And Such Were Some Of You

On sex, marriage, and "damaged goods"

The great world-tilting scandal of the Christian gospel is that forgiveness of sin is available to whosoever will come and receive it. We might face the just consequences of that sin, in many ways and places, but in Christ Jesus, we are no longer condemned.

Christians with a particularly dark and brutal salvation testimony must consider carefully how to steward that testimony. Some keep it closely guarded and share only with a privileged few. Some choose to make it public in hopes that other sinners will be encouraged and Christ will be glorified. Reasonable arguments could be made for either choice. There is no one-size-fits-all right way for the Christian to proceed here. Much of the choice is down to a variety of factors that will differ from individual to individual, because people are people and not widgets.

This week, a Christian husband named Trevor Sheatz caused an enormous stir by posting his side of his wife Ashley’s testimony, which she’s chosen to share freely online for some years. It’s a heartbreaking story, full of promiscuity, addiction, and abuse. But God, as they say. However, because this woman doesn’t have a large public speaking platform, her story had never gone “viral” in the Internet way. It was just there for anyone to discover in her corner of Christian Twitter.

For some reason, all of that changed when her husband made this long post, including far less detail than she’s shared herself, but reflecting on how God can redeem and transform anyone with such a past. He was replying to an ongoing discourse about whether formerly promiscuous women are “damaged goods” to be permanently avoided by Christian men. Something about the post unlocked the secret to Twitter virality. Who knows why anything goes viral, but maybe it was the “hook” that he contrasted his wife’s former promiscuity with his virginity, to the end of offering hope that God can make this kind of union fruitful. In any case, all hell broke loose in the comments, in some of the most appalling ways you could imagine and some you hopefully couldn’t. (Her wedding picture alone drew an avalanche of ugly comments—a perfectly nice picture, but I guess her nose is a little large, which I guess is a particular trigger for antisemitic trolls, who share Venn diagram overlap with the sort of trolls who call women whores. Anyhow.)

Well, trolls will be trolls. But the backlash didn’t end at the level of Twitter trolling. It stirred up responses from people who present themselves as serious commentators with serious commentating platforms. Most notably, this segment from the Daily Wire, in which Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan took turns mocking the post. All speak as if the man sprang this on his wife out of the blue, apparently lacking basic facts Grok could have handed them with one prompt. Knowles says the husband “called his wife a whore online,” but of course it is Knowles who is doing this, not the husband. Klavan jokes that the millions of impressions must be “all those guys coming back,” and throws in an extra throwaway line that he was one of them (here even Knowles and Shapiro cringe).

Knowles expanded more on his thoughts elsewhere, evidently unchanged by the knowledge that the husband has his wife’s permission. She really shouldn’t have put the story out there either, he suggests, and it would have been appropriate for her husband to stop her, because we should all know less about each other, etc. “Testimony tell-all” culture is a real problem, and we need to recover the lost art of discretion, keeping private sin private, and practicing freedom in Christ by letting the past be the past.

Now, I’m not saying there is nothing to these points. But double standards abound. Klavan’s flippant crudeness is especially…interesting, given that his own memoir (which I’ve recommended widely) is all about his wayward youth and Christian redemption arc, including many casual trysts. Is Knowles going to lecture him about the need for “discretion” when it comes to past sexual sin? No? Didn’t think so. Meanwhile, a little walk down recent memory lane on Knowles’s podcast will turn up multiple interviews with former prostitutes. One was a pastor, Joshua Broome, who’s written an entire book about his former life as a pornographic actor. Then there was former OnlyFans star Nala Ray, who joined Knowles not once but twice to talk about her Christian conversion, the second time with her husband. Knowles has tried to defend himself by saying it’s different when a public figure has made his or her sexual past part of a platform. But allegedly, his whole point was that making one’s sexual past part of a public speaking platform should not be a done thing for Christians.

It would seem this commentary comes with an asterisk: “It should not be a done thing, unless you’ve already gotten kind of famous by doing it, in which case please come on the show so we can harvest your Content together.”

It’s also odd that Knowles wraps this up with a sneer at evangelical testimony culture, in particular. The Daily Wire recently acquired Matt Fradd’s Catholic show Pints With Aquinas, which just invited former Baylor professor Trent Dougherty to come opine at length about his less-than-a-decade-old adulterous fall from grace. I would ask Knowles who has less “discretion”: a distinguished Catholic academic still publicly talking about the adultery he committed in the middle of his Catholic academic career, or an ordinary evangelical woman sharing her testimony of how God rescued her from paganism?

All to say, I’m not interested in Takes from people who run their Takes business on business logic. They should at least be men enough to admit that’s what they’re doing, instead of feigning consistency. Or women enough. The Catholic woman behind Evie Magazine also falls in this category. She held forth with a rather cynical take here, all about how average men are so demoralized that “every girl is on OnlyFans or sleeping around,” and how triggering posts like this are, etc., etc. It didn’t take much googling to find Evie’s glowing profile of the formerly mentioned porn actor turned pastor. Again: Something else besides actual principle is setting the standard here.

It thus falls to the rest of us to find a better and non-hypocritical way to talk about all this. Because I do in fact think there is a broader conversation worth having here about discretion, evangelical “oversharing” culture, testimony-as-content, and all that. There is also a broader conversation worth having about Christians’ place in the dating scene, and how Christians should think about prospects with “a past.”

I myself can think of quite a few people among my Christian friends and acquaintances who have “a past,” some of whom have gone on to have fruitful marriages. My good friend Meg Basham movingly incorporated the story of her prodigal 20s into a book. Another writer, Ashley Lande, wrote a book I blurbed about her past addiction to psychedelics. (My first book blurb, which I took as a sign that I’ve Made It as a writer.) It focuses more on her addiction and less on promiscuity, but that’s an element in there and part of both her and her husband’s testimonies. They’re jointly open about it and enjoy a strong marriage.

But other people I know and respect have approached this differently. One Catholic friend around my age recently sat down and gave me a generous few hours of his time so I could tell his story in a long article I’m working on about men who’ve recently joined the church. Because the story dives into some very weird, dark corners of millennial Internet culture, including homosexual elements, and because he earnestly doesn’t want to scandalize anyone who knows him and his wife in person, he’s requested that I use his middle name. To me this strikes a very healthy prudential balance. His story can still be a blessing, but he and his wife get to keep their privacy. Other people in their friends circle aren’t even aware of it. I think this can be wholly appropriate. I do take issue with church subcultures where people are pressured to “share with the small group,” creating embarrassing moments for everyone involved. As long as the people who need to know already know, the willingness to share one’s past sin openly doesn’t make you more or less Christian.

I also think about the wife of a couple I know who opened up about her wayward youth to me over a meal, but hasn’t even talked about it with her own kids. One criticism of Trevor and Ashley was that their kids shouldn’t know about their mother’s past until they’re grown, because of the problems this could cause with discipline and such. There might be something to this, and likewise there might be something to the criticism that kids should have a say in whether Mom’s past is shared with the Internet. Trevor and Ashley are younger, and I’m not sure if they even have children yet. They’re understandably full of zeal and thinking in terms of how many people could be blessed by the testimony, but there are other factors to consider.

However, I do reject a false dichotomy Matt Walsh set up in his take, though unlike his Daily Wire colleagues he was at least trying to be balanced. He asserted that “your story of past misdeeds is only really a good teaching tool and cautionary tale, and therefore edifying, if your life is right now currently in shambles.” But young Trevor and Ashley are happy and content together now. And “‘I sinned a lot and now I’m happy and not suffering any significant consequences for my evil behavior’ just isn’t a very useful moral lesson for most people.” To which I would ask how Matt knows there have been “zero significant consequences,” for Trevor and Ashley or for anyone whose life isn’t “currently in shambles.” Sexual sin leaves scars. Sometimes it leaves people unable to find a mate at all, or causes problems for a couple. We don’t know the particular intimate challenges Trevor and Ashley may have had to navigate together, nor do we need to.

Walsh, like others, is especially put off by the fact that Trevor calls his wife “more pure than most virgins.” I admit, I also take some issue with that phrasing. Trevor has doubled down, saying it’s true because most virgins aren’t Christians, but I think that shows a tin ear. There were other and better ways to convey what he meant. I also react with mixed feelings when he says his wife can now “more easily live out a life of passionate love for her Savior.” While taking the point that he (or she) who has been forgiven much will love much, I would gently suggest that such things don’t need to be a competition. It is a beautiful paradox that God can bring great good out of great evil, and I think Christians can simply rest in that paradox.

Also, while I think there’s been a fair amount of strawmanning from the “Christian manosphere” (“They want to force all us guys to marry reformed whores!”), I don’t think such ambient pressure is nonexistent either—for both men and women. I interacted a little bit with one woman who literally said she would shame any young Christian woman who restricted her dating pool to Christian men who’ve never used pornography, because pornography usage is so common, and women need to be realistic. As long as a man has been clean for six months (!) or more, this woman said the girl needs to consider him, or else she’s being self-righteous, in ways that will cause problems in her marriage (!!) One hardly knows where to begin with this nonsense, which only enables the troll who protests too much that fornication is “leagues worse” than porn use. I got her to back off slightly on the six months (!), and to sort of agree that these things can come in degrees (are we talking about a man who had a rough patch in high school and is now clean in his 30s? a man who’s had rolling addiction patterns up to two years ago?) but not by too much.

But sure, I admit that as a single 33-year-old woman, I face an uphill slope. I’m personally blessed not to have “a past,” but I realize it’s already not easy to find even a Christian man whose background matches mine, especially if you take porn addiction seriously (which I do), and it will only get worse from here. There’s also the entire subtopic of divorce, which can leave a man entirely blameless, yet also for understandable reasons not a woman’s first dating choice if she’s a virgin (and vice versa when genders are swapped). A girlfriend was curious to know if I’d (hypothetically) be open to dating a man with children, which in my social circles will 9 times out of 10 mean he’s divorced. I said I wasn’t completely closed, but I’d have quite a lot of questions. I’m not prepared to say I would have the mental, emotional and spiritual stamina to take on the baggage such a relationship would bring.

It doesn’t feel fair to categorize this reluctance as precisely the same kind of reluctance I would have about dating a formerly promiscuous man, but we could say there’s some shared DNA. In neither case do I want to be dogmatically closed, but let’s just say other factors would have to be so overridingly powerful that it became a second-tier issue. I think Christian men and women alike should feel comfortable saying this out loud without judgment.

In summary: Jesus saves. Trevor and Ashley didn’t do anything wrong. Trolls are gonna troll, grifters are gonna grift. But also, these things are complicated. It’s important to be able to discuss complicated things normally.

However, this requires people to be normal first. That seems to have been a challenge for a lot of people this week, but the option is still available.