Fixed It For You: Tullian Tchividjian Edition

I am amassing a heap of links that might stretch my Takes tomorrow to the point of being overstuffed. There are so many interesting articles and posts out there as to be almost an embarrassment of riches. That being the case, I am of a hundred different minds about which post would be the best to tackle on its own. But, you know, it’s hard for me to resist pure Internet Crazy and so I am giving straight into the temptation to take down a bizarre post by Tullian Tchividjian, grandson of Billy Graham, overseer and “shepherd” of some gathering called The Sanctuary after no less than two adulterous affairs. I feel I am owed this little pleasure from having suffered through Born Again Queer which you can read about here if you missed it yesterday.

Mr. Tchividjian’s post is moderately long but even so, according to the divine gifts of reason and charity, I’m going to first read the whole thing before fixing it as a Help to the author of this Deep Thought in the hope that he will not further shipwreck himself and take other poor souls along into the darkness of his confusion. Here we go:

Evangelical culture has developed a world in which orgasms are more dangerous than arrogance. That’s not a compliment. It’s an indictment. Because it reveals something strange about the evangelical imagination: a perverse and disproportionate fixation on sex. I’m not denying the destructive power of sexual immorality, whether consensual or criminal. God knows how ravaging it can be. I’m questioning why it consumes so much evangelical attention. The answer may not be as pure as it appears. The conversations. The headlines. The whispered rumors. The public confessions. The social media frenzy. The endless speculation about what happened behind closed doors: Who did what? With whom? How far did they go? When? For how long? Every scandal becomes required reading. Every moral failure becomes public theater. The fixation is relentless. There is a word for being consumed with the sexual details of other people’s lives: voyeurism. So, evangelical culture’s obsession with sex begins to look less like holiness and more like a socially acceptable form of mental masturbation. It becomes a way of indulging the sexual imagination while maintaining the appearance of moral distance. Sex without participation. Preoccupation disguised as purity. The secret becomes the stimulation. Psychologists have long recognized that what is suppressed has a way of resurfacing, often in disguised or socially (morally?) acceptable forms. Repressed desires don’t die. They leak out. They find other channels, other expressions, and sometimes even masquerade as virtue. Scientists have shown that the brain often responds not only to direct gratification but also to anticipation, novelty, gossip, and emotionally charged information. This helps explain why people can become captivated by sexual scandals even when they condemn them. So, what appears to be a fight against lust can become a sanitized way of indulging it. I call it the pornography of purity. This is where the irony becomes unavoidable: a culture that believes it is fighting against the power of sexual immorality can sometimes reveal just how much power sex still has over its imagination. It becomes the thing everyone is always looking at, talking about, analyzing, and reporting. A subject of endless scrutiny, speculation and, dare I say, consumption. Perhaps the most revealing thing about a culture’s obsessions is not what it says it hates. It’s what it can’t stop looking at. #sex #evangelicalculture

Goodness. What a mess that is. This writing is of the kind that not only boils, but also pickles all my literary onions. How can “a culture” develop “a world?” What does that even mean? What, pray tell, does “evangelical culture” refer to in an accusation like this? Of whom is Mr. Tchividjian writing? I don’t know, but let us fix this shambles as best we can anyway. Mr. Tchividjian said:

Evangelical culture has developed a world in which orgasms are more dangerous than arrogance. That’s not a compliment. It’s an indictment. Because it reveals something strange about the evangelical imagination: a perverse and disproportionate fixation on sex.

He ought to have said something like this:

I am very sorry for weighing in publicly on any subject, having disqualified myself from ministry, and I know I ought to resign from everything and go vacuum the stairs of some pokey church in some unknown American hamlet, but I can’t seem to help myself so I’m just going to write things online anyway. As a person with a very broken and skewed moral compass, I nevertheless feel that some evangelicals spend too much time thinking about sex. I am going to allow this feeling to grow in me to such a degree that I end up projecting my own strange sexual proclivities not only onto a few other souls, but onto a whole population of unnamed people to whom I have not been formally introduced and of whom I have no real knowledge but I just can’t help myself.

Mr. Tchividjian again:

I’m not denying the destructive power of sexual immorality, whether consensual or criminal. God knows how ravaging it can be. I’m questioning why it consumes so much evangelical attention. The answer may not be as pure as it appears.

Here’s what he really ought to have said:

I am denying the destructive power of sexual immorality at length in this post by trying to blame a whole population of people in the hopes they will feel a sort of fog of guilt and think I am pretty clever.