Sheila: Welcome to the Bare Marriage podcast.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life, and your marriage.  And I am joined today by my husband, Keith.  

Keith: Hey, everybody.

Sheila: And we are going to walk through another book that made me depressed.  We are going to walk through Marriage on the Rock by Jimmy Evans.  I read it earlier this summer, I think, last year and over the summer.  And thoroughly depressed.  But I think we can do sort of an upbeat, very interesting overall review of the book.

Keith:   Yeah.

Sheila: And usually I do this with three other people, but I was like, “Keith, I need you to read this, so that we can talk about it together.”    

Keith: Well, and I definitely had some thoughts as well too. 

Sheila: Yes.  It will be awesome.  Before we get to that, Christmas is going to be here in just a few short weeks, and so I just wish everyone well as you are getting ready for Christmas.  If you want to buy yourself something for Christmas, we do have some awesome merch that makes wonderful stocking stuffers or buy yourself a treat.  We have a whole new line from the amazing her church.  And we have our biblical womanhood, biblical manhood merch, so you can check that out in the podcast notes.  It’s just a great way to support our podcast if you support what we’re doing and want to encourage us and just let us keep going.  And as well, we’re doing a major fundraising push in the month of December where we’re trying to raise some money for some really neat things we have planned for 2025 including some more academic papers.  We’ll be telling you about some of that next week.  Hopefully getting some—figuring out some ways to get our work into other languages especially Spanish and translate our work into some really quick videos that people can share that will be super fun.  So those are the kinds of things that we’re working on and raising money for, so we just want to change the conversation, people.  We need to get this healthy.  And if you want to stand with us, we would love to have you on board.  So you can give through the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation.  And the link is in the podcast notes.  That is tax deductible within the United States.  Or, of course, you can join our Patron group too.  Not tax deductible.  But you can be part of our Facebook group when you do that as well.  And so yeah.  We just really appreciate your partnership.  I would like to take a minute to thank our amazing sponsor for this podcast, and that is Ever, AJ.  They make the most beautiful, cute, fun, functional vegan Bible cases.  And I am totally serious.  When they reached out to me to see if they could sponsor, I was so excited because now I get one.  And they’re amazing.  They have regular floral Bible cases with lots of areas to put pens and paper and notepads.  And they’re just really attractive and modern looking.  They also come in cross body purses, in wristlets, and more.  At Ever, AJ, they’re inspiring purpose and beauty with faith and function.  And their mission is to provide beautiful, yet functional, products for women that align with their Christian values.  And so they create products that enhance both practical needs and aesthetic preferences while cultivating a desire for the Lord.  And honestly, it seriously is both practical and aesthetic.  So please take a look at the link in the podcast notes.  And if you’re looking on YouTube, you’ll be able to see some of these amazing products on the screen now.  But when you support our sponsors, you help support our podcast.  Because when our sponsors do well, it’s so much easier to get other sponsors.  And this helps keeps us on the air.  So this makes an incredible Christmas gift for a woman in your life, your daughter, your sister.  If you bought our Kingdom Girl’s Bible when they were our sponsor a couple of weeks ago, this is a great chance to get a cover for it that is so pretty.  So do check out Every, AJ.  The link is in the podcast notes.  Yeah.  Okay.  Are you ready to go?

Keith: Oh yeah.

Sheila: All right.  So here we go.  Marriage on the Rock by Jimmy Evans.  So to give you a bit of background, Jimmy Evans is—runs XO Marriage, which is a big marriage organization in the United States.  It puts on marriage conferences.  And he wrote a book, Marriage on the Rock, I think 25 years ago, and he recently published the 25th edition, which is what we read.

Keith:     25th anniversary edition.

Sheila: 25th anniversary edition.  Right.  That’s right.  And we just want to talk about it.  The way that we choose which books to do is we look at the Amazon rating.  So we have a whole list of possible books that people have asked us to do or that we think are important.  And we’re just kind of moving down based on Amazon ranking.  So it was time to do Marriage on the Rock.  And before we actually jump into the book, I do want to say a little bit more about XO Marriage which is I have to admit that I went into this one with a little bit of a bias.  I mean I go into all of them with a little bit of a bias.  But this one, in particular, I did because for years he partnered Mark and Grace Driscoll.  And they spoke—

Keith: Right.  Platformed.

Sheila: Platformed them.  And I believe they were on their board, if they have a board.  But they were certainly on the leadership team.  They’ve recently been taken off of it.  But if you go back through the web archives, you’ll see them over and over again in the leadership team.  And so I just think anyone who partners with Mark Driscoll, even after everything came out which they did, even after he moved to Phoenix, even after it was described everything that he had done, I just—I find that problematic.  And Jimmy Evans got his start at Gateway Church, which is where Robert Morris pastored.  And Robert Morris wrote one of the biggest endorsements of the book.  And, of course over the summer, he also had to resign because it came out that he was accused of sexually abusing a 12 year old.

Keith: Yes.  Which he reported as having an inappropriate relationship.

Sheila: Right.  Mm-hmm.  So this is the milieu in which this exists.

Keith: Yeah.  And I think the big thing about this book particularly is that it comes across as really—it seems healthy when you first read it, if you don’t really look at the underlying messages.  And I think it’s kind of like I was saying to you just before we started the podcast.  It’s like in medicine.  We have this thing where we try and catch medical errors because sometimes in medicine the wrong drug or the wrong dose or something gets prescribed and we try and catch those things.  And there’s something in medicine we call the near miss, which is where nothing bad happened.  But we take those cases, and we watch them carefully so we can learn from them so we prevent errors in the future.  And most of the time the stuff that’s being platformed by XO Marriage and in the book, Marriage on the Rock, it’s just healthy.  Take care of each other.  Listen to each other.  Be good people.

Sheila: Yeah.  Spend time together.  Yeah.

Keith: It’s all good stuff, and none of it is harmful.  But every once in a while, there’s something in there that is just hideously toxic in the wrong place.  But most people are just going to let that slide.  They’re not actually going to put it into practice.  They’re not actually going to take it that far.  And so it doesn’t look like it’s harmful.  But you have to learn from that.  Because if you take those things far enough, you end up not seeing that Mark Driscoll is a problem.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.

Keith: You end up seeing people talk about having an inappropriate relationship with a young woman and omitting the fact she was 12 as being honest and forthcoming, right?  So it’s really important to identify these things.  And there’s a lot of good stuff in the book.  I think probably a lot of people read it and weren’t harmed by it.  But there’s some things that are extremely toxic, and you need to have your guard up so that you don’t go down bad pathways.

Sheila: And our plea is just that we stop writing books that have toxic stuff in them and start writing books that are healthy because it’s totally possible to do that.  We do not have—and I think the Christian world we so often say, “Yeah.  I mean there’s some things in the book that are weird but just ignore that and concentrate.”  You know what?  We can do better, people.  We can do better.  And so let’s jump in.

Keith: Can I say one more thing about that?  Because I find it so incredibly ironic that what happens is we talk about a book that’s got toxic, horrible things, which could cause women to get abused.  And we say, “This book is horrible.”  And people say, “You know what?  Eat the meat and spit out the bones.”  All right?  So you have to eat the meat and spit out the bones.  But then they say, “Don’t read The Great Sex Rescue because I think she’s an egalitarian.”  So apparently, you can’t eat the meat and spit out the bones when it comes to treating women equally.  But you can eat the meat and spit out the bones when it comes to abuse.  I don’t think so.  I don’t think so.  Anyway—  

Sheila: Let’s jump into Marriage on the Rock where they jump into Marriage on the Rock.  I want to start at the very beginning because I found this really interesting.  So I’m just parachuting in here because something happened after Keith and I recorded this podcast on Marriage on the Rock.  We were originally planning on running this on December 12.  We actually had another podcast that was all set to go for Advent that we were going to run on December 5, today.  But we decided to reverse those because last week a big scandal broke, and Julie Roys was reporting on this and was instrumental in getting this out.  About Daystar TV.  So Daystar TV is, I believe, the second largest TV company, Christian TV network, in the U.S. run by a woman named Joni Lamb.  Her late husband, Marcus, and her founded it.  And her son, Jonathan and his wife Susie, were also working for Daystar.  And it’s a very, very long, convoluted story that involves second marriages that are suspect and covering up the abuse of a five-year-old girl.  And Jonathon and Susie had some very significant concerns about Joni Lamb.  And in response, Joni brought in Jimmy Evans.  And Julie Roys published a one and a half long audio of that meeting between the four of them.  And Jimmy Evans—I don’t think there’s any words for it other than spiritually abusive.  He was horrible.  He was claiming that they were not allowed to disagree with Jonathon’s mother because she needs to be the voice of God to them.  And when Jonathon said, “Well, then who holds her accountable,” he was told that he wasn’t allowed to be asking that sort of question.  It was really, really terrible.  And so you’ll notice throughout this podcast that Keith and I are trying to give Jimmy Evans the benefit of the doubt.  We’re saying, “I don’t think he meant this.  He seems to really care.”  But after listening to that audio, I have very, very, very significant concerns, and I would have recorded this a lot differently if I had heard that audio first.  So here is a man, who again was good friends with Robert Morris and was involved in the leadership with Gateway Church.  I don’t know if he actually started at Gateway.  I’m confused about how Gateway factored in.  But I know that Gateway hosted a lot of the XO Marriage conferences.  Robert Morris endorsed his book, and Robert Morris, of course, has now been accused of sexually abusing a 12 year old.  And the leaders of the church covered it up.  So he worked closely with those who cover up sexual abuse.  Allegedly, he elevated Mark Driscoll even after all the Mark Driscoll stuff came out.  And now we see him doing this.  And so I just have very, very significant concerns about XO Marriage and anyone who works there.  Dave and Ashley Willis were working there full time.  I don’t know if they still are.  But they got their start on XO Marriage.  It’s not okay.  It’s not okay, and this has to stop.  So with that in mind, I just wanted to say I will put the link to the audio with Jimmy Evans that Julie Roys posted in the podcast notes as well as links to the articles explaining what was going on.  Very, very convoluted story and very interesting and very sad.  But we’ve got to do better than this church.  Okay?  We’ve got to do better.  And so without further ado, let’s get back to the podcast.  So they open the book with their own story.  Jimmy and Karen Evans.  And they talk about how they had—the first couple years of their marriage—I don’t know how long it was.  I think it was about a decade, but I could be remembering that wrong.  Was just really rocky.  And they got to a point one night where everything came to a head, and they had a huge fight.  And Jimmy was ready to leave, and then God got a hold of both of them separately.  And they both had this big epiphany.  And they both came to see that what they had been doing was wrong, and so they both fixed it, right?  And that’s very much how it reads.  So he writes a chapter, and then his wife writes a chapter about how she realizes she was being manipulative.  And she had to stop that, and she had to learn to be more giving, et cetera, et cetera.  And so you’re reading this at the very beginning.  And what was the impression you got from the story at the beginning?

Keith: Oh yeah.  They both were dysfunctional, but they both realized they needed to make changes and care for each other.  And so they both started to try to be better partners for each other.

Sheila: Right.  And then from that, they learned how to be good partners.  Their marriage really grew.  They got asked to mentor other couples.  They get asked to speak on marriage, and that’s how XO Marriage started, right?  And I’m reading this and think, “Oh, that’s a sweet story.  I’m glad that they figured that out.”  Okay?  But then you read the rest of the book, and Jimmy throws in these little things.  He doesn’t connect them all.  So I’m going to connect them for you.  But he throws in these little things where he says what was going on right before this big blow up.  And I made a list of all the things that he had meant.  Okay?  All right.  And let me read them for you.  All right?  Okay.  First, we learn that he cheated on her the night before his bachelor party, and that this was not the first time he had cheated on her.  So he cheated on her the whole time that they were dating.  We learned that he was dominant and verbally abusive.  Those are his words.  He says that he was verbally abusive.  We learn that he played golf all weekend, ignored the kids, and ignored the home and then came home and expected sex.  We learn that she felt used for sex and felt that that’s all that Jimmy thought she was for.  We learn that he would sexually grope her so grab her breasts even when she asked him not to and that he would physically hurt her the way that he held her hand, the way that he touched her.  He would be squeezing her.  She would ask him to stop.  He wouldn’t stop.  And that he used porn.  So all of that was going on.  And these are all on different pages.  Okay?  It’s not like he admits this all in one place.  He says, “Oh yeah.  This was happening.  And this was happening.  And this was happening.”  And what was it that Karen did?  Well, Karen manipulated him by—are you getting ready for this?  Saying no to sex sometimes.  Okay.  So that was Karen’s thing that she did wrong.  And it’s like okay.  So right away what I’m thinking is do they even have an accurate view of what happened in their marriage.  Right?  And they say that on that night Jimmy apologized to her for the first time in their marriage.  And he humbly repented to God for the first time.  And it’s like, well—and then he says he was Christian before this.  So it’s all very—

Keith: Well, when they got married, he wasn’t a Christian.  But he became a Christian shortly after they got married.  I think.  If I remember correctly.  

Sheila: So it’s all very weird.  But she should not have been taking responsibility for that.  But it shows how the idea of saying no to sex and having boundaries in sex tends to be described as being manipulative and sinful throughout this entire book.

Keith: Yeah.  And the other thing too she said—there was something about how she resisted his leadership.  Even if I didn’t do it aggressively or verbally, he still knew I resisted him.  It’s like okay.  So basically, you have an opinion on something.  And that was your horrible sin.  That doesn’t make any sense.

Sheila: Yes.  So he’s cheating on her, using porn, not coming home on the weekend, playing golf, doing all these things.  But her sin is that she might have opinions, and she might say no to sex.

Keith: Yeah.  Now we’re glad that he recognizes those were all bad things.  And he uses them as examples of how not to behave as a husband.  And it’s also playing into the whole—again, this is the whole evangelical thing of I was the worst sinner ever.  And God got a hold of me, and now I’m such a great husband.  That kind of mentality, right?  And I think they’re trying to play into that kind of thing.  That’s great that he’s saying this is not the way to behave, instead behave like this.  And he really is quite clear that pressuring your wife into sex is bad.   

Sheila: And groping her is bad.  He says all of these things.

Keith: Groping her is bad.  Going and playing golf and not dealing with your relationship is bad.  He says all those things.  But it’s like why doesn’t he go the full length and go back to saying, yeah.  Most of the problems in our marriage were me.  Why?  Why doesn’t he do that?  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  It’s just weird.  So that’s just a little aside.  That’s how he opens the book.  And so just to give you an idea of how this whole thing is framed.  Okay.  Now let’s just give a synopsis of his approach.   

Keith: Sure.

Sheila: If I were to summarize it, I would say that he’s trying to recreate the 1950s.  Everything in this book is gendered.  It’s all about her being the homemaker, looking after the home, him working, him having leadership, her being sexually available.  And it’s all based on their personal opinion with absolutely no research backing. 

Keith: Yeah.  Yeah.  So I think that yeah.  I would say the one caveat I would say is that he doesn’t say—everything he says doesn’t sound like the 50s.  He sounds more progressive sometimes.  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  He does.  But what I get the impression of is a man who sincerely cares, right?  When I read Love and Respect by Emerson Eggerichs, I really feel like Emerson Eggerichs doesn’t like women.  To be completely honest.  The way that he talks about women about how we’re always nagging, about how—everything we do is wrong.  He doesn’t really have a nice thing to say about women at all.  He constantly puts women down.  Jimmy Evans doesn’t do that.  Jimmy Evans legitimately, I think, wants to help women and wants to honor women and wants women to have great marriages and wants women to be safe.  I just also think he’s holding on to these gendered ideas that he can’t let go of.  And so it’s making—it’s putting himself in a cage where he can’t go full hog towards what he actually thinks because this whole book is so contradictory.  At one point, he’ll say the guy needs to be the leader.  And then at the other point, he’ll say but she has to always make the decisions with him.  And he goes back and forth on basically everything.  He’ll make a statement, and then he’ll backtrack on that statement because it’s like he’s trying to recreate these 1950s.  But he also knows at some level that’s not right.  But he thinks the 1950s are scriptural, and so he can’t get out of it.  And you just feel like here’s a guy, who has painted himself in a corner and he doesn’t know how to get out of it.

Keith: And he doesn’t even realize he’s in a corner.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Okay.  So let’s start with the basic philosophy of the book, which is everything is gendered.  Absolutely everything in life is gendered.  And needs are gendered.  Here’s a quote, “After almost 50 y ears of marriage and counseling thousands of women, I can tell you emphatically that women are basically the same.”  Okay? 

Keith: Right.  Okay.

Sheila: So he totally understands women, and all women are the same.

Keith: All women are exactly the same.  And they’re different than men.  

Sheila: Right.  Right. 

Keith: Oh my gosh.  Oh my gosh.

Sheila: And they’re very different from men.  But I want you to hear before we introduce some of the problems we have.  I want you to hear a clip, and we’re going to play a clip from Jimmy Evans where you’ll see how he sounds really kind.  And a lot of what he says sounds very good.  And it doesn’t sound unhealthy.  But I just want you all to listen to this clip, and then we’re going to talk about it.

Jimmy Evans: The surest way to fail is to try to change an unchangeable, and the unchangeable reality of marriage is you’re different by God’s design.  The only way that marriage works is to go into your spouse’s world, meet their need that you don’t have, and that’s what makes you happy.  But to do that, you have to accept what they’re saying as being valid.  When we shut down communication on any level, it affects every level.  And when you reject my needs, you reject me.  And when you’re rejecting me, it’s hard for me to open my heart and communicate on these other levels.  And so you have to have a servant’s spirit.  The only selfish people are miserable in marriage because they won’t serve.  But the only way you can succeed in marriage is to have a servant’s heart, to serve someone, praying this marriage will work.”

Sheila: All right.  So we each have totally different needs, right?  And we each need to meet these totally different needs because basically we’re completely separate species.

Keith: Yeah.  Yeah.  Oh, it’s crazy.  Yeah.  Anyway, I don’t know where you want to go with that, so I have so many things I could say. 

Sheila: Okay.  Well, let me jump in to what he calls the four basic needs of men and the four basic needs of women.  And none of this, again, is based on science.  There are no citations for this.  This is just Jimmy’s opinions, okay?  This isn’t based on any research that’s been done on human needs or anything. 

Keith: This is 50 years of experience wherein I would never have a preconceived idea that I would want to see and bias myself to seeing in every counseling event I’m ever in because I already believe this.

Sheila: Right.  Yes.  So here’s the four things.  And these are God given.  They are unchanging.  They are basic needs.  Okay?  So men need honor, sex, friendship, and domestic support.  All right?  Okay?

Keith: Hold on.  Say those again.  

Sheila: So men need honor, sex, friendship, and domestic support.  

Keith: Okay.  So then what they want is they want a lackey, a prostitute, a maid, and a caddy.

Sheila: And a golden retriever or something.  Yeah.

Keith: A golden retriever.  A golden retriever.

Sheila: Yes.  And women need security, soft nonsexual affection, open and honest communication, and leadership.  

Keith: Yes.  Okay.  Great.   

Sheila: Okay.  And, again, these are God given and unchanging.  Not based on any research.  So I want to unpack a little bit about this.  

Keith: Yeah.  Well, those are crazy.  So first of all, some of these needs sound incredibly unhealthy and immature.  But the ones that do sound healthy and mature I don’t think they’re gendered, right?  So what does it mean to have a need for honor?  Women don’t want to be honored.  I mean captivating, right?  The whole point is that, well, we have to show honor to women.  It just has to be a very different kind of honor.  It’s just so ridiculous when they talk like this.  Or what about—what was the one about the women—they need emotional—

Sheila: Open and honest communication.

Keith: Open and honest communication.  So men like being lied to.  Come on.

Sheila: They’re describing this as a female need.  This is not.  This is a human need.  And what I find so interesting—if we look at these needs as a whole as opposed to each individual one and we will talk about some of the individual ones in a minute, but women—non sexual affection and open and honest communication.  If you really concentrate on those two things, which he says women need, you’re going to really grow in emotional intimacy.  

Keith: Yeah.  Well, he actually says in the book that he—when he started meeting his wife’s needs in these areas—I didn’t understand them because I’m a guy.  I didn’t understand them.  But I started meeting them.  And it helped me so much. 

Sheila: Yeah.  And he even says it helped him better than his own needs.

Keith: Helped him better than meeting his own needs.  So why doesn’t the penny drop that maybe you have an outdated, unhealthy view of masculinity that doesn’t—that sees something that’s a human need as a woman need because you haven’t been taught that men can be emotionally healthy?  The penny should drop, but it doesn’t.

Sheila: Yeah.  And he does say that.  He says that what he finds is that meeting the women’s needs like for emotional—for communication, et cetera leads to human flourishing whereas his own do not.  Not really at all.  And when you look at the men’s needs, other than friendship, but domestic support, honor, and sex, those three things allow men to feel connected, to feel special without actually having to connect with their wives at all.  Right?

Keith: Right.  Well, and the other thing too—just another quick plug about the fact that not every man is married, right?  So if it is a need for men to have someone clean their house for them, to give them sex, does that mean if you’re—because I think this is what they believe.  They believe unless you’re married and having kids you’re not a man.  And I got to tell you.  The apostle Paul.  Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  These are not men according to them.  I mean it’s just ridiculous.  Your idea of masculinity has to be more than just how much your wife builds you up.  We have to have a better view of masculinity than that in the church.

Sheila: Absolutely.  Okay.  I want to read you something from page 72 where he sort of summarizes.  He’s introducing this idea of God’s blueprint for marital bliss and how men and women are different.  All right?  And he says—he’s summarizing.  “For a man, the ideal woman is someone who makes him feel like a king.  He wants a cheerleader to tell him how great he is and to encourage him throughout his life.  This ideal woman aggressively meets his sexual needs, looks her best at all times, and provides a home environment to which he can look forward all day.”  Okay.  So that is a woman, who is doing all these things for him without necessarily connecting emotionally whatsoever.  She’s just available for him sexually.  She’s aggressively available for him.  She’s looking her best.  She’s cleaning her home.  That has nothing to do with relationship.  And she’s being a cheerleader and making him feel like a king.  Okay?  What is it that a woman wants?  “For a woman, the ideal man is sensitive and affectionate.  She wants a man who lovingly initiates the wellbeing of the home while treating her as an equal in decision making.  She wants a man who opens up to her and communicates with her in an intimate and honest manner.”  Now which of those two people is emotionally healthy?    

Keith: Yeah.  Exactly.  

Sheila: And this is one of the fundamental problems with his gendered advice is it makes it sound like what men need is not anything that leads to emotional health or intimacy whatsoever.  

Keith: Yeah.  And, again, it’s this low view of masculinity that they have where they want to keep the privilege of being the king, and they don’t want to give that up and actually do the work of being a good partner and most—truly emotionally connecting to your wife.  Because all that emotional connection stuff, that’s her job.  She’s supposed to do that, so that I can point to the world and say, “Look at how,”—point out to the world how great my marriage is.  It’s crazy.

Sheila: Yeah.  To say that men don’t need that kind of emotional intimacy is just—it is a really low view of men.  And I just want to read this sentence again because it’s just so wild.  “This ideal woman aggressively meets his sexual needs, looks her best at all times, and provides a home environment to which he can look forward all day.”  If that’s what you want in a wife, hire someone.  That’s not a relationship.  Yeah.  And I just find that really sad.

Keith: It’s a sad and low view of men.  I think.

Sheila: Let’s save sex for a minute because I have so—you know that we have a lot to say about sex.  That’s a separate point coming up.  But I want to talk about this idea of domestic support for a minute because he deals with this constantly.

Keith: I don’t know where you’re going to go with this later.  But can we just talk about the fact that not all—not everything you feel as a felt need necessarily is a God-given need, right?  I mean men have a God-given need for domestic support.  What?  I’m sorry, sweetheart.  I’m not going to learn how to do laundry or make my meals because that’s what you’ve—God put you here for.  That’s what it smacks of.  

Sheila: Oh absolutely.

Keith: I mean come on.  That’s ridiculous.

Sheila: And it’s also so rooted in 1950s America.

Keith: What if I said women have a God-given need for men to make a seven figure salary.  Come on.  It’s just ridiculous.  

Sheila: This doesn’t apply to the majority of cultures.  It cannot be a God-given need if it doesn’t apply to the majority of cultures.  And if you look historically, men in hunter gatherer societies—we know this—spent most of their days within an arm’s reach of infants, right?  It was not—

Keith: Up until the Industrial Revolution, right?  The family was a unit.  The idea of the husband leaving the family unit to go out and work and bring home money to pay for everything is less than 300 years old.  So it can’t be biblical.    

Sheila: Right.  And so this idea that—if it only applies in our culture, it isn’t God given.  But beyond that in most families today, you need two incomes, and he has an answer for that.  What he says in the book is that even if she works at home she has to stay domestically centered.  So her center has to be the domestic, and she still has to keep up with the home.  So even if she works outside the home.  And he spends so much of the book—the main thing that he berates women for over and over and over again in Marriage on the Rock is that they’re spending too much with the kids.  And you’re not prioritizing your husband.  You’re getting way too caught up in the kids and the home, and you’re not prioritizing your husband.  And he says, “Women, you need to spend more time—the way that you prioritize is through your time and energy.  So you need to spend more time and energy on your husband than you do on anything else.”  It’s like how does that work in the newborn and toddler stage.

Keith: Yeah.  Okay.  So you’re saying to women that you need to prioritize your husband, but your husband doesn’t have to do anything around the house because he has a God-given need for domestic support, which is your job, right?  So do your job but do it in a way that you can also do this other thing that should take up more time.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And he’s just constantly berating women for doing the thing that he tells them to do because he says you have to be domestically centered.  But then he gets mad at women if they’re spending time with their kids, right?  And he has this one part where he says that women can get jealous of their husbands for spending so much time away from the home, out with their friends, just as men—and he equates it—just as men can get jealous of their wives for spending too much time with the kids and the home.  And it’s like okay.  Hold on just a second.  Back that truck up because if she’s spending time with the kids in the home she’s spending time on your family which you are ignoring if you’re out of the home.  That is not the same thing, but he treats them as equivalent.

Keith: They might both feel neglected.  But they’re feeling neglected for different reasons, and they’re not morally equivalent.  Me going off and playing golf and you spending too much time taking care of our children—those are not the same thing, right?  

Sheila: Yeah.  So it’s a really strange thing.  So ladies, whether or not you work outside the home, you have to concentrate on your kids.  But if you concentrate too much on your kids, then you’re bad.  And the way that you tell that you prioritize your marriage is that you spend more time and energy on your husband than your kids and the home.  He doesn’t tell you how that works in the newborn stage or the toddler stage or just the stage where you’re driving kids to practices.  It makes no sense.

Keith: And, again, if instead of all this gendered crap, you just said treat each other well, prioritize each other, spend time with each other, have your hobbies outside of your relationships.  Have your own things but make sure you’re centered on each other.  Then you’d be fine.

Sheila: Then you’d be fine.  And also parenting is such a great way to bond as a couple.  We were closer because we were raising our kids together.  And we did it totally together, and they were fun.

Keith: Just as a guy, the idea that the domestic life, taking care of a household, looking after your kids is a woman’s job and that men aren’t—

Sheila: And that men need it.  It’s a male need for someone to take of it for them. 

Keith: And the other side of it, men are not suited to it.  Men can’t learn how to do these things.  I find that, frankly, insulting.  I can’t be a good parent because women are designed by God to care for children, but men aren’t.  Give me a break.

Sheila: Yeah.  Again, no citation.  And here’s a little bit of a heads up.  In our new marriage book, The Marriage You Want, we actually measured this.  So we measured how important it was for housework to be shared.  And I think that is the chapter in the book that will be like a nuclear bomb going off in evangelical advice—in the evangelical advice world because what we found was amazing.  And we’re working on another academic paper for it, hopefully, this year because it really was quite ground breaking.

Keith: Well, and because what we found supports what’s already reported in the literature, which we just don’t want to accept.    

Sheila: Which is like housework is actually more important than anything else basically when it comes to marriage.  And yet, he’s like no.  It’s entirely her job.  So big problem.  All right.

Keith: And, again, most guys are not going to get that out of this book.  They’re going to get I need to take care of my wife.  And most women are homemakers at a level that men aren’t.  And for most families, that works.  But as soon as you start prescribing that and saying that this is the way that God wants our families to be, you open up people to do things that are really, really unhealthy and say, “See?  Jimmy Evans and God said this is the way it’s supposed to be.”

Sheila: Yeah.  It doesn’t work that way.  Okay.  One more thing about the needs before we move on to some more specifics is he says these are such totally different things.  But when you look at practically how you’re supposed to work a lot of them out, there is no difference practically between what a guy does and what a woman does.  So when she is showing him honor or when he is giving her security, there’s really no difference in the practical ways that you’re supposed to live that out.  And so it’s like he’s clinging to this idea that the genders have to be so different whereas really if you just act in healthy ways towards one another you’re going to be great.  

Keith: Yeah.  But he has to say women need to feel secure so don’t raise your voice to them.  And men need to feel honored so don’t raise your voice to them.  Right?  That’s the way—and it has to be forwarded that way as opposed to watch your tone when you’re having a conversation with your spouse.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  I mean it would be so much easier.  Okay.  And this gets into the next big point that I want to get into which is the inconsistency of his advice.  So he’ll say one thing.  That this is absolutely vitally important in one chapter.  And then in the next chapter, he’ll just contravene it.  And he’ll say the opposite.  And the perfect example is leadership.  So I want to dig down onto this idea that she needs leadership because this is throughout the book.  Throughout the book, he talks about leadership over and over again.  He gives analogies of the boss, the employer, the king.  He uses all these different words for the kind of leadership that she needs.  All right?

Keith: Yeah.  And I think it’s really subtle.  Because Emerson Eggerichs says men need to be the leaders and that’s a need of men to be the leader.  But he kind of sneaks it in going women need to be led.  

Sheila: Yes.  Yeah.  So he gives it as a her need that she needs him to have leadership.  And so for the vast majority of the book, he keeps using these words.  Leader.  He needs you to lead.  She needs you to lead.  She needs the king.  And he gives illustrations of a king, a boss, an employer, how these people care for the people under them.  But then when he actually talks about how you’re supposed to live this leadership out, he makes the claim over and over again that it has to be equal.  So it’s bizarre.  It’s like he uses words like king, boss, employer, and then he says, “But it’s so important in decision making that you make it together.”

Keith: Yeah.  And he never reconciles the two of those things.  

Sheila: No.  He doesn’t.

Keith: Because a lot of the stuff that’s out there is the Emerson Eggerichs Love and Respect type thing.  Then men are in charge.  Women can give their input, and they’re “equal”.  They really honestly believe they think women are equal.  But the man is the one who is actually in charge.  So I don’t know how you can be in charge and—of two people who are equal to each other.  But they don’t reconcile that.  Emerson Eggerichs reconciles it by saying, “Well, she’s actually not really equal.  He’s in charge.  He’s got 51% of the authority in the relationship.”  That’s what Emerson Eggerichs says.  Now that is horrendous and so prone to abuse and can so easily be misused that even Jimmy Evans can’t get away from seeing how bad that is.  So what he does through the entire book is he talks about men needing to be leaders.  And then as soon as he says that, that doesn’t mean that women don’t have a say.  You should have 100% fully equal say.  You make the decisions together because he has to protect against that.  But then he never realizes that the two of them just actually can’t go together.  You need to dump it and just be equals and be partners together.

Sheila: Yeah.  So he says this.  Okay?  “Use the authority God has given you to lead.  As you become responsible for the leadership in every area of your family, your wife will love it.  And she will give you the response you are looking for.”  And then a couple of sentences later, “Ask her advice and pray with her about major decisions.  Then make the decisions together.” 

Keith: Yeah.  Exactly.  And the one that he specifically talks about that really hit me was finances.  And he says this.  Guys, women have this need for security.  So one of the key areas you need to show your leadership in as men is to be in charge of the finances and take leadership in that area.  And he really stresses this.  And it makes total sense.  If you believe that the man is the provider and the woman is—then if that’s her security you need to provide for, that makes sense.  Then he actually gives specific, quite detailed accounting of what they do in terms of finances.

Sheila: So that he is in charge.

Keith: And what they do in their relationship is they sit down together, and they make all the financial decisions together as complete equals.  And then she pays the bills.  Right.  And it’s like this is the whole thing.  They talk about leadership, leadership, leadership.  And it’s like, again, I hear Inigo Montoya in my voice.  “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”  Right?  This is not leadership.  Women are not looking for leadership.  Women are looking for a partner.  Sitting down together, making the decisions together is partnership.  That’s what women are looking for.  The fact that you have to call it leadership or you won’t do it is a sign of your immaturity as a man.  Right?  That is ridiculous.  And then she goes ahead and pays the bills, so she’s the one who actually does the job at the end.  The executive function.  So if anything, it’s 51% on her.  So how is he a leader?  I mean it doesn’t make any sense to me because it’s not about actually doing what’s helpful and what works in a marriage.  They just think that men have this need to be in charge of everything and that they can’t function if they don’t feel like they’re in charge.  And it’s insulting.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  And I think that really is what it is because throughout the book whenever he gives practical examples—and he gives a lot of how you’re supposed to live this out in the marriage.  All it is is men stepping up to do the things that their wives are already doing.  So it’s just men joining the wives in doing what the wives are already doing whether it’s with the kids or with the finances or with the home or whatever it is.  It’s like if she’s already doing it and then he just comes alongside her and does it with her that’s not leadership.  That’s partnership.

Keith: Take initiative.  By all means.  By all means.

Sheila: That’s what leadership should be is just initiative.  Yeah.  Just take initiative.  She’s already taking initiative.  Just take initiative.  That’s what people are looking for.  And I wish he could just be honest and say that he’s an egalitarian.  Just admit you’re an egalitarian because that is what he’s saying is you need to do everything together.  But it’s like no.  He just has to cling to this idea that men have to be in charge.  Okay.  Some more inconsistent stuff.  So there’s inconsistent stuff within leadership.  There’s also inconsistent stuff with how to handle bad things in your marriage.  All right?  Okay.  He spends a lot of time in the book arguing that women should not enable bad behavior in their husbands which I really appreciate.  I think this is really good.  He never actually tells you how to draw boundaries.  He just gets mad at you for enabling things.  So he doesn’t say you’re allowed to say no.  He certainly doesn’t say you’re allowed to say no to sex.  That’s very clear that you’re not allowed to say no to sex.  But he uses words like do not enable bad behavior although he doesn’t say what it is you’re supposed to do.  Okay?  

Keith: But then also you’re not supposed—you’re supposed to recognize he’s the leader, and you need to be led.   

Sheila: Right.  It’s all really, really confusing.  But then there’s this one story that just—left me completely flabbergasted.  All right?  And I’ll paint the picture for you.  So there’s a woman whose husband is having an affair.  So he comes home after work.  He gets dinner, and he picks up supplies.  And then he goes and sleeps at the girlfriend’s house.  And the woman asked Jimmy Evans for advice.  And Jimmy Evans says, “Well, do you want to stay with him?  Or do you want to leave?”  And she says she wants to stay.  And so Jimmy says, “So here’s what you do.  You treat him with the kindest and respect that you would treat Jesus.”  And so for the next—when he comes home to get his supplies, she has dinner ready.  And she apologizes for every bad thing she’s ever done.  And she apologizes for her weaknesses, and she never mentions the affair.  And she just blesses him as he goes to the girlfriend’s house.  It’s horrendous.

Keith: Yeah.  It’s a real story.  Now he does preface it by saying he told her that she has biblical grounds for divorce.  But she wanted to make the marriage work.  So he said, well, this is the way to do it then.  

Sheila: And he goes into a lot—this story takes up a lot of room in the boom.  And this is his idea of how you rescue a marriage if you want to rescue it.  This is completely the wrong advice.  I will tell you.  This is completely the wrong advice.  

Keith: Yeah.  Well I mean, again, because this is the thing that bothers me about this whole mindset.  Because will this keep a marriage together?  Possibly.  But what you’re doing is you’re keeping the marriage together by giving in to the basest and most morally reprehensible parts of this man and letting him get away with treating you badly, letting him get away with breaking God’s commandments, and all that stuff because the assumption is that unless he gets what he wants he’s going to leave you.  So give him whatever he wants, and he’ll stay is a reasonable response.  That’s not a reasonable response.  I mean this is the thing that bothers me.  People who talk about men being in charge always paint it as if it’s for the benefit of women.  Men are supposed to be in charge because that will benefit women.  This man is a pastor.  When you tell a woman—when a woman comes to you and says, “I don’t want to divorce him.  I don’t want to divorce him.  I know I can divorce him, but I want to stay with him,” and to you, in your mind, the only way she can keep him is to act like this, why does your pastor’s heart not say, “You’re worth more than that.  You shouldn’t have to subjugate yourself to a wicked man to make him get whatever he wants so that he’ll stay with you.  You deserve better than that.”  And, of course, in the story, the man becomes a Christian.  And everything is perfect.

Sheila: Yes.  And everything turns around.  And it’s all perfect.  Yeah.

Keith: Because she did this and then he became a Christian and everything is wonderful.  And he repents, and he realizes what he did was wrong.  And everything is perfect.  Right?  Put aside the fact that that’s nonsense, and that’s not what’s going to happen most of the time.  If a guy becomes a Christian because his wife treated him like he was a god, is that going to be a healthy Christian?  Does that man’s faith rest on a foundation that is healthy?  That is truly biblical?  I mean it’s ridiculous to me.  The idea that women should subject themselves and subjugate themselves and humiliate themselves before men should be reprehensible to even people who consider themselves complementarians.  But the problem is as soon as you let in the idea that there’s a way you can be equal but not equal it naturally goes down this pathway.  And you start seeing women as subjugating and humiliating themselves—well, it’s not optimal.  But it’s okay.  And it should not be okay.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Exactly.  And you would never give the same advice to a guy.  It’s so telling that this advice was given to a woman in this book, that she should abase herself because you don’t see that to a guy.

Keith: Oh, and that’s the amazing thing because when you tell people gender is so incredibly—men and women are so different that they have completely different ways of looking at the world.  Everything is different.  They’re not the same.  They’re different species.  Then what happens is you can give the same command, and it’ interpreted as two different things.  So if a woman is cheating on a man, he needs to step up into his leadership and stop that garbage.  But if he’s cheating on her, she needs to step into her submission role and submit to him, right?  So they’re both fighting for the marriage the way God wants them to fight for it.  But they’re complete opposites.  That should raise red flags that when the same command should—translates in diametrically opposed ways for men than it does for women maybe we’re misunderstanding God’s commands.

Sheila: Yeah.  When fighting for your marriage looks so different for both.  Yeah.  Exactly.  Exactly.  So very contradictory advice.  Okay.  Do not enable sin but then tells this woman to apologize for all her weaknesses while he is the one having an affair.  Really, really weird stuff.  Okay.  Next one.  This is a hard one to explain, but he spends so much of the first bit of the book talking about the concept of needs.  

Keith: Can I do this one?  

Sheila: Yeah.  Sure.

Keith: I think I know where you’re going with this one.  Okay.  So the book starts with the standard Christian little diatribe about how only God can meet your needs, right?  So he says God is—has to be the center of your marriage.  It can’t be about getting your needs met.  Only God can meet your needs.  You need to realize that.  If you don’t realize that, there’s no point of reading the rest of the book because only God can meet your needs.  And that’s full stop.  And then the next chapter he says these are the fundamental needs of men and the fundamental needs of women.

Sheila: Yeah.  And you need to meet them.  Yeah.

Keith: It’s like what the heck.  If only God can meet my needs, why are you telling me what my husband’s needs are?  Because God should be meeting them for him.  And why are you telling me my wife’s needs because God should be meeting them for her?  It doesn’t make any sense. 

Sheila: Yeah.  But it’s also interesting that when you look at the four needs of a wife and a husband that God can’t actually meet the husband’s needs.  

Keith: And this is the thing is that when—what’s the wife’s needs?  Security.  

Sheila: She can get that from God.

Keith: God can get you—give you security.  We all pray to God to keep us secure and safe, right?  Emotional connection.  Oh my gosh.  God is such a source of emotional connection and support for me.  All the needs that a woman—

Sheila: Affection.  Even leadership.  Yeah.  God can do those things for women.  But God cannot give a husband sex and domestic support.  Right. 

Keith: Sex?  Domestic support?  And this is the thing is you don’t have to—it’s not very subtle.  Only God can meet your deepest needs.  Here are the needs that husbands and wives have.  And then when a wife’s needs are not being met, it’s so easy for her to go, “Well, God should be meeting my needs.  Not my husband.”

Sheila: And he does say that a lot is that if you rely on your husband it’s idolatry.  And that’s so much easier to say to the wife because her needs could be met in God whereas his can’t.    

Keith: If you have a need for sex, then how does God meet that need?  It can only be met by your wife in these circles, right?  So it’s like we know that only God can meet your needs except for the ones that the wife can meet for the husband.  It’s just ridiculous.

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s so weird.  Okay.  So we had gendered advice.  We had inconsistent advice.  

Keith: Contradictory advice.     

Sheila: Contradictory and inconsistent advice.  And now we have downright dangerous advice.  And there is a lot of that here especially with the way that he handles abuse.  Okay?  He gives a lot of examples in the book of miracles with no caveats.  And we heard about one already with this guy with the affair, and that’s quite common.  There’s a lot of these kinds of stories of someone who is absolutely terrible, who turns around.  But I just want to read a couple of the things that he says specifically about abuse throughout the book.  And he starts with this.  And this is quite early in the book.  He gives a lot of promises.  He says, “It does not matter how out of love you are today.  If you will begin to work at the relationship, it will be resurrected.  No matter what the state of your marriage is today if you will work at meeting his or her needs even if your spouse is not doing the same for you, you will begin to see a real difference.”  And then he later says that this is guaranteed.  So if you do the work, it is guaranteed that your marriage will be fine.  And that’s actually how they market the book.  That you have a 100% success rate when you follow the things in this book.  I mean I feel like we talk about this all the time about how crazy that is.  But that’s just crazy because you can’t fix a marriage by yourself.

Keith: Well, yeah.  And then the thing is too is that whenever a—it doesn’t work for somebody they say, “Well, they just didn’t do it right.”  There’s always a reason, right?  This isn’t going to hurt people if you put this advice into practice.  Well, it hurt me.  Well, you didn’t do it right.  Or, well, you’re not really Christian.  Or, well, you didn’t wait long enough.  She prayed for 20 years, and her husband became a Christian.  Well, I’ve been praying for 21, and he’s not a Christian yet.  Well, you’re—maybe you’re 22.  You can’t do that.  You’re changing the denominator to make the—make it 100%.  If it only works for 10 out of 100 people, you find some way to discount the 90 people it didn’t work for so you can say 100% of people it worked for.

Sheila: Okay.  Let me read you what he says about abuse specifically.  Okay?  Okay.  So this is on page 7, so this is—this sets up the book.  He says, ““Many marriages end in disillusionment, or, even worse, divorce. And this is because the parties involved enter the relationship with unrealistic expectations, not because they are evil or even irresponsible.”  So it’s like he’s denying the fact that there are evil and irresponsible spouses.  He says the problem in the marriage is not caused by the fact that someone is evil or irresponsible.  The problem is that you have unrealistic expectations.

Keith: And if he was saying that most people are not evil, so you should try to work on things that would be one thing.  But to say it does not matter.  This 100% works.  If you do what I’m about to tell you, it will 100% work.    

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Really problematic.  And he talks about abuse throughout the book.  Over and over again he mentions it.  He says—here’s a quote again.  “In cases of abuse it might be necessary to limit some involvement with some people.”

Keith: What does that mean? 

Sheila: In other places—this, again, is the inconsistent.  He actually says get to safety.

Keith: Isn’t there one point too where he talks about avoiding people who are going to tell you to divorce your husband?

Sheila: Yeah.  So that was my next bit.  He says, “Do not talk to your friends or family if you are being abused.  Only talk to your pastor.”  And he says, “Because your friends or family will tell you to divorce.”  And it’s like yeah.  Because your friends and family care about you and they can see through the fog of abuse, but we all know—there have been so many pastors in the news like John MacArthur’s church where they have sent women in abusive marriage, that they know are abusive, back to their abusive husbands.  We had a woman on the podcast who talked about how she was excommunicated, where she was put under church discipline for divorcing her husband.  We know so many women who have been excommunicated from churches for divorcing abusive husbands.  But he says, “No.  You need to go the pastor, not to your friends or family.”  Yeah.  So really problematic.  And then, again—and then somehow about two-thirds of the way through the book, he has this whole thing about abuse where he says, “Yeah.  If you’re being abused, you should leave and separate.  And try not to divorce.  Try to work on it because God can work miracles.  But sometimes divorce may be necessary.”  So he says the right things about two-thirds of the way through.  Well, not totally the right things, but close to the right things.  But then the whole rest of the book is like this is guaranteed to work.  You just need to do this.  And it’s just so problematic.  So he spends a lot of time at the beginning of the book talking about how you shouldn’t leave your spouse no matter how much you don’t like them and no matter how bad your marriage is because if you get into another marriage you’re just going to have all the same problems.  And so you need to fix it now.  And then he gives this guarantee that if you do this it will work.  And he says this, “My wife and I know this is a fact because we have lived out the process.  We don’t resent the work we do for each other.  We consider it a joy.”  And he talks about how they were in a really bad marriage, but they worked at it.  But the problem is they both worked at it.  So he’s saying we know this will work because my wife and I did it.  But the scenarios he’s given before are even if your spouse isn’t working at it, and so it’s not the same thing.

Keith: Yeah.  Yeah.  It’s crazy.  It worked for us.  It can work for you.  And if your situation is completely different than ours, it will still work for you.  It doesn’t make any sense.

Sheila: Okay.  I also want to read to you his take on why their marriage changed because it’s interesting too.  Okay?  And remember he says that he was verbally abusive.  Okay?  So this is his take on how marriages change.  This is what his wife did.  “But one day things changed.  At a point of utter frustration with me and our marriage, Karen turned to the Lord and prayed for the Lord to change her.  From that point forward, she trusted God to change me as she focused on her own behavior and weaknesses.  And that was the beginning of the healing of our marriage.”  So he’s saying that the way to heal an abusive marriage is to pray that God will change you and to focus on your own weaknesses.  And this is what I mean by the fact that he never tells anyone how to draw boundaries.  So he says you’re not supposed to enable abuse.  He says that you’re supposed to stand up to abusers, but he never actually says it.  The actual practical stuff he gives is no.  You just need to work on yourself and trust that God will change the abuser.  So really, really weird.

Keith: Now he, himself, through the book is actually a good model because he was really, really nasty and bad, and he clearly—he’s very open about that.  And he’s trying to be better now.  It’s just so sad that instead of saying, therefore, be a good man and be good to your wife.  And if you aren’t, she should kick you to the curb because you deserve it.  He does this whole thing about divorce is so horrible and stuff like that.  It’s just so (cross talk).

Sheila: And he actually even says—even though he admits that he was verbally abusive.  And he defines abuse as including that later in the book.  This is all from different snippets.  He doesn’t make a cohesive argument.  So it’s all throughout.  But then he says when he talks about his own relationship with his wife he says that she didn’t have grounds to leave him.  So he’s like, yes, if they’re abusive, you can get out.  But then when he’s talking about him and his wife, when he says that he was abusive and that he had cheated on her, he says that she didn’t have grounds to leave him.  So really, really weird.  I also want to read you this story of Greg because the story of Greg really, really bothered me.  And, again, this is to do with abuse.  So he talks about a couple named Greg and Tamara.  And they were on their second marriage.  They had both been married before, and Tamara had a bunch of kids.  And they were seeking counseling, not for the sake of their own relationships but because Greg and her kids were not getting along.  And he says this is a common scenario that causes significant problems.  Now this section is under his point the law of possession.  Okay?  And the point that he is making—

Keith: And I hated that terminology too, by the way.  Yeah.

Sheila: Right.  He felt Tamara did not trust him enough with her children to allow him to correct them or to give input on their lives, so that’s the first issue.  And he felt violated by the way Tamara’s children treated him.  And then he claims that Tamara was violating the law of possession.  But then he also admits—and this is in a throwaway line.  Jimmy Evans says that the children would instinctively accuse him of wrongdoing.  Okay?  And eventually, Tamara chose her children and divorced Greg.  And this is all to say isn’t this terrible of Tamara for not focusing on her husband and letting him correct the children and not believing the children’s thing about wrongdoing.  But there’s a lot of abuse in stepfamilies.  And as a parent, you need to trust what your kids are saying about their stepparent.  Your kids rely on you.  And this whole  concept of, well, now you’re married.  And so your new spouse comes first even before your biological kids.  No.  You had your biological kids first.  And they need your protection.  And so if your kids say that that stepparent is doing something to me, that needs to come first, and the fact that Jimmy Evans glosses all over this and tells the story completely from Greg’s point of view without maybe taking the kids or Tamara into consideration I find really problematic.

Keith: Oh absolutely.  I mean the whole—first of all, the law of possession as if you possess your own children, much less your stepchildren, is disgusting to me as a pediatrician.  But then the issue of he’s supposed to be an authority over them so they need to give in to his authority.  But they instinctively started wrongly accusing him of bad things.  Really?  I mean I’ve dealt with a lot of kids.  I don’t think kids instinctually lie and make things up.  I mean the issue—the idea that the person in power should be believed and that the people who are—don’t have power should be dismissed, how is that working for the church these days?

Sheila: Well, and how did it work at Gateway Church where Jimmy Evans came from?  Right?

Keith: Yeah.  I mean this is crazy.  So to assume that he’s right and they’re falsely accusing him, I’m not saying Greg did anything.  But I’m saying that shows your heart a lot.

Sheila: But to not even have in the book the caveat that, well, you need to defend your kids from stepparents.  I totally believe that stepparents can be awesome.  I mean I am not against stepparents.  I actually think stepparents are amazing.  Brad Paisley’s song, Half the Dad He Didn’t Have to Be.

Keith: I Hope I’m Half the Dad.  Yeah.  That’s great.

Sheila: Beautiful, beautiful song.  Stepparents are incredible.  But there is also a higher—children are most at risk of sexual abuse when the mother has a new partner.

Keith: And to use the example of kids saying that a stepfather was doing bad things and your response as a mother should have been to discount the testimony of your own children and stay with this man—and what a horrible, sinful woman she is for protecting her children, come on.

Sheila: Yeah.  Really, really problematic.  Okay.  So that was the dangerous advice.  Now we’re going to get into sex, which is also dangerous advice.  But I like sex is a whole banner of—and I can’t—almost every single marriage problem that he brings up in this book because he has so many anecdotes, sex is at the root of it.  That women are not giving men enough sex.  This is over and over and over again.  And if I can encapsulate his view of sex in one sentence, which he gratefully gave us a sentence to do so, from—this is what he says, “A woman must never communicate to her husband that her body does not belong to him in an unqualified manner to meet his sexual needs.”  Okay.  Let me repeat that.  “A woman must never communicate to her husband that her body does not belong to him in an unqualified manner to meet his sexual needs.”  There’s a lot of negatives in that.  So I’m going to translate it into what he’s really saying.  Okay.  A woman must always show her husband that her body belongs to him in an unqualified manner no matter what is happening.  Her body has to belong to him.

Keith: Why wouldn’t he have said it that way?  

Sheila: Well, yeah.  I mean yes. 

Keith: Because this is the thing is—this is the problem with gendered advice is it allows you to—you’re saying healthy things.  But then the underlying thing is really, really rotten, and you have to say it in these kind of covert double, triple, quadruple negative ways because it’s just—it would otherwise be recognized as being so obviously harmful.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So here’s an example that he gives.  Okay?  And I just want to read this to you.  “Fred desired to be intimate and enjoy sex.  But Marilyn would not participate when he did something that angered her.”

Keith: Oh my gosh.  Yeah.

Sheila: Yeah.  “Then she would tell him, ‘I’m going to cut you off for a week if you do that again,’ and she meant it.”  And he frames this whole thing as Marilyn using sex to manipulate her husband.  

Keith: This is the classic trope.  I want to get what I want out of you, so I’m going to withhold sex so that you’ll give me what I want because I’m mad at you.  And I want this thing.  That’s the kind of nonsense that—yeah.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And it’s like women don’t actually do that very often.  What more happens is women are like, “No.  I don’t—I can’t do this when I’m not feeling close to you or when I’m feeling used.”

Keith: If your spouse is—okay.  Men, if you’re in the middle of a fight and your wife is really, really angry with you, why are you thinking about sex right now?  Solve the issue.  Work it through.

Sheila: I want to summarize.  This book is obligation sex to the nth degree.  And we have talked so much about the problems with obligation sex.  We have a podcast on it.  I don’t want to go over all that again because this is one of the big things we’ve talked about over and over again.  But just to summarize in our survey of 20,000 women for our book, The Great Sex Rescue, we found that the obligation sex message, the idea that a woman is obligated to give her husband sex when he wants it which is exactly what he’s teaching here, is one of the most destructive messages.  It lowers orgasm rates.  It’s one of the big reasons that evangelical women have twice the rate of sexual pain.  It lowers libido.  It kills desire.  And it’s really destructive.  And the fact that he doubles down on it and doesn’t even care about that is so frustrating.  But it’s not only that.  He doesn’t just preach the obligation sex message.  He also does what Emerson Eggerichs does.  And Emerson Eggerichs does it in one chapter in Love and Respect where he gives an entire chapter on sex and never once mentions that sex should be pleasurable for her too.  Well, Jimmy Evans goes one step further where he talks about sex in almost every page of this book and never once mentions that women can or should orgasm.  In fact, he insinuates that women don’t or don’t very often.  He says, “Guys, you should not expect every encounter to be a mountaintop experience for her,” which I take that to mean that she’s not going to orgasm every time or even that often.  He never uses the word orgasm or climax in the entire book except for once he talks about climax.  And it’s the climax of communication.  It has nothing to do with sex.  So he can type the word climax.  He just can’t use it when it has to do with sex.  So he talks about sex constantly without ever mentioning the orgasm gap or without ever mentioning that sex—that she can feel pleasure.

Keith: Because the assumption is that sex is a male need that women don’t have.

Sheila: And yet, let’s see what he says to women about sex.  Okay?  “While a woman should not have to jump through hoops and learn a new sex trick every week, she should make regular efforts to be creative and aggressive.”  And later he says, “There are times when a wife needs unrestricted romance, and a time when husbands need prolonged creative sex.  Just as a man should aggressively romance his wife, a woman should aggressively pursue her husband sexually.  In fact, if your husband knows some exciting sex is at the end of the line, he will become much more romantic at the beginning.”  And listen to this.  “Don’t make him beg for sex.  Even during your menstrual cycle when you cannot have intercourse, there are still are creative ways to satisfy his needs, if you will only be sensitive and available.”  So yeah.

Keith: And this is the problem with creating all this—these opposite needs that men and women have, right?  Human beings are sexual beings.  Can we just talk about how that works as a couple?  What are your needs?  What are my needs?  When you start making, well, men need sex, women don’t, it’s crazy.  So here’s the deal.  So if we had an idea that both men—sex is for both men and women—like you always talk about.  Mutual, intimate, pleasurable for both, right?  

Sheila: Intimate, pleasurable for both.  Yes.

Keith: If we had an idea that sex was a need for both, right?  Then we would say, “Well, why doesn’t she want it so much,” right?  Well, maybe we need to make it better for her, right?  There’s not one word in this book that encourages men to become better lovers.  

Sheila: Yes.  But she has to be aggressive, creative—  

Keith: But she’s supposed to—it recommends that she read books about how to make her husband have better pleasure.

Sheila: Yeah.  There’s actually a part where it says that she should study his body and his arousal pathways.

Keith: Yeah.  So it talks about her becoming a better lover for him.  I want to shake my head.

Sheila: I know.  I know.  It’s like do you have any clue.

Keith: It’s just crazy.  It’s just crazy.

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s so bad.  And then he spends a ton of time talking about how visual men are.  So men are totally visual like everything we hear all the time.  And so because of that, women can’t wear flannel.  They have to lingerie.   

Keith: Flannel belongs in the fireplace, he says.

Sheila: Yes.  He says that.  So it’s really important that women wear lingerie and really, really pretty pajamas and everything which means you’ve never lived in the Canadian winter but whatever.  Okay.  

Keith: Well, and the other thing too is that if men are visual, why do you—it’s like if someone has a—if someone has a certain characteristic, you don’t need to accentuate that characteristic to make it work for them.  Men are visual.  The flannel is going to be just as good.  Oh, man.  I’m looking—what does it mean men are visual so, therefore, overload their visual sense with way too much?  

Sheila: Yeah.  And he makes a really big point that you need to continue to look good.  You need to look your best all the time.  And then after talking about this for pages, he says, “Women, stop being insecure about your bodies.”  It’s like oh my gosh.

Keith: Men, realize women feel insecure about their bodies, so try to make sure they feel like they’re beautiful and that kind of stuff, right?  But it’s like just crazy.  It’s just insane.

Sheila: And then just really briefly one other thing that bothered me about the sex thing is when he’s talking about porn he says, “Women talking about other men is just as bad as men using porn.”  And it’s like no.  No.  No.  No.  It’s not.  Because one is sex trafficking.  No.  No.  No.  They are not the equivalent.  If a woman is talking about other men or reading a romance novel, that is not the same thing as contributing to sex trafficking.  So we need to stop that idea.  But it’s like every time he mentions a man’s sin he has to mention what a woman does that’s just as bad.  And it’s like but it’s not.  It’s not.  And the whole book is set up that way. 

Keith: Yeah.  And, again, if instead of saying these are the problems that men can get into and these are the problems that women can get into so that we have to balance that out every time we talk about a man problem we have to talk about a woman problem, why don’t we just say sometimes people do this?  And it hurts your marriage.  And sometimes people do that, and it hurts your marriage.  So don’t do that.  And don’t do this.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And just (inaudible).  Okay.

Keith: Because what does the genderification of it all add to the problem—to the solution?  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

Sheila: And that’s a big thing that we really try to address in The Marriage You Want is we’re going to take away all the gendered stuff.  And we’re just going to look at what’s healthy.  

Keith: What’s right?  What’s the—what’s Christian?  What’s biblical?  What’s the good thing to do, right?  

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  All right.  Are you ready for the next bit which is spiritual bypassing and pat answers?  

Keith: Yeah.  Of course.  Of course.  And that was one of the big ones that—the first thing that said yep.  The same old pat answers.  Like you talked about earlier, the miraculous stories.  Everything is just pray and it will all work out and all that kind of typical pat answers.

Sheila: Yes.  And one of the things he says really early in the book is that you cannot have a good marriage unless you are focused on Jesus.  And so you absolutely need to make Jesus the focus of your marriage.  Now I totally agree that Jesus should be the focus of our lives.  But to say it that way insinuates—yeah.

Keith: Yeah.  As a Christian, I want to make Jesus the focus of my life because I want to follow Christ.  That’s why I’m a Christian.  Now to say that if I were not following Christ, I could not do anything in my life, and I would be a hideous mess.  Okay.  That’s a bit of a stretch.  But to say because you don’t follow Christ, your life is a hideous mess, which is basically what you’re saying when if you don’t have Christ, you can’t have a good marriage.

Sheila: Yeah.  And I actually—I remember when I was deep into this thinking.  I assumed that all non Christians had terrible marriages.  I did.  And you know what?  It’s not true.  Non Christians can have great marriages.  And we really need to watch the way we talk about this stuff because we’re insinuating that if you’re not a Christian you can’t have a good marriage.  And actually, there’s a lot of non Christians who have a lot better marriages than a lot of Christians.  So just not true.

Keith: Yeah.  It’s just not true.  And it’s hurtful, right?

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Because the things is we can be following Jesus’ heart even if we don’t ascribe to Jesus, even if we don’t call Jesus Lord because He gave us all consciences, right?  We are all made in the image of God whether we are Christians or not.  And we all need love and intimacy.  And a lot of non Christians are seeking that out in healthier ways than a lot of Christians.

Keith: Sometimes.  Yeah.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Okay.  Then he makes everything into a spiritual battle.  

Keith: Oh, yeah.  Yeah.  This is the thing.  All the time.  Again, it’s one of the pat answers, right?  Everything is a war.  The devil is our greatest enemy.  Everything is Satan out to get us, right?  I counted up this in—did I write the numbers down?  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Right there.

Keith: Yeah.  Oh, yeah.  Right.  The first thing I wrote down is in his wrap up chapter at the end of the book when he’s summarizing the whole book, okay?  So he’s given you all this information on all the different topics in marriages.  We’re now in the summary section.  Here’s what the book is saying.  Point number one, expect Satan.  That was the name of that paragraph.  Expect Satan.  This is what I want to leave you with.  You are going to be attacked by the devil.  That’s the most important thing for you to take away.  I actually Googled how many times Satan was mentioned in the book.  Yeah.  Satan is mentioned 23 times in this book.  Jesus is mentioned 7.  Let that sit.  Yeah.  Let that sit.  Why is that?  And this is the deal.  Okay.  So Satan is going to attack your marriage, right?  Okay.  Well, look.  We have an enemy.  We want to do what’s right.  There are forces that will take us off the path.  I get all that.  But what I often see with the Satan is going to attack your marriage is it’s like the—don’t you dare ask questions.  Don’t you dare think about this.  It’s like that voice that’s telling you that maybe he’s abusive and narcissistic.  That’s the devil speaking to you.  That voice that tells you maybe all this gendered nonsense is unfair and unjust that’s the devil talking to you because we Christians believe in gender hierarchy.  Right?  That kind of nonsense.  And it tells people to shut their brains off.  And I believe God gave us brains for a reason.  And I think God wants us to use our brains.  So if there’s a little voice inside our head that’s telling us, “Maybe the stuff we’re being taught by this Christian author isn’t right,” to automatically assume that’s the devil, that’s ridiculous.  But that’s what they do because they want to show that seed of doubt.  As soon as you start questioning the way we are talking to you, you are on the side of evil.  It keeps everybody in their cages.  And that’s the point.

Sheila: Yeah.  Okay.  The other issue of spiritual bypassing is that there’s quick, instantaneous fixes for pretty much everything.  And there is a horrific story that I want to use to share this.  So he presents a couple that comes in for counseling.  And the woman admits, for the first time she’s spoken it out loud, that her father raped her from the time that she was 10 until she was a sophomore in high school.  So that’s roughly six years.  Okay.  Of horrendous sexual abuse.  And what is Jimmy’s response?  Well, I’m going to read it to you.  “When she regained her composure, I led Pam in a prayer of forgiveness for her father.  This is the single most important act for a woman to be healed from abuse.  Pam was also persuaded that she was not guilty or dirty in God’s eyes or in her husband’s eyes.  This was also something she was wrestling with.  And finally, I prayed for her and asked God to heal the scars in her mind and heart.  I asked him to do a miracle for Pam erasing the pain of her past.”  And that’s it.  And then she was fine.

Keith: Everything was great after that.

Sheila: Yeah.  Six years of incest, of incredible trauma, and it’s fine because she prayed to forgive her dad.

Keith: Yeah.  And on the night that she finally has the courage to speak that out loud, she’s told the most important thing to do right now is to forgive your father.  Right?  And then she does that, and everything is fine.  

Sheila: Yeah.

Keith: No trauma counseling. 

Sheila: Yeah.  This just is dangerous.  This is just dangerous.  And please.  If you have been abused in the past, please seek out a licensed counselor.  And there’s really good trauma counselors and talking alone doesn’t do it.  And so please go seek someone out, and this is not okay.  This is not okay.  And he put this in the 25th anniversary edition.  He should have known better.  We may not have known better 30 years ago, but we sure as heck know better now.  And it was unconscionable to put that in the book that way, I think.  Again, it shows he is coming from a church.  And he did leave that church because he had trouble with the leadership, so I don’t want to paint him with—to—I don’t want to say he is to blame for what the leadership of that church did.  But he did come out of that culture.  And a bunch of leaders at the church have had to step down because they allegedly covered up the child sexual abuse too.  So he does not understand abuse dynamics.  He grew up in it, and he has no training in this which he has said repeatedly that he has no training in this.  And he just gives these spiritual bypassing solutions.  And he does that with parenting too.  

Keith: Yeah.  And that’s what I was going to say.  Talk about no training, and that’s all.  

Sheila: I’m going to let you handle this one.

Keith: Oh, I’m going to chomp at the bit at this one, right?

Sheila: Now I don’t want to go on too much because we’ve talked about this in other podcasts.  So he spends the—most of the book talking about marriage, but then he tacks on these chapters at the end on finances and parenting because these are big issues that parents deal with.  And his chapter on parenting is entirely—

Keith: Yeah.  It’s terrible.  It’s horrendous.

Sheila: It’s entirely on spanking.

Keith: Yeah.  So basically he talks this whole chapter about spanking, why it’s the right thing to do—

Sheila: And spanking with a wooden paddle or—wooden paddle, wooden spoon, or wooden rod.

Keith: Some very specific instructions.  He talks about some of the reasons why people—he goes for—he uses what he calls biblical arguments to why it’s appropriate and all that kind of stuff.  And nothing at all about any other form of discipline.  He equates spanking with discipline.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So he assumes that if you’re not spanking you are, therefore, not disciplining your child.   

Keith: Yeah.  Yeah.  And so he says at one point it’s not the only tool.  But it’s very clear that it’s the main tool from what he says.  And then actually, at the very end, he says two things.  He says, “There are other ways to use discipline.”  All he says is, “I’m not a fan of grounding,” right?  So he mentions grounding to throw away that he’s not a big fan of it.  And then the second thing he says is he believes in withdrawal of privileges or added responsibilities and other creative ways of teaching our children.  But he doesn’t describe any of those.

Sheila: After spending so many pages—this is multiple pages about how to spank.  Yeah.  Mm-hmm.

Keith: And all the literature shows that those other creative ways are a million times better at not only—okay.  Hold on a second.  Your mic isn’t—there.  Not only producing more emotionally healthy children but actually getting them to self discipline.  It’s not about control because spanking is about control.  And these people don’t even realize that they want to control their kids.  They don’t want to disciple and raise their kids, right?  If you want to discipline and raise your child, then you teach them how to behave.  And that is not beating them and making them scared to do something that’s going to make you angry.  It’s about teaching them what appropriate behaviors are, putting consequences in place that match the things they’ve done that are wrong, and there’s so many better ways to discipline.  And he dismisses them with one sentence and spends a whole chapter talking about spanking.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And not just spanking.  Again, with a wooden rod, wooden spoon, or implement.

Keith: With very specific instructions about it.  

Sheila: And I just want to stress that you are a pediatrician.  Not everyone listening may know this, but you are a pediatrician.  And you are up on the literature.  There was a huge meta analysis, which took the world by storm in 2016 by Elizabeth Gershoff.  And it was of 160,000 children.  And she looked at all the research on spanking.  She combined a whole bunch of different studies so that she could—they could make a definitive statement.  And what they found is that spanking is either neutral or negative but not positive.  So if you were spanked and you’re okay, you’re okay despite the spanking, not because of the spanking because a lot of people say,” Well, I was spanked, and I turned out fine.” That’s despite the spanking.  

Keith: And the idea that, “Well, I was spanked, and I was fine.  So, therefore, I’m going to spank my kids,” again, you’re buying the idea that that is the only way to discipline.  And it’s either spanking or zero discipline in the household.  That’s a false dichotomy, right?  So if spanking worked for you as a kid, you are now an adult.  You feel like spanking worked for you.  Why would you not want to find a better way than your parents?  Even if it didn’t “work for you”, why are you so opposed to trying other ways that are actually scientifically proven to work just as well or better?  And then you also don’t have all the baggage and emotional distress and all the horrible things that come with having been physically disciplined.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Because your body does not know the difference between abuse and spanking.  It just doesn’t.   

Keith: And there’s no studies that show that it is more effective than other ways of doing discipline.  

Sheila: No.  Only less.  And we had on David and Amanda Erickson in September about their great book, The Flourishing Family.  I highly recommend it.  And they go through all the biblical arguments for spanking and show why it is not telling parents to hit their kids, to hit their small children.  It cannot be interpreted that way.  The word for child isn’t even the word for small child there.  And so it’s really interesting, and they give all kinds of neuroscience and all kinds of other reasons and ways to discipline your kids.  I just find it so interesting that he completely dismisses all the research and doesn’t include any and just—which is what Jimmy Evans does throughout this entire book.

Keith: Yeah.  And that’s the whole thing.  He’s not qualified to speak on this topic.  I mean he’s not qualified to speak on parenting and discipline because he doesn’t have any credentials for that.  And he clearly shows that everything he believes is wrong because it doesn’t match up with any of the scientific evidence that’s out there, right?  And then sex.  The stuff he says about sex.  It’s proven wrong, not just by your research, but by all the other research that’s out there.  So he hasn’t even read other people’s research.  So how can he be qualified to talk on a topic that he hasn’t actually even researched? 

Sheila: Yeah.  And the only citation that he uses in the sex thing is a Reader’s Digest sex tips.  Seriously?  So that brings me to the last thing I wanted to talk about which is just something that I labeled citation needed.  So I just want to list a lot of the claims that he makes in the book with no citation.  Okay?  So here we go.  First of all, he lists the four biggest psychological needs of people.  All right?  I forget what they are now.  But, again, he’s not citing this.  And I don’t know where this is ever—

Keith: The four biggest psychological needs of a man and of a woman.    

Sheila: Yeah.  And then just the four biggest psychological needs of people which are even different from that.  It’s bizarre.  He says most marriage are storm tossed and conflict ridden.  Actually, they’re not.  Most people who are married are fairly healthy and happy.  Not all.  There is a significant minority who are very unhappy.  About 25% of marriages are abusive.  But when you look at—and in our survey that’s coming out for The Marriage You Want, we found, like most other researchers, that most people rank their marriages pretty high.  So just simply a statement that isn’t true.  We have a very high divorce rate.  Well, compared to what?  And actually, the divorce rate was—at its highest in the 1970s.  And it has been coming down ever since until there was a slight uptick at COVID.  So our divorce rate is actually far lower than it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago, okay?  So just not true.  Reports of true marital happiness are few and far between.  If he thinks that, I’m really sorry for his friends.

Keith: Well, it also shows that he doesn’t understand the concept of what I have seen with my own life may not be the actual experience of the whole world.  Right?  So he’s a pastor, and they do marriage counseling.  So yeah.  They’re going to see a lot of people whose marriages are in trouble because that’s what they do, right?  But then he doesn’t go, “Well, maybe I’m seeing a skewed sample of what marriages are like.”  He’s not smart enough to figure that out, right?  And that’s why you have to look at actual scientific data, not just your own personal experience, which is the—

Sheila: Just use peer reviewed research.

Keith: Which is the only credential he brings is his personal experience.  

Sheila: Yep.  Okay.  He says studies show that marriages get less happy over time as kids grow.  Okay.  This is actually true.  But what he doesn’t say is that this far more true for women than men and why that is.

Keith: And why, right?

Sheila: Yeah.  He doesn’t say.  Okay.  This is just a funny one.  Genitals are the most sensitive part of the body.  Anyone heard of eyeballs?  Can I say eyeballs?  I was going to say under your fingernails.  I mean it’s just stupid.  But let’s not make these stupid claims, right?  We live in the most evil generation in history.

Keith: Yes.  Just like every generation before us.

Sheila: Yeah.  Can we say holocaust?  Can we say—  

Keith: I mean this is a standard thing, right?  We live in the most evil generation ever.  I’m so depressed about the state of the world these days.  This is a constant trope, right?  To make people afraid of the time they live in to go back to this better time I’m trying to show you like the 1950s.  

Sheila: And speaking of this better time, why is it that a hundred years ago our divorce rate was 5% and now it’s 50%?  Okay.  First of all, the divorce rate is not 50%.  And it never has been.  It’s closer to 35%, I believe.  But the reason the divorce was 5% 100 years ago is because women couldn’t leave.  And I have a story about this.  Can I tell you my story?   

Keith: Yeah.  Of course.  

Sheila: Okay.  I shared this on social media a couple of weeks ago.  And it’s a story about my grandmother’s funeral.  So my grandma was an amazing woman.  She married at 30.  But she was a really big personality.  She was an amazing public speaker, and she used to have this radio show on every Saturday morning on a big Winnipeg radio station in Winnipeg, Manitoba before she was married.  She taught at a Bible college in her 20s.  But then when she got married to my grandfather, who was a pastor, she had to quit all of that and become a pastor’s wife.  And she found that difficult.  She was the better speaker.  She was probably the smarter one.  

Keith: But this was a time where just those gender norms were considered—women don’t do that.

Sheila: Yes.  She was an amazing knitter, and she spent a lot of her time knitting.  I still have a number of things she knit.  I’ve worn some of them.  She was the one who taught me how to knit.  So just a wonderful woman.  And after her—at her funeral, we went back to Winnipeg.  And we had a little memorial service.  And this little old lady stooped over probably about 80 years old, came up to me at the end of that funeral, and said, “Your grandmother was such an amazing woman.  She taught me to knit.  And she was so kind to me.”  And I thought, “Yeah.  That sounds like Grandma.”  And she says, “Our backyards were right against each other.  And so we would spend time together at the fence, and we would talk.  And when I told her how exhausted I was with my kids, she would bring me these little pills, and they made me feel so much better.  So whenever I just couldn’t take it anymore, I would go, and I would stand at the fence.  And your grandma would come outside with these pills.”  And I thought, “Wow.  That’s a side to Grandma I didn’t know.”  My Grandma, the pill pusher.  But there was a lot of women on Valium in the 1940s and 50s because they’re—and 60s because their lives were so difficult.  You couldn’t have a bank account in your own name.  You couldn’t get credit.  You couldn’t divorce.  No fault divorce wasn’t in there.  And so in order to get divorced, you would have to prove wrongdoing, which was very difficult to do.

Keith: Yeah.  Especially because it was also a sexist society.  

Sheila: It was a really sexist society.  So you want to know why divorce rate was 5% back then?  Yeah.  It’s not that people were necessarily happy.  And on those threads where I shared that, so—hundreds and hundreds of women shared their stories of what their grandmas’ marriages were like.  And interesting stat is that men died of accidents a lot more before no fault divorce.  They would mysteriously fall down wells or eat poisoned mushrooms.  And women’s suicide rates went down after no fault divorce.  

Keith: So yeah.  So the answer to the current situation is not everyone should go back to this time where we had no other options, right?  To go back to a time where women knew their place and didn’t speak up.  I mean what a horrific way of looking at it, right?

Sheila: Exactly.    

Keith: We need to be empowering people, not taking away their voice.  It’s crazy.

Sheila: Then finally on the citation needed, he does a lot of weird things with Bible stories where he takes a lot of liberties that aren’t there and talks about them like they’re obvious.  He says, “Without a doubt,”—so this is without a doubt, Keith.  Okay?

Keith: Without a doubt.    

Sheila: “Without a doubt”—

Keith: Does he say the Bible is clear?  That’s my favorite.

Sheila: Yes.  “Without a doubt, the Samaritan woman pestered each of her husbands with demands they were incapable of meeting.” 

Keith: Oh my gosh.

Sheila: And a lot of scholars actually think that the Samaritan woman was just someone who was left and was abused, not that she pestered her husbands into leaving her, right?  He also does the Esther story very strangely.  He portrays Vashti, first of all, as being in the wrong for refusing to dance naked before the king.  That she should have listened to her husband and honored her husband.  And then he has Esther praying for favor and praying that she would get chosen to spend the night with the king which means Esther was praying to be raped.  

Keith: Basically, yeah.

Sheila: And I find that very problematic.  So there’s a lot of weird Bible stuff in here as well.  Okay?  So that was a long one.  We do have a one sheet of all the problems on Marriage on the Rock.  We ran it yesterday on the website, on baremarriage.com.  And I will put a link to where you can download our one sheet and give it to anyone, who is thinking of hosting an XO Marriage conference because this is the stuff they teach, right?  And this is the book that will be offered for sale at the XO Marriage conference.

Keith: Yeah.  And the thing—you’re talking about citation needed, right?  So all these things that he’s saying, they’re—he just speaks them.  There’s no evidence for it.  But it just—it lands because that’s what’s in the water.  And I find this so phenomenally interesting in my years in the evangelical church, right?  I’ve heard two things.  Number one is it’s a horrible, horrible thing that people think they can create their own truth.  Truth is absolute.  We must seek the truth and only the truth, and you can’t create your own truth.  And at the same time, they keep spouting these things, which have been proven to be untrue.  But they keep saying, “Well, you have to believe it because it’s God’s Word.  You have to believe it.  It’s God’s Word.”  They’re creating their own truth.  They’re creating their own truth.  Because they are unwilling to let go of these assumptions they’ve made about how men are, how women are, how men are supposed to behave, how women are supposed to behave, what’s healthy, what’s not.  They have a view of the Bible, and they will not realize it’s a view of the Bible.  They equate it with the Bible.  And all the data that’s telling them they’re wrong they ignore it and create their own truth.  This is ridiculous.  If Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, we should not be afraid to look at the literature about spanking before we write a chapter about spanking in a Christian marriage book, right?

Sheila: With a wooden paddle, by the way.  Yes.

Keith: Exactly.  If we believe that Jesus is the truth, we should be able to engage the literature.  And when it disagrees with what our view of Christianity is, if we’re not willing to rethink our faith, then we need to actually give an honest argument about why we think we’re right.  They don’t do that.  They just say, “Don’t trust the world.  Don’t listen to science.  That’s the devil in your ear.”  It is an unconscionably huge lack of integrity, right?  We have to actually look at the data.  And if that changes the way we have to look at our faith, you know what?  I think that’s healthy.  I think we need to be challenged.  And the problem is that this book—this book—most of this book is so sweet and healthy.  We’ve talked about all the bad parts of it.  But most of the book—it’s just a fluff marriage book.

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s just telling people try harder and love each other and be nice.  Yeah.  

Keith: It’s a fluff marriage book.  So people who are generally healthy are going to read the book, and they’re not going to get harmed by it.  But it’s going to also just instill even deeper those cultural assumptions which have the potential to do harm.  And it’s just going to make it more and more ingrained in the psyche that these things are true when they are not true.  So we need to call these things out.

Sheila: Yeah.  And I just want to say I think the sex advice is harmful no matter what because they never mention orgasm at all.  And there’s a lot of stuff that’s harmful no matter what.  But yeah.  

Keith: And for men.  To say that the world is supposed to be designed so that men have things easier.  Men have a need for domestic support.  To say that unironically.

Sheila: Even when women are working outside the home she still has to do it.

Keith: That was just a great title.

Sheila: Or Male Centric Sex?  I can’t remember which one we did.  

Keith: To say that men have a need for domestic support and have no sense that maybe I have an immature view of masculinity.  To never question that.  I mean come on.  We can do so much better than this.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And so listen.  XO Marriage has a bunch of conferences coming up in the spring.  So if it’s happening—in the winter and spring, if it’s happening at your church, maybe you want to share this podcast with them or share our one sheet.  Again, you can get that at baremarriage.com, and I will put the link in the podcast notes for that one sheet as well as the one sheet for all the other books we’ve done like Love and Respect, For Women Only, Every Man’s Battle, Lies Women Believe, et cetera.  There is one other thing that I want to end with though.  Okay?  And it’s this idea.  Marriage on the Rock and XO Marriage grew out of a relationship of a couple who had a really bad marriage, and then there was a turning point where they figured out how to prioritize each other and treat each other better.  And by all accounts, I believe they probably do have a good marriage based on what they say.  I am a little worried about sex because that just seems weird.  But by and large, right?  But they didn’t get any training in this, and they were at a church which promoted them as marriage mentors then.  And then this grew out of that.  Okay?  And what we are seeing across social media is very much the same thing.  There are so many people offering marriage courses because—and their story is we had a terrible marriage.  He had an affair.  And now we’ve rebuilt so we can help you rebuild.  Or we had a terrible marriage.  We turned it around because we learned God’s principles, and now we want to help you rebuild.  And I just want to say.  Those accounts often have millions of followers.  That is not a good way to build a marriage ministry.  Christians, we need to be more discerning, and we need to raise the bar.  Okay?  Let’s see peer reviewed research.  Let’s see people using studies.  Let’s see people that are not speaking only from their own opinion because this is what happens when you speak only from your own opinion without knowledge.  You say stupid things about spanking.  You say terrible reprehensible things about sexual assault.  You don’t understand the ramifications of stepparents and the risks of abuse.  You forget that women can orgasm.  This is what happens.  And this shouldn’t be happening.  We are Christians.  We are sons and daughters of the living God.  And surely, we can do things better than this.  Surely, we can do things excellently.  And that is our call for the church.  And so speaking of excellent in the final podcast of 2024, we are going to share with you about something excellent that we recently did that I am so excited about.  And so join us next week on the Bare Marriage podcast.  Please print out our one sheet on Marriage on the Rock and share it around to anyone who is interested in XO Marriage or Marriage on the Rock or any of our other one sheets.  And we will see you again on the Bare Marriage podcast.  Bye-bye.

Keith: Bye.