Deconstructing the Evangelical Sexual Ethic — with Jenn Alynn-Perri

This is a dauntless media collective podcast. Visit Dauntless dot at them from more content. Hey everyone, welcome back to the full mutuality podcast. A couple quick notes about this episode. So first, we recorded this a pretty long time ago. So, while you may have noticed an improvement in audio quality, overall is our podcast has progressed. This one was recorded before gale and I upgraded our mic setups, so it's not quite as clean as our recent episodes have been. I'm sorry about that, although I guess I'm saying this more for myself than for you, because I've started to pride myself on how our podcast sounds recently, and this one knocks my ego back a bit. Also, in this episode we interview a friend of mine who went to my Alma Mater, Bob Jones University, which we covered in our last episode. But since we had recorded this conversation before episode sixteen, there are a few moments where we kind of sound like we're introducing the school for the first time on this podcast. Obviously that's not the case, unless you happen to be listening to this before you get to our conversation with Lance and Peter. Anyway, without further ADO. Here's our conversation with Jen Allan Perry. Welcome to to the PODCAST, and why don't you start off by by telling us a little bit about yourself? Hey, thank you both. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, I grew up in Greenville in a very conservative evangelical cult, although we didn't consider ourselves evangelical at the time, in retrospect all of the all of the harm hallmarks of an evangelical group are there. I was born on the campus of Bob Jones University, which is the the school that you went to, nate, and we so like it's I grew up with a site or like there was there used to be barge Memorial Hospital, used to be service hospital at the time. Yes, it's time born there. My sister and I were some of the last kids born there before they stopped doing live births. Oh right, right, right. And for a while it became like like a nurses station at a typical school. Or wasn't a full hospital, but they had a pharmacy and a nurse you could see if you were feeling sick for that and I don't know if they do that anymore and not. I think they're mainly using the old hospital for nursing classes, but not for medical practice. I see. Interesting. Yeah, I was born in I went to elementary there and high school and Universe all the way through. Wow, kindergarten. I went to nursery school, kindergarten, elementary, junior high, high school and underground. Wow. See, you're inundated. I mean I was. I was in it. That was a bouge through and through. You don't get any more Bouchi's in this. Well, I've I so my perspective. I mean we're going to reminisce a little bit. Sorry for anybody who's listening and is wondering what the hell this is all about. We're just going to have a little bit of our a little bit of catching up on our time at this university. It's a bizarre one. So the outsider, I will try and play the role of audiences who don't know about okay, yeah, and if there's stuff I don't understand, I'll just interject. Yeah, because it's still I mean I grew up there. Yeah, like a normal childhoods and me. Yeah, and you know what's interesting, is it? It's similar enough to my own like I went to I grew up at a church that was a Bob Jones Feeder Church up here in New Jersey, and the my elementary school all the way from I started in Kfive, but it was a from Kfour all the way up through through year twelve. We had a full fundamentalist which is that branch of evangelicalism that you were alluding to. It was an entire school devoted to teaching fundamentalist Christianity. And the way that my church and my high school to a degree, kind of acted about college was you either went to Bob Jones, northland or Pensacola. Those were sort of the big three. Yeah, that my that my church was like okay with for college. And then so you picked the Middle Road, the one that is not the most conservative but also not, you know, push on the limit, slipperalt. Yeah, right, exactly. We looked at Pensacola with a little bit of side because my church was not King James version only. So okay. So any anybody who thought about going to Pensacola, we were sort of like really that they're a little weird through the crazies right, and don't know anything. When you hear King James Only, it's like a sect of fundamentalism where they only use the King James. Are Very strict, done a lot of rules and yeah, I mean it's there's lots of shades, I guess the fundamentalism. I didn't realize that, but yeah, them with Oh, yeah, to wear like dresses and don't wear pants and right. Well, we actually had somebody on the podcast not too long ago who comes out of a completely different branch of the fundamentalist world. She was from the Bill Gothard camp, the ideal p Yeah, that that whole you know, the Duggers, that that form of fundamentalism. So I am familiar with that only through television, right. Yeah, same. Yeah, yeah, Um. So I guess to kind of give everybody a little idea, like, you know, pull back the curtain a little bit. What were some of the restrictions or expectations that that you had in your in your upbringing? I mean they pretty much all came from school. Okay, my parents, my parents were way less culty than most of the parents of my peers in the cult. So I never even had a curfew. I just had to tell my parents when I left, when I expected to be home, and then if I looked like I was going to take longer, I had to call and get permission to stay out later. Okay, my parents never micromanaged my homework. I did that myself and got the grades I wanted to get. My Dad actually very purposely avoided sharing with me and my sister what he thought about certain things, big issues, in order to avoid coloring our thought process. He really wanted us to learn to think through things for ourselves. Now, the way that worked out was unfortunately, when presented with all the same facts, not every reasonable person will come to the same conclusion. So there are a few explosions in my teens and twenties when I was living my life and what I thought was a perfectly reasonable way, and it turns out my dad has strong feelings about what I was doing and I didn't know that until it was done. Oh it's that was exciting. Okay, so do you care? Are Are you okay with elaborating a little bit on them? I dated someone for the first time in college. I was a late bloomer. Okay, so I was hanging out at my boyfriend's house. He was a recent college Grad and I think I was a junior or something and, like he had roommates. His roommates were home. We were just hanging out on the couch and the living room, you know, and I had left my cell phone in the kitchen. This was when cell phones were in their early stages and I had one of those slide phones with a coarty keyboard that was really, really cool the time. Yeah, I'd left it on the kitchen counter and we were sitting in the living room talking and, as happens when you're in your s with your first significant other, we talked really late, with no sense of time whatsoever. So I'd like one in the morning. I looked at my phone and saw that I had several missed calls from my parents and text from one or the other asking where I was. I was like, Oh shoot, they're hurried. I need to go home right now, and I thought about calling them and I thought no, there's no way they're still awake. They're early to bed people. I'll just I won't wake him up, I'll just go home now. When I got home, my parents were both up, all the lights were on and my parents were sitting in the living room, him on the couch, looking very tired, and they expressed how worried they'd been. They were on the verge of calling the police because I hadn't been answering and I apologize. I explained what had happened and and my Dad said my dad was clearly very angry. There was an edge to his voice and he said to me, you something to the effect of you know what's wrong with what you did, and I said, yeah, I should have kept my phone on me so that I would I would notice when you called. And he said no, the problem is that you are at a man's house past midnight, late at night. Think about that, Jed. Think about how that looks, the implication being if you're at a man's house late at night, it's to have sex, and I didn't want to clarify for my father that in this age, just saying this is my boyfriend implies to most people that were having sex. But it had not occurred to me that my father would have a problem with me being at my boyfriend's house late at night. He trusted me to be there during the day. Why would it be any different at a different time? But but that, I think, is a reflection of hyper sexuality in Evangelical Circles, where we see sex everywhere and every form of intimacy is is expected to be sexual. Yeah, well, just sorry, entered it to interject, but you know, my experience with regards to the school itself was similar in their sort of obsession with what sex right. Like they to the degree that you weren't allowed to have any physical contact with I know, somebody of the opposite gender not rely messes up your brain, doesn't it? Right? Really? Yeah, or not. Sorry, if you're if you're thinking in terms of the binary, somebody who is a, you know, a man, is not allowed to have physical contact of a woman, and you're right, it does. It does mess with your brain. I think I still have emotional and psychological damage from being starved of physical contact. I didn't touch my friends like even like. I wouldn't cuddle with girls because cuddling with sexual right, and girls don't have sex with each other, and I couldn't touch boys at all. So right, I just never got touched, except for a passing hug once in a while, but usually a side hug, because he right. Oh, of course, of course, and I didn't grow up in fundamentalism, but just talking with one of my friends about why she didn't date any guys at Church. She was like, you know, they make feel very awkward in your own body and with your sexuality, to the point where everything becomes hyper sexual in that environment. And she's like, you know, when I'd be at work or when I'd be around guys outside a church, it was never this weirdness like it was sexual. It felt like yeah, tonic, it felt normal. But as soon as I was on the term environments like Oh, if you hug a guy, oh my gosh, I gotta worry about how much contact. I got to worry about all these different, you know, things that it's like. It's funny because out of that fear of like, you know, oh my gosh, we don't want you to have sex and we gotta, you know, keep you guys apart, it creates a sexual tension that does it need to be there, or sexual act, like it puts the focus on it constantly. Yeah, where it does? Yeah, need to be there. Oh, I remember an interaction in high school. I was on the speech and debate team and at a tournament I was talking to a friend of mine from another high school, a public high school, and during the conversation I swung my hand up toward his shoulder, like I was about to tap his shoulder, but I stopped about two inches from his shoulder and then dropped my hand, which was which was the comparable gesture that Bob Jones students had developed because you had to stay several inches away from each other. And he and he looked at where my hand had been and was like, what was that? Do you know what to touch me? Are you? Are you afraid to touch me because I'm Asian or because I'm not Christian? What? What was that? And then I had to like it dawned on me for the first time. Oh, this is weird. Yeah, and then I had to explain no, and my school we're not allowed to touch people of the opposite sex. That did not make him feel any better. He still looked at me like I had insulted him greatly, which I have. I mean, come on, yeah, yeah, because it's weird. Anywhere else it's weird. But that hyper focus, I think, leads to the the kinds of intense and invasive sexual expressions that we're seeing, and I I shouldn't even be calling it expressions, abuses really, that we're seeing coming out of conservative Christian environments. I think in large part has to do with this culture of like fighting so hard to prevent any kind of sexual expression, any kind of healthy sexual expression or exploration, at a time when people are supposed to be exploring and figuring themselves out, figuring out their interactions with each other. So none of that actually happens. Our brains get rewired to see sex as this sort of titilating, like out of reach thing that you can never ever have, and then it starts to set some pretty bad habits, because everything becomes shameful. So everything, every thought that we have, every interaction that we have that might be a little bit unusual, we have to keep hidden because, God forbid somebody find out about it and then we're in we're in serious trouble. MMM Yeah, right. And it's not very seriously to avoid having any of those thoughts when that's old or focusing let R it's a big chunk of what they focus on. Is like if I would be like, right now, guys, don't think about the pink elephants, like just don't know. Just right now, whatever you're thinking about, make sure make sure that what you're thinking about right now in your head, it is not a pink don't imagine a pink elephant. Don't imagine a pink elephant. Think of something else, but it can't be the more you're talking about. Yeah, what is everyone picture in their head right now? If you want to try not to think about it, your is still be thinking about it, because just just you start emphasizing something with such like a you know, strong like when them, without any reason behind it, and then it's like face becomes very like, you become more curious and becomes more like, how do I not think about this? It's like suggestive almoals that you know, you're constantly like. I remember, at least in my evangelical environments, there was this constant talk about how men just thought about sex nonstop all the time. Right, oh again. It'd like the just program that way, and I think it probably encourages that sort of a thought, because of course it does. It's like if you're not, then you're like, what's wrong with me? As to do? This is not pre dumpt, like this is not dominating all my thoughts, so I must something must be a little bit off with me. You know. That's all this. So I'm supposed to think, I'm supposed to be on this during. That's what being a man is. Yeah, I mean we know controlled studies have demonstrated that children become what the adults, the adult authorities in their life, expect them to be, and and other controlled studies of adults have demonstrated that adults fill the roles that they are given. HMM. So if you expect someone to be an abuser, you are influence them, influencing them toward that enough. If you tell someone that they are driven by nearly uncontrollable desires or by impulses that may at times feel overwhelming, then of course they're going to experience that if you are training them to think that way. I am never surprised when I hear a story of sexual abuse or sexual assault where I grew up, and I heard a lot of them. Frankly, I am shocked that it didn't happen to everyone, to everyone there. I'm surprised that so many people made it out without having been physically sexually assaulted or having sexually assaulted someone else, because that's kind of what we were trained to be. We were groomed. If we were female, we were groomed to be victims. If we were male, we were groomed to be violators of boundaries with no idea how to ask for consent. MMM. So I want to back up a little bit because I had this thought in my mind, this question that kind of any time that I enter that space of my old, you know, fundamentalist world, a question always pops up, either in my own head or that somebody else asks. Why should I care about these weird, fringe ideas that that exist in these in these cults? And so I'm going to backtrack a little bit and we'll go to the history books just briefly and we'll talk about Bob Jones University as an institution and how it was funded, who founded it, etc. So, very, very briefly, the the foundation of fundamentalists. Christianity was as kind of one of the reasons that it started was as a knee jerk reaction to what several conservative Christians viewed as Christianity getting soft or Christianity getting liberal. And because you had a lot of the the Social Jud the abolitionist movement, for example, was started by the congregationalist churches. So a number of churches who wanted nothing to do with abolishing slavery wanted to create a bastion for themselves, which they felt it was their God given right to own black people as slaves. So one of the reasons that they formed was that. And they wanted to have this like they wanted to distill all of their beliefs into the fundamentals. Hence their name, fundamentalism. Now, fast forwarding that fundamentalism is pretty much a white, white movement. In a sense like this, pretty much white people in Oh yeah, you're an exceptioning and I'm not saying there are any non white people, but by and large those environments are white. And yes, there was only white people in my school, in my elementary school, all six years there, I only remember one black student. I remember one black student, a different black student. In My middle school, my junior high and high school. There are a bunch of Korean kids who came over as storm students like that, but there was, there was never a lot of diversity. Right rightly. I felt the same when I was there. There were maybe three or four black people that I remember in my in my class. I was class of use seven and there was one other Japanese guy and a whole bunch of Korean, Korean people. But they're all sent over because Korea is a pretty Christian kind of nation and I like to send over a lot of their young people to Christian colleges in the US to learn American Christianity. But the so the reason that I say this is important for all of us to pay attention to is a lot of a a lot of the tenets of fundamentalism have found their way into the political arena in the US. Also, fundamentalism is the foundation for the Modern Evangelical Movement. Evangelicalism was actually a response to fundamentalism in that they wanted to hold to those particular beliefs. They felt like the doctrines of fundamentalism were good, but they didn't like how separatist fundamentalists were. They wanted to they felt they took very, very seriously the Great Commission in the the Book of Matthew where Jesus says go into all the world and preach the Gospel, and they felt like we needed to go into all the world. I think the Apostle Paul wrote something like you know, I become all things to all men that I may reach some right. So so the the reaction to fundamentalism was then the what was it the time called Neo evangelicalism. It's then morphed into evangelicalism, which was kind of started by Billy Graham, and Billy Graham was actually a personal friend of Bob Jones. He attended Bob Jones University back in the day, and then they had a falling out and then it became such a person it was like a personal vendetta that they had against against each other, particularly on the side of Bob Jones, because he was so jealous of Billy Graham's popularity that he that this whole doctrine of biblical separation actually came into into existence because Bob Jones didn't want anybody, any of his students, to be following Billy Graham or to think that Billy Graham was. I remember growing up being taught my pastor said that Billy Graham was not saved, that he was not truly a Christian, and that's where we're a lot of that comes from. So why is all this important? Going back to all of this, one out of every four Americans identifies as an evangelical Christian. EVANGELICALS belief system is founded in fundamentalist Christianity and Bob Jones University is sort of the hub of all fundamentalist Christian activity. So I just wanted to give that like overviews so that people were aware and like just to get a sense for why this conversation, why we're having this conversation and why we think it's important. Those a little cool factions you mentioned the political influences of fundamentalism and evangelicalism. They were. They were prosegregation, is what they were, and anti civil rights. Yes, now those same groups, the children and grandchildren of the people who argued that Christianity required keeping the races separate are using the same arguments and similar passages in the Bible to argue that the genders should be kept separate along binary lines and that gay people shouldn't exist. Right. Essentially, just like this was important in the S for human rights, it is important now. If we're going to advocate for human rights, we are going to have to combat people coming from this mindset, where, I should say ideas, coming from this mindset. Right. Yeah, Oh, a hundred percent, and that's kind of leads me to to a question that I think might get get us down this road a little bit. So at what point was there? was there like a catalyst moment or idea or something that sort of turned you away from these ideologies. What did that look like and where are you now in relationship to beliefs of your of your background? No, there was no single moment where I made a hard and fast decision or a sudden about face. It was very much a gradual process and I was resistant the entire way. I did not want to change my mind. I mean who does really, whoever wants to change their mind. But there were several moments that caused me to to open my mind to the possibility that I might be wrong about one thing. And the way that that started is usually disappointing to my conservative friends, because it was not an outside influence that I felt fell under. The way that I started deconstructing, to use a current Buzzword, the way I started the process of changing my mind about who God is and what Jesus meant, is that I read the Bible, which I'd been doing my whole life, but I'd been doing it in little, tiny chunks under the strict guidance of an interpreter, and I certain ways of interpreting and looking at right. Well, in my s I went out into the professional world and I was working one or two jobs at a time and my Bible reading, my devotions as we called them, had just fallen by the wayside. I just I didn't think to make time, and so at least two years had gone by that I had not read the Bible for myself, and I thought, Oh, I should start that back up, because that's what Christians do. They read the Bible every day. And I decided that I wanted to read the Bible in large chunks rather than in short chunks. So instead of a chapter day, I was going to read a book a day, or for the really big books like first and second kings and the Psalms, I'd read more like ten to fifteen chapters at a sitting. And the reason for that was that I have always been a concept person. I'm really good at grasping concepts quickly. I am not a memorizer and although I was very familiar with most of scripture, I would, I would recognize passes, passages quickly, I was really bad at remembering which books they were from, let alone which chapter. So I was no good at proof texting, like none whatsoever. I could quote a section, but I couldn't tell you where it came from and I wanted to work on that. So it like, okay, I'm going to I'm going to step back. I took speed reading in college. I'm going to do a bird's eye view of this to get myself a framework of the big picture, the structure of these books, to hang all these details on that I'm familiar with. That's what I was hoping to get out of it. It went very differently from how I had expected. There were two things I noticed, and the first one was most of what I'd been taught the Bible clearly says it doesn't say at all. In fact, in a lot of those cases, if you read the passage in context, the author seems to mean the opposite of what I was taught. Right. Well, damn, that really upsets the apple cart, doesn't yeah, and the second thing I noticed is that most of the Bible is delivered in a way that doesn't seem to be designed to be prescriptive. It's descriptive or poetic. Right. The few passages that are prescriptive are written to a specific audience, usually in response to two specific questions which we don't know how universal are they. So I'm saying it a descriptive passage tells us what happened. A prescriptive passage tells us or someone what to do or what not to do or how to live. And even when we when we pull out just the prescriptive passages, amongst those, there are a lot those, we have to decide whether they are universal or specific to a time, place or people just reading passages at face value. Most of the prescriptive passages appear to be specific, not universal. Yeah, because they are worded in a way that that says you, this person, I'm talking to you. You need to do this. You really have to have a reason to take a command that's given to one person and tell someone else that they have to follow it too. When you're looking at the whole Bible as if, and I think this is a way that evangelicals and Fundamentalis tend to use the Bible, is it's meant to tell us what to do now. So they're looking for, you know, what might be prescriptive for someone else and trying to apply it to now, like there's not a sense of historical reading, of context, reading like a cherry pick this and how do I make you do what it's telling them to do? So I kind of sorry, just really quick. It's just it's so relatable that that my own my own like faith deconstruction was the same kind of thing. I was given tools at you know, in my churches to read the Bible, and then I read the Bible and somehow and I took those tools that they gave me and I put into use, like like reading Greek, and started recognizing hey, this, none of this adds up at all. Yeah, yeah, I mean at one point I set out to do a study on marriage in the Bible because I'd have been exposed to past cultures where marriage was defined very differently and conducted very differently, like the way they determined whether or not someone was married was very different from signing a contract or doing a ceremony in a church today. So I was like, okay, I want to strip this down to the bare bones, like what is the minimum required to be married according to the Bible? And so I created a spreadsheet and I was I was I started listing out every occurrence of the Greek or Hebrew word for marriage or or husband or wife or Mary, like. I had a whole bunch of them, and I started listening all of them and the results were very disappointing. I gave up on it very early on because what I noticed, similar to what I noticed in my read through, was that this is not a how to manual with clearly defined terms. There's no to do list. It actually reads much more like a history of coaching, where God interacts with his students, with humans, and he doesn't tell them this is, this is what you will ultimately become, here's here's everything you need to be if in a perfect world. Instead, he tells them this is what you should work on right now, and what he tells one group of people to work on is very different from what he tells a later group of people to work on. This is kind of a good place to segue a little bit as well, since your study was centered on marriage. How then, as we kind of move forward, since in the the conservative Christian world you see this thread of marriage going hand in hand with sexuality and you cannot have one without the other. So what, then, does that journey for you look like as you start to reevaluate some of these things? Yeah, my thinking now is very different from how it was ten years ago and my behavior is only just now beginning to align with my beliefs. The process for me over the last decade or decade and a half has been to begrudgingly admit that, okay, there might be other valid ways of applying this passage or interpreting this command. And and only later did it, did I actually allow myself to say it will maybe I should be applying this command differently. Yeah, I for most of my s I was open to nonconservative lifestyles, if you want to call it that. Like I had concluded that it is perfectly reasonable to be a Christian, read the Bible and trusted as the word of God, and conclude that it's fine to have sex with anyone you want to, as long as you observe consent, as long as you respect the other person as a human being and and respect their boundaries so you don't exploit them. But I didn't want to live that way, you know. I was like, well, but I want to live a conservative life. I want to save sex for marriage, I or or at least a very committed long term relationship, even if we don't sign a marriage contract. And it was only it was it was later than that that I realized that I really not cut up for monogamy. I will probably never be monogamous again. I would definitely not get married as long as I live in South Carolina under South Carolina's current divorce laws, which effectively make divorce a privilege for the well funded or well connected. Like I'm not going to participate in that. So that's very different from what I had always expected my life to be and it's it's been uncomfortable to get used to that idea that I'm living in a way that I didn't expect. HMM. Well, also, if you grew up in a Christian fundamentalist sort of environment, you don't ever have I mean I don't even I'm not in that environment anymore, and I still find it very difficult to see represented in media nonmonogamy as as a concept. Actually, it's kind of interesting that in the Bible there's a lot of that and I remember reading that as a good going but you know, it wasn't polyamory, it was polygamy, which is we're no different. The topic of the event is non consensual, not right. Thing different and it's not women with a bunch of husbands, it's a guy owning a bunch of women. Right that right ownership. When it came to marrymen as livestock. That's D it is right. Will talk about biblical marriage. That it's very interesting, like you said, if you put out a spreadsheet and start looking with biblast say it's not what we're told, when people are like, you know, I saw clearly not supposed to do that. It was like Biblical Times Card Store and he's looking at some kinds that's a concubine and some that say wives and like, and it's like kind of a throwback to that. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, Laird, category was Unholy Union Parta, which is is great. But it's interesting that, you know, in conservative belief systems the idea of not being monogamous is so incredibly taboo, when the Bible it's full of nonmonogamy and nobody really go was like David Terrible, you know, it's like no man after God's own heart, you know, Abraham, like, Oh, I mean tell me. Helped me out here, but I can only think of one passage that even mentions monogamy, and even there it's not all that clear, the passage about deacons, where a deacon should be a man. Yeah, one, right, woman, right, for sure. Even even that gets interpret as different ways. Yeah, right, yeah, that's it's interesting. I guess one of the curious things that I so make sense to me that it would have been very hard for you to imagine anything outside of monogamy growing up, you know, in an environment that would never present anything except that as except if you read the Bible, then you see something different and then it's we got to do mental gymnastics right to like to bend it. But I'm wondering what was it for you where you came to the conclusion of, you know, I could believe the Bible is the word of God and all this and I could still live as long as consent as the rule. Where did you come to that? Through the but it was here. It was that experience reading through the Bible and seeing that it doesn't prescribe how sexual relationships should work. It really doesn't. Most of its mentions of sex are descriptive and pretty clearly negative. Right, at least the peeple at least one person involved in this sexual encounter is harming someone else in the sexual encounter. Did you find anything in the perspective that bend you towards consent, like was your any passage in scripturehere you're like, here's the Bible promoting consent as a concept. Okay, so one one passage that was particularly shocking to me was one night I sat down and I read Ephesians and Philippians in one go, and that passage that all these gets quoted at weddings. I was, oh, by the way, I was a complimentarian when I sat down for this and I left an egalitarian in one sitting. HMM. But I read Effusians and Philippians and that passage, wives submit to your husband's, husband's love your wives. I read the whole section and the description that Paul gives of what he means by those phrases. He says wives submit to your husband's as into the Lord, and husband's Love Your wives as Christ's love the church. And he goes on to talk about self sacrifice and submission and putting someone else's needs above your own. And in practice those two things he's telling husbands and why it's to do the same thing for each other, right to treat each other the same way. He's making them equals in their relationships and even without considering the cultural context where women were just one level up from slaves, who were slightly above livestock, but not much, even without considering the radical shift that that must have been and for Greek and Roman and Jewish readers to look at that here. Oh, but wife is supposed to be treated just as well as the husbands and the relationship. Just ignoring that, just reading it at face value, with no concept of the of the upset in patriarchy, you still have to walk away from it thinking that in practice these two things look the same. So Paul is advocating for equality in marital relationships. Yes, and that that made me walk away and think, Huh so, maybe, yeah, maybe, men and women are supposed to be equal. Yeah, what a concept. I know we live in an era of unprecedented access to information, news and media, but what happens when all that information leads you to suddenly realize you spent the majority of your childhood in a cult? Well, we can tell you. Join me, Jessica, go forth, think Kathleen Reynolds, as we take you into the world of cult recovery after all the emotional, psychological, financial and sexual abuse we experienced as part of Bill Goth's advanced training institute. On our podcast called leaving the village, we talk candidly about our journey out and interview other survivors whose experiences boggle your mind. As scandals continue to rock the twisted world of IBLP, subscribe to leaving the village today so you don't miss a single episodes. Hey everyone, I hope you're enjoying this episode. I want to take a quick break from the conversation to let you know that we have a fantastic new way for you to support the podcast. If you like what you hear from our show and want a partner with us, head over to Patreoncom full mutuality to donate as a partner, you'll get exclusive content, access to occasional live recording events and more for as little as five dollars a month. Thank you already for your support of what we're creating. And now back to the conversation. I find it interesting that you're your your practice of using that as sort of your framework for and and like again, we're kind of talking about your your own personal journey, and that was like one step along the way. But aside from a passage like that, at least in my experience, consent is really not a talking point in the Bible. I was gonna go there that's I mean, I really know where I was leading in, because I was like great, you know, remember that consent passed, like what you mentioned about a fusions. I'll go back to consent, but I wanted to say like, for me, that was one of those eye opening I also used to be complimentary in my thinking and and changed. And for those who don't know those terms, we've defined it in past podcast episodes. But it's this idea of men and women having defined rules. Guys do this, girls do this, versus Galitarian, which is sort of you're equal and it's not a separate but equal kind of thing, like Cerecas, and it's your equal. That's how that's how quality actually works. So and when I started, actually, for me, one of those things that started on doing it is when I studied effusions and I found out that that passage specifically, if you want to go with the women are told to submit. In the original language, that word is net the what it's submit unto eat one another as into the Lord, is the first verse. And then when it gets to the wives, so it's it doesn't it actually says in the original language and Whis unto your husband's as as to the Lord and there's no verb in there saying what do people take the pullet from the previous one instead of? And what's interesting is the chapters were only inserted way later into Bible writing, and the verses is as well. Right. So it wasn't like this was referring to this passage. No, those passages were inserted later on. It was more likely the bigger context of what the verbage was about, which was about, you know, it being submitted at like having the spirit of the Lord and your interactions with each other. I think was a bigger context of that whole passage is, you know, making it bit right, like if you can keep reading earlier, you start seeing the overall. When you start zooming out, like you were saying earlier, it gives you. So to me it was a shock, I think the first time when I started recognizing and I pulled out one of my translations had the word submit in Italics. Most of them don't even do that, but it was like a more honest translation because then at the best it noted right that this is actually been an addition to make sense of the way the Greek writing is, which is not it doesn't always have the verbage in it. So we're we're inserting what you think the topic is into it in order to make sense of it in English. It when it made sense if was written like word for word or you know, which is how a lot of the Bible is written down, which is a lot of interpretation which a lot of people leave out. Of How much bending can be done with people who have a certain perspective on the world when they want to put out a translation. How much that goes through our history in Christianity? But so the Egalitarian thing definitely. It was that passage for me and realizing what people inserted this word and to make it specific submission for women. I was like, how dare they these? I was always told you never take anything out of the Bible, you never insert anything. Are God will pull you out of the book of life or he will, like every play written it. That's as a revelation. SOS like do this. So I was just like, how dare they? I can't believe that they people told me this start of my whole life that I can add or subtract from it, are actually like tampering with the word of God and that's the reality of the whole how bibles written is that there is a lot of tampering. That goes down to a lot of guys. There's a lot of there's a lot of seriousness. I don't want to say people who go into this profession or, you know, being flimsy, but you know it's not as solid as people want to think. When they're going authority of God, you know it's the word of God. But going back to consent, sorry I had to grab a Shail off because that Effesians passions to me when we talk about a Galitarianism, was eye opening. But when it comes to the topic of consent, I grew up my whole life in Church never hearing that concept talked about. Know, and whenever David and Bathsheba was brought up, it was always adultery. It was never rape as a topic and in and they always talked about it like they cheated and I would and it it. It was. So I realized the programming in that for me, by ignoring what consent is, by ignoring that Bayhiba had no consent, by ignoring that she was taken against her will and raped. That is what that is. It's not consent. The fact that that topic was never broached, that they would read that story and skip over that. This is rape and non consent really was a part of my religious framing in terms of how relationships, even within my church context or set up. To not even be able to recognize what consent looked like, yeah, to not be able to acknowledge what rape actually was, was a part of my church dontext. I don't know if you guys, yes, had some more. Oh. Yeah, all the boundaries we had around sex. We are about under what circumstances you can have sex or not have sex, right, and there was no like when you should say no and when you should say yes. But there was nothing about what to do if someone says no when you think they should say yes. Well, if you're a woman, the teaching was if they if they say yes, and you've kept saying Oh, what's sort of the teaching like? I yeah, a lot of stuff. Like women, if you don't want your guys to cheat or look at more, you need to be having sex with them off and even if you don't feel like it, even if you're not in the mood. And I remember somebody giving me this advice one time of like, you know whether or not actual I had it from different perspectives, but the same message of like, even if you don't want it, you know this is what's going to draw you too closer. Or actually had a marriage counselor pull out the Bible and say, you know, your body is not your own, it belongs to your husband. When, my God, when my ex was literally saying am I it? is she allowed to say no to me like this and we were separated right my wand and what's all? Fuck people. I don't recommend Christian counseling. I will, I will have this in I'm not a fan. I don't think a lot of and yeah, I won't go too far down that road, but I will say that, you know, I've had it in many directions. People come at me even, you know, more subtly, like not. You know you have to have sex if they want to, because the Bible says your body is not your own. But even just well, you know, this is how you make a man feel loved and cared for is you have sex like that's how he and and in my head going wait a second, if I'm not in the mood and I'm just doing this to hold on to that person, you're teaching me that how I feel internally doesn't matter. You're teaching me that my knees, my desires, my my disinterest is unimportant to this whole conversation, like all of I mean, I would never want someone like if nate, you know, bought me flowers and I said, oh, baby, you got me flowers. What she did? Because, because I have to get you flowers, this is what I'm supposed to do for you. I'd be like, take back at what your ears Yes, flowers really, but like that we're training women that it's okay if you have sex and you don't enjoy it, that's not the point of sex. Is a terrible message a lot of us have in programmed to internalize and to really doesn't matter if it's out of pleasure and enjoyment. It's this is your Dudaism, wife. Yeah, and the flip side of that, I think, is by growing up, leadership was very cautious not to teach me or other women how to say yes, because they didn't want us to say yes. Don't say yes. Then you get married and say us all the time, but for now don't say yes. But when you remove, when you take away from someone the tools to say yes, you also take away the tools to say no. Yeah, so that's I think what made me angriest. Makes me angriest about my upbringing is that I was stripped of the tools I needed to protect myself. And I won't go into detail here, but there were a couple experiences in my s where I didn't know how to say no. I wanted to say no, but good girls are naive and you can't say no to what you're unwilling to name. So, because I couldn't name it, I couldn't admit that I knew what was going on, because that would mean that I had a dirty mind. I couldn't say no. I just had to look for a way to slither out of this, the circumstance I had found myself in, which apparently was probably my fault, like, why were you even there in the first place? Yada, Yada. That isn't a topic. I think is is also words exploring to is in these environments there's a lot of talk about modesty, a lot of talk about helping men not to stumble, and it's taken me a very long time to understand how vile that is as a concept. I remember talking about modesty other people I remember preaching modesty to other people. I remember thinking it was a woman's responsibility in part to help a dude out. You know, to me, you didn't think the wrong thing and I look back at that and I'm like that's absolutely awful. Like I look at Jesus saying, if your eye causes you to send tell a woman to put some more clothes on to help you out. Yeah, not at all. It was Gouger eye out. It was like you were fully, absolutely, one hundred percent resonally responsible for yourself. But if you're being that problematic, then you need to take Jurassic Action Yourself to stop yourself from this crop like it's like it's so it's so extreme the way, and you know, I love people. Would like you need to take the Bible literally, need to take it seriously. Tell me how many guys are walking around without eyeballs out there in their churches? It's just not happening, you know. But yet they'll take a verse that says, you know, dress with pure modesty and won't even look at the context of what they were talking about, with the modesty being about fashion, being about X. Well, flashing your wealth was actually the context of that message. But it's like they'll focus in on that word modesty and will be like see, we to. The Bible says that, but it's like he also says Gout your eyes, out, gooing. For some reason nobody's. Nobody's gouging out their eyes. But when it comes to the women, we're putting stuff in here, some extra stuff to make sure that they're and I and it's kind of zoom out of that when it creates inside of women. Is this if he thinks of me the wrong way? I have a part to play in this. Yeah, it I have a role. He must I must have done something that caused him to think I wanted this or that gave him the wrong impression. Yeah, I know when we were talking with you mentioned a previous guests in fundamentalism, was ATI. They would use an expression of the I did they use us about Jones defrauding someone? I don't know. Different different fundamentalism has different words of basically, you're presenting yourself a certain way and you're causing a guy to think he's entitled from how you're acting. They would call it defrauding guy by like yeah, you were smiled at them the wrong way, like you're defrauding him, because now he is imagining that you want Xyz because you smiled at him the wrong way. So I don't know, Oh my God. Yeah, yeah, I think there's a lot of pressure on women inside of Evangelical Culture, not even just fundamentalism, to see themselves as responsible and to feel ashamed if a guy acts out in approval on them, like they have done something to cause a situation which I alluded I mentioned earlier that women were grooms to be victims, and this is one way that they're growing to be victims. Yeah, because if I am responsible for someone raping me, but I'm not going to tell anyone about it because I'll be admitting to my own fault, I'll cover it up rather than go ask for help, and I think that's what happened with a lot of my peers. They were silent for years about sexual assault and rape because they thought it was their fault that it had happened to them. They don't. I think that's it. When you don't even teach consent, you don't even have a working definition for rape, so then rape becomes the back alley with a stranger grabbing you and throwing yes against the wall. And it's not your nice boyfriend who's putting pressure on you. It all these other scenarios of someone who you trusted ever factor into your head a hundred percent. Yep, Yep. I remember reading a headline in the local newspaper sometime in my teen years. It said, I forget the stat but x percent of rapists know their victims, and I remember thinking the Boltment, that's crazy, because I couldn't fathom a scenario in which someone would rape someone they knew. It would have to be like maybe a friend from school like you described, pulls somebody into a back alley, tricks them into getting back there and then slams them up against the wall and has sex with them while they scream no, please stop. But that was the only scenario I could envision that would count as rape. I couldn't imagine like, if your boyfriend has sex with you, well, that's probably your fault because you flirted with him too much, you stayed out past this night right, you're at his house too late. Of course you're gonna think you walked into his home. I don't know. Oh my God, I'm thinking another statistic I heard, which I was mind blowing for me in terms of how women are always pressured with what they wear, you know, as if they're their job is to govern a guy's thoughts, as if guys cannot think things if you're wearing, you know, if your covered head to toe, I mean in some instances anyway, don't even go down that rabbit show. But it's interesting. They had a museum of what women were wearing. You could probably Google this. Maybe I'll look at for it, for the show notes what women were wearing when they were raped, and it was amazing how many of it were pajamas their house. There in their house rights people they know. was uncle, it was a family member, was a cousin, Ye was a friend of somebody they trusted. Most of the rapes happened under sannais where people were wearing very ordinary things. Nothing's productive, provocative or sexual in nature at all, and that's a myth that I grew up with. was like, if you're going to be raped, it's because you're wearing something to encourage it. Then, if that's the case, why our most rapes done while women are wearing very modest attire, nothing revealing at all, baggy clothes from neck to ankle. Yeah, right, yeah, and that's the assumption that rape is about sex and not about power. That's another big myth that we all grew up with as well, which is like rape is about wanting sex, it's that's sexual appetite out of control, instead of examining power dynamics, which is not a part of evangelical thinking at all, as which of power dynamics look like and how warm is it? Who? Like you know, if it's a teacher and I'm a student, there's something off. If it's a pastor and someone our counselor and someone under them, like these. This idea that some people are in positions where consent isn't even a possibility in this consider completely unethical in the secular world, but in the Christian world you're not even taught about how those different power differentials may consent impossible in certain situations. The take, yeah, can sent off the table. Right, if your few lose your job, if you don't do what your boss says, then how how is that a consensual thing? Right? Like right, yea flirt with you and be really nice to you and say, are you sure you don't want to date me? But like when you're scared, you can't feed your kids, you know, then what right? Like, how is that? Yeah, how? And another thing we haven't touched on yet is this this modesty talk is all very binary, like it's all about women versus men. Well, okay, if if sexual purity, of avoiding sexual thoughts and so important, and if gayness is so bad, then why are we not telling men and women to be modest in the locker room together? Right? Why is it fine for dudes to run around shirtless at Sports Ball Games when there might be someone struggling with same sex so attraction in the STANS? Know, yeah, and for the record, we don't believe in that idea of struggling with same sex attraction. It's if you're here, stark has a fond yeah, yeah, I can see each other space, so we could. Yeah, eyeballs getting all wide, in case you didn't detected in the tone of voice. Yeah, that's sorry. Has. That is the way that Evangelical Christianity tries to detract from the fact that's like homosexualities and orientation. So in order to avoid I wish to clarify that for anyone listening who doesn't know about that. That is a way to try and make it as if it's a personal choice, which I mean to me. I'm like, I I'm straight and if I'm going to look at the way men behave in society as a whole and and it being at choice to be gay or not, there's no way I'd be straight. Like there's just this just it's doesn't make any logical sense to me why I would ever choose to be like in this is a Tory. I don't want to be attracted to that. Just like guys have to step up their game. There's a problem going on here. Like there's a lot of issues happening. You know, women are have a lot of female friends and it's so much, so much easier. It's just overall, the emotional intelligence is so much higher, the ability to get vulnerable is so much more. There is so much more going on. That's great that guys, you know, have been socially programmed to not be able to do very well. I've been have been discouraged from even getting into what their own emotions. All you want to assist. They want to be a girl. Oh, you know, all this this talkic stunts men actually, and I'm like yeah, and even that phrase. And if it's a don't want to be a girl, as if that's the worst thing. Wow, yeah, like patriarchal culture could conditions men to hate women and then want to be with women at the same time. Right, you girl, worst thing in the world. You don't want to be a girl and does disrespect towards women, but then you have to have to get one. Yeah, you have to get one and you've been taught to literally despise women. It's yeah, that's how I know being straight is not a choice, because I'm like all of that set up just would make me be like if I could be attracted to women, I would have a lot easier streak. But I did find a great guy love me, and he is is fantastic, but it's rare, and when I look around, I mean the dating scene, was a scarier mail and it wears are going to be justly insulted by throwing that out there. Oh my goodness, yeah, that's okay. It was skewing a little too heavily in the mail direction. I was looking at the spotify stats and like, Oh, I drive. Why, why is our audience fifty one percent male? What's going on here? Yeah, it's from that down. When we start going a little to Joe Rogan, like, Nope, it's only men like this, this is a bad thing, this is how so I'm I'm curious now, like we're starting to head in that direction of talking a little bit about consort of Christians mentality with respect to the Lgbtq community and the same sex attraction, queerness transgender people. How, then, do you take that? You know, you start heading down and I know some some might hear this as like Oh, you know, it's a slippery slope. Once you get rid of, you know, one fundamental of the faith, then you know it's a free for all and you just, you know, believe that having sex with the person the same sex as fine. But maybe we can draw a little bit more of a logical, kind of rational thought process to why we might say, not only is it okay, it should be celebrated and applauded. When somebody comes out, when somebody expresses a gender identity that is not what they were assigned at birth, when somebody shares that they are attracted to a gender that they buy society standards, should not ordinarily be attracted to. How do we make those steps away from this idea that anything that isn't you know, straight managed, straight woman together and marriage bad and to where we are now. HMM. Well, the first thing I thought of us you were asking that question. It was an experience I had a few years ago when I still thought I was straight. A friend of mine came out to me as pansexual and I didn't know what that meant. At first. I was like, okay, what's the difference between Pan and buy? Is he just it's he into group sex, but I didn't want to ask because, you know, I don't want to put the burden on him to educate me. So I go googling things like what does this mean? Oh, Pan Sexual, and I shared the definition I had found with a good friend of mine. I told my friend. So I found out pansexual means that you are attractive to a person based on who they are and what they're like, not based on what their body is shaped like. So you don't care about their genitalia, you just care about the chemistry you two have as human beings and that's the basis for your attraction. But yeah, and I think that's when we when we incorporate consent into our lives and, from a Christian perspective, I think that's that is the way that you show respect to someone is that you the way that you love them and care for them is you practice consent. You seek to understand and then observe their boundaries and to help them understand themselves. That is how you love someone and in that context, any sexual orientation can be celebrated. If someone doesn't have to be sexually attracted to me in order for me to celebrate their life, and they don't have to not be sexually attracted to me for me to celebrate their life. Yeah, I think what our society of learning to do is to move away from etiquette it toward boundary setting, and that, I think, is something that Christians ought to be really, really good at, because we have long been taught to give people a little more honor and kindness than society requires of us, to do a little better, and right now we are doing way worse than the rest of society in terms of being kind to people. Yeah, and I also want to take it in in this other direction because I've I've often had these kinds of questions or accusations hurled at me about like, you know, you're you're straight. Why do you care? And I'm like, what, why do I need to be part of a community in order to care about the needs of that community? But also from from kind of another perspective, I think in terms of one of the one of the things that I've been doing over the last several years is sort of reframing my understanding of Christian faith and practice into and through this lens of Justice and Liberation. And when we look at groups of people that have historically been cast off and marginalized and oppressed, often brutally, that their ability to assert themselves in society, just for the sake of have being allowed to take up some space, being allowed to see themselves in media, being allowed to talk about who they are, is an incredible power, incredibly powerful thing, because the gender, straight white man has been plastered across every possible position of power influence media representation. So why is it such an imposition to maybe, for I don't know, a few days out of the year, throw a pride flag up there and say hey, not everybody looks like what we've been conditioned to see as normative? Right? So that's kind of like the the thing that I that I sort of latch onto in those sorts of convert conversations and in days where I feel more Christian than than other days, one of the things that helps, that kind of keeps me sort of connected to that faith is that idea of Justice and liberation, that the that the wrongs that have been committed against queer people, predominantly at the hands of religious people, that those wrongs will be righted and that, if you want to use the mythology of Christianity, that that's the message of Jesus Right, that that, if we follow Jesus, who has commanded us to go and spread good news, maybe good news in this scenario is that the oppression that you have been under for such a long time, we're going to make that right and instead of oppression, we're going to celebrate you. Right. And unfortunately, now, because we live in a capitalistic society, major corporations are taking advantage and throwing pride flags out there while doing nothing to change the landscape for the Queer for Queer people. Right, but anyway, that's a whole other conversation. Even done diversity inclusion training, but they have a bride flag around their logo. Right. I think you hit the Mail on your head when you said why do I have to be a part of a marginalized community to care about what happens to them, and I think, I think that's like Christians are taught to care for the widow and the orphans. We're not taught widows take care of each other, orphans take care of each other. It's all of you. Take Care of the Widows and orphans, like take care of the members in your society who are unable to get what they need on their own. Like if, as the saying goes, you can't you can't offer somebody a hand up if you're in the pit with them like we. The the LGBTQ community needs allies, just like the civil rights movement needed white people fighting alongside black civil rights leaders to make change happen. You need people advocating from inside for what they need and you also need people advocating from outside for to make that feasible, to offer the resources that marginalized communities just don't have because their marginal exactly, yeah, they do need. I think the the part of the maybe the weakness, is sometimes when we see yourself as the one who's out pulling a person out of the pit. We can do the saviors and stuff up as well, and because probably an important note to be made that what you said. Those in the those communities, need to be the ones leading the way, but they need the support and the resources. I like that point you made of those outside, because they're not marginalized and they have better access to that stuff. I think one of the things that's dawned on me when it came to reframing pride, because I grew up being told by they so proud pride, is that pride is evil. Why is it need to celebrate? I mean, do straight people walk around talking about how they're straight all the time? I we just show it in every movie and TV showing everywhere. So every day is straight. Yeah, a little girl, you're talking do giant? Who Do you like her? You know, you have adults talking to their five year old about if they're in a romantic relationship with a well girl. Get me started about mononormativity. All of our way. Yeah, it's still about couples and plus onees. What about a plus three or the come on, yeah, actly, go on, but like it just even. I think one of those things that help me start understanding the value of pride and reframing that was realizing how many gay kids get kicked out of their homes by Christian families, how many gay kids get disowned? I started looking around and noticing in my youth group there are a lot of gay kids who are suffering of severe depression, wanting to end their lives and didn't come out to their family because they didn't know, yeah, that would be responded to. Of Kids that were coming home with a boy to the dinner table and a family gathering because if they brought a girl they wouldn't be invited if they were growing. So there was a need to conform in order to be accepted in there was not an acceptance, there was a rejection. And people want to be like, oh, your sexuality doesn't define you, but then how are you completely kicking someone out of your community because of their sexuality and pretending it doesn't define them when you're defining everything by their sexuality? And so realizing how dangerous it is for for gay people in society still today. I mean that's still a reality that that gay kids have and that Trans kids have in terms of suicide rates because of the threats that they're under constantly and the and the fear of rejection from their own parents and how psychologically damaging that is. Then yes, we have absolutely everything to celebrate when someone comes out and tells us who they are, when saying who they are poses such a risk to their survival and wellbeing and safety and security and and having a sense of family, all of that can just be ripped away. Like a straight kid will never have to ask that question of if I tell my parents that I'm attracted to the opposite sex, could I lose? No, there's nothing that follows in there in our thought process. So yes, we need to be happy and and be proud of people who can can come and say the truth about who they are when they're told constantly to be ashamed of who they are. And that was a big reframe for me to realize. Pride exists as a response to Christians Homophobia in part, and probably it's part. It's the way that we recover from shame. Yeah, is by learning to be proud about the parts of ourselves that we have always hidden and repressed. What I've been doing a lot of that in the last year. I've been processing some trauma which has caused doors in my brain to just fly open. Whole parts of myself I didn't know existed. It's also unlocked some physical issues, like I've seen my physical health deteriorate and get better in alongside my my mental health processing. Yeah, like the coughing that you hear, and I hope you're not hearing the gum chewing that's because of acid reflux that I've been dealing with, which seems to be looking back over my history, my digested issues seemed to stem from sexual and religious trauma. So it's been fun to see. I say fun, it's been fascinating and frustrating to watch those those things developed side by side. I do want to give out, give a book for local to the Greenville area. If you or someone you know is is being rejected by family or kicked out of their home because of their sexuality or sexual orientation or gender identity, they are are groups in Greenville that have the the resources and the manpower and the and an eagerness to help you or your friends or family member. Pride link in Greenville recently opened a queer wellness center near the Heywood Mall, which offers medical mental health therapy on site, as well as basic living essentials like snacks and toiletries and cozy corners to hang out and feel safe and accepted. Also, First Baptist of Greenville has provided a lot of help to people, especially teenagers and twenty somethings, who've been kicked out of their parents home after coming out, and I know a lot of folks there would be happy to help someone find a place to live or even provide a place to live with an adult who will be affirming and encouraging and help someone get on their emotional feet again. And Greenville, the upstate, now has a Queer Chamber of Commerce, which is a network of Queer affirming, queer owned and ally businesses, and if you reach out to them, I know the leadership there would be happy to network for you and help you find people who have the resources to help with your specific situation. And you're also welcome to find me on social media and send me a message and I can, I'm happy to introduce you to people I know who can get you what you need. Well, thanks for sharing. I action want. I'm going to put all of those into the show notes so that people can can find that stuff easily, click the links, etc. Jen, this has been a blast. Thank you so much, for joining us. Yeah, we did cover a lot of ground and this has been really exciting. I kind of want to get your thoughts on we talked a lot about, you know, the things that we might see as wrong with our upbringing, and I don't I don't know, at least from my perspective, I don't know that there is much that I can glean in terms of what's right. But perhaps, as sort of a parting thought, what are some things that you might want to express to to conservative Christians of your stripe, from from your upbringing? What are some things that you would like to share with them about what you think and who you are now? Um, actually, what I would like to express to people who are living in a conservative environment is something that I wish had been expressed to me when I was doing the same. I feel like we're we're given a binary, another binary the age old archetypes of the the virgin or the slut. You have to choose between the two, and in conservative circles, of course, the slut is not an option. You have to be the virgin. So I always felt like I was being pulled into directions by my different friends circles, my conservative Christian friends were all about don't have any sex because you're not married, and my non Christian friends were like, I felt like nobody said this to me, but I felt like the pressure was have all the sex, sleep around, go to bars, hook up, do one night stands, and it was a relief to me to the most liberating thing anyone has ever said to me was if you don't want to have sex, don't have sex, and I really wish people would hear and know that monogamy is a valid choice. It works for a lot of people. Celibacy is a valid choice. That works for a lot of people. You don't need a reason to not have sex, you don't need to even know why you don't want to have sex and you never owe anyone an explanation for saying no. Yeah, it was. I was relieved to learn in my late s or early s that it is very normal for a lot of adults in this country who are not conservative Christians, who are atheists, agnostics, to go long stretches, years at a time, not being sexually active. That's very normal and it's okay and there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah, so the so the sexual liberation includes the right to say no, not just in a certain circumstance, but for long stretches of time. I would I totally not only vacuum up from it. Is definitely a new thought in the sense of flee. Grew up in those environments being told, you know, first of all, you to talk about sex all the time. Everybody wants and all of the time, and you had avoid it all the time. And then there's that hyper focus on it. And then if you look at the studies and Statistics about secular kids, and we would they, we hear in Christian circles about how sexualized our society has become, how accessible sex is and how everywhere and young adults these days and young teenagers are having sex later in life and less and before when she is. And you know it's not because they're in families that are telling them, discouraging them from not. In fact, I was constantly discouraged and I from having it and I had it very young. I think all the talk about it pushed me in the other direction totally. Yeah, actually had completely the opposite efact and I look at my kids and the pressure was off and they went for long stretches without being with anyone and we're happy and content, and I gave credit to being not in those environments where that was the cause of continuous focus, where they could feel normal just being by themselves. You know, yeah, I said. They're not afraid that the rapture is going to happen before they have sex. Right, Oh, that's my biggest fear as an adolescent, though it's like, yeah, it's true, because they have no lease, don't send email and heaven we're genitalia. That's amazing. I think that's a good note to end things off. Yes, just absolutely and imagine it. Don't think, don't think about it at all. You're allowed thinking about this topic. Thank you again, Jen. So where can people find you on the the INTERWEBS? What are you have a like social media handles, website, etc. Uh, Huh, Uh Huh. It's hard to find because you have to spell my last name, and God bless you if you are able to do that. But you can find me on facebook or instagram or twitter. I'm not very active on twitter, but if you message me there or at me, I will see it. And if you search for Jen Jenn Alan, Perry, Ali and N Perri, that's that's my handle everywhere. Jen Allen Perry, and we'll go ahead and put that in the show notes and your name will be in the title so people can figure out how to spell it pretty easily. But thank you again. This has been so much fun and we'll see you all around soon. That wraps up another episode of the full mutuality podcast. If you haven't already, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast APP and if you don't already have one, head over to our website, film mutualitycom for a list of all the apps you can find us on. We couldn't do this without you, our listener, so thank you so much for your continued support. Speaking of support, one of the best things you can do for us is to head over to apple podcasts and leave us a review. I'm pretty sure five star reviews get you an extra crown in heaven looks. Seriously, if you found this episode insightful, spread the word and share it with your friends, and don't forget to follow us on social media. You can find us on facebook, instagram and twitter at full mutuality. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you on the next episode of the full mutuality podcast.