So here’s a little story about the time I blushed, well, fifty shades of red. You can’t miss the smash hit, Fifty Shades of Grey. You see women reading it on every bus, subway, and in every hair salon. So what’s a girl to do? Read the book to see what all the hype is about, right? Sure, I thought. So I flipped through a couple of pages to check it out.
Yeah. Instant regret.
Two pages in, I had to put the book down and ask God for forgiveness! Talk about “mommy porn.” I thought books like this were only found in some women’s homes on a hidden book shelf next to covers of Fabio, a horse, and some buxom beauty. Put a glossy new cover on it, and it’s a best seller?
American women are in dire straits. Our country’s national debt is sky rocketing; women account for 92% of the jobs lost under this administration, and our children’s and parents’ health care is in dire jeopardy of being run by Washington bureaucrats obsessed with taking away our right to “shop” for this commodity. It’s no wonder women need an escape, but while Fifty Shades of Grey may seem like a simple “escape” from the real world, it’s more like jumping from the frying pan into a nuclear reactor.
And what’s it going to get us? Nothing. It’s erotica, sexually themed fantasy, quasi-intellectual word candy that’ll rot our brains … and maybe our souls.
Christian women, we need to wake up! This country needs us. It needs our passion, our intensity, our desire to defend ourselves and our families. It needs the $22.50 we spent on “Fifty Shades of Grey” to be invested in a cause or campaign in which we believe (click here for a good place to start).
But women everywhere are politically and spiritually asleep, lulled into a cultural obsession with Christian Grey, an abusive therapist who seduces a college senior. And some men are even buying it on the advice of women as a lesson book for what women like. I recently heard a male bus driver say he wants to get this book on audio! (I’ll bet you do, ya perv!)
Is this what we’ve come to: Women — Christian women — flocking to bookstores in droves to buy morally reprehensible tripe?
Why are we falling headlong into this grey area, where Hollywood tells us that all we should care about is stepping outside of reality and filling our heads with hormone-driven daydreams of men to whom we are not married?
Do you remember being afraid of the dark as a child? (Ninety degree turn, I know. But stay with me.) Do you remember the day you stopped being afraid? It was probably when you learned that darkness is simply the absence of light. Have you thought about that? While we can study light, we can’t study darkness. Why not? Well, how do you measure how dark a room is? You measure the amount of light present.
Now let that sink in for a moment. What in your life is dark? What is light? We can only measure darkness in our lives by looking at how much light is in it.
And somewhere, in this struggle between light and dark, we have the annoying issue of “grey,” that fuzzy middle ground in which we find such a false refuge from condemnation, but which in reality God hates so very much. And we need to ask ourselves, “What is grey for me? Facebook? The music I listen to? The movies? What about the books I read? What about Christian Grey?”
Sisters and fellow Christians, if we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that Fifty Shades of Grey is merely a pornographic pleasure for our minds, and, as we know, the Bible commands us to guard our hearts, for everything we do will flow from it (Proverbs 4:23). By investing our energy in smut, we are tearing down these walls of protection around our hearts.
The Lord has given us a clear, black-and-white example of true love. The images that are depicted in Fifty Shades of Grey are full of lust and give a false perspective on how men and women should present themselves.
While Christians are still to be a part of the world, we must not conform to its patterns. Anne Frank once said, “Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.” Ironically, sometimes we have to be that candle. Let us choose to defy and define darkness in our lives. It just may shine light on a grey area in your life and maybe in the life of another.
Let us resolve to keep our eyes, our money, and our time away from morally questionable pursuits, and, instead, let us focus on the God of true love, who is fifty shades of great. Let those of us who are single resolve to wait for a man who knows our value is not in how much you can service him, but how much we can serve the Lord. Let us wait for a man who knows that true love is black and white, not shades of grey.
Today’s guest blogger is actually two women. This piece was authored by Alison Howard, Concerned Women for America’s (CWA) Executive Assistant to the CEO, and Amy Clemenson, an intern with CWA’s Ronald Reagan Memorial Internship Program.