Sunday's Cool: Death to the Billy Graham Rule

Maybe we're all getting the "can men and women just be friends?" discourse wrong.

Every other month or so, Christian Twitter goes off on another round of “can men and women just be friends” discourse. I’m of two minds about getting involved on this latest iteration. On the one hand, I see the appeal. It’s a juicy topic, closely related to all sorts of purity culture bugaboos like the Billy Graham Rule and humanity’s checkered history of keeping our pants on. On the other hand, how much more juice can possibly be squeezed from this lemon? 

But I’m gonna go once more to the breach, dear friends. The persistence of this topic, particularly among Christians, would suggest that it’s something we haven’t gotten figured out yet. And while most of the ongoing debate assumes we haven’t resolved it because we haven’t figured out sex, I actually think it might be because we haven’t figured out friendship. 

There are basically two camps here. The first, more conservative view, is that a married person should not hang out alone with someone they’re not married to. In extreme cases (like, say, our former Vice President), this includes business meetings, work trips and other professional situations. The argument here is that the flesh is weak and, even if you don’t succumb to your romantic urges, it just kinda sends the wrong signal. Billy Graham said he never spent time alone with any woman who wasn’t his wife, supposedly as a way to stymie reporters who hoped to trap him in a scandal. 

The second view argues that this is a legalistic holdover from fundamentalism that ends up devaluing everyone involved. It teaches women that their company is inherently dangerous and teaches men that they can’t be trusted with even the most platonic of interactions with a woman. The “Billy Graham Rule” has an outsized negative impact on women, who are objectified as both a personal and professional liability. They also end up being excluded from professional opportunities, since business meetings, work trips, golf dates and lunches with the boss are fuel for career advancement. (Roxy Stone and Katelyn Beaty did a great job exploring all this on their podcast).

It won’t surprise anyone to hear that I’m partial to the latter view, for a whole host of reasons others have written about better than I could. But I don’t think the former view is quite as insane as other less-conservative folks tend to think. There is a flood of sex scandals in Christiandom, and a lot of these guys are just desperately plugging their thumbs into holes in the dam. You can hardly blame them for looking over the last few years of headlines about Christian leaders and concluding that they really shouldn’t be alone with women. Of course, their solution is not to remove these men from leadership positions they clearly can’t handle, but to bar women from getting in their way.

The Billy Graham Rule is definitely a fear-based model. There’s no way around it. It’s the solution you come up with when you see sexual urges as Jason Voorhees, lurking behind every corner, an irresistible force. Your chances of triumphing over being a sex pest are doubtful, so best to just remove the variable of women altogether. 

One problem with all this is, I’d argue, is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You teach abstinence instead of discipline, and these men never even have the opportunity to learn that mature grownups can and do wrangle their sex drives, though it’ll still buck every now and then. Another, more self-evident problem, is that the Billy Graham Rule is not working. Few institutions have been as rigorous at removing the temptation of sex from men in leadership as the Southern Baptist Convention and the Catholic Church. How’s that working out for them? 

(It’s a little beyond the purview of this post to get into the heteronormativity of all this too, but it’s definitely worth noting that the Billy Graham Rule only really flies for someone as apparently straight as its namesake. Factor in the reality of queer people and this rule just does not scale.)  

So, no, policing one-on-one time with people you’re not married to isn’t the solution. But I think there is a problem, and we’re tackling it the wrong way. A lot of the criticism of things like the Billy Graham Rule centers around career opportunities for women, which is very real but not, perhaps, the fundamental issue here. There’s something deeper going on that’s hurting not just our professional lives but our humanity. 

The fundamentalist view is that traditional families are foundational to society. It follows then that, to some degree, procreational sex is foundational as well. It’s what we’re supposed to be doing and anyone who can’t or won’t is, to some degree, not quite where they should be.

I think we underestimate how much this mentality (which exists well outside of fundamentalism) can poison interactions between men and women. If breeding is at the core of who we are then, yeah, maybe we should be careful how much time we’re spending around each other. We can only resist the prime directive for so long. 

But what if procreation was only one part of who we are as people? What if the bedrock of society isn’t just married couples who make kids, but all of us, together, working in unison to build a better, healthier and more creative future? What I’m trying to say is, what if friendship, like sex, is also fundamental to who we are as people? 

Part of the reason behind the astonishing rise in loneliness is that we, both individually and corporately, have devalued friendship. We see friends as nice things to have if time permits. This is especially true of men, but women have suffered from it too. I’ve written about this before, but we have systematically structured our lives away from meaningful friendships with others. It’s left a clear and identifiable mark on the quantity and quality of our friendships. 

So much so that I think we sometimes have difficulty even recognizing the possibility of friendship in another person. The people in our community might work with us, provide for us, live near us or be a candidate for romance and sex. But once we age to a certain point, we don’t think of the people around us as potential friends. 

This enormously limits the amount of meaningful interactions we can have with another person. We objectify each other because we don’t know what else to do. 

But when we see friendship as something deep and abiding to our humanity instead of just a cherry on top, we open up an enormous new number of ways to connect with others. Interactions with people become less dangerous because we do not default to thinking of each other as potential sexual partners but potential companions who can enrich our lives intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, all with their clothes on. One-on-one interactions with people who you’re not married to aren’t minefields to tiptoe through, but gardens. 

It is striking that while the Bible spends a good deal of time talking about romance and sex, the love that it is most interested in exploring is agape, often translated as lovingkindness. It’s just the love God calls us all to have for one another. It is, in other words, a call to be friends. 

There are all sorts of exceptions, I’m sure. I don’t blame a woman whose husband has a history of infidelity for asking that he limit his time with other women. And you’re going to meet people with whom you connect on a sexual level. Sometimes you’re married to those people and sometimes you’re not, so you gotta be smart and honest about how you handle those. And there are certain roles in which meeting one-on-one with someone else might be unwise. 

But I do tend to think that these things are exceptions, and it really doesn’t take that much wisdom to navigate these situations without laying down a blanket rule that devalues everyone in your life (including you) and doesn’t accomplish its intended purpose anyway.

And when we choose to see friendship as core to ourselves and others, we open the possibility for a world in which we are not just all strangers who could occasionally combust in one-on-one meetings, but a community of humans who are united in love and trust, building a more valuable future because we better understand the inherent value in each other.

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• Saw The Fabelmans, which I loved. So strange that someone with Spielberg’s natural ability to connect with huge audiences is increasingly seen as arthouse Oscar bait. Doesn’t speak well of the state of cinema.

• I’m nearing a thousand subscribers, which is really cool. When and if I hit the mark, you’ll be seeing a few changes around here. I’d love to offer Q+As with other people, some book excerpts and things like that. If you have any other suggestions for what you’re liking/not liking about Clusterhuck or things you’d like me to offer, you know where the comment section is!