Hey everyone,

Sorry my blog posts have been a bit sparse for the last two weeks, as you know I’m self employed so I, like every other self employed individual in the country, have been frantically trying to finish my Tax Return (and gathering money to pay my taxes lol) before the deadline to avoid the £100 fine! Blogging came second to that I’m sorry lol. Anyway, it’s submitted now and I can get back to blogging.

I’ve been meditating on something someone said to me a while back. “Why don’t you just find a nice guy from church?”

Well….. that’s making some pretty big assumptions, like the idea that they are all “nice” for a start:
They are only men

Christian men are just that… they are men. They have the same stupidness festering at the back of their minds that other men do, it’s just the way they deal with it is different. Or at least it’s supposed to be. Don’t expect too much from them hah hah! They have the same struggles. Any Christian guys reading this, well… whatever naughty thoughts they were ever going to have about me, trust me, they have already had them as soon as they saw I posted something on FB/Twitter/LinkedIn… In fact, it’s probably the reason why they even read my blog in the first place… regardless of whether they are in a relationship or not.

A guy could be one thing leading worship on stage and then behind closed doors he’s a gimp! Women have literally died, literally, when they just assumed that a guy was one thing because he said he was.

I’ve always said that the only difference between a Christian guy and a guy who isn’t a Christian is thus – they both want to have sex with you in the back of their car it’s just you expect the Christian guy to have the decency to marry you first… and that’s it!

The moment some exegete find any scrap of evidence that you CAN in fact have sex before marriage, they are all going to be at it like no body’s business… Do not be under any illusions, that nice church boy wants to put his penis in your daughters vagina. Yeah he’s waiting but with the end game of penetration.

The problem with being a woman is that a man who just wants a place to park his penis for the night wants to have sex with you and a man who is attracted to you, utterly loves the very ground you walk on and is completely dedicated to your personal and spiritual development is also a man who wants to have sex with you. When both kinds of men are expressing the same kind of desire towards you it can be difficult to tell which man you should be with! Some Christian guys are just getting married JUST so they can have sex with the young woman they like. I’ve heard these horror stories and they all ended in divorce unfortunately because they slept with each other, then immediately realised that all they had in their relationship was the anticipation of sex, they had sex and then relationship was done literally within a few hours of marriage. It’s sad but this is happening in the church, right now because there are guys whose motivation is not what it should be.
You cannot make assumptions about anyone’s Christianity

Not every person who says they are a Christian is a Christian. Only Jesus knows not who but WHAT is actually sitting in the pews. It says in the Bible:

(Matthew 7:21 NLT) “[21] “Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter.”

Some people are just IN the church but they are not OF the church. On more than one occasion I’ve had guys, church guys, who seem soo nice and sweet at church and good, call/fb message/etc me to ask to see me naked… I’m not even joking. I wish I was, this has happened people! I’ve just stopped taking certain peoples calls/whatsapp/fb friend requests now lol. We’re not supposed to have sex or do highly intimate and sexual things before marriage! I’ve blogged about this! (follow this link for more information). I’m not saying we can’t kiss but good gracious! Stop asking! It’s not going to happen! These people are not Christians, soo many guys I’ve met and I’ve realised that they are just there (as in at church) so as not to upset their mum or their grandmother but they don’t believe it and at the first opportunity they misbehave.

Some guys they just think that it’s ok to go up to the boundary but it’s not ok to cross the boundary. The boundary is a marker of where you should not be, it’s a warning sign that you are going to the outer limits and YOU NEED TO TURN BACK! So many times guys who I thought were Christian tried to encourage me to do things with them that I should not and I’m thinking “…what’s going on?!!?? I thought you and I went to church??…”.

You have got to be careful. Only Jesus knows what is really going on in a man’s mind.
Male headship and female submission theologies make Christian men mistreat women (this bit is in my PhD)

Christianity, like mainstream European/British/American culture is patriarchal (men leading follow this link for a dictionary explanation) this mixture of religion and male headship/female submission ideals have been proven to be dangerous for women, as religion and spirituality can overtly and covertly promote abuse (Yick 2008, p.1289) and the greatest predictors of violence against women are environments that support male control and male authority over female behaviour (Heise and Kotsadam 2015, e333). As a result, the Christian environment can be predicted (and proven) to be an abusive atmosphere for women, as it is already known that Christianity is patriarchal in nature and patriarchy fosters and cultivates environments where men seek to control or abuse women (Wall 2014). Furthermore, Christian teachings can be used to enforce patriarchal marital roles, e.g. male leadership/control and female submission (Aune & Barnes 2018, p.10).

The cocktail of sexist ideas towards women and faith have been proved to be unsafe for women in churches. In a study conducted in Christian homes in North America, it was found that physical abuse rates of Christian women are similar to societal rates (Annis and Rice 2001). This was found to translate in UK churches where a study conducted in Cumbria found that when all forms of domestic abuse are included, the evidence (e.g. Wang et al. 2009) suggests that there is not a significant difference in rates of abuse when churchgoers are compared with non-churchgoers. Conservative ideas on female submission and male headship and a culture of silence were found to blame in many of these cases (Aune & Barnes 2018). Shockingly, it was also found by S. Tracey (2008) that evangelical men who sporadically attend church are more likely than men of any other religious group, even more likely than secular men, to assault their wives (Tracey 2008, p.16). Knickmeyer et al. (2010) interviewed Christian women who said their husbands used conservative Christian theological ideas of male headship and female submission as sanction to abuse them (Knickmeyer, Levitt & Horne 2010, p.102), compelling their wives to submit to their authority because they said the Bible required it. Christian teachings can also be used to pressure women to forgive too quickly or to see abuse as their “cross to bear” (Nason-Clark 2004 p.304). Interestingly, mainline protestant churches have been quicker to respond to the issue of domestic abuse than evangelicals, the most conservative of whom continue to publish marriage advice literature that ignores the problem (Aune & Barnes 2018, p.12).

The Bible, when properly translated, is egalitarian but as men are often holders of knowledge and therefore… power, they are not forthcoming with this information. This is because if the women understood that they are equal as leaders to men they would rise up, become more independent and the men would loose their ability to control them. For further reading on this topic I suggest starting with “What Paul Really Said About Women” by John Temple Bristow. I say start here because it’s not super long but is still academically rigorous – here’s the link for the book on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/What-Paul-Really-about-Women/dp/0060610638.
Conclusion

If there is a Christian guy who is interested in your daughter you should exercise the same level of caution and suspicion that you would with any man. Some Christian guy’s are in fact a larger more pressing threat, more dangerous than your normal man because he appears non-threatening and “safe” so you trust him more and scrutinize him less, then happily leave him alone with your daughter, not realising that she is actually just his prey. He knows you are more willing to look away and trust him because he’s a “good church boy” and you want your daughter to be with someone “nice” and “successful”. He uses this to his advantage. However, if it has a penis it will try and find a vagina to put it in so be careful how much freedom you have with him. Everyone has a point in which they will just give in.

Arm yourselves with knowledge and stop being so gosh darn naive.

P.S. some are really nice this is not true of every Christian man you just have to pray that you found the right one and use discernment.

Catherine x

Bibliography

Annis, W. and R. R. Rice. 2001. A Survey of Abuse Prevalence in the Christian Reformed Church. Journal of Religion and Abuse. 3:3-4, 7-40

Aune, K. & R Barnes. 2018. In Churches Too: Church Responses to Domestic Abuse – A case study of Cumbria. Coventry: Coventry University and Leicester: University of Leicester.

Heise, L. L. and A. Kotsadam. 2015. Cross-national and multilevel correlates of partner violence: an analysis of data from population-based surveys. The Lancet Global Health. 3, e332-340.

Knickmeyer, N., H. Levitt, & S. G. Horne. 2010. Putting on Sunday Best: The Silencing of Battered Women within Christian Faith Communities. Feminism & Psychology, 20:1, 94-113.

Nason-Clark, N. 2004. When Terror Strikes at Home: The Interface Between Religion and Domestic Violence. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 43:3, 303-310.

Tracey, S. R. 2008. What Does “Submit In Everything” Really Mean? The Nature And Scope Of Marital Submission. TRINJ. 29, 285-312

Wall, L. 2014. ‘Gender equality and violence against women: What’s the connection?’ Australian Government, Australian Institute of Family Studies Web site, at: <https://aifs.gov.au/sites/default/files/publication-documents/ressum7.pdf&gt; 2 March 2018

Wang, M-C, S. G. Horne, H. M. Levitt & L. M. Klesges. 2009. Christian Women in IPV Relationships: An Exploratory Study of Religious Factors. Journal of Psychology and Christianity. 28:3, 224-235.

Yick, A. G. 2008. A Metasynthesis of Qualitative Findings on the Role of Spirituality and Religiosity Among Culturally Diverse Domestic Violence Survivors. Qualitative Health Research, 18:9, 1289-1306.