If you are waiting for a thoughtful Orthodox perspective on modern love, Waiting and Dating will leave you still waiting.
My friend the Anglican priest and theologian Rev. Jarel Robinson-Brown has rightly noted that much of Christianity’s current meltdown over issues of gender and sexuality can be chalked up to the fact that there is not a comprehensive theology of sex, at least not one that reflects the reality of our real sexual lives. And Lilyana Andrews’ new book Waiting and Dating: An Orthodox Christian Guide for Navigating Singleness and Godly Relationships (Ancient Faith 2025) is unlikely to do anything to improve the situation. In fact, one might argue that Waiting and Dating and other similarly situated work serve to exacerbate the problem, hiding the old bad answers in much improved, gentler language, ensuring that this damaged and damaging perspective survives just a bit longer.
It seems a bit redundant and certainly unnecessary to go over at length what Andrews gets wrong. It is what one might expect: The view of sex and sexuality presented in the book is a schizophrenic one that declares sex simultaneously to be a wonderful gift from God and a uniquely dangerous temptation, a site of potential sin that can damage you “physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.” While it is frustrating that Andrews does seem so close to recognizing the pernicious effects of such a view, noting the “shame, guilt, and regret” that has grown out of it, she does not challenge this view. Like so many “safe” Eastern Christian women writers before and after her, Andrews gets close to naming the problem, before pulling her punch, and retreating to the safe ground of moral platitudes. An easy example of this includes a passing discussion of sexual transmitted infections (STIs) and unwanted pregnancies, which Andrews cites as one of the “physical dangers of sexual immorality.” In the span of approximately five sentences, Andrews repeats several common, dishonest troupes of purity culture (including questioning the effectiveness of birth control and highlighting disproven science about the “bonding” effects of sex).
She declares that in light of these (largely overstated) dangers, the traditionally restrictive teachings surrounding sex are evidence of God as a loving parent who “sees what will hurt us and warns us to stay away.” Except that’s not what a loving parent does. That’s what a controlling parent does. What an authoritarian parent does. A loving parent warns about the risks of any given behavior and then gives the child tools to navigate and mitigate those risks. You teach a child to look both ways before crossing the street. You don’t forbid them to ever leave your block. And yet, Waiting and Dating contains none of this very practical, easy-to-access information. There is no discussion of birth control methods or condom usage. No sage advice about regular STI testing or the use of PrEP. Instead, Andrews clings to an ineffective, possibly immoral in some cases, “abstinence only” approach, even while acknowledging that this may not be the reality for most people.
And this is all before we get to the fact that Waiting and Dating simply ignores the existence of non-heterosexual people (seriously, if an alien were to have this book and Andrews’ blog as its only exposure to humanity, the alien would be completely unaware gay people exist). One senses this is because the “compassionate conservative” approach taken by Andrews could not hold up under the strain of confronting the casual cruelty of normative contemporary Orthodox teaching and practice visits on sexual minorities.
Not that most of this is Andrews’s fault. Andrews is the product of a culture and a system that works pretty well for people like Andrews And when a system works extremely well for you, it is difficult to recognize that it may not work that well for other people, particularly if your own life experience insulates you from the people for whom it’s really not working. This is why it perhaps does not make sense to be getting our advice on these subjects from the faithful, happy wife of a faithful, happy priest, from a person for whom the system has worked extraordinarily well. In other words, from someone whose exposure to these challenges is secondhand at best, and academic at worst. Andrews sees there is a problem because she comes across as a compassionate person, a basically decent human being capable of seeing when people are suffering, but her limited perspective makes her think the problem is with the messaging not with the message. And the effect of that limited worldview is that she not only repeats and sanitizes teachings that are doing harm to real people, she remains (it would seem to me against her own will) more loyal to doctrine than to people. Because when you start caring more about people than your moral platitudes, only then can you start to really think critically and helpful about, well, anything.
In her 2019 book Shameless: A Case for Not Feeling Bad About Feeling Good (Convergent Books), the Lutheran pastor and public theologian, Nadia Bolz-Weber rightly notes, “…we should not be more loyal to an idea, a doctrine, or an interpretation of a Bible verse than we are to people. If the teachings of the church are harming the bodies and spirits of people, we should rethink those teachings.” This is the place to which Andrews is not brave enough to go, and thus far the majority of Eastern Christian thinkers, writers, and clerics have not been ready to go. But the time is coming–and more quickly than we would expect. The long-term viability of Christianity writ large depends in no small part upon adequately responding to changing values and norms around gender and sexuality, a challenge at which thus far Eastern Christians in particular have woefully failed. Waiting and Dating is a doubling down on the old failed position. So, back to the drawing board.