The Problem of the "Rescue" Narrative in Christian Writing for Women

Protecting and Protection Rackets in Millennial Christian Literature

There is a strong “rescue” theme in fiction and non-fiction Christian literature for women.

Part of this seems to be a result of the titles of “Jesus” and “husband” bleeding into each other, drawing on the New Testament trope of Jesus as the church as a husband and wife. As a Christian, I have no objection to describing Jesus as savior and rescuer. The problem is when we uncritically assign this same role to men. 

For example: in the under-discussed but widely-read purity-culture-making book When God Writes your Love Story (Eric and Leslie Ludy, 1999), Leslie Ludy frames the status of a woman before figurative husband Jesus and literal husband Eric in desolate terms. Leslie experiences dating as the process of slowly chipping away at one’s humanity, giving “parts” of herself (primarily emotional) to a series of men before resolving to give herself more completely to Jesus and the safe relationship with her now-husband, overseen by her father (112). 

The rescue theme is all but essential to similar books like Captivating (John and Stasi Eldredge, 2005), in which the husband-wife dynamic is explicitly framed as a rescuer-rescued relationship drawing on damsel-in-distress film tropes. 

Once married, women stay safe because they have husbands, who protect them. Nancy DeMoss identifies husbands as among the authorities who protect women. Like children obeying their protective parents, submitting to and following one’s husband keeps one from danger - spiritual and otherwise.  

This also happens in Christian storytelling. When I was a kid, my church used to give the book Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers to eighth graders (that book has a scene where the main character has sex with her biological dad, it’s basically Oldboy for children). The primary dynamic in this book which I suppose was interpreted as aspirational for young women, frames the entire process of courtship and marriage (where the categories of God/Jesus/husband are intentionally blended) as a rescue. Heroine Angel’s life is a nightmare of abuse and exploitation until Micah saves and marries her. 

Likewise, while biblical narratives about love and marriage don’t always need to be framed as rescue, they regularly are. We can, if we like, choose to foreground the initiative of Ruth in choosing to pursue and win Boaz. Or, we can frame Boaz as the man who saves her from widowhood, poverty, and vulnerability. 

This narrative makes life hard for women for a few clear reasons. 

1. It’s hard to have an adult identity when you think of yourself as in danger, spiritually or physically. The rescue narrative encourages women to think of themselves as vulnerable, childlike, and unable to fend or think for themselves.

DeMoss explicitly frames women as like children, who need the direction and protection provided from men to be safe. A two-year-old who wants to run into traffic knows what he feels, but doesn’t understand the reality behind it. In the same way, encouraging women to think of themselves as needing protection encourages them to infantilize themselves, to think of their instincts as irrational, and avoid direction from women who don’t fall in line with the men around them. 

The additional problem, as we will discuss below, is that the rescue narrative actually makes women vulnerable. If Christian men are here to rescue women, it is hard for women to protect each other and themselves. They are regularly reminded of their deficiency, of their exposure, and of their inability to protect themselves and each other. This removes contexts for women to trust their own intuitions or to share their concerns about certain men with others. If men with the right beliefs who say the right things are the protectors, not women, it’s hard for women to pool their knowledge and resources and realize when someone is actually not protecting them at all. 

So this brings us to the second problem. 

2. It’s hard to tell the difference between someone who is protecting you and someone who is manipulating you, especially when you are very young and sheltered. To illustrate this, I’m going to do something I usually try not to do online, which is talk about my own dating experiences. I was fully boiled in the rescue/protection narrative as a teenager. The world is dangerous, interacting with men is dangerous, but a good Christian protector will, like Jesus, keep you from harm.

So here’s how this worked for me. I spent way too long involved with a guy who used the fear of rape to get me to do what he wanted. 

I thought he was protecting me. It wouldn’t shock me if he thought he was protecting me. In practice, what this looked like is that if I didn’t do what he thought was best, I was going to get raped. Volunteer in the late evening and walk home with my girlfriends? That’s how you get raped. Go to a party with your neighbors? That’s how you get raped. Travel? Rape. Office hours with a professor? Rape. Seems unlikely that would happen? You don’t know men like I do. Basically, anything that was participating in life outside of church (or him) was an opportunity to get raped.

What I now understand as a grownup is that this is a really effective way to make your girlfriend feel extreme guilt or fear about doing anything you haven’t pre-approved. It’s control. It’s putting up fences around a woman to limit her life to what you want her to do. But if you’ve been cooked into a rescue-protection model for how men and women relate, it’s almost impossible to notice. That’s what he is supposed to do. And disobeying is how you put yourself in danger. 

3. It’s hard to freely choose love, commitment, and marriage if you need a man to protect you. The relationship between married couples is beautiful because it is freely and joyfully chosen. We marry not because we need each other but because we want each other. You can’t freely choose to marry someone who is the only thing standing between you and certain death. The relationship distorts from one of adults who choose to honor, love, and cherish each other to a needer-needed relationship.

Just as the rescue dynamic makes it hard to freely choose love and marriage, it makes it just as difficult to not choose it. How do you really embrace singleness if singleness is understood to be such a vulnerable state - especially if your parents live far away? Even worse, how do you end a relationship, engagement, or even a marriage with your savior? Even if you understand a relationship is destructive or harmful for you, training yourself to think of yourself as a victim in need of saving from your romantic partner can easily override that awareness. There is no pop-Christian category from needing to save yourself from your own rescuer. And yet as many Christian women have learned the hard way, this is often exactly the kind of salvation that is badly needed in Christian spaces. 

Some responses to possible objections: I understand that in the case of particularly Christian storytelling, a rescue fantasy is driving the romantic narrative. I understand and accept this - it’s okay to enjoy a romantic fantasy novel. The problem is that this fantasy is often framed as instructive and formative for women, and it dovetails with what women are being told through non-fictional, decidedly non-fantastical sources. 

I also understand that, in a world where so many women are harassed and abused, many women actually do need protection, and it’s great when good men provide it. Seriously, no notes - go out and stand up for the women in your life, guys. The problem is that when this rescue relationship is framed as the essential element of marriage, and when it fosters in women a self-conception of being a person who needs protection specifically from men. That’s not healthy. Women can and should protect each other, and they can provide it for each other in a way that men often can’t (ie, women usually ask each other for vibe checks about new romantic interests, because women see things men don’t). Women also need to be empowered to develop discernment about which men actually are protecting them, and which ones are running a protection racket.