I'm not sure there's ever been one single event that brings together feminists, the BDSM community, and conservative Christians (like Focus on the Family) as this movie. Their concerns really boil down to two:
- That Fifty Shades is "soft porn" and shouldn't be released to a wide audience.
- That the story glamorizes domestic abuse patterns.
But that's not what strikes me about it. I have no desire to see the film. I read the first book. That was enough. What strikes me about the response is this: What more did we expect?
Fifty Shades of Grey is a mirror of the culture that women experience every day. Regardless of which side of the walls they live on, we know women are consuming this stuff because the underlying ideology is what they're familiar with. Just in exaggerated and overtly sexualized tones.
Both inside and outside the Church, women are fed the line that they're not complete without a man. This is why I wouldn't get behind Twilight. And it's why I won't get behind Fifty Shades of Grey. From the time we start ingesting Disney films, we know that a woman's life revolves around finding her prince. Tabloids and self-help books are filled with titles about how to get a man and how to manipulate him into staying. The vast majority of secular material on sexuality written for women is about how to make a man want you and how to please him in bed. Throw in the statistics about how frequently women experience assault (1 out of 5 American women have been sexually assaulted), the discrepancy in income earning (78 cents to the dollar), and the lack of women in leadership (10-20% in most fields) and you end up with a pretty clear case of misbalanced power between men and women.
And, thing is, it's not much better inside the Church.
Large segments of the Church continue to hold that it's God's intention for humanity is that men should hold exclusive power in the home and in church. They are the decision-makers and the ones responsible for the well-being of the women and children under them. That's why Christian women are left hoping to find a man like Jesus, because that's the only way you can insure the gender hierarchy of marriage isn't abusive.
Now, I'm not saying that all these Christians are inherently abusive. I know lots of men who are able to live up to the ideal of being a Christ-like head of their families. We can recognize a mis-balance of power, even while noting that good-hearted Christians read and interpret Scripture in ways that require them take power and authority from women and give it to men.
The problem here, though, is that the Christian attempt to have men become the "spiritual covering" of women is a theological band-aid over the brokenness and gaping wound that results from sin, not from a created order. I know lots of Christians who are insisting that Fifty Shades of Grey is a satanic twisting of how relationships are supposed to be between men and women. The difference, though, is that they continue to define that relationship in terms of authority and dominion.
The problem is that the basic ideology itself is exactly the same. In the very worst of scenarios, a culture of male-dominated authority leads to horrors like what is depicted in 50 Shades of Grey (and worse). The most perfect possibility that these Christian alternatives of "spiritual covering" of the man over the woman can offer is a safe, life-giving relationship resting in the capable and loving authority of a man who is at all times just like Jesus.
But there's the problem.
Even the most godly man isn't Jesus. I know I'm not. I can only approximate the selfless love of the cross. But that approximation is always going to pale in the face of the real thing. That's why lots of Christians have this idea that nothing less than perfection will work for masculine authority and leadership.
And there's the problem.
It just doesn't work. But, what's more, there's no biblical warrant for that ideal. Jesus doesn't come to fix the curse; he came to abolish it. He came to overcome, to make right what was made wrong, and to offer a new covenant in place of the old. I think that's what Paul is insisting in Romans.
In his lifetime, Jesus repeatedly treated women as equals, despite the cultural pressure to do otherwise.
He never tried to make holy this idea that men have authority over women. Because you can't make holy what isn't holy. He rejected the whole idea that men have dominion over women, because the idea all along was that men and women rule together (Genesis 1.28). This is why Paul demands later that any divisions of race, economic status, and gender (!) have been broken down, so the Church must do the same (Galatians 3.28).
So I have to wonder: Why are we still trying to band-aid the open wound of sin?
See, that's the real problem of Fifty Shades of Grey. It's business as usual in the fall.
The Kingdom of God demands so much more.
We've been lifted out of this horrible place of authority-and-leadership-over into a place of awesome, joyful responsibility of seeing God's kingdom move forward toward its complete fruition in our homes, in our churches, and in our world.