It's Christmastime at the Washington Post—and Christmastime at the Washington Post means it's time for another article bashing Christianity, the religion that invented Christmas.
So this year we have this very strange op-ed, written by Ruth Everhart, a Presbyterian pastor in Bethesda, Maryland:
Church culture tends to be fixated on sexual purity year-round, but during Advent, I'm tempted to blame it on the Virgin Mary. After all, she set an impossibly high bar. Now the rest of us are stuck trying to be both a virgin and a mother at the same time. It does not seem to matter that this is biologically impossible.
Um, yes indeed it's biologically impossible to be both a virgin and a mother, unless you happen to be a Caucasian rock lizard or one of its parthogenetic relatives. And indeed the Virgin Mary herself, according to Luke's Gospel, questioned how she, never having had sexual relations with a man, could become the mother of the "son of the Highest." The angel Gabriel had to explain to her that "with God nothing is impossible." Most Christians, including Everhart's very own Presbyterians, hold that Jesus as the son of God had no human father. No one is obliged to believe in the Virgin Birth (and plenty of people on this planet don't)—but if you do, you believe that it was a unique supernatural event.
This is why no Christian denomination that I know of actually forces women to be "stuck trying to be a virgin and a mother at the same time." That was Mary's job.
Now, Ruth Everhart, as she narrates, was the victim as a 20-year-old college student of a horrific form of sexual assault: Intruders broke into the house she shared with several other young women and took turns raping them, at gunpoint. Everhart convincingly describes the trauma of this event, and also the guilt and shame that all crime victims report. If only I'd done something a little differently, this wouldn't have happened. And for rape victims who have to repeatedly retell the grisly details in police reports and courtroom testimony, the trauma, guilt, and shame are undoubtedly double and triple. Fortunately for Everhart, she seems to have come out of the experience reasonably intact: She now has a loving husband, children, and a successful ministry.
Nonetheless, Everhart is determined to pin the blame for her lingering sense of violation not on the gang of rapists, not on a perhaps callous legal system, but on the Christian church:
Church culture has overfocused on virginity and made it into an idol of sexual purity. When it comes to female experience, the church seems compelled to shrink and distort and manipulate. … We want to pretend sexuality is something we can lock in a box and keep on a shelf. But a lockbox won't work. Neither will a chastity belt or a purity ring. Certainly not the abstinence pledges they make young folks sign.
In other words, if only Christianity encouraged young women to have loosey-goosey sex lives instead of trying to save it for their husbands, rape victims wouldn't feel so bad. And that doctrine of the Virgin Birth, with its "gospel of sanitized sexuality"—please!
… I study [Mary] this time of the year — always dressed in blue with downcast eyes — and want to ask: "How was it really? And how do you feel about what the patriarchy has done with you?"
I feel sorry for Ruth Everhart—I'd never want to go through what she went through—but I feel even sorrier for Christian readers of the Washington Post, whose way of saying "Merry Christmas" is to fire cheap shots at the central Christian event that the day celebrates.