Evangelical Christian blogger scolded for using word ‘vagina’ in book
Rachel Held Evans doesn’t want to talk about her vagina anymore.
“I’m sorry,” said a spokesman for her publisher, Thomas Nelson, in turning down a request for an interview, “she’s a little uncomfortable continuing with this conversation.”
Evans’s modesty at this juncture is surprising, given that she’s led the charge for anatomically correct speech in evangelical Christian circles for months now. “Christians,” she wrote on her blog in May, “who wish to remain engaged in culture can’t afford to be scandalized by a li’l ol vagina.” In fact, Held’s advocacy on behalf of genital correctness — and the controversy it has stirred — has propelled her new book “A Year of Biblical Womanhood” into triple-digit Amazon rankings, even though the book is not yet available for sale in stores. Evans may not relish being pigeonholed as the Christian Naomi Wolf, but she staked out this turf, and I wish she would keep defending it.Evans is a young Christian blogger and a leading member of a new tribe of evangelicals who, raised in traditional families and churches, are straining to hold onto the faith of their parents while rejecting the righteousness, moralizing and knee-jerk conservatism of the past.Other members of her tribe include Rob Bell, whose book “Love Wins” argued that everyone, and not just born-again Christians, can get to heaven; and Mark Driscoll, who preached in his book “Real Marriage” that all kinds of sex play (including oral and anal sex) are approved by God within a monogamous marriage. (All three have been called heretics by their outraged Christian opponents, and though they share an “outsider” identity, these young Christians do not necessarily share perspectives or priorities: Evans panned Driscoll’s book on her blog, deriding his view of sex as macho and narrow-minded.) But the aim of this group is, broadly, the same: to rescue evangelical Christianity from the mean-spirited name-calling of the past – to open its doors to a broader way of thinking that accommodates the complexities of modern life.Read on at the Washington Post.
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