there's something about this narrow menu of options that's presented for women in Christianity that then when people who are tradwives say this is how I want to live this is what I've chosen for myself I'm like yeah but chosen from what like in what ways is your spirituality raw view of options outside of this and how is being a tradwife in making this content a coping mechanism for a life that you didn't actually have that much choice in because you didn't have options that were given to you.
Yeah, yeah and it's it's rough. Okay, I have I have multiple thoughts off of this. Some of them are like so you you listed you gave some options for what are women's roles and I think maybe one of the accepted places that women can roll or can have a role.
Lead in some way is like other women or children and so there's an interesting place in that of women being able to influence other women and so I think one kind of dark side of all of this is that the tradwives that we are seeing who are so popular are making money and a lot of the people as they'll talk about it as they'll talk about it as a calling or this isn't something that I would normally do but I'm following my particular mission which is to influence in this particular way.
And so there's a glamorized version of what we're seeing which is this tradwife imagery the performance of perfection around it and then like if someone were to actually have this lifestyle and not make the extra money and not have the like fame and platform that.
The tradwife influencers have that's that's a much scarier place to be and gives you more of what you're saying there of where you don't have any like income or means on your own you're not even being viewed really so you don't have any interaction or engagement outside it's just your home.
I think yeah one of the images that I'm thinking of is well I guess I can't see someone who's inside their home who's not influencing but she didn't have as big of a following and she wasn't married and she was kind of as you were saying a pre wife she was saying this is my she would put the hashtag treat tradwife on it and say I'm not married yet but I know that I will be a wife and I know that what my job is right now is not to go to college but to care for my parents.
I'm going to go to college for my parents home and to gain my skills in that particular way and there's something that rubbed me in a scary way and seeing that especially being like oh 40 people saw your video like why are you making this content this makes me so sad.
Yeah. It's deeply frustrating and it feels frustrating because it's just patriarchy and homophobia and kind of chaotic misogyny that's being I think that's one of the one of the scriptures that's often used I think by men who defend tradwife stuff or you know tradwife lifestyles is not a good thing.
I think it's hard is that we're talking about tradwife as like a internet archetype but many pastors like male pastors are teaching people to be tradwives as vocation in in a way that now has an aesthetic to attach to it.
And so before they could seem like they were just being harsh or patriarchal but then they can now turn to these women and say no but look how beautiful it is and that in a lot of the theology that gets placed upon that is this idea that you can replace your present unhappiness with a future hope of glory or happiness or being rewarded or being blessed.
And so when I hear the language of tradwife I see a lot of the people that I knew growing up and growing up and a lot of the messages I was given as a young woman about what it meant to live a fulfilling life and it really was like find a husband and influence other women to live godly lives too.
And the Titus a leader is being told to teach older women how to be reverent in the way that they live not to be slanderers or addicted to too much wine but to teach what is good. Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children to be self controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind and to be subject to their husbands so that no one will malign the word of god.
And that feels like the crux kind of scripture for me around how men think about this stuff even if they don't know the passage. If women live this particular way God will be glorified and how is God glorified I don't know straight up do not know because most of this content or most of the way that people are tradwights is happening in the quiet and secret of a person's home.
And what happens in a lot of those context really in my view ends up being abuse like where there is no sharing of mental load where one person is an object of another person's desire in not in like a Bridgerton cutesy kind of way in a terrible way. And so this kind of general sharing of being a wife as being these particular things now has an archetype to point to and that now has conservative Christian commenters being like,
yeah, this is it or yeah, I'm going to try this or absolutely glory to be to God. And so you end up with a critical mass of folks who normalize dynamics that even if they are not abusive are not short are not long paths to abuse or to degradation or to objectification or to stripping people of their authority and their agency.
And so I think that some of that teach women to teach women like you were talking about when you couple that with Titus and even the way that Titus passage talks about women is addicted to one and not raising their kids well at all of these things. I'm like, oh, so that evangelicals can see control of women as a counterbalance to the more lining of the word of God. So any time like we were saying in the history kind of section of this.
There is a sense that whatever we see the US falling away from Jesus quote unquote in the eyes of evangelical Christians, there is always a backlash like this that moves us toward more traditional views in the spirit of that passage.
Well, I mean all of this again, we say all of this is like intertwined the patriarchy of it, the massaging of it, but also the purity culture that like this is for the good and the purity and the holiness of women and maybe even thinking back to like my young self or your young self. And if this is what we're being taught is the thing that is good, the thing that will make us the most pure like why wouldn't we strive for that and what a scary message that is.
Yeah, and even as we close, I think I want to talk just a little bit about what some of the because there is a lot of appeal to this lifestyle and it's why it works. I think I'm just wondering if we can talk a little bit about some of the costs because the appeals can seem high and benign, but when I think of this kind of world where you have to subliminate your identity to your husband or where you have to.
I kind of said that so much less of a douchey way, but that's what it is. Why am I like this? Oh, I'm just going to go with it. It's the only word in my brain. You subliminate your identity to your husband, you take away a person's ability to discern for themselves and you couch all of that in a life that is not real. That is what is so bothersome to me about so much of this content is that you're not seeing a huge amount of what's going on behind the scenes.
You're not seeing the lights and the editing and the tools and it's what makes the same as a like a beauty magazine that a Christian would like an evangelical Christian now would applaud. Which is that you have this world that you can edit that you can use tools to create that is generally inaccessible but that is aspirational so you can you never quite get there unless you're one of the few, but you can just try and try and try and try and it is in that effort that you it's like your effort.
I mean my gym says it's in a good way, but it's like effort to find success and a lot of try to have content to me feels like that like effort to find success like the hard you try to be a tradwife. The more God is going to honor you and glorify you and the more you're going to get out of that.
And so I think there's just some costs that sit behind it even for like regular people who wouldn't be that interested in this content but might still believe or hold like little edges of this content in their minds. I think yeah, just the the fact of social media and what the highlight reel or the glamour and the beauty of what we see is going to be something that's appealing and we don't we don't see what's on the other side of it.
We don't see what the other 23 22 hours of the days how they're spent. Yeah, it gives us an aspirational picture of how to be a wife of how to be a mother of again how you have to do all of these things and then we stare at our you know screen after scrolling for a little bit and we're like dang I'm just sitting on the ground. Scrolling on my phone. Yes, what if I actually died right now. Yes, for sure.
And I think about how I lived this right I think that I remember when I was in late high school early college one of my friends had gone to Bible college and she came back in brought the practice of filling out a husband journal which was this way of ensuring faithfulness to your future husband by having you write a letter to him every day in your journal or regularly set on your wedding night.
You could give it to him as an act of faithfulness and so it was this serving of or like fidelity to a non-existent man in my life that that I did because I thought it was going to make me a better future wife and so I did this like effort to find success like I'm putting a lot of effort and so that I can have a godly husband who will then give me my life and so I think that that was one of the tools that was used to reinforce purity culture that it's like you want to be faithful to your husband.
And not give yourself away or you know be a piece of chewed up gum because you have this person who like God is waiting to give you is going to be your greatest gift and if you defile that gift by defiling yourself like don't do that so do everything you can writing letters every day to a hypothetical man in order to hold your heart pure for that person.
So I think there's like the combination of that with this building of in Traguev content a world without help a world without community that is needed to raise kids and to be whole humans that really just makes me kind of sad.
And I think there's lots of ways that I am still unlearning those patriarchal and purity culture messages that say that life will be easier or better in a particular way as a queer woman of color I'm like oh it is easier to be straight because the world is violent toward queer people and toward women it's not because it's inherently better to be straight or more godly to be straight it's because the violence that we use in church spaces is the thing that we call a couple of years ago.
We call a consequence for anything that falls outside of this kind of Traguev life and so to make this world seem this like godly and heavenly world of Traguev free seem accessible and attainable now also means that there is a normalization of violence toward people who fall outside of it and that for me is part of why this conversation has felt important.
Yes, yeah I appreciate you naming that because again we've we've held this conversation within the framework of generally like white heterosexual marriages and yeah one of the huge costs of this is that anybody who doesn't fall in that which is quite a few folks are not going to get the chance at even if it's a not great like way a not great path to that chance but towards that towards purity and holiness and all of that.
That's not even a possibility. Yeah, so if it's not possible but we're striving toward it how do we start to unlearn the little bits of this that might be sprinkled into our consciousness or our world view or the lot of it that might still be holding on to us in some way because I think I know a lot of single women in my life who while they are very progressive still hold a lot of these things as they're dating or as they're figuring out this stuff out.
So yeah, how do we unlearn some of this stuff? I think being able to name it in the first place is one of them. I know so many women that I grew up with would feel the pain of being single in the church and part of it is because it's better to be married and also we're not complete until we have our husbands or you know any of those things and so I think you know being able to name it even just to hear that is not what makes you that does not need to be the best that is not the start of your life.
It feels like an important thing. I think also recognizing like as we're talking about the performance of care, care work that care work in itself is valuable just because it's not beautiful and just because you don't have a camera while you're doing it and address taking care of yourself is a lovely thing taking care of your home and the place that you live and feeding yourself and being able to think of yourself in this moment as someone who deserves food and a clue.
Food and a clean place to live and someone who gets to grow those are all really lovely and worthy things. And that we can reclaim that care work is hard. Care work is challenging. Yes. When I think about the ways that care work in evangelical spaces and in this content is framed as easy or natural.
I think it does a disservice to and dishonors people who care for people in their lives who are dying who care for folks who need more help who care for folks in their families right like I I see the challenge of care work thoughtfulness of care work and it really gets erased underneath these kinds of messages.
And it's really, really frustrating and I think I want to re claim for people that care work is hard even if the aesthetic of care looks beautiful and easy because that I think in doing that we get to remember that we're humans with agency and that we get to feel and that we get to know what feels right for us and good for us know that we have limits and boundaries because in this content there are no limits and boundaries there is no there is no stop to how far a woman should go to please her husband.
There is no distance that a person shouldn't go to please their future spouse and I think that having boundaries and limits that never exists in this kind of content can help us as we're reclaiming our theology from purity culture to be able to say what are my boundaries and limits or what are the expectations that this person is putting on me that I that I don't want to live into because I think one of my greatest concerns right now for a lot of my friends is that they would end up with partners who are mediocre who don't care for them.
Who don't care for them well who don't give them what they need or who are just the best option out of a bunch of bad options that seems better than being alone and I think a lot of that kind of stuff can be rooted in the seeds of this sort of content and so it feels really hard for me.
Because I watched some of my friends in the dating world settling for some version of this or some version of the behavior that generally men are expressing in that feels rooted in a lot of these assumptions or these kind of fantasy fantasy desires for how a woman would be because what what
a tradwife content is for men is fantasy. Yes, yeah, and I think in that there's maybe the the sycophess picture of doing things over and over and over again that your good life is and even your good marriage is purely in your hands of all the things that you do.
So the more that you serve the more that you give of yourself the smaller that you become the better marriage that you have and in some ways it's yeah like that's its own really painful thing right like folks who are in relationships that they're not happy or asking maybe when we're asking a question what what more do I have to do what more do I have to change how can I only be praying for my husband but not asking him directly because he has to hear it from God and not from me and so there's a lot of that.
There's a lot of that pain underneath and an extra labor in burden underneath. Yes. Well, this took a bleak turn and wait no there's happy things to maybe not of tradwives but as we think about it as we think about how to interact with it and like how how we want to build something for ourselves I think that they're really lovely things out of that. Tell me if you are those even as we as we get ready to close what are some of the things that you feel like are hopeful as we unlearn.
Yeah, this the the seeds of or the pressure of I think for many people of this type of content as light or heavy as it ends up being. Yeah, I think you don't need to be a wife or a mother to have value. You can recognize that we can hold the beauty and the support and the holding of a village when we're thinking about these and so when the nuclear family wants to isolate.
When we think about a village and connections, there's so much love and and hope in and how we are held both as single people or partnered people. One of the things that I return to as we think about what what appeals to us about the imagery of trad wiffery is cottage core and how there's a huge everybody is really intrigued by cottage core in probably in peak lockdown because this provided a lot of information.
This provided a lot of imagery of things that we could do while we were stuck at home and it's interesting to see the ways that cottage core is lean straight like has made a very easy path for tradwife content. But the lovely and interesting thing about cottage core is designed and created by queer teens on tumblr in the 2010s and was picked up in a lot of ways by folks of color who wanted to imagine a soft life for themselves.
Where the imagery of all of that was something that they hadn't seen in their bodies before. And so I think even as we like see the beauty of something that doesn't mean there's no beauty to be had at all. And so there's still beauty that we can see in care work in both in the hard but land and the lovely of what it means to do things if that makes sense.
And so it totally does because I think what I do find appealing about some of this content is that it opens a door for us to see something that we might want and then to ask ourselves why. Like when I see someone staying at home and making a pie, what is that? What about that appeals to me? And what does that tell me about the ways that I can show up for myself in different ways or ask people to show up for me in different ways.
I need a slow day. I need a day where I can just focus on creativity and beauty where someone might just need a day with their kids to not feel like something that has to be forced and can just be fun. It might be a place where you take care of someone and you feel appreciated by them. It might be a place where you need to feel like you are blessed by God or that God sees you are honors the way that you're living.
I think the content if we ask why is this so appealing to me? I might just be like, because it's pretty and there might be a deeper thing that it can tap at that can help us to know the things that we ought to be pursuing or that we can be pursuing even if we're not doing it in a my husband gives me an allowance so I bake pies all day kind of way.
You know, I feel like there is something beautiful. Like in I don't want to discard the beautiful imagery or the beautiful actions because the rest of it is nefarious. I want to hold those pieces that are good and say, okay, purity culture says that this kind of life or family is going to save the world.
And that we need to protect and perform this type of motherhood and wifehood at all costs. And instead we can say, most of us want to eat a cake with people that we love and most of us want to create a cozy space that feels like ease for us and that those are really good things that I think we can pursue that are much more attainable than an influencing platform where we lie about how much money we make off of the stuff that we do so that we can influence other people towards.
God that requires prostilizing so I just think there's something better than that that can be. Gleemed from the edges of this content. Yes. Yeah, I love that. I love the like even as we said before that there's a removal of self and desire that in reclaiming this we can engage with our own desire and engage with our values and even and build values off of that. Build the ways that we want to live our lives. There's an invitation to imagining a good life and that's a really lovely thing.
Yes. In for some of us that still have a little bit of a prostitizing guilt bone in us. I think there's this idea that your life doesn't have to be so beautiful that people ask you about Jesus all the time. I think that some of this content would say that you have to present a life that is so foolproof that and so good and so glorious that God is glorified.
And then I think God is just glorified when you are yourself and yourself at your best and that doesn't require like a presentation of your life for God's glory. Because I think that you could do that a lot of other ways that don't require a contorting into what is a mythological expression of nostalgia in the United States. And I think we can do better than that. I think you as yourself can do better than that. Not you Allison, you the collective you. Sounds really harsh if I say just to you.
Yes. No, that's wonderful. Yes. God is with you as you are single. God is with you as you are partnered. God is with you as you are you know cleaning your house without a camera on. God is with you as you put ingredients together and you know feel things with your hands and make something that is good or honestly make something that you know looks good and then is a little salty and you're like, oh dang, I wasted a lot of flour with this but you know I did something.
Yes. Is there anything else you would like to add as we're closing out any words for the people that feel like they would be important to you as we close this conversation? Hmm. I don't know. It feels like the next words to come out of what we just said were that you are enough and you are good and that God sees you in it. And that's much lovelier than my last words which are men do better.
Men created the world that the track life lives in and the entitlement, the violence of the assumption that the world revolves around men is what keeps this entire pattern going. And it's kept it going for over 100 years in the United States alone and so men's ability to be in touch with their own emotions and their needs, their entitlement and their need to be fulfilled in every way by a person outside of themselves is what this is rooted in.
And so for men, even if you consider yourself progressive, setting men of color are terrible at this. What are the ways that you exploit people in your own life because you believe that you are at the center of the world? In what ways do your emotions shape your family? Because when you don't get what you want, you create punitive consequences whether in your attitude or how you show up or don't show up.
That's the kind of bullshit that creates this world is the entitlement of and the defecation of men. And so I think men's work is to unlearn the need to play God in their own lives in such ways that don't make room for other people to be themselves, their partners or not. So your words were nicer than mine, but mine were men. This one's kind of on you. This is kind of on you. A good balance, I think. As we often strike. Oh, man. Well, Allison, I'm so appreciative of your time today as always.
Is there anything you want to plug any place you want people to find you out in these streets? I'm plugging sunset walks. They're so nice. If you can, if you can get out for a little bit of time, listen to a podcast, listen to a book, listen to birds, talk to a friend, watch the sky change color and flowers bloom. What a lovely thing to get to do. I mean, that very seriously, that's been such a good and healing thing for me.
So I know you do. I just love something for like, I got a book that came out or whatever. And you're like, my plug is for you to be human. And that is a good invitation. And I take that and express my gratitude to you for that kind of invitation to folks who might always want more resources and maybe just need more life. And so I appreciate that and appreciate you and so grateful for your time today.
Thank you so much. It's been so good to get to talk to you about this and, you know, going on a little rambling valleys and hills and get to someplace I think is really helpful. I hope it's helpful. Me too. Thank you so much. Thank you for joining for another episode of reclining my theology.
Stay tuned for our upcoming season that will carry us through the fall and that I'm hoping will help us to navigate these increasingly dystopian feeling times that we're in and in doing so might help us to do a little bit better together. See you next time. Get ready for this drop.