Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl

5 Comments

1. Paul B. says:

   March 6, 2010 at 12:28 pm

   Dating Jesus is very well written. Ms. Campbell is a bit younger than I, from a different part of the country, and of a different gender, but she is a great storyteller and her reminiscences of growing up in church were very engaging.

   I don’t think she meant it to be so because she doesn’t dwell on it, but the most piercing memory I took away from the book was when a normally kind Sunday school teacher publicly shamed her as a young teen, for asking too many questions about gender limitations within the church. That kind of thing sickens me. It seems not to have affected her as much as it would I.

   I wish I could endorse this book completely, but there are hindrances. The book’s feminist history is not so interesting, and I skipped the 30 page lesson near the end entirely. There are smatterings of liberal politics (stem cells, Gulf War, etc), with the assumption of their rightness, that I found distracting. And then there are theological excesses.

   I’m not completely sure, but if I could encapsulate Ms. Campbell’s beliefs they would be that the Bible is paternalistic, therefore untrustworthy. She laments that Paul’s theology has become so important, but then attempts to explain his words in a new light. Evidently his theology is important after all.

   There seems to be quite a bit of ‘Eve guilt’ – feeling gender guilt for our first mother biting down on the forbidden fruit. But the Bible actually lays the guilt on Adam more than Eve; unlike Eve, Adam knew what he was doing, and chose his wife over God. Ultimately, focusing on Adam’s greater guilt only substantiates paternalism, so that wouldn’t be much help to Ms. Campbell. Maybe undue Eve guilt is the cost of elevating Eve’s culpability?

   At one point later on, Campbell actually exonerates Eve’s sin, saying she doesn’t blame her for wanting wisdom. What’s so bad about that? Campbell asks.

   It was here that I felt the train finally leave the tracks. The problem with liberation theology, which places a filter based on our own needs and desires above the centrality of God’s purposes in Christ, is that we distort the Gospel in order to support our theories. So toward the end, while I find Ms. Campbell’s reference to God as “her” off-putting, I don’t find it surprising.

   The irony of theological rebellion is that we don’t have to leave orthodoxy to find plenty of biblical evidence that God does have female characteristics. Even Adam is not identified as a man until after Eve is formed; apparently he originally embodied the characteristics of both genders, and the formation of woman from him was more a separation/polarization than an addition, with what was taken from his side being much more than a mere rib. And one doesn’t have to abandon orthodoxy to acknowledge that history has not been, and continues not to be, kind to women.

   Nonetheless, the Bible – and emphatically, Jesus himself – has given us “Father” as the ultimate relational descriptive of God. In my opinion, maturing in the Gospel does not entail leaving its basics behind.

   Despite these flaws, this book has value for anyone, of either gender, who has left a church for any valid reason and has bitter memories. The human side is told very well here. I’m giving this book a 7/10 (Amazon needs to wake up and expand its rating scale). Those people who were damaged by church and got fed up and left, rather than walking away from Jesus, need to sort through the situation and retain the good. They will find some good to feed on here, despite the concerns.

   I sometimes think of Zacchaeus, the tax collector in Luke 19. Jesus comes to his town, but short-of-stature Zacchaeus can’t get a glimpse because of the crowd following Jesus. So, despite being a man of wealth and privilege, Zacchaeus climbs a tree for a better vantage. Jesus then invites himself to dine with Zacchaeus, but the crowd protests: he is a sinner! But Jesus knows the heart. Zacchaeus promises to offload a lot of his wealth to the poor and to rectify any past offenses. Against all conventional religious wisdom – even “Christian” religious wisdom – Zacchaeus is Saved.

   You see the metaphor. The church is indeed imperfect, and in our carnality we actually hinder the work of Christ. We stumble “these little ones” time and time again, and it is a scandal indeed.

   Blessed are those who will not allow the crowd to keep them from Jesus. If that’s been happening, find yourself a tree and climb it, see Jesus accurately, do right to all men, and let no man take Christ’s words of salvation away from you. He came to save not to condemn.

   Whether fundamentalist or feminist, we have to be careful about confusing our own priorities of doctrine and praxis with his. After all, the purpose of climbing the tree is to see Jesus more accurately. Ms. Campbell has done a noteworthy job telling of the church’s very significant foibles, but not such a good job describing the unchanging Christ who has been revealed to us.
   Rating: 4 / 5
2. northhollywoodbookfan says:

   March 6, 2010 at 2:30 pm

   The title is intriguing, suggesting a raucous, no holds barred, tell-all memoir about growing up as a fundamentalist Christian. However, the book is far gentler than I expected it would be. If you’re expecting a bitter tell-all exposing the seamy underside of life growing up inside the church of Christ, this isn’t the book you’re looking for.

   In the first chapter, Susan Campbell reenacts her baptism with a delightful mix of cynicism and reverence. The rest of the book doesn’t quite deliver on the promise of the first chapter, but it’s still an engaging and interesting story that she tells.

   The footnotes are delicious, some of them downright funny, and the added notes and references add to the personality of Susan’s story. If you knew this woman in real life, it would be impossible not to like her.

   Rating: 4 / 5
3. Tower of Books says:

   March 6, 2010 at 4:13 pm

   Susan Campbell was raised to be a devout Christian inside a fundamentalist church. As a child, she did everything Jesus wanted her to do. Soon, however, she began to question her faith. How could she belong to a religion that looked down on women so much?

   Campbell created a beautiful story about faith and feminism. The chapters about her youth are filled with funny parts like her baptistism and when she knocked on doors for Jesus. Dating Jesus is also filled with plenty of footnotes with references to the Bible or 70s shows. Importantly, Campbell stresses that what her church taught her in her youth is different from Jesus’s message itself.

   My main dislike about the novel was how the chapters were arranged. The novel skips from when she was in high school and still attending church to when she’s married (after college) and not attending church. I would have liked to know what she did in those in-between years. This in turns, ruins the pace. Two-thirds of the novel deals with Campbell’s youth, and the other one-thirds is when she’s married and not attending church.
   Rating: 4 / 5
4. Florinda says:

   March 6, 2010 at 4:25 pm

   Despite the fact I haven’t been a regular churchgoer for several years – or maybe because of it – I still find religion a fascinating subject. I’m interested in both academic-style discussion of religious topics and personal accounts of experience with organized religion, especially struggles with it. I’m pretty sure that ten years of living in the Bible Belt contribute to a particular curiosity about fundamentalist beliefs and practices, and my own issues as a woman living within Catholicism draw me toward other women’s stories of their own religious issues. Susan Campbell’s Dating Jesus brings two of those lines of interest together.

   Campbell is a journalist with the Hartford Courant, and her book, subtitled A Memoir of Fundamentalism, Feminism, and the American Girl, is a little different than I expected – lighter on the memoir, and heavier on history and analysis connecting fundamentalist teachings about women’s roles and the feminist movement in the 19th and 20th centuries. Campbell’s approach is thematic rather than strictly chronological, and she usually places the events she shares from her personal history into a larger context. Regardless of the emphasis, however, it was a pretty quick read, and accessible and thought-provoking throughout. (Well, thought-provoking for me, anyway, but I’ve already said this is an area I think about quite a bit. )

   Campbell’s family became members of a fundamentalist church in Missouri when her mother married her stepfather, and young Susan initially embraced it wholeheartedly, Bible reading, outreach ministry, and all. However, as she grew into her teens and young adulthood in the 1970′s under the influence of second-wave feminism, she began to question the restrictive roles that her church demanded of women – but she came from a background that didn’t encourage questioning. Certainty, rooted in the belief in the literal truth of the Bible, is one of the hallmarks of fundamentalist thought. On that note, I found the distinctions Campbell makes between fundamentalism and evangelical Christianity enlightening; not coming from either tradition, I’ve tended to lump them together.

   Campbell spent several years as an adult studying at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, and calls herself a “seeker” these days. She is without a “church home” now, and seems to have mixed feelings about that. She has re-framed some of her understanding about Christianity and women though direct reference to verses about Jesus’ interactions with women in the Gospels themselves, which seem to be much more woman-friendly than a lot of “official” Christian teaching, and seems to see some hope in a renewed emphasis on “social ministry” by some congregations.

   I think I had expected the balance between personal and political in this book to be different, but I still found it a worthwhile read.
   Rating: 4 / 5
5. Ana Mardoll says:

   March 6, 2010 at 4:26 pm

   Dating Jesus / 978-0-8070-1066-2

   When Amazon started recommending “Dating Jesus”, after purchases of books like Quiverfull and The Purity Myth, I mistakenly believed that the book would cover modern fundamentalist objections to dating and basic sex-education, and I was slightly surprised to find that this book has very little to do with dating (except as the author details her life and journey) and much more to do with her discovery of feminism as she grows up in a fundamentalist environment.

   I was instantly charmed by the first few chapters of “Dating Jesus”, as Campbell tells her life story and I recognize so much of myself and my own past in her story. Her writing style is folksy and flows nicely, and so much of her writing reminds me intimately of my own history (particularly counting the wood-knots during the countless sermons she sits through). As the book advances, however, the biographical parts become more and more broken up with feminist history, and often in such a meandering tone that I wish this book had been more rigorously edited. Campbell breaks narrative frequently and often to say, basically, “I can’t believe I just wrote that, that makes me sound bad, LOL!” and the effect feels less conversational over time and becomes more affected (or, in other words: one outburst is spontaneous emotion, but a dozen outbursts are planned). Much of the feminist history presented here is interesting and important, but as it is not filtered through the lens of the biography format (“I felt that Susan B. Anthony. . . “) but rather is just given in a flat textbook format, the flow of the book feels broken and jagged.

   As a side note, while on the subject of history, I would like to make a motion that Christians and ex-Christians stop talking about Biblical “history” when they have nothing more than scripture *memorization* and the “history” they learned in Sunday School. I respect Campbell immensely, and I am sure she means no offense, but she should not use her book to repeat – however innocently – the old canard that Jesus was a “rebel rabbi” because he didn’t treat women like dirt when all the other Jewish teachers oh-so-obviously did. Actual scholars like Robert Price have painstakingly pointed out that many of the rabbis of Jesus’ day did not subscribe to a painfully ‘literal’ interpretation of the Hebrew law that Christians claim Jesus was ‘rebelling’ against, and it verges on anti-Semitism to continue to spread mistruths about a culture just because you can’t be bothered to research your book. Jesus – if he existed, and if the writings we have of him truly reflect his teachings – was awesome enough on his own without flanderizing his contemporaries into caricatures for him to out-perform. Furthermore, claims regarding Biblical authorship and early church timelines should be made by actual scholars and historians, not former Bible Quiz Masters. It’s frustrating that Campbell seems to have this blindspot – she can understand that much of what she has been *taught* (about women, at least) is not necessarily true, but she seemingly cannot accept that much of what she *read* may not be historically fact either, presumably because it would be emotionally damaging to have spent so much time memorizing the Bible, only to find that much of what she believes about it may not be true.

   Disregarding the non-scholarly material regarding Biblical history and authorship, there is a lot here that is interesting, but the format feels awkward and forced. I wish the feminism information had been framed less in a ‘textbook format’ (“Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote ‘The Woman’s Bible’ in 1898, discuss. “) and more in terms of how Campbell felt, as a girl, upon learning about ‘The Woman’s Bible’ – and what she felt about the contents, then and now. The jumps from biography (how Campbell feels about church, boyfriends, and brothers) to history with very little bridge in-between creates the impression that Campbell does not really remember how she felt, or perhaps does not know how she feels now, but I would much prefer to read Campbell’s piecing together of her likely childhood response to this marriage of her holy Bible and her intuitive feminism, as opposed to the novel equivalent of a Wikipedia page with dates and quotes and factoids.

   I wanted very much to like “Dating Jesus”, but by the end of the book I was left with the impression that Campbell didn’t have as much to say on her childhood as I wanted to read. The biography sections are superb, the historical sections are dry but probably factual, the Biblical sections are marked with that fundamentalist blindness that believes Biblical study should occur in a vacuum – beginning and ending only with the ‘approved’ Bible books, and nothing else – but the assortment as a whole fails to mesh, and ends up feeling like three short books wedged uncomfortably into one.

   ~ Ana Mardoll
   Rating: 3 / 5