We Are More: Sisters Talk Faith & Feminism

The Bible is full of miracles, wisdom, redemption…and a frankly alarming amount of poop. This week, we’re digging into the stories Sunday school conveniently skipped: a sword swallowed by a man’s belly, a plague of possibly divine hemorrhoids, golden replicas of those hemorrhoids, and a prophet negotiating with God over exactly whose poop he has to cook with. If your version of Christianity requires the Bible to be polished, dignified, and suitable for a Hobby Lobby sign, we have some deeply unfortunate news for you. God put the weird crap in there—we’re just unhinged enough to talk about it.

“Not my church!” Okay, babes. Let’s talk about your church. This week, we’re looking at the seemingly respectable theology of male leadership and female submission—and what happens when someone follows that hierarchy all the way to its ugliest conclusions. We’re talking control, abuse, “biblical manhood,” good Christian men™, and the very convenient definition of equality where one person somehow gets all the authority. Not every church takes these beliefs to the extreme. But maybe the better question is: why are we comfortable with the beliefs that make the extreme possible?

They taught us Jesus is love, people will know us by our fruit, and we should hide God’s word in our hearts. So we did. And now apparently we’re being difficult because we keep noticing when the fruit is rotten. This week, we’re talking VeggieTales, Awana jewels, performative prayer, deconstruction, and all the childhood faith lessons that held up suspiciously well once we started asking questions. You can’t be mad at us—we learned it from a flannelgraph.

The synapses are synapping, the theology is theologizing, and somehow Jesus has ended up at a sloppy disco with 180 gallons of wine. In part two of our discussion of Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dale’s God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, we’re talking Jubilee, joy, breastfeeding the body of Christ, and why apparently you’re allowed to kick God in the shins. We also ask what happens when you stop treating the Bible like an instruction manual and start actually trying to know the character of God. There is chaos. There is wine. There is an alarming amount of Leviticus. Somehow, we swear, it all connects.

Apparently, God doesn’t hate you. Wild, we know. This week we’re talking about God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, why Joseph may have been a fabulous little turd, and whether God can take a joke. We also have some questions about why Christians got so comfortable making everyone feel terrible about themselves. Spoiler: we don’t think that was the point. Unclench, you little cuss.