Sheila: Welcome to The Bare Marriage Podcast. I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from BareMarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.  And I am joined today by my two wonderful coauthors for The Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better, Joanna Sawatsky, our statistician and researcher.

Joanna: Hi, everybody.

Sheila: And my daughter, Rebecca Lindenbach, who did our focus groups, who helped write our survey, and who just wrote all the funny lines in the books.

Rebecca: That’s me.  I’m the funny one.

Sheila: You’re the funny one. Okay.  And we are here to talk about a book that was recently published.  I think it was out in June.  The Toxic War on Masculinity by Nancy Pearcey.  And so many of you have emailed asking if I’ve read this and what we think about it, and we’ve been thinking about this for a couple of months.  But we just—we went on vacation, and we weren’t in the right head space.  And so we thought we would just wait until we’re back, and we’re relaxed and able to take a stab at it.  So we are here to talk today about one of the big talking points from her book which is the idea that conservative complementarian men do better.  And so we want to just ask that question.  Do conservative complementarian men do better?

Rebecca: And the reason people want us to look at this book, in particular, is because she’s called the most eminent research scholar in evangelicalism.

Sheila: Yeah.  And I don’t think that’s necessarily the main point of this book, but a lot of the podcasts she’s done, a lot of the media interviews she’s done, that has been the big takeaway.  And you see this a lot of the discussion around this book is isn’t this great that complementarian men do so well.  So we actually want to look into the data on that.  Before we do that, let’s just talk about some of the good things in this book.  Okay.  I really like and appreciate her call for men to be more involved in their families and her call to recapture a biblical view of masculinity and get away from some of the ways that we’ve been framing masculinity.  And so get back to responsibility, engagement with your family.  I think that is such an important message.

Rebecca: And yeah.  Even though she, like you said, she talks about how complementarian men do just as well, her book really does encourage men to act egalitarian.

Sheila: Yeah.  It really does.

Rebecca: Yeah.  It does present egalitarianism in action as the best way.

Joanna: Yep.  I was super jazzed.  She actually described a lot of the stuff that’s really important to my husband, Josiah, and I as a couple.  And it has affected what kind of jobs we’ve taken, where we live, the idea of having a very short commute so that you’re not spending a lot of time in the car because that’s associated with higher rates of stress even though it is often very necessary and having jobs where you have lots of time with the kids and really making sure that work place balance is a big deal, right?  And a priority for your family.  And I really appreciated that because I was like, “Look.  That’s how we live our lives.”  So that was real exciting.

Sheila: Yeah.  You guys essentially sacrificed a little bit of income for a better work life balance.

Joanna: Yep.

Sheila: And that’s a lot of the call she’s making is just to remember the importance of family and remember the importance of connection and breathing life into your kids.  So we really appreciate that.  I think her heart for this book is really good.  It’s to try to—I especially liked what she said about abuse.  I mean she presented a beautiful picture of what it looks like when the church really comes and fights against abuse and stands against abuse.  So a lot of that is really—I thought was really well done.  There were a few things that were kind of odd in her take on history.  Someone wrote a big academic—almost like an academic paper on this.  We’re not historians.

Rebecca: We won’t speak much on it.

Sheila: But I’ll put a link in and just how maybe she didn’t use some historical academic theories quite properly.  So I’ll put a link to that.  And I did find her take on suffrage a little bit strange.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Reading the excerpts of her take on suffrage, I was—eyebrows up.  That’s for sure.  

Joanna: Yeah.  Can I just read one sentence from that section?  Because I think it really exemplifies what we were looking at and kind of going, “Oh, this is odd.”  So on page 100—

Rebecca: Quick little thing just because I know most people know this.  Women’s suffrage is women’s right to vote.  Just in case anyone doesn’t know.

Sheila: Yes.  Yes.  In case anyone is wondering.

Rebecca: We’re talking about women’s ability to vote here with what Joanna is about to read.  Are you ready?

Joanna: Yep.  “In short, women’s suffrage represented a tragic erosion of women’s trust in men to take responsibility for the common good especially women’s good.”

Rebecca: Can I just say something?  This is exactly the problem that I—the reason my eyebrows went up is it’s—why on earth would it be tragic that women would want to have a say in their own future?  My husband isn’t like, “Man, Rebecca wants to have the vote because she doesn’t trust me.”  No.  He loves me.  He’s like, “Yeah.  Your opinion.  You should have one.”   

Sheila: In the broader context, the point that she is making is that when there was a household vote then people trusted men to stand on behalf of the household, and now this wasn’t the case anymore.  But the framing of it—how she talks about suffrage almost entirely from the anti-suffrage point of view is just—it’s just a strange framing.

Rebecca: And I think that it makes Nancy sound like she has an opinion she doesn’t have.  And I think that unfortunately the kinds of people who are anti women’s suffrage, who we know still exist, are going to read this book and see themselves in it.  And I’m not saying that’s Nancy’s perspective.  I think she accidentally wrote a book that she doesn’t agree with in this area.  Personally.

Joanna: Yeah.  I think that what’s really tragic is that it really heavily implies that the only reason that women needed the vote is because black men got the vote.  And that is really problematic, and I don’t think that she meant to write that.  I really don’t.  But I am just personally so uncomfortable with the way that that section was written.  And I wish, frankly, that her editors had done a better job.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca: Yeah.  There were a couple of different—there were a lot of layers there that were just eyebrows.  Eyebrows.

Sheila: So I think while she had really good intentions, there just is some problems with some of the historical framing, with some of the ways that she sort of breezed over history and condensed things that weren’t necessarily linear, and, again, we’ll put a link to that.  But what we really want to talk about is our big area of interest, which is data about outcomes based on beliefs.  Her big thing is that—and she said this many times.  She’s not defending complementarianism.  She’s defending complementarian men because when you look at the data complementarian men do really well.  And that’s the big takeaway that is happening on the podcasts and a lot of the interviews that she is doing and isn’t this wonderful.  And so we want to actually look at that.  We wrote an op-ed that, as we’re recording this, has not been published, but I believe it will be out before this goes live.  And so we will hopefully put a link to that in the notes.

Rebecca: And if it’s not, it will be up on the blog at some point soon.

Sheila: Yes.  If it’s not, it will probably be up tomorrow.  So everything we’re going to say is there along with all the stats we’re going to quote.  But yeah.  We want to look into this idea.  So first of all, big picture things, and we talked about this all ready, so we’re not going to talk about these in as much detail because we did a podcast last year on Josh Howerton’s claims that conservative Christian men do well.  But many of the studies that are claiming this aren’t of conservative Christian men.  They’re of Christians in general.  

Rebecca: Exactly.  It’s like if you said Canadian—it’s like if you took a pool of Canadians, and then you just said, “Well, look Albertans are really happy with the amount of spending happening in Toronto.”    

Sheila: Yeah.  It doesn’t work.  

Rebecca: It’s like no.  It’s like you looked at Canadians as a whole.  We don’t know what Albertans think.

Sheila: Yeah.  And so when you’re looking at a study and people are concluding that conservative Christians do well but the study includes mainline Protestants, Catholics, people from all over the world—

Rebecca: In a lot of these studies, conservative Christians aren’t even the majority.

Sheila: No.  They’re actually the minority.  And so you need to ask that question.  And so we talked about that with Josh Howerton.  The other thing that we didn’t talk about with Josh Howerton which is super important is the idea of a confounding variable.  Joanna, can you explain what that is?

Joanna: So essentially, it means that the correlation between two things that you’re seeing is actually due to another unobserved variable that is not causing one thing or the other.  So do you want to give your example that you had about a confounding variable?    

Rebecca: Yes.  

Sheila: Okay.  Here’s what it might look like.  We’re Canadian.  All right?  And let’s say we belong to a public health initiative, and we’re like, “How do we keep Canadians healthy in the winter when it’s so hard to exercise and the weather is just crappy?”  And we thought, “Well, maybe they just need more fresh air.  So let’s do a study.  And let’s see if fresh air in the winter helps people stay healthier.  So we’re going to measure how many times people go outside in a given day and how that correlates to health.”  And we do that study, and we find out wow.  People who go outside aren’t necessarily that healthy.

Rebecca: Yeah.  The people who go outside twice a day are really great, but the people who go out outside seven, eight times a day they’re really unhealthy.

Sheila: So maybe fresh air actually is bad.  But what we may not realize is there is a confounding variable going on there which is smokers are the ones who tend to go outside frequently.  And so we think we’re measuring fresh air, but what we’re actually measuring is the effect of smoking.  And even if not everyone smokes, smoking is such a huge—has such a huge effect on health that it’s kind of overshadowing everything else.  And so we’re not actually measuring fresh air.  And that can actually be what is going on here in a lot of these studies about whether conservative Christians do well is that we’re not actually measuring the effect of being a conservative.  We’re measuring the effect of religiosity.  So Joanna, take it away.

Joanna: Yeah.  So if you think about church attendance, a conservative evangelical church, people tend to go to church a lot more frequently.  That’s more of a value.  Additionally, the other thing is that in the 90s and early 2000s there was a big push about involved fatherhood in evangelical circles and about spending time as a family.  So it makes sense to me that this would be something that you would see.  But the big thing is that religiosity is so profoundly protective for families, for children, for dads.  And so the more a church brings its people together the better outcomes you’re likely to see.  And so, therefore, those who go to churches that are more likely to be attending frequently are going to have better outcomes.

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  And what the studies that I have seen have shown, it’s also a bit of a self-selected group of who tends to go to these very fervent conservative evangelical churches.  They tend to be people who are very, very strong—already have a very strong belief in family values.  It’s not even necessarily that going to church gives you a belief in family values as much as people who are very family oriented tend to gravitate towards more family oriented groups such as these specific types of churches.  Right?  You have people who are very focused on helping the community, who want to be a better person, who are open to personal growth, who have strong values about generosity.  All these really positive things that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see yeah.  That will make a great marriage.  Right?  Oh, pro social behavior, altruism, heck yes.  Let’s make that work.  And so they’re more likely to go to these churches, and so they’re going to hear all this stuff about how the man needs to be the head of the home.  The woman needs to submit to him.  And so they might say all this stuff, but they’re altruistic people.  They’re kind people.  They’re selfless people.  They’re willing to put the others first.  They’re trying not to be proud, and so they’re not—they’re going to—just like what Nancy Pearcey says.  They don’t act like it.  Right?  And so this is a confounding variable is we think that we’re measuring conservative—whether someone is a conservative evangelical, but we’re actually not.  We’re just measuring whether they’re religious.  And religiosity is so powerful of a force and Jesus is so powerful that what ends up happening is the majority of people at these churches act like Jesus.  They don’t act like the teaching.  And so that’s why it’s such a confounding variable.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And as we’ve said before when we talked about our book, She Deserves Better, this is what we found in that study.  This is what we found in The Great Sex Rescue is that church attendance is protective.  The more you go to church the better you tend to do unless you believe those toxic teachings.  

Rebecca: Exactly.

Sheila: And multiple studies have found that religiosity is good.  The Harvard longitudinal study was a huge one in that.  This is a really, really subtle thing in psychology.  But here’s the thing that I want people to understand.  In the North American context, religiosity is highly correlated with conservatism.    

Rebecca: Conservatism.

Sheila: Conservatism in church.  All right?  That is not as true in other countries.  When Joanna looked at our statistically significant results from—we had statistically significant results from six different countries in our survey of 20,000 women for The Great Sex Rescue.  So we had Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Canada, the U.S., and South Africa.  What we found is that those how do best—you could basically put that on a scale of least conservative to most conservative.  And the least conservative countries did better.  So the top was—it was New Zealand, the UK, Australia and Canada, who kept switching places, the U.S., and South Africa at the end with a big caveat that in both the U.S. and South Africa we had heavily white populations.  So it’s like while in the U.S. conservatism is so correlated with religiosity that isn’t necessarily true in other places.  But it is true in the U.S.  So in the U.S., when you’re measuring conservatism, you are measuring religiosity.  And it’s like is it actually the conservatism that’s helping?  Or is it religiosity?  And what we tried to do in our surveys was control for religiosity and then we found.  So now we’re left with this question.  If we actually did want to measure the effects of conservative or complementarianism on marriages and who makes the best husbands, how would we do that?  All right?  And there’s one way you could do it is you could just simply ask people, “Hey, what do you believe?”  And that is what the vast majority of these surveys do.  They say, “Hey, what do you believe?”  And lo and behold, people who believe in male headship tend to do really well because of the confounding variable of religiosity.  But here’s the question.  Is that the right thing to ask?  Because if you wanted to study the effect of spanking, for instance, on kids, would you measure parents who believed spanking was okay?  Or would you measure parents who actually spanked?  Right?  It’s not about measuring the belief.  It’s about measuring when you act it out.

Joanna: Okay.  So in 2003, Sally Gallagher, who I just constantly fan girl over—Rebecca and Sheila can tell you how much I talk about her.  She published a book called Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life.  And it’s based on the 1996 Religious Identity and Influence Survey and also on her own interviews that she did as part of that initiative.  So the interviews and things happened in the late 90s, early aughts.  And what she looked at is that—how does male headship actually play out?  What does male headship mean in evangelical marriages?  How is it put into practice?  And what is—what do evangelical couples believe would be lost if the idea of male headship were to be discarded?  And what she actually concluded is that evangelical couples, on writ large, practice what she calls symbolic traditionalism.  So they believe in headship, but they actually live out a pragmatic egalitarianism.  So while they may say that the man is the head of the household, they don’t actually live out the man making the final decisions even if they say that he does make the final decisions or that men should.  She actually believes that the presence of this symbolic traditionalism is a way for evangelicalism to have a cultural marker that says, “We are different from everybody else because we believe that men should be in charge.”  But they don’t actually act out the idea that men are in charge because that goes poorly, (a).  And (b) because we can’t have men only being the ones working today because of the economic realities of the world that we live in.  And so it’s an interesting kind of snowballing effect that she describes in the book.

Sheila: Right.  So what she’s saying is people believe in male headship because they want to be able to say, “We do marriage the Christian way.”  

Rebecca: It’s virtue signaling.  It’s literally virtue signaling.

Sheila: Yeah.  And that’s what she found.  Now Pearcey actually acknowledges this, and she does talk about Gallagher.  So what she says in her book is she says, “Committed conservative Christian couples use the traditional rhetoric of male headship”—

Rebecca: In essence, they say they believe in male headship.  Just complicated words.  Sorry.

Sheila: Yeah.  “Yet, in practice these men fit the close relational model favored by progressives.”  So she’s acknowledging that the people who say they believe in male headship actually do the better thing, which is the thing claimed by people who believe in equality.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Exactly.

Sheila: Now here’s the problem.  If you’re claiming that, can you actually say that complementarian men do better?

Rebecca: Yeah.  If you’re claiming that the most committed to the value, those who are the most religious, the most into it, the most strongly are not acting it out—

Sheila: Yeah.  And Nancy Pearcey—and we were in quite a few Twitter debates about this back in June and, I think, early July.  She was saying, “Well, you know what?  Complementarian men—they’re allowed to define it.  They’re claiming that they’re complementarian, and they’re doing really well.  And that’s okay.”  And I have a real problem with that because words have to mean something.  

Rebecca: Yes.  

Sheila: And what actually distinguishes complementarianism from other ways of doing marriage?  How do we measure complementarianism?  And in Twitter, a lot of people were saying, “Complementarian husbands simply believe that they need to love their wife sacrificially as Christ loved the church.”

Rebecca: Okay.  Then you’re egalitarian.

Sheila: Yeah.  Because here’s the problem, you cannot say that as a complementarian value because that is also an egalitarian value.  Another thing that people were really saying on Twitter is, “No.  Complementarianism just means that men and women are different.  We’re going to specialize, and we’re going to do things differently in our marriages because the sexes aren’t the same.”  Egalitarians don’t believe the sexes are the same either, by the way.  And so they’re saying, “Complementarians.  In complementarian marriages, we just mean that women stay home with the kids, and the men work.”  And the thing is that, again, in egalitarian marriages, you can do that too.

Rebecca: Except that you don’t have to.

Sheila: It’s just that you don’t have to.  And I just want to reiterate as well.  Our research for The Great Sex Rescue found that when you act out traditional gender roles that’s fine.  It works well.  There’s no problem with it unless you believe it’s the way things should be.  And as soon as you believe, “No.  We’re doing this because we’re supposed to.  Because this is what we’re supposed to do,” then things start to go funky.  But if you’re doing it because it’s a genuine choice, there’s no problem with traditional gender roles.  They’re actually good.  And that’s what all three of us chose to do.  We all chose to be home with the kids.  So it’s not that that is necessarily a complementarianism thing either.  If we’re going to measure complementarianism, we must measure what distinguishes it from other ways of doing marriage.

Rebecca: Yeah.  There’s lots of different ways of doing Christian marriages.  I mean any time that you have to do any sort of logical syllogism I immediately go to dogs.  Right?  Because it’s the easiest way to do it.  That all poodles are dogs.  Not all dogs are poodles.  Okay?  So all complementarian marriages are Judeo-Christian marriages.  They’re based in the Christian religion.  That’s what it is right now.  Now male hierarchy is different.  But specifically, complementarian marriage that believes God has called men to lead and women to submit.  That’s a Christian marriage.  But not all Christian marriages are complementarian.  So we have to figure out what’s different.  Right?  So if you say, “Well, I believe.”  So I had a Yorkie.  Right?  We did have to just put him down, so everyone feel sympathy for me.  But I had a Yorkie.  And if I get a German Shepherd next and say, “This is my new Yorkie.”  It’s like that’s not a Yorkie.  “No.  No.  No.  I believe that a Yorkie is a friend, who is a dog, who I can cuddle, and who loves me and follows me around.”  Okay.  But that’s still not a Yorkie.  “No.  But this is how I define a Yorkie.  This is what Yorkie means to me.”  It’s like it’s still a German Shepherd, guys.  It’s not anymore a Yorkie because I define it.  This is not a my truth situation.  Right?  If they say, “Well, complementarianism to me means that my wife and I wrestle through things together, and we are bonded, like equally yoked oxen as I sacrificially love her, and she sacrificially loves me.”  Yeah.  Great.  That’s like everyone else.  Then why are you still claiming the complementarian label?  This is clearly a German Shepherd.  It is not a Yorkie.

Joanna: Right.

Rebecca: Right?  But it’s because they have—it would be like if I was still in my sadness and trauma I couldn’t bear the thought of not having a Yorkie.  Right?  So I was like, “No.  I have to believe it’s a Yorkie.  I have to.  I have to believe it.”  Right?  It doesn’t make sense.  Just accept reality, guys.

Sheila: Yeah.  So if we’re going to measure the effects of complementarianism, we have to figure out what complementarianism is and what are the distinguishing features.  Okay?  What makes it a German Shepherd, not a Yorkie?  What makes it complementarianism?  And that’s actually quite easy to do because there’s a lot of statements about it that are quite unambiguous and that define it very clearly.  So for instance, the Danvers Statement, which was the codification of complementarianism as published, I believe, in 1987—’88 or something like that at the inception of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.  It’s been adopted by all the SBC seminaries by most PCA, Presbyterian Church of America, entities by many other organizations as what we believe in about marriage.  You’ll see many churches have signed on to the Danvers Statement.  And it’s defining characteristic—it asserts that “marriage is characterized by a husband’s authority and leadership and a wife’s willing submission”.  Okay?  Emerson Eggerichs, best selling marriage book in evangelicalism, clearly says that there is a marital hierarchy based on a husband’s authority where the husband gets the tie breaking 51% of the vote.  Okay?  So very much about husbands have authority, hierarchy.  They make the final decisions.  The late Tim Keller, widely respected evangelical pastor, he wrote a book, The Meaning of Marriage, where he said that the husband is to have ultimate responsibility and authority in the family.  So the distinguishing feature of complementarianism is that husbands have the ultimate authority.  And that, thankfully, is something that we can actually measure. 

Rebecca: Yes.  It is.

Joanna: Yep.  And it was actually measured in the 1996 study that I was just talking about.  They actually asked, “What does authority mean to you?  Does it mean that husband’s have the final authority?”  And we also measured the inverse.  So we said that marriage should not be characterized by a hierarchy as well in our study that we did for The Great Sex Rescue.

Sheila: Yeah.  And we asked, “Who makes the final decisions?”  We asked a whole bunch of different questions.  So what the 1996 study found is that when women believe that men should have the final decision they are more likely to act that out.  Right?  So you don’t necessarily act it out, but you’re more likely to.

Joanna: But most don’t.  Most don’t.

Sheila: Yes.  And most don’t.  And so in our survey of 20,000, we kind of continued that.  There hasn’t been a really large survey on this since, so ours is the next one 20 odd years down the road.  25 years down the road.  So we found that only 27.8% of women who believe in male headship actually have the husband making the final decision.  But when you do believe it, the fact that the husband makes the final decision increases 3.14 times.  

Joanna: And we also know that unilateral decision making is very bad for marriages.  That’s been really well studied by Gottman, but we also found that as well in our study.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Had a seven times higher divorce rate.  Something like that.  It wasn’t like, “And you had a 2% chance of not being happy.”  No.  Seven times the average.

Sheila: Higher divorce rate.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Than the people who don’t believe that and don’t act it out.

Sheila: Yeah.  And this is right in line with John Gottman.  His research, out of the University of Washington, is—he’s the world’s premier marriage researcher.  And he found—he has a whole chapter in his book about sharing power where he talks specifically about especially religious men who believe that they should have the final decision and final authority.  And he says that when you act that out your chance of divorce is 81%.  So huge.  Now here is what’s interesting.  Nancy Pearcey actually quotes Gottman from this very chapter.  So from the chapter where he is saying that not sharing power is disastrous in marriage—so the point that he is making is that if the husband makes the final decision, that’s really bad.  But then he goes on to talk about how most people who believe this don’t act it out just like we’ve been saying.  And when you don’t act it out, you can actually have a really good marriage.  And that’s what she quotes.  So she says this, “Citing his work and his conclusion that in both egalitarian and hierarchical marriages, emotionally intelligent husbands have figured out the one big thing.  How to convey honor and respect.”  She goes on to claim that labels don’t matter.  See?  So it doesn’t matter if you’re egalitarian or complementarian because as long as you’re emotionally intelligent you can figure this out.  And so we need to stop arguing about egalitarian and complementarian.  That is not the conclusion that Gottman found from that chapter.  And you can’t claim that beliefs in complementarianism are irrelevant by quoting someone who found that acting out those beliefs is disastrous.  And that is what she is claiming over and over again is it doesn’t matter what you believe.  Complementarian men do as well as egalitarian men which I actually think is a funny claim to begin with because the claim they do as well as egalitarian men is kind of like saying, “Yeah.  We know egalitarian men do better.”

Rebecca: Yeah.  It’s like, “Don’t worry.  We can catch up guys.  Why don’t you just join the winning team?”  It’s like, “Hey, if you’re lucky, your marriage might be as good as the people who are doing it an easier way where both of you are loved and respected equally, if you’re lucky.”  Guys, just take the easy road.  You are allowed to not make this harder than it needs to be.

Sheila: I know.  Okay.  Joanna, while we were looking at this book, you actually ran some new stats.  So yay.  Drum roll please.

Rebecca: Yay.

Joanna: New stats.

Sheila: We have some new stats for you that we didn’t—this is the glorious thing about having such a huge data set from Great Sex Rescue is every now and then you figure out a new question to ask.  

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  Oh, I’m so excited.  We’re working on a new book, and I keep going, “And I will run these stats from the survey that I never thought to do before.  And oh, and also these ones.”  It’s so exciting.  So we decided to look at how acting out hierarchy affects orgasm rates.  Okay.  Because we talked a lot about the 47 point orgasm gap so 95% of men almost always or always orgasm while only about 48% of women do.  And what we found is that 51% of—51.7% of women, who act out egalitarianism, almost always or always orgasm.  So then we’re looking at a 43% orgasm gap.  But if we’re looking at women who act out complementarianism, only 40.2% of them almost always or always orgasm.  So that’s a 55% gap.  And we also found that if you live out male authority, you are more likely to have complete anorgasmia.  So it was 10% of women who practice egalitarianism versus 16.7% of women who live out male authority.  

Sheila: Right.  So in other words, when you practice complementarianism, things go worse.  There is more divorce.  There is less marital satisfaction, and sex is way worse.  So we can’t claim that labels don’t matter when, if you look at the actual outcomes of the belief, it’s worse.

Rebecca: Let’s just take this out of the marriage realm because that often has a lot of preconceived ideas and a lot of emotions around it.  Picture a sorority where all the girls at their rush—they’re told, “How do we keep our skin so perfect?  We all go to bed with blue paint on our face.  And then in the morning we wash it off, and we call ourselves the blue girl crew.”  It’s all cute.  It’s just a thing.  And every time they talk about their skin routine it’s like, “Yeah.  Well, after I wash off my face paint, then I do this exfoliate.  Then I do this toner, and it’s all great.”  And then when they take class photos, it’s like, “Oh my gosh.  The blue paint is making you glow.”  And everyone is always talking about this blue paint.  And then you have a group of new initiates.  Can you tell that I’ve only watched one sorority movie?  I don’t know if I have any of the words right or not.  Anyway, a new group of sorority initiates, and most of them kind of understand that no one is actually using blue paint.  We’re seeing these girls without makeup.  Their skin is not blue.  They are not—

Sheila: It’s just an inside joke.

Rebecca: It’s just an inside joke.  It’s just silly.  It’s like how Grandma says she’s turning 29 every year.  Right?  But it’s a fun way to bond and have a cute little community, and they have the blue girl crew on Facebook.  It’s all cute.  But there’s one little girl, who is like, “Well, I guess I need to get me some dark blue paint.”  And she goes.  She gets the royalist of blue.  She puts it on.  She wakes up in the morning, and she washes it off.  And her skin is covered in blue stain.  So she’s like, “Well, they must just put on foundation and cover up.   So she puts on tons of concealer, tons of foundation.  She makes sure that the blue isn’t really as seen.  And she walks out, and everyone is saying, “Oh my gosh.  You look so great today.”  She’s like, “Yeah.  Gosh.  They can tell.  Yeah.  I’m one of the girls.  I feel so special.”  And it works for awhile until she starts breaking out.  And she’s like, “Guys, how do you spend this much on foundation and concealer?  I’m going through a block of—a thing of concealer a week.  This is ridiculous.”  And they’re all like, “Oh, I just wash off the paint.  And I guess just keep doing your thing.  You look great, girl.”  And no one really gets that she’s actually doing it because none of them would actually do it.  They’re all just in on a joke.  And that’s often how this marriage stuff happens is everyone says things like, “Yeah.  No.  You just got to let him lead.  You got to let him lead.  You got to listen.  You must become—don’t focus on yourself.  Don’t be selfish.  Let him lead.”  Meanwhile, in their marriages, their husband is just nice.  Their husband wouldn’t make big decisions without them.  They don’t have to worry about their voice being heard because they’re married to great men.  And then you have Cindy over here who is married to a man who is happy to have his voice be the only one that is heard, who makes the decisions, who tells her how much money she can spend, who—just very, very domineering and just cruel often.  And what is she supposed to think?  This is why the labels matter.  If we know that teaching that male headship, if it’s acted out, is negative, are the people who are acting out pragmatic egalitarianism, if their churches were preaching, “Hey, you should just love your wife as your own body.  And both of you should have a say, and don’t trample over her,” they’d still go to church.  These are good people.  The only reason to keep these beliefs about male headship around is just to make sure that we’re different from everyone else.  That’s what Gallagher found.  It’s about being part of the blue girl crew, right?  The blue girl group or whatever.  It makes us separate.

Sheila: If people listening are like, “Oh, but what about all of those verses,” we’ve done so many podcasts on this, and I don’t want to go into it again.  But I’m going to link to our podcast with Philip Payne.  And I’m going to link to Marg Mowczko’s website, which you can look up any Bible passage there, and you can look at what she’s written about Ephesians 5, 1 Peter 3, Genesis 3.  Whatever passage there is.  And so if you’re having questions and saying, “But that’s what the Bible says,” like I said, we’ve dealt with this a lot.  But we will put links so that you can answer those questions.

Rebecca: And I know that one of the things that Nancy is trying to do with this book—because that’s what she said over and over again on Twitter is that she’s not trying to defend one side or the other.  She’s just trying to present quote unquote the facts.  But here’s the problem.  When you present the facts and the facts are if you act out a certain way of marriage, things are bad, then you can’t then also say, factually, that this way of marriage is safe because it’s not.  It’s only safe if they don’t do it.  So if churches are truly allergic to the word egalitarian, if they just don’t want any labels, that’s fine.  I just don’t want to label it.  If we’re all going to be we’re 20 year olds in multiple fluid dating relationships and don’t want to put a label on it, that’s fine.  But if you truly don’t want to do that, then churches can still actively preach against harmful messages.  They can say, “Beware of people who will use the Bible to tell you to dominate your wife.”  They don’t have to say, “Be egalitarian.”  They can just say things like, “People will twist Scripture to tell women to be quiet and become doormats.  Don’t do that.  You guys are a team.”  But they don’t do that.  What they do is they preach, “He’s in charge.  She’s not.”  And then they just kind of hope that people don’t listen to them.  That’s an asinine response.  It’s an asinine response.  It is.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And I wrote an article awhile ago.  Pastors, will please preach what you practice?  Because you know what?  Most pastors—they don’t act out complementarianism, but they preach it.  And while it doesn’t hurt those pastors and while it isn’t going to hurt the majority in the congregation, it is going to hurt the 20% who act it out.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Sheila: And so if 20% of your congregation is going to act it out and they’re going to be hurt by it, then we need to take that into consideration.  And we need to stop saying it doesn’t matter.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Sheila: All right.  Next point.  The other thing when we’re trying to measure complementarianism is that we usually look at what we would call global marital satisfaction outcomes or global sexual satisfaction outcomes.  So you say to people, “How happy are you with your marriage?  How close do you feel in your marriage?”  And then we’ll find that when we ask those kinds of questions often the more conservative people tend to rate their marriages the highest.  All right.  One of the studies that claimed this—and we talked about this with Josh Howerton when he was looking at the IFS study.  And Brad Wilcox, who Nancy Pearcey quotes a lot with regards to these stats, works for IFS.  They said this.  This is what the report’s authors posit.  “It is possible that simply being married is more important to highly religious women which may raise their satisfaction ratings.  They may be more likely to look at their relationship through a rose colored lens.”  So they’re even admitting that yeah.  These women say their marriage is better.  

Rebecca: Do we actually know that?

Sheila: But do we know that because there could be some rose colored glasses going on.  So here’s some new stats for you.  We actually measured this.  We measured the rose colored glasses phenomenon in our study of 20,000.  So Joanna, do you want to try to explain the difference between global and specific measures?

Joanna: Yes.  So we looked at, again, those global measures of how satisfied are you in your marriage, do you feel like you’re close, those sorts of questions.  And we found that complementarian beliefs were correlated with 33% higher odds of having an above average global marital satisfaction.  But then we also looked at specific questions.  So hey, when you’re arguing, do you feel heard?  Do you feel like your needs are as important as your husband’s needs?  And when we asked those specific questions that really are measuring pragmatic egalitarianism, we found that couples who have complementarian beliefs have 35% higher odds of having below average specific marital satisfaction.  

Sheila: So they do better when you ask the big picture questions.  But when you actually hone down and ask the individual questions, the people who say they believe in this do worse.

Joanna: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca: Yeah.  And I wonder how much of that is because when you’re in these circles you’re told so often, “You have to respect your husband.  Make him look good.  Don’t badmouth him.  Your marriage is great.  This is—marriage just takes work.  It’s okay.”  And you’re so taught to not to—to not see your marriage for what it is because you’re so taught to think about things in terms of like, “Okay.  This is just me becoming holy, not happy.  This is just a way that I’m supposed to grow together.”  There is a certain aspect that is true to that.  Absolutely.  But when we see this is the result, where it’s like, “Yeah.  My marriage is great.  I love my marriage.  No.  I don’t feel heard in arguments.  No.  He doesn’t really take my opinion seriously.  No.  I don’t really feel that I matter as much as him.  No.  We can’t really talk about hard stuff.  And no.  I don’t feel comfortable to him in conflict.  But yeah.  My marriage is great.”  That’s what we’re talking about where it’s like these are people who have been primed to always answer, “Yes.”  Like how when someone asks you, “Hey, are you?”  “I’m fine.  How are you?”  You just say that. 

Sheila: Well, and especially because in a lot of these circles, women are told, “Your main purpose and role in life is to be a wife and a mother.”  And so if that is your main role and purpose, then it’s really difficult to admit to yourself that I may not be as happy as I want to be.  And so that can be part of it.  Okay.  We also looked at rose colored glasses when it came to sex.  

Joanna: Yep.  So we asked—if we looked only at women who never or almost never reach orgasm and those women are 22% more likely to say that they’re satisfied with their orgasm frequency if they also believe in hierarchy in marriage compared to women who believe marriage should be equal.

Rebecca: So they’re not actually having better sex.  They just don’t think that it could be better.

Sheila: Yeah.  And is it really a success if women, who believe in hierarchy, don’t think they deserve to orgasm or don’t mind if their marriages are objectively worse?

Rebecca: Yeah.  It’s like, “Hey, she doesn’t orgasm, and she doesn’t like our marriage.  But hey, she’s fine with it.”  

Sheila: Now, again, I got into a conversation on Twitter with Nancy Pearcey about the rose colored glasses effect.  She acknowledges that it exists.  She quotes other researchers, who say it’s actually a positive thing.  And you can actually—there are some positive benefits to rose colored glasses in that you’re more likely to stick it out.  Because you see your marriage as better, you’re less likely to be—to pick at each other for things.  And so these can be positive things.  But if you’re trying to measure, “Do these people have better marriages,” the rose colored glasses effect says that you can’t do that properly.

Rebecca: Yeah.  And we interviewed so many women too who—my question as well with the 7.4 higher times divorce rate, how many of these rose colored glasses women are just 10 years away from waking up and realizing that they are in a horrible marriage and leaving?  Right?  That’s the problem with the rose colored glasses.  They work until they don’t.  Once they crack, there is no going back.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So Nancy Pearcey did say on Twitter that the whole argument is just worn out.  The complementarianism, egalitarian debate is worn out.  Those were her words.  We shouldn’t be arguing about it anymore because you know what? Complementarians do just as well.  And we’re just here to say that that is not statistically true.  The data does not show that.  And you cannot claim Complementarians in name only who act out egalitarianism do well is not a ringing endorsement for complementarianism.

Rebecca: No.  It’s an embarrassment.  It’s literally like, “As long as you’re a hypocrite, it’s fine.”  That is what it is.  And I’m going to be very, very blunt there.  That’s what it is.  As long as you’re a hypocrite, you’re fine.  We shouldn’t have to be hypocrites to follow Jesus.  That’s actually the opposite.  We’re supposed to let our yes be yes and let our no, no.  So if you are someone who says, “I believe in male leadership and male authority, but I don’t act that out against my wife because I love her,” then tell people.  “Because I love my wife, I would never put my foot down.  I would never tell her that she doesn’t have a voice.  Instead I’m just so grateful that God gave me this partner and that we can be iron sharpening iron together, and we’re so much better together than we ever could be apart.”  Say that.  Say that, for pity’s sake.  Don’t say, “Yeah.  I am in charge, and she submits.  And that’s how we have a good marriage,” when that’s not what you do.  We’re not supposed to be liars.  The truth shall set you free.  Let’s just tell the truth, people.  Joanna said when we were doing Great Sex Rescue that what we learned during this book is that you learn 85% of what you need for your life in kindergarten.  Here is one of those times.  Just tell the truth.  If we all told the truth, the vast minority—it’s seriously such a small group who actually acts this out.  Maybe they would wake up and realize, “Hey, the majority of Christians, and not just Christians, but conservative evangelical Christians, right?  The majority of conservative evangelical Christians would never think about making big decisions without asking their wife first.  Would never think of saying, ‘I know you feel that way, honey, but I’m putting my foot down.’”  They would never think of doing these things because of the love they have for their spouse, because of how they grateful they have—in this equal partner, this actually real meaning of helpmeet.  This idea being equally yoked.  It’s such a better picture.  And it’s easier, and we don’t have to lie.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yes.  So that is our plea.  I do think it’s wonderful news that those who believe in Jesus do better.

Rebecca: And I think it’s great news that majority of Christians don’t listen to their pastors about marriage.  That’s great news.  (cross talk) of our job.  That’s amazing news.

Sheila: But please, can we just start preaching what we practice?  Because we can’t claim that complementarianism doesn’t matter when you act it out.  It does.  And it really—it really bothered me that Nancy Pearcey used stats to bolster her argument that it doesn’t matter from materials that were actually showing the opposite.  And I think that that showed a lack of integrity, to be frank, in how to handle data.

Rebecca: Well, and the only way that this doesn’t matter is if you don’t care about the women who are abused.  That’s the actual problem.

Sheila: And we know she does.

Rebecca: That’s the thing.  

Sheila: We know she cares about women who are abused.  And so—

Rebecca: Yeah.  But as a larger point, why would we keep complementarianism around?  The image of us being different from the world is more important than making sure that women are not abused in our circles.  That’s really it.  But let’s talk about the—you were talking about the stats.  We’re actually going to talk about some of this research because this book has been heralded as an academic masterpiece.

Sheila: Yeah.  This book has really been praised for its scholarship.  And so I know this is a super awkward conversation.  But as people who are really trying to raise the bar on what counts as scholarship in the evangelical church and we want to call the church to be able to engage the dialogue in the wider culture, I think this is a conversation we need to have.  And so this is going to be a little bit of a tricky one.  And, again, we really do think that Nancy Pearcey meant well in writing this book, but there’s some significant issues with her citations.  And we’re just going to mention a few to give you a taste of it.  But Nancy Pearcey—in her bio, she says this, “She’s a former agnostic, who was hailed in The Economist as America’s preeminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual.”  So she’s been hailed as this intellectual.  She’s had several jobs as a scholar in residence.  And that’s how she is most frequently referred to is as a scholar.  She earned her BA from Iowa State University, a MA in biblical studies from Covenant Theological Seminary, and she did additional non degree study in philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto.  And she has an honorary doctorate from Cairn University.  Okay.  Before we get going on this, all three of us have degrees from secular universities.  At the time when I went to Queens University, it was ranked two in Canada.  I don’t know what it’s ranked now.  But it had, I think, the highest—you needed the highest marks to get in.  It had one of the most stringent admission policies.  It didn’t admit very many students.  

Rebecca: It’s still up there.  

Sheila: It’s still up there.  Yeah.  Rebecca went to University of Ottawa, which is known as one of the Ivy Leagues of the north.

Rebecca: I don’t know if it is.  I mean all of Canadian universities kind of are because we don’t have that many universities, right?  So all of our universities are much high—this is one of the tricky things being Canadians talking to mostly Americans is it’s hard to describe—

Joanna: Oh, I can.  I can do it.  

Rebecca: You can?  Thank you.  Thank you. 

Sheila: Yeah.  Because you’re an American.

Joanna: Okay.  So essentially, Canadian universities are like the flagship state schools in the U.S.  So think about comparing the University of Nebraska to the University of California to Penn State to Ohio State.  Right?  There may be slight differences.  Some are going to be a bit more selective than others, but they’re all very strong schools.  And there you’re looking more at the difference between departments than you are the difference between the different universities.

Sheila: Yeah.  So Waterloo is incredibly strong for sciences, for instance.  

Rebecca: And the University of Ottawa—the reason I wanted the University of Ottawa is because it’s a very strong school for psychology.  

Joanna: Whereas if you’re talking sciences, University of British Columbia is incredibly strong in biology.  As is U of T.  Yeah.  U of T is also premier for its public health school.  But in the States, you have the flagship state schools.  You also have lots of private universities, which can vary quite a bit in what sort of education you’re going to get.  And then within the state schools, then there’s also a lot of smaller state schools.  In Canada, you have your large universities, and those are called university.  And then if you go to a technical school where you can still get a Bachelor’s in nursing or other Bachelor’s level study, those are called colleges.  But they would be more like your state schools that aren’t the flagship state schools or smaller arts colleges.

Sheila: It’s like the show, Community.  If you watch the show Community.

Rebecca: It’s not though.  We don’t even have those.

Joanna: No.  It’s a bit stronger than that because it’s more—community colleges would be below that.  Yeah.  It’s just a difference.  There’s only really two tiers in Canada.  There’s only 30 million people in Canada.  And that’s a very big difference than 300 million like you have in the States.  So anyway, that is—  

Rebecca: So just saying, that’s why it’s just a little awkward to talk about that kind of stuff.

Sheila: So we’ve been to secular universities.  Joanna, you went to—

Joanna: I graduated summa cum laude with a microbiology Bachelor’s of Science from Ohio State University where I received a full ride academic scholarship.  1 of 15 that the university gave out to my freshman class.

Sheila: Right.  And so we all—all three of us received scholarships and academic awards.  My graduate studies was completely paid for from all the awards.  So we’ve all done that.  I TAed for four courses.  So I marked papers at the university level.  Three first year courses, one third year course.  So I have marked sociology papers.  Rebecca—

Rebecca: I worked with my university as an academic writing help advisor when I was in my second year of university, and I was working with Master’s level students.

Sheila: Yeah.  And a lot of what you did was specifically teaching about citations.

Rebecca: I did.  I taught people how to do citations.  I taught how to actually write research papers.  I taught people how to find research that they needed.  

Joanna: I don’t remember how many courses I TAed, but it was a lot.  So I did biology, biochemistry, public health.  And then within public health, I did environmental public health, statistics, and some epidemiology stuff was also in there.  Anyways, I don’t remember all of it.

Sheila: What I’m trying to say is we—

Joanna: There’s a lot.  

Rebecca: We just know a lot of research stuff.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And—

Rebecca: Joanna knows a scary amount of research stuff.  I’m going to be honest.  

Sheila: Before we get into this, let me just say.  There’s a really influential book.  It just had its 25th anniversary, I think, two years ago.  It was reprinted.  It’s called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.  And The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind is that there isn’t one is the author’s thesis.  Basically, he’s trying the anti intellectual movement in evangelicalism when it started and what’s happened now.  And he really mourns this because he says that because there is such anti intellectualism we are no longer able to talk to the wider society.  See?  He says, “Catholics and mainline Protestants stayed in the universities.”  So you still have Harvard Divinity School, for instance.  Right?  You still have Catholic theologians.

Joanna: University of Notre Dame is one of the best schools in the U.S.  And it’s a Catholic university.

Sheila: But they stayed in the conversation.  They stayed in academia.  Think about C.S. Lewis at Oxford where he would go for a pint with all the other professors and they would talk.  And there’s so much benefit from professors who are theology professors talking with professors from other disciplines.  You’re able to influence ethics and medicine and all this stuff because you are there.  

Rebecca: But also you’re submitting yourself to the same standards that the secular universities are expecting of their—

Sheila: Right.  And so you’re still in that conversation.  And his point is that Catholics and mainline Protestants stayed in the conversation.  Evangelicals took themselves out of that conversation and started their own universities.  And Christian universities really vary.  There’s some amazing ones.  And there’s some not so good ones.  But one of the things that really bothers me about specifically this book is that it’s being touted as a scholarly book.  And I am telling you—

Rebecca: It’s not.

Sheila: – as someone who has marked sociology papers, there are some significant issues where anyone who works in academia would see the holes in this.  And the fact that we think in evangelicalism it’s good.  So we want to go over five big picture things.  We’re not going to go over all of her citations.  Just five big picture things.  Now for those of you watching on YouTube, she has a lot of footnotes. 

Rebecca: Yeah.  She does a great job citing her sources.

Sheila: A lot of footnotes.  And so you can look at this book and think, “Oh wow.  She has so many references.  This is amazing.”  What she doesn’t have in these footnotes is peer reviewed journal articles that are relevant to what she’s talking about.

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  Yep.  She has one.  There’s a few.  There’s definitely a couple of them, but they are few and far between.  And whenever I came upon them, I rejoiced.  My favorite one was she had one really good one about how commutes are stressful, and I was like, “Yes.  This is why I live close to downtown.  Ha, ha, ha.”  But primarily, she’s citing a lot of news articles.  She cites a number—a good number of academic books so books put out by Oxford University.  And those would be considered peer reviewed.  Typically, her sources—they are quite old.  I got the sense in reviewing her sources that she developed an amazing catalogue of facts and sources awhile ago and did a super good job.  

Rebecca: What do you mean by awhile ago?

Joanna: 20 years ago.  

Rebecca: Like the early 2000s?

Joanna: Early 2000s, early 90s.

Sheila: A lot of stuff is 90s.

Joanna: A lot of her stuff is cited from the 80s and 90s.  So I suspect—that’s what I think happened.  I have no evidence of that.  But she’s not quoting more recent scholarship.  And specifically there, it would be in historical citations.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And this is the thing.  There is such a wide breadth of peer reviewed work right now on how beliefs in male hierarchy affect marital outcomes, and she’s not citing any of it.  So she’s not—she just doesn’t do the systematic literature review, which would be required in any scholarly work like this.  Is let’s look at what is actually being said in the literature right now.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  If you’re claiming to do a thorough review of the academia of the time—say, “Here’s what research says about stuff today,” then you absolutely have to do the systematic review.  If she had come out and done her own thing, I don’t necessarily know if you would need a systematic review in the same way if it’s like, “Hey, here is what I found,” right?  That would be different.  But she’s saying, “This is what the data shows.”

Sheila: But we did our own thing, and we still—we still did a systematic review. 

Rebecca: Oh, we also did a systematic review.

Sheila: And we have lots of peer reviewed studies in both Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better looking at what other people have found about orgasm rates or about some of these other marital outcomes.  And so that is a problem.  So that’s number one is she has not done a systematic literature review.  Number two is when she does cite studies she doesn’t tend to cite the study.  She cites newspaper articles talking about the study.

Rebecca: And that’s such a problem.

Joanna: At one point, she cites a TED Talk, which was just a little funny.  No.  It was really quite odd to review all of those and to find the number of times that were citing a news article about the study instead of citing the study itself.  And, again, she does do it correctly a couple of times.  So she’s clearly capable.  She is an intelligent woman.  She can absolutely do it.  And so it was disappointing to me that the news articles were cited so frequently.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Now, Becca, what did you teach when you did—about this?

Rebecca: Oh gosh.  I got this all the time because I dealt with a lot of Master’s students.  But I also dealt with a lot of first and second years, who are just kind of figuring out how to do academic writing.  And they almost always, especially my little psychology ones—so I was like, “Buddy, you can’t misrepresent us like this.”  But they’d come into the academic writing help center with a paper about the effects of emotional neglect in the first three years of life.  And they’d have these—this huge long reference list.  And it would be Psychology Today.  And it would be kidshealth.au where it’s like an op-ed on there.  I’m like, “Okay.  No.  No.  No.  These are great jumping off points you found interesting, but you actually have to track down the study because it is notorious how badly things are misrepresented in news articles even in things like Psychology Today.”  If you read something in Psychology Today, there has been so many studies on how badly misrepresented the average thing of research is on there.  You actually have to go to the source itself.  You can’t just cite the news article, or it means you didn’t do your work.  It means you literally read someone else’s summary of it and were like, “Yeah.  That sounds about right,” and then you cited it instead of actually going to the article yourself, making sure they did it properly because news articles are not peer reviewed.  So you don’t know—yeah.  No.  You go ahead.

Joanna: I have a story about this.  So I did some additional graduate work in biochemistry before deciding that that was not my thing and moving on to public health.  And the laboratory that I was in our—the professor, who ran the lab, had been in a class when he had preschoolers at home.  And he was teaching biochemistry.  And he said, offhanded to the class, that maybe kids eat their boogers so that that boosts their immune system.   And he got a big laugh.  And then a student came up to him and said, “Hey, could I write up a piece for the newspaper for our university about how you think and you have this theory that eating your boogers helps the immune system?”  And he said, “Sure.  Whatever.  Go ahead.”  And so they did.  They wrote it up.  And then do you know what happened?  That was really funny.  It was pretty click baity.  And it got picked up.  It got on Jimmy Fallon.  And then every week or two we would get phone calls in our laboratory that did not study children eating their own boogers.

Rebecca: But probably there were these things saying, “Researchers out of this found that.”

Joanna: Yeah.  And so they would say, “Hey, could you update us on how your research is going?”  And we’d be like, “No.”  

Rebecca: Well, and that’s exactly the problem, right?  Because we know—and by we, I mean the research community—knows that research dissemination through pop media areas is abysmal because, first of all, they don’t care about the same stuff that the researchers care about.  And the stuff that researchers care about is what Nancy should be caring about here.  It’s going to be the less sexy, less flashy.  It’s going to be just the cold hard facts of what’s going on.  But additionally, journalists are not trained in scientific writing or scientific—

Sheila: Well, some are, but most are not.  Yeah.  Yeah.

Rebecca: The majority of journalists.  And even if they are, they’re not trained to the same extent of the researchers doing the job.  Right?  You’re not doing four years in microbiology to then be able to be a journalist.  You’re doing some courses—

Joanna: There are some really awesome science writers out there.  It’s an awesome career path.  But that’s not who we’re talking about here especially when we’re talking—yeah.  Exactly.

Rebecca: (cross talk).  We’re talking about some op-ed in a newspaper by an editor who thought this new study was really interesting.  It’s not the same as peer review because, again, if Johnny is writing for even The Washington Post, you don’t have a panel of experts reviewing what Johnny wrote, going through it, asking him for revisions, looking at the methodology, making sure his assertions of what they did matches up.  There’s nothing like that.  Johnny just writes it.  

Joanna: Yep.

Sheila: And, again, when I was marking papers, we just didn’t let people do that.  

Rebecca: No.  Absolutely not.

Sheila: They had to cite the actual study.  This is not proper academic—

Rebecca: They had to actually read the actual study too.

Joanna: I am a huge fan of Ed Yong and Riley Black, who are two amazing science writers.  But, again, that’s not—you can’t cite their write ups of a journal article in an academic environment even though they are excellent at their jobs.  

Sheila: And the reason this matters, again, is because scholars looking at this book, in the secular world—if we want to actually engage with the secular world and tell them why Jesus matters, we have to do it to their standards.  And we’re not.  We’re simply not.  Okay.  So that’s number two.  So she didn’t do a literature review.  She often cites newspaper articles instead of the actual thing.  The other thing that she does is she—when she is talking about whether or not complementarian males do better, she tends to use only one source or one primary source which is Brad Wilcox from the Institute for Family Studies.  My very, very first paper in sociology—it was 1988.  I’m at Queens University, and I am writing about the state of the church in Canada.  And at the time, there was a professor at the University—I believe it was Saskatchewan. Reginald Bibby.  Who was Canada’s foremost expert on evangelicalism and religion.  And my paper was full of Reginald Bibby.  Okay?  I had his books.  I had his journal articles.  Everything I wrote was by Reginald Bibby.  And it was a good paper, and my TA got back to me and said, “Okay.  Look.  This is really well written.  This is really well organized, but I got to dock you a lot of marks because you cannot write a paper with only one source.  You have to look at what other people are saying too and especially what his critics are saying even if you’re just simply going to acknowledge his critics said this.  But this is why we don’t have to listen to them.  But you do have to engage with them.  You do have to admit that they exist.”  

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  One of the big things that we talked about in psychology a lot in my lab especially but just in the psychology department as a whole was we wanted to get away from homogeneity of thought.  Right?  So you didn’t actually want to only listen to people who said one thing because then you were in an echo chamber.  And so for us, it wasn’t even only that we couldn’t listen to—we couldn’t only cite on person.  We really had an extra thing because there’s different branches of psychology.  So if you are talking about something from a developmental perspective, you had to look at it from both—from all the different types of developmental theories.  Right?  If I’m doing a research paper on theory of mind development and how to—and the best practices for something—I don’t know.  I’m making stuff up as I’m going along.  But you have to actually look at it from multiple different angles.  It can’t just be like a bunch of different people who all think the same thing.  Nancy Pearcey’s work is exactly—is a great example of why we shouldn’t do that because Brad Wilcox has been really, really well critiqued by people.  The IFS studies have great critiques out there.  There’s tons of peer reviewed evidence that shows very opposite things in some cases.  In some cases, it affirms what Wilcox has found.  In other cases, it takes it further.  And if she had challenged herself to the same standards as I was held to in first year and you were held to in first year—and I know she knows about these standards because she’s been at these universities too.  Right?  If she had held herself to that standard, we would have not been in this mess where you have one primary source.  You’re giving just an echo chamber’s information of, “Yeah.  This is all good.  It’s all hunky dory,” and completely ignoring all of the other research that’s out there that’s actually showing, “No.  It’s not so hunky dory.  Not hunky.  Not dory.”  

Sheila: And interestingly, she even ignores some of Wilcox’s findings.  He was involved in the study, which found that men are most likely to be abusive if they believe in headship.    And they’re least likely to be abusive if they’re Christian and they don’t.  But she doesn’t mention that.  So it’s like she only mentions the Wilcox stuff when it agrees with her.  And so that’s a problem.  So that’s number three.  Number four, Joanna, do you want to take it away about the today issue?

Joanna: Yeah.  As I said, Sally Gallagher’s book that came out in 2003 is amazing, and it’s based on data that was collected in the late 90s and early 2000s.  Very frequently Pearcey will say, “Today,” and then she quotes an interview subject that Sally Gallagher quotes in her book.  

Rebecca: When I think today, I think before I was born too.  Well, some of her interviews were from before I was born.  

Joanna: Yeah.  I think they were mostly done in the late 90s.  When you were in diapers.  

Rebecca: Before I was potty trained.  My apologies.  And that’s today, guys.

Joanna: That’s today apparently.  

Sheila: And she’s calling this today.  Now let’s think of what was happening.  Let’s think of what’s happened since 1996.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Pre 9/11.

Sheila: Pre 9/11.  

Rebecca: Justin and Brittany were still together.  

Sheila: Pre the Internet.  Okay?  The Internet was just in its infancy.  

Rebecca: Call of Duty hadn’t come out yet.  

Sheila: Yeah.  No Internet porn.  

Rebecca: Not really.  The pornpocolypse was in 2006.

Sheila: 2006.  When people got high speed Internet.  

Rebecca: Social media started really in 2008.  

Sheila: Social media was 2008.

Rebecca: MySpace was before then.  But it was really 2008.

Sheila: Yeah.  Think about all of the changes that have happened in the last 20 to 30 years.

Rebecca: And changes that would directly influence how we see men.  I mean even if you think about violent video games and pornography.  Even just those two things.  How can you talk about research that doesn’t address either of those and consider that today?

Sheila: Yeah.  Now Sally Gallagher’s research is really important.

Rebecca: It’s really good.

Sheila: But we need to see it in historical context now.   

Joanna: And it would be really great if she was quoting it and saying, “And these are some focus groups that I did to update them.”  It wouldn’t even have been hard to do a couple of focus groups to just corroborate those findings.

Sheila: It was also largely before purity culture.  It was before the conservative resurgence in the church.  Christianity, itself, has changed profoundly since 1996.  Purity culture was just coming in.  The conservative resurgence was largely—what?  ’98?  ’99?  In the SBC.  So this was not even there yet.  There were still female professors at Southern Baptist Seminaries in theology at the time.  

Rebecca: Yes.

Sheila: There were egalitarian professors in Southern Baptist seminaries at the time.  And they were all kicked out after this.  So evangelicalism has changed significantly.  And yet, she’s not acknowledging that.  You just can’t do that.  I don’t know how to explain how bad that is to do.  

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  

Rebecca: It’s just complete misrepresentation.  It’s complete misrepresentation.  And it’s so unnecessary.  This is why I just get frustrated.  It’s just so unnecessary.  There are so many great studies out there that she could have done Sally Gallagher as a part of her historical discussion and then talked about how that’s changed today.  But she didn’t because Sally Gallagher’s results are a lot more convenient to the conclusion of the book than what’s happening today.  What’s happening today blows the conclusion out of the water.

Sheila: Well, not really.  I mean her conclusion is still that it’s—

Rebecca: No.  But the idea of what it means to be a conservative complementarian today is different than it was in the 90s.  Again, while women still had positions of authority in the most conservative spaces.  Well, not like the IFB, but the most conservative mainline spaces.  Where, again, we didn’t have the Internet porn problem that we have today.  We didn’t have—everything is so different.  And this is why you’re not supposed to cite sources that are older than 10 years for up to date stuff.  And you definitely can’t do that if there’s more recent stuff available.

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.

Rebecca: Which is, again, one of the other problems, right?  So there are some times in this book where she’ll say things like, “Since 2012, research has demonstrated something.”  But then she only cites stuff from 2012 even though there’s other stuff available from 2014, 2018, 2020, 2022.

Joanna: Or we don’t even know if there is.  I presume there is because she says, “Since 2012,” but I don’t know because she didn’t cite it.  

Rebecca: Goodness gracious.  And there are some that we’ve seen.  There were some about church attendance where it was 2014 stats, and there was one from 2018 that she could have cited instead.  By the same group.  By Barna, I believe.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  So she’s just simply saying stuff that’s out of date when there isn’t a need to.  And, again, this doesn’t—this wouldn’t work in any academic—any normal academic situation.  This would not be considered high scholarship.  That would get you marked down in a first year course.  A first year course.  And what bothers me is she actually teaches in graduate school at a Christian university right now.  I find this really, really problematic because how are we supposed to have a positive effect on our culture if we can’t even talk their language and if our standards are so much lower.  

Rebecca: Yeah.

Joanna: Really interestingly—so she has a discussion, and she talks about how Christian fathers are so much more involved.  And she does earlier in the chapter cite a couple of studies—Brad Wilcox’s book, Soft Patriarchs, and then also another study about how evangelical fathers spend more time with their kids.  And then a few pages later, she says, “Hey, remember this.”  And then she talks about all of the things that this means, but she doesn’t cite evidence for any of those very specific things.  And then she says, “Here are my examples of how Christian fathers are rejecting careerism, and they’re way more involved in their kids’ lives.  And blah, blah, blah.”  And she says—the evidence that she gives is a couple of dads from Sally Gallagher’s research and then a man, who she knows.  It’s like—

Rebecca: Oh gosh.

Sheila: It’s anecdotes.  Yeah.  And she quotes from anecdotes in Gallagher’s book.

Rebecca: From the 90s.

Sheila: Which were focus group interviews.  They weren’t part of—you can’t say Christian dads are 34% more likely to do something.  It’s just, “Hey, she talked to this Christian dad, who says that he does this.”

Joanna: Yeah.  And she did have a couple of those citations earlier in the chapter but not in this particular part.  So it was just very strange.  I didn’t really understand it.  She also had a moment where she quoted herself instead of quoting John Chrysostom.  Or she quoted John Chrysostom, and then, instead of the citation going to John Chrysostom’s sermon where the quote occurred, she quoted her own book, which presumably has the quote cited.  I’m not sure.  But I found the quote within five seconds of Googling which was really interesting.  It wasn’t hard to find.  And I totally get it.  If you’re quoting from some obscure magazine that is no longer available, go for it and quote the secondary source.  But it was just very strange to see so many quotes of primary sources where the secondary sources were actually quoted when it didn’t need to be done.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Because typically, you’d cite the secondary source if you’re citing someone else’s interpretation of something or someone else’s commentary.

Joanna: Or if it’s a historical piece that has been archived that would be very difficult to actually get your hands on the original, and it hasn’t been digitized.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Sheila: Yeah.  It just isn’t proper citation.  I can’t explain this enough.  Okay.  Last one that we want to talk about is how she presents a lot of scientific data.

Joanna: Okay.  So I found this really fascinating.  This is something that you guys can do at home.  So you can look and see how recent are the citations, right?  Are we citing things that are really old?  Or is it more modern?  That’s an easy one to look at—look for.  Are we citing newspapers?  Are we citing peer reviewed journals?  Easy peasy to look for.  But really interesting one—so she has discussion about male anger and how men are angry, but they don’t realize how angry they are.  And so, therefore, we need to just have compassion on the angry dudes, who are scaring us.  It’s a very strange point.  

Rebecca: It’s a take.

Joanna: It’s a take.  But she has a lot of scientific points about how women have more pain receptors, and women feel more fear.  But she doesn’t cite journal articles. She cites a marriage book by Patricia Love and Steven Stosny which—or Stosny.  Sorry.  And then she has this quote that she quotes from their book specifically, and I just thought it was really funny.  “The males of all species of social animals have deeper, more resonant, voices specifically designed for roaring.  The angry male voice gets deeper, louder, and more menacing because it is designed to invoke fear of physical harm whether he wants it to or not.”  And so I read that, and I was like, “Roaring.  All social animals.  Hmm.  Have we heard of bees?”

Rebecca: Have we heard of mice and naked mole rats and stuff.  I don’t know.  Maybe they squeak deeper.  But yeah.  Bees, ants.

Joanna: No.  Actually, naked mole rates squeak based on the queen of the colony.  I Googled it because I Googled list of social animals.  And the naked mole rats popped up, and I Googled their roaring.  And they don’t roar, but they do squeak.  And it’s squeak is determined by the queen.   

Sheila: So it’s completely the opposite of what these guys say.  Yeah.

Rebecca: Oh my word.  But also lionesses roar.  Lionesses roar too.  Women roar.  

Sheila: They also do the hunting.  And this is—I mean it’s just a little throwaway line, but it’s like she cited—she did a scientific finding without citing any actual scientific sources citing a marriage book instead.  And the scientific finding isn’t even true.  

Joanna: And it’s logically not.  It’s obviously false.  If you think about, “Wait.  What are social animals?  Do they roar?  Ants do not roar.  Okay.”

Sheila: Right.  And, again, and I want to read—as we wrap up, I want to reiterate I do believe that she really meant well with this book.  I think it’s an important conversation that we need to have which is what is God-honoring masculinity.  How can we encourage that as a church?  How can we encourage that as a culture?  How did things get off the rails?  How do we fight against abuse?  These are all super important, and I’m glad she’s starting this conversation.  And she’s doing what a lot of people haven’t done which is she’s trying to trace the roots of it through history.  And it’s a really ambitious project.  A really, really ambitious one.  The problem that I have is that it just isn’t done to normal scholarly standards that would pass even a first year university check in most secular universities that are good.  And when I see so many Christians praising this work as being scholarly, it makes me really worried that we aren’t going to be able to engage with the broader culture because we can’t even work to their standards.    

Rebecca: Yeah.

Sheila: And we need to do better, people. 

Rebecca: And we can do better.  That’s the thing.  We can do better.  There are Christians who are doing better.  

Joanna: Yep.  And I think it’s difficult when we discover that we’re wrong.  Right?  People don’t typically change their minds.  There’s lots of research on people’s opinion changing, and it’s pretty rare actually.  What tends to happen when we see a large societal change in viewpoint is that actually people who held the opposing view died out.  That’s—

Rebecca: It’s seriously hard to change our minds.

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  It’s really very difficult.  It takes a lot of courage.  A lot of courage and a lot of bravery.  And so what I just want to encourage folks who are listening and who are thinking, “Wait.  What are they saying about complementarianism?  Or how would I engage in culture?”  To actually engage in the scholarship in a deep way is risky.  Right?  Because it means that we may have to change our minds on something.  Maybe a very deeply held belief is going to be found to be not the case.  And so I just want to encourage our listeners that Jesus says that He is the truth.  And so if we’re following Him, we’re going to find truth.  And we know from Joshua, that the Lord, our God, will be with us wherever we go, and that, therefore, we can be strong and courageous.  And I just want to encourage folks that if we follow Christ we will come to truth and that we can rest in that.  That he is our Good Shepherd.  And I got the sense from reading the book that Nancy is very conflicted.  And I don’t know this.  This is what I got—a sense from the book is that she is conflicted and that she is dealing with a lot of cognitive dissonance.  And I just hope that she’s able to find a place of peace and rest. 

Sheila: Yeah.  And I hope that people will continue her work.  I’m glad she’s started this conversation.  And it’s an important one, and I hope we can continue it.  But Jesus calls us to use our gifts and to use them well.  And so let’s raise the bar because this world desperately needs Christ.  Religiosity is such a profoundly positive thing.  And the world doesn’t see that.  The world sees religion largely as a negative thing a lot of times.  We have so much to offer, but we can’t do it unless we raise our standards. 

Rebecca: I’m just tired of Christianity and the Gospel being something that is laughable to people in the secular world.  I firmly believe that we are called to be ambassadors of Christ.  That is something that I actually—I feel that very heavily that my job as a Christian—part of my job is to represent Jesus to people who don’t know Him.  And what happens when I show up to an engineering meeting with the picture of a house I drew in fourth grade?  I’d be laughed out of the room.  And that’s what we’re doing here.  And it’s hard because these are conversations that I’m sure everyone listening agrees.  We have to have these in the general culture.  We have to figure out this whole problem with toxic masculinity that’s going on.  We really do have to have this conversation.  And if the thing we’re bringing to the table is biased research, a complete lack of modern evidence, and us just kind of cherry picking stuff that makes our point and ignoring the parts of the research that we cite that directly opposes our viewpoint, we can’t tell the world that we care about honesty, integrity, or truth because we’re showing none of it.  And that’s why I get so mad about this stuff because I see this directly as a facet of our ambassadorship of the Gospel, of Jesus.  And I see it as us dropping the ball over and over again because instead of submitting ourselves—and this is what submission means.  Instead of submitting ourselves to the same standards that we hold other people to, instead of submitting ourselves to the checks and balances and being humble and recognizing that maybe our biases might be clouding our judgment, instead we say, “Well, they all must be wrong.  And I’m just going to look for the stuff that I agree with and call it research.”  I’m not saying that’s what necessarily happened here, but it’s hard to make a case that it isn’t because there isn’t a single opposing modern journal article from the last five years—or last 10 years, let’s say.  I don’t know how long she’s been writing this book.  I highly doubt it’s 10 years.  It was shocking.  And it’s saddening.  And I think that in the next iteration of this conversation I think we can hold ourselves to a higher standard.

Sheila: Yeah.  I really hope we do.  Just think of the difference between how C.S. Lewis was seen and how modern Christian scholars are seen.

Rebecca: And I don’t disagree with it.

Sheila: C. S. Lewis was widely revered in the Oxford community.  And today’s evangelical Christians are not because we aren’t holding ourselves to the same standard.  We need to do better, and I believe that we can. I believe that we can.  So please you know what?  Go to universities.  Take the hard courses.  Don’t shy away from secular university.  Secular universities often have amazing Christian groups on campus.

Rebecca: That’s where I met my husband.

Sheila: Yeah.  That’s where I met mine too.  And the people that go to Christian groups on secular campuses are often really, really, really strong Christians.

Rebecca: And I know there’s this huge misconception that the secular world hates Christians.  They actually don’t.  I used to have lunch with my—the most progressive, your stereotypical leftist professors that my Baptist youth group would have warned me about.  I used to just go and have lunch with them and just talk about ideas like how much do we owe the other person.  And is there a God?  And we just talked about it.  What they don’t like is Christians like this who say, “Well, I can do this too,” and then don’t actually do it well.  They like Christians who think.  They like Christians who aren’t brainwashed frankly.  And so just be a non brainwashed Christian.  Don’t be afraid of the outside world.  Because with Jesus, this is nothing to fear.  There is nothing to fear, guys.

Sheila: Yeah.  And we can have a tremendous impact.  So let’s just not steer away from scholarship.  And let’s be wise about where we go to school.  Make sure that whether it’s Christian or secular you’re going to a school that has good academics.  Make sure the professors that you’re studying with have peer reviewed papers that they’ve published.

Rebecca: And not peer reviewed in your theological group’s journal.  

Sheila: What would count.  And let’s do better because the culture needs Jesus.  And we are Jesus’ ambassadors.  And so we need to be able to speak the right language, and we need to hold ourselves to the same standards.  So yeah.  So I know that was a heavy one.  Thanks for listening to this edition of the Bare Marriage podcast.  Really appreciate it.  Again, we will put links to our op-ed so hopefully they are out now.  We have two of them coming out.  I think one is coming out tomorrow, and one, hopefully, yesterday.  But we will put links to those.  If not, just look for them.  I will post them on social media.

Rebecca: They will be on the blog.

Sheila: Follow me on Instagram.  And then next week we’re going to take on, I believe—we’re going to look at the book, For Women Only, and we have another downloadable One Sheet.  So that will be a great one to listen in on.  So thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you next week on the Bare Marriage podcast.  Bye-bye.

Rebecca: Bye.