by Bailey Pickens
I grew up a Presbyterian (USA) in the Deep South.
This will be the opening salvo to many an essay of mine, I’m sure. This is because it’s important: I grew up a mainline Calvinist (gently Calvinist, I’ll admit) surrounded by conservative Baptists. This means a lot of things—some of which I’ll write about later—but for now, this means I grew up very close to, but just outside of, various permutations of Evangelical Christian culture. My background seems to have me bristling at depictions of Christians no matter where I am: defensive of Christians writ large at my college in Chicago, of liberals when I visit home, of Evangelicals at my divinity school in Connecticut.
This past semester, I audited a class taught by Mark Oppenheimer, an NYTimes columnist, called “Writing About Religion.” A fun, lively seminar, it examined religion journalism of all sorts, from Christopher Hitchens’s hit piece on Mother Teresa (very highly recommended, incidentally—his conclusions are to my mind hysterical, but his obsessively collected and meticulously presented evidence complicates the new saint’s legacy in a real way) to long-form pieces on Scientology to disillusioned ex-Christian memoirs to a prizewinning series of articles on an imam in New York City.
The class gave me plenty to bristle at: though often pleasantly surprised by the writing and my fellows, I was just as often brought up short by what felt (unfairly, of course) like nearly deliberate ignorance. I felt bristlier by the week, and by the end of the class may as well have been a pincushion, exhilarated by the discussions but furious at misunderstandings of my own people and my childhood neighbors. I was given an outlet for my bristles in a paper assignment: “Use what we’ve read to talk about how religion journalism should be done. However you like. Opinions welcome!” And I had plenty.
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“Would You Pledge Your Virginity to Your Father?” is primarily a portrait of Baumgardner’s own bewilderment that anyone’s answer wouldn’t be a resounding “no.” The article stumbles between statistics that complicate rather than bolster her thesis (viz., that the women and girls she interviews are entranced by the shadows on the wall of the cave [the cave is patriarchy]), poorly situated expert quotations, and words from the girls involved that are relegated to background noise.
The article is bad, and it isn’t bad because Baumgardner isn’t smart or aware or is especially unobservant. It’s bad because she writes about participants in purity culture the way my genteel, racist grandmother talks about black people. Baumgardner is unable to write about the purity ball she attended with any coherence because she is fundamentally unable to sympathize with the people she saw. Perhaps more to the point, she does not think they are to be sympathized with. The girls are to be pitied, the fathers viewed slightly askance, but their words and actions exist in a sphere separate from the sphere of rational people with healthy sexualities—that is, Baumgardner’s sphere.
This is worth pressing. Baumgardner’s total inability to in any way relate to the people she writes about here leads her into a species of pedestrian objectification that is appalling, especially considering her feminist background. She describes body shape, dress cut, and makeup use, as though offended at the thought of people with different, arguably dangerous—but at any rate backward and prudish—understandings of sexuality, buying into precisely the same standards of female beauty and prom fashion that animate every teenage formal event, everywhere in America, that doesn’t mandate the covering of shoulders. The tight fit of a promotional t-shirt “sends a bit of a mixed message,” she says, apparently endorsing the idea that tight clothing signals sexual availability, although the first thing that stfusexists.tumblr.com taught me is that that’s sexist. She is so unsympathetic to her subjects that she falls back on the sort of shaming of young female sexuality that one assumes she would ordinarily abhor. “In patriarchy,” says one of her experts (out of left field and after an ignorant throwaway line about “biblical times”), “a father owns a girl’s sexuality.” What a relief to know that, as my father never worked to prevent my figuring out of mine, I got to grow up outside of patriarchy.
I am not demanding that Baumgardner herself become an Evangelical Christian if she hopes to write an effective article about purity culture.
The problem is not that she isn’t one of them; the problem is that she cannot understand how anyone would be. The problem is that this is too weird to be worth genuinely looking at in light of the importance of father-daughter relationships to girls’ development and self-esteem, which statistics she includes without connecting them to the girls in question at all. The problem is that this is too weird to be worth looking at in light of girls’ ownership of their sexuality—even if it’s co-ownership with a male relative—against, say, the assumption of much of American culture that female sexuality and female bodies belong to everyone else, especially men. The problem is that Baumgardner is too invested in the idea of sexual exploration as the healthy model of teenage development to devote any scrutiny to the Texan she found for this piece who made a pledge (apparently unconnected to the balls) at fourteen, had sex at fifteen, and was pregnant at nineteen, and who is instead merely presented as evidence for the claim that purity pledges are doomed to failure.
The problem is that she wrote this article before she went to the ball at all.
Baumgardner doesn’t understand what she’s looking at. She can’t.
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Contrast this with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s article for GQ. “Upon This Rock” starts out precisely as smarmy and self-congratulatory as I would expect a GQ article about Christian rock to be. Sullivan is smarter than everyone around him, even (or especially) the people helping him get to the people he’s writing about. He pulls a cute bait-and-switch describing Evangelicalism as a cult controlling a dystopian future. He even condescends to the fat girl in the second section. The article is candy to anyone with a taste for too-slick, too-smart writing about people they thinks they're above, until a day or so into the Creation Festival, when Sullivan cracks. He writes it to the rhythm of physical exhaustion and hunger, but the larger point is that he knows the people around him. He can’t keep writing like they aren’t the same kind of person that he is.
Sullivan manages to write about affective community, essential humanity, and the work of Evangelical Christianity in the lonely and the damaged without ever suggesting that his readers should convert, or that Christian rock is good (it is, as he says, very bad), or that Creation Festival is a fun place, or anything else that might reflect a lack of critical distance. Sullivan’s piece is good because, though outside, he can sympathize with those on the inside, and in a way that can’t be written off with a nod to his adolescent experiences. A hip suburban church experience is little like the Evangelicalism of the desperately poor and marginal. The West Virginians who take Sullivan in quote from the King James Verson, not the NIV; Verm and company prepared him, perhaps, for Creation Festival, but much less for Ritter and Jake. Sullivan’s piece succeeds where it might have failed, utterly, as the first third at least suggests that it ought to fail, because he is capable of sympathy with people who are unlike him. He is capable of imagining a world in which their actions and words are reasonable, not foreign, and what's more, he's capable of imagining that that world is in fact this one, and not too far from home.
The obvious question is whether this is a sympathy required of writers about religion in particular, and at first, I thought that it was. I’m religious. I thought I wanted a treatment of religion that recognized it as special. I was wrong. The parallels between sports and religion are easy: insider jargon and shorthand, loyalties that can be arbitrary and fanatical, allusions to previous events and shared histories that outsiders can’t access. But there’s a piece of this analogy that we didn’t touch in class: the defensive Catholic recoil and the rush to protect rapist priests bears startling resemblance to the near-riots in Pennsylvania around Sandusky’s trial and conviction. I don’t need Sullivan to dance around the patness of Evangelical certainty, and I don’t need Baumgardner to decide that purity balls are the way to go if you’re worried about your fifteen-year-old daughter’s sex life.
What I need—that is, what I understand to be the obligation of a religion writer—is good reporting. Reporting cannot be very good if the reporter doesn’t understand what she is looking at. Reporting cannot be very good without a basic understanding of the field of play and an ability to sympathize, on the level of “also a human person,” with the people in it. Religion is a human endeavor that is important to people. It deserves precisely as much respect as, and no more than, any other human endeavor that is important to people. If the endeavor seems bizarre, humanize it. If it seems alien, familiarize it. If it’s harmful, show it. If you write about it, know about it. If you don’t know, learn. This is, of course, not an easy demand to make of reporters of any kind, that they be sympathetic and aware, but it isn’t a demand for special knowledge or for special treatment of the subject. The biggest holes in Alix Spiegel’s piece, “Pray (Can the secular world and the religious world understand each other?)”—the lack of awareness of Colorado Springs’s place in the American Christian jigsaw puzzle—could have been filled by five minutes on Wikipedia. The piece is still better than many because she does not make her subjects freaks; because she finds a deep attraction, a gut level “getting it,” about the way they relate to each other and to her. Andrea Elliot’s series, “Muslims in America,” soars because it does not flinch in front of difference or let difference dominate the story, and she seems to have done her homework.
If religion journalism’s major post-9/11 project is to be explaining religion as a motivating force behind national and global events, it must also treat it as something that is not just other, something simultaneously curious and understandable, like every other thing humans do.
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About the author:
Bailey Pickens is a divinity student at Yale, studying in order to become a Presbyterian minister. She went to college with James Davisson. This is her first guest post for In Progress.
Photo source:
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/peasap/566255156/
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