I would love to have a conversation about this with Du Mez. And I do not remember any instance of a girl or woman being blamed for pre-marital sex or extra-marital sex, at least not as harshly as the male involved. I never heard that sex is a good gift of God until much later. I/we were given the clear impression that any sexual thoughts, feelings, urges, desires had to be repressed and repented of when they occurred until marriage and then absolutely limited to the marriage bedroom.
In my opinion, based on my long-ago experiences as a white male American evangelical, I am sure that our spiritual mentors were extremely unrealistic about boys and young men in terms of their sexual urges. (I have seen most of Wayne’s movies over the years and do not remember any one in which he treated a woman as a sexual object or someone to be abused in any way. John Wayne was celebrated, if at all, as a paragon of male sexual restraint and purity. In the denomination and Bible college I attended it was absolutely clear that if pre-marital or extra-marital sex occurred it was the man’s fault. (The “bleeding Sadducees” were held up to us as examples of men who were so rightly concerned about purity of mind that they went to an extreme.) The point of the story was, I learned, not to keep your eyes closed but to keep your mind pure, clear of any sexual thoughts-no matter what you saw. I wonder if Du Mez is at all aware of this “other side of the story?” We adolescent evangelical males were told about the (probably non-existent) “bleeding Sadducees” of Jesus’s time who bled because they kept their eyes closed in public so as not to see women and they kept running into buildings and other obstacles. In the evangelicalism I grew up in (long before she was born), there was at least ALSO a strong emphasis - aimed at young males- that we were totally responsible to rein in and control our sexual urges until marriage and that only within the bonds of marriage could we have sexual thoughts and desires. I do not discount or deny Du Mez’s “story” about the white, American, evangelical tendency to blame women for men’s immorality, but I never experienced that. Masturbation which was never mentioned by name but strongly hinted was so sinful that a young person (or anyone) who engaged in it was already halfway to hell. What I now consider normal puberty and adolescent feelings and thoughts, desires, were considered almost mortal sins. We were told that we could easily fall into Satan’s hands just by having dirty thoughts about girls’ and women’s bodies and about sex. I and my white, American evangelical male peers were harangued by evangelists, pastors, Sunday School teachers and writers about our sexuality and how we could go to hell for having sexual desires and feelings. I grew up in the thick of mid-to-late 20th century white American evangelicalism-as a boy and young man.
Here I will respond to only one part of Du Mez’s responses to the interviewer’s questions.ĭu Mez claims that the white American evangelicalism of the 1940s through the end of the 20th century thrived on a vision of male sexual dominance over women that excused distorted and abusive masculine sexuality and blamed women for their experiences of sexual and other abuse at the hands of evangelical men. However, I have watched the following Youtube interview with Du Mez: “Kristen Du Mez: How Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith | Amanpour and Company.” I admit that I have not yet read Kristen Du Mez’s book “Jesus and John Wayne.” I plan to.