After all the media attention you received in December because of your comments in the GQ magazine, I hope and pray that you will read just one more. Maybe it will help if I tell you that I am a huge fan. While only watching my first episode of Duck Dynasty just a week before the controversy broke, I still love everything about the show. I even bought my dad one of your DVD’s for Christmas. I love that you stand for Jesus to the best of your ability. So while I write this letter to you because it directly deals with comments you made, this is honestly a letter to the American people, and I guess even more specifically the American Church that I honestly never expected to write. Let me explain.
Today is January 17th. It’s 9 am, and just a
while ago I was awakened from my sleep. The date is significant because we are
weeks away from the controversy, so it’s not like I had media bytes rolling
around in my subconscious. I honestly believe that the Lord woke me up with a
startling phrase. I believe the Lord woke me up and told me, “Jill, you are
much more than a vagina.” Obviously, groggy and confused as to why we were
having this kind of discussion in the middle of the night, I told the Lord,
“I’m sorry….WHAT?” Then as if I was
hearing dictation, I began to hear the Lord walk me through this letter that I
am sending you now. So here goes:
Phil, I am more than a vagina. As a woman, I am more than a
vagina and boobs. I missed it when the controversy first broke, but you did
more than offend the LGBT community, you offended women as well. In your overly
simplistic statement, you relegated the act of sexual intercourse to a choice
between vagina’s and anuses. Not only I am more than a vagina, but so is Miss
Kay. When you have made love to your wife, you look into her eyes, you engage
with her heart and soul. She is a person. She is not just a vagina. You see, we
live in an overtly sexualized world, which has relegated sex to a consumerist
mentality. In a recent blog post,
Benjamin Nolot, director of Exodus Cry and producer of the documentary
Nefarious: Merchant of Souls states, “Girls internalize this message as they
grow up and over time it becomes woven into the core of their identity. By the
time most reach adolescence they have become fully amalgamated into the
culture’s narrative – To be powerful, accepted, celebrated, appreciated, and
adored – to be VISIBLE, you must be SEXUAL. The alternative is to be rendered
completely and entirely irrelevant – to be made INVISIBLE.” Billboards, TV shows, movies, magazines all amplify the
motto “Sex Sales.” America is the top consumer and producer of pornography. We
live in a world where women and children are abducted regularly and then sold
into prostitution and human trafficking rings. Humanity as a whole is guilty
for devaluing human life in a myriad of ways. That is basically what you did in
your statement. You devalued not only your own wife, but women in general when
you said that sex was a choice between a vagina and an anus. It simply cannot
be that simple. You chose to make a vow of commitment to one woman, Miss Kay,
for the rest of your life. You see, this is why if your covenant with Miss Kay was
just about her vagina, then it would not be so sacred. The covenant of marriage
(an expression of the relationship between Jesus and the church) is chiefly
revealed in the act of physical intimacy: the breaking of a hymen (a blood
covenant), the transferring of the seed of life from a man and implanting it
into a woman (the gift of the Holy Spirit). Nevertheless, the mystery that
happens in sexual intercourse is the joining of two souls. The oneness that
happens in sex is a mystery and is so much more than vaginas and anuses.
Not only has our culture devalued human life but we have devalued
marriage, and I don’t mean by states allowing gay marriage. Marriage was
devalued when uncontested divorce was initially made legal, and the prolific
amount of divorces that have happened since are proof. Divorce is rampant in
the world as well as the church. The very thing that Paul signifies as the
guidepost of the relationship that Jesus bought for us has been treated
casually. For this and so many more reasons, it’s no wonder that the message of
salvation in Christ is lost on the world today.
Having said all of this, I want to tell you that I
understand or rather hope you didn’t “mean” all of that when you said it.
Unfortunately, words mean things. There are implied as well as inherent
meanings in every word we use. The glory of communication is the subtle nuances that mean things. The cultural background that imbues every word with a thousand
definitions, are incredibly important. Having grown up in the South, I am all
too aware of the ignorance that is tolerated as the cultural norm. Bigotry
against races and gender is commonplace. In the movie The Help, the character
Abileene, makes a statement about raising children as a black maid that I found
very poignant. She makes the statement that as a maid she is loved and adored
by children until they turn 18, and then all of the sudden she is relegated as
trash. I thought it was significant because in many ways, I feel the same way
as a woman. In the American church, by and large I am qualified because of my
gender to teach children about God as long as they are a minor. Mysteriously,
when they cross the threshold into adulthood, I am no longer qualified to teach
them about Jesus publically. My point is that while I understand that your
comments were made from a lifetime of cultural worldviews, there is something
higher that you should aspire to confessing. When you accepted Jesus as your
personal savior, you became an inhabitant of a different Kingdom, a different
culture. The value systems of your former life are supposed to take the back
seat to the new value systems of the Kingdom of God. Sanctification, the
process all Christians go through of becoming more Christ like, is slow and
tedious, requiring much repentance and submission. In 2 Cor. 10:5 (MSG) Paul
says, “But we don’t live or fight our battles that way—never
have and never will. The tools of our trade aren’t for marketing or
manipulation, but they are for demolishing that entire massively corrupt
culture. We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies,
tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose
thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ.
Our tools are ready at hand for clearing the ground of every obstruction and
building lives of obedience into maturity.” In talking about spiritual
warfare, Paul says that our job is to demolish our massively corrupt culture,
warped philosophies, and to tear down barriers erected against the truth of
God. Spiritual warfare is the opposing of the culture of this world and
enforcing the culture of the Kingdom. The culture of this world is one that devalues
humanity, sexuality, marriage by promoting pornography, promiscuity, divorce,
abortion, human trafficking and a thousand other atrocities. We as believers
must guard ourselves from the seemingly innocuous and casual regard of things
God calls holy. Lou Engle once said, “If you treat the prophetic casually it
will cause casualties.” I will take that statement one step further. If we
treat anything that God calls holy, casually it causes casualties. The casualness and simplicity that you use in
referring to sex as simple body parts is causing casualties of epic proportion.
It kills the sacredness of marriage, the mystery and beauty of joining two
souls together in sex; it significantly devalues and thereby kills the core of
femininity and relegates women to sex objects.
I have one last thing to say in regards to
this issue. While I agree with you that homosexuality is a sin, I think the
overemphasis of it that the church is making in this hour is the greater
problem. In 1 Cor. 13 (NIV), we learn how God defines love. “Love is
patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It
does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, and
it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with
the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always
perseveres.” There are two phrases from this passage that jump out at me: 1) it
keeps no record of wrongs and 2) it always protects. I don’t know about you but
I am pretty well aware of all the mistakes I make. I think most humans are. Whether
the LGBT community agrees with us that homosexuality is a sin is not really the
issue. God makes it pretty clear that it is his job to change hearts. We, as
Christians, are called to love. In fact we are called to love the Lord our God
with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
I sincerely don’t know how to deal with all of the intricate
nuances about this issue. I have analyzed this argument from every angle. I
have good friends who are gay (both Christian and non-Christian alike) so this
issue is extremely important to me. I want to love them well. I believe in
accountability and all of that stuff, but I also know that the times of
greatest change in my own testimony have come not through someone holding a
measuring stick to my life, but extending me grace and mercy. That is in and of
itself the audacity of the Cross, that we (any of us) would be given mercy. I
don’t believe the statements you made exemplified love. You were keeping a
record of their wrongs. You held up a banner and said that because they
participate in XYZ sin they are devalued and somehow not deserving of God’s
love and mercy. Again, you may not have “meant” it, but that’s what you said. You
also didn’t protect the LGBT community. You didn’t protect them from being
exploited, from the lies of the enemy which would tell them they don’t deserve
God’s love, from unwanted rejection, etc. Rather you chose to make comments
that treated the LGBT community much like David treated Bathsheba’s husband.
You sent them to the front lines to be slaughtered. All I know is that there is
not one Christian who does not struggle with some kind of sin on a daily basis.
Be it sins of pride, lying, adultery, pornography, lust, stealing, etc we all “have
fallen short.” I think the Church is guilty of focusing way too much on sin and
not nearly enough on the mercy found at the cross of Christ. It is a delicate balance,
one which I have not perfected.Phil, I don’t have all the answers. As I said in the
beginning, this really is a letter to the Church and American public as much as
it is to you. I pray that if anything good can come of the controversy you
found yourself in the midst of in December, that it will cause the church to
look at issues like gender equality, homosexuality, marriage, and our treatment
of holy things casually more seriously.
I pray that God blesses your family. As Paul says in Philippians
1:9-11, “This is my prayer: that your love might become even
more and more rich with knowledge and all kinds of insight. I pray this so that you will
be able to decide what really matters and so you will be sincere and blameless
on the day of Christ. I pray that you will then be filled with the fruit
of righteousness, which comes from Jesus Christ, in order to give glory and
praise to God.”
Sincerely,
Jill Hurley
