Podcast: Confronting the Idols of Body Image, Sex, Abortion, and Motherhood (Jen Oshman)

March 14, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Idols of This Age

In today's episode, Jen Oshman discusses the many empty promises that the culture of the modern world makes that run counter to the clear teaching of Scripture and God's good plan for us.

Cultural Counterfeits

Cultural Counterfeits

Jen Oshman

Jen Oshman casts a vision for women to reject the idols of our age and find real hope in Jesus, embracing their identity in Christ and recovering his design and purpose for their lives. 

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:59 - Winsome Idols

Matt Tully
Jen, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Jen Oshman
Thanks for having me. This is a joy!

Matt Tully
In your new book you make this really interesting argument. You start off by saying a big claim, that in the last few decades especially women have been shown some winsome and convincing idols—that’s the phrase that you use—that have been especially dangerous and influential in our culture. We’ll get into these more in detail in a little bit, but what are some of those idols that you see as being particularly winsome in our world today?

Jen Oshman
I have been in women’s ministry now for a couple of decades and I’m the mom of four daughters, so this is something that I’m really sensitive to and something that I’m on the lookout for. It’s something that women are coming up to me at Bible study and at church and in my discipleship relationships and friendships, so I really have a front row seat to some of the things that I see our culture promising women—over-promising and under-delivering. I go after these five that I feel like come up over and over again, where I see damage taking place, women walking wounded for having believed the cultural narrative that these idols will give them life. The five idols—and not that this is an exhaustive list by any means, but they’re just the five that I see repeatedly wreaking havoc in the church and among my friends—the five idols would be 1) outward beauty and ability, 2) cheap sex (hook up culture), 3) the abortion industry, 4) the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, and the fifth idol tends to surprise people. It’s sort of the hidden one inside the church, but it’s the idol of marriage and motherhood. The five of these all relate in some way to our identity as women—our sexuality, our gender, our relationships—where we often look for hope or empowerment or identity. The world or the church says Here’s where you’ll find it, whether on purpose or subconsciously. We go there and it doesn’t deliver.

Matt Tully
That last one in particular is one that I definitely want to dig into. I think a lot of our listeners are Christians who love the Bible, believe the Bible, love the gospel. They might resonate with a few of those, but that last one—you’re saying these are things that you’re seeing not just outside the church but actually in the church. These are influences that we should be on guard for.

Jen Oshman
Right. This is the cultural air we’re breathing. Since the 1960s—since the sexual revolution and the counterculture—those first four have been just increasingly prominent. We inside the church can sort of look out there and critique them. The truth is, they're happening to all of us inside the church whether we admit it or not. All four of those are things that women in the pews are wrestling with all the time. Sometimes we pretend like we’re not, but we are. That fifth one, I think, is one that’s just maybe been more subtle. Maybe we’ve put more hope and identity and power in the status of marriage and motherhood than God ever intended.

Matt Tully
You say that these idols have been “wildly successful” in drawing women in. Take a step back; why do you think that is? Why have these idols been so effective?

Jen Oshman
I think that’s a multi-layered answer. If we just take a 30,000 foot view on that question, we can go back to the garden and we can go back to our tendency—our sin nature—to look for meaning and identity and power in anything other than our Creator, other than our good and kind Maker. That was Eve and Adam’s first mistake, and we’ve been making it ever since. So, idolatry is not new. Idolatry is as old as we are. But some of these specific idols that I take on, they’re not new either. Of course, king Solomon is correct that nothing is new under the sun, but I’m just writing for our age. I’m writing for my peers, the women a bit ahead of me and a bit after me. These specific idols have managed to take root and be wildly successful (I realize I used over-emphasizing words there), and I have seen them cause so much damage. I think they have, since the sexual revolution, caused so much damage because we, for the last several decades as women, have really been looking for Where’s our place? Where does our identity come from? Where does our power come from? Where can we be working and moving and making a difference? As we’ve been sort of searching for that place as a secular society and as a culture as a whole, I think we’ve landed in some really damaging places.

05:38 - Idols and Identity

Matt Tully
It does seem like those idols that you listed there do seem, in some pretty powerful and direct ways, connected to issues of identity, of issues of personhood and how we view ourselves, how we view ourselves in relation to other people. Is there something to that? Why is that identity component so central to this?

Jen Oshman
Again, I think it’s as old as we are. The identity issues have been around for millennia, since Adam and Eve. I think since the sexual revolution in particular, identity has been tricky for women. There are a number of reasons for that. One is that in the 1960s—and, of course, there were decades building up to this. It’s not like it came out of a vacuum. But for the sake of brevity we don’t need to go into hundreds of years of history. In the 1960s, we as a culture began to look at issues of equality, issues of power and empowerment, who matters and who’s valuable in society and who isn’t valuable. As a people, as a Western civilization, we determined that it is somehow better, more valuable, to be out in the working world, to be exerting oneself in a career field or somewhere outside of the home. For many reasons related to the sexual revolution as well as related to things like the advent of birth control and things that were happening in the Supreme Court, we somehow deemed the male body as the normal, better body. We said If men can work, then women can work. If men can have sex and not have babies, then women can have sex and not have babies. I think it was subconsciously and maybe somewhat subtle, but throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, as a people we decided it is better to be a man. It is better to norm the male body than the female body. It’s better to have sex without consequences than to plan for and celebrate and anticipate with joy the creation of new life. That came through birth control, that came through abortion, that came through hooking up—all of these idols that I start to list. It’s because we said let’s do it this way rather than this way. Rather than pausing culture, pausing work, pausing life and saying let’s welcome in new life, we said no, let’s stop life.

Matt Tully
In your mind, does that constitute almost a belittling of distinctly female qualities and experiences.

Jen Oshman
I think so. Absolutely. I think the female body was devalued and we devalued the role of women. The Lord God created us to be co-creators, or sub-creators, with him. He made both male and female required for procreation. Humans are precious. We are the only thing made in God’s image. His desire and calling on us is to cultivate creation and to go and multiply. There’s nothing more precious in creation than humans. In our sin nature and in our idolatry, we have somehow put ourselves above God’s good will and God’s good design, and instead said No, let’s not procreate. Let’s have sex without consequences. That is better. That’s the higher good.

Matt Tully
It’s so interesting because I think maybe someone who would be listening and wouldn’t be a Christian, or maybe not in our neck of the woods (so to speak), would say Well, the goal of a lot of that progress, in my mind, was to push back against the devaluing of women. They would say that their goal was kind of the opposite of what you’re saying actually happened. How do you think about that? Were there things in the culture that were sending mixed messages about women’s value and place?

Jen Oshman
We get everything so mixed up in our human minds and in our sinful nature, and its really grievous. My secular friends, and even myself as I’ve sort of wrestled with these issues for decades now, my secular friends would definitely say No, it’s to protect women. It empowers women that there is birth control and that there is the opportunity for abortion. I’m not making blanket statements about something like birth control necessarily. I’m definitely making a blanket statement about abortion. I know that the perspective is that that empowers women and that protects women. But the sociological evidence just does not bear that out. That’s actually not true. I go back and ask Why? Why did we do that? Why didn’t we as a community say let’s protect life. Let’s protect families. Let’s create a corporate structure. Let’s create neighborhoods and schools and a way of living that normalizes having babies and bringing them up in family units that treasure them and protect them and care for them. All idols are good things that we turn into ultimate things, and that is really what happened with sex. It’s called the sexual revolution because revolutions change everything. We took this one good gift and turned it into our highest good gift. There are so many great books out there that can help us understand why that is. We can look back to Freud and Rousseau and other thinkers throughout the last several hundred years to get at how sex got put on a pedestal higher.

Matt Tully
It became this totalizing topic that just affects everything.

Jen Oshman
Absolutely. It’s so in the water that we drink and the air that we breathe that I don’t think people even recognize that actually, the way we have set things up is a devaluing of what a woman’s body can do. It’s a devaluing of who God created us to be.

11:16 - Covert Cultural Influences

Matt Tully
Speak to that a little bit, the cultural waters. What are the biggest influences in our culture today that maybe we don’t even think of as influences that are pushing these idols on women?

Jen Oshman
I think we see it in every sphere. Of course, the one that comes to mind so quickly is social media because that is in the palm of every woman’s hand. Whether she’s nine years old or maybe all the way up to sixty years old, that smartphone with social media is in the palm of her hand. It’s really discipling us. It’s shaping us as women. One statistic that I found amazing as I was researching the book for the specific chapter on outward beauty and ability is that teen girls are looking at media on their phones for nine hours a day. And that’s not for academic purposes, so not homework. Nine hours a day. That’s the current average, and it will probably be up by the time this podcast comes out. We are being shaped by media and social media. Just these reels, these pictures, these little squares.

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about that. Obviously, I think one of the biggest things that not just young girls (but definitely young girls) are doing on social media is watching, following, peeking in on the lives of “influencers”—these people who often seem to have their lives put together pretty nicely and have lots of opinions on things. Taking a step back, what do you think about social media influencers? You’re a mom of some daughters, so how do you think about that?

Jen Oshman
It can be a dark world. We have to go in discerning. We’re often such passive consumers. I think it’s this convergence of the Internet and the availability everywhere of media content, along with consumerism and capitalism. Everything has been monetized. It’s to the point that we are branding ourselves: Is this my aesthetic? Is this my brand?

Matt Tully
It’s like Let me tell you about this cool thing I learned from the Bible today. And also, let me show you this new sponsor product that I’m promoting.

Jen Oshman
Right. So, it’s really, really tricky because we can approach social media with a pure heart and a desire to maybe steward it as a resource where we go to encourage ourselves and to encourage each other. But the line is so thin and is so easily crossed. We so quickly are prone to stealing God’s glory and promoting ourselves and looking to other people as our god rather than our Lord God above, looking to them for our teaching and truth and wisdom. All of this when we have the Word of God readily available to us, probably on the same phone where you’re scrolling Instagram. So, I do think media saturation is one reason that we are really struggling with this. We see this idolatry sanctioned in laws, in our cultural habits, in slogans and snippets and cliches that we say to each other and that we see in headlines. It is very pervasive. It’s hard to get away from.

14:13 - Idol #1: Outward Beauty and Ability

Matt Tully
Let’s dig into some of those specific idols. The first one that you mentioned is outward beauty and ability. I think we probably all have some sense of what you mean by outward beauty—what you mean by that, why that can be an idol, how that can be an idol—but maybe speak a little bit about ability. What do you mean by ability being an idol?

Jen Oshman
At first I was just going to write about outward beauty; at first it was just going to be about appearance. But as I began to dig into that specific idol, the reality of the issue is that we instrumentalize our bodies—to borrow a phrase from Nancy Pearcey—we turn our bodies into instruments. Rather than thanking God for creating us the way that he did, for being grateful for the bodies that we have—whether they’re healthy or not healthy, whether we walk with a disability or not—just honoring the Lord for how he made us, we want to turn our bodies into tools for maybe our promotion. We already spoke about the branding of ourselves online and being beautiful so that we can promote our particular product or our particular social media field. Ability is really the same. We want to be able to say Here’s what I can do. Oftentimes you hear parents say I don’t care what my kids do. I just want them to grow up and be happy and be productive members of society. We just have this subconscious value of you’ve got to be doing something to be a helpful human. You’ve got to be producing something. You’ve got to be moving some ball down the field. By saying that and thinking that uncritically, we are discipling each other to think that only bodies that can do stuff are useful.

Matt Tully
Is that particularly tempting for women, or do you think it manifests in particular ways for women that might be different for men?

Jen Oshman
I think it’s probably something we all in the West struggle with because we are a very much, as I talked about in my last book Enough about Me, we’re very much a do it yourself, pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of culture. If you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps, then are you even worthwhile?

Matt Tully
What good are you?

Jen Oshman
Yes. So, I think men struggle with it a ton. I’m not in men’s ministry, but from the outside looking in I think for sure that men struggle with it because identity is so wrapped up in work. What am I producing at work? Am I climbing the corporate ladder? Am I doing anything beneficial? Women feel it too, and I think that for women, as we are perhaps slowed down by various seasons of life or by some sort of injury or disability that God deems fit for us, there is that question of Am I good for anything? We have turned appearance and ability into an idol. We think If I don’t have this, if I don’t look like this, if my body can’t do this, if I can’t produce this, then I’m not worth anything. That’s where I’ll find my satisfaction. And it’s a lie. It’s evil.

17:04 - Idol #2: Sex

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about that second idol, sex. I think that’s one that, again, to a conservative Christian can seem obvious, but do you think there are ways in the last decade or so that the issue of sex, particularly among Christians, has changed or morphed? Has this become a different kind of idol that it maybe once was?

Jen Oshman
I think that we have idolized it in ways that we just don’t realize. It sneaks up on us. I think we see it when, and this sort of goes to the fifth idol of marriage and motherhood because they’re somewhat related, bu you can get a sneaking suspicion that in the church we have idolized sexual intimacy when we feel sorry for the single people, when we go Man, I just can’t imagine a life of celibacy. You’re all alone. We look away from cohabitation and we cant like that’s not that big of a deal, or even as we embrace homosexuality and put a stamp of approval on that. It’s because we can’t imagine that people would have to be alone, that they wouldn’t have a sexual partner. I think we’re not aware, but it creeps up. When everybody in the church is trying to fix up the single people, it’s because subconsciously we can’t imagine a life without that kind of intimacy. We have elevated, then, sexual encounters to a place where they don’t belong.

Matt Tully
Yeah, it becomes something almost less than human if you don’t have that.

Jen Oshman
Exactly. Yes. Exactly right.

18:31 - Idol #3: Abortion

Matt Tully
Another one: the issue of abortion. This has obviously been a “hot button” issue for a long, long time. Maybe this is one where more Christians are often more unified in opposition to abortion. Even with that, do you feel like you’ve seen among Christians, and maybe Christian women in particular, a loosening of convictions around abortion?

Jen Oshman
I don’t know. I think maybe so. I think we’re probably seeing a loosening around convictions all over the place because the cultural rushing river current is just so strong. What alarms me a bit about the way we talk about abortion in the church is that so many women in the church have had one, and we aren’t necessarily framing the conversation with sensitivity towards these women. Having been in women’s ministry, I have a number of friends who frequently share that skeleton in the closet that they’re afraid to talk about. They’re not going to throw that out at women’s Bible study, but it’s something that has wounded them deeply and continues to wound them deeply. What I would love to see happen in the church is sort of a decriminalization of abortion. Maybe that’s a weird way to put it, but instead of looking at Oh, abortion is horrible. Women who do that are horrible. Why would they do that?—getting behind it and saying What is leading to it? What is causing it? Why does somebody feel like they’re in a position where abortion is the only option? Have women talking about it from a place of compassion, a quickness to listen, a slowness to speak, and creating space where a wounded sister can share what the circumstances of her life were like that led her to think that that was her only option. So, I think there’s often in the church an us vs. them conversation going on—the bad people out there that are having an abortion. Well, the reality is 1) we’re all bad people, but 2) there are women right here sitting next to you who have walked through this. What if we better understood what led to that? And what if we became part of the movement to address those issues? What if we all flooded pregnancy resource centers? What if we got involved with the immigrant community and single parent homes and people on the margins—the poor and unemployed—in our community? What if we rolled up our sleeves and got busy in the community where abortion seems to be their best option and say Let’s root out the reasons? Because the truth is, abortion is something that harms women for life. It’s something that the pro-choice movement is so loud and so winsome and so powerful about that people don’t often pause to understand the wounds that are life-long.

Matt Tully
Do you think church leaders perhaps would be surprised at how many women in their congregations have had an abortion?

Jen Oshman
Yes, for sure. Yes, absolutely. We’re just so quiet about it. I think we’re afraid to talk about it. We don’t know how to talk about it. I think that sexual sin inside the church is rampant, and so we feel like we can’t talk about it. People feel like Well, who am I to say that? I had an extra marital affair or I had multiple sexual partners. People in the church have participated in these sins, so you feel like you then can’t speak to them. If we would receive God’s grace and mercy and forgiveness and be healed of those things that we’ve done in the past, then we could move in compassion to those who are still just reeling in their suffering and say I’ve been there too. I’ve made these choices too. Let’s seek our Maker and our Savior together and seek his healing.

Matt Tully
What does it look like to have that compassion and seek to have that understanding and a gentle, listening ear for women who have struggled in this way and have this in their past? And yet, I think some people could hear that and think—and sometimes it is—that that sort of language is used as sort of a distraction from how we actually need to say that this is not right. We don’t want to make excuses for this in some sense, so how do you hold those things together?

Jen Oshman
I think it’s a theological issue. It’s a theology of creation. Who is God and who are we? What’s his character and how did he make us? If we could return to honoring these bodies that God has given us and praising him for the creation and the way that he created us, and realizing these bodies are not our own. I don’t get to spend my body the way I want to. This body belongs to him; so does my soul, my heart, everything. Life and breath and everything comes from the hand of my God. So, I think if we were constantly remembering who we are and whose we are—that we are created in the image of God and he is good and kind and went so far as to die on a cross on our behalf and then rose again victorious—if everything was couched in that truth rather than maybe some of the self-help messages that we’re preaching to each other, some of the good advice (Here’s the practical ten steps to deal with this particular problem on a surface level), rather than going back constantly and remembering and reminding each other of the sovereignty and the kindness of our God and that the circumstances that we’re in are not an accident and that he is able in the situation that we’re in. That kind of covers it all, right? The crisis that you’re in, sister, I’m going to help you with it. We’re going to choose life together because you’re worth more. You were made for so much more than cheap sex or abortion. You were designed to thrive as you abide in your Savior. As a community, as a body of Christ, we’re going to walk through this valley together. We can address things on the front and on the back and everywhere in between if we remember who we are and whose we are.

24:30 - Idol #4: The LGBTQIA+ Spectrum

Matt Tully
Maybe one of the most, if not the most, contentious, controversial issues in our culture today revolves around the LGBTQIA+ movement (that’s the term that you use). In what ways would you say that this is a prominent, real potential idol for a Christian?

Jen Oshman
The whole book was one that I wrote with fear and trepidation and prayer and tears.

Matt Tully
Unpack that. Why is that?

Jen Oshman
Because all of these topics are so scary! All of these topics are so contentious, and I really wanted to write with a tone of compassion because that is what I feel. Each of these idols, for me, are idols that I have either struggled with myself or been burned by myself, or dear friends have been. As I wrote each chapter, I have the faces of friends, the DMs of friends, the emails and texts with friends, the face-to-face discipleship relationship. So, none of them felt far off, and I wanted to communicate just so—in a way of communicating great grace and also great truth.

Matt Tully
Do you say that thinking that oftentimes maybe Christians haven’t done that well?

Jen Oshman
I think that’s true, but as I said earlier, I didn’t grow up in Christian culture. I know that oftentimes we are accused of lacking grace, and I’m sure that’s true. I lack grace everyday, so I know that’s got to be true about us. But to know that the body has wounded, we wound each other all the time and that is a grief, and I don’t want to contribute to that. Jesus came that we might have life and have it abundantly. I want to be a mouthpiece that communicates life, not death. That’s why finally I was like You know what? I’m just going to write this book. I see what’s bringing death, and I want to bring life; if God would allow me, to be a conduit of life. That’s why I felt willing, like Okay, this is scary, and I’m so afraid I’m going to say it wrong. And even if I say it right, it might be read wrong. But I’m just going to trust the Lord that this would be a conduit of life in some way. To get back to that fourth idol that I wrote about—the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, that is huge. That issue, again, as old as humans are. There is nothing new under the sun. I could have discussed each of those letters in so many different ways. I could have gone thousands of directions.

Matt Tully
There is lots of variety even within that spectrum.

Jen Oshman
Yes. I was careful just to be very specific in this particular chapter and really try to focus especially on ROGD—rapid-onset gender dysphoria—which is something that is sweeping our Western civilization, especially teenage girls and young adult women, as well as the issue of homosexuality. I just want to be so careful even in the way I talk about it on the podcast and the way I wrote about it in the book because these are dear friends of mine. Mostly Christians are probably going to read this book. It’s going to be women in church, probably, who are going to pick this book up. I think the temptation that they feel—the idol in this specific scenario—more often than not, though not everybody for sure—will be the fear and unwillingness to talk about it. The issue just seems so scary and so like you can’t actually say anything that is true or firm. You can’t call on the authority of the Word of God or the authority of anybody in this particular subject or you will be canceled. You’ll be written off. You will potentially divide your family or divide your church. You’ll lose friends. You might lose business. Someone might look up your profile online and tell your employer and you’ll get fired. The stakes are starting to get higher. By next year and the year after, they’re probably just going to get higher and higher. So, I think the idol for Christian women is submitting to culture rather than surrendering and submitting oneself to the Word of God.

Matt Tully
Are you saying that you think Christian women need to be on social media, posting their opinions on all these things? What does it look like to not surrender?

Jen Oshman
First of all, it looks like being in the Word of God yourself and being convinced that he is our Author and he has authority, and that his Word has authority. It starts there.

Matt Tully
Have you seen that? Is there sometimes maybe even a subtle preference to not even fully knowing yourself because you don’t really want to have to land that plane?

Jen Oshman
For sure. It’s scary. If I really believe what the Bible says, then I’m going to have to really believe that these decisions my dear friend or my child is making are wrong. Then, I’m going to have to walk that line. Maybe it’s just easier to go with the flow. Right now the flow is that counselors, teachers, practitioners, doctors, therapists are all gender affirming when it comes to ROGD. They’re all saying If your child thinks that they are the other gender, we must move forward swiftly with treatment: with puberty blockers, with hormones, with breast binding, with transition. Otherwise, your child will probably commit suicide. That’s really the conversation: you’ve got to swiftly move forward. Insofar as we’re speaking just about ROGD, I want Christian moms and teachers and counselors and people in the church, people who follow the Lord, to be willing to say The Word of God is true. His Spirit is able. We can stand on this in a way that is loving and kind. So, no, I don’t want people going to social media and just blasting the latest trend or news story or whatever. I don’t want to do that. I know that’s tempting sometimes. It’s tempting to just say Can you believe it? But I don’t think that’s really helpful. Each person’s situation is unique and she can steward it the way that God has given it to her. I think the bigger issue is being convinced, as women who follow Jesus, that he really did say what he said and he really is able to help us in this situation and that we really can trust him to follow him and follow what his Word says. It’s going to be okay, even if we get canceled. Even if we lose reputation and finances and businesses, that’s okay. Peter tells us you will be blessed if you are cursed for the name of Jesus. My heart is that women would actually believe that.

31:07 - Idol #5: Marriage and Motherhood

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about that last potential idol that you mentioned, the one that maybe doesn’t seem like it should be on the list, but I want to hear you explain why it is. That would be the idol of marriage and motherhood. Why did you put that on there?

Jen Oshman
It’s so funny because anytime I talk about this book to somebody and I’m listing off the five idols, for one through four they’re like Yes, yes, and then I say five and they’re like Whoa! What? Throughout the book I try to bring in the parable of the prodigal son, and I feel like those first four idols maybe identify really easily with the prodigal, with the younger brother who took the inheritance of the father. He went out to the far country and he squandered all of his inheritance on reckless living. Those first four idols really match up with that. We’re given good gifts and then we go and do crazy things with them. But the older brother stayed home and pursued his identity and his worth in his morality, in doing what was expected and following the rules, not for the pleasure of the father, not out of a relationship of love and a desire to bring his father glory and to honor his dad, but to get what was coming to him because he earned it. The older brother is in this fifth idol. For me, writing this was actually really convicting myself because I realized that even though I didn’t grow up in the church, I have absorbed some of these false ideas that you’ve arrived once you’ve gotten married and once you become a mom. It’s something I’ve heard in my own church from other women and it’s something I hear frequently, that motherhood is a woman’s highest calling. That is not true. That is a damaging lie. I know that maybe we say it flippantly and without really thinking it through. My desire in this chapter was to ask Is that true? Why do we think that? Why do we say that?

Matt Tully
Someone listening right now might be feeling a little bit of I say that. I think that’s true.

Jen Oshman
I know. That’s true. Well, God created women. He created Even as an ezer, a helper to Adam. It was so fun to study the word ezer. Chapter 9 in this book is called It’s Good to Be a Girl, and I just loved diving into that a little bit more. The word ezer, of course, is not just mean helper, but it’s defender, powerful, and strong.

Matt Tully
It’s a term that is used of God in different places, right?

Jen Oshman
Yes. In sixteen places in the Old Testament God is called ezer in terms of delivering, defending, and helping his people. So, that word helper really is so multi-faceted. In the church I think what has happened in response to the sexual revolution and in response to the swift current that we’ve seen in the last several decades, the secular society around us has said The best thing is for you to have multiple sexual partners. The best thing is for you to sleep around, co-habitate, have an abortion, whatever. Try on multiple sexual identities, try on multiple genders. Your highest good is going to be found in multiple ways of expressing yourself sexually. The church has, rightly, said that is wrong. The church has said No. The sexual revolution got so many things wrong, and we want to defend the institution of marriage because it is designed by God for our good. That’s all true. I don’t disagree with that at all. Marriage is a gift of God, it is designed by him. He created us male and female to procreate and for flourishing—your flourishing and mine—that we would bring up generation upon generation in the safety and protection and nourishment of a family. It is a good gift. But I think in an attempt to swing the pendulum away from secularism and what we have done with sexuality, we have then put marriage and motherhood on a pedestal that it was never meant to be placed on. We have subconsciously—again, as I said earlier when we were talking about how we address single people in our church—we’ve subconsciously regurgitated this message to each other that it’s better to be married and that it’s better to have children, and you have not yet really arrived as a mature disciple of Jesus until you have reached those plateaus. That’s just not in the Word of God. You won’t find that in Scripture. So, we’re putting something in the Word that is not there.

Matt Tully
Are there other things that are often done or said, in the church broadly, beyond things like saying motherhood is the highest calling for the Christian woman that you think contribute to or are expressions of this imbalanced view?

Jen Oshman
Yes, I do think so. Again, this is maybe a benefit of growing up outside the church, but my husband and I did not really go through the purity culture of the 1990s and the early 2000s. We got married in 1999 (we were believers then), so we sort of sat on the sidelines as we saw purity culture taking place. The purity movement: your dad puts a ring on your finger for your purity until you get married, the purity balls, and the purity promises. I critique that and everything else in my book as a sister. I don’t mean to be coming at this and saying, You guys really screwed that up!

Matt Tully
You’re not coming from a position of You’re just so silly.

Jen Oshman
Right. I don’t mean to condemn. Again, we came from a good place. We have made sex a god in this culture, and so in the church we are going to say No! Abstinence is better. But then I think maybe we turned abstinence into the god. We turned purity into the god. Unfortunately, we began to bow down to the idol of modesty and purity, and it became this sort of works righteousness. What we were saying in youth group and what they were saying on college campuses is You can have the best marriage and you can have the best future if you save yourself for that person. So, don’t have sex now and earn your best life later. It became a form of legalism. Maybe it started from a good place, but I think the message that many teens and college students heard was I can earn my future happiness, my future prosperity, my future healthy and amazing marriage. I can earn it. Those people are all married now, or maybe divorced or still single. The fruit of it has proved rotten because, again, marriage and motherhood were not meant to sustain the weight that we place on them. They weren’t meant to be our god.

Matt Tully
So it’s not about belittling or devaluing marriage and motherhood, but it’s about putting them in their proper place.

Jen Oshman
Yes, absolutely.

Matt Tully
Not asking them to do more than they were supposed to do.

Jen Oshman
Exactly. If we are looking for our identity and our satisfaction in marriage or motherhood, we will be terribly disappointed because they will not deliver. They will not deliver the soul-deep satisfaction and peace that only Jesus himself can give us.

Matt Tully
Do you feel like you’ve had to learn that over the years of marriage and motherhood?

Jen Oshman
For sure. I had to learn in all of these areas. I can turn something into an idol in five minutes. It’s not hard to put my hope in something temporary very quickly, but nothing and no one can sustain it. Only God in heaven can give us that kind of satisfaction. He is our Maker, and as Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God.

38:52 - It’s Good to Be a Girl

Matt Tully
Maybe as a last question, your second to last chapter, as you’ve already mentioned, is entitled It’s good to be a girl. Do you think it’s important to say that and be reminded of that in our cultural moment today?

Jen Oshman
I do. Absolutely. I said at the beginning of this podcast that in many subconscious ways I think the male body was normed, the male way of life has been normed. I don’t mean to claim victim-hood status as a woman, but raising four girls and being in women’s ministry, I’m just always conscious of How can I help you celebrate that God made you a girl? We see women devalued in secular society and I think oftentimes we see women devalued in the church, whether it’s on accident or on purpose. It’s our sin nature. We devalue each other. We devalue the human body. That’s kind of what the whole book sort of points to. So, I want to be raising my daughters to realize that God created us male and female, and that was good. The expression of his image needed both genders. He didn’t just stop with Adam. He made Eve as well in order to fully express his image among us, his humans. I want to be looking for ways to celebrate that. I feel like so often we’re coming at the conversation from the perspective of Well, here’s what you can’t do. Here’s the boundaries. Here’s what’s not allowed, when there is a massive conversation and celebration that we could be having instead. Who did God make you to be? What are your circumstances? What are your giftings and callings? Let’s go for it! By his power and for his glory, let’s run after that good gift. I just want to re-frame the conversation to one that is life-giving and joy-giving. I want to lead women away from these idols that are hurting them and destroying them. They overpromise and under-deliver. I want to just come alongside women as they read and say Come with me. This path leads to death, but the narrow path of Jesus leads to life. It’s such a good life. Let’s go there.

Matt Tully
Jen, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk with us and help us to hopefully better identify some of these idols, but then, as you say, to quickly turn our gaze to Jesus.

Jen Oshman
Yes. Thank you so much, Matt.

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