It’s Time to Celebrate–and also Refocus on Christ
In the last podcast of 2021 I was very, very tired. I took two weeks completely offline, knit a ton, and rejuvenated.
And then we had some really good news (including hitting 1,000,000 downloads of the podcast on December 31!), and I decided it was time to open the year celebrating what has happened, and reminding us why we’re doing all of this: so that we can put Christ back at the centre.
Plus there was an awesome Twitter thread I just had to share with you! So listen in:
Or, as always, you can watch on YouTube:
Timeline of the Podcast
0:10 2021 in Review
3:10 Summarizing GSR/Christian Climate
18:10 Discussion on the life of male evangelicals
29:00 Interview with Scott and Melissa Coley
1:00:30 What will your belief outcomes be?
1:05:15 Keith discusses men in the church
Celebrating What’s Happened with The Great Sex Rescue!
Rebecca and I open up the year with a bit of a victory lap–plus we tell the story of The Great Sex Rescue. I realized that I tell the story so often when I’m on other people’s podcasts, but I rarely tell it on our own. We talk about elements of the book, but we don’t summarize the book as a whole. So I thought it was time to do that, and explain the four big teachings we found that were detrimental to women’s sexual and marital satisfaction:
- Women are obligated to have sex when their husbands want it
- Women should have frequent sex with their husbands to keep them from watching porn
- All men struggle with lust; it’s every man’s battle
- Boys will push girls’ sexual boundaries
We talked about how it all got started when I read Love & Respect–and we created some merch to set the record straight on that, too!
Does Christian Marriage advice make life so easy for men?
In December, Scott Coley, from the Faith, Philosophy and Politics podcast (here’s my episode with him!), published an awesome Twitter thread where he talks about how, if you follow Christian marriage advice about gender roles, life becomes so easy for Christian men. There’s no sacrifice. You get everything you want and you get to do anything you want:
While we’re on the subject of virtual church:
— Scott Coley (@scott_m_coley) December 15, 2021
What’s striking about large swaths of the American evangelical church is that if you’re a white American man with conventional tastes and modest abilities, being an evangelical Christian is just. so. easy.
Here’s the whole thing:
While we’re on the subject of virtual church:
What’s striking about large swaths of the American evangelical church is that if you’re a white American man with conventional tastes and modest abilities, being an evangelical Christian is just. so. easy.
In fact, if you’re a white male in the US just looking out for your own personal interests, you’d be crazy to choose any other way of life.
To start with, you get to just show up and start theologizing from your own point of view, that just counts as ‘theology’.
You get married and then you never have to make your bed or do laundry or cook ever again.
And you get to be the decider of things.
And you get to gain as much weight as you want but she can’t because if she does then you get a pass on infidelity—well not a *totally* free pass but she’s not allowed to get properly angry with you because she let herself go, so she kinda had it coming.
And all you really have to do, basically, is just keep the womenfolk in their place and the cultural interlopers at bay, and don’t look at pornography—unless the wife lets herself go, in which case you still shouldn’t do it but it’s a as much her fault as yours at that point.
So except for lusting after women that aren’t your wife—which shouldn’t be a problem if the missus is doing her part—you just do all the stuff you’d want to do anyway as a white American man, and it counts as Christianity.
No cross to bear.
No hating your father and mother.
No meaningful sacrifice.
No effort to understand perspectives that make you uncomfortable.
In short, it’s just nothing like the life that Christ tells his followers to expect.
So a lot of white evangelical men were doing virtual church long before live streaming came along.
And surely it’s of no matter whether such men attend virtual church in person or online.
Scott and Melissa Coley joined me to talk about how this isn’t a Christian view of marriage or gender roles, and how we have to get back to putting Jesus at the centre.
The Network of people who preach these things
Rebecca and I then talked about how these types of ideas get promulgated, and I made reference to this chart created by Josiah Hawthorne on Twitter (he gave me permission to share it):
I know it’s hard to read–you can see a bigger version here! A couple of things: the Bible that’s at the bottom is the English Standard Version, the one that was translated deliberately to obscure the importance of women and to subjugate them (more on that here). And my favourite part is Kevin Bacon at the bottom for no reason.
Reader Question: I have to have sex with my husband to control his irritability
Keith joined me for this one, where we had a disturbing reader question:
A few years into our marriage, I read a book that recommended not going more than 3-4 days without sex. My desire to be a good wife and to take care of my husband’s needs led me to follow that advice. It actually made a lot of sense to me because it seemed then (and still seems today) like after 3-4 days without sex, my husband would become so irritable and grumpy. I have to think through family plans with that in mind. For example, if we are doing a fun family day on Saturday, I need to make sure he gets sex on Friday night so that he will be most agreeable and pleasant with me and the kids the next day. After 16 years of marriage, my mental clock still keeps track and if sex doesn’t happen, the kids and I pay the price with having to deal with a crabby dad/husband.
My husband will complain sometimes that sex just seems like something else on my to-do list. He is right. And while I enjoy it, I definitely would not want to do it so often but he is just easier to deal with when he has it on a frequent basis. Also I find that if I need to talk to him about something or there is a problem we need to work on, we need to have sex first so that he is more likely to be emotionally available.
Also, I have mentioned to him that he can seem irritable when he hasn’t had sex but he insists it is because physical touch is his love language.
Keith and I talked about how this doesn’t look anything like Christ–and how too often our advice looks nothing like Christ.
So we want to put Christ back in Christian marriage advice in January, and we decided to end the podcast with that perspective:
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Things Mentioned in This Podcast:
- Our Patreon! You can join for as little as $3 a month, and $5 a month gives you access to our awesome Facebook group
- The Great Sex Rescue, our book that is changing the evangelical conversation about sex and marriage because we actually listened to 20,000 women
- Scott Coley’s Twitter Thread, and Scott’s Twitter account, and Melissa’s Twitter account
- Josiah Hawthorne’s graphic of the conservative evangelical network
- The Atlantic article showing how power changes the brain
- The study showing that husbands are six times more likely to leave their wives if their wives get cancer than wives are to leave their husbands
- Our Open Letter to Focus on the Family about the problems with Love & Respect (at the bottom there are links to all of the other things we’ve written about the book)
- My initial series I wrote on Love & Respect
- Our Love AND Respect merch!
Putting Christ Back in Christian Marriage Series
- Putting Christ Back in Christian Marriage Introductory Podcast
- 6 Ways Christian Marriage Advice Leaves Christ Out
- Why There’s More to Christian Marriage Than Just 5 Passages
- Does a “Christian” Marriage Need to Suffer to Grow?
- Do We Need to Jump out of the Boiling Water? How Advice for Christian Men Got So Off Track (from Keith)
- On Deconstructing our Faith–and Reconstructing by Holding on to what Jesus has said (from Keith)
- Is it So Wrong to Want to Submit to My Husband?
Plus please see my submission series!
The relatively recent rise of widespread female education plus the amount of outside-the-home work that women were essentially forced into to support materiel production for two world wars may be contributors to the idea that men need to reassert their quite self-serving “God-ordained” leadership in church, in the home, and in society generally. When women can design, construct, and fly military fighter aircraft, for example, it’s kind of hard to convince them that they should be happy to just stay in the kitchen doing dishes…unless we make it essentially sinful for women to do anything that, well, men say women shouldn’t be doing.
In reviewing my own adult life and thirty-plus years of marriage, I’ve realized that I subconsciously felt I was seriously flirting with ACTUAL SIN AGAINST GOD to question anything a male teacher, author, or pastor said, that I was QUESTIONING GOD’S OWN COMMAND to even possibly give the slightest hint to my husband that something that was happening in our lives and our marriage was maybe not quite right.
—
I don’t know what I believe anymore. I don’t know how to grow as a Christian anymore. I don’t know how to chase Jesus anymore. And IT’S MEN IN CHARGE IN CHRISTENDOM that have left me here.
I know how you feel. It was really hard for me too, especially since I still have a hard time relearning how to read the Bible and how to think about the writings of Paul and the others. I don’t know if you’ve ever read the Narnia books, but the in Voyage of the Dawn Treader where they get lost in the darkness, there’s a white albatross that guides them out. Jesus is the albatross, he’s not like any man described in these heretical teachings.
I love the illustrations of C.S. Lewis. In Prince Caspian, Lucy is the only person who sees Aslan as he is trying to led the Pevency children to Prince Caspian.
This is a great example of how we can be led astray if we are not focusing on God and looking to Him as our ultimate authority. We can use other people to help guide us, but they are just as broken and prone to error as we are.
I’m sorry, Jo. I think many are feeling that way. I hope that this month we can talk about this at greater length!
I get it. I’m there. We have a lot to talk about.
The disturbing reader’s question made me cringe. How awful to live like that. Like living with a capricious toddler. The difference is that a toddler will grow up. Will this man ever grow up? And if not, how to even pretend to respect him? She may be able to do it one year, two years, a few more years. One day she may not be able to do it any more.
I think that’s true. Many women manage this for a decade or two and then just break.
Re: John Piper, and wife giving directions. For 40+ years they have lived adjacent to the intersection of two interstates: 35W & I-94. And very near highway 55. There is an exit nearby, but no entrances; and assuming only 1 or 2 of 6 are helpful, there’s many more wrong options than correct.
I wouldn’t mind politely conversing with your husband about a few things he said in the podcast and would be happy to send a screenshot of Google Maps showing the complexity of our roads. I’m hoping that since I’m submitting my email that you have my email. But with technology, I don’t assume something like that.
Hi Jeff, how is the complexity of the roads relevant? John Piper believes women need to give directions to men in a different way / style than they would to other women, in order not to offend against men’s God-given masculinity. Piper has said that we all understand this. Surely simply being polite and clear is all that’s required, regardless of the sex of the person lost and the person giving directions? And also regardless of whether it’s ‘left at the end of the road’ or a long, complex list?
In some ways, it is “so easy” for these men.
In some ways, it’s not. It seems to actually generate a lot of fear and insecurity and anger, since so much energy and anxiety goes into making sure that they are in a position of power and that nothing and nobody is threatening that.
All that energy and focus on maintaining power then makes it so much harder to have genuine, healthy relationships or to focus on the stuff that we actually need to focus on in the world.
When you talked about how weird it is that women are told they need to submit and do everything around the house because “he would give his life for you”, I thought of this old parody video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdbHiDnbhb0
Sure, you could bravely offer up your life – but would you do the dishes?