a word before we begin

This booklet is about romance, the whole glittering culture of it, and it may be the one in this series that offends you most, because it touches the thing many of us hold most tightly. The daughters of Christ are being deceived about it, by the world and, far more painfully, by the church, and what follows exists to drag that lie into the light and to show that it does not hold up, not to history, and not to the Word of God.

I will tell you plainly that I have been angry about this. Not at you, for you and I are in the same boat, but at the bill of goods women in the church have been sold. And not some small corner of it, not one bad congregation or one strange teacher, but the whole of the modern Western church, top to bottom, which has been handing women this same lie for a very long time now, long enough that we have stopped being able to see it as a lie at all. I was sold it too, and it took me years to see it.

Stay with me through it, because on the far side of this lie there is more joy waiting than the lie ever promised: more joy in yourself, more joy in your walk with Christ, more joy in your marriage and your friendships and your home. The lie promises everything and starves you. The truth looks harder at first, and then it sets you free.

chapter one

the lie we are sold

The vast majority of us love this stuff, so let me name it plainly. The romance novels with the bare-chested men on the cover. Fifty Shades of Grey, which sold more than 150 million copies, the overwhelming bulk of them to women, a strikingly high number of them to women in the church. Bridgerton. Twilight. Outlander. The Notebook. And the Hallmark Channel Christmas movie, you know the one, because it is always the same one, where the big-city career woman comes home to the small town and falls for the rugged man who runs the Christmas tree farm. We do not merely enjoy these things. We hunger for them, we arrange our daydreams around them, and then, quietly, when no one is looking, we hold our own husbands and our own ordinary lives up against them and find them wanting.

Let me put us on the same side of the table so we understand each other. I am not standing outside all of this looking down my nose at it. I enjoy some of it myself. I truly enjoy the Twilight films. I actually like Bridgerton, though I will say, as an aside, that there is a filtering service called Vidangel that strips out the explicit scenes and the worst of the language. And let me commend that to you in passing: if you or your family would like to watch a great deal of what is out there without all the adult content folded into it, go find a tool like that, for it is a wonderful thing for a household, and especially if there are children about. But that is an aside. My point is this: I am not telling you these stories cannot be enjoyed, or that there is something wrong with liking a good tale well told. I like them too. This is not a work against stories.

Let me draw a line here, because it matters. There is a difference between a story that has bad content in it and a story that is bad content at its core. Bridgerton has a story underneath it, a world, characters, a plot you can actually follow, with explicit scenes laid on top that a tool can strip away, leaving the tale intact. But Fifty Shades is not a good story with a few bad scenes in it. The bad thing is the story. Strip out the domination and the degradation and there is nothing left, because that was the whole point of it. The one has filth poured over it; the other is filth all the way down. So I am not asking you to treat every title alike. I am asking you to learn the difference between what can be cleaned and what is rotten at the root.

Now hear the burden of the whole booklet. I am not wringing my hands over the daughters of Babylon. Of course the world devours these stories and binges these dramas; the world is the world, and the women of Babylon will do what the women of Babylon do, and it is no more surprising than water running downhill. Let them have their books and their movies. That is not my concern, and it is not the point. My concern, my burden, is that the daughters of Christ are lined up at the same trough, feeding on the very same things, and calling it harmless. This is not a work scolding the world. This is a word calling out something inside the church.

My burden is that the daughters of Christ are lined up at the same trough, feeding on the very same things, and calling it harmless.

And I want to suggest something you are not going to like. If nearly every woman on earth craves a thing this badly, if the world simply cannot get enough of it, that is not proof the thing is good for us. For the daughter of God, that is precisely the moment to stop and look twice. I am not saying the world is wrong about everything; that would be foolish. I am saying the world is wrong about a great many things, and our own Bible tells us so plainly. The whole world lieth in wickedness, John writes. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.1

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”

– 1 John 2:15

So when I see a book like Fifty Shades sell so readily, I do not think, well, it must be giving them something they truly need. I think: what exactly is the hook, and what is on the other end of the line? Because I have come to believe that this whole glittering culture of romance, the one we were raised on, the one we have been marinating in since we were little girls watching the prince slide the glass slipper onto the right foot, is not the harmless indulgence we tell ourselves it is. I believe it is quietly starving us. I believe it is wrecking marriages, including a great many that look perfectly lovely from the outside. And the saddest part is that most of us will defend it to our dying breath, precisely because it feels so good to want it.

That is what this booklet is about: a lie so sweet and so familiar that we have stopped being able to taste that anything is wrong with it. I am not going to tell you that romance is wicked, or that longing is a sin, or that you must never again enjoy a love story. What I am going to do is show you where the lie hides inside the thing you love, so that you can pull it out, and keep the good, and be free.

confessions of an action-oriented woman

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sources & notes

  1. 1 John 2:15–17 (“Love not the world”) and 1 John 5:19 (“the whole world lieth in wickedness”), the believer’s call to hold the world’s appetites at a critical distance rather than assume that what is universally craved must be good. A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, on the idolatry of inordinate desire. Fifty Shades of Grey (E. L. James, 2011), which began as Twilight fan-fiction, had sold over 150 million copies worldwide by 2017; Twilight (Stephenie Meyer, 2005) roughly 160 million.
  2. John 4:1–26, the woman of Samaria at the well, to whom the Lord offers “living water” that ends thirst (John 4:13–14), after naming her five husbands (4:18). The idol-as-broken-cistern image draws on Jeremiah 2:13 (“broken cisterns, that can hold no water”). J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible (John).
  3. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (Yale University Press, 1977), on the nineteenth-century doctrine of “separate spheres” and the “cult of domesticity,” which these historians date to roughly the 1790s–1800s, not to all of history.
  4. Edward Jay Epstein, “Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?” The Atlantic (1982); Uri Friedman, “How an Ad Campaign Invented the Diamond Engagement Ring,” The Atlantic (2015), on the De Beers / N. W. Ayer campaign: the agency was engaged in 1938, and copywriter Frances Gerety wrote “A Diamond Is Forever” in 1947 (first run 1948). Before the campaign, only a small fraction, commonly estimated around one in ten, of American engagement rings featured a diamond.
  5. The major romance properties are the work of women. Fifty Shades of Grey (E. L. James) and Twilight (Stephenie Meyer), and the great bulk of the romance-fiction market and much of the Hallmark-style romance film catalogue, are written and produced predominantly by women. The observation that this body of work tends to render male characters in one of two unrealistic directions, the domineering “beast” or the feelings-driven idealized companion, is a critical generalization, not a universal law, and the text grants explicit exceptions in both directions. As one such exception, Kathryn Bigelow directed Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and The Hurt Locker (2008), for the latter of which she became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director; her handling of male characters and masculine milieus is widely regarded as an exception to the tendency described. Band of Brothers (2001) is offered as an example of the fraternal, duty-centered war narrative in which men are portrayed as men tend to portray themselves.
  6. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960), for the fourfold distinction; W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Love.” In the New Testament agape and phileo are used throughout; storge appears only in compound and negated forms (Romans 12:10, philostorgos; Romans 1:31, astorgos); and eros, common in classical and Koine Greek, does not appear at all.
  7. Plato, Symposium, especially the speech of Diotima (201d–212c), where eros is portrayed as a striving ladder of longing that ascends from one object to the next toward beauty itself; with the Greek deity Eros (Roman Cupid) behind the personification. The medieval descent of “courtly love” is treated in C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936).
  8. The comparison to addiction (rising tolerance, diminishing return, chasing a first high) is offered as an analogy for the escalating dynamic of novelty-seeking. On discontent as ingratitude, Philippians 4:11 (“I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content”) and Hebrews 13:5.
  9. Gary Chapman, The Five Love Languages (1992), a widely-used framework not derived from Scripture but from a counseling-and-self-fulfillment model; the critique here is that organizing love around the meeting of one’s own preferred “language” inverts the self-giving pattern of agape.
  10. 1 Corinthians 13:4–8, where love (agape, KJV “charity”) is described almost entirely in verbs, actions rather than feelings, with John 3:16 (“God so loved the world, that he gave”). Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Wise (1 Corinthians), on love as deliberate action.
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