I am blogging today at the express request of my colleagues here in PresbyLand, who have uncovered a shocking travesty of epic proportions. The General Assembly Council, one of the church’s highest governing bodies, had better keep to their hotel rooms this Friday night and pray. Because right across the street from the Brown (the hotel featured in the Orlando Bloom-Kirsten Dunst film Elizabethtown, by the way), the Girls Gone Wild Tour Bus is coming to Louisville!!

According to the ad featured in the local news weekly today, “Come be a part of all the excitement as the ORIGINAL GIRLS GONE WILD Crew takes Louisville by storm.” At the top of the full page ad is a large photo of four bikini-clad, seductively smiling young women. It is unclear whether the crew filming will be staying with the Council members at the Brown Hotel. Also unclear is whether Snoop Dog, whom I’m told plays a prominent role in previous Girls Gone Wild videos, will be chatting it up with GA Moderator Rick Ufford-Chase in the lobby. Perhaps the Presbyterian News Service can score an interview.

Honestly, I must admit that my first impulse is to laugh hysterically at the juxtaposition of the Frozen Chosen with this epitome of American secular debauchery. I’m sure that there is no way the event planners could have seen this coming, or that they could have done something about it if they had. And anyway, Girls Gone Wild just seems kind of ridiculous to begin with, something of a big joke.

But really, perhaps GAC should be praying about Girls Gone Wild at this meeting, a meeting where the Council just last night celebrated the anniversaries of women’s ordinations during worship. Because the continued presence of Girls Gone Wild, 50 years after the doors were opened to women as full participants in the church, is something of a commentary on how much we’ve failed our women.

Our foremothers fought so that their daughters could be seen as something more than baby-making machines, be understood as humans with thoughts and feelings far beyond their physical bodies. Opening the church doors, opening the work world doors, opening all the doors to women that the Jerry Falwells of the world argue should be closed, was supposed to tell us we were more than the body we could offer men. We were supposed to discover that we were made in the image of God—not because God does or does not have a vagina, but because God is the source of love and all humans, female and male, have the ability to reflect that equally.

Yet 50 years after our full entry into the church, nearly 45 years after the late Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, too many women still feel that the best way to be validated is to show their breasts off to a camera for millions of ogling men. And it isn’t because of some innate, natural tendency on the part of those women, it isn’t because they don’t have other options, it isn’t because they’re just trashy and sinful. It is because we tell them that their bodies are paramount, pure and simple.

I recently watched an ad that the Presbyterian Church has available right now online to attract young families back into the church. It features a young woman giving birth, with a voiceover saying, “Ten years ago, your life was your boyfriend, your clothes, your weekend,”—cut to newborn baby crying—“now it’s Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer.”

As long as our society, and our church, keep telling women that their ability to sexually please men and bear children are the most highly valued gifts they have to offer, Girls Gone Wild will be alive and well.

“Elijah then came near to all the people, and said, ‘How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.’ The people did not answer him a word.” --1 Kings 18:21

Kelsey