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 everybody, I’m happy.  I’m really happy.  We’ve got some great stuff to share with you today about a new paper that Joanna, Rebecca, Keith, and I have just published.  Joanna, Rebecca, and I did it with the help of Keith’s connections at Queens University and his amazing editing prowess and his academic experience.  And we’re all ready to tell you about that.  This has just been such a long time coming, and it just feels like we’ve reached a big goal.  And we’ve done it, and we are raising the bar on what counts as research in the evangelical church so that we can make things healthy, evidence based, and biblical.  And so I want to share with you today, in this interview with Rebecca and Joanna, just how we’re feeling and what we accomplished and why it matters.  And we’re also going to share with you just some of the things that have bothered us about what some other authors are doing with regards to science and just ask us, as a church, can we please not be afraid of truth.  And can we please be a people that has integrity and is honest and doesn’t try to just see our own biases be realized but actually is seeking out what is happening in the world, what is happening with people, how Jesus made us, and all of that fun stuff?  So I am very excited to share with you this interview and this celebration as we finish off 2024.  All right, Joanna.  Would you like to tell our news?

Joanna: We are published.  

Sheila: Yes.  In a peer-reviewed journal.    

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  And not just any peer-reviewed journal.  A really good one.  Yeah.  So we are in Sociology of Religion, and our title, which had—the goal with journal articles that I always have is to come up with a very punny title and then explain what it is after that.  So here is ours.  Sanctified Sexism: Effects of Purity Culture Tropes on White, Christian Women’s Marital and Sexual Satisfaction and Experience of Sexual Pain. Yeah.

Sheila: All right.  Yes.  And that was in Sociology of Religion in November 2024.  And yeah.  And it was pretty well received.  I know, at one point, we were the third most downloaded article on there overall.    

Joanna: Yeah.  I think that it’s—there—it’s also a back—we’ll see how it shakes out in the weeks to come for how—where it lands in their rankings.

Rebecca: Yeah.  But it definitely had a huge splash right at the beginning there.  So we’re thrilled to see.  We’re still at the beginning, and so we’re thrilled to see where it ends up.  But we got so many interview requests within 72 hours of it being published.

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  Yep.  It was very strange to get emails and be like, “Oh, So-and-so has 217,000 followers on Twitter.”  Okay.  Yes.  You can have an interview.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  So we’ve been featured in a number of places.  And this is just such a big deal.  I mean we’ve been working on this—well specifically, Joanna has been working on this for years.  And we wanted to get it out sooner, but the problem was we kept doing more surveys.  And we kept writing more books.  

Joanna: Yep.  And the other thing is that we wanted to get into a really good journal because we realized that—so excuse me, sociologists, I’m going to critique your field very briefly.  We realized that while we’re talking about evangelical marriage books and why there are all these problems the other problem is that the sociologists aren’t talking about this stuff.  These books sold millions of copies, and they’re—it hadn’t been covered.  And so we wanted to do a really good job, so we could get into a good journal and really start a new conversation.  We’re trying to also change the conversation in sociology, folks.

Sheila: Yes.

Rebecca: Yeah.  I know.  Joanna and I were looking at it.  And you just kept saying as we were editing this, “Why on earth haven’t all these sociologists of religion looked at the best selling religious books?”  People studying gender and religion and sociology, and they’re not looking at the books on marriage and sex.

Joanna: And they’re a dumpster fire.  So it’s really easy to write it up.  I mean it’s not really easy.  I had to also—essentially though, guys, I had to become a sociology expert, right?  I had to read the books and interact with the literature, and so it took some time to really do that.  And so we were actually able to do some—there’s a—anyway, I won’t get into the weeds for what we were able to do.  But I think we were able to come up with a paper that is really interesting both from a oh my goodness dumpster fire books but also how do sociologists of religion understand evangelical marriage.

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  Absolutely.

Sheila: Yeah.  Because we really want academia to pay more attention to this because these books—the 13 books that we looked at for The Great Sex Rescue have sold—I think we calculated it one time.  It was between 30 and 40 million copies.  I can’t remember exactly what the number was.  But it was really high up there.

Rebecca: Yeah.  If Canada is—comparable to our entire population.

Sheila: Yeah.  The entire population of our country has—these books have sold.  And so this is a really big deal, but it’s so fringe.  If you’re in academia, if you’re outside of evangelicalism, you don’t realize how big these books are.  And so people just haven’t necessarily looked at what they’ve said, and so we were one of the first ones to do that.  So that was really exciting.

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  And I think a lot of that is also—part of the thing that makes our team so interesting is that we do have so many different disciplines, right?  So we have Joanna with the epidemiology, all that big picture public health stuff.  We have mom with sociology and also public administration, right?  And then we have me with psychology.  And I feel like what this ended up doing was we were looking at it from one—this idea of prevention, right?  Where did the problem start and how can we nip that in the bud?  Which is totally Joanna’s wheelhouse.  With the idea of the larger cultural context, which is mom’s wheelhouse.  And then the ideal of how does the individual within that context response, which is my wheelhouse.  And I think that a lot of times it helps to have those interdisciplinarian teams because then you’re all looking at it from different perspectives.

Sheila: So let’s just—I don’t want to—we can’t explain the entire paper because it is far too big.

Rebecca: No.  And if you are interested in that, we have done some podcasts in the Patreon.  

Sheila: Yes.  So if you join our patron group, you could get an inside look at our paper, and we will put a link, of course, to the journal article in the podcast notes.  And what we did is we used a subset for this one.  So we had 20,000 people in our original one, but we were looking just at Americans for this paper.  And we wanted to look at Americans, who were super religious as kids and still super religious and had also answered all the questions.  So I think there were—what?  About 5,500 people in the subset for this one, Joanna?

Joanna: Yeah.  Mm-hmm.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So not everybody.  So it was a subset, but it was the ones that were the most religious because that’s what we wanted to see.  And you know what?  That subset ended up being really, really white because our data was really, really white.  We just had a hard time getting minorities to take the survey.  The U.S. church is just really segregated.  There just really wasn’t much that we could do about that, so I really hope that one day we’ll be able to have a more diverse sample set.

Joanna: Yeah.  And so based on that limitation of having a smaller number of minority respondents, which is a normal problem in research—it’s very, very common.  So what we determined to do based on advice given to us by a tenured professor or tenure track—I don’t know where he is in his journey.  Tenure track, at least, professor at a Big Ten school was to restrict our analyses to just white respondents.  So that is what we decided to do.

Rebecca: Yeah.  And that’s one of the things—when it comes to doing the peer-reviewed process, one of the strengths of being in an academic research setting is that you do get to kind of learn from each other.  And so when someone, who is literally like one of the top of his field, tells you to do something, you do it.  And for people who are confused about it, the reason why is in research you can’t assume.  You can only really prove.  If we were to look at the sample that was predominantly of one people group and then apply the answers to a whole bunch of other people groups, that’s just not actually what we found.  So it’s lying.  And frankly, we call this out a lot where people will survey women, and then they’ll say—oh, sorry.  They’ll survey men, and then they’ll say what women would have said.  It’s like but you didn’t survey women.  And so we are not about to do the same thing that we just called a whole bunch of people out for.  And that’s all I’m going to say on that.

Sheila: Yeah.  And we’re not saying that these things don’t affect women of color at all.  In fact, I would assume they affect them more because that’s what other surveys—

Rebecca: Well, Joanna and I did the—did a lot of research into this, right?  We read a ton of articles on how purity culture and tropes around sex affect, not just white communities, but also minority communities.  And in general frankly, my hypothesis based on all the other research is that actually it did worse.

Sheila: Yes.  So hopefully, some day maybe people will test this on other communities too because I would love to see that done.  A reminder to everyone who is listening, if you have enjoyed the Bare Marriage podcast in 2024, make sure you don’t miss it in 2025.  Please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts on your podcast app to Bare Marriage, and you will hear us every Thursday.  And if you want to support what we’re doing, you can do that through joining our Patreon at patreon.com/baremarriage and give just a little bit a month.  And that gets you access to our exclusive Facebook group, unfiltered podcasts, and more and lets us keep doing what we’re doing.  And for tax deductible receipts within the United States, you can also give through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation.  And there is more about all of that in the podcast notes.  And please, mark our podcast as five stars and leave a review.  Or would you even consider sharing this episode so that other people can found out about Bare Marriage?  All right.  So let’s talk about what this paper said in a nutshell.

Rebecca: What our paper found, in general, is this while religiosity as a whole is a beneficial thing for people, if they believed tropes about sex pretty much that reduced her autonomy or made sex into a threat to her autonomy, sexual pain rates went up.  So that’s pretty much what we found.  Anyone who has read The Great Sex Rescue is like, “Oh, so you found what you found in The Great Sex Rescue.”  Yes.  It was, in fact, the same data set.  But the other thing that we found that was really interesting that we didn’t get into in The Great Sex Rescue is that women deconstruct beliefs differently based on their lived experience.  So for example, if you’re in a really great marriage with a really great guy, you deconstruct beliefs about how all men are monsters.  Whereas if you’re in a really bad marriage where you feel like you’re being used you’re more likely to deconstruct the obligation sex message than someone who is in a good marriage.  And what we found so interesting about that is what it really says is there’s a lot of people out here who are deconstructing half of it because their lived experience has kind of proven the other half.  And then you see people who are deconstructing totally different stuff from you, and you’re like, “Well, they just don’t get it.  They just don’t get it.”  It’s like no.  No.  No.  No.  Both of us need to hold space for everyone else’s experience.  I’ve just been thinking about that silly holding space meme from Defying Gravity all week.  That’s what I’ve been thinking about.  We just need to hold space for other kinds of deconstruction.  It’s like yeah.  If you think that all men are untrustable, it’s because you haven’t met trustable men.  But the women, who have met trustable men, are like nah.  

Sheila: Is trustable a word?

Rebecca: It is now.  

Sheila: Okay.

Rebecca: It’s canon.  Here we are.

Sheila: So yeah.  And we just looked at everybody’s sexual pain, and it was super fun.  I’m really proud.  I think it’s a great article.  

Joanna: I think it’s a really interesting thing.  We broke the tropes that we looked at into whether or not they were coercive or restrictive to women’s sexuality.  We looked at sexual pain as Rebecca said.  But we also looked at marital and sexual satisfaction.  And there’s all sorts of interesting references to the literature that I find personally really fascinating, and we have lots of quotes from sermons and books and stuff.  So if you want to check it out, you absolutely can.  There’s a link.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And what I think is so funny too is when we were first—the first draft of the paper we were actually taking out quotes.  We felt like we had too many quotes from some of these books.  And it felt too sensationalistic and not academic enough.  So we were taking some of them out, and then the—some of the reviewers said, “No.  No.  No.  On the next round, put more.  We want to hear more from these books,” because they couldn’t believe it either.  So we have a whole table of terrible quotes.  And yeah.

Joanna: It’s amazing.  It is my favorite table in the paper.  And it doesn’t have any numbers in it.  

Sheila: Yeah.  I’m going to publish it.  I will put it up on the website what our table was.

Rebecca: Here’s the thing.  What do all these authors say whenever we call them out?  What do they say?  They have the same thing.  I never said that.  I never said that.  Well, I never meant that.  Well, no.  I never said that.  No.  A reasonable person wouldn’t take that away from what I said.  No.  Of course, that’s not what I said.  Well, sorry to break it to you, guys.  Those quotes have now been peer reviewed as, yes, in fact, that does say that.

Sheila: You said it.

Joanna: Yeah.  So we had—

Rebecca: We have them all labeled under which trope they are.  Joanna made a very pretty table.

Joanna: I think that was actually Sheila.  

Sheila: Yes. 

Rebecca: Oh, it was mom.  Well, you guys worked together on it either way.  But yeah.  Mom made a very pretty table where it was like, hi, this one is, in fact, under all men lust.  This is Every Man’s Battle.  Yes.  It is.  And now it is peer reviewed that yes, in fact, a bunch of sociologists also read that and were like, “Yeah.  That is what that says.”

Sheila: Yes.  And we even managed to get the Married Sex one there about—that we talked about a couple of weeks ago on the podcast about how—send him nude photos so that neurologically he’ll be drawn to your body instead of other—yeah.  That’s in there too, so we got that in there.  Mm-hmm.  So really proud.  All right.

Rebecca: What we’ve been talking about for a long time here is about changing the conversation about marriage and sex in the evangelical church.  But one of the ways that we can—need to change that information relates to how we got to this absolute dumpster fire of a place in the first place.  Okay?  So for decades now, I mean I don’t even know how long you would say.  But I would say definitely for a very long time the evangelical world has been kind of separating itself from the general science world, right?  So science can’t be trusted because it’s all just a part of the big political machine, or they don’t care about truth.  They only care about agenda.  So you can’t trust science.  But the minute there is a morsel of a study that proves the evangelical talking point, all of a sudden new study finds.  Oh my gosh.  Have you read this study?  Look at this research.  Everyone needs to read this study.  Well, you know that it’s backed up by research.  And so what ends up happening is there is this weird dichotomy where research can’t be trusted unless it says what I want to say because, of course, research has an agenda they’re pushing.  I just want to hold space for the hypocrisy there.  

Joanna: But it’s true.

Sheila: Well, yeah.  And if we believe that Jesus is the truth, we should not be afraid of research and the scientific process.

Rebecca: Well, and I do want to say one thing because I know that there are—it’s not a lie that there is biases in academia.  That’s very well established.  By academia, in academic papers.  This is a thing that’s peer reviewed and talked about.  Academia is aware that there is a bias, and they’re even publishing papers that are calling them out for their bias.  But the big thing that happens in academia that doesn’t happen in the evangelical circles is that the papers have to follow a certain standard, which means every paper has their methods.  So if you controlled your data set for something, that’s in your methods.  If you ran stats a certain way, that’s all there, so there is this kind of background check you can do.  And so you can tell—so even if there is a bias and they twisted the numbers and all this stuff, it’s actually right there in front of you.  It’s not hidden.  That’s the whole point of the peer review process.  So even if you want to believe that it’s all political and all biased, at least there’s a trail. 

Sheila: Yeah.  Do you remember when we did that podcast with Beth Allison Barr and Miranda Cruz a couple of months of ago?  We were looking at the 93% stat.  That pastors have been quoting for 30 years now that when dads come to Christ 93% of families follow.  When kids come to Christ, it’s 3%.  And with moms, it’s 17%.  And there is no citation.  No one is actually quoting the original study because I don’t think there is an original study.  And when you trace all the footnotes back—and most people don’t even give a footnote.  They give a footnote to a Baptist news article, which quoted it or something.  But when you take it all back, it’s from a Promise Keepers workbook in 1996 where it made that claim with no footnote and no study.  And so they’re quoting the workbook, but there is no methodology.  There’s no study.  There’s nothing.  And yet, that stat is quoted everywhere as we showed.  So it’s not that they won’t quote stats.  It’s that they only quote them when it suits their agenda, and they never check.  Or I shouldn’t say never.  But it’s quite frequent that they don’t actually ask is this even valid.  

Rebecca: We would love to see some evidence that people check and ask, “Is it valid”?  That’s what we’ll say.  We’d love to see some evidence.

Sheila: Because what we think happened is that the reason we’re in such a mess with evangelical marriage and sex and even parenting books is because unqualified people wrote them.  And they didn’t write them based on actual research.  And so that’s what we’re trying to do.  We’re just trying to set the bar higher.  

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  Just show your work.  Cite the sources.  That kind of thing.  One of my favorite examples is that Love and Respect says men need love.  Women need respect.  The evidence for men is we did this survey.  The evidence that women need love is go look at greeting cards.

Sheila: You got to say that again because people won’t believe it.  So just say it again.

Joanna: Okay.  So for the whole point that men need respect and women need love, for men, we have a horribly written, invalid, double barreled survey question that makes me physically pained.  And for women, we have the contents of the greeting card aisle.

Rebecca: Because they all talk about love.  You don’t have a respect card.  You only have love cards.  So women must want love.

Sheila: Yeah.  And we’re not even kidding.  We are not even kidding.  You can check it out in Love and Respect.  And next month when we come back for the 2025 season of the Bare Marriage podcast and we start moving into our intro for our new book, The Marriage You Want, which is out in March, when we did our matched pair study, we actually looked at that survey question about love and respect.  And we’re going to have several episodes where we are going to share with you what we actually found because it is groundbreaking.  It will cause an earthquake.  It’s amazing.

Rebecca: And you know what?  We didn’t go to the card aisle ironically.

Sheila: No.  We asked both men and women, a non double barreled question.  

Rebecca: Yes.  But Joanna is exactly right.  That’s how this works is no one bats an eye when the quote unquote proof given is, well, I read a couple cards once, and they were all just this lovey dovey crap.  So that must be what women like.  No one cares.

Sheila: Yeah.  That should raise alarm bells, people.  When you’re reading a book and you see something like that that should raise alarm bells.  But I think the other thing about expecting that science is so politicized is the whole point of science is to disprove something that was thought of to be canon.  If you can disprove something, which everyone thinks is true, you will get published.  And that’s partly what we did.  Do you want to explain, Joanna?

Joanna: Yeah.  Yeah.  So just let me point out.  If you could disprove the theory of gravity, you would do it because you would not only get published, you would get mega famous.  You pull something like that off—there are all of the incentives in the world in scientific spaces to be an iconoclast.  

Rebecca: Oh yeah.  Absolutely.

Joanna: That’s absolutely a thing.  So what we did is I found a wonderful book.  And I am literally a fan girl of Dr. Sally Gallagher.  She is a professor out of the University of Oregon.  And she did a study in the late 90s, early aughts, looking at evangelical marriage.  And she had so much funding, guys.  She did a really well done survey.  And then she did all of these interviews.  She traveled across the country for a year interviewing couples and talking to them about how they make marriage work.  And she took that research, both the interviews and the surveys, and she put it into a book.  And her big overarching thesis for evangelical marriage, how does it work—which has been the thesis statement for how does evangelical marriage work since her book came out—is that evangelical marriage is characterized by symbolic authority and pragmatic egalitarianism.  So we have a symbolic male headship that doesn’t actually have teeth, right?  Because he has all of the cards, he can play the veto card.  But he doesn’t.

Sheila: Right. 

Joanna: But that doesn’t actually—isn’t how it plays out, but he, apparently, has the trump card.  This is Gallagher’s thesis, not what I’m saying happens.  But then what actually happens, according to Gallagher, is that they—couples actually make decisions based on egalitarian practices similar to what you would see in the wider culture.  And then that symbolic authority for men is actually a calling card to differentiate people who are in versus people who are out.

Sheila: Because we do marriage Christ’s way.

Joanna: Exactly.  So it’s essentially a way of demarcating who is okay.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  So her whole thesis is that Christian marriages are not actually really different from the healthy secular marriages.  It’s pretty much all the same.  It’s just that there is this, in essence, a little bit of a dog whistle, a calling card, whatever you want to call it that’s like, oh, but we’re not like them.  It’s about community involvement.  But then we actually challenged that thesis in our paper.

Joanna: Yep.  For the first time.  And I do want to say that I actually think that Gallagher oversimplified a little bit because there is power in just holding a trump card.  

Rebecca: I agree entirely.

Joanna: That’s a problem in and of itself, and I want to make sure I say that.  What we did though is that we—and this is what we put into the paper.  And we had reviewers say, “Make it bold.  Make it big.  Say it more.”  Because we wanted to know, does the pragmatic egalitarianism that characterizes evangelical marriages extend past the bedroom door?  Because Sally Gallagher—because she was interviewing couples together in the late 90s, early aughts.  Didn’t touch sex.  It was just off the table for her which is entirely an understandable limitation given the kind of survey she was doing, the kind of work that she was doing.  But she didn’t look at this important area.  When we looked at how evangelicals view sex, what we actually find is that there may be lip service to egalitarianism, to making sure that she has a good time, but what actually reigns is male authority.  

Rebecca: It’s the complete opposite to what she found in general marriage.  And that’s really—that was the really big thing in our study that a lot of the reviewers are so excited about because we, in essence, put what has been the reigning idea about how these conservative evangelical marriages work—we questioned it.  That’s what’s so exciting is seeing people excited about figuring out truth.  And seeing people who are actually interest in being like, “Oh, maybe I was wrong,” because that’s what I’ve been so encouraged by whenever we talk to people who are, frankly, not in traditional evangelical spaces is—I’ve actually found there’s a lot more willingness to be like, “I was wrong, or I misunderstood.  And now I have more information, so let’s change our minds.”  And I think that’s something that we could really stand to learn as a church because—okay.  We have to talk about the funny situation that happened regarding peer review.  We have to because it fits so perfectly—example—exemplifies this issue.      

Sheila: I want to give some context about what we’re talking about next.  When The Great Sex Rescue was first published, our research, understandably, upset many best selling evangelical marriage and sex authors because we found that the things that they were teaching actually did measurable harm.  And at the time, one of those bestselling authors was Shaunti Feldhahn whose books were based on big surveys that she had done and that was really considered authoritative about how men and women were.  At least authoritative in evangelical circles.  But we found that her surveys likely were not accurate because what she was teaching was harmful.  Right when our book was published, she issued a public statement questioning our survey methods, and we wrote a statement in response.  And I’ll link to both of those statements in the podcast notes.  We also have heard over the years since from multiple sources, from organizations and big podcast hosts, and conference organizers that she has been telling others behind the scenes that our methods were not up to scrutiny.  Now that we are finally peer reviewed we can put those accusations to rest.  We have passed a test that she never submitted herself to.  We have not been able to properly respond to some of these things because we hadn’t been peer reviewed yet.  But now that we have, we would like to look more carefully at some of the claims that Shaunti made about her own research and about the peer review process and what rigorous research looks like.  Yeah.

Rebecca: So one of the things that we found and we haven’t talked about because we weren’t peer reviewed yet and we were like we don’t want to talk about this if we haven’t done it ourselves is that years ago Shaunti’s research—

Sheila: Shaunti Feldhahn, author of For Women Only, For Men Only.

Rebecca: For Young Women Only.  All these books that, in essence, perpetuate the idea that men and women are totally different from each other.  Women can’t fully understand the male experience.  Men are visually stimulated in a way that women can never understand.  And so the sexual battle for men is so much harder and so women need to do what they can to make this easier for their husbands or for the boys around them.  There’s all sorts of really toxic stuff that’s only the even—that’s the—

Sheila: And we’ve talked about it.  I’ll put a link to our one sheets looking at For Women Only and For Young Women Only.  Really problematic.  Mm-hmm.  

Rebecca: But there was a program that was made out of her stuff that was then used in a school in Singapore.  And this student from Singapore wrote this astounding and just eviscerating critique of the curriculum, in essence saying, “You’re teaching rape culture.  You can’t do this.  You’re teaching teenagers rape culture.”

Sheila: Yeah.  She was the equivalent of a senior.

Rebecca: Yeah.  She was 16, something like that.

Sheila: Because it was being used in high schools.  And that post went totally viral.  And the ministry stepped in.

Rebecca: And cancelled the program.  And so then in a post discussing that experience of how she was just so frustrated they weren’t listening to the dad and all that stuff, there was a comment thread where someone said that she—is she peer reviewed?  

Sheila: Yeah.  Because if she’s claiming her research is this good that Singapore could be using it for their curriculum, then is she peer reviewed?

Rebecca: Yeah.  But is she peer reviewed?  And I just need to read the response.  Okay?

Sheila: So this is from Shaunti Feldhahn, who, again, has been known as the premiere evangelical researcher, and that’s how she—

Rebecca: Who claims to be—

Sheila: That’s how she bills herself.

Rebecca: Yeah.  She claims to be a Harvard educated social scientist.  Or social science researcher.  Something like that.  That’s what she claims.

Sheila: Yeah.  And she’s done a lot of surveys that form the basis of her books.  

Rebecca: And form the basis of a lot of evangelical culture around this.  So here’s what she said.  “As you may know, peer-reviewed studies are almost entirely ‘pure research’ rather than the ‘applied research’ that I do which is conducted for a specific practical purpose and published not in a peer-reviewed journal article but in a book for the popular audience.”  So first—first pause is that this is objectively not true.  Everyone knows this is not true.  This is a very, very silly thing to say.  There is a whole other option when you’re getting research funding.  You can just say secondary use of data.  It’s literally called secondary use of data.  That’s what we did.  But then she says this, “Each of my seven research studies thus far has taken anywhere from two to four years to conduct, costs between $40,000 and $80,000 U.S. dollars, and is based on interviews and surveys with at least at least 1,000 individuals of the group under study.  For example, adult men, or teenage girls. Each study is conducted by a leading survey and research firm, and each is nationally-representative within the United States across all ages, racial groups, and religious backgrounds.  All the studies have at least a 95% confidence interval, plus or minus 3.5%.  I hope that provides a little more clarity.  You can find more via the research tab on my website.”  A couple things to say here.  When you are writing a book about religious people, it’s not actually a brag to say you are representative of all religious groups.

Joanna: No.  It’s not—a nationally representative sample is not the correct thing.  You have to actually sample your population of interest.  It hurts me physically.  My stomach is in knots.  It hurts so bad.  There’s no reason to have a nationally representative sample when you’re looking at a particular subgroup.  You shouldn’t do it.

Rebecca: Well, they also didn’t even want to look at Catholics.  They were just talking about evangelical Christianity.  It’s ridiculous.  But the other thing here is that it—this is a logical fallacy that is often used.  Because it took a long time and because it was expensive, therefore, it must be worth something.  But we’ve all see the kinds of stuff millionaires will spend money on.  This doesn’t actually mean diddly squat.  I don’t care if it took you 17 years and cost you $8 million.  If it’s a bad survey, it was just a waste of money.  So then a—  

Sheila: And I just want to say.  Our surveys do not cost that much.  So those of you who have given money, we have done everything on a shoestring because Joanna hasn’t been paid what she’s worth, frankly.  But she’s done it because she believes in getting the right information out there.  And so when you give money to us, we are doing things as cheaply as we can and still getting it done properly.

Rebecca: Yeah.  We’re not just trying to throw money at something, so we can brag about how expensive it is. 

Joanna: No.  No.  No.  And we are trying to make sure people are getting paid close (cross talk).  That is a goal.

Sheila: We are hoping to do that.  That’s a goal.

Joanna: That’s a legitimate goal, and we like it.  But also we’re doing it because we feel it’s the right thing to do.  And we’re doing it on way—there’s no reason for it to cost as much as Shaunti had it cost.  But it is what it is.

Rebecca: Yeah.  So then this guy replies.  “You mentioned ‘peer-reviewed studies are almost entirely pure research rather than the applied research that I do, which is conducted for a specific practical purpose and published not in a peer-reviewed journal article but in a book for the popular audience.’  Your above statement is factually wrong and contradicts your earlier statement on rigorous research.  If indeed your findings and interpretations are sound, they will stand up to scientific scrutiny or the peer-review process.  Even applied research has scientific standards that must be followed.  If not, what you have is just simply a collection of data from the pop-quizzes, which is very prone to all sorts of biases and misinformation.  Combining such fuzzy data with neural theories , example that men’s and women’s brains are wired differently gives a false sense of legitimacy, as well as contributing to gender stereotypes.”  And Shaunti just replied, “I’m sorry—

Sheila: I just want to say.  I don’t know who this guy is.  But Mark, who is writing on her website in 2014—wait to go, guy.  Thank you.  

Rebecca: Exactly.  And then she just replies, “I’m sorry you feel that way.  We’ll have to agree to disagree.”  And it’s just like, “You are correct that applied research has scientific standards that must be followed which is why we did so.”  She didn’t do so.  It’s not peer reviewed and—“which is why my findings are recognized as credible by researchers of all stripes.”  Except for the ones who are supposed to peer review it.  You don’t get to say researchers find it—

Sheila: You don’t get to say it’s credible when you haven’t gone through the peer-reviewed process.

Rebecca: And if you spend that much—it’s not like something is magically credible the minute that it’s peer reviewed.  It’s Schrödinger’s study, right?  It’s either find, or it’s not.  But you don’t really—you can’t really prove it until it’s peer reviewed.  But there are things that are fine that aren’t peer reviewed.  That’s fine.  But it’s like when something has a question like this, imagine—

Sheila: This is from For Women Only.  Here is one of her survey questions, which she said was rigorous research.  Okay?

Rebecca: “Imagine you are sitting alone in a train station, and a woman with a great body walks in and stands in a nearby line.  What is your reaction to the woman?  I openly stare at her, and drool forms on my lower lip.  I’m drawn to look at her, and I sneak a peek or glance at her from the corner of my eye.  It is impossible not to be aware that she is there, but I try to stop myself from looking.  Nothing happens.  It doesn’t affect me.”  And then is her line after it.  “A whopping 98% of men put their response to an eye-catching woman and can’t not be attracted categories, and only 2% were unaffected by a woman with a great body.”  That’s not rigorous.

Sheila: That should tell you that you’re not measuring anything.

Rebecca: You’re measuring what you think you are.  I think they’re just measuring that people have eyeballs.

Joanna: But what is so weird is that there is such a disparity between I am literally drooling over someone and, hey, there’s a lady over there, and I don’t want to seem like a weirdo.  One of them could actually be protective for her, and you’re actually thinking like, “Oh, she’s alone.  I don’t want this to be inappropriate, or her to be skeeved out at all.  So I’m just going to make sure I have my headphones on, and I’m looking the other direction.”  Totally fine.  We love that for you, dude.  And then the other guy over here is an absolute certified creep.  

Rebecca: A menace to society.

Joanna: Those two things should not be in the same bucket.

Sheila: Yes.  Should be on the FBI watch list.  Yes.  

Rebecca: No.  And that’s what this guy in these comments was trying to get at is this is not rigorous research.  These are pop quizzes.  And this is the difference.  Surveys are not all created equally.  Some of them are just for fun.  Some of them are pop quizzes, right?  And that’s really what Shaunti’s does seem to be.  It does have more of a Cosmo magazine, what kind of creep are you kind of vibe, right?  Genuinely.  That is how it feels.  

Joanna: Are you a BuzzFeed quiz?  Which one of the Avengers is your BFF?  

Rebecca: Yeah.  And I think that Shaunti’s quizzes are a lot more close to that end of the spectrum than actual surveys that can then be gone to be used in academic areas.

Sheila: We pulled apart one of her survey questions for For Young Women Only and did a deep dive into it on a podcast awhile ago.  So I will put the link to that in the podcast notes.  So if you want more information on why you can’t word questions like this—

Rebecca: But the really big reason why we wanted to talk about this specific issue was this.  Evangelicalism has done research badly.  We have a situation here where there is a woman, who claims to be a Harvard research—a Harvard educated, social science researcher, who is know promoting this calling it rigorous research when she hasn’t followed a single one as far as I can tell of the standards that any actually Harvard educated researcher would be—would know to follow.  She has not submitted herself to peer review.  She’s gotten—it sounds to me, from what I’ve seen, she’s hired firms whose jobs are not to ensure that it is up to academic standards.  Because I’ve looked at the firm and I don’t see anything that promises to do the job.

Joanna: Yeah.  No.  Their job is just to do the survey (cross talk).

Rebecca: No.  It’s to make surveys.  Exactly.  That’s a perfectly acceptable job, if that’s your job.  

Joanna: It’s a great job.

Rebecca: Good for you.  Make your bank.  But she’s not doing the things that—what she touts as her authority, which is this education and this qualification would mean that she would be expected to do.  And so what she’s doing is an appeal to authority.  It’s a fallacy.  You can’t question me.  I’m a Harvard educated researcher.  Who are you to question me?  But you’re not doing Harvard educated researcher things.  So your authority doesn’t matter because you’re not doing the things.  And this happens a lot in evangelicalism.  We hear, well, Kevin Leman has got a PhD.  Why are you questioning him?  Because he didn’t use PhD research in Sheet Music.  There’s no citations in—

Sheila: Well, there is to Redbook magazine.

Rebecca: No.  That’s what I was going to say.  There’s no citations to the kinds of journal articles that a qualified doctor of psychology should know about it if he’s going to be talking about sexuality.  Oh, well, Emerson Eggerichs has a PhD.  Okay.  And where do you see it in his book?  Where do you see the rigorous research?  You cannot use an appeal to authority if—because what you’re doing doesn’t hold up to that authority.  There are times when you get to say, “Sweet pea, I am a doctor, and you are not.  And you might think that more green tea will cure your child’s diabetes.  I can tell you they need insulin.”  There is a level where sometimes you do just need to trust the authorities.  But it’s not when they’re telling you don’t look at the data because I am the expert because that’s what she’s saying.  She’s saying, “Don’t question it.  Don’t question it.  I’m the expert.  This costs so much money.  How could you possibly question it?  It took a long time.  It took money.  It took a lot of work.  So, therefore, it must be good.”  These are all appeals to authority.  And none of them stand.  So I just wanted—just—this is the big thing that I’m passionate about is just getting people to know how to think about these things again.  Because if you’ve been raised in an evangelical bubble where this passes muster as research, you may not have been told that this does not pass muster as research.  And you are allowed to question when someone is just using their degree as a battery ram against people’s common sense.  And when they don’t actually do the things that the people in that authority position should do like get your really expensive paper that you already put all this money into peer reviewed.  That’s the cheapest part.  If you’re research was $80,000, it does not cost much to get it peer reviewed.

Sheila: It takes a lot of time.  And it’s very difficult. And you have to pass a huge process, which her survey wouldn’t.

Joanna: Yeah.  Wouldn’t.  No.  Can I read a little bit of our paper?  

Sheila: Yes.  Please do.

Rebecca: Yes.  Please do.

Joanna: Okay.  So this is from the very, very end of the paper in an area called Symbolic Traditionalism in the Discussion.  “Gender stereotypes and overgeneralizations abound in evangelical literature about sex.  One author conducted a survey (N = 405) and ignored her finding that 55% of women reported having equal or higher libido than their husbands focusing her book on low drive women as ‘we did not have the ability to test whether the husbands of the women answering exactly the same were in agreement with that assessment.’  No such corrections were made for the men’s self-reported data.”

Sheila: Yes.  And we’re referring there to Shaunti. Yeah.

Joanna: Mm-hmm.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  And this is the situation where even women in evangelicalism are hammering forth this patriarchal idea that our voices shouldn’t matter as much as men’s voices.

Sheila: Let’s be clear about what she did because I don’t know that it’s clear to everybody there.

Rebecca: Sure.

Sheila: Okay.  So she did these surveys for her book For Men Only and For Women Only.  So For Women Only, she surveyed men.  For Men Only, she surveyed women.  And in her surveys of women, she found that 55% of women in her survey said that they either had higher or the same libido as their husbands.  So only 45% said they had a lower libido.  And she discounted the 55%. 

Rebecca: She just didn’t include them in the book.

Sheila: Didn’t include them in the book because they didn’t answer the way the husbands did.  So she said, “Women, you’re not accurate narrators of your own situation.”

Rebecca: So in this book that’s supposed to tell men the secrets of how they might not realize their wife is thinking, she completely disregards more than half of her sample because, oh, that doesn’t sound like it’s what the men think women think.  That’s bonkers.  But yeah.  Exactly.  It’s so biased.  And we can’t allow people just to use these short cutted logical fallacies anymore, to push through subpar research ideas.  I don’t even want to call these surveys research because they just flagrantly ignored even the most basic research requirements.

Joanna: Well, here’s why they’re not research.  Because when we did—I remember starting the survey for Great Sex Rescue and having genuinely anguished discussions with you, Sheila, where you were like, “Are we going to find what we think we’re going to find?  What are we going to find when we do the survey?”  And we didn’t know.  We were aware of the fact that our survey might find absolutely nothing and that we would have to make the argument that you leave the 99 to go after the 1.  That was our fallback plan.  And if we had had that happen, all of the work that I had done on the survey would have been moot, and we would have had to go entirely based on our analyses of the books and on anecdotes.  Now that is not what happened.  But we were aware that it was a risk, and we opened ourselves up to that risk for failure.  Because when you do actual research, there is a chance that you will not find what you expect to find.  In fact, I still get consistently surprised by our data.  Now the big stuff is what it is.  Obligation sex, bad.  

Rebecca: Marital rape, bad.  

Joanna: Yeah.  The stuff that you would expect is—the no, duh, stuff is—yeah.  But there’s other—lots—

Rebecca: Yeah.  Being emotionally connected, good.  Yeah.  Okay.    

Joanna: Yeah.  Exactly.  But there’s lots of nuanced things that have been surprising.  But what Shaunti and Emerson Eggerichs and all of this kind of ilk of the research that was done for books in the early 2000s in evangelical marriage world incorporated set out to prove a point.  They said men need respect.  Women need love.  We know this because that’s what Dobson was saying in the 70s.  So because that’s what Dobson was saying and we need to say to say it today, we are going to do research that shows that men need respect and women need love.  And so the goal was about a specific conclusion, not about the journey.  So for anyone who knows Brandon Sanderson’s book—

Rebecca: Journey before destination.  Journey before destination, friends.

Sheila: And to get back to what we opened up with in evangelicalism, there’s two approaches to research, right?  Either you write off science because they’re just anti Christian or you find something that says what you want it to say and you amplify that huge.  And I want to play a clip for you right now to show this isn’t just Shaunti, and this isn’t just pastors talking about the 93% or—all the silly ways that we’ve shown you how evangelicals treat science.  This is Lisa Bevere in a reel that she recently put up on Facebook and Instagram.  So here.  Let’s take a listen.

Lisa Bevere: See, I don’t believe sex is just physical.  And actually, they’ve proved genetically that when you have sex with someone you’re actually sleeping with them and everybody they have slept with for seven years.  So it is a linking physically, but it’s also a linking of the souls.  And God doesn’t want you linked in your soul with 1,800 people.

Rebecca: I just want to say that every time I hear anyone try to talk about genetics I immediately am like uh oh.  We’re about to leave on a train away from real worldville.  

Joanna: No.  I’m like you mean—so she must mean epigenetics because you’re not assuming that you’re changing people’s DNA for seven years.

Sheila: No.  She actually is.  She actually is.  And I’ll tell you why.  

Rebecca: For anyone whose—I’m sorry.  For our audio only listeners, Joanna’s face there was just amazing.  Yeah.

Sheila: Yeah.  So what happened was there was—in 2018, this website, which deals with conspiracy science theories.  Just the wackiest stuff, right?  They misrepresent scientific studies and they blow them up out of proportion.  They wrote that these journal articles—these studies from 2012 and 2005—say that when you have sex with someone you carry around male DNA in your brain.  Okay?  And there was all kinds of social media posts that went viral after this 2018 article that said, “See?  This proves that when you have sec with someone you literally carry around their DNA.”

Rebecca: Yeah.  Your DNA literally changes.

Joanna: Well, I mean moms have—anyway—

Rebecca: Yeah.  We’re about to get into that.  

Sheila: So someone decided to fact check this, and they went and they looked at the 2005 and 2012 journal articles that supposedly this other article was referring to.  Okay?  And they talked to the author of that article.  And what the author said is that no.  You cannot get that from our articles.  What we were showing is that very likely if there is male DNA it’s because you have either had a previous pregnancy with a boy, a miscarriage.  Maybe there was a male twin in utero with you.  There’s a reason.

Rebecca: And it’s not just because you boinked once in high school.

Sheila: Yeah.   Yeah.  It isn’t.  And it was speculated.  Could it also be from sex?  But they said there is absolutely—that has never been explored, and that has never been found.  Ever.  

Joanna: Nope.  Nope.  Nope.  As a mom, you’re going to carry around DNA from your kids.  As a person, you also are likely to carry around some DNA from your mom because if you were a breastfed baby there are actually immune cells that travel from mom to babe via the milk.  This is not a don’t use formula thing.  It’s just a fact about breast milk.  Fed is best.  But the reality is that that makes no sense.  Okay.  So we have—

Rebecca: Sorry.  We told the epidemiologist a thing about genetics, and now her brain is breaking.

Joanna: No.  Yeah.  Sorry.  I also have a microbiology—did we change—well, it’s epi and it’s—it’s everything, right?  Okay.  So did we change—we’re not changing the germ line cells for the human—the woman who has had the sex, right?  Because we couldn’t change her actual DNA in all of her cells because that wouldn’t work.  So we just have male DNA floating free in her body?

Rebecca: No.  I think that you’re adding too much logic to this.  

Joanna: Like the sperm are still swimming around?

Rebecca: I think you are adding too much logic, Joanna?

Sheila: Because I think Lisa Bevere actually combined two different things here.  Maybe even three.  So she combined this 2018 thing that went viral about how women’s DNA is changed if they have sex with the other things that were often shared during purity culture that when you have sex you have sex with everybody your partner has ever slept with.  Right?  Because of STIs, sexually transmitted infections and diseases.  So I think she’s combining that with—it’s the soul tie idea.  Yeah.  And you end up with this.  And it’s like if you listen to that and red flags don’t go off in your brain, you’ve likely been failed.  Your education has failed you.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  And that’s not a shaming thing.  That’s not something that we need to get defensive over.  But it’s really concerning.  Because it’s very clear to anyone who has a rudimentary understanding of how genetics works, you cannot change someone’s genetics.  You can’t.  

Joanna: The entire reason that I had cancer is because a couple of the cells in my thyroid decided to go rogue and to accumulate mutations.  That was changing their DNA.  That is called cancer.  So we are not able to do that easily.  It is difficult for tumors to accumulate mutations that cause cancer.  That is why we don’t all have cancer all the time always.

Rebecca: Yes.  The fact that so many people can hear this stuff and think, “Wow.  That’s deep,” shows me that you’ve—that so many people have been taught to do this evangelical method of research, which is we don’t research enough to get really educated in it.  We don’t research enough to actually listen to experts in the field.  We don’t trust research enough to submit ourselves to the fact that we don’t know everything.  Again, the difference between the appeal to authority and respecting legitimate authority, right?  Going back to when that professor told us you need to cut this down to specifically this subsection of a subsection of your data, we were like, “Hey, you’re the expert.  You genuinely know best.  We’re going to do what you told us to do.”  That’s different than an appeal to authority, right?  We don’t respect research enough in evangelicalism to respect the legitimate knowledge and authority of people who have dedicated their lives to research actually do have.  And so as a result, we’re not able to identify the clear just tomfoolery that exists out there when people quote people’s Facebook posts about a Twitter post about a journal article about a Reddit post about a—this is bonkers, guys.  This is wild.  And so yeah.  If you are someone who listened to that clip and was like, “But I just don’t see the problem there,” that’s probably—

Sheila: That’s what I’ve been taught my whole life.

Rebecca: That’s what I’ve been taught my whole life.  You probably have been told—you’ve been given a belief about science that has not given you the tools you need to actually identify what is real and what is a lie, what’s real and what’s sensationalized.  And if that’s the case, the good news is it’s actually not that hard to change that.  There are so many great creators whose entire job is just to educate people in a fun way on YouTube.

Joanna: Just go to Crash Course.  

Rebecca: I was going to say.  Crash Course is great.

Joanna: They have playlists for everything.  Just go start watching the playlist biology.  Crash Course biology, anatomy and physiology, they have a new biology one.

Rebecca: Even Khan Academy has all sorts of short videos.  What is this?  Just start listening to podcast by people who are really well loved researchers, who actually are in the—and I’m sorry to say this. But who are in the secular academic world as well. 

Sheila: My husband loves Quirks and Quarks.  Is that a Canadian one?  

Joanna: Yep.  Yeah.  It’s CBC, I believe.  Yeah.   

Rebecca: Yeah.  But there’s all sorts of these kinds of areas.  It is easier now than ever before for you to be able to build up your own research.  I mean what do you call it other than a BS detector.

Sheila: Yeah.  And that’s what we’re saying.  You don’t need to be an expert in all this stuff.  You just need to understand enough concepts that you can tell when something doesn’t make sense.  And honestly, that clip from Lisa Bevere should have raised a lot of red flags.  That is really problematic.  And I actually—when someone shared this in our patron group—because people share amazing stuff in our patron group.  And I went to Instagram to message her and say, “Hey, I don’t think there’s really a source to this,” and I found out she had already blocked me preemptively.  I don’t know why.  So then I went to Facebook, and I actually commented on the reel.  And I said, “Hey,”—and I was polite.  I was like, “This really doesn’t have a citation.  And here is the problem with what you said.”  And she hid the comment.  I can still it, but no one else can.  There’s not even the openness to realizing, “Hey, I—what we said is just not scientifically accurate.”

Rebecca: And we really hope that that was just done by some intern running the page who isn’t Lisa herself.  We really hope that there is—that hopefully Lisa actually maybe even someone tells her about this.  Or we talk about how this was actually coming from the equivalent a Reddit—a sub Reddit of incel culture stuff.  It was weird.  The website is on.  And I hope that she sees this, and she’s like, “Oh, I didn’t know that that’s what my intern was doing.  I didn’t realize that I had had someone go and preemptively block them.”  I hope that’s the situation.  We always give benefit of the doubt, guys.  Always.  Right?  And if that’s the case—

Sheila: But how did she make that claim in the first place?  And that’s what makes me—because like I said, it even took it beyond what this 2018 article was saying.  That seven years thing.  I mean I’ve heard that to do with STIs.  It’s weird.  Okay?  By the way, the seven years isn’t accurate for the STIs either.  It’s just I’ve heard it said in that context.

Rebecca: The place that I’ve seen it is the idea that your skin cells replenish every seven years or something like that.  I’m not saying that’s true or not either.  I’m saying I know that’s a big thing in online survivor spaces where it’s like, oh, no cell of me has been touched by you kind of thing, right?  So I wonder if she’s just taking a whole bunch of Tumblr posts.

Sheila: I know.  And kind of putting them together.  That’s not accurate what she said.  And we don’t need to lie to get people to Christ.  We don’t need to scare people into doing the right thing.  Jesus didn’t do that.  We can tell the truth.  And this kind of—this needs to stop.  And if you’re in a teaching position and you are not wise enough to realize when you’re saying something which is that bonkers, I would just say that I think you need to do some more research and educate yourself because people should not be in teaching positions when it comes to sex or marriage or relationships or any kind of self help if they are not familiar with actual research.  Because otherwise it’s just based on your opinion, and it’s scary.  This 2018 article too—so she took this article, which—and she probably hadn’t even read it.  It’s just because it went really, really big on social media which is why they fact checked it, right?  So people were just making little graphics.  So she probably saw this stat about how you’re changed genetically from some graphic and then combined it with other things in her mind or something and came up with this.  But that was based on one guy reading these studies and coming to the wrong conclusion.  And the funny thing is we’ve had several articles published about our journal article, which are wrong already.  

Joanna: Yeah. They’re largely correct, right?  They’ll be mostly there, but sometimes it’s just you read the paper three days ago.  And there’s a misremembering for what you read.  (cross talk) It happens.  It’s not abnormal.  This is a thing that you are told in all of your undergrad classes.  Do not cite.  You have to go actually check the paper.  

Sheila: Yeah.  You’re not allowed to cite newspapers.  You’re not allowed to cite an article about the study.  You have to look at the actual study because so many of the articles that came out—a lot of them that came out talking about our paper were saying that we said that Christians have worse sex.  We didn’t say that.  We said that when these tropes are believed it affects sexual satisfaction and makes things worse.  But we didn’t say that—  

Rebecca: We didn’t actually measure non Christians in this sample.  We couldn’t say that Christians had better or worse sex because we didn’t have a comparison group.  

Sheila: We did say they had higher rates of sexual pain because we do know that.  

Rebecca: We know that from the general literature.  

Sheila: Anyway, so I just thought that was funny.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  And so I—this whole podcast is kind of like celebrate with us as we got peer reviewed but also here are some tricks so that you don’t accidentally make silly research faux pas.  I want to explain kind of how a lot of times articles work with journalists.  Okay?  So we’re going to put it in YouTube terms because everyone kind of understands YouTube.  Say that Samantha Marie is a vlogger, and she vlogs every day of her life.  And Thursday, October 7, is a particularly boring day, and she’s like, “Gosh, this isn’t going to get any views on it.”  And so what does she do?  She titles it.  “Oh my gosh.  I almost died?!?!”  And then what happens?  You get a lot of clicks, and you realize, “Oh, so she got a couple splinters, and her and her friends screamed gangrene for an hour because they had just watched Pirates of the Caribbean.”  And it wasn’t actually that she almost died.  That was a ridiculous over response.  And a lot of the journal articles that we’ve read that are quoted in these Christian books are, first of all, not from—there are different levels of journalists, who talk about this.  And most of them are trying to be very accurate.  But a lot of them are, in essence, slapping on a did I almost die tag line onto a very banal video.  And so when you’re seeing someone who is quoting a research article or a social media post or anything that’s not the direct article itself— 

Sheila: Yeah.  So if they’re quoting a newspaper article about a research article.  Mm-hmm.

Rebecca: Exactly.  Yeah.  Or I would even argue that what would be acceptable would be a presentation from the researcher itself.  Not something where the researcher is quoted in an article but an actual from the researcher itself.  You should also be looking at the actual article and seeing if it actually says what it says it says because often it doesn’t.  

Sheila: And that’s what’s interesting about Shaunti is all of her brain science research because she says this is all based on brain science—she doesn’t quote the study.  She quotes newspaper articles about the studies.

Rebecca: And I’ve read those studies.  And I did not find the same conclusions.  It’s like if you twist it and you don’t understand neurology then yeah.  I can see how you get there.  But yeah.  So this is the thing.  We just want to make sure that you guys, who are our listeners—we know that you’re here because you love research, right?  We know that you’re here because you’re excited about all the stats and the tables and the—we’re actually proving stuff, and it’s not just one guy’s opinion, right?  It’s not just the norm.  And I also know that a lot of you are here because you’ve kind realized how little understanding you were given about how to have that detector for, oh, something’s fishy.  And that’s a really big thing I would just tell you is you may have been raised in a culture that taught you that research is acceptable as long as it promotes my opinion and fight against that.  And even if someone is saying your opinion if they’re saying something really inflammatory or that is just a definite, “This is how God made it, and this is why you should do what I say,” just—do you have a citation for that?  Do you have an article for that?  What research is that based on?  Right?  Because how much would life have been different if when Love and Respect said, “And by the way, greeting cards are all wishy washy, so women must not need respect,” someone said, “Oh, do you have a citation for that,” because there was none, right?  There were no citations for Every Man’s Battle.  There were no citations.

Sheila: Yeah.  Not a single one.   

Rebecca: And then we have reels like this that are on your timeline all the time.  And if you see someone who is constantly doing these threats and fear based messages that sound ridiculously out there and they’re not having citation and they’re not giving you actual evidence, stop following them.  They’re probably contributing to this lack of ability to tell what is true and what is propaganda because the evangelical world has, unfortunately, don’t a lot of that.  And it’s really sad.  And that’s one of the reasons we’re so excited about being published because we’re hoping that we’ve started to change the expectation.  Because now if people want to write a new book and they want to call it research based, they can ask, “But is it peer reviewed?  Or is it up to those standards?”

Sheila: And we’re not saying that every author from now on has to be peer reviewed, but what we are saying is that you need to use peer-reviewed research.  And one of the things that we did in Great Sex Rescue, in She Deserves Better, in The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex, in The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex, and in The Marriage You Want is while we based it all on our own research, we also had multiple, multiple, multiple peer-reviewed studies to show that what we found was in line with what the science has already found.

Rebecca: Exactly.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So Joanna, how are you feeling now that we are published?

Joanna: Oh, I’m thrilled.  I mean I remember putting—we submitted the article at the end of November last year.  And then it took about a year to go through the peer review process.  This was our first go at it.  And so the reviewers had some really thoughtful suggestions and really improved the paper.  We had a lot of editing to do and then had to—wait for it to actually come out.  So it didn’t come out until November.  So I remember submitting it on November 30 last year and thinking, “Well, I expect that we’re going to get what’s called the administrative review,” which means they’re going to desk—reject it which means that they look at it.  The main editor takes a peek at the paper and says, “Nah.”  This was what we expected for this paper.  The journal that we submitted to is, again, very, very highly regarded.  And I just didn’t think we were going to pass muster.  And so I remember just sitting by my Christmas tree and going, “They haven’t rejected us yet.  They haven’t rejected us yet.  And when they reject us, they’ll give us hints for what to do to make it better, so it will be great.”  Okay.  And then they didn’t reject us, and they didn’t reject us again.  And then they sent us a response, and they said, “Hey, you guys are great.  But you need to fix a bunch of things and then resubmit.”  So it’s been—it was honestly a dream come true to have it be in this journal.  It was like my little baby got into Harvard.  That’s very much how it felt.  So I felt very—it was a big professional pat on the back.  It’s also just really exciting to see the work getting into a new field.  I’m really excited about the potentials, again, to change the conversation in sociology of religions, in the psychology of religion, really looking at how do we expand scholarly understanding about these areas.  When we look at—I mean this is not new news.  But women’s health stuff is highly understudied.  There are so many papers about erectile dysfunction and so few about vaginismus and dyspareunia.  It’s a real problem.  And so I’m happy to both kind of say, “Hey, guys, let’s flag this from a medicine perspective, from a public health perspective, and from a sociology perspective.”  And I’m excited to see our highly interdisciplinary approach, which is let’s use our knowledge of the sociology that’s happening, right?  Let’s look at these books.  What are the patterns that we’re seeing across this sub population?  What is the psychological impact?  What are the public health impacts?  What are even, again, the medical impacts of these teachings?  And bring all of that together into one article.  It was really fun to sort of see how the Avengers assemble—that we’ve taken actually bore some fruit.  

Sheila: And we have more papers on the go.  

Joanna: Oh goodness.  Yes.

Sheila: So you’re working on two more this year.  Hopefully.  It will take awhile to get them out.  But we also—last year we raised money through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation.  The Good Fruit Faith Initiative just helps do what we do to try to get the word out to the broader population about healthy teaching around sex and marriage in the evangelical church.  And so we were able to fund some research grants with that.  And so we have—I don’t know how many different.  Five different researchers?

Joanna: Yep.  And they are all at various points in the publication process.  We’re looking at a really good rough draft, and it’s off to go have a second draft.  So hopefully, that one will get submitted soon.  

Sheila: And that’s on the modesty—that’s on modesty.  Our modesty findings from She Deserves Better.  Really, really cool.  I don’t want to spoil it (cross talk) effect, but it’s going to be wild.  And then our Love and Respect paper, we’re going to talk more about that next month—what our findings are and what we’re hoping to submit on that.

Joanna: Yeah.  And then the paper for that one is a little bit delayed.  The woman, who is writing it, is expecting her first baby.  

Sheila: So congratulations to her.  

Joanna: And also she just moved to the Arctic, so I was like, “I lived there.”  Yes.  I know it’s quite the thing.  

Rebecca: Yes.  

Sheila: So there’s a lot going on.  And this year coming up, one of the big things we were trying to raise money for last year with the Good Fruit Faith Initiative was this scholarship.  We are looking to raise some more money to continue our paperwork so that Joanna can get some more papers written, hopefully this year.  Well, we’ve decided to dream bigger because we actually met our fundraising goals last year.  And so we want to meet them again, but we’ve decided to raise them.  Because here’s the problem that we have, I feel like in the church if people know that there’s a problem they can find us, right?  If they are struggling in their marriage, if the advice they’re getting from Love and Respect isn’t working for them, they can Google something, and something by me will pop up.  They can find us on social media.  But what if they’re stuck?  And they don’t realize there’s a problem?  They just think this is what life is.

Rebecca: Also a lot of marriages—we get people at the breaking point, right?  Where it’s been bad for 15 years, and now you just can’t take it anymore.  But what if we were able to reach people at year 1?  What if we were able to reach people when they aren’t thinking about divorce yet?  But that’s the road that they’re towards because there’s horrible stuff going on.  What if we can get them safer early?

Sheila: And so—yeah.  And so that’s what we want to do in 2025 is we want to create a series of, hopefully videos, maybe a podcast series.  We’ve got a lot of dreams.  We’re not sure how it’s all—going to all pan out.

Rebecca: Well, because a lot of it is also going to be we’re going to try stuff, see what works with the metrics, and we’re not going to throw money at stuff that doesn’t work, guys.      

Sheila: Right.  And it also depends how much we get.  But we’re hoping to do—to create some things that you all can share that don’t have my branding on them.  So it’s not about Sheila.  But it’s about this information in a non controversial, more educational, fun way.  So we’re not going to use, necessarily, the buzz words that we use on the Bare Marriage podcast.  But we’re going to make it so that it’s really shareable within churches that have a lot of this toxic stuff.

Joanna: Yeah.  It’s the sort of thing that you can share with your very complementarian sister-in-law, right?  That’s the dream is that it’s stuff that could be more widely applicable—not applicable.  It’s stuff that would be more palatable.   

Sheila: Palatable.  That’s the word.  Yes.  And so we want to do that.  We also are looking at some translating work, to hopefully getting some of our work into Spanish.  We’re hoping even if we have enough money and Joanna has enough time our big dream—our big goal.  This is going to be a big job is to do another survey about sexual pain and get a sexual pain course done.  So those are our big dreams.  The end of the year is almost upon us.  So is Christmas, of course.  But right after Christmas, you enjoy your family.  And then there’s that panic on December 30 where you realize, “Oh shoot.  I have to give away money, if I want to get the tax receipt by December 31.”  And so as you are having that panic on December 30, will you think of us?  

Rebecca: Think of us.  As you are panicking, think of us.    

Sheila: So if you would rather give money to Bare Marriage—or to the Good Fruit Faith Initiative than you would to the government, would you think of us?    

Rebecca: That’s a pitch.  

Joanna: That’s hilarious.  

Sheila: Because I think we just—it’s just us, right?  And we’ve been doing this—and—  

Rebecca: We want to do all this stuff, but it’s going to also—we’re going to have to hire editors.  We’re going to have to hire—it’s—

Sheila: We need to bring the professionalism up a notch for some of this stuff to go well.  So we’re just asking you to partner with us so that we can change the conversation.  We need to change the conversation.  We’re getting so much done.  I am so proud of all of us.  I am especially proud of Joanna for all the work that she did and for Becca with the editing of the paper.  All the stats.  It was a big job.  And none of us are in universities anymore.  We couldn’t walk to the professor’s office next door to ask for help.  

Joanna: Nope.  Nope.  We had to figure it out ourselves.  And also again we’re in a highly interdisciplinary area where people aren’t writing about this stuff, so you’re trying to be professional while also trying to incorporate the quote “bellies are very intoxicating to men.”  

Sheila: Which our paper opens with from Dannah Gresh talking to eight-year-old girls.  Yes.  If you want to partner with us in changing the conversation, will you consider giving to the Good Fruit Faith Initiative?  Now unfortunately, it is only tax deductible within the United States.  We are hoping one day to get that in Canada if we can find a similar organization to partner with.  Or in the UK.  But we’re not there yet.  So we can’t offer it in Canada.  But if you’re not in the U.S. or if you’re in the U.S. and you don’t care about a tax receipt, you can also join our patron.  So that’s another way to support us on a monthly basis is join our patron group, and then you get access to our Facebook group and to unfiltered podcasts and more.  And what we’re really hoping for is if we can just get 50 more people giving $50 a month.  We’re set.  We’re not trying—Focus on the Family last year they raised $138 million.  We’re trying to raise $128,000.   

Rebecca: It’s a bit different, isn’t it?    

Sheila: Bit different.  And we’ve already got a big chunk of that through our first fundraising giving Tuesday, so we’re on our way.  But if you would consider joining with us, we would so appreciate it.  And we will put the link to both the Good Fruit Faith Initiative where you can get your tax receipt in the United States or our patron.  And you can join us that way too, and we’ll put those in the podcast notes.  

Rebecca: We all have different dreams about what the future will look like in our group.  And my dream genuinely when I look at the stuff is just that we can help make it so that more people actually know the facts enough to not get sucked in by this stuff anymore.  Because all of this stuff, there is an undercurrent there of it all—if you look at it critically, it’s not believable.  And I just want to help people look at things critically.  That’s my big thing.  Just don’t buy it if it’s crap.  That’s my whole thing.  And I’m really excited about how much a lot of our initiatives over the next year or two are going to be tying into that idea of how do we not just change the evangelical message on marriage and sex but, in essence, inoculate us against all these damaging messages so that even the stuff on parenting, on self worth, on—

Sheila: Mental health.   

Rebecca: – mental health, all these things, they just can’t get ya in the same way so that we’re building up resiliency to be a stronger group of people who are following God.  Anyway, that’s where my heart lies too.  

Sheila: And this is the last podcast of 2024.  And we’re about to go into Christmas in just a week.  Yeah.  In a week, it will be Boxing Day. 

Rebecca: Goodness gracious.  

Sheila: And when I look back over the final podcasts on the last few years, I feel like we’ve gotten happier and happier each year.  The first year was kind of like me on my yellow chair going, “Man, I’m sad,” after Great Sex Rescue was out.

Rebecca: And then we were together the next year.  We were sad.  

Sheila: And it’s like why is the church so terrible.  But over the last years, we’ve gotten more and more hopeful.  We’re all in good churches.  We’ve all landed in good churches.  And for awhile, we weren’t sure where we were going to go when COVID ended.  But we’ve all landed in good churches, which are safe and which are healthy.  And our pastors all support what we do.  My pastor threw a big party for us, and he was even the one to make the squares for the party. 

Rebecca: I know.

Joanna: That’s a Canadian thing, by the way, folks.  So Americans have cookies.  British people have biscuits.  Canadians make squares.  They’re essentially cookies but better.  Public service announcement done.  

Sheila: And we feel like things are changing too.  The number of people that I see commenting on other people’s social media parroting back a lot of the stuff we say over and over again on Bare Marriage is just like yeah.  It’s getting out there.  It’s getting out there, and things are changing.  And it’s exciting.  And no.  We’re not going to bring down Focus on the Family.  And no.  Love and Respect is always going to sell.  But we can help the people who are open to getting out.  We can help them.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Sheila: We can help them get to freedom and health and wholeness and Jesus, and that’s what we want to do in 2025.  And we’re happy this time.    

Joanna: Okay.  So this year my church has discovered—I guess it was last year they actually discovered this.  Which is that I grew up evangelical and also really believe in church and, therefore, I have no shame when it comes to kid skits.  Zero.  You want me to dress up in what—sure.  I’m your girl.  I will dress up however the heck you want me to dress up which means that every year for VBS now I get to do the skits because I am a willing adult, who works a flexible schedule.  So this also means that I occasionally get roped in to do skits in front of the whole congregation which is not maybe my favorite thing.  But also it needs to happen.  It’s for the children, and I have a six year old and a four year old for whom it makes their lives.  So sure.  I’m game.  So this past Sunday I spent an hour doing my hair in some truly ridiculous braids.  The patrons have the pictures because (cross talk).

Sheila: Yes.  I saw it yesterday.

Joanna: And we had gone shopping at Goodwill the previous day and found a pink cotton adult sized onesie, and I stole my daughter’s tutu.  Thank goodness for elastic being very stretchy.  And was a very oversized Cindy-Lou Who for church.  So I was supposed to enter in the middle of the choir singing this fun Advent anthem.  And I’m hiding around up by the altar, and it felt—anyway, I did it.  I did the thing, and it was good.  And I did my skit.  But the whole skit was about—oh my goodness, guys.  The Grinch is trying to steal Christmas.  And what are we going to do?  And the problem is that the Grinch’s heart, of course, is two sizes too small.  So how are we going to help our friendly Grinch to grow his heart?  I had a bunch of things in a bag, and I pulled out a staple remover.  Should we use these Grinch nail clippers?  “No,” said the kids.  And I pulled out, finally—I had swiped it off of the coffee church—post coffee table.  A mug.  I said, “Guys, this is it.  It’s really about community.  It’s about the time that we spend together.  Not about the Christmas gifts.”  And, of course, I said this all in a very Cindy-Lou Whoish way.  But the point is that we do these things so that we enjoy our time spent together and that we have people with whom we share a relationship.  And so we want to—I’m going two ways with that.  First of all, I hope that you have people in your life with whom you can share community.  And if you don’t, I hope that you are able to be brave to take some steps in the New Year to find that community, to go out and try a new church, or to ask that person out for coffee, or whatever that looks like for you, whatever that action step might be.   But the other thing is that I want to make it really clear that we really value all of you, right?  I’m sorry, guys.  I’m trying really hard to do a podcast where I don’t bring up the Green brothers.  But John and Hank Green talk about parasocial relationships, right?  We don’t know your name presumably, person listening, unless you know us personally.  So there’s a parasocial relationship.  But we also have what’s called a sarapocial relationship according to the Green Brothers which is that we have a relationship with all of you.  And that relationship is really life giving to us too.  It’s exciting.  It’s wonderful to know that you all are listening and learning, and we really appreciate the gift of your attention that you give us and hope that we’re able to be a help.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  That’s a great Christmas message.  

Sheila: I almost want you to say Merry Christmas in your Cindy-Lou Who voice now.

Joanna: See?  The reason that they had a grownup do Cindy-Lou Who was so that we could do it completely ad lib.  

Rebecca: Yes.  Absolutely.  The patrons will get that some day.  I don’t know.  We’ll see.  

Sheila: No.  It is true though.  I so appreciate the messages that I get every day and the comments on everything.  Please like and comment whenever you see something of mine that you like.  It helps the algorithm so that more people see it.   

Joanna: And it also warms our hearts.

Sheila: Yeah.  It does.  It really does.  And yeah.  So we’re going into Christmas 2024 happy.  

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  We are.  

Sheila: And I’m very excited about the marriage book that’s coming out, Marriage You Want.  It’s out in—March 11.  So we will have information on how you can join the launch team in January.  If you want to make sure that you don’t miss that, we will have a sign up link for our email list, and then you will see everything.  But that’s going to be awesome.  And that marriage book—it’s not like Great Sex Rescue.  We’re not trying to tear anything down.  We are just building healthy from the ground up.  So it’s a positive book.  It’s fun.  It’s unlike anything you’ve read.

Joanna: Yep.  And also it’s—sorry.  I would just like to make a plug for the stats.  They’re really interesting.  I was really worried because we were doing a marriage survey.  And I was worried that all the stats were just going to say people who like each other have a good marriage or other words of wisdom such as that.  But no.  We have really interesting stuff.

Rebecca: Oh, we do.

Sheila: There’s three times as many charts in this thing as in—

Joanna: You think you’ve seen charts.  You have not seen charts.  

Rebecca: Joanna has been unleashed.      

Sheila: It’s so fun.  And so that’s coming in 2025.  So as we end 2024, we just want to say thank you, everybody.

Rebecca: Thank you.

Sheila: We hope you have a wonderful Christmas.  We hope you find great community.  We hope you experience Jesus in a real way and the peace of Christ—may it rest on your home and in your hearts and in your families’ hearts especially around some of those awkward family conversations at dinner around Christmas.  May you not have too much awkwardness.  And, again, if you would like to help us in 2025 get our message out, please consider giving to us during that panic on December 30 or before.

Rebecca: Again, if you panic, think of us.  When you panic, think of us.  That’s the best tag line for a giving.  I just need to say that.  That’s the best tag line.  When you’re panicking , think of us.

Sheila: Think of us.  

Rebecca: Merry Christmas, guys.

Sheila: Merry Christmas.  Bye-bye.

Rebecca: Merry Christmas.