Our family has been attending an Anglican Church since COVID ended. We haven’t been in a typical evangelical church for over 7 years. We left because of trauma and grief about how the church has ignored the injustice of the way women have been treated.

Yet I felt, watching the documentary, that Hollywood had learned the secret language that evangelicals share. They had uncovered what makes us feel safe, and what makes us stay, even in churches that are toxic under the surface.

It’s the fact that in a church of just a few hundred, there will be enough musical talent that you will feel like you’re at this amazing concert.

It’s little children running around after the service and crawling on the stage and playing with the drums.

It’s the row of ladies lining up beside the serving tables and the coffee urns to receive their thanks for volunteering at the ladies’ tea.

It’s that you can call your pastor when there’s a medical emergency, and someone will come.

It’s feeling like you are truly, honestly, worshiping Jesus together with the people who matter most to you.

It’s all the things that make you feel like a family.

And I still mourn and grieve so many of these elements.

Yet I can never go back, and the Netflix documentary Death of a Pastor’s Wife shows why.

I renewed my Netflix subscription last night just to watch the first two episodes of Death of a Pastor’s Wife (I may have more thoughts after I’ve finished the third!). So many people were tagging me in posts about it and sending me questions about it, I thought I had better watch, even though I’m not on the Netflix part of my yearly roster right now (I subscribe to streaming services one at a time, watch everything I want, and then move on to the next one so I’m not paying for everything all at once. Right now is Apple TV, not Netflix!)

I’d like to share a few thoughts I’ve had after watching episodes 1 and 2.

I remember when Mica Miller died two years ago. I watched the clips of JP Miller’s sermons, talking about how women owe their husbands sex, with horror. I read about how he deliberately leaked her nude photos online, and about how she had posted videos about the abuse she was suffering from. I read about how he groomed her since she was thirteen years old.

None of that was a surprise. But what emotionally hits is two things I want to talk about: the dangerous intersection of Every Man’s Battle theology, and the evangelical reliance on charisma.

Every Man’s Battle redefined battling with lust as being of good character

Every Man’s Battle hit Christian bookstores in 2000, and sold like wildfire. The book turned into a franchise that has sold more than 4,000,000 copies. It was based on one simple premise: all men struggle with lust, and they do so because that is the way God made them.

And the solution that is offered to lust? Men “bounce their eyes” from women (which is still objectifying, because whether you’re lusting after her or deliberately refusing to look at her, you’re still seeing her as a collection of body parts rather than a person), or you treat your wife like a “merciful vial of methadone” (their words) and transfer all your sexual energy to her, going to her for “10 bowls of sexual gratification a week.” (they never define what a bowl of sexual gratification is. Perhaps we should be grateful.)

Every Man’s Battle was written by Fred Stoeker and Steve Arterburn, two men who have absolutely no credentials to be writing about sexual struggles or getting over such struggles. They are not counselors or psychologists. They are not social scientists. And they have ZERO citations in their book.

Their only qualifications are simple: They are both self-proclaimed former sex addicts.

That’s it.

And the evangelical church allowed them to speak for “all men.”

I have written at length on the problems with Every Man’s Battle, and its offshot Every Young Man’s Battle (which is infinitely worse, and left me in tears). It features prominently in our book The Great Sex Rescue. You can download a one-page info sheet on the problems with it here.

But what this book did was it turned men talking about their struggles with lust into something that we should applaud, not judge.

It turned using your wife as methadone for your lusts as something moral, a sign of good character, rather than a sign that you hadn’t discipled your sexuality and that you were not renewed, and showed no fruits of the Spirit.

It turned your wife into a sin management tool, and if she refused to be used as a masturbatory aid to slake his lusts, she was the one sinning against God.

The expectation that a man could see a woman as a whole person and respect her as such was simply erased from popular consciousness. Any man who said he could do this was lying, as Mark Driscoll recently said in a reel. Growing in self-control so that you saw women as sisters in Christ was suspect; getting up in the pulpit and announcing you lusted after everything that moved and had a hard time when 12-year-olds wore tight sweaters became a sign that you were in touch with the Holy Spirit.

Enter JP Miller

Mica Miller’s husband JP was a charismatic, attractive pastor that, from Mica’s accounts, degraded her sexually, pressuring her to take testosterone to keep up with his sex drive; giving homeless people money to use his wife sexually while he watched; demanding she have sex with him four or five times a day, and refusing to let her sleep if she didn’t.

The congregation didn’t know this part of their life.

What they did know was that JP Miller “had an affair” (it was actually clergy sexual abuse) with Mica while he was still married to his first wife. They knew he then married Mica.

And they knew that his favourite thing to preach about was how wives had to satisfy their husband’s sexual urges.

The creepiest part of the documentary is listening to this man’s disgusting sermons, and watching the backs of the heads of the congregation members just sitting there as he misquotes 1 Corinthians 7. Repeatedy he claims that 1 Corinthians 7:3 says “do not refuse your spouse”, even though it does not. It says “do not deprive,” and those are not the same thing.

In his sermons, he completely eliminates the idea of consent in marriage, giving the most blatant examples of what we have deemed the “obligation sex message” that I have ever heard. When we measured this obligation sex message in our survey of 20,000 women for The Great Sex Rescue, we found this to be one of the most destructive messages. It lowered women’s libidos, orgasm rates, and marital satisfaction, but most importantly it’s one of the big contributors to the fact that evangelical women suffer sexual pain disorders at twice the rate of the general population.

What was so sad was hearing Mica’s friends who were interviewed in the documentary speaking as if what JP taught was biblical, he just took it too far. They didn’t even realize, even now after all that has happened, that JP was not teaching what was biblical at all. They still think he was actually right about the Bible, just wrong about how he treated Mica. They don’t see how the one leads to the other.

How did JP manage to hoodwink so many?

One of the saddest parts of the first two episodes so far is when JP announces that his wife has left him and is undergoing a psychotic episode, but that he wouldn’t allow this to derail what Jesus is doing in the church—and the church gives him a standing ovation.

That church was filled with people who knew Mica. She had been front and centre leading worship for years. She had been active in women’s ministry; she had welcomed newcomers and taken time to get to know them; she had invested in people’s lives in a way that JP never did. But when he announces that she has left him, instead of questioning why, they all applaud him. Hundreds of people stood up to give this degraded, disgusting abuser a standing ovation.

How did this happen? I think it is something inherent in evangelical churches that I’m not sure can be fixed. I think it’s one of the reasons that liturgical churches are growing because they are not as prone to this. But it comes down to this:

Evangelicalism rewards charisma over character

The story of JP Miller’s church is one of rewarding those with charisma and talent over those with maturity and character.

JP played piano incredibly well, and he announces at a young age that he wants to preach. And so the church lets him, and he becomes their pastor at a very young age. But there is no consideration whether he actually has the character for this. There is only the fact that he can mesmerize a crowd.

Even Mica, as lovely and in love with Jesus as she is, should never have been given the roles she had at the tender age of 16. Sure she could sing, but why is she actually leading the praise team? Why is she not being mentored, discipled, cared for, rather than thrust into the position as if she is a mature believer?

Why did the church stay with JP after he admitted to the “affair” (clergy sex abuse) with Mica when he was still married to his first wife?

Because charisma was more important than character, and Every Man’s Battle had turned public confessions of battles with lust into a sign of good character.

Why did the church stay with JP after Mica left him?

Because charisma was more important than character.

Evangelical churches tend to revolve around a pastor. When you can find a charismatic, relatively young, good looking pastor, it can make it seem like your church is “hip.” Like it’s somewhere that everybody should want to be. And so the church starts to grow.

But character is missing. And I don’t know how we can bring back character when the church service itself so relies on charisma to keep people coming through the door.

I think it’s why we need a return to liturgy, more of a focus on Scripture, and less on a sermon.

Cultural evangelicalism has eroded character.

And it’s done it at the expense of women.

Every man’s battle swayed an entire generation to think that when a man complains that he’s finding a 14-year-old’s sweater distracting during a service, that man is being righteous, rather than that man is showing serious predatory vibes and we need to keep him away from children.

Every man’s battle taught us that the way men defeat lust is that women do their part, and if a man falls, it’s because a woman, somewhere, messed up. Either a woman dressed too immodestly, or a wife didn’t give enough oral sex (Remember Mark Driscoll telling women they should get on their knees and repent of not giving oral sex?)

Every man’s battle taught us that we as women can’t expect to be treated with respect, because God wired men to visually lust after women.

Every man’s battle taught us that while women love God, women should never expect to be safe in church. And we need to just realize that God wired men to be unsafe.

And then, when predators like Miller start giving all the signs that they are dangerous, we don’t pick up on them, because they’ve all been so normalized.

We’ve forgotten what true character is.

And so we don’t even notice abuse and sexual degradation when it’s right under our noses.

I pray that one day Mica Miller gets justice, and I hope this documentary is the beginning of that. Everyone should watch it just to see how these ideas from Every Man’s Battle have become so pervasive in the church that they don’t even set off red flags anymore.

But I also know that until we confront the lies beneath the every man’s battle idea, we will continue to disciple a new generation into sexual harm, where consent in marriage is eroded, dehumanizing and degrading your wife is normalized, and no woman is truly safe.

Check it out!

You may also enjoy:

• Our post explaining, in detail, all the problems with Every Man’s Battle, with quotes

• Our puberty and sex course The Whole Story, to teach kids about sex and puberty in a non-toxic, non weird way

• Our podcast on how Fred Stoeker and Steve Arterburn totally obscure the reality of sexual assault. Here’s a clip from that podcast:

It’s constant, and we’re always reminded that one day the kids will leave home, but your husband will still be there. He needs to be the priority.

You know what we don’t hear?

“Husbands, your wife has just given birth, and her body has gone through more trauma that it likely ever will again, except when she has more children. Her hormones have dropped precipitously. She isn’t sleeping. Her milk is regulating. She is getting used to being a mom. Now is the time to step up and be a fully engaged partner, taking shifts at night as much as possible so you both can sleep, caring for her during the day, and making sure meals are made.”

Nope. Instead we get advice like this, from Gary Thomas’ best-selling book A Lifelong Love:

Notice what he is saying: If the wife tends to a helpless infant’s cries, she is neglecting her husband, and she has power over her husband.

There is no talk about how the husband can help too. There is no talk about how the baby SHOULD come first–because it’s a baby.

There is only guilt trips thrown at a woman for wanting to tend to her helpless infant in distress, because somehow this is taking away from her husband’s sex life.

What kind of man feels jealous of a baby? What kind of man sees a baby as a threat, rather than as someone to nurture and love? This boggles my mind.

And in the chapter where this quote appears, Gary is talking about power shifts in marriage, and how the power rests with the one who is the least invested in the marriage. He points to different times this can happen, when power shifts back and forth.

But what he is saying is that caring for your infant means you’re less invested in the marriage.

Who says that? Why are evangelical resources pitting husbands and kids up as if they’re in competition with each other? This frames husbands as kids that women need to care for while they are at their weakest, rather than as partners they can rely on to share the load and care for them.

Most evangelical men aren’t like this

Most dads actually are involved dads! Most dads don’t resent their kids. Most marriages are happy, and about 50% of evangelical marriages function as healthy partnerships! It’s not that evangelicals don’t ever get this right.

It’s instead that our advice gets it so totally backwards, because evangelical marriage advice tends to center the man, rather than looking at what leads to the best outcomes and best reflects the heart of Christ.

This month we’ve been reminded of how much women are ignored postpartum

Like many of you, I’ve been glued to the Lindsay Clancy case, where a mother allegedly killed her three children due to postpartum psychosis. There is much speculation about many aspects of the case, but one of the important cultural moments is the wider discussion of how much the postpartum period consumes a woman and the toll it has on her.

I’ve read countless studies over the last week about how one of the biggest predictors of postpartum depression (PPD) is the amount of support a woman has at home. Having a husband who picks up his share of the load lets her feel that she is safe and she’s less likely to develop PPD.

The postpartum period is absolutely crucial for the mother and baby. It can’t get more crucial. And yet what do evangelical marriage books say about this time?

• Kevin Leman in Sheet Music insists that you should give hand jobs and oral sex, since “faithfulness is a two-person job.”

• Gary Thomas talks in Married Sex about how much men like hand jobs during this period, because he loves seeing you so excited as you give them (note to Gary: she’s moaning to get it over with faster, not because she’s excited. In our focus groups women told us that they often moaned when giving sexual favours they were guilted into to speed up the process. And the “wetness between her thighs” that you say excite you so much is not her sexual lubrication when she’s postpartum or on her period; it’s blood. Yes, a large minority of women enjoy doing this postpartum, and more power to them! But if you have to write a book convincing women to do this, these aren’t the women who already want to do it).

• Intended for Pleasure says that when you can’t have intercourse after giving birth, you should give manual stimulation to the same frequency as you had sex before you gave birth, so that he will not be jealous of the baby and his needs will be met.

I am so done. I am so disgusted.

Here’s a clip of us from a podcast taking on Josh Howerton saying something similar. I’m just gobsmacked at how evangelical pastors and authors see women who are run ragged with children, and feeling distant from their spouses, and the answer is always, “women, you need to save your best energy for your husbands, so try harder at night,” rather than “men, if your wife is exhausted, it means you’re not doing enough. Jump in. They’re your kids too!” (We talked about this dynamic quite a bit when we looked at Jimmy Evans’ book Marriage on the Rock as well.)

Much of this advice stems from a misreading of the stats

Yes, divorces do spike once kids leave home. But our matched pair study of 7000 people for The Marriage You Want found that this wasn’t because people had nothing in common once the kids were gone. Instead, it was that women had been putting up with deeply unfair dynamics in a number of areas for years, and you can only put up with that for about 20 years before you break.

Women can have sex without orgasming for about 5 years without it bothering them too much, but at 10 years they start to get upset, at 15 years they’re really mad, and at 20 they’ve had it.

Women can do the vast majority of the housework, even if they work outside the home, for about 5 years and it doesn’t bother them that much, but at 10 years it registers. At 15 they’re mad, and at 20 they’ve had it.

We call this the unfairness threshold, and we showed several examples of it in The Marriage You Want. When she’s the main one to initiate repair after conflict; the main one to make all the medical and dental appointments; the main one doing all the kin keeping for your own side of the family, but also your own. When too much of the burden falls on her, and she isn’t cared for equally, the marriage suffers.

Those divorces that happen after the kids leave home, then, aren’t primarily because the couple has nothing in common anymore. It’s that the husband has been treating the wife unfairly for decades, and when the kids leave, she finally feels that she’s able to leave too.

And that unfairness actually stems from this evangelical marriage advice.

When they teach that the main priority on the birth of a child is that the husband still ejaculates, rather than that the wife gets support and sleep, that sets up the dynamics that will lead to divorce.

When they teach that the problem in a marriage where she is carrying the mental load and emotional labour for the family, and that she is doing most of the hands-on housework and childcare, is that she isn’t saving her best energy for her husband at night, they train couples to ignore the inherent unfairness of all of that labour being put on the wife.

The very evangelical advice that teaches people to put the marriage before the kids actually destroys the marriage.

If, instead, they taught people to be partners and care for children together, that marriage would grow and would likely last, because she would feel valued, less tired, and part of a team.

The Lindsay Clancy case is showing us how desperately important it is to support new moms. The evangelical church instead decides that new moms need guilt trips about their husbands’ sex lives.

Wake up, church.

And everyone else: walk out of any church that teaches like Josh Howerton does. Let’s stop supporting any organization, book, or church that gives these horrible messages that literally destroy lives and families.

You may also enjoy:

• The Great Sex Rescue, where we have a chapter talking about the atrocious advice given to couples postpartum and during her period

• Our podcast on postpartum advice given to women about sex

• The Marriage You Want, which comes with a video study and a study guide with small group discussion questions and premarital questions

• Our podcast episode Let Dads Be Dads, about the ways that evangelical advice sets dads up as children who need to be cared for, rather than expecting them to be engaged dads with their own kids

But first, a bit of background. Last week I wrote about the two kinds of marital rape.

I originally published this on my blog a few years ago as part of a longer series I was writing about sexual recovery in marriage when the dynamics have become toxic. I started that series thinking it would be six posts; it ended up being much longer because the comments section was filled with women describing marital rape situations. Marital rape is, tragically, rampant in evangelicalism.

Well, it’s rampant everywhere, but within evangelicalism it’s often normalized, and that’s the problem.

My thesis about the 2 kinds of rapists is quite simple:

One the one had are abusers who would abuse regardless. They were always going to be abusive, entitled, narcissistic people.

But on the other hand we have men who wouldn’t have otherwise raped their wives, but ended up doing so precisely because of evangelical teaching that normalized it.

When evangelical teaching says:

• Men have an insatiable need for sex that women will never understand

• God made women to help men defeat lust and porn

• The worst thing you can do is to lust after other women or watch porn

• Wives are men’s lawful sexual outlets

• God’s will is that you have lots of intercourse with your wife

• Women don’t tend to want sex

• Women aren’t to deprive you

Then you’ve created a culture where everyone thinks it’s normal for men to pressure or force their wives to have sex with them. Men assume it’s normal for women to have sex against their will, because women never want it anyway but God wants us to have lots of sex. And since it’s wrong to watch porn/lust, and wives are the ones that are supposed to reduce that temptation, then it’s more righteous to use your wife than to do the other things.

Rape becomes normalized among immature men who may not otherwise have done so, because in some twisted way they think they’re honoring God. We spent two chapters on this in The Great Sex Rescue, and these were the most important chapters we wrote. And every single day I get so many emails from women telling me story after story of rape happening in their marriage.

Often they aren’t able to identify it as such, but as I explain, any time you have to have sex to prevent something bad from happening, there is a lack of consent and that is coercion.

When we were discussing this on social media, so many people denied there was a problem.

They said this wasn’t prevalent in evangelical materials; they said that I was just attacking the church for no reason.

And so today, I thought I’d share just one particular book. It wasn’t a huge seller, but a huge discipleship organization used it as a men’s study. Navigators still advertises it.

(UPDATE: Since originally posting that link earlier this week, the Navigators appear to have taken it down! That’s progress! Yay!)

It’s the Every Man a Warrior series, and it was written by Lonnie Berger who worked at Navigators.

After my article on marital rape, a woman sent me a screenshot of several pages, and I want to include them here because this is absolutely typical of the way that marital rape is normalized in evangelical materials. I’ve talked about the best-sellers that call women methadone before. Here’s a book that went moderately big, and is representative of the general approach that evangelical material took towards sex in marriage:

I know that can be hard to read, so let me highlight some of it:

But Kevin’s anticipation of their honeymoon was shattered on their wedding night when Carol rolled up into the fetal position, pulled the covers over her head, and quietly sobbed. She later revealed that her older brother had sexually abused her during high school.

In the first decade of their marriage, sex was never good. Carol had performed her wifely duty even though Kevin knew she hated it and resented his physical needs. Now twenty years into their marriage, with four children, Kevin was losing hope. As they got into their late forties Carol became increasingly angry toward him. Her bursts of rage and stares of hate were driving Kevin into depression and despair.

Now, they hardly ever had sex. Kevin’s frustration kept mounting and once a month or so he would demand to have sex. Afterward Carol would go sleep on the couch and seethe at him for days. Sex made her feel the horrors of her brother’s abuse and caused her to explode at her husband.

Kevin was a gifted entrepreneur…He worked 60 to 70 hours a week. At least at the office he felt successful, valued, and appreciated. Plus, it was an escape from the torture at home.

…Kevin had never had an affair, although the temptation was high.

Can you see the marital rape implicit in that story?

Here is a traumatized woman, and what does Kevin do? He has sex with her that she hates repeatedly throughout their marriage, and when she shuts down, he “demands” it once a month, after which she feels so horrible she sleeps on the couch and seethes at him.

Can you see what is happening?

Nowhere is it acknowledged that HER sexuality has been stolen too. Nowhere is it acknowledged that he was compounding her hurt. Nowhere is it acknowledged that she had very good reason to say no, and he should have been part of her healing, not the cause of her suffering. Nowhere is it acknowledged that women don’t shut down like this and seethe at their husbands for no reason.

And how does the author describe the dynamics of the situation? Kevin is experiencing “torture” at home.

Here’s a man who is leaving a traumatized woman at home for up to 70 hours a week to care for 4 children, and he’s then upset that she’s angry at him after he rapes her.

It’s unclear why the author puts in the stuff about what a good businessman Kevin is. If someone is good at business, does that mean they can rape with impunity?

Here’s the next part of the story:

Again, I know this is hard to read, but it talks about how Kevin sought help from a mentor and from counselors. The counselor told him to divorce Carol basically because she was withholding sex, but Kevin didn’t want to do that. And the solution to all of this? Kevin had to realize that it is godly to do right when you are suffering. And he was the one suffering.

“So then, those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator [go to God] and continue to do good [what’s right].”

In recent years this verse has become my definition of being a “real man of God.” A real man of God responds to hurt, suffering or trials by “going to God and doing what is right.”

After telling this story, the resolution is that Kevin decides that, despite his suffering, he will do what is right and stay with Carol.

Kevin is the one who is suffering! This is Aunt Matilda all over again (hello to those of you who get the reference).

This is beyond disgusting.

Where does Every Man a Warrior fit in to evangelicalism?

Here’s how the Every Man a Warrior organization describes it:

Every Man A Warrior

DISCIPLESHIP / LEADERSHIP / MULTIPLICATION

EMAW is a discipleship Bible study that “Helps Men Succeed in Life” and win the battles they fight every day.

Since 2011, 100,000 men in 65 countries and in 27 languages have been impacted by the EMAW curriculum.

So they have trained 100,000 men all over the world to believe that men are the victims when they are forced to rape their wives, and then when their wives are upset about that they are doubly victimized.

And all of this is being done in the name of discipleship. It is being done as they are trying to win converts to Christ and teach them what it is to be a Christian.

This book was widely used by Navigators, and the author once worked with Navigators (he has since gone out on his own).

This is what I mean when I say that evangelical materials normalize marital rape.

It is not that they explicitly say “raping your wife is okay or understandable.” It is not that they explicitly say “sure, this is coercion, but God gave you needs.”

No, instead it is that they describe dynamics that are coercive in nature without ever naming them as such, and then they do a major DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) by painting the husband as the victim here.

And, honestly, I think this is worse.

By obscuring what rape actually is, they make it so that people have difficulty identifying coercion. And then when men participate in this, they think this is normal, and even of God. They don’t even realize what they are doing because books and resources have told the same story as their marriage and clearly said that this was normal.

And that’s why marital rape is so high in evangelical circles. We’re taught not to name it or even see it, and to judge the real victim as the man who isn’t getting all the sex he wants.

Even when the woman is experiencing classic signs of PTSD and coercion, we’re taught that this is just her being unjustifiably angry rather than her being traumatized and wanting to get as far away from her abuser as possible.

There simply is no excuse. This has to end.

And the thought that this is being taught in the name of Christian discipleship right now, on the mission field, should be a huge wake up call to what we are supporting with our own tithes and offerings.

You May Also Enjoy:

• The Great Sex Rescue, which clearly shows how these ideas are rampant in evangelicalism, and how we should think about things instead. We also have a free book video study that you can use with The Great Sex Rescue!

• How two pastors responded to my social media posts this week on marital rape—examples of the problems that are out there!

• Our Great Sex Rescue toolkit with attractive downloads and info that you can share with people in your circles about why these teachings are so toxic

• How pastors and authors use euphemisms to disguise sexual assault (video)

Our team recently published a paper in the Scientific Study of Religion journal based on our dataset for our book She Deserves Better showing that boys who attend churches that teach modesty messages are more likely to sexually assault and harass their peers in high school.

Those boys would likely not have done so had they not been taught that it was a girl’s responsibility to dress so that she wouldn’t entice him. If he hadn’t been taught that God made him to lust, and that it was up to girls to be the sin management tools, they likely wouldn’t have done what they did.

We also know from an Institute for Family Studies 2019 report based on surveys of 60,000 people that religious men who believe in male hierarchy are the second likeliest to abuse their wives, while men who attend religious services and believe in equality are the least likely.

And other studies have found that conservative Christian women are more likely to stay in abusive relationships. Quite simply, abuse is a problem in evangelicalism.

But today I want to talk about a particular phenomenon that we’ve identified in our datasets: marital rape that may not have happened save for evangelical teachings that normalized it.

When we analyzed the top 13 evangelical books for our book The Great Sex Rescue, there was one word that was missing from all of them: Consent. While several books did do a good job at talking about the importance of not raping your spouse (Boundaries in Marriage and The Gift of Sex), no book that we looked at had a robust discussion of what consent and coercion looked like in marriage.

Yet when we asked our survey takers who left their emails if any of them had stories of marital rape to share, a full 20% who answered our query did.

And in our focus groups, we heard horrifying story after story of marital rape.

Not all marital rape dynamics are the same.

I’m going to distinguish between two different dynamics that we’ve seen in readers’ stories:

1. Rape where the husband is exercising control and truly doesn’t care and is abusive.

2. Coercion where the husband may not have completely realized the dynamics that were present, and actually thinks he is doing what God permitted.

The first instance is illustrated by Tim LaHaye’s story in The Act of Marriage of Aunt Matilda, who is the actual antagonist (the bad person) in the story that he’s telling:

Apparently her aunt, whose marriage was arranged by her parents in the old country, found herself petrified of sex on her wedding night. When her embarrassed and clumsy farmer husband, who was twenty years older, brought her to their wedding bed, he “stripped me naked and raped me in my own bed. I fought and screamed to no avail.” . . . Her conclusion to her niece was, “As far as I’m concerned, marriage is just legalized rape.” As much as one might feel compassion for poor Aunt Matilda and her equally unhappy spouse, we can hardly envision more unhealthy concepts to pump into the impressionable young mind of a bride-to-be.

Please notice that Tim LaHaye called the rapist, who held his wife down while she was kicking and screaming, and did this throughout their marriage, “equally unhappy” as his rape victim.

This anecdote is from the fourth edition of their book. And nobody at Zondervan (the publisher, who still, to this day, has this wording in its book and has not taken it out) thought, “hmmmm….maybe it’s not a good idea to call a rapist equally unhappy as his rape victim!”

No, they thought that was okay. Which is why I dedicated The Great Sex Rescue to Aunt Matilda, and all others like her. The evangelical world has failed women by making marital rape normal. And I’m incensed and so angry.

When writing our book we developed a 12 point rubric of healthy sexuality teaching. And the marker that evangelical books as a whole scored the worst on was the concept of consent, coercion, and obligation. It is absolutely atrocious. There is very scant teaching that women’s autonomy matters, and that men can’t just take what they want. There is lots of teaching, on the other hand, that men own women’s bodies and that men are entitled to them. (And you can read lots of evidence in The Great Sex Rescue!)

In the evangelical world especially, we are not taught that consent matters.

When rapes that would obviously fall into the first category above, where there is violence being done and the husband doesn’t care are minimized in our best-sellers, is it any wonder that marital rape is so common?

But the problem goes deeper than that. It is not just that abusive men are enabled.

It is also, I believe, that men who would not otherwise be abusive become that way, perhaps even unwittingly.

This is what happens when consent is not discussed properly. When we talk about sex as something that God commands women to give, then, as one reader commented to me about people who think this, “The wife’s consent is irrelevant to these people because only God’s consent counts.”

It’s like this passage from chapter 10 of The Great Sex Rescue:

We have even had several male commenters on the blog taking issue with the fact that women can say no to sex for the six weeks postpartum or during her period.

Referring to the 1 Corinthians 7 passage, Tony commented, “Consensual is a keyword. If he didn’t consent to going six weeks [after a baby] or even one week a month [during her period], then unilaterally imposing that on him is certainly not consensual.” Another man echoed him, “The period of abstinence after pregnancy and during the wife’s period is not by mutual agreement so that the couple can devote themselves to prayer. It is being forced on us men because we are being told to give our wives a break.” You need mutual consent to say no, these commenters feel—but apparently you don’t need mutual consent to say yes.

See the book here!

Think about this for a moment:

If you honestly believe that GOD is telling you that you need two people’s consent to say no, then consent has been flipped on its head in the evangelical world.

It’s rape that is normalized, not mutual, intimate, and pleasurable sex. Because in this warped interpretation of the Bible, the evil thing is not taking sex from someone; the evil thing is withholding sex.

And if having intercourse in marriage pleases God (which is what we’re also taught), then when someone takes it, this is actually glorifying God, in some weird way.

Then let’s combine that with the idea that the wife is the only “lawful sexual outlet” he has.

As Doug Wilson said, wives are the only lawful sexual outlet. This is common teaching in the evangelical world–that the wife is the only proper place to put your lusts. So Every Man’s Battle teaches women that when he quits porn, you need to provide all the sexual release he needs so he doesn’t sin. You become methadone for him.

In this mindset, him using his wife for sex, whether she wants it or not, prevents sin. In fact, the whole reason that God gave marriage is so that men wouldn’t have to sin sexually (as Mark Driscoll said, now his penis has a home).

The thing that must be avoided is lusting after someone else or masturbating or sexual sin in any way; and the way to avoid these things is to have sex with your wife.

Thus, using your wife for sexual release is seen as a righteous act to avoid sin.

In fact, as Every Man’s Battle says, she should be grateful for this! She should understand that he is honoring her by doing this.

Can you see how, if you are immersed in this way of seeing sex, that a husband may totally not understand what marital rape is?

My contention is that the evangelical world enables the first type of rapist by not calling it all out. But then it creates the second type of rapist. It pushes men who would otherwise treat their wives well to using their wives, because they think this is what God wants and that this is righteous.

Yes, it’s twisted. It’s absolutely bizarre and hideous and evil. But over and over again we heard stories like this one, that we included in the book (and trigger warning, it’s especially bad):

My husband and I have sex every day. Every other day we have it twice a day, and often 3 times a day! When I’m on my period, tired, we still do. When I had our babies, he googled and told me it’s okay after four weeks, we don’t have to wait for six. When I feel like it’s too much, [1 Cor. 7:3–5] is thrown at me. He also explains to me why he needs it and how he feels when I deny him (like if I’m exhausted and fall asleep before it happens). I actually feel abused. I curl up in a ball on my side and let him do it. I’m detached emotionally (not always, but almost always during my period) and this hurts him.

I love my husband. He’s my best friend, but sometimes I want out! I feel like I’ll either lose my best friend or continue to feel abused. I tell him it hurts me when we have sex too often or when I’m on my period, but he says, then why would God say to NEVER deny each other?

Let’s notice a few things about this story, which is typical of so many that I’ve heard:

• The wife feels abused (and is being abused)

• The husband ignores the wife’s obvious distress

• The relationship is otherwise good (she says)

• The husband thinks that this is what God wants

Now, I know some may argue that the third and fourth point likely aren’t true, and that this guy is just abusing his wife and knows it.

But here’s the thing–I’ve had so many heartfelt emails from guys saying, “I didn’t realize I was coercing my wife. I thought this was what God wanted. I thought, by not wanting sex, that she was the one in sin. I used her and I never realized it”, that I’ve come to believe this dynamic is far more common than we think.

Should they have realized it? Yes.

Was it still abusive and coercive? Yes.

Did it cause trauma? Yes.

Did he realize it? In many cases, I think he (and even she) may have convinced themselves this was normal, and identified HER reluctance as the problem.

I have simply heard too many stories from women saying, “he is such a great guy in every other way; he doesn’t belittle me, he’s a great dad, he helps around the house, but he’s so selfish in bed and I feel so used.” And I have had too many messages from men wanting to know how to make this right that I think this is a very real phenomenon.

In far too many evangelical marriages, she is being coerced and neither of them understand the dynamic.

• When you believe that you need mutual consent to say no, but not mutual consent to say yes (because God’s consent is all that counts);

• when you believe that she is the lawful sexual outlet, and God gave her to you specifically to use so that you don’t sin;

• when you believe that God wants sex to be frequent in marriage, and is upset when it doesn’t happen–

then it is easy to see how they both may not understand coercion and marital rape.

Quite frankly, we’ve created a lot of rapists, some of whom are absolutely devastated and heartbroken when they later realize what they’ve done (I hear from men like this everyday).

Now, many are not, and that when a husband doesn’t understand that he’s raped his wife even after it has been clearly spelled out, that can’t be fixed. They abused because they wanted to abuse, and the only solution is to get out.

So let’s be clear about what coercion is.

Marital coercion is any time sex happens when a woman feels as if there are negative repercussions to not having sex.

We tend to think of marital rape as the Aunt Matilda situation, where she is held down, kicking and screaming. But rape is any time there is no consent. And you cannot properly give consent if you feel as if something bad will happen if you don’t, or if you are being pressured into it in some way other than physically (as the second woman was with spiritual abuse).

So, for instance, these things are all instances of marital coercion:

• If sex happens because he lectures her about not depriving him and uses 1 Corinthians 7 as an excuse to do what he is doing.

• If he becomes angry, gives her the silent treatment, or treats her badly if they don’t have sex (Roughly 16% of our respondents said that their primary motivation for sex was to avoid something unpleasant, and 7% said it was to avoid him treating her badly).

• If he embarrasses her in public less if she has sex with him

• If he is nicer to the children and doesn’t yell at them as much if she has sex with him

• If he gives her access to money, groceries, or other things only if she has sex with him

• If he tells her that without sex he will lust at church, or at work, or use porn (Alyssa Wakefield told us in her podcast that she had to have sex every Sunday before church or her husband would lust).

This is not an exhaustive list, but I hope you get the picture: If she has to have sex to avoid something bad happening to her, or has sex under physical, emotional, or spiritual pressure, then that is not consent.

And this dynamic is toxic for the marriage; it is poison for the sex life; and it can easily lead to PTSD, chronic health problems, mental health issues, and more in her. We know that long-term victims of abuse are more likely to develop certain chronic health problems. The body keeps the score.

Anyone who thinks that Jesus sees coercive sex as sex doesn’t know Jesus and doesn’t know sex.

They may think they know Jesus, but they don’t.

Because Jesus would never think it’s good and okay for a man to “have sex” with his wife while she’s curled up in a ball.

Jesus would never call a rapist equally unhappy as his rape victim.

Jesus would never tell a man that it’s okay to just use a woman to satisfy your lusts. In fact, Jesus didn’t.

And Jesus understands intimacy. He created sex to be mutual, intimate, and pleasurable for both, not as a lust management tool and entitlement for men.

We have got this so wrong. We have done so much damage. It is time to repent and make this right.

You may also enjoy:

• Our deep dive into the book The Act of Marriage

• Our Rubric rating 13 of the best-selling evangelical sex and marriage books

• Our download of all the problems with Every Man’s Battle

• Our podcast on the pressures put on women to perform sexually in the postpartum phase

• How evangelical teaching to teen girls enables date rape

How evangelical books and pastors obscure sexual assault:

We’ve successfully shown through our studies of about 40,000 people that many evangelical teachings on marriage and sex bear bad fruit, often making marriages worse, while teaching about partnership and mutuality and equality bears very good fruit.

Many who believe in male hierarchy haven’t liked that.

For instance, Juli Slattery, on a podcast four years ago, described good fruit like this:

As modern Christians, we want the fruit of a good marriage. We want our husband's love as well. We want him to help with the kids we want. We want to be good wives that encourage him. That's fruit. The root is what is God doing in my heart? And do I really trust that God is good?

So four years ago, good fruit was a good marriage with a husband who loves us and helps with the kids, while we encourage him.

Recently, she described it differently, saying this:

I’ve heard the verse over and over again. Used. You got to look at the fruit of the tree. And if a teaching doesn’t bear good fruit, if it makes some people miserable, it’s a bad teaching. But when we actually look at when that passage is used, it’s actually saying, look at the teacher of the fruit of a teacher’s life.

Do they have the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control? Yeah. So I think, you know, part of this is like you’re saying, the discernment of what is the spirit behind the critique. And is it ultimately defining flourishing? Is reconciliation with God or something else?

Now she’s saying all Jesus meant was look at the teacher’s life. But good people can give awfully bad advice. That is, quite frankly, ridiculous, and an attempt to get out of the box they’ve got themselves in, where it’s obvious that the advice that prioritizes men over women doesn’t end up bearing good fruit.

Watch this week’s Bare Marriage podcast to see these clips, and more:

Basically the argument comes down to this: they’re arguing that we only measured happiness in marriage, while we should have measured spirituality and obedience.

But here’s the problem for them: Our surveys didn’t really ask people “do you feel happy in your marriage?” We actually used scales of relationship health that asked questions that allowed us to measure things like:

• is your marriage joyful?

• Does your spouse have patience?

• Do they exercise self-control?

• Are they faithful?

• Are they good?

• Are they gentle?

We pretty much measured the fruits of the Spirit in marriage!

To better explain all of this, I’m going to ask Joanna Sawatsky, our statistician for all of our studies, and co-author of The Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better, to respond.

She’s also the author of our peer reviewed studies based on our datasets, and our research coordinator.

Here’s Joanna!

Joanna Sawatsky, Sheila Gregoire, and Rebecca Lindenbach—the three authors of The Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better.

One of my hottest takes is that I think that we need more statistics in our theology.

And I think Jesus would agree with me.

After all, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said,

¹⁶ By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? ¹⁷ Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. ¹⁸ A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. ¹⁹ Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. ²⁰ Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them. (Matthew 7:16-20, NIV)

This concept – that we can identify the goodness of a teaching by its outcomes – is central to what we do at Bare Marriage. So much so that our non-profit initiative with the Bosko Foundation is called… Good Fruit Faith (btw you can support our research, translation, and other work that doesn’t directly bring in revenue by donating here, where Americans can receive a tax receipt).

Recently, an author/podcaster/apologist decided to critique our work by claiming that we were measuring fruit incorrectly. So today you get me, resident stick-in-the-mud and dedicated fruit-evaluator.

Here are some common problems that happen when we get critiqued for our “check the fruit” argument:

1. People conflate the fruit with the tree

The fruit in our lives is the outcome of our choices and behaviors. Let me give an example. I am a person who loves going to the mountains and hiking with my kids. The fact that I take the kids to the mountains is not fruit – it is the tree. To put things in statistical terms, it is the independent variable. The fruit is the dependent variable, the thing(s) that change because I take my kids to the mountains.

What things does taking kids to the mountains change? It makes my kids feel competent, it gives us family togetherness, it creates shared memories, it connects us to the natural world, and so on. Those are the dependent variables.

What many of our critics do is say something like:

We believe X is right. People who read our books also come away believing X is right, so our books bear good fruit. People who read other books start not believing X, so the other books bear bad fruit.

But this is measuring the tree by the tree. You cannot judge the fruit of a belief in X by measuring whether people keep believing X or not. You have to judge whether a belief in X leads to other things that we want—or things that we don’t want.

In our case, we have a variety of dependent variables we have utilized to measure the things that we want to see. They include:

• Marital satisfaction

• Relationship Flourishing

• Marital Trust

• Healthy Conflict Resolution

• Self-Esteem

• Being safe in a church community from sexual harassment or exposure to clergy misconduct

• The absence of sexual pain (caveat here: I don’t mean to imply that women are to blame for their pain, only that is an unwanted and sad outcome that, while multicausal and complex, is often linked to religious teachings about sex)

• Having high sexual satisfaction

• Not being abused in one’s marriage

• Not being overwhelmed by lust

Depending on the research question, a dependent variable might also be frequency of church attendance or time spent in prayer, especially given other research on the benefits of religiosity for overall well-being.

However, and I do think this is important, measuring church attendance without other measures that evaluate the fruit of the spirit or the abundant life in Christ can accidentally end up simply measuring the tree. That is, the fruit should be apparent in the life of the person following Jesus. In fact, the verse following Jesus’ admonition to examine the fruit regards the import of following the will of God, not simply declaring the Christ is Lord.

To use a theological term coined by Matthew Bates, our salvation is by allegiance to Christ. And that allegiance is shown by being “little Christs”—aka being the hands and feet of Jesus in the world and developing the fruits of the spirit. It is easy to be a butt in a chair at the Sunday morning service and become a whitewashed tomb, instead of a flourishing member of the body of Christ, continuing his work in the world.

Alongside these dependent variables, we have considered a variety of independent variables, largely relating to how the church has discussed issues of biblical manhood and womanhood, lust, sexuality, and marriage. Those variables are the tree.

2. People seek to downplay the impact of the outcome variables we chose

One of the measures we used in our survey for She Deserves Better is the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. And so we have been criticized for “only measuring happiness.”

First, a point of order. Happiness is different than self-esteem.

Second point of order. We measured plenty of other outcome variables (see list above.)

But finally, I’d like to take some umbrage with the idea that we shouldn’t measure happiness because that isn’t a valid outcome for the Christian.

Seriously?

The God-Man himself did his first miracle at a wedding so that people could celebrate together and so that the hosts wouldn’t lose face.

But beyond the wedding at Cana, among the fruit of the spirit is… JOY!

And I’m sorry, but every sermon I’ve ever heard about how joy is an acircumstantial sense of well-being is… just describing a form of happiness and good cheer. The Bible says that “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” and that “God loves a cheerful giver.” SO even if we HAD simply measured global happiness (which we didn’t), I can make a solid scriptural case for why that’s completely fine.

But finally, what we DID measure was self-esteem. And I can totally put that into a Jesus-y register by saying that we “evaluated whether women were secure in the knowledge that they are daughters of the King of Kings and have the high and holy calling of being image bearers and Christ’s representatives on earth.”

3. Theological Language and Taking the Lord’s Name in Vain

One of my broader concerns is that, if we believe that Jesus is Lord, then we believe that there is power in his name and teachings. To claim that authority by applying it to what we are doing, then, ought to be done with circumspection (aka fear and trembling).

I am concerned that folks will use Jesus-y language in an attempt to discredit us, hiding behind Bible verses and making us out to be heretical or enemies of the church.

You’ll notice here that I have used a lot of scriptural allusions and language. That is because while the Bible is a challenging, difficult, and strange book, it is also a book which I find utterly fascinating. I remain completely taken by the teachings of Christ, even after everything. There are Old Testament stories which are some of my greatest tools in understanding my own biography! That is, I believe in the power and import of the scriptures in our lives as believers and the potential of the teachings of Jesus to create a world where things are “on earth as it is in heaven.” Furthermore, I think that the vocabulary of the scriptures is simply beautiful and it connects us to a tradition that goes back thousands of years. However, when I am writing to a scientific audience, I use a different voice and register, which does not include appeals to scriptural authority or Biblical references. I like to think of Paul’s line about being “all things to all people.”

But there is another side to the use of Biblical language – we can use the power of the scripture and the fact that people do, understandably and legitimately, want to follow the teachings of Christ to hoodwink them by baptizing bad behavior with spiritual sounding language. People say “abundant life” and mean “participating in deliverance ministries countering demons” or they say “love so and so” and then the action is to… not offer that same person hospitality. Words have meanings and obfuscating them by using scriptural language to literally sanctify behavior that is harmful, such as when Emerson Eggerichs edited scripture to make his point seem more scriptural in Love and Respect, is abhorrent.

When Jesus was confronted by the Syrophoenician woman, he didn’t hem and haw and go on about how he was God in the flesh and therefore her argument was invalid. Instead, he altered his behavior because she made a good argument. That’s the kind of fruit I hope to display in my life as a person writing about the work and teachings of Christ and how the impact our lives today. As James said, “not many of you should presume to be teachers, because you know that you who teach will be judged more strictly.” That is to say, “your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus” aka I am not hoping for anything more than Christ himself did.

Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life

If Jesus lived today, I don’t think that he would be a statistics professor. But I also don’t think he would not be a statistics professor. In fact, I think he’d be pretty into using mixed methods research to dig into difficult topics. Why do I think that?

On earth, Jesus was all about exposing the lies that underpin our actions and attitudes. That’s why he talked about specks and logs.

• Jesus was all about ensuring that his followers showed integrity, measuring themselves against the same standard they measured others, which is why he talked about not judging lest you also be judged with the same standards.

• Jesus was all about exposing that *actual* state of affairs, which is why he talked about casting pearls before pigs.

• Jesus was all about leaning on the everlasting arms while also being “shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves.”

Jesus was AND IS the Truth.

Statistics are a way for us to get at truth, to measure things accurately. You can’t know if you’re a wise man who built his house on the rock or a foolish man who built his house on the sand unless you can identify what is a rock and what is the sand.

Right now I’m mucking around with some very fun statistics, beyond my usual bread and butter of regressions. (Say a prayer for my computer’s RAM. She is sad that I keep asking her to calculate class means in my latent class analysis.)

And the reason that I care so much about this is that if we want to see truth, we should use all of the means at our disposal and seek to find truth. Statistics and rigorous scientific methods are good gifts that we can use to do that.

Following Jesus means pursuing truth, because Jesus is the truth.

Now that can be scary, because if I actually follow the truth wherever it leads, I might end up somewhere uncomfortable. I might have to deal with the underlying realities of the world (environmental degradation, the use of sweatshop labor to make clothing, etc.) One of the great tools of the modern world in creating suffering is simply hiding it so that we don’t see the brutality. Statistics allow us to tell the truth, as best as we can and with limitations that we state (again, we come back to integrity) and to reveal what is. Now, that is scary, because there can be surprises and things we did not expect.

But if we’re pursuing Christ we are pursuing truth and if we are pursuing truth we are pursuing Christ. And so we do not need to be frightened.

Overall, I just want Christianity to live up to its marketing material.

I want the church to embrace the ACTUAL abundant life in Christ. I want our lives to be characterized by relationships in which we can trust each other, where we “spur one another on towards love and good deeds.” And we measure that using fruit, largely including evidence of the fruit of the spirit in the lives of those who claim Christ.

I just don’t see what is so controversial about that.

In the sermon on the Mount as recounted in Luke, Jesus says

“No one lights a lamp and hides it in a clay jar or puts it under a bed. Instead, they put it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light. For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Therefore consider carefully how you listen.” (Luke 8:16-18a).

May we all consider carefully how we listen.

You may also enjoy:

• The Bare Marriage podcast this week, where we looked at this in great detail!

• A list of our peer reviewed articles and an explanation of our research

• Our book The Marriage You Want, which has made people the most unhappy because we’ve made a clear case that hierarchy in marriage leads to entitlement and doesn’t work

• Our Friday Round Up video on Alisa Childers where Joanna, Keith and I addressed some of the (quite frankly ridiculous) critiques and asked why they were so insistent on discrediting us

Authors were upset that we had quoted their works and showed them in a bad light. Our publisher pretty quickly talked them down (after all, you can’t sue someone for quoting your exact words), but it was still a harrowing time.

And it reminded us that, even if we bring the receipts based on a HUGE study (20,000 women in that case) to show meticulously how certain ideas contained in their books did real, measurable harm—their first instinct will be to lash out, not to apologize.

Shaunti Feldhahn even said that we weren’t doing things in a “kingdom way.” Apparently trying to warn people against false teachings that can hurt them long-term is going against Jesus.

Yes, those lawsuit threats were a little scary.

But more importantly, those threats did a real number on my faith.

For the next few years, when picking up the Bible I could only read the gospels. Everything else in Scripture was too triggering. I had to just look at Jesus, and Jesus alone, to comfort myself in what God was actually like. To see how God actually does care for people.

It was excrutiating realizing that these people that I had looked up to, whom I had thought knew Jesus and cared for people, were only interested in their own bottom line.

It didn’t matter that evangelical women were suffering from sexual pain disorders at twice the rate of the general population. It didn’t matter that their teachings were stealing women’s sexuality from them, making it harder to get aroused or reach orgasm, or artificially lowering their libido. It didn’t matter that their teachings were making it harder for women to identify when they had been date raped, or even raped in marriage. It didn’t matter that their teachings were causing divorce rates to increase.

They simply didn’t care.

And those statistics represented thousands of individual women. Extrapolated from our data, it’s millions. Millions of women who try so hard to get in the mood but just can’t. Millions of women who feel used. Millions of women who are seeking medical help and trying desperately to find a solution to the pain they’re having.

And they didn’t care.

Usually in these articles I try to teach something, or show one of our findings, but today I just want to get a little raw and explain why this matters so much to me.

We’re doing a three-episode arc on the Bare Marriage podcast right now looking at how purity culture authors are rewriting history.

Dannah Gresh, the “mother” of purity culture who wrote the curriculum that told girls as young as 8 that their “bellies are intoxicating”, which she defined as having the power to make adult men out of control, has just rewritten her bestselling book And the Bride Wore White. And she’s doing a publicity tour where she talks about why she rewrote it and what she corrected.

The problem?

She doesn’t mention any of our actual critiques. Instead, she uses strawman arguments to make it sound like we were critiquing her for something totally different.

She’s rewriting something without apologizing for what she wrote before, or telling people what she got wrong.

She’s rewriting the book while keeping the same messages on her website (and even in her publicity interviews for it; she talked about modesty at length in the Focus on the Family interview).

What should it look like if an author wants to apologize?

The best biblical model we have for this is Zacchaeus. He’s a tax collector who has been cheating people for years, and when he encounters Jesus, he doesn’t just change and say he’s sorry. He makes restitution, paying back anyone he cheated four times. That’s what change looks like. It’s not just saying “I’m sorry.” It’s recognizing that there was actual and measurable harm done that requires amends.

I asked on social media what it would look for an author to truly make amends, and I got some great answers! said:

IMO, the best apology/ repentance is one with no personal gain.

I’m not entirely sure what that looks like, but publishing a retraction that earns publicity points and enables them continue to use the same platform to publish doesn’t feel like repentance.

Maybe it looks like going back to school, earning credentials, and entering a helping profession?

Maybe it’s something away from the spotlight?

Maybe it’s more inner work and relational repair than outward facing ministry?

Here’s another answer:

First they need to be quiet and listen to those harmed by their books until they understood, really understood, the harm they caused, then follow that with listening to experts about the harm they caused and the healthy alternatives.

I like the emphasis there on listening to the experts!

Yet what have Dannah and Bob Gresh done?

Bob had a tantrum at Cedarville University where he said:

Dana led purity culture. She wrote about purity culture. And I’m sort of sick and tired of hearing everybody beat up purity culture as the most traumatic thing they’ve ever gone through. And I’m also sick and tired I’m I’m sick and tired of that woke message. And I’m also sick and tired of Christian leaders and institutions and people that won’t wake up to some of those messages and know that the good days weren’t always so good. There were mistakes. There were things that hurt people. Don’t let your life be wrecked by a book. It’s a book. Don’t spend your life criticizing, becoming cynical.

You can watch it here, starting at around 7:15:

Bob is sick and tired, y’all. He’s sick and tired of everybody complaining about purity culture and complaining about Dannah’s books.

That doesn’t sound like people who want to make amends. That sounds like people who want to keep profiting off of their messages.

Here’s what I don’t understand:

It isn’t hard to say “I was wrong.”

I’ve said it so many times. I’ve taken books out of print. I’ve taken down podcasts. I’ve erased about 1000 blog posts. I talked in The Great Sex Rescue about how seeing the data showed me I was wrong in some of my teaching, and I vowed to do better.

You know what didn’t happen? No one got angry at me. They just thanked me.

When we make things right, people feel healed. Validated.

They don’t tend to get that angry, because we all know that we can get things wrong. We know that we need to grow. And so when people do grow, people are often relieved and feel seen!

This week made a factual error in an article she wrote. It wasn’t an error that would cause anyone decades of harm. It was simply a factual error in an argument she made.

You know what Kristin did? She wrote an entire other article telling people, “hey, I got this wrong.” She published in full the message she received detailing the error. She apologized and did a full mea culpa. She wrote that second article because, as she says, when you merely correct the first, most who saw the error will never see the correction. So she went all in.

She showed integrity. She showed that saying, “hey, I’m sorry” isn’t that difficult. It’s what you do when you got things wrong!

Do these authors not care that so many people would feel tremendous healing if they just said “I’m sorry”?

Kristin’s error didn’t harm people, but their messages did. Decades of marital turmoil. Decades of stolen sexuality or pain. Decades of heartache that could have been avoided if they hadn’t internalized toxic messages.

Bob may be “sick and tired” of us pointing this out, but the rest of us are here trying to figure out why these people don’t care. Why they’re happy to make millions off of toxic messages, but they aren’t willing to care for the souls they hurt in their wake.

And they’re doing it in the name of Jesus.

Having those lawsuit threats broke something in me. Not because I was scared of the lawsuits, but because I realized how morally bankrupt so much of evangelical publishing was. How could the vehicle that was supposed to teach us about God look so little like God?

That’s why we want the apologies! We want our pain validated. And we want to know that we weren’t just a means of people making money. We want to know that we actually mattered. We want to know that having faith in Jesus actually does change you and make you care for people.

When they don’t apologize, it is a cancer on the church.

And that cancer continues to grow with each tantrum, each strawman argument, each rewriting of history to make themselves seem like the victims.

I’m still holding out hope that at least one of these big name authors will say “mea culpa”.

I just want someone to say, “it mattered that so many people were hurt, and I’m so, so sorry I contributed to that in very real and specific ways.”

I know, of course, that it may never happen. But I so desperately wish that those authors would understand that I’m not quoting them or showing where they went wrong to get famous myself, or to make money myself, or any of the other things they accuse me of.

I’m doing it in the desperate hope that (1) people who have been hurt will realize that this wasn’t of God, and it wasn’t Jesus who was telling you these awful things; and that (2) I’ll be shown that belief in Jesus does make you want to help people.

I so want to believe that those who teach the Bible actually care about people. I so want to believe that people I used to think of as colleagues, and even prayed with, were serious about Jesus. I so want to believe it wasn’t a farce to make money.

I so want to have my faith restored.

And while I’m still waiting for that, I hope I can help others restore their faith.

Because none of this nonsense was ever of Jesus.

You May Also Enjoy:

• Our podcast detailing the strawman arguments and the rewriting of history

• Our book The Great Sex Rescue, which demonstrates, with stats, how harmful so many messages were, and our book She Deserves Better, which shows how purity culture messages hurt women long-term

• The article outlining how Dannah Gresh told 8-year-olds their bellies were intoxicating

• Our podcast from a few years back detailing how authors have responded to The Great Sex Rescue

• My statement responding to Shaunti Feldhahn’s accusations of us

• Our Whole Story puberty & sex course, to get your kids started off better than you were!

In our surveys of primarily evangelical women, most women do say that they want their husbands to act as a spiritual leader.

At the same time, we also see that when husbands act in authority over their wives and make the final decisions (even if they consult with their wives first), marriages suffer. Things go much better when people act as partners.

So what is going on? Why are women saying they want a spiritual leader?

I want to walk through what we think is going on, but here’s the issue in a nutshell:

Do women want husbands in authority over them?

When women say they want their husband to be their “spiritual leader”, do they mean they want their husband in authority over them?

Well, let’s look at the definitions.

The Definition of Authority:

“I have the right to make decisions for you, which you must follow along with.”

Someone in authority can set the agenda for those under them.

We see authority in a boss/employee situation; we see it in a teacher/student situation; and we can see it in a marriage which thinks that the husband is supposed to make the final decision.

What about leadership?

The Definition of Leadership:

“going before, showing the way, taking the initiative.”

When a group of soldiers needs to assault a position, the leader is the one who goes first and the others follow.

You can be a leader without having authority. Leadership is a good quality that can motivate others and get things done. Leadership is based on your internal character and your behavior.

Authority, however, is merely based on your position, and has nothing necessarily to do with your merits.

The problem is that leadership and authority are seen as synonyms, and so when you talk about wanting leadership, people often assume you want authority. Things get mixed up.

Is it that women want a husband to have a position over them, or is it that women want their husbands to take initiative?

I think when women say, “I just want my husband to be a spiritual leader,” they don’t mean actual leader as in authority. I think they just mean I want him to be engaged. I want someone who is actually taking the initiative and being proactive and thinking, “Okay. You know what? We really should be talking to our kids more about God. Let’s just pray after dinner. Or let’s have some neat conversations at dinner where we share our highs and our lows. And let’s connect with the kids.” She’s not looking for a leader. She just doesn’t want to have to do all this herself.

In our focus groups, that’s what’s come out over and over. She just doesn’t want to feel like the whole thing is on her shoulders. She wants to feel like he’s noticing, too, like he cares too. Like he is invested in this, just like she is!

In our book The Marriage You Want, we explained this in chapter 6. It was something we measured in our matched pair survey. What women especially want is to not feel that the burden for managing all the relationships, and the spiritual lives, of the family falls on them. They want men to take initiative too.

Here’s a simple example from The Marriage You Want—let’s take who makes medical/dental appointments. We asked couples, when it comes to medical/dental, do you make appointments for yourself, or does your spouse do it for you? In roughly half of marriages they each make their own, and in the other half she makes it for both of them. In virtually none does he make them for both of them.

And what happens when she makes it for both of them?

• Respondents were 83% more likely to have a below aver- age Relationship Flourishing score.

• Women were 76% more likely to be dissatisfied with their sex life.

• Men were 68% more likely to be dissatisfied with their sex life.

We see this over and over again on other measures too: if she’s the one who buys his mom’s birthday gifts, marriages suffer. If she’s the one who instigates repair after marital fights, marriages suffer. When she carries the burden of emotional labour for both of them, marriages don’t do great.

Okay, this likely makes sense to most of you.

Yes, women want a husband who takes initiative, and no, women don’t really want someone who makes decisions for them.

But here’s the bigger question:

Why do we call taking initiative “leadership” when men do it?

Here’s an example that was left in the comments on Bare Marriage.

A man was explaining what his recovery from porn had looked like and how he won back his wife. He said:

After I got through the [90 day sex fast after quitting porn] (first time I’d ever done something like that post puberty) and she still wasn’t throwing herself at me, I read a secular book on getting your married sex life fixed as a man. The book basically said, “become a better man, so that she wants you again” but had a lot of practical advice. Anyway, one of the things was family leadership. There was absolutely no Christian “she’s your wife so she must submit and encourage you” to lean on, just “start acting and taking initiative.” I mentioned off handedly that I might be taking on more leadership in the home, and she quite literally laughed in my face. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Then, when it kept up and wasn’t just a phase, when I got home from work and was involved, saw things that needed to be done and just … did them, attended to the boys, kept a level head when she was pushed overboard and overwhelmed and calmed her down and helped her plot a course, etc…she got…PISSED.

I took her on a date, she looked across the table from me and said:

“You are capable of THIS, and you have me 15 years of THAT? I wan’t a refund. I want those 15 years back!”

And I said, “I wish more than anything I could give you those years back. I want them back too. All I can do is make these next 15 so much better that the last 15 pale in comparison- if you’ll have me.”

So he’s saying that he changed by starting to show leadership in the family. But what was his definition of leadership?

when I got home from work and was involved, saw things that needed to be done and just … did them, attended to the boys, kept a level head when she was pushed overboard and overwhelmed and calmed her down and helped her plot a course…

Do you see the issue here?

He’s calling something leadership that is really just taking initiative. And if we’re going to call taking initiative leadership when he does it, then we have to be honest and call it leadership when she does it.

And most women are already doing it.

Women don’t want husbands who step in and do everything so that the woman doesn’t have to do anything; she wants someone who will get in the trenches WITH HER.

And yet, in the evangelical church, we don’t have a word for that.

We don’t have a word for men being engaged partners in a relationship, taking initiative and doing what needs to be done to help carry the emotional labour for the family.

And so we tend towards other words, like “spiritual leadership.” But the problem is that “spiritual leadership” can mean two very different things, with two very different outcomes:

1. It can mean what the woman wants, a fully engaged partner with her, which has excellent outcomes

2. Or it can mean a husband taking authority over the family and making the final decisions, which has very bad outcomes

We simply have no word for a husband being a fully engaged partner, and so we call it “leadership.”

But she’s already doing all of these things. She’s already caring for the kids and managing their emotions; she’s already leading the kids in prayers at night and teaching them about the Bible; she’s already making sure important dates are celebrated in the immediate and extended family.

We call it leadership when men do it; we call it nothing when women do it.

And because the word “leadership” has so many toxic things attached to it, when we say that we want men to step up and act as a leader, we’re not being clear about what we actually want.

Let’s stop using the word “leadership” and start using the word “initiative.”

Because that’s what women actually want, and that’s what brings good dividends in marriage.

And that’s what we found, over and over again, in our data for our book The Marriage You Want. Initiative matters. Authority kills. So let’s not muddy the waters.

Pssttt…Many people ask for recommendations for premarital curriculum.

The Marriage You Want has it! Our book comes with a study guide that has premarital questions, and our video series is great for small groups or premarital!

Find all the info here!

Imagine, if you will, that you read your Bible and truly, honestly believed that the Bible taught that white people got to lead and teach, but those of other races couldn’t.

How would you feel?

Or imagine you lived two hundred years ago during American chattel slavery, and you truly believed that the Bible taught that slavery was okay.

How would you feel?

And let’s acknowledge and remember today, Juneteenth, that so many churches did indeed argue this, to their immense shame and judgment.

If you’re anything like me (and I assume that you are because you’re reading this!), you’d be devastated. It would cause a huge crisis of faith. You want to believe in Jesus, you want to follow Him, but how can you if He arbitrarily chooses some to have power over others?

How, exactly, is a God that would make some people inferior to others (even if people claim “it’s equal but different roles!”) good?

That’s been what has made me so despondent this week.

And, if I’m honest, despondent is the right word. Since I started speaking out about the SBC decision to restrict women and stop them from preaching or pastoring, I’ve been inundated by literally thousands of comments from mostly men defending the decision and calling me rebellious for challenging it.

Here’s one, from a pastor:

Here’s another from someone who trained at a Baptist seminary:

Now, not all commenters are like this. Some men just leave long arguments for why complementarianism is the correct viewpoint. They say, essentially, “the Bible says this, and who are you to question the Bible?”

There’s one thing not a single one of those thousands of commenters has said:

Not a single one has said, “Yeah, I know this sounds awful, and it really is unfair, and I don’t know why God would do this, but I do believe God did this.”

And that, my friends, is what hurts more than anything else. That’s what keeps me up at night.

It’s not the rude ones, because you will always have rude ones. It’s the ones who gleefully share all the Scripture passages, and show absolutely no remorse about the outcome of this for women. Who don’t care that this puts women into inferior, insubordinate positions; who don’t care that this makes women more vulnerable.

They’ll just claim it doesn’t. That men are called to love their wives as Christ loved the church, and that God will hold men responsible for how women are treated, so all will be well.

700 cases of sexual abuse in the SBC show what a lie that is.

Let’s return to that question I posed.

Quite simply, if I believed that God created me to have power over others, I would be absolutely crushed. Because I know that this is not just.

We all know it’s not fair! We all played as kids and had an innate sense of justice. We all wanted the rules followed. We hated when someone got special treatment. We knew the ideal was to share. We learned all of this in kindergarten.

And then somehow it seems that those in the SBC have forgotten it. They’ve convinced themselves that unjust isn’t unjust. That what is blatantly sexist can’t be called sexist if God wills it—even if the exact same thing would be called sexist in any other setting.

So here’s my question: how can someone who truly loves Jesus, and who wants to spread that love to the world, and who wants to be Jesus’ hands and feet, not be devastated to learn that God shows favouritism and gives power to some and not to others?

How could they not be upset that they were leaving women vulnerable?

I would believe they were sincere in their Scripture interpretations more if they expressed reticence for it.

I have had friends in my life who truly believed the Bible taught complementarianism, and they were upset about it. One is a pastor, and he always said he wished it wasn’t that way, but he can’t explain away certain verses (I wish he would read Philip Payne or Marg Mowczko!). I respect that. I don’t agree with him, but I respect that.

But those who don’t show any reticence? To me, that speaks volumes about what they think the kingdom of God is like.

Now, I want to pause for a minute and say I think there’s a difference between men who espouse complementarianism and women who do.

I’ve spent the last year researching women who support complementarianism for my next book Fawn: How a Trauma Response Became Biblical Womanhood, and there are complex reasons that women support their own subjugation. The story is convoluted and difficult.

But when men support it, what they are supporting is the ability to have power over women. And if they are not saddened by that, that speaks volumes.

Romans 1 and 2 tell us that people can learn and know much about God just from looking at the natural world, and living in this world. And learning about justice is ingrained in us. As I said, we learn it as kids.

The fact that so many so eagerly discard what human beings can easily know, in the very fibre of their being, speaks about their hearts.

Let me switch gears for a second and show you something else.

Al Mohler has just joined up with Doug Wilson.

Some of you may not understand the significance of this, but let me explain.

Al Mohler is the head of the flagship SBC seminary, and the one who championed the motion that passed last week at the SBC convention that restricted women’s ability to preach or pastor. He has said that women can’t be on church podcasts. He wants to restrict women’s voices.

But Al Mohler is also pretty mainstream in evangelicalism. That’s important to remember, as we turn to Doug Wilson.

Doug Wilson, who is not a trained pastor, has started a denomination in Moscow, Idaho, that the American Secretary of Defence attends. He has written a book claiming chattel slavery wasn’t that bad. He wants the 19th Amendment, that gives women the vote, repealed. He has defended pedophiles in court, and has arranged the marriage of one pedophile to someone in his community to help him deal with his urges (the man was later sent to prison). He advocates for extreme corporal punishment. His wife has said there is no such thing as marital rape. He has said that sex can’t be an egalitarian pleasure party, but must be a man conquering a woman.

In other words, this man is dangerous and looks nothing whatsoever like Jesus. Not even an iota.

For years abuse advocates have been trying to raise the alarm on Wilson ( did in Jesus and John Wayne, for instance) but we’ve been told he’s just too fringe. He doesn’t speak for evangelicalism. Don’t worry about him.

And now here’s Al Mohler, fresh from his victory at the SBC convention, teaming up with Wilson.

To Al Mohler, defending slavery and repealing a woman’s right to vote aren’t deal breakers, but a woman teaching about Jesus is.

Okay, here’s where everything starts to make sense, and here’s where I want to land:

Some people claim Christ because they want power, and some people claim Christ because they want to love others.

Those are two diametrically opposed motivations.

Both use the same Bible. Both use the same words. And both speak past each other.

You can have both types of people in almost every denomination and every church. You can have both types in the SBC, and both types in the ACNA, and both types in the PCA.

Jesus warned us this would happen. Jesus warned us against those who want power and authority over others (Matthew 20:25-28), and said that the point of life is to serve others.

Why would Mohler team up with Wilson? Why would all of these hundreds (if not thousands by now) of commenters on my Facebook feed defend complementariansim without showing any personal remorse?

Honestly, I can’t see any other explanation for what has happened lately.

The church is going to divide along these lines.

I truly believe that the old things that divided denominations, like age of baptism, or Calvinist/arminian, or cessation of gifts vs. charismatic theologies, just aren’t going to matter in the same way as we come to terms with the fact that some in our midst are only here because they can use the Bible to feel superior to others.

And you can’t have fellowship with that. You just can’t.

And so those of us who just want to love the world and share Christ’s love with people, and see that world transformed, are going to have to go our separate ways.

It’s been a tiring week for me.

The absolute relentlessness of the attacks has been something I haven’t experienced to the same degree before. But I’m also grateful for the clarity.

And when you see this through the power lens, it all makes sense.

And it sends us back to Philippians 2, where Paul tells us to have the same mind of Christ, who gave up everything for love.

Someone who did that would never be gleeful about getting to have power over others and making them vulnerable.

You May Also Enjoy:

• Our starter pack of podcasts addressing complementarianism

• My husband’s Keith’s series on the Danvers Statement (from the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood)

• My Amazon recommendations for books making the Scriptural case for egalitarianism

• Our book The Marriage You Want, which shows what marriages marked by equality rather than hierarchy work (and has stats for why they work better!). One of the big things I get asked about is premarital counseling—and The Marriage You Want has a study guide with premarital questions!

But that means that 25% said no. And likely a higher percentage of those in the pews also would reject this, because churches that agree with restricting women would only send delegates who felt the same way.

Far more than 25% of SBC members, then, are very disappointed and feeling unmoored right now And today, I would like to write specifically to the women wondering what to do, because I have been there.

Let’s be clear about why the SBC wants to restrict women.

The SBC is not doing this to be faithful to Scripture, because the case for women not being pastors is incredibly tenuous (as we’ll see in a minute).

The SBC is doing this because they want to.

This fits with their theology of hierarchy and exclusion.

This fits with how they have ignored the sexual abuse crisis in the church, and refused to deal justly.

This fits with how they have belittled abuse victims.

This is not about Scripture. This is about power.

We can tell it’s about power because, as said earlier this week,

“It sounds like all prohibitions are permissible, but there is no interest in protecting women from needless and unfair prohibitions.”

The SBC will crack down on churches who let women do too much, but not on churches that let women do too little. So a church that lets a woman preach is bad, but a church that campaigns to repeal the 19th amendment and end women’s right to vote, or a church that refuses to let a woman on a praise team, is presumably okay.

The SBC is making a huge decision based on 2-3 verses using obscure Greek words and phrases, ripped from their context.

When you ask whether or not women can serve as pastors, people usually turn to two passages:

1 Timothy 2:11-15, which they say claims women can’t have authority over or teach a man;

and 1 Timothy 3:2, which says that elders must be “husbands of one wife”.

But that 1 Timothy 2 passage is includes a Greek word normally translated as “have authority over” that is used nowhere else in Scripture, and is very rare even in other Greek literature at the time. It is not easily translated.

To use a verse that is not clear to disqualify over 50% of people in the pews from the pastorate is to do the opposite of humbly and soberly walking with God.

And what about 1 Timothy 3:2? Many scholars have made a great case that “husband of one wife” is an idiom for “faithful” or “married only once”, and did not literally mean the “husband of one wife.” If Paul had meant that, he himself would have been disqualified from eldership because he wasn’t married.

Besides, in 1 Timothy 3:12 Paul writes the same thing about deacons—and Paul calls Phoebe a deacon and assigns her the book of Romans to read to the people of Rome. Paul had female deacons, so he obviously didn’t intend that “husband of one wife” to exclude women.

There is so much more that could be said, and I’d point you to Marg Mowckzo’s amazing site to look into her articles on 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Timothy 3.

When people say that the SBC is just obeying the Word of God, then, they are displaying incredible hubris.

So many evangelical scholars started off defending complementarianism, and as they looked into the evidence, they realized egalitarianism made more Scriptural sense. Philip Payne who wrote The Bible vs. Biblical Womanhood, Terran Williams who wrote How God Sees Women, even Preston Sprinkle who wrote the recent From Genesis to Junia all were surprised by what they found.

The case that the Bible excludes women from leadership, in other words, is not a slam dunk in the least.

It requires ignoring so many biblical scholars. It requires taking 2-3 passages with obscure Greek out of context, and ignoring how Paul treated women; the witness of Jesus; the message of the rest of Scripture; and the original languages. It requires explaining away all the female apostles, deacons, prophets, preachers, teachers, and more who appear in the pages of the Bible.

If they’re wrong, the consequences are enormous and tragic.

If those arguing that women should have enhanced roles are wrong, all that has happened is that more people have talked about Jesus.

So let me ask: are you willing to take that risk?

My friends who are still in SBC churches, you know that this has gotten worse over the last few years. The votes are winning by larger margins.

Are you willing to dedicate your life to a church that may be seriously hindering the kingdom of God?

What are the ramifications of staying?

If you have children and they grow up in this church, there is a large likelihood they will walk away from the faith because of things like this. Especially if they are girls.

The church is the only place in society today where men can tell women “you’re subordinate to me” and still be called the good guy. In academia, in the workplace, in government, if men ever did that they would be chastised, ostracized, and fired.

But in church, men can declare it and be called faithful to Scripture.

That means that church is the ONLY place your daughters will be overtly discriminated against wholeheartedly and deliberately. Yes, tragically they will likely experience harassment and misogyny elsewhere, but it won’t be sanctioned from the top like this.

What is the chance that your kids will want to be associated with that kind of sexism as adults? And if they learn that this is how God sees women, they’re likely to abandon God too.

That’s not what you want for them.

Yes, you want them to have great community, great children’s programs, great friends, and a great church, and if they’ve got that at an SBC church now, it’s really hard to walk away.

I get it, because I’ve been there.

And so I’d like to tell you my story.

Twenty-seven years ago I started going to a church that welcomed me with open arms.

I was a Toronto transplant in a small town, raising our two girls (aged 2 and 4) while my husband had a super busy job as a pediatrician and was on call a lot. I needed to find a place where I could belong, find friends, and have a safe community.

We tried a variety of churches before landing at Parkdale Baptist. We landed there largely because of my husband’s job. A nurse on the floor was the wife of the pastor, and she and Keith clicked, talking about obscure Bible passages and her recent trip to Israel. A patient of Keith’s was a little boy with a health issue no one could figure out, and Keith got to know his mom Lisa over hospital visits. We started camping with Lisa’s family that summer, and went with them every year for the next 15 years, spending our best summer memories with that family.

I started attending the church’s women’s Bible study, and I loved it. Baby-sitting was provided, and women of all ages got together for an entire Thursday morning.

I was still testing the waters three weeks in when I developed a horrible stomach bug. My husband was in an ambulance accompanying a little boy to the Hospital for Sick Children and couldn’t help me. But I literally could not look after my children. I didn’t know what to do. In desperation, I called the leader of the Bible study group, whom I had only met twice, and asked if she knew anyone who could possibly look after my kids.

Half an hour later Sue was at my door, transferring car seats into her car, carting off my kids, and driving me to the hospital where I stayed for the next twelve hours.

I had found my community.

I loved that when I walked into the church with my girls, adults knew their names and showed interest in them. They had friends we hosted for playdates. They enjoyed the kids’ programs.

A year later that pastor and his wife left, and a new one came, whose daughter Annie bonded immediately with my youngest.

Over the next few years I started leading one of the women’s Bible studies, and met my good friend Jill. I assisted my friend Susan as she directed kids’ plays and productions. I served on a praise team. My husband became a deacon. Life was good.

And then the praise team leader quit, and I was appointed the new leader.

The first morning leading, after we sang our opening song, I said into the microphone, “As you sing this next song, leave the concerns of the week at the foot of the cross, and look to Jesus.”

I didn’t know the impact that one sentence would have on the next year of my life.

At the next deacon’s meeting, one of the members asked whether it was appropriate to have a woman give directions to men while leading worship. Women could sing, but could they pray? Were they permitted to speak if men were in the congregation? Did they have that spiritual authority?

For the next year, as I led worship, my husband Keith had to defend me in deacon’s meetings against other members who wanted me removed–or just to shut up.

We lasted a few more years before I just couldn’t take it anymore.

Yes, I had my community, but could I raise my girls in a church that didn’t think they were equal and that treated women like this?

There’s so much more to the story, but you likely know just what I’m talking about. When a church has a doctrine that focuses on hierarchy and men being in authority over women, the problems are not just theological ones. It has ramifications for who is likely to be in leadership; for how problems are solved; for what kinds of Bible studies will be offered; for what marriage advice is give; for what is taught in youth groups about purity.

It has ramifications in all areas of the church.

But could I leave? Could I leave Lisa, and Susan, and Jill, and everyone else who had made us feel so welcome? Could I take my daughter away from Annie?

Eventually we decided we had to. I was so tense during each church service, and on edge for the rest of Sunday. It wasn’t good for my mental health, and we kept wondering,

“If we’re attending this church, aren’t we lending our reputation to it? Will our friends and acquaintances and even patients think this church is safe because we’re here? If I’m busy helping to create great kids’ programs and good worship, then am I not pulling people in? And what if they hear that God doesn’t love women as much as He loves men? What if they get sucked into some of this bad theology and teaching?”

And so we left, trying to find someplace that wouldn’t see my giftings as a problem, and that would welcome my daughters no matter what God made them to be.

I know that’s a hard decision, and I likely had a lot of the same reservations then that you do now.

So let’s work through them as we figure out what to do:

“But my kids love the programs at the church!”

One of the things keeping me at that church was concern for my children and their friends.

But after conducting studies of over 40,000 evangelicals since, I’ve realized that churches with toxic theology end up hurting kids. Our team recently published a peer reviewed paper based on our dataset for our book She Deserves Better that showed that girls who grow up in churches that teach modesty and purity messages—which the SBC is more likely to do—are more likely to be harassed and abused in that church by both adult volunteers (10% of all girls) and peers (another 10%).

In fact, boys who attend these churches are more likely to be abusers than boys who go to other churches!

While religiosity is helpful when it comes to self-esteem measures and later marital and sexual satisfaction, when girls internalize toxic things as teens, they actually would have been better off never having gone to church at all. All of the benefits of church disappear when toxic things are believed.

No matter how flashy and fun or huge the youth group, then, if it’s teaching toxic stuff, it’s hurting your daughter, and she’d be better off not going at all.

But take her to a healthy church, even if the youth group is smaller, and she’s more likely to thrive.

But I love my church and I don’t want to just abandon it!

Loyalty is good and lovely—but it can also be misplaced.

As said on Threads this week:

“I say this in love and humility (having learned the hard way myself): at some point, even the most well-intended effort to bring about change simply becomes complicity in the status quo.”

We need to ask if, by staying, we’re going to change things or if, by staying, we’re allowing a church with toxic theology to keep functioning.

You staying is very unlikely to change the church that you’re in. The leadership has already decided what it wants to believe, and there simply aren’t systems in place to change that.

But by staying you may boost the church so that it attracts more people.

“We don’t agree with the SBC as a whole, but we’re just joined to cooperate in missions!”

It’s laudable to want to invest in missions. But what happens when you partner in missions with people who promote patriarchy? Especially since so many of the places where those missions dollars are being spent are patriarchal already?

Missionaries come in, and instead of freeing people from patriarchy, they baptize it.

How is missions like this good news for women?

I received emails this month from missionaries in Kazakhstan, Slovenia, Rwanda, and Tanzania. All of them were dismayed that their fellow missionary workers were bringing the toxic evangelical marriage books, like Love & Respect, with them, and teaching them in a whole other culture.

If you want to partner in missions, why not join a Baptist organization that won’t export patriarchy as part of the gospel?

What would happen if you put that energy into a healthier church?

When you grow up in a system, or exist for decades in a system, it’s hard to picture that there’s an alternative out there—a church where women can be welcomed, where hierarchy isn’t lauded, where control isn’t the focus of church.

But healthy churches exist. Good churches exist.

And often they’ve been squeezed out by the megachurches with the fog machines and the intense worship experiences. They may not have as many people, or kids’ programs, or amazing facilities.

But what would happen if everyone who disagreed with the SBC in your church left and filled the pews in these churches? Then there would be workers to grow kids’ programs and youth programs in a healthier way. There would be money and energy to make more of a difference in the community. And the churches that are hurting people wouldn’t have as many bodies or tithes to continue to grow and hurt others.

Clarity is lauded in Scripture.

Jesus said that it is better to be hot or cold than to be lukewarm.

When good people leave, then that which was keeping the toxicity in check is gone, and the toxicity will become more apparent. That’s sad, sure, but not actually a bad thing in the long wrong. When it’s clear what a church is like, then it’s harder for it to attract healthy or vulnerable people.

Clarity can be a gift. When people stay in churches that hurt them, they prolong the fog.

We need to welcome the clarity.

What if God is allowing the church to make it apparent who is going after power, and who is going after Jesus?

I still mourn the church that I lost.

That women’s Bible study is still the best community I’ve ever had in a church space. I still miss it, and I know I’ll likely never find it again.

But here’s the thing: When you leave a church because the church isn’t healthy, chances are other people will also be leaving the church for the same reason. The idea that your community will stay just as it always was is a pipe dream.

Everybody that was my close community at that church isn’t there anymore. But the people who made the church toxic for our family still are, twenty-seven years later.

I had Lisa over for dinner on Tuesday night.

Jill has been my hair dresser now for twenty-five years, and we have a lunch date next week (and she came on our Bare Marriage cruise last year!).

Susan did the decorations for both my daughters’ weddings, and I was the MC at her daughter’s wedding. Here she is a few years ago at my daughter Rebecca’s baby shower (with Lisa in the background and her daughter in the foreground):

And Annie? She was in my daughter’s wedding party.

We didn’t lose the people we cared about, because they cared about the same things we did. And they all eventually left too.

I know it’s hard.

But the Son of Man had nowhere to lay His head, and we shouldn’t be sacrificing Truth and the well-being of women so that we keep a community that likely isn’t going to stay anyway.

When things get toxic, good people leave.

The community you think you’re keeping will be going away.

So it’s time to do the right thing, for yourself, for your daughters, for the generations of women coming after us.

It’s time to do the right thing for the church, and for the kingdom of God.

It’s time to put our energy into spreading the kingdom, rather than fighting against those who are trying to stop us.

Leave them behind, let them fight amongst themselves.

And let’s get busy, get the work done, and build something healthy.

You may also enjoy:

• 12 Questions to Ask to Vet a Church’s Website (and the podcast that goes with it)

• Little Girls in Miniskirts in Church Parking Lots aren’t the enemy (about an SBC pastor)

• What if Keeping the Peace Hurts Long Term (and why we need to do the hard thing)

• Our Great Sex Rescue toolkit, with printouts expaining the harmful beliefs we measured

• Our book She Deserves Better

,

Childers, a former musician and member of Zoegirl, is now a conservative apologist. There’s a whole lot more to that podcast story, and I’ve publicly asked Childers for an apology.

But here, today, I want to talk about the criticisms of our research that she and others have made.

I don’t normally address these issues, because, quite frankly, our work speaks for itself.

1. We did the largest study of evangelical women’s marital and sexual satisfaction that has ever been done, and we followed it up with three other very large studies.

2. We determined to do the studies to academic standards, even though we have no backing from universities, no funding, and no ability to get grants.

3. We submitted our work to peer review, and we have three articles published so far, another accepted, and multiple other ones in various stages of the submission process.

In summary, it’s pretty much unheard of for citizen scientists to be published in peer reviewed journals, and it’s particuarly unheard of for evangelical authors to write books and then get the secular world to recognize the quality of our research.

I’m very, very proud of what we’ve done, and in awe of my co-author and stats expert Joanna Sawatsky.

We’ve had these three articles published about our work:

• Sanctified Sexism: Effects of Purity Culture Tropes on White Christian Women’s Marital and Sexual Satisfaction and Experience of Sexual Pain (Sociology of Religion)

• The etiology of sexual pain in American Christian women: associations of sexual debut, maternal teachings on sex, and abuse history with pain severity (Journal of Sexual Medicine)

• It’s Not Just Fashion, It’s Sin: The Impacts of Modesty Messaging on Female Adolescents Within the White Evangelical Church (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

The first two are based on our dataset for our book The Great Sex Rescue, and the third on our dataset for our book She Deserves Better. We’re in three different journals with very different disciplines (Sociology vs. Medicine), which, again, is virtually unheard of.

Another upcoming paper that is already accepted will be a qualitative analysis of our open ended questions around sexual pain, so we’ve done both qualitative and quantitative research. And again, we’ve done it all without university backing or funding (though our collaborators in two papers are affiliated with universities!). We’ve been able to do this because of the people who donate to us through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation (you can donate too to help our work!).

Conservative evangelicals don’t like our findings

Our studies found several broad things, that I talk about constantly:

1. Obligation sex hurts women’s orgasm rates, hurts marriages, and is one of the biggest drivers for the fact that evangelical women suffer from twice the rate of sexual pain disorders as the general population

2. Many teachings about sex in evangelicalism artificially lower women’s libidos; lower orgasm rates; and are largely responsible for our 47 point orgasm gap, including teaching things like “all men struggle with lust” or “wives should have frequent sex to keep their husbands from watching pornography”

3. When girls internalize modesty messages as teens, they are more likely to have decreased self-esteem, more likely to marry abusers, more likely to be sexually harassed and abused by both pastors and peers in their own churches, and more likely to develop sexual pain disorders later

4. Marriages where there is a gender hierarchy do far worse than marriages where the spouses function as equals and partners.

Our findings are not limited to these four things, but they are the ones that I talk about the most often. This is threatening for a lot of people in conservative circles who have spent their lives teaching this stuff. And so they do everything they can to discredit us.

Lately, the most common attack is to question our research methods and announce that we did it badly so we can be ignored.

Again, the fact that we’re peer reviewed in three large, high impact journals in different disciplines shows this claim to be laughable on its face. But they say it anyway because our work is too great a challenge to their ideologic assumptions about men being in hierarchy over women. And I’d like to take today and just address some of the most common things I hear.

“She just got people who believed like her to take her survey!”

This critique shows a profound ignorance of our findings. Our primary findings are something called ODDS RATIOS. We were measuring differences between groups, often based on beliefs. So we were saying, “if someone believes X, how much more likely are they to experience anorgasmia, or sexual pain disorders, or divorce, or low libido, or whatever outcome variable, than people who don’t believe X.”

We needed two groups of people to compare to come up with our findings.

We didn’t ask people, for instance, “did obligation sex hurt you?” We asked people first a whole series of questions about their marriages and sex lives, and then we presented them with a list of beliefs, some of which we thought were helpful and some which we thought were harmful (with the order of the beliefs randomized), and then asked if they had believed them at two different points in time: today, or when they got married/when they were teens (the latter differed depending on the belief we were measuring).

Thus, we were able to say, “if people believed obligation sex when they were married, they were far more likely to experience sexual pain disorders than if they didn’t.”

“She just got people in bad marriages to take her survey!”

Again, this doesn’t make sense. The whole point is that we were able to compare different groups of people. Most people in our surveys were in relatively good marriages. But we were able to find out which types of marriages and which types of beliefs were MORE LIKELY to hurt marriage.

“She just got people to take it from her own followers!”

Yes, our followers were overrepresented. 40% of the people who took our survey came from our survey link. But we generated over 250 unique links that were used, and people who wanted to recruit others used their own unique links. We also had 80 other influencers who recruited people, including Gary Thomas, whom we have since criticized. He sent us over 850 people. Shaunti Feldhahn also shared our link widely.

“She just got people to take it who agreed with her!”

Actually, one of the big challenges that we had was that we didn’t have enough egalitarians in our dataset. Our survey was open for about two months, and at around the six week mark I started interacting a lot on egalitarian sites and asking egalitarian influencers to send out the link, because we had too many people who believed in male headship and who practised complementarianism.

We ended up with a dataset that was more complementarian than not, but we certainly had enough to compare the two groups. So the thought that our survey was filled with digruntled egalitarians with bad marriages is nonsense.

“Her study was too small and done badly!”

For The Great Sex Rescue, we surveyed 20,000 people, using convenience sampling and snowball sampling. Most research studies that you read about have roughly 1000 people in them. We had twenty times that (Note: for our papers we often used subsets of the data, for instance only white American respondents, or only people who had answered certain questions). Most have just university students that are easily recruited. We had people from all over the world.

Our sample size was HUGE. Again, the fact that they don’t understand this means that they haven’t read very many papers.

Here’s an example: You know the stat that 75% of divorces happen frivolously, because people, especially wives, aren’t that committed? That comes from a sample size of 52 individuals. 52. Yet how many times have you heard that quoted?

(Incidentally, I actually think that was quite an interesting study, and the people quoting that stat like that don’t understand what the study was measuring).

“Snowball sampling is biased!”

Most surveys are convenience samples—they’re not randomized, but they find people who will take their survey. Ours was partly convenience, partly snowball sampling, where you get other people to recruit, so you move beyond just your circle into concentric circles.

Snowball sampling, then, is a step above convenience sampling, and we had 40% convenience and 60% snowball.

To say snowball sampling is biased, in the way that they do, actually reveals a tremendous amount of ignorance about research.

The word bias has a colloquial meaning and a research meaning. Colloquially, it means that someone believes something so much that they twist facts to fit what they believe, or they slant their findings or questions to be biased.

In research terms, the meaning is that there could be mathematical bias within the sample. And there are ways to remedy for that! We did mathematical tests to see whether the differences we found between groups were random (due to chance) or if they were honestly differences. We only published our findings if they met the threshold of statistical significance.

The fact that they don’t even realize that when Google says “snowball sampling is biased” that doesn’t mean bias in the way they think it does shows how unqualified thy are to make these critiques.

“Snowball sampling is only applicable to the people she studied, so this doesn’t apply to everyone else.”

If you truly believe that—that studies only tell you what those particular people say or believe or have happen to them—then there’s no point in believing any study at all.

The whole point of social studies is that we study a sample and see if it applies to a wider group. And in our case we know that it did because our findings are completely in line with other studies of the same population. (this is called having external validity). Are there issues with social sciences? Of course there are. But to take their criticisms at face value means that we should never believe any study ever—including ones that support what they think.

“They had a ‘Limitations Section’ so they don’t even believe their own research!”

Yes, our papers have limitations sections. That’s because pretty much all peer reviewed papers do. When you write a paper for a journal there are certain headings that are almost always there. Some journals do it slightly differently, but the general model is: Abstract, Introduction, Methodology, Results, Discussion, Limitations, Suggestions for Further Research.

Our limitations section said that our results weren’t necessarily generalizable more broadly, beyond our population of interest.

This has been taken to mean, “see, you can’t trust her results! It only applies to the 20,000 women she sampled!”

That’s not what generalizability means. What it means is that we sampled a certain group—in this case white, American, evangelical women. Our limitations section says that these results may not apply BEYOND that group. It may not apply for Chinese immigrants on the streets of London, or Catholic believers in Kenya.

By making this critique, what they’re saying (without realizing it) is “we don’t have to trust her about white, evangelical, American women because her study only applies to white, evangelical, American women!”

If our survey was only valid for the 20,000 women who took it, then the journals wouldn’t have accepted our papers. The journals felt that our results were accurate for the population studied, and contributed to the knowledge of this population. It is not up to those who don’t even understand research to declare otherwise.

Now I want to turn to some bigger issues.

There are ways to minimize bias, and we used them.

Every survey is subject to mathematical bias, and to leading questions. But there are also ways to minimize this. One is to ask questions that get at what you’re measuring in different ways. So, for instance, you could ask:

• When I share problems with my husband, I feel heard

• My husband understands me when I’m sad

(This is just an example). These questions measure the same thing. If you put them in different parts of the survey, and then you see how people answer them, you can test if you’re measuring things properly. Because if people answered differently to those two questions, that’s a sign there’s something wrong.

We did A LOT of this. We also randomized the order of the belief questions we used. We used previously validated question sets to measure things like marital and sexual satisfaction (which is best practices). We used Likert scales (strongly agree--strongly disagree). We used established practices to assure both reliability and validity.

Here’s what biased survey questions look like

Here’s an example of a survey question that Shaunti Feldhahn used, and I haven’t heard conservative complementarians criticize her research (though she has said that Christians can’t get peer reviewed, which is ridiculous. You just can’t get peer reviewed if you don’t do your survey properly).

I hope you can see how hopelessly leading this question is. She uses it to claim that 98% of men can’t help but want to look at women.

You could ask this in a variety of ways that would minimize bias and get at a better response, perhaps like this:

If you are in public and an attractive woman walks by, what is your most likely response?

1. I stare at her and am distracted

2. I glance up for a moment

3. I notice but quickly look away

4. It barely registers

Now, there are lots of reasons this would be a problematic question too (this is why survey designers work a lot with how to ask things well or how to measure things well), but I hope you can see that this is less biased than the way Shaunti asked it.

Here’s another example of extremely biased wording, this time in her survey of teenage boys for her book For Young Women Only:

I wrote a long deep dive into the problems with this survey question, and how the way she worded it and used it ended up excusing date rape.

Our questions were nothing like this. We used standardized questions, Likert scales, and other techniques to minimize bias. In fact, we minimized bias so well that some of the things we were trying to measure (like modesty) ended up having null results because our question wording was so neutral that people didn’t get what we were asking. For our next survey of women for our book She Deserves Better, then, we expanded modesty into five questions instead of just one, and we got LOTS of interesting results!

People hold us up to standards they don’t hold people who agree with them up to.

Every Man’s Battle had no peer reviewed citations. In fact, in the 15 best-selling evangelical sex & marriage books we looked at, there were only 11 peer reviewed citatins, and most were to theology journals. Not 11 per book; 11 for all the books.

You can download our rubric of the top evangelical books here.

But here’s another example of bias to show what I mean: Alisa Childers dismissed our stats, but said that Nancy Pearcey’s in The Toxic War on Masculinity were done much better. In a nutshell, here’s why that’s bunk:

• The vast majority of “stats” that Pearcey used were not from peer reviewed journals, but were secondary sources (news articles talking about research, for instance)

• Pearcey has done no original research nor has she been peer reviewed for her ideas

• When Pearcey did quote marriage experts’ stats, she often distorted the conclusions of those experts (so she quoted Gottman’s stat but came to the exact opposite conclusion he did)

• The peer-reviewed research Pearcey used most often was from a twenty-five-year-old study by Sally Gallagher, and she kept referring to that study as “Today” or “recently.”

• We have dealt fully with the problems with Pearcey’s research in a podcast, and in a big article on her stats with Baptist News.

Also, here’s something interesting: The whole reason that Sociology of Religion was so interested in our article was because we were furthering Gallagher’s research, and challenging some of its conclusions. So Childers liked Pearcey because of what she said about Gallagher, but Sociology of Religion found that our research furthered what Gallagher said! Yet somehow Childers thinks Pearcey trumps us. Interesting.

If people think our findings are wrong, the proper thing to do is to conduct their own study of 20,000 evangelical women and get it in peer reviewed journals.

That’s the thing—we’ve passed an incredible bar. We have had academics who spend their lives looking at surveys and data analyze our methods and findings and say that it is up to snuff.

If people think it isn’t and that we’re wrong, then it is up to them to do their own survey, to academic standards so that they can get it passed peer review as well.

It is not up to me to keep defending our team against quite ridiculous critiques. Given the high level of our work, which they criticize, and the low level of work of the people who agree with them that they swallow whole heartedly, they are showing that they will just never believe anything that contradicts their pre-conceived views.

A podcast host with no stats or research training or education in the field is not a proper arbiter of whether research is done well.

Especially when they don’t even understand peer review, what limitations sections are, what odds ratios are, or any of this stuff.

What she’s asking you to believe is that she, who has never taken courses in any of this or even understands survey development and can’t even use the stats programs that need to be used to analyze our data, is more qualified to judge the quality of the research and methods than people who have devoted their whole lives to this.

She’s asking you to believe her over the editors and reviewers at The Journal of Sexual Medicine, The Sociology of Religion, and The Scientific Study of Religion.

And the problem is that many people don’t have a problem with that, because evangelicalism has become so anti-intellectual that we just don’t believe in expertise.

I feel like we have done calculus, and people who have only done long division are criticizing us.

And they don’t even understand calculus exists. And they say we’re wrong in our calculus computations, but how do we even explain it when they don’t have the knowledge base to understand our explanations?

Here, for instance, is just one of the stats tables from one of our articles. I highly doubt the people criticizing us would even know how to interpret this, because they don’t know what they don’t know.

Until people who critique us can explain this table inside and out, they simply aren’t as qualified as we are to speak on these things, and that’s objectively true. That’s not just my opinion.

People keep saying ridiculous things about our research, and then demanding I respond. And I don’t even know what to say, because how do you explain p-values and statistical significance when they don’t even know these things exist? How do you explain best practices for reliability and validity, when they don’t know the scientific definitions of these words, let alone the word bias?

At some point, I can’t explain or defend ourselves anymore, except to say:

If that’s not enough, there’s really nothing I can do about that. I can’t explain calculus to people who don’t think it exists, and it really isn’t my job to do so.

I hope that at some point evangelicalism stops hating expertise and science. I hope at some point people realize that Jesus is Truth, and that studying things properly teaches us more about God and His universe. I hope that they start understanding that when Jesus said we can judge things by the fruit, He meant it.

But until then, there’s little I can do to change their minds. And so our team will go on publishing research, explaining why so many evangelical marriage and sex teachings hurt people and showing how those teachings look nothing like Jesus.

Our Friday round-up this week features us responding in video form to many of these same issues! Take a watch—and remember to Subscribe to our YouTube. It makes a real difference to us!

You May Also Like:

• Fixed It For You: We fixed a survey question so it doesn’t enable date rape

• Have You Seen a Sexy Gorilla? A deep dive into the problems with Shaunti Feldhahn’s survey questions

• The Great Sex Rescue: Our book based on our survey of 20,000 women

• The Whole Story: Our puberty & sex course for parents & preteens & teens, based on peer reviewed reseearch of best practices, and our own dataset

• Our Great Sex Rescue healthy sexuality rubric, where we grade evangelical best-selling sex and marriage books on a 12-point scale.

I’ve got some quick new findings for you today, and then some birthday reflections I had this week.

One of the things we’ve measured in our surveys is the idea of headship–that the husband is head of the wife, and that this means that he is in authority in some way. Unsurprisingly, women who act out male headship (ie: where he makes the final decisions vs collaborative decision-making) have lower marital satisfaction than those who don’t act it out, and the best marriages are those who never believed it and don’t act it out (what we’ve been saying all along!).

But here’s what’s interesting: if women act out male headship while believing in it, the negative impact is still there, but it’s significantly reduced.

Again, the best case scenario is to never believe it and not to act it out. But if you’re going to act it out, if you believe that this is God’s will for you, that dampens the negative effects.

What this means is that complementarianism is significantly threatened when women see that there are alternatives. And you know what?

Increasingly women are seeing the alternatives to complementarianism.

First, we see them in the real world. All of us can see relationships today where husbands are equal partners. Even if we spend time only with people who believe like us and act like us, or go to a church where everyone thinks this way, we still live in a bigger world. We have doctors appointments and we see the dad taking his kids to their medical appointment–and rocking it! We go out to restaurants and see couples with an easy back-and-forth camaraderie where she can speak up and state her opinion. In the workplace, we see female managers, and men who report to them who have absolutely no problem with it.

We can see that a different world is possible because people around us demonstrate it everyday, and that makes staying in our boxes far less psychologically tenable.

As more and more women see that something better is possible, the chance that they will willingly stay small decreases. And that means that denominations and churches will have to step up the rhetoric to keep women small.

But women are also hearing that complementarianism is not the only way to see the Scriptures, and that when you look at the original Greek, the total story of Scripture, and the practice of Jesus, Paul, and the early apostles, egalitarianism is much more supported. And if women start seeing that there is a better way, they are far less likely to willingly submit to an inferior position.

They are seeing that complementarianism is being taken far too far, even by relatively mainstream evangelicals. We have Nancy Pearcey declaring on Alex Clark’s podcast that women’s suffrage was a net negative. We have whole denominations refusing to address sexual abuse crises, but instead saying that making sure women aren’t called pastors or do the work of a pastor is a main priority (Al Mohler has even recently said that women shouldn’t be on church podcasts).

Things are getting more extreme, which makes many women question complementarianism even more.

Why is complementarianism becoming more extreme?

When systems are threatened, they double down. And that’s what we’re seeing. Complementarianism is a system that allows men to be in hierarchy over women, and as Skye Jethani argued in a recent Holy Post podcast, the biggest benefit of this is mediocre men. Men get to be in charge without earning it, and they get to have power over women, which is really intoxicating. There’s nowhere else in society where you can discriminate against women blatantly and still be called a good guy. In church, you can.

But all of this could easily be lost if women stop going along with it.

And women tend to stop when they see that there is an alternative.

That’s why what we do here at Bare Marriage is so threatening.

The backwards way people critique Bare Marriage

In the last few days a podcast has dropped critiquing us and calling us unbiblical and warning against us. Many people have sent it to me, and our Patreon group has thoroughly analyzed it (I love that!). We’re not going to do a reply because it’s laughable, and they don’t even offer valid critiques. They didn’t even quote anything I directly said until after the 59 minute mark! It was all just innuendo.

But what I found fascinating for our discussion today was that the main argument they used was that “she isn’t complementarian and so you can’t listen to her because she isn’t biblical.” In other words, they did everything backwards.

They didn’t look at the evidence. They didn’t look at the arguments. They had a pre-determined end point, and that became the way they measured whether something was good or not.

That’s not how you do research, science, or even critique. You can’t say, “because she disagrees with my interpretation, you shouldn’t listen to her” and think that that’s a valid critique! (and yes, the podcast said other equally ridiculous things, but I found this so interesting).

When people critique us, or other people pushing back against complementarianism like or , they tend to start with “well, you know she’s not one of us anymore.” They don’t address the arguments, they just say, “they can’t be right because we know we’re right, and they disagree.”

That’s not what Jesus said to do.

Jesus, in Matthew 7, talks about how important it is to judge fruit. In context, He’s speaking about how to figure out what interpretation, what teaching, is correct. And His answer was to look at the fruit, because a bad tree can’t bear good fruit, and a good tree can’t bear bad fruit. So look at the fruit!

What’s interesting is that so many complementarians think they’re doing this, but they define bad fruit as “stopping believing what we believe.” So they say that we’re bearing bad fruit because we’re leading people to believe differently than they do. But that’s ignoring the whole point of what Jesus is saying! He’s telling us to judge between two viewpoints by looking at the fruit. You can’t then say that believing in one of the viewpoints is evidence of the fruit, because that would be circular logic.

Why do they do this, though? Because their belief system is threatened because more and more women are seeing that they don’t have to be in subjugation, and that God wants them to live a full life. And once that’s out of the box, it’s really hard to put it back in.

And they don’t have real arguments to put it back in, because the evidence isn’t there.

Complementarianism only endures if you convince women there’s no real alternative.

That’s why they can’t debate egalitarianism on the merits–because to do so acknowledges that egalitarianism is a valid viewpoint based in Scriptural arguments and data. Instead, they have to shut it down, because they can’t let women realize that theirs is not the only way of seeing the Bible.

Because once women see that–they realize they don’t have to live with injustice, and in fact God wants more for them.

And they want more for themselves too, including thriving marriages and sex lives! And you can’t have those without real intimacy, and you can’t have real intimacy when one person’s opinion automatically carries more weight in the marriage than the other’s.

I was thinking about all of this on my birthday this week.

I had a strange realization this birthday, which is that I see the world fundamentally differently than I did for most of my life–and let me explain, because I’m going to loop it back around. I shared this on Facebook, and I want to elaborate a little more.

I have said before that I always thought the church would have made more progress on embracing the full humanity of women by now. Even after we wrote The Great Sex Rescue, I thought people would engage us on its merits, rather than just dismissing it because we didn’t think like they do. I thought better of people, I guess. I wasn’t anticipating the huge backlash we’d have against women that we have seen in the last few years, both in the church and outside. I wasn’t expecting that things would be getting harder.

This applies not just to the church, but to the wider world. For many older Gen X, like me, we grew up with lots of instability in the 70s and 80s, but there was a sense that things would get better. We saw the Soviet Union fall in the 90s. We felt like freedom was on the march. 9/11 was a huge, pivotal moment, but even then, I had this sense that the people at the top were at least trying to protect us (one can debate how well they did that in hindsight).

Our generation had relatively good wages. We were able to buy houses. Things looked like they would continue getting better.

That’s not where we are anymore.

It feels like the world is heading in a direction that NOBODY wants except the ultra-rich, but governments seem unwilling to do anything about it–or are actively hastening the demise.

I realize now how sheltered I was in so many of my other decades. I think about people growing up in countries where they could never trust their governments to do right by their citizens, or where governments (including my own) were actively discriminating or hurting them. That really was the norm for most of human history, and it still is the norm in many parts of the world.

And so I worry, perhaps for the first time, that the world that I am leaving for my grandkids won’t be as good as the one I grew up in.

We thought that the trajectory was going in one direction–towards equality and justice and human flourishing. But what we’ve seen is that, when systems are threatened, they double down and become more extreme. We’re seeing it in the church, and we’re seeing it in society.

The fact that they are threatened, though, shows that there is an opening.

In all of this chaos and pushback, God speaks to us. So much of the themes of what I’m saying are the themes of Scripture. And what does Jesus call us to? To love our neighbour. To build community. To think not only of ourselves but of others. That’s the way that we combat so much of what is happening now. We get back to community. The church needs to function as what it was supposed to be–as the hands and feet of Jesus, as the shelter in the storm, as a safe refuge for people.

I want to be the safe refuge. I want to be part of a community that is trying to build something that matters in a world that is getting off track. We can’t do anything about the billionaires, or about the data centers (though protest if you can), or about AI taking everyone’s jobs.

The early church couldn’t do anything about the Romans.

But we can love each other. We can call the church to more. We can leave spaces that are ignoring the harm that is being done, or that are actively covering for those in power, and we can create spaces that are safe.

We can imagine a different future for our kids and grandkids where there is justice and love, even if it’s only in safe pockets. So let’s create those pockets. Let’s create those churches. Let’s be the light. I don’t know what that will look like, but I will spend the rest of my working life exposing where the church has bought into darkness, and calling us to something better.

And I’m so grateful to all of you who are here with me, doing this work with me! Let’s keep pressing ahead, no matter what happens around us, and no matter what threatened complementarians say.

Because once women see that there’s a different way, a glorious way where they can experience true intimacy and acceptance, you can’t put us back in that box.

Here’s how you can give me a FREE birthday present!

Want to encourage me this birthday? Here are some super quick ways!

1. With algorithm changes in social media, and major changes in how Google does search, it can become harder for people to find me, or keep up with me, with every update that benefits big tech rather than creators. But I’ll always own my email list! So sign up for our emails. We don’t spam you. And then you’ll be the first to hear about cool things, like our simulcast event in October!

2. Follow me on ONE more social media channel! I’m most active on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Substack.

3. Follow me on YOUTUBE! Our goal for this year is to grow our video reach, so we’d love your support there!

If you’d like to financially support us, you can donate through substack!

And you can also send me a birthday present supporting our academic work through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation (you’ll get a tax receipt in the United States!)

As a young adult, if I weren’t totally suffering in some area of my life for Jesus, then I obviously wasn’t sold out for Jesus enough.

Now, like most things in our Christian walk, there’s some truth there. It’s nuanced. But as I entered my 50s, I started to ask why the voice of God in my head was always a disappointed one.

“You could have tried harder, Sheila.”

“Sheila, you know I love you, but I’m so disappointed you’re not living up to your potential.”

Sure, Jesus loved me. But I also made Him sad on a daily basis.

And I started wondering—How did I come to believe that I was never trying hard enough, giving enough, suffering enough to make God happy?

And after a lot of journalling, and even some therapy, I realized that in my late teens and early twenties I read Christian books voraciously. I read novels about giving everything up for Jesus and dying. I read books about giving everything up. I read books about spending an hour a day praying (“could you not watch with me one brief hour”?), about realizing you were making money, men, leisure, work, education—really anything—an idol.

Books had shaped me. In some ways for good—but I’ve also had to spend years untangling my view that when Jesus looks at me, I make Him cry.

In our work at Bare Marriage, we’ve also uncovered how the vast majority of best-selling evangelical marriage and sex books hurt women.

And I don’t say that because I merely disagree with the theology that:

• women are obligated to give husbands sex when they want it;

• women should have sex to keep husbands from watching porn;

• girls should dress so they’re not stumbling blocks to the boys around them;

• men should make the final decisions in marriage;

• all men struggle with lust.

I don’t just disagree with these things; we’ve measured the effects of these teachings. And they’re uniformly bad, resulting in more abuse, more divorce, lower orgasm rates, higher rates of sexual pain, lower rates of long term self-esteem, and so much more.

These teachings are harmful, but they’re also throughout evangelical best-sellers.

(See more about our research here.)

Books are not just a matter of theological debate; books are often a matter of long-term well-being vs. long-term harm.

In our surveys, we found that the most harmful beliefs were taught not by pastors or by families, but from books and media.

When we asked women where they learned the harmful beliefs we were measuring, the biggest source of that belief was not a pastor preaching or parents passing it down, but rather women reading books, magazines, or listening to podcasts.

In our final chapter of The Great Sex Rescue we left a warning for pastors, explaining that they can be giving wonderful, healthy messages about marriage and sex and parenting, but if the people in their congregation are studying harmful books in Bible studies, or getting harmful books out of the church library, or listening to Focus on the Family, people are going to be hurt anyway. Pastors have to understand it’s not just about teaching good things, but also warning people away from harmful resources.

Interestingly, when we were conducting our research for The Great Sex Rescue, I had to read the 15 best-selling evangelical sex and marriage books. Not wanting to spend money on them, I took them out of our church library—from a church that was egalitarian and quite healthy. But despite their egalitarian, healthy stance, they still had all the horrid books on their shelves. (I didn’t return them, and I told them why!).

So here’s the question I want to ask today:

Given that books can do harm, do church libraries have a responsibility to vet their books?

I realize that not all churches have libraries. I asked this question on Facebook this week, and many noted that most megachurches have bookstores, not libraries.

But as a Canadian, I don’t think I’ve been in a church in a long time that HASN’T had some sort of a library. So this affects a lot of churches.

I had hundreds of comments on that post with people debating about whether churches should vet books, and I’ll summarize the issues here, and what people generally agreed on by the end:

Church libraries are different from public libraries.

Most acknowledged there’s a difference between a public library that is focused on knowledge, and works AGAINST censorship, and a church library that is focused on shepherding and helping people. If people come to your library for spiritual help, then they shouldn’t be hurt in the process.

Usually the people using a church library are more vulnerable.

The biggest users of church libraries tend to be tween and teen girls reading fiction, and adult women seeking self-help books. If people are seeking self-help books, that means there’s a problem they’re trying to solve. Thus, giving them bad books is going to actively hurt them.

One woman shared a story similar to mine of reading as a teen:

As a teen, I spent a lot of time in my church library. A lot of the most harmful ideas I encountered or even internalized came from books I either found there or received from well-meaning adults.

It’s easy for parents to assume they don’t need to vet the books their kids get from church. And it’s easy to assume that teens are fine getting books from the adult section, because it’s all “good Christian content.”

I don’t want to restrict access to knowledge, but I do think there should be more discernment there. Maybe warning stickers like the ones you sell. Maybe signs (plural for libraries that span whole rooms!!) that explain how books are chosen and that remind young people that not everything that sounds Christian is good. This should explicitly apply to both fiction and nonfiction.

Books in my childhood church library reinforced Islamophobia, rapture fears and one-world-government conspiracies (albeit indirectly, as far as I remember), purity culture, and no doubt awful marriage and parenting advice. I don’t know how much of it my pastors or even my parents agreed with. Probably more of it than I’d like to think, unfortunately.

Another said this:

My mom became our church’s librarian a few years ago – we have a small church, so she and one other person take care of the library together. In our experience, the two groups of people who frequent the library are 1) kids looking for something interesting to look at/read and 2) people who are looking for Biblical help with something they are struggling with. Based on that, we figure the church’s books should be safe for kids/teens, and they should also provide safe answers for people who are searching. My mom has gotten rid of lots of books that didn’t meet those criteria. She has also intentionally added books to the library, as well. We have another shelf for people to leave books they don’t need/want from home anymore. Those books are free for people to take, but none are ever added to the church library without first being thoroughly vetted.

And pretty much everyone agreed with this:

People assume if a book is in the church library, the church approves of it.

Another woman expressed it this way:

Let’s say a women in an abusive marriage decides to check out a book from the church library ab marriage- she believes that the church would only put out books they would endorse (bc that’s what common sense would tell you). She finds “The Excellent Wife” by Martha or “Lies Women Believe” by Nancy. She takes them home and reads them. Now she is even worse off than she was before. She now has been told that she is not entitled to anything in marriage and must suffer in silence bc that is God glorifying. Those are only 2 of the several examples I could give. Are we really going to take that chance with Gods precious sheep? Would you put a toxic book you didn’t want your kid to read in your library at home? No you wouldn’t! We need to be just as deliberate and careful about our church libraries as we are about our home libraries. That just seems like common sense to me.

Given these issues, what should should churches do about the books on their shelves?

I think churches have a moral responsibility to vet the books. The danger and harm done is just too big a risk.

Don’t want to read all the books? Here are some quick ways to vet:

1. Use a search engine to find reviews of the book.

That gives you a sense of whether it’s a good one or not!

2. Look up the 1-star reviews on Amazon and /or Goodreads

Most books will have some 1-star reviews, and these are often more helpful than 5-star reviews. If the 1-star reviews are stupid, it’s likely a great book! If they’re thoughtful and seem to have merit, it’s likely bad.

3. Check out our one-sheets of harmful books

We have some resources that can help. We’ve done a series of one-sheets with all the problems with some of the best-selling sex & marriage books that you can find here.

You can also browse our rubric of healthy sexuality teaching to see where books may fall.

Or, if all that fails…

4. Acknowledge openly which books are vetted and which aren’t.

In our Patreon group where we were initially discussing this, my daughter Rebecca had what people seem to agree is a great idea:

Divide the library into three very well-marked sections:

1. Books the church endorses

2. Books that aren’t vetted

3. Books that are only here for research purposes

And if you want to drive home #3, we’ve got some great stickers!

Volunteering to be the Church Librarian could be an amazing opportunity to get toxic books away from people in your church

Yes, church libraries can be really harmful.

But also: what a great opportunity to volunteer somewhere that can make a huge difference!

I’m constantly getting sent pics by people who work as church libraries, showing me what they’re getting rid of from their libraries—all the every man’s battle books; Love & Respect, all the Shaunti Feldhahn books or James Dobson books. Wouldn’t it be great to get those gone, once and for all?

And to put standards in place so the books never end up there again?

And think of the positive impact you can have if you start buying GOOD and heathy books for the library!

If you’re looking for a place to volunteer, consider the church library!

Here are a few great comments to motivate you:

I fill in at our church office from time to time. My husband and I have also had some candid conversations about your books with one of our pastors. I scanned the library while filling in last summer. I pulled out Love and Respect, Every Man’s Battle and a few others. I brought them to that pastor, he cringed, and then tossed them in his trash can.

When I was a teen, my parents volunteered to reorganize and repaint the church library. They gave me the job of going through the books. Clearly, no one ever threw anything away. I’m not sure someone even laid eyes on some of the stuff. Problematic doesn’t even begin to describe it. We corrected that and set up a labeling system as well.

I am the volunteer at our church. I will pull things I know to be harmful, but I can’t read everything first. (Most book are donated.) We have a disclaimer posted on the wall that everyone should read and discern for themselves. We do also have 2 special shelves: one for resources specifically recommended by our pastors and one for resources recommended by the librarian (me). This is how we highlight titles that are known to be good, or connect to a sermon series, or whatever.

Thanks to all who chimed in on Facebook! And now I’m excited to see all the new church library volunteers that will come out of this post!

If you haven’t subscribed to Bare Marriage yet, YOU SHOULD! It’s always free. Always evidence-based. Always healthy. But you can also support us monetarily, and help fund our research, academic papers, translation, and more!

You may also find these helpful:

• Our list of onesheets of problematic books

• Our rubric of healthy sexuality teaching

• Our Great Sex Rescue toolkit, with printables about the effects of all the different toxic teachings we measured

• Our Hazardous Materials stickers to put on toxic books you want to keep for research purposes!

The Gospel Coalition, a rather mainstream evangelical organization founded by the late Tim Keller and having entirely male leadership, published a Facebook post.

And what was their message for Mother’s Day? Was it about how dads could step up to the plate and appreciate their wives? Was it about the unique contribution women make? Was it about how God is a mother too? Was it about how we should all recognize the extra burdens mothers bear?

No, it was something very different.

It was: Hey, women, don’t expect anything and you won’t be disappointed!

For an organization that claims to care about men leading their families, this was the message that they wanted to make sure people heard about Mother’s Day: women, don’t expect anything.

The same day that The Gospel Coalition posted that, Focus on the Family chimed in.

This wasn’t specifically a Mother’s Day post, but it appeared the day before Mother’s Day. And what was the message?

Stop expecting your spouse to change. Just let go of all expectations. “Expectations are the thief of joy.”

I talked about this post on my Facebook Page, but I want to elaborate on a few themes here today.

This is an excellent example of a false dichotomy.

Either she is:

1. Expecting him to act in every way exactly like her; or she

2. Leaves her expectations behind, loves her spouse exactly as he is right now.

But what if there’s another option?

What if there’s simply expecting that he will act as a partner in the marriage? You don’t expect him to do as much as you, or in the same way as you. You just expect him to do SOMETHING, because he is a grown adult and he is the father of these children and he promised in his wedding vows.

Expectations are not the thief of joy.

The real thief of joy, as we have found repeatedly in our surveys, is unfairness.

Women can put up with unfairness for about 10-15 years before everything explodes and falls apart.

But posts like this continuously tell women that if you expect the bare minimum, you’re really expecting the moon.

If you expect him to do something--anything--that’s the same thing as expecting him to be just like you.

But those are not the same thing.

And what is the solution that Focus on the Family gives for this situation, where a man isn’t fulfilling his basic responsibilities?

To merely pray.

It’s not to say anything. It’s not to draw boundaries. It’s not to have a big sit down and make reasonable expectations crystal clear. It’s just to pray and learn to live with things just as they are.

This advice doesn’t work. This is the same advice that Emerson Eggerichs gives in Love & Respect, where he reports that he was leaving wet towels on the bed and candy wrappers on the floor, and the solution was that his wife stopped expecting things to change. (By expecting change, she was being “disrespectful.”)

In our data for our book The Marriage You Want that we uncovered a trend we named “The Unfairness Threshold”. It showed up in a number of different areas of marriage—when they keep having sex but she never has an orgasm; when she does the vast majority of the housework; when she’s the one who always initiates repair in the relationship or when she’s the one who takes care of everybody’s extended family.In all cases, these things don’t bother her for the first few years. Even at 10 years she’s okay. But by 15 years she starts getting really upset, and by year 20 things often fall apart. Marriages end or often become sexless.

Unfairness is not sustainable in the long run.

Check out The Marriage You Want, which also has a study guide with small group & premarital curriculum, and a video series!

And overwhemingly, in all the different areas of marriage that we measured, the unfairness tends to go in women’s direction, at at least a 4:1 or 5:1 ratio (with things like kin keeping it’s even higher).

That’s why, when we see advice like Focus on the Family gives, we know that even though it uses gender neutral language, it’s really directed at women, because it’s women who have far lower marital satisfaction than men do, especially in the evangelical church.

Besides, let’s do a test.

Can you imagine Focus on the Family telling men that no matter what they’re upset about, their expectations are the problem and they should just pray? Would they say, “Sure, your wife won’t have sex anymore, and she’s refusing to do any housework, and she’s neglecting the kids, but the problem is you for expecting anything”? Or would they tell men to exercise their leadership and put their foot down? This advice simply isn’t given when you reverse the genders.

When we have:

1. Women with far lower marital satisfaction than men

2. Women with far more burdens of unfairness in the relationship than men

3. Women with far worse sex than men (47 point orgasm gap, remember!)

Then it’s women who are going to tend to have more relational problems and want marriage help. That’s why these posts, even with gender neutral language, have an outsized effect on women.

And when women go to Focus on the Family, they’re told: “The fact that you want change is a sign that you don’t love Jesus enough.”

That’s pretty much what The Gospel Coalition said too. If you’re upset, it’s because your identity isn’t in Christ.

One woman said this about the advice to have no expectations:

I was taught to expect nothing or it was placing him as an idol. So I obeyed that and birthdays and Mother’s Day and Christmas — yeah you get the point. He was so glad to be off the hook. And did nothing. To the point that one family Christmas we all drew names and he drew mine. On the day we opened - whole extended family had a gift but me. I stayed silent sitting there — and then an aunt was like oh wait you don’t have a gift who had your name?? Ended up it was my husband. My mom ran from the room and wrapped up something real quick and brought it back and everyone laughed it off. OH MEN lol was the response. I was heart broken and it was one of the days I got more “woke” to reality.

This is the fruit of telling women to have no expectations. When we marry, we promise to go through life together. To love one another and care about one another. To be faithful and respect one another. When your spouse isn’t following through on their vows, and is showing you disdain, that is not okay.

And to pretend it is simply does what this woman found: It enables selfishness and entitlement to grow. That is the opposite of what Christ wants for us.

Surely Focus on the Family and The Gospel Coalition know an absence of expectations enables entitement?

Yes, I think they do. But remember that one of the founding values of both organizations is male hierarchy. And they value that above marital harmony. The aim is to keep men in power, which means shielding men from accountability.

And that’s why marriage advice is focused on telling the person who is upset to stop being upset, rather than solving the problem. If they solved the problem, they’d have to confront the fact that male hierarchy causes entitlement. So instead, they just tell women to stop being upset.

Pretty much of all of our problems with evangelical marriage and sex books come down to this: They frame the problem as being the person who wants change, NOT the person who is creating a deeply unfair relationship.

The solution to marriage problems is to make the person who is upset feel as if they have no right to be upset, so the marriage stays intact.

But if things are deeply unfair, that relationship is not a healthy one.

If one person is being taken for granted, and carrying significantly more of the load than the other, that is not healthy. If one person is using the other for emotional regulation and using them like a sex toy devoid of intimacy, that is not healthy.

When we become upset because we’re being treated unfairly, that is our emotions warning us of something that is seriously wrong. We can’t have intimacy when there is also deep unfairness.

But instead of treating the unfairness as the problem, evangelical marriage advice treats the emotional turmoil and disappointment that the unfairness causes as the problem.

Yes, Jesus told us to forgive. But He also told us to walk in truth. He also wants us to grow. He does not want marriage to be a place where selfishness is enabled, and where emotional growth is stunted because one partner can use the other to cover up for their deficiencies.

Quite frankly, much evangelical marriage advice ignores everything we supposedly teach about discipleship and spiritual growth.

And that’s why you can read book after book and hear the same messages, and keep feeling like you’re the problem when all you want is actual intimacy.

You aren’t wrong for expecting your spouse to love you and show up in the relationship and be a partner for you. That’s what you vowed, and that’s why you got married. God didn’t make marriage to enable selfishness, and our marriage advice should be pointing people to growth, not entitlement.

You may also enjoy:

• Our book The Marriage You Want

• Our open letter to Focus on the Family about Love & Respect

• My take on The Gospel Coalition’s strange book Beautiful Union (the author, Josh Butler, is now hosting a new podcast about being cancelled)

• 4 Things You Should Expect in a Marriage

• Our podcast on the Unfairness Threshold

Here’s what happens: Before marriage, Christians are told that sex is deeply intimate. That it bonds you together. That as you get closer and love each other more, you’re going to want to have sex.

The books and youth group advice tells you that the world sees sex as only physical–that the relationship doesn’t matter, it’s just orgasm that does. They tell you that the world depersonalizes sex, while the church sees sex as something sacred and beautiful, and that’s why it’s meant for marriage.

I actually agree with that (except that I don’t think “the world” has a uniform way of seeing sex, but that’s an argument for another time).

But here’s the problem: All of that logic goes out the window as soon as a couple gets married.

Then what are we told? (I’ve put together quotes from various books here to show the pattern):

It’s very important that you don’t deprive your husband of sex. He needs physical release. If he doesn’t get physical release, he’ll come under satanic attack. He is under constant attack from the world from women who wear such revealing clothing, and porn is everywhere. When he tries to stop lusting, be like a merciful vial of methadone for him. Let him transfer all his sexual energy to you. Let him come to you for 10 bowls of sexual gratification a week. If you would be upset if your husband wouldn’t talk to you, how can you expect him not to be upset if you don’t get him release?

Once you’re married, evangelical advice changes. Sex is no longer about connection, but rather about providing “release” so that he doesn’t stray. Your emotions don’t play a role at all.

A while ago I did a stitch about an influencer couple telling women that they should have sex even when they don’t feel emotional connection:

I find this interesting–that before marriage, sex is seen as something that is intended to be a deeply spiritual, intimate experience, and that’s why it’s meant for marriage, but AFTER marriage we’re told that we shouldn’t even consider that intimate experience, we should provide him release anyway.

This isn’t the only way that evangelical sex advice mirrors “the world”

Christian marriage and sex advice frequently and rightly rails against pornography, but then inexplicably sees women and sex the same way porn does.

In pornography, women exist to serve men. Women exist merely as sex objects. Women aren’t seen as whole people.

But then books like Every Man’s Battle, while ostensibly trying to help men defeat lust, actually agree with pornography’s depiction of women.

Women in these books only exist either to tempt men or to provide men with sexual release. The way that men are supposed to defeat lust is to “bounce their eyes” and never look at women, which sees women entirely as sex objects too. And then they’re supposed to turn to their wives and use them like they’re methadone.

There is absolutely no difference between how porn treats women and how Every Man’s Battle treats women. In both cases, women are only sex objects, and women exist to satisfy men’s cravings. In fact, in the book Every Heart Restored, which is supposed to be for wives of men trying to quit porn, one woman laments “I feel like a human toilet for semen.” While author Fred Stoeker admits that’s sad, his solution is for the wife to understand that this is how God made men (“men just don’t have that Christian view of sex”), and that she should have compassion for him.

(Interestingly, we weren’t even allowed to use that quote in our book The Great Sex Rescue, because our original editor thought it was just too much. Even though we were merely quoting another book!).

Mark Driscoll, too, has called women the “home” for men’s penises. That God created women to provide the penis with a home. Josh Butler wrote that horrible book Beautiful Union explaining in detail how men’s ejaculation is holy, while never mentioning a woman’s orgasm or that she can feel pleasure too.

So is sex deeply spiritual, or do men just require women to provide “release”?

Honestly, when you look at all of this together, it does sound like “casual sex the Christian way,” doesn’t it? Put sex in marriage and it’s automatically “holy”, and then you can prioritize his orgasm while claiming that you’re doing things God’s way.

But the central mistake that all of this thinking makes is that it centers the man’s ejaculation as the thing that God wants, first and foremost, and it sees women as a means to an end rather than as a whole person.

And there is nothing holy about that.

We cannot create a Christian sexual ethic or a Christian approach to sex when we still center the man’s orgasm above all else, and then make women adapt to it so that they can provide orgasm on demand.

What does this have to do with Christianity? What does this have to do with having the mind of Christ, who became a servant? What does this have to do with the Golden Rule of loving your neighbour as yourself? What does this have to do with truly “knowing” someone?

All of this only makes sense when two beliefs are simultaneously present:

1. Men’s orgasm is prioritized and men’s needs are prioritized

2. Men are assumed to be scared of true emotional connection, and so channel all needs for intimacy into sex

And thus we have now created casual sex the Christian way.

No wonder so many evangelical women struggle with libido or orgasm! No wonder so many women get married not truly understanding their own desires for sex (because we’ve never been taught we had any). No wonder so many men think they’re actually being righteous by pressuring their wives to have sex, because they’ve been taught that God created her to be a release valve for their lust.

But there’s nothing holy or Christian about one-sided sex. There’s nothing holy or Christian about ignoring or minimizing the need for true authenticity, vulnerability, and emotional connection (the ingredients that are actually the biggest drivers of libido). There’s nothing holy or Christian about seeing women as objects.

When authors and pastors pretend that emotional connection automatically flows from sex, and we tell people, “just have sex and you’ll feel closer,” they ignore the actual reality on the ground, where almost 1 in 5 women say their primary emotion after sex with their husband is feeling used. Sex doesn’t bring them closer; sex makes the gulf wider.

And evangelical teachers know this when it comes to premarital sex. They talk so much about how in hook up culture women are discarded, and have their hearts broken.

But somehow they think a wedding ring changes that.

It doesn’t.

And if casual sex is wrong before marriage, then it’s deeply harmful after marriage too.

If you’ve been caught up in this cycle, I wrote a long series of posts on this a few years ago that you may find helpful. I also highly recommend you read The Great Sex Rescue, which will be both eye-opening and validating!

You may also enjoy:

• Our book The Great Sex Rescue, with all the data from our survey of 20,000 women showing how these messages affect women’s marital and sexual satisfaction

• Our orgasm course, for women who want to know what all the fuss is about!

• Our series on how to get out of a sexual rut, when the narratives around sex in your marriage have been so destructive

• Our one-sheet on the problems with Every Man’s Battle

• Our puberty and sex course, so you can introduce your preteens and teens to sex in a healthy way, so they’re not as susceptible to these damaging messages

I remember a commenter writing about how her husband was accusing me of making sex only about the woman. The husband, you see, felt that if he had to care if his wife was interested in sex, and had to make sure that she orgasmed, then sex was now all about her, and the pendulum had swung to the other direction.

He said, “making sex only about me isn’t okay, but now we’re making it all about you.”

I hear that a lot–if we focus on a woman’s orgasm, then suddenly sex is only about her. Except that he is still reaching orgasm too. It’s only that now he has to try to bring her to orgasm, and he has to put in effort, and so it feels very different than when he could just be serviced.

It reminded me of a protracted conversation we got into on the blog a little while ago about how women deserve orgasm too, with a man arguing that the wife should do what he wants 50% of the time, and he does what she wants 50% of the time, and even though I said that meant he orgasmed 100% of the time and she only did 50% of the time, he still thought that was equal.

THIS COMES UP A LOT–WHEN WOMEN ASK FOR FAIRNESS, THAT IS SEEN AS THE EXTREME.

A while back, when I was still on X, a video went viral of an ultra-conservative podcast out of the Presbyterian Church of America called PresbyGirls. In it, I was mentioned, rather derogatorily.

They said:

On one side we have sort of Wilsonite, jaded, red-pilled men, sort of more toward hyper-patriarchy, priests of their family. We have this side. And then we have this other side, I’m thinking of the foremost Christian women influencers, this list is great–Kristin Du Mez, Sheila Gregoire, Beth Allison Barr, Aimee Byrd, Rachael Denhollander, and a bunch of other people thrown in there…and you have this other side of the fence screeching about how men are just NEVER trustworthy, and in order for the church to be a safe space for women, women have to run it.

Presbygirls, YouTube, #UsToo--Abuse in the Church

Now, I was totally tickled pink that she thought I was one of the “foremost Christian women’s influencers.” And I’m glad they see Doug Wilson as an extreme person we wouldn’t want to emulate! (To be honest, I’m not sure they’d see him that way now, as he’s gotten more mainstream and the fundamentalists have been normalized).

But is this characterization of us accurate?

Let’s put it in graphic form, using a pendulum. They’re saying that on one side you have Doug Wilson, and on one side you have “screeching women” who think women need to be in charge in church, and then there is, presumably, these podcasts hosts who are in the “reasonable” middle.

So it looks like this:

PRESBYGIRLS DEPICTION OF THE PENDULUM

I heard a sermon recently where Matt Chandler was making a similar argument. You had the egalitarians on one side, and the unreasonable complementarians on the other, and what we just need is the middle, which is convinced complementarianism. Here’s his spectrum:

MATT CHANDLER’S FALSE SPECTRUM

Just like PresbyGirls, he was entirely misrepresenting the spectrum, putting egalitarianism on the extreme and making themselves sound reasonable.

(You can listen to the clip of his sermon in my podcast on the problems with complementarianism, starting around 27:30).

THEIR SPECTRUM IS DELIBERATELY MISLEADING, BECAUSE NONE OF US WANTS WOMEN TO BE IN POWER ALONE.

We simply don’t want men to be in power ALONE either. We want women’s voices to count along with men’s voices.

So let’s redo the Presbygirls’ (and Matt Chandler’s, and so many others’) depiction of reality, but this time accurately reflecting our positions (or at least accurately reflecting mine; I shouldn’t presume to speak for everyone else):

PRESBYGIRLS ACTUAL PENDULUM

DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM WITH THIS DEPICTION?

They are placing “people wanting equality” as the other end of the spectrum, as if it’s something ultra-extreme. But is “people wanting equality” actually at the other end of the pendulum from men wanting to hold power and have only men’s needs cared for? Is that really the opposite?

I don’t think so.

I think the pendulum more accurately looks like this:

ACCURATE PENDULUM

LET ME EXPLAIN GYNARCHY

Many people think that matriarchy is the opposite of patriarchy, but it isn’t. Patriarchy is about hierarchy and status and control. Matriarchy, on the other hand, is about centering the well-being of children especially and tends to operate largely on a cooperative basis. Societies that have been matriarchal are not hierarchical towards women, as patriarchy is towards men.

There’s not even a real-life example of the opposite of patriarchy, because it doesn’t tend to happen. When women have political power, it is not that women are prioritized at the expense of men; it is that hierarchies tend to be broken down so that children can flourish.

For the sake of argument, though, we’ll assume that gynarchy—the rule of women—exists, and we’ll place it at the other end of the spectrum from patriarchy.

THE OPPOSITE OF PATRIARCHY IS NOT EQUALITY; IT IS GYNARCHY.

The opposite of caring only for men’s needs is caring only for women’s needs; it is not caring for BOTH men’s and women’s needs.

When you’re used to being the only one prioritized, and when you’ve never had to do any work to care for your partner, then equality feels like a huge pendulum swing. But it isn’t. It’s simply returning the pendulum to its normal resting place.

Asking for men to care about women AS WELL as themselves is not an extreme; it is literally the definition of middle–we each care for each other and we each are equal.

The actual extreme would be to say, “men don’t matter and women don’t need to consider men’s needs; the priority in the home and church should only be women.”

I don’t know anyone at all who is arguing for that.

When people say that I am the extreme and they are the reasonable ones, then, they’re arguing for that space with the question mark below:

TRUE PLACEMENT OF THOSE WHO CLAIM TO BE “REASONABLE”

When you look at it graphically, what they think is “reasonable”–a position somewhere between patriarchy and equality–is actually still quite on the extreme, isn’t it?

I HOPE SEEING THIS GRAPHICALLY CAN CLARIFY THIS DISCUSSION.

Equality feels scary when patriarchy is all you’ve ever known. It feels so different.

But it is not the extreme.

It is the extreme to say that men’s needs should be prioritized, even if that has become normal within evangelicalism.

That’s what I was trying to say in that discussion a few years ago about women’s orgasms. That’s what I was trying to explain to that commenter this week, so she could better articulate it to her husband.

And this is what we’re saying in our book She Deserves Better. It should not be extreme to say that girls are not responsible for boys’ sins, and that it is not girls’ jobs to make life easy for boys.

That is merely trying to take the pendulum back to the middle, where we all matter, we all serve each other, and instead of grasping for power, we try to follow after Jesus, together.

I long for the day when that is not seen as radical.

You may also enjoy:

• Our marriage book The Marriage You Want, which shows how to have a marriage based on caring for each other, rather than prioritizing one at the expense of the other

• My “Starter Pack” of podcasts on the problems with complementarianism

• Our book The Great Sex Rescue, about how to prioritize her pleasure during sex (and thus make sex equal!)

• Our recent podcast on the book For Men Only, showing how gender essentialism doesn’t work

• Our podcast on the problems with complementarianism in a nutshell, featuring Matt Chandler’s problematic spectrum

Yet it’s a trope that is accepted and spread among our churches—and they even use suspicious and questionable stats to back it up.

A while ago on the Bare Marriage podcast I talked with and Miranda Zapor Cruz about the myth of the 93%, which goes something like this:

• When dad comes to Christ first, 93% of families will follow.

• When mom comes to Christ first, 17% of families will follow.

• When kids come to Christ first, 3.5% of families will follow.

It’s been quoted at length my multiple preachers and authors.

This stat has been shared for years by prominent pastors, and is ubiquitous in Instagram reels.

● Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, quoted it in his 2000 sermon, “15 Qualities Every Family Needs to See in a Dad and Why.”

● Tim Clinton, president of the American Association of Christian Counselors, quoted it in a 2021 episode of James Dobson’s Family Talk Radio.

● J.D. Greear, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, quoted it in his 2017 address to the ERLC (Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission) National Convention.

● Josh Howerton, Texas megachurch pastor, quoted it in his 2024 Father’s Day sermon, saying it came from a “recent study.”

The problem? No such study has ever been produced. It was mentioned in a PromiseKeepers workbook in 1996, without citation, and has been parroted ever since, unquestioningly.

As we talked about in our discussion of this stat in the podcast, it has been parroted even though modern studies in the American evangelical context show something very different—that both mothers and fathers matter in faith formation, with mothers being slightly more important.

So why do they share a stat with no backing, rather than actual studies? Because that fake stat says what they want to believe—that women actually are inconsequential, and men are the important ones.

We taked about this on the podcast two years ago now, but every week I see more and more Instagram reels pop up sharing this same false information. It’s not going away. so it’s time to revisit it and look at the impact this false idea has had.

Is this just a harmless claim? Or is it doing serious damage to the church?

Well, here’s what I’m worried about:

ARE CHURCHES GETTING RID OF WOMEN’S MINISTRIES?

I recently asked on social media if anyone could recall witnessing, in their own churches, seeing women’s ministries being removed. My heart broke as I was inundated with stories from men and women alike who told me that, yes, they did in fact see this happen.

But why is it happening?

To answer that question, we have to go back in time to when church culture began to shift in ideology to this idea that it was men who needed to be taught, pastored, and reached by the church, effectively turning women into afterthoughts. Or erasing us entirely.

The message these church leaders center is, “I’m going to pastor the men,” (as SBC megachurch pastor Matt Chandler explicitly said in a clip I shared), but then, in all too many cases, this turns into, “so therefore we don’t need women’s ministries.” Because when you have a situation where the pastor is focused mainly on reaching men and building men up as leaders, then the message he is communicating is, “I’m not here for the women.” Women are not being shepherded or invested in by church leadership.

In fact, women’s ministries can become a threat to the pastor, because they can raise up strong women who are grounded in Scripture who may prove a threat to the pastor’s vision. So it’s better to make sure the women don’t meet separately. It’s better to not invest in women’s leadership.

Well, then where do the women go if they want some spiritual nourishment, some counsel, or if they just need some advice? Usually, it would be to a women’s ministry leader, but increasingly, churches are getting rid of women’s ministries. They’re getting rid of the places where women usually have been able to use their gifts.

Women no longer have anyone to turn to in their church.

Amanda Cunningham used to run the Women’s Ministries at the Rockwall campus of Lakepointe Church, and she’s gone on the Julie Roys Show to talk about how they got rid of their women’s ministry.

LAKEPOINTE CHURCH HAD WOMEN WILLING TO SERVE.

They had tons of volunteers. They had qualified women. And they still got rid of it. Because at Rockwall campus, supposedly, they wanted all the campuses to offer the same thing, and so they promised that rather than women’s meetings and frequent get-togethers, instead “we would do one or two big events a year for women,.” Those events hadn’t materialized. Women are being ignored and left out of church life.

So these women who had been getting together and who had been able to exercise their leadership gifts, now no longer have those opportunities.

I also received a long testimony from someone who used to work for Christ Church of the Valley, which is a multi-site church in Arizona. But before we get to his story, let me share with you a little snippet from the church’s handbook:

WHO ARE WE TRYING TO REACH?

Reach the man so we can reach the whole family.
“When a Mother comes to faith in Christ, the rest of the family follows 17% of the time; but when the Father comes to faith, the rest of the family joins him 93% of the time.”
David Morrow, “Why Men Hate Going to Church” (Page 47)

Reach the younger generation so we have a future.

Reach our neighbors so we can change our culture.

(note how their support for the 93% stat is to quote another man quoting the stat without a citation).

Do you notice what’s not there? Women. The church’s mission statement is about reaching men; reaching children and youth; and reaching the community.

But women? They’re afterthoughts.

Here’s what a former employee in the graphic arts department told me (used with his permission):

IS IT A SURPRISE THAT WOMEN ARE LEAVING THE CHURCH FASTER THAN MEN?

The latest data once again shows that Gen Z women are leaving the church faster than Gen Z men, and for the first time in history there’s a demographic age group where the women are less religious than the men. That’s huge.

(and it points to a needed correction on the rhetoric about Gen Z men’s religious involvement: It is not that Gen Z men are flocking to church, as the Theobros are saying. It is that women are fleeing faster, so Gen Z men now make up more of a proportion of church goers than Gen Z women.)

That’s the fruit of this:

• when you tell women that we don’t matter,

• when you tell women that we can fulfill our greatest calling and it still isn’t going to be that influential because it’s only the man that really matters,

• when you deny women any opportunities to use their gifts and

• when you even get rid of the very, very, very limited few places that we could–

why would you expect women to stay?

SO LET’S DO BETTER, OKAY?

I’d love to leave you all with a quote from one of my guests on episode 253 on embracing women’s equality in the church:

There are churches that do it well. Like, it’s not like this needs to be invented. There are churches that do not use these kinds of statistics and don’t set up men and women in these hierarchies. It’s not actually that hard not to do it.

It might be hard to unlearn it. It’s not reinventing a theology that doesn’t exist or a history that has never existed. It really is returning to what the church used to do and what some churches have always continued to do.

Miranda Zapor Cruz

The Myth of the 93% Podcast

You May Also Enjoy:

• Our podcast discussing how this stat was spread, with lots of clips of people using it

• A quick 12 step template to vet a church using its website to make sure it’s safe for women

• Why young women are fleeing the evangelical church

• Our book She Deserves Better, which looks at what millennial and Gen Z women were taught in youth group

In our 4 different studies of 40,000 people altogether, we’ve managed to put numbers to this. We know the harm that’s done when people internalize purity culture messaging, like “boys will push your sexual boundaries, so girls need to b the gatekeeper” or “girls should dress so they’re not stumbling blocks to girls around them.”

But the bestsellers of purity culture, even though purity culture has waned, still sell. And I think we need to have a wider conversation about the ethics of publishers continuing to publish books that we know do measurable harm. For instance, when girls internalize those modesty messages? They’re 52% more likely to experience sexual pain disorders, and 67% more likely to marry abusers.

This matters.

So today, I’d like to take a look at just one book so we can see the problem up close.

When God Writes Your Love Story is quintessential rape culture

Eric and Leslie Ludy (who got together first when he was 21 and she was 16) wrote one of the “Bibles” of purity culture–When God Writes Your Love Story. We talked about it at length in our book She Deserves Better, and I want to focus on one specific passage.

It tells the story of 16-year-old Jason grooming and raping 12-year-old Rebecca, and then moves on to the story of Todd and Karly, both college-aged students who were in love and had consensual sex when they got carried away. What’s the commonality between these two stories? They’re both about “losing your virginity”, of course!

For further context, this chapter is about how you can deal with lost virginity, and how God loves you anyway and there’s redemption. (I guess we should be thankful they said that you’re not ruined for life, at least).

But it’s how they frame the problem of “lost virginity” which is so heinous.

They competely downplay sexual assault

Look at the words they use to tell Rebecca’s story: so much is in the passive voice. They don’t say that Jason attacked Rebecca; they say:

• she “left as a used and defiled sex toy.”

• she “lost her virginity”

• she was forced from childhood into womanhood

Think about how else they could have told this story:

For months 16-year-old Jason had been deliberately grooming 12-year-old Rebecca. Rebecca felt flattered by the fact that Jason wanted to be her friend, and liked hanging out with him. One day, when his parents were away, he invited her over to his house, and she went.

There, he raped her. He brutally traumatized this child that he had deliberately deceived.

See what I mean? They could have told this story as being something that Jason deliberately did to Rebecca, to emphasize that sexual assault is only ever the rapist’s choice and action. But instead, they told it as if this was something that Rebecca just had happen to her.

Eric and Leslie Ludy now identify Rebecca with her rape

They called her a “used and defiled sex toy.” They didn’t say that she FELT like she was used and defiled; they said she was.

They also said that she had gone from girlhood to womanhood–as if raping a girl makes her into a woman (does the act of rape make a boy into a man?). But let’s be clear what’s happening here: Rebecca wasn’t a woman because she was raped; Rebecca was a traumatized child.

Think of how this episode would have sounded to a sexual assault victim reading it

They now hear, “I am a defiled sex toy.” They don’t hear “this boy did something heinous to you that caused you trauma”, they hear “this episode changed the very essence of who you are.”

The Ludys may think that they wrote this chapter to offer hope to those who “lost their virginity,” but their emphasis shows they understand absolutely nothing about trauma or the dynamics of sexual assault.

But that’s not the only thing they got wrong.

Even in consensual sex, her identity is the one changed, not his

In the story of Todd and Karly, once they have sex, Todd moves on from Karly and is disgusted by what they’ve done. But Karly? She’s “lost her most precious gift.”

They don’t describe Todd as losing his most precious gift; they only describe Karly that way.

Now, let’s be clear: all biblical commands and admonitions around sex are given equally to men and women (at least in the time of Jesus and the epistle writers!). There is not a “this is holy for him” and “this is holy for her.” To say that she has lost something when he hasn’t has nothing to do with the Bible, and everything to do with American purity culture.

There’s so much more I could say here about the concept of “losing one’s virginity”

We talked about this at length in She Deserves Better, and the male/female double standard and how harmful this is to sexual assault victims, besides the fact that our sexuality is not defined by one encounter, but rather by choices we make everyday. I don’t want to repeat that all here, but I’d encourage you to pick up She Deserves Better! It’s specifically written for moms of daughters, but I think most women who read it do so to reparent themselves, and find it very validating and healing.

See more about the book!

Eric and Leslie Ludy wrote a highly problematic and traumatizing book that should never have been printed, and needs to be retracted now before it can do more damage to another generation.

Which leads me to the big question I wanted to ask today:

What should accountability look like for the authors of these books?

What should it look like for publishers? What should we do now?

Here’s how When God Writes Your Love Story ranks on Amazon right now:

For comparison, She Deserves Better is currently ranked 50,000, so this book is right now selling better on Amazon than our healthy alternative. This is actually quite a decent sales ranking, because I know the royalties that we make off of She Deserves Better.

That means that the author and the publisher are still making quite a bit of money from this book which traumatizes sexual assault victims.

And because they’re still making money, it’s very unlikely that the authors or publishers would willingly stop selling it.

The dilemma of evangelical publishers with toxic books

Pretty much everyone agrees that purity cuture was either traumatizing, or at the very least went too far. This is quite widely acknowledged, and even pastors who still teach the very tenets of purity culture will tell you purity culture went too far (it’s hypocritical, yes).

So if we agree that it went too far, why are the books that sold purity culture to a generation still for sale? Why aren’t they being recalled?

Especially because, as our data from She Deserves Better shows, this does measurable and demonstrable harm to women long-term (and creates predators out of boys).

Shouldn’t, then, the publisher of such a book bear ethical responsibility for taking it out of print? Yes, we know that publishers are allowed and encouraged to share books of all different viewpoints. But this is not just a case of a different viewpoint; this is a case of spreading messages that do long-term harm, making it more likely women will marry abusers; making it more likely women will suffer from sexual pain disorders; making it more likely that they will have long-term deleterious effects on their self-esteem.

But here’s the bind that evangelical publishers are in:

1. Most are publishing far healthier books today than in the past.
2. Their backlist is what allows them to still be profitable and take a risk on new books.
3. Much of the backlist that generates that profit is MAJOR TOXIC.

This particular publisher is Multnomah/Waterbrook (the same one that does all the Every Man’s Battle books). I know that the current editors would never publish When God Writes Your Love Story today. But I also know that the sales from When God Writes Your Love Story allow them to take the chance on newer and healthier books, most of which won’t earn back their advances. When a publisher takes a chance on a book, they never know if it will sell or not. And usually only a small proportion of books really take off, and they rely on these books that consistently sell to keep the company afloat.

What happens when the books that are keeping a publishing company afloat are actively harming people?

Here’s my opinion: Jesus compels us to do the right thing, and believe that God will honour that. It may mean the company goes under and something else grows instead. It may mean that this is the end of an era in Christian publishing. I do not believe that keeping companies afloat outweighs the harm that is being done by continuing to sell these toxic books.

The Christian publishing industry is largely responsible for purity culture

This is not the fault of any one publisher; pretty much all of the big evangelical publishers had best-selling purity culture books. And it was because of these books that the messages took off.

Eric and Leslie Ludy even tell the story in this podcast that they had no intention of writing a book, but their publisher (Multnomah) approached them. Without the publisher, this book would never have been in print.

If they were responsible for that harm that was done, then they are also responsible to fix it.

It is a moral imperative. One cannot call oneself a Christian if one knowingly and willingly continues to do harm, as publishers do by continuing to sell books that we have now proven cause long term harm.

This was always our aim when we started our research projects–to show how these books and messages are harmful. We’ve done that. It’s now up to publishers to do the right thing. But I have no idea how to see that happen. So I’d like to know what you all think: How can we move forward here? Saying “boycott the bad publishers!” wouldn’t really work, because the good books are also published by these same publishers (Baker, who publishers our books, also publishes His Needs, Her Needs, for instance.) The good books that undermine purity culture are also published by the publishers of the purity culture books!

So what do we do? Tell me what you think in the comments!

You may also enjoy:

Our peer reviewed article talking about how modesty messages increase the chance a girl will be assaulted/harassed in church and increase the chance boys will become predators

Our FREE video study that goes along with She Deserves Better

Our book The Great Sex Rescue which documents the harm done by messages about sex and marriage

Our podcast on the long-term effects of modesty messages

But what if some marriage authors or teachers don’t understand the difference between a woman being willing to have sex and a woman being aroused? Too often, teaching around marriage and sexuality centres the male experience, and portrays women as a passive participant whose needs and feelings are erased from the experience.

Evangelical sex advice often centers the question of, “how can a husband turn his wife on so that she will be willing to let him have sex with her?” The answer to this question is often presented as a man doing the bare minimum in a relationship: praying together, helping with housework, spending time together, etc…

According to these teachers, doing all of this is a surefire way to turn on a woman and will lead to sex. However, this advice skips quite a few steps in the female response cycle. It also seems to equate a connection with one’s spouse as the definition of “turned on.”

We talked about this in a podcast a while back, but I wanted to turn it into a post for easy reference!

LET’S PICTURE TWO DIFFERENT MODELS OF SEX FOR WOMEN.

One is focused on getting her to agree to have sex with her husband–we’ll call that male-centric sex. And one is focused on making sure that sex is pleasurable and meaningful for both–we’ll call that couple-centric sex. Here’s what the two routes look like:

HERE’S THE PROBLEM: TOO MANY TEACHERS EQUATE “WILLINGNESS TO LET HIM USE HER FOR INTERCOURSE” WITH “AROUSED.”

And these are NOT the same thing whatsoever.

Let’s take a look at how this works out in practice. On the topic of how to turn a woman on, Emerson Eggerichs, author of Love & Respect has this to say:

You turn on a woman sexually by not having anything to do with her sexually….The irony of it all is that what turns a woman on sexually are the nonsexual things. This is a classic truth, an axiom, a basic principle. Gentlemen, if you’ve never learned that, I want you to trust me here… So notice the things that turn her on. It’s so easy to do. Reading a book together, praying together, helping her with the household. Why is it that your wife wants you to vacuum?

It isn’t necessarily because she’s this domestic engineer who has a whip in hand and wants you to abide by every command she gives to you. Maybe she realizes that it’s a sexual turn on to her, and so I want you to just be reminded here that it’s the nonsexual things.

Emerson Eggerichs

Episode 039 - Tuesday Night is Coming Part 2 - A Good Woman’s View of Sex

He’s saying that it’s the nonsexual things that get her aroused, or “turned on.”

HE OBVIOUSLY ISN’T UNDERSTANDING THE SEXUAL RESPONSE CYCLE.

• At WILLING TO START, you’re not feeling much of anything yet, except an openness to start being affectionate and seeing if it will go somewhere.

• At EXCITEMENT, you’re starting to feel tingly, and warm, and affectionate. This is when you want lots of kissing and touching (likely not in the erogenous zones) to lead to the next stage.

• At AROUSAL, her vagina is producing lubrication. Her nipples and clitoris are erect. This is when she actually wants stimulation in the erogenous zones, leading towards orgasm.

Now, doing non-sexual things, like connecting, being a fully engaged partner in managing the home and the children, spending time together, is definitely the way to encourage your partner to move from “neutral” to “willing to start affection.” But after that, if you’re expecting women to actually respond physically, you do have to do actual physical things.

Arousal is most definitely sexual, and there are marked physical signs of arousal. When Eggerichs says “you can’t tell if a woman is turned on,” this insinuates that he may not actually understand the sexual response cycle, because it’s hard to imagine that anyone who does would ever make such a claim.

Where are we at as a church when the author of the best-selling marriage curriculum in North American evangelicalism talks about sex by erasing women’s experience and just plain getting basic stuff wrong?

“INTERCOURSE” AND “MUTUAL SEX” ARE NOT NECESSARILY SYNONYMS

What happens if you see sex as merely intercourse? Women get the short end of the stick (and I didn’t mean that as a pun).

We found in our survey of 20,000 women for The Great Sex Rescue followed by our survey of men for The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex that we have a 47-point orgasm gap where 95% of men almost always or always reach orgasm in a given sexual encounter compared to just 48% of women.

Of the women who do reach orgasm, only 40% can do so with virtually no foreplay. Advice, such as the type Emerson gives, leads to a lower satisfaction rate for women because that advice removes sexual stimulation that she would actually enjoy from the equation.

IT SHOULD NOT BE OKAY TO ERASE WOMEN’S EXPERIENCE FROM OUR DISCUSSION OF SEX.

In the Christian world when you read sex advice, what you hear is, “You know she’s not going to want you. But here is what you can do to get her so that she is willing to let you.” What kind of a view of sex is that?

We need to get to a point where men in the Christian world don’t think it’s acceptable to write sex advice that makes it sound like they don’t know how to bring a woman to climax. Because when we accept that kind of advice that erases women, we’re damaging women. And it’s ridiculous that this is understood in the secular world, and it’s completely looked over by the Christian one.

We are normalizing women being erased. We are normalizing women not reaching orgasm. We think it’s so normal that Joshua Butler can write his book Beautiful Union (remember that?) calling sex which focuses on a man’s orgasm during intercourse as an icon of the gospel, while a woman’s orgasm is barely mentioned. Seriously, he talks about semen a ton, but the stuff that tends to bring a woman to orgasm? That, apparently, is not iconic of the gospel.

Please, church: let’s get to the point where it isn’t acceptable to talk about sex without talking about what women experience. It isn’t acceptable to talk about sex where we focus it entirely on a man’s climax during intercourse.

As we talk about in The Great Sex Rescue, sex should be mutual, intimate, pleasurable for both. That needs to be the baseline.

Right now we have this phenomenon of male centric sex across almost all of our resources.

It’s not an unreasonable request to ask for that to change, and I hope that the Christian world will listen.

You may also enjoy:

• The Male-Centric Sex podcast!

• The Instagram reel where I first heard that Emerson Eggerichs admitted that he can’t tell if a woman is aroused—and I spit my tea!

• The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex/Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex to understand the sexual response cycle

• The Orgasm Course to help you figure out how your body works

• The Great Sex Rescue to undo our ideas that men’s experience of sex is the main story

It was based on the idea that lust is “every man’s battle”, and the reason men lust is because of how God made men (“we got there naturally, simply by being male.”)

God made men to visually consume women and to obtain sexual gratification through the eyes, and so lust is something that all men struggle with, apparently.

And it was authored by two psychologists using peer reviewed research, right?

Of course not!

It was authored by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, two men who had absolutely zero qualifications for writing about recovery from unwanted sexual behaviors—except that they were both self-proclaimed former sex addicts (the former is up for debate, as you shall see in the excerpts I’m going to show you in a minute that will make your hair stand on end).

The book was so popular it spawned a whole industry of “every man” and “every woman” books that eventually sold over 4,000,000 copies.

Every Man’s Battle was one of the main books we looked at for our book The Great Sex Rescue, because it was so formative in how evangelicals think about sex, and it basically discipled a whole generation of men into their ideas. Even if men didn’t read the book, pastors and many counsellors took it as gospel truth, teaching its ideas to men.

• You lust because you’re male

• God doesn’t want you to lust, even though he made you visual

• The way to stop lusting is to “bounce your eyes” from women and not look at them, and to obtain sexual gratification from your wife, treating her as your “methadone”

I’m not even kidding about that last bit—they literally called women the “methadone” for their husbands’ sex addictions.

The whole concept that “all men struggle with lust; it’s every man’s battle” is a terrible one. We measured it in several of our surveys, and being taught this, even if you don’t believe it, results in women having lower libidos and less trust in their husbands. If they do believe it, we also see lower orgasm rates and more rates of sexual pain.

On the men’s side, if men believe it we see terrible outcomes too. They’re worse lovers. They do less foreplay. They complain that their wives aren’t adventurous enough in bed. Teaching millions of people this concept has literally hurt millions of marriages.

But I want today to focus on something else that’s central to the book, and it’s this:

Every Man’s Battle completely erases and ignores the effects on women of men’s lustful behavior.

In the every man’s battle world, it’s men themselves who are the victims of their own lust, because men lose their purity. The only time the word “victim” is mentioned in the book is referring to a man being a victim of a woman’s wiles.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t mention sexual assault, sexual abuse, and outright crimes. They just simply ignore the effects of these things on the actual victims, erasing their stories.

To set the stage of the passages I want to share, here are a few Fixed It For Yous I’ve done of one of the authors, Fred Stoeker, ignoring the reality of date rape:

To see more Fixed It for Yous, be sure to follow me on Instagram!

He phrases sexual assault as “pushing against the boundaries of our girlfriends” to obscure what he’s really talking about. He paints it as not actually that bad, because he refuses to think about the experience from the point of view of said girlfriend.

But we see this in even more horrifying ways in Every Man’s Battle itself.

Example 1: Every Man’s Battle Ignores the Reality of Statutory Rape

In this passage, we hear a story about a man, presumably in his 30s, married and the father of 3, grooming a 15-year-old girl for rape. Note all the language that he uses to minimize what was done–he talks as if she participated fully, and he was hardly to blame because she was a “knockout” who “looked more like 20.”

What’s striking here is that they only narrate the story from the perpetrator’s point of view.

We never hear how she feels. Usually in books like this all names are changed, so we can’t identify who it is, but they gave him a name and not her. He is the only one who is personalized here, who we are invited to care about. And what happens?

Kevin jokes with her sexually, dares her to do sexual things, that escalate to having intercourse. He describes this as completely consensual.

But the girl immediately told her parents who now want to press charges. This was rape, on so many levels. It was statutory rape because she was 15; it was unwanted because she immediately told her parents; and it was abuse of power because he was an adult leader at her youth group. This was rape-rape-rape. (All rape is horrific, but I just want to show that they had absolutely no excuse in ignoring the reality of what was happening here).

The book, though, never actually calls him a rapist–just announces in panicked tones that the parents are going to have him charged with rape. It never talks about the harm done to the unnamed girl, just the devastating consequences for him because he got “out of control” and “somehow” had sex with her.

And look how Stoeker and Arterburn frame this whole encounter: it’s in a passage about “lurking at your neighbour’s door”, and going somewhere you shouldn’t be. It frames statutory rape of a minor as the same thing as infidelity with a married friend.

This is absolutely horrifying.

Example 2: Exhibitionism and Masturbating to Your Sleeping Sister-in-Law

Then there’s this example of “Alex” masturbating to the sight of his sleeping sister-in-law.

Exhibitionism is actually a crime.

This is not merely a “sin.” The authors say that Alex masturbated out in the open to the sight of his sister-in-law. We don’t know the age of this sister-in-law either, but I get the sense she’s likely a teenager (she’s falling asleep on the floor).

I have so many questions about this! How do we know she stayed asleep? I can imagine a girl waking up to hear what he’s doing and pretending to still be asleep!

How do we know this didn’t escalate to anything else? Perhaps I’m just too Canadian for this, but when I hear of a man masturbating to his teen sister-in-law, I just think Paul Bernardo/Karla Homolka murdering Karla’s sister Tammy.

But how do they frame this? He participated in “visual gratification” which led to him defiling the marriage bed. So his sin was against his marriage bed, and presumably against his wife. But the sister-in-law? She’s completely absent from the discussion. She was asleep, after all. No need to talk about her! She was just the object.

Rebecca and I talked about these examples in our podcast last week!

How should these stories have been told?

The problem is not that these stories are in the books. The problem is how they were told. Let’s take the Kevin story. Here’s how they could have told the same story, in a way that would have actually been helpful:

Consider Kevin, who had so given himself over to objectification of girls and women and his lust that he abused and seriously hurt a young girl under his care.

Kevin deliberately volunteered as a youth group worker in order to get access to the kinds of young girls he fantasized about. He tried to deny this was the case, and portrayed himself as a godly man wanting to help youth, but his actions showed his true motive.

Soon after volunteering he met Cassandra (name changed for privacy reasons), who was only 15 years old. He began grooming her, testing her by teasing her about her boyfriends and her appearance. Cassandra was naive, and respected him because he was in his 30s, and a father of three adorable children. She didn’t know what to do with his behavior, and so she fawned.

One night, Kevin pushed her and raped her. She immediately told her parents, and he was charged with statutory rape of a minor. Instead of dealing with his objectification of teen girls, he groomed a girl for his own pleasure, hurting her terribly in the process, and wounding his own wife and kids too.

That’s not so hard, is it? Just tell the story in an accurate way that puts the blame where it belongs and reminds men who the real victims are. But Arterburn and Stoeker prefer to ignore the effects of their own lust.

Throughout all of their Every Man books, Arterburn and Stoeker ignore crimes and ignore victims.

The word “victim” rarely appears in their books, and when it does, the man is usually described as a victim of a woman wearing tight clothing or seducing him. In their book for teen boys Every Young Man’s Battle (one of the most horrifying books I’ve ever read, far worse than the one for adult men), they narrate multiple date rape examples without ever naming them as date rape.

Arterburn and Stoeker simply can’t be this ignorant. This is willful. These are conscious decisions to never, ever think about the effects of men’s acting out sexually and assaulting women and girls from the women’s and girls’ points of view. What women think and experience is irrelevant; only the men’s experiences matter.

As one commenter said, perhaps the reason they can’t acknowledge it is that to do so means acknowledging that they themselves have been rapists. They prefer to think of themselves as promiscuous, but not as rapists. That seems plausible to me.

Every Man’s Battle sexually discipled millions of men.

Millions of men got their idea of sex and what sexual integrity looked like from reading these books. As many men said on my Facebook page when I published these images, they’re horrified they never saw these problems when they read the books.

But of course they didn’t! They were reading books by “experts” that were published by one of the largest Christian publishers. Editors and publishers had read and okayed these words; Focus on the Family had promoted them. This was the gold standard. Who were they to question it?

And so millions of men were discipled into a sexuality that completely ignored the effects of their behaviour on women.

All that mattered was men staying pure for men’s sake.

Every Man’s Battle made lust problems worse.

After all, lust is the objectification of women and girls—using their bodies for your own gratification, rather than seeing them as whole people.

And what do Arterburn and Stoeker do in the name of fighting lust?

They present women and girls as objects too. They’re not even named. Their experiences and perspectives are ignored. They’re not real people; they’re merely objects of temptation to men.

And that’s why these books made everything worse.

I’m absolutely sickened, and quite frankly, I want an apology.

I want an apology from Waterbrook/Multnomah (full disclosure: they published one of my older books). I want an apology from Stoeker and Arterburn who, instead of apologizing, have disparaged us and had us threatened behind the scenes (or at least one has). I want them to publicly apologize to evangelical women.

I’m not holding my breath, of course. But it would be so healing. And until that apology comes, we will just have to keep giving examples of how absolutely horrifying their books were, because when people see pics of the actual pages, somehow it hits harder.

You may also enjoy…

• Our write-up of all the problems with Every Man’s Battle

• Our write-up of all the problems with Every Young Man’s Battle (it’s even more horrifying)

• Our book The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex, which goes into the effects on men of this teaching

• Our book The Great Sex Rescue, which talks about the effects on women of this teaching

• Does our messaging about lust create lust problems for teen boys?