“Reverence means “fear mingled with respect and esteem.” A godly woman fears God and knows His ways are superior to her ways even when they don’t make sense and don’t appear to be working. She keeps her eyes on the eternal rewards by living in obedience to the Lord with His Spirit working mightily within her. Her greatest desire is to glorify God in everything and store her treasures in heaven, therefore, she continues to reverence her disobedient husband and prays for his salvation.” – Lori Alexander / The Transformed Wife, Biblical Womanhood: A Study Guide, Page 73. Kindle Edition.

 

I decided to purchase and read this book out of my insatiable, morbid curiosity with all things involving why people follow certain value systems and make odd value judgments. Lori Alexander, known by her media personality of the Transformed Wife, had gained notoriety for her extreme vision of social conservativism based upon her fervent Christian faith. Whenever there’s a type of person who makes this sort of content, a part of me just wants to know “Why do people like this exist? What belief structure or value system created a person like this? Why do they want to change the world based upon their belief structure? Why do they believe that their actions are an unquestionable moral good for the betterment of humanity?” and the best way to learn why isn’t via reading articles or watching Youtube videos of people critical of them; the best way to learn is from reading their own arguments and beliefs. I must confess that I had actually made a mistake and bought what appears to be her autobiography first and then bought this specific book, so my total amount of money given to her from my own purchase of her book series was a grand total of $9.44, when it should have been only the $1.95 that I had initially intended. However, it’s possible the other book might be useful research material for the aforementioned reasons. Thus, I was not upset if I can still find a use for the other book like I did this one. It may indeed come in handy in the future. I purchased both books around November 2020 and never got around to reading them until now for worldbuilding purposes for a fantasy book I’m working on.

I had been texted by a friend whom I had messaged repeatedly about the contents of the book, and I shared my initial realizations after having finished this short book. These are my honest, unvarnished impressions and the only parts I’ve changed was for clarity’s sake. Regardless of how painful this might be to read, these were my honest takeaways from having finished reading her book and edited only for the purposes of protecting my personal information or to correct any factual errors on my part regarding my recollection of events on social media for when I purchased the book:

 

 

1. There is honestly no hope that Christianity survives into the next 100 years at least in the US but very possibly beyond it, for the simple fact that it’s intellectually worthless to pretty much every other mode of thought. The Abrahamic god teaches an exclusive moral system of set standards of right and wrong, but you pick and choose. That’s fundamentally a self-contradicting moral system where everyone creates their own ideas and pretends it makes sense. And I mean… this is honestly even worse than pretty much every other religious value system on an intellectual level right now. It has no hope for a future. I can better understand why Christians seem almost perpetually confused by other cultures and other religious value systems, because this religion has no intellectual value at all. No actual philosophical depth to ask anything beyond obedience to their god and hatred of sin. It simply can’t function for long in a peaceful society without needing to find enemies everywhere. Eventually, it becomes too exhausting for people to seriously follow.

 

2. Every single one of my presumably whiny critiques about Christianity probably did a lot more damage than I thought. In fact, the New Atheist movement did more damage than most people seemingly want to admit. If I share the Biblical verses, it probably causes people to pause and feel a lot more confused than I thought imaginable. I recall this one guy in the r/megaten discord channel who was so shocked by the verses on misogyny that I listed, he literally asked “What is this shit?” when checking it. If I make a fantasy book with a misogynistic protagonist spouting Bible verses, it’ll be more damaging than I initially thought. They act like it’s a huge disrespectful thing, but they just hate having to think about a faith they supposedly believe in but actively never want to think about. That’s why it is doomed to oblivion.

I was aware that one of the reasons Christian conservative internet personalities like highlighting that they were blocked and banned was to share with their followers the belief that companies or other political groups are denying, shying away, and “hiding” the “truth” of the message of Jesus Christ; so as to further reinforce their confidence in it and to spread antagonistic views of Otherness. It’s more a dramatization for themselves, but this sort of behavior could credibly be argued to be an expression of freedom of conscience regardless of how others feel or perceive it. Most detractors would view it as the person being self-righteous and move on. What I had suspected, but didn’t fully realize, until reading this book was that Christian conservative internet personalities like the Transformed Wife and others are really doing this because they don’t want to think about their own religion. They need the Otherness, the dehumanization and bigotry towards women in particular, and the contempt for people on the other side of the political spectrum because they need to feel secure in their beliefs. By attacking others and feeling attacked or criticized thoroughly by perceived non-members of their political group, they can focus on the antagonism and feel affirmed in their Christian identity and their religious faith without ever having to look at themselves in a mirror and think over why they choose to live as Christians, per se. They don’t listen to the criticism and reinterpret it as an attack perhaps to shut down any personal doubts that they have about their own religious faith. By externalizing their perceptions of evil, they don’t have to think for themselves.

This book also helped me to understand more clearly why Transgender people are automatically dehumanized by right-wing Christian groups in more recent times. To be clear, I am not saying that Lori Alexander did this in this particular book; she did not mention Transgender people at all. What I am saying is that the mentality she displays in this book towards cisgender women better helped me to understand why the hatred for Transgender people exists beyond just the Biblical contempt for anything that declares itself more than two genders. While the Bible itself preaches contempt for anything that isn’t strictly identified by two genders and contempt for other LGBT people; the reason Transgender people are chronically used as scapegoats right now is due to the fact that Right-wing Christians sincerely never want to think about what their Christian priests have done to their own children historically and even now. They need to reflexively identify and vilify a group of people with Otherness, because then they can try defending and justifying a religious belief structure without having to think about it on a deeper level of why they believe in it. They’re basically accusing Transgender people for what their own Christian priests have been doing in their own Churches and they do that in order to keep themselves from thinking about Christianity on a deeper level. The feelings of intense anger and hate help to create a form of tunnel-vision wherein they only focus on strong feelings of animosity for Transgender people without having to think about why they hate them or how illogical the intense feelings of hate for Transgender people are. One unfortunate consequence of their persistence in this stigma against Transgender people is that many Transgender groups seemingly perceive these tactics to be working and have employed them back at Christian conservatives to the detriment of Transgender human rights. It’s obviously a tall ask to request a stigmatized group of people who suffer from homelessness, street violence, and legitimate threats to their lives in the US to be asked to be the bigger people and seek less abrasive tactics, but it seems like utilizing the very same tactics – possibly learning from their own Christian backgrounds – has resulted in massive backlash in favor of the Christian conservative worldview in many Western countries such as Great Britain and Canada. I think sarcasm and mocking jokes would do much better than hate rants that end-up conforming to bigoted and preconceived anti-Trans beliefs.

 

 

The Transformed Wife argued that women need to be obedient homemakers to their husbands, with copious Bible quotes arguing in favor of this, and she goes so far as to argue that it doesn’t even matter if a woman doesn’t love her husband or if a husband cheats on the wife since Yahweh commands obedience to women in subjection to their husband as per Yahweh’s will for women in the Bible. Women shouldn’t drink alcohol, wear jewelry, or wear designer clothing to keep sober and modest, as per what the Bible requires of women and she religiously provides the Biblical quotes in affirmation of these instructions. She seemingly perceives the adultery on the husband’s part to be test, whereas a woman cheating on her husband is a sin. She repeatedly argues for chastity, modesty, and obedience to husbands and portrays a work-life balance as too stressful and leading to homes where love and compassion are weakened because women aren’t serving their biological purpose as home caretakers and raising the children to be obedient to their fathers. She describes engaging in sin as the husband trying to convince their wives to watch porn with them and compares it to the sins of theft and murder in moral equivalence. The most salient failing of this book is that she surprisingly didn’t account for the two most pervasive reasons that any human being, men or women, would have for not wanting to stay at home to be a full-time child caretaker or solely obedient and dependent upon their spouse. After having finished reading it, she often categorizes women’s work-life balance in terms of insurmountable and unmanageable stressors that ruin women’s peace of mind and create dysfunctional homes, here are two pertinent questions for anyone willing to defend her beliefs and arguments:

1. Why wouldn’t your average woman simply grow bored of merely being a house and child caretaker for most of their lives?
2. Why should any woman who has career ambitions or personal dream goals, and seeks to take advantage of her capitalist opportunities, be forced to toss her personal desires aside because some holy book written by bronze-age peasants from 100 AD told her to?

Imagine if the world that Lori Alexander envisions came to pass, because she doesn’t understand the intrinsic truth about capitalist ambitions that people, and especially modern women, have about a free and fair democratic society. Why should any woman who seeks to live their dreams and become a lawyer, a doctor, a pilot, a business owner, a college professor, or a scientist decide not to do it because the Bible says their purpose is to stay at home for childcare purposes and to please their husbands? Why would this not devastate the US economy, because of a massive shortage in the workforce? Moreover, we do have credible examples of what society would look like in such circumstances; the Transformed Wife’s ideal world for how women should behave is not altogether different from that of ISIS, the Taliban, or Al Qaeda and the only argument against them that she could credibly make is that they follow the wrong religion, which is not really an argument because both religions are based upon personal faith. Moving beyond that issue, there’s even deeper flaws with her arguments. What boggled my mind was that at no point did Lori Alexander ever even think that women felt intrinsic satisfaction and fulfillment in their career goals and she never addressed that at all in her book. Step away from just the blatant self-hatred and misogyny for a moment and just think about what this woman actually tried to convey in her book; she literally could not even conceive or understand that women in the United States and across the world feel genuinely fulfilled and happy with their stressful and hectic careers. The Transformed Wife was incapable of understanding that it is gratifying to be under those stressors, because it means these women are either working towards their personal goals or they’ve reached their personal goals. There was not even a conscious awareness of this basic fact about why women go into the workforce. Her beliefs and arguments wouldn’t even work in the context of helping socially conservative women; imagine if a socially conservative woman who gave birth in a hospital and feels less comfortable with male janitors cleaning her hospital room suddenly had no other options but that or young women who survived a rape going through a rape test kit and only having male police and medical professionals to help them. Unless the next step would be an argument for women returning to being “barefoot and pregnant” and that obviously wouldn’t work due to how interconnected our lives are; it simply wouldn’t work. Even more importantly, women wouldn’t be free to do anything in such a social context. It really wouldn’t be a state of affairs any different than a country run by the Taliban or ISIS. This reflexive antagonism towards women’s empowerment that Lori Alexander has; it clearly didn’t account for what the outcome would be like for women despite the fact women suffer from very real forms of violence in countries that don’t respect women’s rights.

Perhaps the most intriguing lesson from reading this book’s contents, and double-checking the voluminous number of Biblical verses that she cited throughout her book, was that I think I’ve ascertained a better understanding of exactly what is killing Christianity throughout the United States. It was so simple and so obvious that it paradoxically becomes easy for most to miss. Until reading this book, I didn’t quite understand the crux of it, but now I think I have a much better approximation and understanding of why Christianity is doomed to fail within the United States and why it has no meaningful future within one-hundred years or less in the US. I’m hesitant to draw a broad brush and suggest it could also happen across the world as there are far too many factors at play, but if Christians throughout the world follow US trends, then they’re very likely to hasten their own decline into complete non-belief. It chiefly has to do with how Christians perceive the concept of sin. If sin is categorized by fairly standard concepts like theft, lying, and murder; then Christians can just go on with their ideas and roll their eyes at most nonsense from more extreme members of their religious group among the variety of denominations. If, however, they view it in more cultural themes and terms like what shows, video games, books, and so on to consume and what sort of thoughts to have (which is an advocacy for thought crimes); then, they are doomed to fail. They would be constantly getting angry at the most obscure and trivial nonsense and exaggerate its importance. To retread what was specified earlier, but clarify the harmful modus operandi of this belief structure: They need to reflexively identify and vilify anything that deviates from the conceptual framework of Christianity as filled with sin, they do this to justify the religious belief structure so they don’t have to think about why they believe in it, and it eventually exhausts and stresses them to the point they resemble people who suffer from nervous breakdowns. This belief system, when applied to supporting it on a cultural level, attempts to vilify everything as satanic without explicitly saying so in more modern times; it continues to stifle and vilify other forms of free expression under the basis of the most bigoted and hateful notions based solely upon Biblical stories of supposedly backwards people that Israelites slaughtered in the Old Testament and applies those contemptuous tribal-based belief structures upon people in modern times who come from different socioreligious backgrounds by assuming anything that doesn’t fully align with faith in Jesus Christ is automatically devil worship. Anything that doesn’t solely align with slavish worship of Jesus Christ is automatically assumed to be seeking to persecute or kill Christians, so that Christians can convince themselves that any rape or murder they commit is pre-emptive and justified based upon their faith in Biblical stories and the self-serving Just-War doctrine of Christianity; that is, violence and its consequences are viewed as “morally neutral” when Christians commit it upon non-Christians and “intrinsically evil” when non-Christians commit it upon Christians. Unfortunately, this mentality is also the origin of the Woke agenda that right-wing Christians vilify. When one dispassionately views the framework of thinking behind a lot of the beliefs that Christianity claims to stand against, I would argue that you will find the same mentality that Christianity preaches when accusing other people of hypocrisy and devil worship; Islam, Communism, Socialism, Woke ideologies, and I’m sure many others; all of these value systems could credibly be argued to be off-shoots of Christianity’s concept of struggling against sin. Apart from Islam, they largely don’t believe Jesus Christ is the Messiah, but they believe anyone who disagrees with them seeks to harm them, to deceive them away from “truth”, or is a person too deluded to communicate their revealed truth with; such as the more modern “anyone who disagrees with Woke Ideology isn’t acting in good faith” crowd. The ironic part is that this very struggle against sin creates these branching deviations that are wrongly criticized to be satanic worship; if you have trouble believing this, consider Christianity within its own circumscribed belief structure. There are approximately 45,000 Christian denominations across the world and apparently more than two-hundred branching Christian denominations in the United States alone. Many of the more narrow-minded branches believe their ways are righteous and the true word of Jesus Christ; all others have deviated or been deceived by the devil. When Churches work to remove this reflexive vilification of others in their religious teachings, such as with the Unitarian Universalists, and try for a more peaceful and open-minded religious system; the religious system collapses, precisely because there’s nothing to hate anymore. No Otherness, no contempt, no fear-mongering with delusions that other groups secretly believe in Satan and whisper among themselves on how to harm Christians so that Christians can convince themselves that pre-emptive violence in the name of Jesus Christ is justified. Even acknowledging Islam being more violent, it doesn’t justify Christianity’s violent tendencies and it’s not a badge of honor to argue that you belong to the second most violent religion on the planet and that every instance of violence was the religion being misconstrued or manipulated; what then does any true believer of this faith with over 45,000 denominations across the world even look like?

Finally, even setting aside the justified opprobrium generated for her negative attitudes towards women being treated equally and the defensiveness of Lori Alexander and her more staunchly conservative Christian apologists, one of the most harmful beliefs that has been overlooked; which I found was in Chapter 3, page 28 of the Kindle version; is her views on how to properly raise children:

Spanking is a controversial issue these days yet it never was up until this present generation. All fifty states in the United States still allow parents to spank their children with something other than their hand at the time of this writing but make sure to check with your state or country to see if it is legal. This doesn’t include abuse in any form: pulling of the hair, slapping a child on the face, whipping a child on the back, or punching in the stomach. The best and safest place to spank a young child is on the bottom or upper thigh. Read the following verses and summarize what God has to say about the rod.

Proverbs 13:24

Proverbs 23:13

Proverbs 29:15

How does God discipline us according to Hebrews 12:6?

What does “chasten” mean according to the dictionary?

What does “scourge” mean? God commands children to do what in Ephesians 6:1 and Colossians 3:20?

Whose responsibility is it to teach your children to obey you?

For those who are unfamiliar with those Biblical verses, I’ve added links to each chapter from the Bible Gateway website for the appropriate context. You can click on each quote and read the fuller context. I’m honestly disgusted, especially since we know how harmful and outright murderous beliefs about inflicting violence against children with rods as a method of discipline are. In conclusion, I found this book surprisingly more useful for analyzing and understanding the more primitive cultures like Christianity and how the more hardcore – that is, more primitive than usual compared to others of their religious denominations – Christians justify their moral values via frothing with raving lunacy, cruelty, stupidity and reactionary behavior in order to shut their own minds down from thinking deeply about their own religious beliefs and demanding everyone else behave more like them in shutting their minds down because the simplistic viewpoint of the Bible says so. The only other thing of note is that, when discussing this book’s contents with a close friend, they made a point that my descriptions of the book sounded more like Lori Alexander has a submissive kink and she’s trying to use her religious beliefs in Christianity to justify her BDSM submission kink. Overall, I’d give this book a 2 / 5, since it’s useful for worldbuilding purposes for creating a misogynistic, conservative fictional character in future fantasy books that I’ll be working on.