In preparing to teach my students about Jesus’ hard saying about the “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” (Mark 3:29) this week, I couldn’t help but make the connection to the recent, bizarre criticism of Evangelical efforts to end the sex-trafficking trade. What’s the charge? Well, apparently taking women and children out of the pay-for-rape game smacks of Evangelical colonialism to some. According to Yvonne Zimmerman, a professor of Christian Ethics, instead of focusing on trafficking in all of its forms, Evangelicals seem to narrow their concern to sex-trafficking, likely because of their “Protestant” theology of sex and vision of the “sexually pure and pious” woman. (Read “evil, Victorian sexual mores that Freud opened our eyes to, and Foucalt exposed as forms of social control.”) If they weren’t so obsessed with restricting sex to their particular norm, they wouldn’t be so focused on the prostitution-trade. What they seem to be overlooking is that some of these women might actually want to stay in prostitution and so the imposition of our values is, at the very least, problematic. They are assuming an idea of freedom and inadvertently limiting the freedom some of these women would choose for themselves.

Right.

You can read the rest of my guest piece over at the Christ and Pop Culture Blog at Patheos.com.

Soli Deo Gloria