Jefferson Bethke is at it again with a new “spoken word” video. His previous spoken word video about hating religion and loving Jesus has over 18 million views as of this article. My commentary on that video is HERE. Bethke’s latest video is titled, “Sex, Marriage, & Fairytales || Spoken Word.”
While the video is only four minutes long, Bethke puts way too much on the table to address everything, but there are quite a few things I would like to address starting with the opening line:
“Disney movies and chick flicks, they’ve put us in a weird position. They have distorted our reality because we forget they are actually fiction.”
I really have a hard time believing that any sane individual has forgotten that the Lion King is fiction (Michael Jackson being the exception). If there is anything that has distorted our reality because people forget that it is actually fiction, it’s the Bible!
“In marriage we either get better or get bitter, either joy or remorse’s. What we are doing isn’t working, just look at the rate of divorces.”
Here we have a failure of imagination, a false goal post, and ignorance. Bethke uses the old apologist trick of limiting our options. Either A or B, either C or D. Why can’t it be both? Why aren’t there other options? Better or bitter? That’s all he could come up with?
Next let’s take it out of order a moment and talk about the rate of divorces since he brought it up. According to The Barna Research Group’s 2008 study, born-again/evangelical Christians have a divorce rate of about 32%. Atheists have a divorce rate of about 30%. To be fair to the religious, that’s a statistical dead heat. Jesus doesn’t make people any less likely to get divorced and possibly more likely! But the main point I want to make here is that divorce doesn’t mean that a marriage wasn’t successful. Length of marriage is not the same as quality of a marriage. People get divorced for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it is just that people have grown apart over time. That doesn’t mean that their entire marriage in which they made each other better and which was filled with joy now becomes eclipsed with bitterness and remorse and ought to be judged a failure by some "non-judgmental" Christian.
“Yet the secret of joy, if we just pull back the façade, is realizing that most problems arise when we elevate our spouse to God.”
“We’ve exchanged the truth about God for a lie. We’ve exchanged God for lesser created things like a husband trading his wife for a 2D image on a screen.”
“So men, grow up. Put down the controller. How about you lead her with grace instead of trying to control her.”
All three of these lines give us a pattern of how Bethke sees relationships. Women are lesser things. I want to draw attention to the word “things” here. According to Bethke (and the Bible) women are things and are meant to be “lead” by men. This seems a lot like control to me and like with his last video it seems that he is trying to make a distinction where one does not exist. This is Biblical sexism, pure and simple.
“For the singles, become friends first before you every become lovers. Pursue Jesus as your foundation, before you get under the covers.”
“Because believe me a strong friendship before marriage; will make a good marriage after. Marriage isn’t just sex, it’s conversation and laughter.”
These two lines deal with the distinction between friends, lovers, and spouses. I don’t think couples need to be friends first before becoming lovers, but I agree with Bethke that they ought to become friends before getting married.
I don’t agree with abstinence before marriage. It puts a great deal of pressure and strain on the relationship. In trying to make sex less part of the relationship, it only causes the couple to fixate on their lack of it.
Bethke then gets into some weird Jesus stuff some of which I really didn’t even understand. But his analogy of Jesus proposing on a cross was a little creepy and for someone who doesn’t approve of marriage equality, he sure does seem to be suggesting that dudes marry another dude. How many husbands is Jesus allow to have anyway? Plus, he swings both ways apparently too.
Let’s back up a bit for my final point here which I want to address to Bethke personally:
“Now I’ve never been married but I’m a product of one that was non-existent. So don’t tell me that I don’t understand the pain; don’t tell me I don’t get it.”
Jefferson, you not only don’t understand the pain, you obviously don’t understand the joy either. You don’t get it. You don’t have to be married to understand marriage, but it sure does help a lot. You can’t judge everyone's marriage based on your view of the relationship of your parents. People are different. They have different wants and needs; different ideas and expectations concerning sex, marriage, and relations.
Promise and commitment are certainly important to help couples try to work through their problems, but they might not always succeed. What good is a marriage that makes everyone miserable? One thing to consider is that things change and people change too. It isn’t about God and Jesus; it is about your spouse and you.
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