Women deserve personal autonomy and to know that their bodies are not the extent of their impact or ability to impress. Modesty and brash sexuality as a personal choice is fine. To then have the audacity to preach about “being made whole” when all teachings to this point have painted an experience of God that’s only capable of loving my holiness which excludes my sexual expression in the name of modesty is a slap in the face disguised as godly teaching. It’s why even your “good Christian wives” can’t do the Silhouette Challenge privately for their husband’s pleasure because these teachings never allowed them to fully embrace their sexuality.
#Pastor mike todd heresy free#
It is these misogynistic teachings, absent of any critical engagement, that feeds the beliefs and mindsets of people who attacked Chloe Bailey (to the point of tears) for choosing to be free this week.
It is these words, spoken from self-declared messengers of God, that both sexualizes and scandalizes everything women do.
These lectures demand that we constantly disassociate our sexuality from our intellectual capacity and force us to choose to exist in parts. From the time we are girls with no knowledge of our sexual selves, we are preached sermons of modesty and asked to bury any glimmer of our sensuality and then magically expected to sprout sexuality wings because y’all “chose” us and we said, “I do.” We are told we’re created in the image of God, but every conversation of our bodies is cloaked in shame and sin while naming everyone but ourselves as the owners of our personhood. His sermon engages a long history of men preaching about the bodies of women with themselves, their opinions, and desirability as it concerns us as the center. Todd’s choice to shame a trend that he’s obviously been scrolling through is just the tipping point of hypocrisy in the pulpit. Todd’s use of the Silhouette Challenge, however, is strange and begs the question Jameelah Jones asks: “How do you know about the silhouette challenge and what women are showing under their clothes?” Given that Pastor has likely curated his timeline to like-minded people and that there are no accidents in the algorithm, to see so many of a very specific niche challenge means that one has attuned their algorithm to it through consistent engagement. Male pastors often choose to parade the bodies of women – who make up the majority of congregations – through their sermons. Yet this sermonic moment lacked a challenge to men to consider their mindset while pushing performative modesty onto women in Jesus’s name. It feels like stating the obvious here but if a man doesn’t want to get to know me after seeing the illusion of nudity, the problem is his intention, not my actions. Yet, Todd drops the ball when speaking to women, diminishing our worth to the sum of our body parts.
In an attempt at equity, Todd does put the onus on other men in his sermon, asking them to “be a husband that is not trying to impress his college buddies, but be an anchor for your family that may not be as impressive on the ‘gram but you’re impacting the next generation to love and lead their families.” These words see the fullness of men’s humanity and speak to the height of their potential to hold families together and heal generational cycles of brokenness. Todd may be the most recent voice admonishing women to not seek to be impressive with their bodies, but his words echo a generations-long tradition of the church’s repression of women’s bodies and sexuality.
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