Sheila: Is the message from God to women that you need to follow your husband and obey your husband and that your main job is to submit? Or is the message to women from God that you get to follow Jesus wholeheartedly? That’s the question that we’re going to be looking at today on 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. One of the ways that we do that is by pointing out when so much advice given in evangelical circles has not been healthy, biblical, or evidence based, and that’s what we’re doing today. We’re going to take a look at Martha Peace’s book The Excellent Wife which sells really well in fundamentalist circles and in biblical counseling circles who often us it as a textbook. So that is coming up. Before we get there, I want to say thank you to the sponsor of this podcast the Kingdom Girls’ Bible. Honestly this is such a fun, amazing Bible. It’s great for girls let’s say ages 8-15 with all kinds of amazing colorful photos of women in the Bible that we sometimes don’t think about and so take a look at that. It’s just such a great way for girls to feel included in the story. I always want to thank our patrons who just let us do everything that we do, but also behind the scenes, they give us so much encouragement and help us keep going. They post stuff that I would never know about so they’re the ones who often bring things to my attention so that I can talk about them on social media, and it’s just my resource too. So you can join our patron for as little as $5 a month and get access to our exclusive Facebook group or if you just want to support what we’re doing within the United States and get a tax receipt, you can give through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation. You can also give outside in other countries too. You just can’t get a tax receipt. We’re working on that for Canada. Sorry about that. But the links to those are in the podcast notes, and now without further ado, let’s bring on our guests and talk about The Excellent Wife. I have been so looking forward to this. This is awesome. I am joined by two amazing women as we look at this book. I have Marissa Burt who together with her coauthor Kelsey McGinnis is writing a book I am so excited about on parenting. What’s the title of it again?

Marissa: In the Way They Should Go: How the Christian Parenting Empire Shaped a Generation of Evangelicals and Where do we Go from Here?

Sheila: So it’s kind of like GSR, The Great Sex Rescue, but for parenting, and I’ve been sharing Marissa on — and I share a lot of her stuff like if you like what we say about that, go follow Marissa because she’s just doing amazing things. Then we have the awesome Tia Levings, who was on the podcast last week with her new book The Well-Trained Wife. Tia, we’re recording this in July, and you just got it.

Tia: I just got it.

Sheila: So this is the first time you’ve held it. Yeah, hold it up again.

Tia: And the first time she’s been on camera. I refer to her as a she. I’m not sure why, but I love her and here she is.

Sheila: The Well-Trained Wife. Tia was on — was featured in the documentary Shiny Happy People coming out of the Gothard cult and has written some really important things just calling us to awareness of what’s going on in that world and how it isn’t as fringe as we think which I think is a really important message which is what we want to get into today as we look at the book The Excellent Wife by Martha Peace. Now before — I have a few opening things I want to say about it, but I want our audience to understand how bad this book is first. So before we get into like all the nitty gritty, just to set the stage, this book the main point of it is, you need to submit no matter what even if it means you suffer in marriage because suffering in marriage is good. I want to read a quote where she says this, “A submissive wife entrusts herself to God knowing that in difficulty God will give her the grace she needs to get through it at the very time she needs it. In the event it does not turn out well, the wife can have the comfort of knowing that she was pleasing to her Lord and whatever suffering she undergoes will be for doing what is right.” How does that make you feel, Tia?

Tia: I’m supposed to have language for that, but a flashback in time when my first thought was well every day is suffering, and I don’t want to just get through my life. Also the strange parallel of feeling utterly validated that my life was hard and it was suffering, but then trying to do the math of but it’s supposed to be that way. Instead of giving me a solution to actually make it better this entire study was about how to endure, and it’s the opposite of serenity which teaches you to change the things that you can change. So I was constantly gaslighting myself and suppressing myself through the process of this book in particular so I feel a lot of things come up when I hear a quote like that.

Sheila: And I’m sure we’re going to get into that some more later. Marissa, what was your overwhelming feeling? You’ve been on Instagram talking about getting ready for this interview so you’ve reread the book recently. What’s your overwhelming feeling?

Marissa: Just that encapsulates a lot of the book, and the starting place is that marriage is going to be suffering and hard. It’s woven throughout that it’s normative, that it’s not probably going to end well. There’s all these sort of subjective terms for — that leave a whole range of best case scenario this saddles couples with toxic codependency and just awful baggage that they’ll have to work through. Much more likely it’s enabling abuse of all kinds and baptizing it with this kind of language. It’s not just once. It’s almost every chapter there’s some version of that which I think just constantly normalizes it for the reader.

Sheila: Yeah, and that’s what I really want people to hear is that The Excellent Wife is not like Love and Respect or The Power of a Praying Wife. We’ve already talked about how toxic those books are, but those books when they mention abuse, it’s in passing. Stormie Omartian in The Power of a Praying Wife has like a list of things that God can heal your husband from and one of them is abuse, but it’s not like it’s a central focus of the book. Abuse is mentioned constantly in The Excellent Wife as something that you are supposed to endure. 

Tia: The irony that your book is The Great Sex Rescue, and there’s a picture of a life raft on the cover and The Excellent Wife is more like oh I see you’re drowning. I’ll talk to you while you’re drowning. Let me talk to you while you’re drowning. I’m not going to reach out a hand. I’m not going to actually help you get out of the water. I’m just going to talk to you while you drown.

Marissa: And tell you what you’re doing wrong. That’s what it comes —

Sheila: Yeah, and that’s the whole focus of this book. Every single chapter is here are all the things you’re doing wrong because as an older woman I’m supposed to correct you. So the whole book is about how to correct you and how other older women in your life should be correcting you and how your husband should be correcting you and how your church should be correcting you, and even how you can correct your husband as long as you do it in this exact particular way. But it’s like your entire life is correcting everybody around you.

Marissa: And that latter felt especially rich to me because all this setup of clearly everything is deferring to the husband, like everything. She is very clear down to the tiniest details, the length of hair I think she says. Everything. She says catch the little foxes, misquoting this Bible verse to sort of say every little detail matters. In this context then she kind of has the audacity to say but when it matters give your husband a biblical reproof as though those two things could ever go together. In this scenario, she’s trapped women. Oh, now it’s on you again. It’s your responsibility to then reprove in this very dangerous situation.

Sheila: It’s all a mess. So let’s put a lid on that because we’re going to get into the content of the book in a second. I just wanted our listeners to hear like this is really bad and for you to believe us first. There’s two things —

Tia: I have a question. I’m sorry. I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have to ask you girl-to-girl, woman-to-woman, do you believe her name is real? My very, very first take on her was that has to be a fake name.

Sheila: Well, her husband’s name isn’t that because hasn’t her husband written stuff and his name isn’t Peace, is it?

Tia: No, I think it’s part of the gaslighting. I think the name itself is teaching us —

Marissa: Oh, that’s fascinating.

Tia: Martha in the Bible — I’m really sorry to interrupt you, Sheila. I know I derailed your point, but this is from the top. I want to go from like what’s your very, very first impression of this book? I was like that can’t really be her name. Anyway.

Sheila: Yeah, so I don’t know. I don’t know. If any of our listeners know, you can let us know.

Marissa: Please tell us. It’s what she speaks and teaches under so if it is a pseudonym it’s what she has adopted as her public facing persona.

Tia: As part of the manipulation is how I took it. Yeah. You’re going to find peace which of course there is no peace. Okay, I am sorry.

Sheila: That’s okay. Peace, peace, when there is no peace. That’s actually a good title for this podcast. Peace, peace, when there is no peace. Okay, so two quick observations about the book. Number one man this badly written. Like it’s really — okay, as much as I dislike Love and Respect, The Power of a Praying Wife, For Women Only, all those books, at least you know an editor has gone through it, and there is kind of an argument. I don’t agree with the argument. I think it’s repetitive. I think it’s dumb, etc., but there is kind of — this is really atrociously written. 

Marissa: (inaudible).

Tia: I got it in the context of a time in my life where I called them the basement books were hitting our shelves. These were books that were self-published at home, and they would include Michael Pearl’s entire catalogue, Doug Wilson before Canon Press or when he was starting Canon Press, and so we were getting them at homeschool conventions, and they were all very pretty crudely published which became a flag for me like an editor has not seen this. No one has vetted this material, but so I actually like — in some ways this cover always reminded me of I think it’s supposed to be a prayer lace, but it reminds me of a teddy. It looks like lingerie to me. You can hardly read the font, and I’m going to show some of the pages. It’s — you can’t read that. I mean it is backwards on the screen too, but everything from the writing to the typesetting to the presentation is not — hasn’t been vetted. No one has looked at this.

Sheila: And yet is sells really well. People often ask me how do you decide which books to take on? We do have a list. People send us lists of books. We keep the list, and then basically we just go to Amazon, and we start at the top, and we go down based on Amazon ranking. So we kind of try — it doesn’t always work that way because sometimes there’s topical things I want to do, but so the fact that we’re doing this book right now means that this still sells really well. It tends to be around the 10, 11,000 mark on Amazon which is really high. It’s really high. So this book still does sell. A lot of people have never heard of it because unlike Love and Respect which is toxic but it’s promoted by all the big Christian publishers. Emerson Eggerichs — or like Christian Media, Focus on the Family, etc. all of those places love Emerson Eggerichs. He speaks at counseling conventions, etc. Martha Peace is really more known in this fringe group where they don’t read anything else, and so they don’t know this is badly written because they’re only allowed to read this certain subset of books which were all really bad.

Marissa: And I would say it really matches with them. It is — I think it’s part of the branding as well. It’s supposed to be this no nonsense almost concordance style. It’s very — some of it is verbatim. She quotes in the beginning. I recognized a lot of these names from the parenting resources coming out of biblical counseling. A lot of the same players and they use the same format of question and answer and Bible verse, and I’ll answer the question you’re not even asking. It’s very — it’s their own — it’s an own style from within the community, how biblical counseling communicates.

Tia: I’m so glad you said that, Marissa, because that — as a new reader, as a young wife that was handed this, that format was part of the affirmation that I was in a safe territory. The part of The Excellent Wife ministry is that it’s passed woman to woman so the Titus 2 model of the older woman teaching the younger woman in the book, but also it’s passed that way. It’s spread that way and a few other ways in churches. They all affirm one another’s work by that familiarity and that repetition so I’m really glad that you picked up on that and that you pointed it out because I think younger me needed to hear that’s why you trusted it when it didn’t make sense.

Sheila: And it is right in the middle of this biblical counseling world, and that’s the other thing I want people to understand. So there’s several different types of counseling. Who wants to describe this? Can anyone describe the difference between — okay, Marissa, what do you think the difference is?

Marissa: Because I am becoming more and more convinced that we are under considering how influential the biblical counseling, nouthetic strain of thought is in mainstream evangelicalism, and it started in the ’70s with Jay Adams, Dr. Jay Adams. You may be familiar with. He wrote Competent to Counsel, and his whole kind of premise was that psychology, the whole field of psychology was at odds with Christianity and what the Bible taught so they could not coexist. So he kind of created this whole other approach to dealing with problems is how it’s typically talked about — life problems. They reject any kind of therapy, typically any kind of medication, anything like that, and instead the Bible is viewed as literally life’s instruction manual. Many of them will use the example of an appliance — a home appliance and say in the same way that you have an instruction manual for your appliance, you have the Bible. The idea is that people are then trained under these principles to counsel others which this is a great example of that. It’s basically telling people what they’re doing wrong and telling them to examine the sin in their life. It goes under the term nouthetic counseling, ACBC. I think that’s the Association of Christian Biblical Counseling I think counselors. It used to be NANC. So they’ve shifted a little bit their labeling to try and rebrand. I always tell people be wary of biblical counseling because there’s a distinction between a licensed mental health professional who is a Christian who might with your permission be willing to weave in discussion of faith and a biblical counselor which may just be someone trained inhouse, buying a $30 Jay Adams course online, that sort of thing. Martha is very clear when she writes her introduction first that she’s sitting under the authority of these men she names, these pastors, because she could not have authority of her own as a woman. It really reads like she’s kind of regurgitating their teaching. I don’t know when she wrote this book, but she started counseling other women two years after her conversion. So I think it’s fair to say she was kind of swept up in this as a young Christian and then just began to tell other women the biblical counseling approach here. She quotes directly from Lou Priolo, from Jay Adams, from others who I was shocked show up in Ted Tripp’s Shepherding a Child’s Heart, Ginger Hubbard’s Don’t Make Me Count to Three. They quote the exact same resources about anger, about authority so exactly as Tia said, these are all circulating kind of lending each other credibility, but it’s all a little bit of smoke and mirrors because they’re all quoting each other.

Sheila: Yeah, exactly. I want to stress too. One of the big things biblical counseling believes is that everything can be seen from a faith and sin lens so either you don’t have enough faith or you are sinning so if you are in an abusive situation the answer is not let’s figure out how to get you out. The answer is let’s examine yourself to see what you’re doing wrong and are your attitudes in line because you need to always be joyful. Emotions are bad, and we’ll talk about that in a minute, like anything negative fear, anger, loneliness, anything like that is a sin, and instead we need to go back and remember that God is great. So if we aren’t joyful constantly, then we are in sin. So there is no trauma lens. There is no justice lens. There is none of that, and I mean — whenever I say this — I understand that there are some wonderful biblical counselors out there because there are, and I’ve known some. But if you truly want to counsel and you truly have a heart for helping people and you are a counselor, please go back and get licensed. If you are one of the good ones, then go back and get licensed so that you can also do this properly. In Canada, you’re not even allowed to call yourself a counselor unless you are licensed, but in the U.S. or at least — I think it varies by province. It’s confusing. I know where we are a biblical counselor cannot be a counselor. They can’t say that. They have to be a coach or something different, but in the U.S. — if you’re not licensed, counselor is a word that is protected. But in the U.S. that’s not true and so sometimes — you don’t always understand that the counselor you’re seeing isn’t licensed. So there is a big difference, and you can go to seminary and actually get a master’s degree in biblical counseling and not be licensed. At Master’s Seminary, the Southern Baptist Seminaries that used to do licensed counseling, they’ve now turned to biblical counseling so this is spreading. On the biblical counseling websites, I found so many positive reviews of The Excellent Wife so like this book is straight in the heart of biblical counseling. So as a Southern Baptist church expands its biblical counseling and gets rid of all licensed counseling training which is what they’re doing then this book is going to become more popular because it is the marriage book in biblical counseling. So that’s why we’re doing it. All right so with that intro, let’s get into the meat of it. So let’s talk idolatry. Can we do that? I’ll just give a few examples, and I’m not talking about how she says that women are idolatrous. I’m saying that she is idolatrous because she tells women that you are supposed to obey your husband, not God, and that your role is to glorify your husband, not to glorify God. How do people not find this awful? I don’t get it.

Tia: I found it awful, but I also had no power so the context again I’m going to pull into the context of you’re already in a submissive authoritarian power structure of top down. If you’re lucky, you get to step outside and go to a counselor. We’ve established your options there are going to circle back on you and bite you. They’re going to stab you in the back, but it’s a big deal to even get to step outside of your marriage enough to go to a counselor which is why it’s so important that what happens in churches actually helps relieve suffering not compound it. But the context of that where I — if I’m reading of course, my husband equals God at that point. My authority equals God. It’s a straight line up, and so I’m in line with that teaching when I’m hearing that. I’m not hearing that it’s another God at all. That’s something that dawned on me — I don’t know — ten years after I’d been out of it. I was like, “Wow, that’s idolatrous.”

Marissa: Well, I was given this book as a 22-year-old wife in the mainstream, nondenominational church. I did not come from a background that normalized any of this and I ate it up as a newlywed because I sincerely wanted to please the Lord. I mention that because I’ve heard from many women who on their own did this and oh boy did it cause problems down the road, but later I remember probably five years in, my husband had no idea I was digesting this, and he was a little bit — I mean he knew I had gone to this Bible study but did not know these kinds of principles. I think there’s a layer of this that plays into the way these materials are primarily marketed to women, and you’re always given a resource, and you’re always given a way to improve yourself whether it’s as a wife or as a mother so the stage is set a little bit. If you have anything in my — I hadn’t worked through anything at age 22, anything in your background that sets you up for codependency, enmeshment, bending into something, this feels right in a certain sense. I remember sitting in that room and most of the other women were talking about how they threw — had thrown that book across the room, how they hated it, but I returned to that several times over the first five years of marriage because if anything felt distressing you had no tools. So you’re like well I’d better try harder. I must do something more, and the certainty is really appealing I think. So I think it lands differently, but I’ve heard from — I’ve been posting about it — I’ve heard from multiple other women very similar to my experience where this was something they were kind of dutifully doing and unaware, kind of self-adopting different things. I don’t know how better to say that.

Tia: Yeah, I relate to that because this is under the umbrella of what we can do something with. Like oh I can listen to an older woman. I can take her advice. I can use this tool, and it’s — there’s this other aspect to the submission mindset that women have all this potential that’s not getting used. We have all this capability and resourcefulness, and so at any time when you get to exercise it, it’s like here’s a lane that’s okay. So I’m going to be the best submissive wife possibly, and I’m going to follow God, and I’m going to receive his blessing. If my husband doesn’t know all the ins and outs of it, it’s okay because I’ve gone to the Lord in prayer and done these things.

Marissa: I’m going to be excellent.

Tia: Definitely.

Marissa: The treadmill of Christian excellence really supports this. Mediocrity is not an option. She sets that up again and again with like the strawman. This way is biblical, but you may not be a real Christian frankly she talks about if you don’t fall into this because she’ll even say like if you’re a real Christian, God will give you the grace you need. I mean she says kind of like if you’re truly a Christian in several places, and I thought that was interesting. So that idea of like maybe I’m not a mature Christian if I have a problem with this. Real, mature Christians would take this hard road and would do more.

Tia: It’s a subtle shame isn’t it? That’s a subtle —

Marissa: A subtle shame. (inaudible) ensnared with it anyway.

Sheila: I want to pick up something you said, Marissa, which is like you read this and you were sucked in. Let’s talk about why people are sucked in by this because seriously every single chapter in this book has the same message. You need to submit to your husband’s authority and do what he says basically. I mean I could write the book in four sentences. That would pretty much be it. So every single chapter saying the same thing, you do what your husband says, and you’re supposed to be happy about it. But I think the way that she gets women in is that probably half the book is Bible verses, and maybe that’s an exaggeration, but it’s a lot. There’s pages upon pages. Every time she makes a statement, she has like this list of Bible verses which makes it sound like well you can’t argue with her because this is the Bible. That’s — when I looked at the reviews on a lot of the biblical counseling sites, that’s what they kept saying. This book is so richly based in the Bible. It’s so grounded in Scripture. Just because you use a Bible verse does not mean the book is biblical or that it actually has the heart of Jesus.

Tia: Thank you.

Sheila: Because to me this book found every single verse you could possibly find about obedience and leaves out every verse I can think of that shows Jesus’ compassion and care and God’s heart for justice. I’m parachuting in here to talk about what is a biblical woman? So often in these books they say they are giving the biblical advice towards womanhood, and yet, they’re ignoring actual biblical women. So we have awesome merch called be a biblical woman where we talk about all the different women in the Bible and what they did. They were not just obeying their husbands. They were obeying God, and they were serving. They were showing hospitality like Lydia. They were exhorting like Phoebe. They were serving like Martha, protecting like Abigail. They were teaching like Priscilla. They were working hard like Tryphena. They were speaking truth like Hulda. They were seeking justice like Tamar. They were setting boundaries like Vashti. So if you want an actually much bigger picture of what it means a biblical woman, and if you want to encourage your daughters, your sisters, your small group leaders, your women’s ministry leaders, whatever, we have mugs, totebags, canvas things for your wall. We have stickers. We have all kinds of things in our line so do check that out. The link is in the podcast notes.

Marissa: Yes, proof texted verses everywhere. It’s the nouthetic way I think.

Sheila: But then you can’t argue because it’s the Bible. It’s like no, no, no. It misses Jesus. I keep saying this, and I want people to hear me on this. The Bible is not the word of God. Jesus is the word of God. Jesus is the word, and we interpret the Bible through the lens of Jesus, not Jesus through the lens of the Bible. So many people have gotten that really wrong because if it doesn’t match up with the heart of Jesus, then it’s not right. None of this matches up with the heart of Jesus.

Marissa: It serves — I wanted to — I read this book recently.

Sheila: Yes, we did a podcast with Scott Coley.

Marissa: So maybe he talked about this.

Sheila: End of July. End of July.

Marissa: I thought of this when I was reading it because he talks about motivated literalism and the way Bible verses are used in complementarian thinking. There’s a whole chapter on it. It’s well worth reading, but he says this, “Here’s the argument. One the Bible is true. Two the Bible confirms my moral beliefs. Three therefore my moral beliefs are true.” That is on repeat throughout this book of it’s a motivated literalism. There’s a presupposition. It’s almost like someone opened a concordance and then found all the verses that they’re using to support that presupposition, but it is compelling when you read it. If you’re reading it, you think oh but this is scriptural even though they’re really — many of them are just ripped right out of context and aren’t even relevant to the points they’re supporting.

Sheila: Yeah.

Tia: I think you just hit something, Marissa. So you just said it’s almost as if someone wrote down what they said and then opened a concordance to see what would — that is how I was taught. So if that’s — that’s the flip isn’t it? We should be opening the Bible to see what it says, opening the concordance to see cross-references and where else this shows up so that we can be shaped by what it says not the other way around. I’m just having a little mind blow right now.

Sheila: We did a podcast on how Emerson Eggerichs misuses Scripture a while ago, and he does that. It’s obvious that must have been what he did — that he just pulled up every use of the word respect because in two different places in his book he quotes positively as if we’re supposed to learn from this people saying stuff about respect in Scripture stories when those people are the bad guys in those stories that we’re not supposed to emulate. One of them is in the first chapter of Esther when it’s the pagan leaders of the country that are saying we need to get rid of the queen or else the wives might think they don’t have to respect their husbands. He’s quoting this positively. Another is from an Old Testament story, like — so I’ll put a link to that podcast, but this is what people do I think. I think they just type in a word in a concordance and pull up any verse and just take it — rip it completely out of context.

Tia: I was taught that way from 13. I’m having such an epiphany right now. It’s one of those moments where I didn’t realize there was another way because I went to — my pastor was the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. I was not in a fringe group. I was in the biggest megachurch in the southeast, and I was taught to do exactly what you just said — pick a word, look it up in the concordance, and use every reference. I mean it’s how you end up with the babies bashed against the rocks, and you’re wondering how can that be a good thing. It’s not a good thing, but baby showed up in concordance, and so — sorry, I’m not —

Sheila: Tia is processing.

Marissa: Can I share an example that just solidifies this from her book?

Sheila: Yes, yes, please do.

Marissa: Okay, she in “The Wife’s Sorrow,” her last chapter which just broke my heart. I thought this whole book is a wife’s sorrow, but anyway she quotes John 16:6 when Jesus tells the disciples, “Sorrow has filled your hearts.” She gives no other context in that. She says they were overwhelmed with sorrow.  She goes on to say, “The passage in John 16 does not tell us but perhaps the reason the disciples were overcome by their sorrow is because their response to their circumstances were sinful. If their sorrow had been godly, their hearts would not have filled with sorrow. They would not have been overcome by this emotion.” I thought wow if that doesn’t show the thought. Rather than saying Jesus is observing their humanity, their sorrow, their grief. Honestly they are humans like the almost robotic calculation is well I know sorrow can’t be good and certainly not to be overwhelmed by it so they’re probably sinning. I just thought it was wild that she outrightly named that without a pause, and that approach really dampens any curiosity to the Scriptures as well. It’s really sad.

Sheila: Yeah, yeah. It totally is.

Tia: I read that on the heels of my daughter dying, and I was dealing with the church I was in did not want me to continue grieving. They — I was supposed to move on and was having a hard time doing that. Like eight months after is when I was handed The Excellent Wife and told to read it, and we were studying it at church. So I mean it’s right in line with what you’re saying there.

Sheila: Can I just say — and you and I talked about this last week, Tia, but when my son died — and our children died of the same thing. It’s quite the story — both of our children had hypoplastic left heart condition, and they both died after surgery, yeah, about the same age so really strange. But when my son died, my church assigned me several people that would just come and sit with me and talk with me for months afterwards. It was actually — it was really beautiful. So if you’re in a church that is telling you get over it because your child died, just know that there are churches that will assign people to just come and sit with you and bring you food and grieve with you.

Tia: And that your sorrow is not sin.

Sheila: Yeah, yeah, okay, well you know what, let’s move on from that. I’m going to come back to the obey thing because I had some more to say, but since we’re talking about feelings.

Tia: Emotions.

Sheila: What do feelings — because feelings are a problem, people. Let me read you a quote. “There are wives who have husbands with them and yet they are alone. Perhaps their husband is withdrawn, aloof, or hardly ever home. He may be very self-absorbed and inwardly focused. The wife may be bitter and feeling very sorry for herself. Her self-pity may be fueled by an idolatrous desire for intimacy with her husband.” So, ladies, if you’re sad because your husband is withdrawn, aloof, hardly ever home, self-absorbed, inwardly focused, and of course, she also talks about husbands who hit their wives, husbands who are harming their wives, husbands who yell at their wives, husbands who are abusive, that’s all part and parcel the same thing too. Remember that the problem is that you have an idolatrous desire.

Tia: Yeah, that includes I would say now if some older wives were me, I would say that includes if your husband is stonewalling you, giving you the silent treatment, can’t handle emotional intimacy or physical intimacy, and so he’s just neglecting you. There are a lot of things under that hat, and yeah, I mean — my heart breaks at the thought. Like it’s humanity. If you have any human longing, you’re sinning.

Sheila: Yeah, this book is filled with charts. There’s a lot of charts, and like on the left side, it’s like all the sinful stuff. Then on the right side it’s what you’re supposed to have instead along with Bible verses. The stuff that she says is sinful is just so interesting. So here’s just a couple. Wanting to be treated fairly. That’s a sinful idolatrous desire. Wanting to have your needs met. That’s a sinful idolatrous desire. Not wanting to have your feelings hurt is a sinful, idolatrous desire. She tells the story of a woman named Karen whose abusive, distant husband she feels like he uses her for sex, and he never talks to her. This forms the basis of one of the chapters, and Martha Peace at the end of that chapter pronounces that Karen has an idolatrous heart for wanting kindness.

Marissa: That’s horrible. It’s just horrible, and it — yeah, it’s robotic. It’s any self at all is selfish, is sinful. Your humanity is sinful, and it’s so destructive.

Sheila: So you’re going to this book and, Tia, you did. You went to this book to try and fix your marriage. You are feeling lonely. You do want your needs met. You are feeling like you just want to be treated fairly or even just treated a little bit better than you are because maybe fairly is too much to ask for but just a little bit better. You’re told that your feelings are sinful.

Tia: Yeah, at this point in my story I was — it was a literal tug of war inside of me because I had grown up hearing God was love, and that — my parents have an excellent marriage, and so I wanted that companionship and teammate aspect to it. But I also just had gotten into a desert of where there was no joy. I had joy and happiness when I was home alone with my children, but just in the vein of motherhood and as an adult woman, I was realizing there was more facets to life than just my parenthood so I was trying to put together this die-to-self teaching, realizing that okay anything that I want for me including a kind word is selfish, and so I need to die to it. When you really kill off any softness, kindness, goodness in the world, it leads to despair. That’s the fruit of Martha’s teaching is despair. She has an answer for that too. What happens if you want to kill someone or if you’re feeling despair? Which seems to be a common enough problem she had to put it in her pages which I wrote about in my book. But I had to — it’s written as an exercise model, and I had to go through her charts and exercises in order to attempt to comply.  I was — I would have been corrected and held accountable for my lack of submission at this point in my marriage so I was doing everything I could to be pleasing.

Sheila: It’s just heart-breaking.

Marissa: Yeah, and she repeatedly tells women to do that. Go ask your husband what you’re doing wrong, and kind of get a performance review from him. There’s self-review where you can review of — kind of review whether you’re being respectful enough. But I can’t even imagine in an abusive context. Go ask your husband what you’re doing wrong. I mean it’s incredibly dangerous advice.

Tia: I think if I had anything to say about The Excellent Wife it’s that right there. It’s that exception of if you’re in an abusive context. I think people who defend the book tend to think that that’s an anomaly, but the entire book is written to that preposition. You are in an abusive situation so here’s how you can cope with it. So that it’s actually a flip of itself. That’s the norm, not the exception.

Sheila: Yeah, exactly, and again, this is so different because the other books — the books that I’ve criticized before for ignoring abusive situations — she doesn’t. She’s talking about abusive situations while she’s giving all of this advice.

Marissa: Yeah, and as you mentioned, Tia, it’s normative enough that twice she talks about — I think twice in her charts she has if the wife is wishing she could kill her husband, if the wife is wishing she could kill herself, if she feels like she can’t go on, like the normalizing of that alongside with other things that you might find in other marriage books of we’re arguing — she pops that in. You’re like that note — that discordant note there of — are you hearing about this from a lot of your counselees, Martha? It makes me wonder.

Sheila: Yeah, wanting to kill your husband, that’s not normal. That thought has never in my life occurred to me, and I’ve been married for 33 years. I have never had even the slightest thought of wanting to hurt my husband.

Tia: But I’m learning at this age — I’m 50-years-old. I’m in a partnership now with somebody who is truly my equal and teammate. It’s just wonderful, and ironically, I knew him in high school. We met when we were 16 at church, but we deconstructed at the same time. What I’m learning is oh relationships don’t have to be automatic suffering. Love doesn’t have to be hard. If your marriage is hard, work on solving that. Don’t assume that marriage is hard because we hear that all the time. Marriage is hard like it’s just something you’re supposed to accept. No, not necessarily. If your chemistry is there and you know how to problem solve and everyone is working on their psychological health, there are ways to improve that where it’s not hard. It’s maybe a challenge sometimes to cohabitate or cooperate, but it doesn’t have to be the automatic ticket to suffering that I think I expected it to be.

Sheila: But what does it say about this community, this niche of faith, this bubble — I don’t know what we want to call it — where the biggest marriage book is written assuming that your life is terrible.

Tia: What it says is we have to back it up several points. I think this book is fruit. When they say examine the fruit, I think a book like this is called for because several steps ago they recommend you marry someone you barely know. They prioritized your virginity and your purity over any compatibility, and they didn’t teach you what to look for in a healthy partner. They didn’t give you any problem solving skills. They didn’t give you any psychological health resources. They didn’t give you any sex education, and so by the time you get here, all of that, you’re bearing the fruit of that. Now you’re like okay I’ve got these apples. What am I supposed to do with them? Then Martha is going to give you some answers for your worms, but it’s not —

Sheila: She says you need to love the worms. You need to realize that not enjoying the worms is a sin.

Marissa: Yeah.

Tia: Pretty much.

Marissa: And you need to do more. I think you’re exactly right when you said there’s no skills as well, like there’s either a moment of reckoning where the whole house of cards falls down because this isn’t sustainable. Her advice is for the wife to do everything for the husband more and more and more which will — it will never — it can’t ever work out. So I think it either leads to deconstruction. It has to. Or yeah, you have to knuckle in and do more, come at it from a different angle. I think it’s soul crushing because the philosophy is flawed. This shows up in the parenting stuff too. It’s all hierarchy and obedience, and blind, instant, unquestioning obedience to your own hurt again and again. It’s a theological framework underpins this. I think an erroneous theological framework, but all of it kind of is wrapped up together. I think if you remove any of the cards the whole house comes down, and they have an answer for that too. They have an answer for everything. If that happens and someone leaves, well, the problem was them. Maybe they weren’t really a Christian to begin with or maybe they were lured by the idols of the world and worldliness or whatever. There’s always an answer. I do think that certainly is very appealing to a lot of people and maybe keeps people in it. I always find it really curious to wonder about the leaders. Someone like Martha who is freely dispensing this advice. I don’t know. Is it just proximity to power? How does that work out where you feel so — I don’t know her feelings, but the writing voice comes so almost smug certainty.

Sheila: Debi Pearl does that too. You know, Debi Pearl calls — actually — calls her readers names, like dumb clucks and things like that. There is a lot of —

Tia: (inaudible) their own situation. They’re married to ferocious men, and they have to do it. It gives them proximity to power somewhat, but that — well, I can — I have to do something to get by in here so I’ll help other women. This is what I’m learning to do. This is using my gifts for God so I’m going to help other women also deal with their situations. They don’t know anything different so they don’t know maybe it’s not like this for everyone else. It’s part of that echo chamber, and like you said, it sets the stage for what comes next because if you feel, you’re going to be shunned. The streamline is there for us. They realize they will lose everything if they don’t, and I think in the case of Debi Pearl and Martha Peace and I would say Wilson’s wife, Nancy, like these are women who are probably pretty capable and smart women, but they’re going to use what they have to support this man model for their own survival. I always hear that. Oh, what would happen if you really admitted — like Debi Pearl had a very violent rape situation on her wedding night. He made her walk across oyster shells in her bare feet. If she ever really admitted to the horror of that, her world would fall apart too, and she cannot —

Sheila: Debi Pearl — the book that you’re referring to is Created to be His Helpmeet by Debi Pearl which is very similar to The Excellent Wife. It’s just even more fringe but sells very well again.

Marissa: They’re often recommended together.

Sheila: Yeah, they are.

Marissa: And they come in the communities  — you mentioned Wilson, and when you were talking earlier, Tia, I was thinking about this with this idea of redefining joy, of like choose joy, and so it’s almost — a lot of the terms feel like redefined like you may not be feeling joyful, but we’re going to tell you it’s joyful because you are confident. You are righteous and doing the right choice, and so there’s a lot of spin here to kind of try and self-gaslight and the community is gaslighting of like this is joy. This is a good marriage if these things are in place.

Sheila: But again, okay, so if the picture that Martha Peace is giving is you need to be reproved all the time because you are not submitting enough and you need to understand this is what you’re supposed to be doing you even if you feel terrible, if that is the main picture of marriage — like people are telling on themselves. They are telling on themselves, and if the biblical counseling organizations have read this book and have decided this — this is the message of marriage that we need to give out, they’re telling on themselves. We need to realize that. This isn’t good. The fact that they think this is normal means that their marriages are something that most people don’t go through, and if they don’t realize that, they are in such an unhealthy bubble. They have no moral authority to talk to us. They need help themselves.

Tia: That’s why it’s not fringe. When you do the math of how many counselors and pastors you just described, that’s the majority of them. I lost my second point, but I think it has to do with the importance of —

Sheila: Let me tell you what I mean by fringe because I say this word a lot. Like when we were doing The Great Sex Rescue, we decided that we were only going to review books that were by big evangelical publishers, and we were going to look at the best sellers. So The Excellent Wife wouldn’t have counted in that because it is by this fringe publisher. Really the only two books this publisher has ever put out that do anything are The Excellent Wife and then the one written by her husband, The Exemplary Husband. Okay, so —

Marissa: He’s actually not her husband by the way, just FYI.

Sheila: Okay, yeah, yeah. It just goes along with it. Maybe that’s why I thought her husband’s name was different. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. So this is a fringe publisher so fringe in the sense that it’s not mainstream evangelical, but it’s not fringe if you look at the effects because it is just so widely used in biblical counseling programs which are getting bigger and bigger. It’s so widely used in homeschooling communities which is bigger and bigger. So it still sells really well even if it’s not on like the typical Christian media. It is having an incredible effect, but in these subgroups where it is promoted what does that tell us about the marriages in homeschooling communities? I was in a homeschooling community. Okay, we homeschooled both our girls all the way through high school. I am not against homeschooling as long as you are homeschooling to give your kids more opportunities, not fewer opportunities. As long as you’re homeschooling for good reasons and it’s not just to shelter them from the world out there but because for educational reasons or family reasons, they can have more opportunities at home which is what my girls had. But you still need to have them involved in the real world, and so our girls did lots of jobs as teenagers. It was great. It was great. But our homeschooling community was weird, like it was odd.

Tia: What years was it?

Sheila: So we would have been active from 2000 until when would Katie — 2012 maybe?

Tia: Yeah, that’s the movement.

Sheila: 2013.

Tia: That’s where we become more — and I saw we because I was in that time period too of becoming more fundamentalist, becoming more nationalist and so there are a lot of things influencing that weirdness that Little House on the Prairie, McGuffy Reader, like there’s the trad wife movement. There’s a lot of things that are impacting that.

Marissa: And the cross-pollination that happens because you have Wilson’s stuff being handed out alongside Gothard’s. She uses the term early on defrauding, and I was like oh I’ve only ever heard that from the Gothard camp. I’m curious. There’s all this strange — people are introduced to these people via homeschooling I think in a lot of ways. They wouldn’t maybe in their local church or something, but they come across the resource table and find these.

Tia: Interestingly all the roads lead to Texas. We shouldn’t forget that. The seminaries are there. These places, these groups have headquarters there. They all have strongholds — not Wilson. Wilson is in Idaho, but spend any time here, he’s been in Texas. He certainly spends time there so it’s — there’s a lot of cross-pollination.

Sheila: Just being weird. There are some great churches in Texas. I spoke at one recently, but you’ve got to be wary and fight against this stuff because it can infiltrate very easily. So I want to talk about — getting back to how feelings are a sin — where she does talk about how a husband — you should be asking your husband how you’re doing. You should be willingly responding to his reproof. You should listen to his reproof. You should accept it. You should be open, and so you’re supposed to welcome it when your husband tells you all the things you’re doing wrong. You’re supposed to do this without defending yourself, and she says that if you feel intensely hurt by his words as he’s giving you reproof, that’s a sin too even if he is angry or unkind. So if he’s angry or unkind while giving you a reproof and you feel intensely hurt, you are in sin.

Tia: I will just say that it was — I held this book while I was being spanked. Like this book was in my life as I was being disciplined as a child by my husband, and my feelings about that were a sin and when I went to a biblical counselor at my church, he told me I was sinning by not honoring my husband enough. So when I hear that, I hear the far end, but my box is full of Me Toos so I think if we center survivors, it’s not so far end. I think she’s saying the thing without saying the thing.

Sheila: I want to talk about something else she says which kind of dovetails with Marissa’s work. Again this is a woman who throughout her book is talking about abusive husbands, men who hit their wives, men who yell at their wives, men who are evil. She talks a lot about evil men. But these same men — she says that you are to obey them, not God, and you are to obey them in everything. One of the things that you are to obey them in is disciplining children. So let’s talk about the repercussions of telling a woman that she has to obey her husband in terms of disciplining kids when her husband is evil and abusive.

Marissa: It enables abuse. I did a series recently. It was 20 reasons I think why Christian parents are unwilling to give up the corporal punishment of children, and this was one of them. I think that there are women in particular who turn to that because the stakes are too high for their children to not comply. If they’re married in this kind of relationship to an evil, abusive man, like they will — not only do they have — they have to walk that really fine line between not making him angry and making sure the children don’t escalate him. It’s awful that this sort of teaching normalizes like we’ve said and enables that and is kind of like you should accept that. You should — God wants you to accept that. That level of spiritual authority that weaves in spiritual abuse. It’s not just that we think — Martha thinks you should. God thinks you should do and requires that of you. It’s — it makes me angry when I read it for so many reasons, but one is the accountability never comes for these people. They’re writing this, profiting off it in many cases, and the receipt comes due for the families. It’s devastating. My inbox is full similarly from parents and adult children reckoning with how this played out from Christian family life parenting teaching, but they continue on. She was speaking relatively recently. I saw some YouTube clips of her — same message, same schtick, new generation. It’s devastating.

Sheila: Yeah, she was recently on — right now — she’s part of a thesis committee at Master’s University where they’re — where kids get to — or students get to present their theses, and she’s part of that too at John MacArthur’s church. She’s still there. She’s still doing all the stuff.

Tia: That’s why I think survivors speaking out is the only recourse we really have. She can preach those ideals, and those ideals are so attractive to people needing a formula and they need a formula. They need a structure. They need an answer to the chaos that they feel and the fear in their relationships, and if that’s the only voice that they hear, which is why this book keeps spreading because it is the only voice that will help women stay in the abuse that’s part of the system. Like it’s the go-to resource for a reason because it’s a giant enabler. Without a counter voice of hey this is the fruit of that. (inaudible) survivors. There is nothing for someone else to choose between while they still have the ability to choose.

Marissa: Yeah, from survivors and I think from the Christian community because I think our voices as Christians need to be loudest here, not overriding survivors. I don’t mean that, but loudest in rejecting this because I think there’s a tendency to be like well this isn’t really Christian or something. It’s easy to not all Christian this, but that’s not true. This is coming in Christian churches, from Christian voices, using Christian rhetoric, and I do think — I appreciate, Sheila, that you said there are churches that don’t operate this way, but I think we need to really be vocal in saying no. No, this is not okay. This is not good. We reckon with the harm and to whatever degree makes sense take accountability for the way Christian communities more broadly have enabled this.

Sheila: Yes, because pastors please in our survey for The Great Sex Rescue, 20,000 women, we found that when we looked at the most harmful teachings, and we asked women where they heard them. The majority of them heard them from other Christian media so like Focus on the Family, etc. or from Bible studies or from books. They didn’t hear them from the pulpit so it isn’t necessarily the pastors preaching this stuff. It’s that the women in your congregation and the men in your congregation are going to the homeschooling conventions. They’re going to — listening to Focus on the Family. Like that’s where they’re hearing this stuff. So if you’re not preaching against it, then they have no way of knowing that what these people are saying is different from what you believe because I was naïve. I figured I love Jesus. They love Jesus. We’re all saying the same thing. No, we’re not. No, we are not.

Marissa: And vetting — like I was in mainstream nondenominational church. This was the new married Bible study. They had a couple, and this was the book that they gave us all. I have no idea — I was only at that church for a year, but I have no idea if that was part of — if the pastors had ever vetted that or anything. So there is a way that I think we as a community can say invite people to a different way. Invite people to a different way.

Sheila: And remember that survivors matter. It doesn’t matter if it was one person who was harmed by this book or thousands. I’m pretty sure it’s in the upper tens of thousands at least that have been harmed by this book easily. You think about the generational trauma that that is having, that that is the fruit of this book. So let me give you some more examples. Okay, so just to let you know how bad this is. We do have a one sheet — downloadable one sheet that you can have. It’s free. I’ll post the link in the podcast notes where you can just fill it out, and it will come to your inbox. You can see all of these quotes that I’m giving. You can hand it out so that no one else ever uses this book. But she tells women — and she gives this list so I’m quoting — who are facing immorality, physical or verbal abuse, irresponsibility, threats of leaving, use of alcohol or drugs, that the way that they respond to their husbands should be by suffering. That it’s okay. It’s okay. This is all good. That it’s good to suffer personal embarrassment. That you should still think praiseworthy thoughts, that you should not review his thoughts over in your mind, that you should be speaking in a gentle and respectful way. So you’re being abused, and you’re told if you’re suffering personal embarrassment that’s a good thing. You should glorify God because you get to suffer for righteousness’ sake. You need to think praiseworthy thoughts even as you’re being abused. You need to not review his thoughts over in your mind so never think of them again. You’re not allowed to tell anyone else about it either because that would be slandering him so you’re not allowed to tell anyone else. You need to speak in a gentle and respectful way.

Marissa: I think it’s so good you spotlighted those, Sheila, because throughout the book — and I’ve heard this when I was reading reviews people would be like well she does say in chapter 14 get the authorities involved or something. Throughout the book, she pitches chapter 14 over and over again and all the (inaudible) ones. I get to that in chapter 14. Well, chapter 14 is really thin, and when you have all that buildup of all that teaching then you get to this chapter that very subjectively says well when it gets to be too much then you — and really it’s not even the police, it’s first go to the church.

Sheila: Yeah, and then the church might call in the police. It’s not even you.

Marissa: Yeah, so I just want to name that because even in reviews I read and Facebook groups people defending this book will say well no Martha does say that. No, that’s not legitimate because of the rest of the framing of the book so far enables all manner of abusive behavior, and then the chapter that finally gives a nod to that is subjective. It’s not crisply defined so it’s all up to the woman whose been under this to determine when is too far or the church leaders which as you mentioned, Tia —

Tia: Yeah, it’s a trap. It’s a trap. When you parallel this with the nouthetic counseling and the way the counseling department has been set up, there’s no resource. You go to your church and you feel this — a whole chapter in my book here, this section where I was like okay I’m going to tell the whole truth of this very embarrassing thing happening to me, and this man of God is going to help me get out. I’d been raised in that church. It was my daddy church. It was my father. My Father God was going to come rescue me, and no, he shut me down in less than an hour of you need to honor your husband more. Then I go home, and I try to digest that there is no way out. There is no where you can go when you’re told that it’s God. Where are you going to go? You know Psalms. If you go to the bottom of the sea, you’re not going to — he’s going to — you’re not lost. It’s a trap.

Sheila: Can I talk to our listeners here for a minute? I want you to really listen to what Tia just said. So she went to her church which was supposedly a good church. This was your SBC church, right?

Tia: Yes.

Sheila: So this wasn’t a super fringe church. This was an SBC church to get help, and she was with all of the very, very bad abuse, and you can read all about that in Tia’s new book A Well-Trained Wife which we talked about last week on the podcast and which launched just two days ago. So you can order it right now. So she goes and tells about this abuse, and she’s told she has to honor her husband. Women, maybe you’re not in an abusive relationship. Maybe you have a great husband, but if you are going to that church, you are giving your tithes, you are giving your volunteer hours, if you are a relatively healthy, great person, you’re giving your reputation to this church. You’re saying hey this church is safe because I am a safe person and so this church must be safe too. So people are staying in this church because you are there, because you are making the volunteer activities great, because you are giving money. I know it’s not just you, but you’re part of a system that’s doing that. If that church is then turning around and telling a desperate woman who comes in for help that she needs to honor her husband more, you’re part of that system even if you don’t realize it. So it is so important for all of us to know what will our pastor do if an abused woman comes in? If the answer is not immediately call the police and say I am not qualified to handle this and so I am going to suggest that you go to a licensed therapist who can help you and we’re going to get the authorities involved and we are going to give you any financial help we can as you try to get your life together or whatever, then your church isn’t safe. So we need to know whether or not our church would take — because a lot of us don’t know. If we have a great marriage, we have no idea what our pastor is going to say to an abused woman so please be curious. Please be curious.

Tia: It’s unfathomable — I know our church was on TV. Our church was big and shiny and wealthy and white and all the things. So it’s unfathomable to the good people who were there that anything bad could be happening, but they also didn’t really care to look. We had — it was right in front of them, this fraction of ultra conservatism that was growing in their midst, but rather than ask those questions that you just shared, they didn’t want to ask. They didn’t want to know. They just wanted to know that we were on top and doing the right thing. I know that’s — when you’re busy and your life is going on, and you’re trying to do all the things, you don’t want to get involved in heavy, hard things and — it’s a lot. I understand that it’s a lot, but that’s what congregations are when we bear one another’s burdens. Gosh, I mean my life would have been so different if in that moment, I had been swooped in and rescued. It was such an act of trust for me to say that and to write those words out, and it was my really cry for help, and my life would have been so different. So much suffering wouldn’t have happened.

Sheila: And for your kids too, not just you, but for your kids too.

Tia: For my whole family. The church had the resources to do it. It’s an extremely wealthy church, 11 city blocks in downtown Jacksonville, Florida. They had the resources.

Sheila: Okay, here she is saying okay yes you go to your church if you’re being abused and then the authorities might get involved, but at the same time, she says divorce is not an option, and if you refuse to work towards reconciliation, you’re being rebellious.

Marissa: And bitter.

Sheila: Yeah. So in all of these situations even physically abusive situations, and I don’t mean to say that physical abuse is worse than emotional abuse because emotional abuse is physical abuse since the body keeps the score —

Marissa: Thank you.

Sheila: — and emotional abuse does have long-term, physical consequences as well. But even in these cases, she is saying you must work towards reconciliation. The only hope she gives — it’s really odd. There’s this one place where she says perhaps if things are bad enough God may actually take your husband out of this world, like God may actually kill your husband. So the only hope she really gives is maybe God is going to kill your husband.

Marissa: And she gives — there’s two things. I wanted to ask you a question, but when you said that, Sheila, I wanted to ask you a question about the intimacy chapter, but when you said that, I wanted to say she also gives all these little false glimmers like that of like false promises like if you do it this way, your husband is more likely to listen to you or might be more likely to repent. Totally unsubstantiated, but they’re sprinkled throughout these little like false hopes to string — to keep people hopeful in the midst of despair. I wanted to ask you because you mentioned physical and emotional abuse but sexual abuse as well. Her whole chapter on intimacy I thought of your work which is so valuable, so important because it read like probably the script in so many of these books, but as I was reading that chapter which for those listening is as you can imagine is basically a woman can’t say no and needs to intentionally figure out how to be ahead of the game with providing sex for her husband. I noticed the word should over and over again, and I did a search. It’s all throughout the book. Should shows up 170 times like what you should do. A quarter of those are in the chapter on intimacy.

Sheila: Interesting.

Marissa: And I wanted to hear your thoughts on that chapter just —

Sheila: Yeah, you know what? Okay, this is going to sound weird. I read this book after reading another book on marriage, and I actually found her sex take not as bad as some of the others which is saying a lot because she actually does mention that women can feel pleasure. Okay, so she actually mentions that which is like oh okay well good for her because a lot of them don’t even say that. But it’s still a totally abysmal take. There’s this one point —  I was laughing at this. I mean you have to laugh or you’d cry, right? But she’s talking about how you need to make time to have sex with your husband, and you need to prioritize that time. She gives the example of if you’re on the phone with a friend tell her you’ll call her back. So I just get this — so you’re on the phone talking with a friend, and your husband is like I need sex right now, and you’re supposed to hang up. What kind of a marriage is that? Yeah, and it’s — there is this one point where she says here I’m going to get the direct quote. She says, “Even if his touch makes you feel nauseated — so even if his touch is nauseating — you need to focus on joyfully pleasing him.”

Tia: So again, I’m going to come back to context because context — so if you’re nauseated because your husband is touching you, that’s a body signal that something is wrong, and you’ve been violated.

Sheila: Yes.

Tia: And when you said what kind of marriage is that? That’s the question we need to be asking. She takes it for granted that you are going to be hounded. I think back to my younger self. I got this book — again right after I was told to wear a denim jumper with no panties underneath it so that my husband could have access whenever he wanted. I was trying to — my husband wasn’t that kind of guy. He didn’t care for access, but I was trying to figure out, “Well, are all the women at the homeschooling convention not wearing underwear then?” How is that modest? I was trying to do this math, but that question of what kind of marriage is that that you would say — you would even say that kind of advice, that you would be on the phone with a friend, and you were expected to stop what you were doing in order to do that. That’s what’s normal? Okay, if that’s what they’re calling normal, then run, run, run, run, run.

Marissa: And all the flags — like you said, the bodily response — are overridden from the get-go in this book. In that sense, it’s sort of like a book grooming because she sets up that objectivity and rationality is the biblical way and feelings are the sinful way. So when all these things that are a lot of them are red flags show up in the put off category of what you — of the sin you need to put off. I was reading about so many of them are like yeah a flag of why? Why is maybe a woman feeling lonely or detached from her husband?

Sheila: Or scared. Or scared.

Marissa: Or scared, or any of these things. These are God-given response signals in your body, and your emotions, and your mind that it’s not well. You’re not safe, but again it’s the elevation of again like you mentioned, Sheila, her own — Martha’s idolatrous approach, the elevation of this ideal of husband as lord essentially and the ideal of a submissive wife trumps all. It’s so insidious because it’s such a trap in that sense as well. Anything that could be an invitation to get curious or to be like what’s going on or to find a way out is preemptively dampened like it’s probably sin. 

Sheila: I just need to say this is right in line with biblical counseling because this is what biblical counseling says is that any emotion other than joy and gratitude at any time means that you are not fully submitted to God and that your faith isn’t right. So if you have any negative emotion like fear, anxiety, sadness, etc. your — the problem is you as a Christian, and we need to fix it as opposed to saying maybe our emotions are God-given because God experiences all of the emotions too, and he shows all of the emotions throughout Scripture. Maybe your emotions are God-given and they’re there to tell you what is happening in your life and hey I’m supposed to pay attention to something.

Tia: (inaudible). This makes me wonder about Martha’s background. So, Marissa, you said that she started this two years after becoming a Christian, and that’s — I’m reminded that the abusive pastors that we talk about in the SBC and in other denominations, they all have a pathology or proclivity before they’re pastors and it comes out later in their abuse stories of well that one liked boys — little boys. He was a pedophile, and he became a pastor. So it makes me wonder like who was she before this. What solution did she find in this kind of pat answer structure? What is her marriage like? We’re not asking enough questions I think about (inaudible) what she is?

Marissa: And she talks about it a little bit, which I thought is really curious. Two things, and I did listen to a little clip of her giving her testimony. She talks about it a little bit in the first chapter. But it jumped out at me because the language, and this shows up in Ginger Hubbard’s book and others, is so hard toward herself. She describes herself as being spoiled her whole life, as being an only child who was never — these are her words — who was never disciplined and allowed to do whatever she wanted in these different arenas, and it never satisfied. She in her words pursued worldly things, was considering an affair, like all these sorts of things. Before she had debilitating panic. She started getting panic attacks and had kind of a conversion moment. For her that regained peace. Who knows what more to the story is there but it always jumps out at me now when the harsh, self-critical language, like the inner voice comes out toward herself or toward the Bible characters. This shows up in Ginger Hubbard’s book Don’t Make Me Count to Three. She talks about Martha in the Bible as whining at Jesus and trying to manipulate him. Martha Peace does this as well, and so it’s almost like the lens is very self — deeply self-critical that comes out and then becomes their voice to mentor others as well. So I don’t know she doesn’t give a lot of details about her personal background. It’s a good question because I think —

Tia: I’m suddenly very curious.

Marissa: Yeah, there are reasons people choose it. There are reasons, and I do think it’s really appealing to new converts honestly like these sort of teachings are because —

Tia: Oh, for sure. It’s a solution. It’s a formula.

Marissa: It’s a solution.

Tia: Here are the rules for your happy life, but right back to my initial skepticism, my first gut reaction when I saw this book was is this even really her name and if I go back in time to young Tia who was like well find out. Find out if that’s her real name? What is her background? Why would she be so self-loathing? Why would — why is someone with so much self-loathing so confident to teach this formulaic approach and hold it up against other abusive teachers? Yeah, I know what my next project is going to be.

Sheila: Okay, I have two more points I want to make. The first one is — this is Tia’s favorite point, she talks about this a lot — let’s talk fundie baby voice. Fundie baby voice. So, Tia, why don’t you explain the phenomena? You talked about it last week on the podcast too, but let’s explain it again.

Tia: Yeah, fundie baby voice is an outsider term for what we used on the inside which was using a soft, sweet, feminine voice to make it very clear that we were nonthreatening, do any of our leading, or teaching, or coaxing in a very gentle — gentle spirit is one of the words for it. Keep sweet is another. Childlike is what I was taught with Fascinating Womanhood. Positioning, it’s a posturing, and it’s a vocal adaptation to not sound like an empowered adult woman who knows her own mind. You are instead a submissive, soft, malleable spirit in the home.

Sheila: And you can hear Michelle Duggar has it. This is a phenomenon that a lot of people have talked about how women in these circles often develop a voice that is very high — it’s high-pitched, it’s quiet, etc. It’s just interesting how throughout this book repeatedly she talks about how you have to have a gentle voice. You have to have a soothing voice. You have to respond with a gentle tone even when your husband has sinned or failed. A gentle tone of voice or a soothing tone of voice when your husband has sinned against you, that’s the fawn trauma response.

Tia: Exactly.

Marissa: Yeah, yeah.

Sheila: And you’re normalizing it.

Tia: You’re also affirming to your self-conscious that’s how you stay safe. That’s what happens.

Sheila: Yeah, and then putting a biblical spin on this. This is how God wants you to be. God — Jael — when we talk about biblical women, Jael was a biblical woman who hammered a tent peg through Sisera’s head. Zipporah was a biblical woman who chastised her husband, Moses, because their kids were uncircumcised, and she’s the one that did it. There’s lots of women in the Bible who speak up and say no, no, no, no, no.

Marissa: Well, even The Excellent Wife, which this jumped out at me with her little flower she has early on. She quotes Proverbs 31. Proverbs 31 says nothing about fundie baby voice, attitude. All the things in this — all the things she’s saying are the biblical wife, even if you want to make Proverbs 31 a checklist, which I think is a misinterpretation of Proverbs, it’s not this book. It’s totally outside the bounds even of what the Proverbs 31 wife is doing. Most of it is what she’s proactively doing with her work, her livelihood, her creativity. Anyway.

Sheila: Right. Yes, exactly. Okay, I want to end with this. As we’re wrapping up, I want to end with these thoughts. So this is other stuff that she declares is a sin because seriously this whole book is just declaring everything you could possibly do that’s healthy as sin or any self-protective things is a sin. She says that it is a sin to say that there is no hope for my marriage. It’s a sin to believe that this is more than I can take, and I’m feeling overwhelmed. It’s a sin to be self-protective. All of these things are sins. She gives no caveats for abuse or for chronic infidelity. Instead she tells women you have to battle for your husband no matter how long it takes even if it’s years. Yet this is the book that is the biblical counseling marriage book. This is it. So please, listeners, ask yourselves what does that say about the biblical counseling model? What are we going to do about it? So, Tia, you lived this. What do you want people to hear?

Tia: I mean what I took from that was that the institution of marriage was more important than my humanity, that staying in line was more important than my humanity, that nothing mattered to them more, and so today I speak about anti-fundamentalism which is always you are putting a person over an idea no matter what. That — people — humanity is more important than any institution. That any idea that needs to kill people in order to survive is not worth that loyalty. So my life now is devoted towards okay who is this prioritizing? What benefits from this? I think pastors turn to this. I think teachers turn to this as the go-to because it keeps women in line, it keeps women married at all costs. I’m not willing for women’s lives to be the cost that gets paid so that we can have the marriage statistic that they want that proves their system works. I’m just not going to live in service to that anymore. My favorite thing I think from this conversation was your point about Jesus and what Jesus teaches and that we read the Bible through Jesus’ life, not the other way around. I think that’s an excellent criteria because Jesus was human and had feelings and emotions and taught love and valued our humanity over the institutions that he came to break. So yeah, I think like ask yourself who is being served by any book — any book you hold in your hand who is being served by this?

Sheila: Yeah, thank you. Marissa, any final thoughts after you’ve read this?

Marissa: Just dovetailing on that I think it’s telling — it would be interesting to do a search on Jesus in this book because in nouthetic, biblical counseling he doesn’t show up a lot in those materials. It’s doctrine. It’s heavy doctrine, and it’s people speaking for God. Yeah, Jesus gave women dignity. He saw the individuals in front of him. He invited people to love others. It is not complicated. I think in that sense every book that has these charts and these lists, it’s just an exhausting way — you can almost feel it when you read it. For the Christians who — I want to say to the Christians who want to say this is so biblical, and I want to quote from Galatians and say, “Who has bewitched you that you have so quickly turned from the freedom of the gospel of grace?” Because Martha when she talks about grace in this book, what it is is if you’ve done it right and it’s worked for you, you can say that’s God’s grace. If you’ve tried hard enough and it’s worked. That’s not the free gift of grace. Jesus says it’s an easy yoke. It’s like come to me you who are weary. So I think the treadmill, the spiritual treadmill that this book and all the books that come from nouthetic teaching offers is not in alignment with the gospel of grace that comes through Jesus Christ.

Sheila: Thank you, and again, nouthetic — nouthetic counseling is just another word for biblical counseling, and biblical counseling is a misnomer because it’s not like they’re actually from Jesus. They just use that word. They’ve appropriated that word to make them sound good when really what they’re doing is just legalism and fundamentalism. It’s not emotionally healthy at all so yeah we just need to be aware of this, and I really didn’t want to do this book because I didn’t feel like I should because I feel — like I said we try to focus on books that are published by big Christian publishers and this one isn’t but the influence is growing. These “fringe” books are becoming bigger, and we need to keep our eyes open. We need to survivor centered like Tia who went through all of this, and please read her book The Well-Trained Wife which came out two days ago. If we are not specifically teaching against this stuff, the people in our churches can be sucked in. That’s what I’ve seen happen too like in our homeschooling group, people went to normal churches, and they started reading Debi Pearl Created to be His Helpmeet. So unless we’re specifically teaching against this, people are going to get sucked in, and it’s going to have terrible effects so yeah, we need to clean up our own house, and this is our house. So thank you for joining us, women. I love this conversation. It was so fun to meet you in person, Marissa, and then, Tia, I met you last week, but so great to see you again. So where can people find you? Let us know. Marissa.

Marissa: Oh, yes, I am across most social media platforms at mburtwrites, and I’d love to connect with you there.

Sheila: And your Instagram — you’re awesome. She does these — and Twitter both of them or X, whatever it’s called, who cares — she does these great deep dives, really thoughtful deep dives into parenting resources. I really appreciate that.

Marissa: Thank you. I’m going to do one on this because I was like (inaudible) I will be doing a deep dive. More Excellent Wife. You can find me there.

Sheila: Awesome, and Tia does major deep dives into fundamentalism. I love it. So, Tia, where can people find you?

Tia: Yeah, I’m tialevingswriter at everything and tialevings.com is my website.

Sheila: Okay, and we will link to all the social media stuff too so thank you so much, ladies. It’s been great talking to you.

Marissa: Thank you, Sheila.

Tia: Thank you.

Sheila: I really appreciate both Marissa and Tia joining us, and again you can get our one sheet download of The Excellent Wife and please email it, print it out, give it to anyone you know who is reading this book or recommending this book. Give it to any biblical counselor you know. We need to get this out of the hands of vulnerable women that it is going to hurt. I want to read to you an email that I got when I started speaking out on social media saying that we were going to look at The Excellent Wife so many people sent me their stories. Here is just a really typical one of how this book impacted a couple. She says this, “Since before we were married, he struggled with porn and lusting after people in his everyday life. Throughout our marriage, he brought all of that into our bed in the sense that he was rarely there because he actually wanted to be intimate with me but instead it was a legal release after he got turned on somewhere else. I finally reached a point where I couldn’t take it anymore, and I wasn’t willing to enable his sin. I started to recognize the abusive cycle the kids and I were trapped in. Thanks to the support of my parents we separated, and he seemed like he might actually be repentant this time, and I had some hope. We found out about a Christian rehab program for sex addicts, and after several months, we decided he should attend the program, and I would do the corresponding program for wives. My counselor had me read The Excellent Wife, and she knew the intimate details of our story, of his sin against me, and against our children. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time on what exactly was wrong with the book other than feeling like it had the huge emphasis on submission, and I was convinced that an unhealthy understanding of submission was a huge part of how I ended up trapped in an abusive marriage for so long thinking I was doing what God wanted of me when I covered my husband’s sin and struggles, when I submitted to his legalistic and drastic approach to discipline, definitely emotional and verbal abuse, and at times physical as well, when I didn’t go get counseling or talk to trusted family or friends because I respected his desire for privacy, etc. Looking back, I’m so frustrated that the place I thought was offering us hope and healing and freedom in reality was simply making the problem worse. So thank you for your work. It’s been instrumental in helping me see things with a healthy perspective. I’m in the process of a divorce now. He seemed better at first, but it didn’t take too long to see that he hadn’t really changed.” That’s what this book does. That’s the fruit because it’s not really preaching Jesus. It has nothing about the heart of Jesus in there. It is just condemnation after condemnation telling you that you need to submit to a sinful human being and obey him instead of telling you that your job is to glorify God and that God cares about you and that you’re supposed to be running after Jesus not running after a sinful human being and trying to get him to like you. Let’s go and be free, women. We don’t need to listen to this stuff. Let’s be free. Please take a look at our one sheet. We’ve got some resources on there that are much better. Take a look at our book The Great Sex Rescue for a real rescue and check out Tia’s book. I’ll be sharing Marissa’s when it publishes, but all of these things are in the links because we can do better. We deserve better and together let’s form healthy churches. Let’s get out of the toxic ones. Let’s stop supporting spaces that are promoting this toxic stuff, and let’s start elevating voices that are actually leading to good fruit and healing. Thanks very much. I’ll see you next week on The Bare Marriage Podcast. Bye-bye.