Good Theology Isn't a Shortcut to Being a Good Person

The line from what we believe about God to how we act isn't as straight as we'd like to think.

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If you watched Shiny Happy People or grew up anywhere close to the Gothard movement, you know about these umbrellas.

There’s a lot going on here, including but not limited to a fundamental misunderstanding of how umbrellas work. But, mostly, it’s just a very patronizing view of women and a revealing picture of that whole movement’s obsession with hierarchy and patriarchal authority.

In the wake of Shiny Happy People, it’s easy to think of this as Ground Zero for Gothard’s abusive legacy. And insofar as this Russian nesting doll umbrella-situation is copied by other Christian movements like the Southern Baptist Convention, it’s tempting to say we’ve found the dark heart of that whole toxic chimera. It’s very easy — maybe too easy — to draw a straight line from Umbrella Thinking to mistreatment of women, silencing of victims, skepticism of whistleblowers and ongoing empowerment of bad men. Fix this disastrous theology and you could turn the ship around.

I think good theology is important. And I don’t think men should think of women as the little umbrella to their big umbrella. But I’m not convinced that theology and praxis are as neatly correlated as we’d like to think. And there are some real dangers with tying them together too tightly.