Turns out Harry and Sally were wrong, according to three Hillsdale professors — “the sex part” does not always have to get in the way of male and female friendships.

A room of close to 20 women listened attentively to the professors’ rationales this past Sunday at an event organized by Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Fredericks and Assistant Professor of Education Catherine Kuiper.

James Strasburg, associate professor of history, began the panel by pointing to an Aristoltelian definition of friendship: we wish well to one another solely for the sake of the others’ flourishing. He also called upon Scripture and church history, envisioning a friendship between sexes as something Jesus himself and other saints such as Perpetua and Felicity’s co-ed group of martyrs modeled.

“We see a really clear mandate from multiple biblical authors, that men and women within the faith are to encourage one another and build one another up and love, that is specifically to quote 1 Thessalonians 5:11,” Strasburg said. “If we look at how Jesus lived out his humanity, of course, he’s befriending women and even doing some taboo things within his context, meeting with women one on one, to share with them the good news to exhort them in the faith, making them into disciples. So there’s a Christological basis for friendship between the sexes.”

Strasburg also added a theory about why this question has arisen in the first place, specifically in Chirstian evangelical circles.

“The Billy Graham rule,” coined in 1948, contends men should not meet with women who are not their wives in a one on one setting.

Not only did Strasburg argue against the Billy Graham rule, he also said he thinks it has been misinterpreted over time when taken out of the context of Graham’s ministry and applying it to all interactions between men and women.

“I think that the real pitfall and danger of the Billy Graham rule is that it doesn’t leave room for envisioning human relationships between the sexes outside of the sexualization or romanticization of those relationships,” Strasburg said.

Strasburg pointed to ecclesia as a necessarily counter cultural view of relationships and people.

“I think it’s perhaps incumbent upon us as Christians to offer the world a vision and examples of what those friendships could really look like,” Strasburg said. “If the critique of the prevailing culture is that the culture just leads to a sexualization of friendship, and the culture cannot think outside of sex and sexual identity. In one sense, the Billy Graham rule is just offering that right back to the world. And so if being Christian is about joining a body Ecclesia, and offering to the world, another layer of being human, that this is our chance, this is our opportunity to do just that.”

Anna Vincenzi, assistant professor of modern european history, offered a similar answer. She used her experiences growing up in Italy to assert that not all cultures have the same struggle with male and female friendships.

“The idea of dating is a very American thing that had to be explained to me when I came to this country, and I found it pretty insane to be very honest,” Vincenzi said. “When I was in college, I was going to lunch with my male friends all the time without ever thinking that there was any romantic implication, or that any of us was there to figure out if there could be any romantic implications.”

She said those friendships were important to her growth and that female friendships were crucial to her now husband’s growth, Lorenzo. She also grew up in the Catholic Church during a movement within the church called “Communion and Liberation.” Her parish was highly involved and its priest intentionally sought out co-ed collaboration, despite its genesis in the ’50s.

“I think the first reason why he did that is that he saw a value in any kind of friendship,” Vincenzi said. “I can name a lot of men that have accompanied me in growing throughout my life. I am a much better person, Christian, teacher, because of our relationship. I think the second reason why he did that is that he taught that it’s best to educate people to responsibility than to fear.”

On the topic of fear, Vincenzi further discussed the reality of love and fear after marriage.

“Can you fall in love with someone after you’re married? Yes, you can. That happens all the time,” Vincenzi said. “I think that what he was doing by making this movement a co-educational movement was educating people that the fulfillment of life is fulfilling your vocation, and to love someone else is to love their vocation. Having been educated in dealing with relationships in this fuller way, makes it possible for me to hang out with my male friends without fear, but also without any ambiguity.”

Andrew Kuiper’12, husband of Catherine Kuiper, closed the panel by taking a historical look at what society calls “men’s work” versus “women’s work.” Keeping in theme with the 1940s-’50s historical context of the other two answers, he said questions like these could be reactionary responses to the restructuring of the labor market during the 1940s and ’50s which allowed everyone to work outside of the home.

“It is simply a widening of a certain form of the capitalist labor market in a way that now threatens a certain vision of masculinity,” Kuiper said. “Women were not going to the factory very much before this, so what is it that made you a man? That you had a job, a nine to five job. Which is why I’m technically a woman right now because Catherine is employed, and I’m not, so I’m at home with the kids.”

According to Kuiper, the question of whether men and women can be friends derives from this idea of men and women’s separated spaces, and the neoliberal idea that the family is an independent unit that precedes the rest of society.

Kuiper said this is antithetical to the gospel message.

“I think we need to consider that there’s something that Christ does to an idea of biological family that’s actually quite disruptive and unexpected,” Kuiper said. “Paul is clearly envisioning the ecclesia as some kind of revolutionary subject throughout history, which is why he says insane things like, you know, there’s no Jews or Greeks or slaves or free or male or female. There’s some kind of energy that the kingdom of God is breaking into recognizable social forms, which doesn’t totally annihilate everything that came before, but it does disturb it.”

Kuiper said people need to understand that notion before men and women can be friends.

“We’ve certainly lost that,” Kuiper said. “So if you want to be friends with men, you’re gonna have to bring them back into a better Christian eschatological understanding of the equality of persons.”