Was it really because Christians are misogynists? Was it really because men don’t care about the happiness and health of their wives? Was it really because Evangelicals hated black people? Or is it because they—like the rest of the world—are staring into a genderless, plastic abyss wherein women and men are not who God says they are, whereby they must, the cultural law says they must, enact their desires or they will not be whole and healthy?

I made some dear (IRL) friends upset yesterday who have been helped by Gregoire’s previous book. The day was also one of unrelenting frustration whereby I spent the whole of it in the car driving people around instead of doing what I planned. I was not able to respond to anything, nor even beat back my own sink full of dishes, nor walk the dog, nor keep up online. I did manage to read a second chapter of Gregoire’s new book but I’d like to do two chapters in one post, so I’m going to pick that up tomorrow. Instead, I want to try to put words to something that I think is swirling around in the cultural air. This will be hard because I prefer to have a tweet or an article to bounce off of, but, it’s International Women’s Day—so let’s celebrate with a listicle.
One. An alluring and powerful narrative has formed about the plight of women and the reasons things are so bad today. It goes something like this: Christians have irreparably damaged their witness, the Christian faith, and the lives of women by their unacceptable view of marriage and sex; and Christians have damaged the Christian faith by their view of the Bible.
Where did this narrative come from? How did it form? It has two or three sources. The first source, I think, is the culture itself which, in a short time, radically shifted from one view of what it means to be human, to another. It took a whole century for the new view to become entrenched, but I really think contraception was the millstone that sunk a “biblical view of the family” under the sea for most people. Even if they had some idea with their heads about human relationships, what they knew with their bodies radically contradicted that view. In a world where women can control if and when they have children, the biological reality of being a woman is not meaningful or substantive enough to undergird and support a society.
The second source of this narrative was the Christian reaction to this change. Christians reacted strongly, as they should have. But, in many cases, wildly and with a hint of hysteria. As the western world shifted from a positive to a neutral to a negative view of Christianity, it is not surprising that those people who refused to shift away from “traditional” and biblical norms became the bad ones. Moreover, as the defacto conscience of the whole, they are discovering that they ought to be quiet, but that they may not go away. In family systems theory, the “biblical view of the family” is the trap that holds all the toxic fumes of the larger system. The western family needs Christianity as its scapegoat. It needs Christians to occasionally react in sorrow and outrage. But secular culture cannot absolutely get rid of Christianity or it will have to face who it is, and that’s not pretty, so of course it won’t do that.
In the usual way of these sorts of cultural shifts, the outside assault on the “biblical view of the family” was helped by the inside repudiation of it. Many “Christians” now unreservedly accept a secular view of what it means to be a self. Assumptions about the needs and requirements of this new kind of humanity, though largely, I would say (after reading just two chapters of Gregoire) unexamined, drive the internal “culture war” that Christians are enduring. Health—both physical and emotional—are at the center of these assumptions.
It is hard for me to overstate how deeply I feel this shift myself. That is because I came in and out of American culture at key moments and was able to observe how it was changing. Christians through time and space have not had this new assumption of “health” at the heart of their faith. And not just Christians either. Most cultures around the world continue not to pursue this idea of “health.”
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Let us answer the call of the Lord, serve our neighbors with love, and fear, trust, and love the Lord above all else. Then, we shall take up the mantle of Elisha, answer the call of the Lord, carry out the work of the Lord, and hear at the end of our days, just as certainly Elisha heard, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

Then Elisha died, and they buried him. And the raiding bands from Moab invaded the land in the spring of the year.
II Kings 13:20 NKJV
During a recent sermon on Isaiah 38 and the sickness of Hezekiah, our church was reminded of the reality of death for the enemies of God as well as for the friends of God. “Death spread to all men, because all sinned.” With only two exceptions among mortal men, Enoch and Elijah, all who ever lived eventually died. Where are Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Joshua, Rehab, David, Jeremiah, Esther, Daniel, Peter, Mary, John, Paul, and the whole host of Bible era saints? They are not with us for they have gone to sleep in the Lord. They have died. Likewise, Elisha, faithful servant of God for more than sixty years, eyewitness to the great miracles of God in Israel, preacher of the Word of God, defeater of the Syrian armies, counsellor to kings, watchman over the church of the Lord is not with us for Elisha died, and they buried him.
The death of a faithful example in the faith should cause us to analyze our own lives. The Lord has appointed for men once to die and afterward the judgment. The Day of the Lord is hastening on.
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After some positive comments about the St. Olaf of the 90s, he mysteriously pronounced that: “Other indicia suggest the Midwest college is entering a divestiture of its Lutheran identity that, though much longer in coming, could be swifter in its eventual accomplishment.” Other schools—Azuza Pacific and Calvin—were assessed quite positively, but Burtchaell had little confidence in their futures as Christian schools.

During my sabbatical year of 1985–86 at St. Edmunds College of Cambridge University, I had the good fortune of having many conversations about Christian higher education with James Burtchaell, who also had a year-long sabbatical there. He had recently moved from the provost’s office of Notre Dame to its theology department.
I had moved in 1982 from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago to Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, recruited by President Norman Fintel in order to build a strong religion department and to help strengthen the connection of the college to its Lutheran heritage, including the founding and shaping of a Center for Religion and Society.
Burtchaell was fearful that Notre Dame was loosening its connection with the Catholic tradition, as so many other Catholic schools had done. He was very interested in criticizing and preventing such a move.
I was still in mild shock about the Roanoke College that I found when I arrived there in 1982. Half the department chairs were hostile to the college’s connection with any sort of religious tradition. The other half were apathetic about that connection, not seeing any relevant connection between the college’s Lutheran heritage and liberal arts education. Only two of us department chairs thought it important to hire Lutheran Christians if the college was to have any continuing relation to its original founding. The Dean and the President both farmed out the hiring of new faculty to the departments.
The shock came from the contrast to what  I experienced when attending a Lutheran college in the Midwest in the late 50s that was unabashedly Lutheran in its identity and mission. Though I had lectured at many Lutheran colleges while I was a seminary professor for nearly twenty years, I had not looked closely at their overall religious substance. After my jolt in arriving at Roanoke, I now had to take a closer look. What had happened in those twenty years?
A great aid in taking that closer look came from my friend Burtchaell, who had followed up his interest in the secularization of Christian schools. In the April and May 1991 issues of First Things Burtchaell wrote two connected articles entitled “The Decline and Fall of a Christian College.” The articles presented a very long and highly erudite historical account of how Vanderbilt moved from being what Methodists hoped would be their flagship Christian university to a thoroughly secular institution in which Christianity offered no public relevance. In the articles he points to nine fateful moves that were crucial in that secularization.
Though there were some earlier studies of secularization in higher education, this one was a game-changer because of its clarity and passion. In hopes of understanding the process of secularization, I had already organized a faculty/administration discussion group on the subject of Christian higher education. When Burtchaell’s articles came out, we were given tools to understand what had happened. We could almost put our college’s name in every reference to Vanderbilt that Burtchaell made. His work was enormously helpful to understand what had happened and gave us clues about how we might take measures to mitigate the secularization process and perhaps rebuild a viable Christian college.
However, those articles were but a foreshadowing of what was to come in his The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches, a tome of 868 pages, published by Eerdmans in 1998.1
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