What If It’s Just Bad? Beautiful Union, Part Forever, It Will Never Stop

On Trying To Find the Emperor’s Clothes

Photo by iam_os on Unsplash

Why defend Beautiful Union? I’m seriously asking. Why is anyone still affiliating themselves with this book? 

Even defenders of the book seem to struggle to find something positive to say about the book itself. This isn’t surprising. As I have said, on the whole the book is not remarkable. The sexual ethic is indistinguishable from anything else that evangelical Protestantism has produced in the last several centuries. The writing is mediocre. The exegetical grounding of the thesis is weak. The book is, at its best, pleasant and predictable. At worst it’s comically bad for reasons that really should have been caught much earlier in the process. There is nothing in this book that strikes me as something that the evangelical church desperately needs on the level of theology or argumentation in order to proceed. There are much worse evangelical books about sex. There are better evangelical books about sex. This one is mostly fine for what it is – an unsurprising rehash of arguments that everyone has already heard before. Even if you are not persuaded that the bad parts are truly bad (and they are), the kindest thing one could say about this book on an evangelical nonfiction rubric is that it’s fine.

So I think it’s hard to find anything intrinsic to the content of Beautiful Union that creates contexts in which people are so eager to find something defensible about it. It’s simply not good enough or original enough for that to be the case. 

I suspect the anxiety actually not that the book itself must be saved, but rather, the religious, theological, social, and economic mechanisms that brought Beautiful Union to life must be saved. The book itself is not essential. The forces that made this book exist, however, are treated as essential. And if the book is, in fact, very bad, then the forces that created it might have some problems too. 

What are the grim lessons that must be learned if Beautiful Union is, in fact, a bad book? What do the holdout defenders still struggle to admit? 

1. Good Intentions Are Not Sufficient 

The voice behind Beautiful Union is not the voice of a jerk. It is, as I have said, the voice of a “nicecore evangelical” - someone who by all accounts is sincerely attempting to do good pastoral care by writing a helpful and informative book about sex. 

However, as we have all learned, meaning well is not enough. The good intentions of the team behind this book have been cited again and again by the book’s defenders. I suppose this is all right; having bad intentions is certainly much worse than good ones. Nonetheless, a sincere desire to do good pastoral work cannot overcome the challenges the production team clearly brought to this book: inability to handle Scripture, difficulty forming and sustaining a thesis, apparently heedless chauvinism, a tendency towards manipulative language, and the dimmest of glimpses into the cold hard facts of female anatomy. 

My strong suspicion is that an anxiety point here is the terrible discovery that meaning well is actually not enough to write a good book, or be a good pastor, or to participate as a teacher with authority in a theological debate. These are, in fact, all skills. They require training, practice, accountability, education, and often years of experience. This is not conducive to a social model of religious authority where young men are snatched out of Bible colleges, hone charisma and personal appeal, and are then platformed as multifaceted experts about a range of subjects. The evangelical megachurch system, and the associated publishing and media platforms, simply do not have time to wait for people to actually become experts. They need to catch the wave of celebrity as it rises and before it falls. 

In light of this, the idea that a sincere desire to do good, and a love for Jesus, is sufficient replacement for training, education, and experience must be an appealing idea. But it is simply wrong. 

2. Men Can’t Do Theology Without Women 

The idea that a discipline should be researched and taught by only members of one demographic is generally agreed to be a ridiculous one. We can all see what would be lost if only people under 30 could study oncology, only Californians could be political scientists, or only people from deserts could publish papers on botany. Not only would we be leaving a lot of talent on the table, but the number of research questions, and therefore the amount of knowledge that could be generated, would be comparatively limited by the narrow experience of the researchers. Presumably people in Denmark have political challenges that are nothing like those in California, there are lots of fascinating plants that don’t grow in the desert, and the kinds of cancers that people under 30 might be most concerned with are a limited sample of the world’s cancers. 

This is all obvious. However, American evangelicals historically struggle to accept that this might also be true of theology. There is widespread comfort with women learning about the Bible or teaching it among themselves. However, the anxiety seems to particularly emerge when women want to become part of the community that produces knowledge, or to teach this knowledge to men. 

So they don’t. And so women are outside the knowledge pool when bad books get written, only for the book to get laughed into the sunset when women actually get their hands on it. 

My strong suspicion is that Beautiful Union’s crash landing may have been an uncomfortable first experience for many on its production team with the phenomenon of perspectivalism. Things that are perfectly clear, acceptable, or logical to you aren’t clear, acceptable, or logical to others because you do not share the same experience. By all accounts, this seems to have appeared to the production team (and early readers) of Beautiful Union to be a groundbreaking, historic accomplishment in theology of the body and Christian sexual ethics – because of the shared assumptions and norms of this group. Once this book left the hands of people who were comfortable with, among other things, a consistent divinizing and elevation of men in sex and reproduction at the expense of women, the project fell apart.  

It doesn’t even need to be the case that women were not involved in the book production at all. The question is whether those women were as comfortable with challenging men, or as listened to when they do, as women in the broader Christian public. As lots of women who have worked in evangelical churches, colleges, or other organizations can tell you, when women rise to the ranks of influence in evangelical spaces it is usually because they have been extensively screened for their willingness to agree with men. I am not saying that women who teach at Christian colleges or serve as women’s pastors in conservative churches are not qualified to hold their positions. I am saying that in addition to being qualified to serve, they are also held responsible for deferring to, and repeating, men.

If women can’t teach men and are strongly discouraged from challenging them, men are trapped in a situation where they cannot access information that only women have. In the case of subjects like gender, sexuality, and reproduction, the knowledge that women have that men don’t have is substantial. Most importantly, the only people who can tell men how something will sound to a woman’s ear or land with a female audience are women.

This goes beyond soft-comp comfortability with taking on women’s “suggestions” or “good ideas.” This is full acceptance that there are subjects about which men, by virtue of being men, simply are not able to understand without being educated by women. They have to accept women’s teaching and authority on subjects about which women are authorities. A man who does not learn from women – like a woman who doesn’t learn from men, or an American who only reads American authors or (honestly) a Christian who only reads within his denomination – is simply not an educated person. He is preserving blind spots. 

This is an uncomfortable reality among those who believe their orthodoxy requires them to not be taught by women. However, if one wishes to commit to this, he must be willing to accept that if he produces theology it will almost certainly be bad. He is simply not educated enough for the task.

3. The Mechanisms By Which Evangelicals Produce Quality Content Are Not Working 

In addition to bracketing off input by gender, evangelicalism frequently insists on hearing feedback only from other evangelicals. This seems to have been a pervasive problem in the production of Beautiful Union, which was produced by an evangelical pastor, who preached this content for feedback among evangelical audiences, and whose work was edited and published by an evangelical publishing company. 

In fact it seems from some of the early reviews and endorsements that some critics were under the impression that Beautiful Union was scholarship. Its prominence among the Keller cultural apologetics center suggests this was intended to be a theological contribution to persuade a general public. 

The problem is that if evangelicals of a certain commitment only want to take on feedback from those who are already primed to agree with them, however, the gap between what they think they are producing and what is actually produced is substantial. In this case, it seems that people who could have provided valuable information about what Beautiful Union actually was, how well it would succeed in its goals, and how it would be received were not at the table.

The reality is that the siloed nature of evangelical discourse (evangelicals talking to other evangelicals and eschewing content that perhaps may reflect even mildly differing viewpoints) is wildly different from the way that, say, academic publishing works. I will not pretend that evangelical publishing is the only publishing wing that is vulnerable to handshake deals, inside endorsements, and highly narrow writing for a similarly narrow audience. There are a lot of very bad secular books. But peer review is at least intended to provide ruthlessly impartial feedback, which simply cannot be provided among mutually-boosting friends.

Where Beautiful Union flopped is that the book seems as though it was produced by an extraordinarily narrow team – one that was completely oblivious to how offensive the text would be to a general Christian audience – but was made to be read by a much broader audience. The traits that seem to qualify one to platform and elevate megachurch pastors affiliated with the TGC, however, do not seem to be traits that can help people determine how a book will land with a wider audience. Or, indeed, to determine if a book is actually good. 

And if the quality controls were so dormant when this book was produced – what if other evangelical books are also bad?

Well, they are. Beautiful Union did not invent terrible exegesis or tenuous grasps of theological concepts. These are all for sale wherever books are sold. The reason why Beautiful Union attracted so much attention was that a Christian book had not, to my memory, really been bad in the peculiar way that Beautiful Union is bad – not simply in a failure of theology and interpretation, but in its utter lack of self-awareness. It exhibits a curious tastelessness that sits so strangely alongside its accessibility and apparent grasp for decency. To be crass, no pastor had been so publicly earnest about ejaculation before. 

That, and Beautiful Union had the infelicitous Twitter fortune of second-acting John Pokluda publicly drooling over a woman he remembered from an unlikely sex yarn that seemed to be set at a Chili’s. This was not Josh Butler’s fault, but surely online Christian women were unusually poised for impatience. 

Nonetheless: Beautiful Union’s inelegant tawdriness – not simply its quality – is what made it stand out from the pack. In terms of its incapable theology, though, it is thoroughly mundane among modern Christian nonfiction. There are many worse books than Beautiful Union for sale at Barnes and Nobles right now. The reality is, the mechanisms that let this disaster happen have rubber stamped far bigger disasters. 

This brings us to the disturbing possibility that a great deal of books for Christians are, in fact, this bad. If this book could get this far, while being so conspicuously gruesome in addition to teaching bad theology – what other books have succeeded that are like this? Particularly, those on subjects that are far less likely to publicly fail? 

The mechanisms by which evangelicals make, produce, and screen content did not catch the errors. But it was not because the errors were hard to spot. Everyone else saw them. The problem is the system, not simply this book.

4. No One Can Make You Like a Book if You Don’t Like It 

Like many of you, I am anticipating the release of Dune: Part II this fall. The central lesson of Dune, as I have always read it, is this: institutional power cannot control charismatic gifting, individual whims, and community spirit – for good or for ill. 

Any readers at Multnomah or TGC might do well to reread Dune in the coming months before the movie comes out. Because just as institutional power cannot control charismatic gifting, it surely cannot create it. 

And this is what I think the central problem is. Evangelicalism in America has long been a power game, grasping for control over culture, politics, women, sexual minorities, and so on. It is very good at seizing institutional levers to take and manipulate power, and to create new channels through which power can be created and wielded. 

What it simply cannot do, and will never be able to do, is create new evangelicals. It cannot make itself liked. It cannot make itself appealing. And I suspect this is deeply concerning for them. 

A scrupulous protection of the normal channels of power, and a dogged insistence on the primacy of one kind of theological voice, can keep dissenters out of power, and it can place a certain kind of pastor in the public eye. What this power cannot do, however, is make this pastor popular. It can secure a lucrative book deal for such pastors, but it cannot make people like the book. These channels of power might like the book very much. But they have no power to make people outside those channels like the book – and all indications are that this is very frustrating to them.

Of course, the measure of theology (academic or popular) is not necessarily its popularity. But one cannot escape the sense that this book – given the apparent affability of the voice behind it – really was meant to be liked. But it wasn’t. There is no power on earth that can make people like Beautiful Union. It is simply not good, and the vast majority of us know it. 

The failure of Beautiful Union and the steadfast refusal of the public to accept a book that was clearly intended for them is a warning siren for evangelical avenues of power. It is not a good book. It is not a book people like. You can use all your platforms and all your spokespeople to call it good, but calling it good will not make it so. Evangelicalism can insist on its own correctness, and it might be able to persuasively insist on this in the doors of its own churches. But it has no power over the hearts of its hearers – and its power diminishes every foot it takes outside its church doors. 

And that, I suspect, is terrifying for them. But it cannot be changed.