(This month, I am taking a short break from my megachurch visits series.)
Over at CT, global managing editor Morgan Lee has a new article with a curious problematic. It’s not Israel or Palestine or the 2024 election; no, it’s “Taylor Swift,” whom Lee laments, “can do whatever she wants.”
Lee’s coverage of Swift’s latest, “The Tortured Poets Department” (TTPD), focuses attention on the singer’s (purportedly) lackluster songwriting therein. TTPD’s shortcomings don’t simply reflect a slump; in Lee’s take, they reveal a character flaw– something like pride. “The problem with [Swift’s] hubris isn’t just aesthetic… It suggests an artist unwilling to accept the wisdom of others.” Lee posits Swift’s album suffers from the singer’s unwillingness to accept editing. Actually, it’s even worse than this: the problem is that Taylor “answers to no one.” The article imagines a jet-setting Taylor enacting preeminence over both “mayors” and the Japanese embassy. Taylor runs roughshod over dignitaries and elected officials!
How, you may wonder, is this a Christian concern? Why is CT so rankled by Taylor’s freedoms?
Readers familiar with the last seven years of Christianity Today’s coverage of women might hear a familiar refrain in Lee’s critique of Swift. Back in 2017, CT began problematizing women who speak about matters of faith without any “church authority” over them–women they said had “big platforms” without “accountability.” Bestselling authors like Jen Hatmaker, in these takes, supposedly lead their readers astray because they lack ecclesial hierarchs to set limits on their speech.Why, CT asked in earnest, are bloggers and speakers like Hatmaker able to speak and teach?
For CT, the answer was seemingly not the first amendment; it came down, instead, to the internet, which wantonly allows lay women to gain followings. In more recent treatments, CT problematizes the market, which gives women, most especially Taylor Swift, “outsized” influence. Both the market and the internet can be depicted as money-driven and corrupting– and therefore as illegitimate means to influence. CT would therefore like Christian women to choose to forego such access. Lee’s subtitle: “true liberty, in art and in life, is created by constraints.”
I’ve been surprised to read CT’s admonitions that women should go about finding ways to quiet themselves or submit themselves to authorities. But CT’s call for restraint and submission hasn’t stopped with women’s careers–it is expanding to include the embrace of limits over romantic decisions! Lee problematizes one TTPD song in particular: “But daddy, I love him.” Many readers hear the title of this song, and its contents, as Swift’s echo of the protestation of Ariel, Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1:10). Others hear it as an echo of Allie, Rachel McAdams’ character in The Notebook. (Swift fans have 
already developed videos that blend Swift’s words with images from both movies.) Both movies feature young women wresting the authority to decide their marriage partners for themselves; Swift’s “but daddy, I love him” song features her rejection of familial oversight and expression of romantic autonomy.
But CT is rethinking how women should decide who they date and marry. This January, CT published an article against The Notebook, some twenty years after its release. This article, “Past-lives is the Anti-Notebook,” again advocates for choosing constraints over love: “We’ve romanticized stories of destiny-driven love… This drama shows the beauty of limits.” In this article, Morgan Lee traces the origins of romantic liberty to The Notebook, which movie and which liberty she flatly advises readers to give up. Lee writes, “Again and again, Scripture teaches that we often don’t know what’s best for us; we need each other to discern what’s beneficial and what’s not. Listen to advice and accept discipline, and at the end you will be counted among the wise.” Lee would prefer romantic heroines to listen, not to their hearts, but to someone with the authority to “advise” and “discipline” them.
Recent research I’ve been doing into the roots of Pentecostals’ romantic eschatology (for which I have been investigating “bridal” agency) has left me wondering whether, in these articles, Christianity Today is stricken with historical amnesia or is knowingly swinging at straw-women. Romantic female authority has older roots than The Notebook (2004); it is predicated on far more than the internet. One can locate the roots of romantic feminine agency some two hundred years earlier than Notebook or TTPD. Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) features a heroine called Fanny Price, who refuses her uncle’s demand that she marry a Mister Crawford to instead marry the love of her life, (eww, her cousin) Edmund. Though Fanny is first banished for her disobedience, she emerges victorious as the novel’s only, true “infallible guide concerning matters of the heart.” In Austen’s text, it is Fanny who knows best, despite the short-sightedness and bad judgment of literally every other character. She doesn’t need to defer romantic decisions to the counsel of others; Fanny needs most to listen to her own heart and her own head. (Another Austen
character, Persuasion‘s Anne Elliott, messes up her life by listening too much to others!) 
When Taylor asserts her right to make her own romantic choices, she does so having inherited the authority to do so from a long literary tradition that asserts that, when it comes to matters of the heart, young women know best for themselves. If CT wants to valorize, instead, submission in women’s romantic lives, they won’t have to take on just Taylor Swift, Rachel McAdams, and one smallish mermaid–they’ll have to deal with the matriarch of English literature, Jane Austen. (Why, though? Why would they want to?)
In so doing, however, it is likely that CT might be fighting its own tradition. Many critics have noted that Fanny’s character embodies the values of Anglican Evangelicalism, which literary scholar Kathryn Sutherland describes as “a conservative middle class ideology which offered an effective public platform for women as moral campaigners.” (Sutherland calls Fanny a redemptive “Eve” and “angelical”– the original evangelical, if you will.) Fanny has been depicted by some as an abolitionist. Her historical counterparts could well have been active in England’s Clapham Sect (1790-1830), which campaigned for the abolition of slavery, or in British Methodism, as both these streams of early evangelicalism forwarded heart-felt religion. Protestantisms of the heart elevated the role that feeling could play in Christianity, creating symbolic resources & opportunities for women who were thought to be especially adept in emotional matters. If, as Sunderland and others have suggested, Fanny Price is not just the “ur-Victorian romantic heroine” but also the faithful image of early, progressive Anglican Evangelicalism, how is it that CT presently conceives both women’s romantic agency and their public expressions of faith as– not proper to evangelicalism, but instead–being the ill-conceived developments of the market, of the internet, and in dire need of oversight? Has not Fanny Price valiantly walked so that Taylor might fly? Why is CT trying so hard to clip her wings now?
For how, it’s a rhetorical question, but if you think you know, please advise.
