Sheila: Happy New Year.

Rebecca: Happy New Year.

Sheila: Hello, Bare Marriage people.  We are here in 2025.  

Rebecca: Yep.  I have already made that mistake a couple of times.  I’ve already—think, “Oh, well, this year was 2023.  So now it’s 2024.”  I was like nope.  That’s not right.

Sheila: Right.  But this is an exciting year.  And I am 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 by my daughter and coauthor and just all-around person who helped me do things.

Rebecca: My official title is co.  

Sheila: You’re co.  Rebecca Lindenbach.  

Rebecca: Co everything.

Sheila: Yes.  I am excited about the year.  We ended December saying, “Hey, we’re going into Christmas optimistic for the first time in years.”  And I’m coming back, and I’m all rearing to go.  And I want to share a really quick Bible verse that I did—that I posted this week as the first post of the year up on baremarriage.com where in Ecclesiastes 3.  That section where it says there’s a time for everything.  A time for every season under heaven.  A time to be born, a time to die.    

Rebecca: Seasons turn, turn, turn.  Yes.  Like that 90s song.  Yes.

Sheila: Yes.  Exactly.  Yes.  No.  60s.  It was like 60s. 

Rebecca: Okay.  I was in the 90s when I listened to it as a 90s kid when you played it in the car all the time.

Sheila: Yes.  But part of it is there is a time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones together.  And I take that to mean scattering stones in those days that would have been breaking down the walls, breaking down all the buildings that we’ve got, breaking down the things that aren’t working, that are faulty.  But then after you’ve done that, there’s time to gather all those stones up and rebuild.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  Absolutely.

Sheila: And 2025 is going to be such a fun year because we are going to build something healthy.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  The visualization that I like from our area of the world is the scattering stones is the ripping the stones out from the farm soil, throwing them to the side, and then later on in the year making one of those stone fences you see all around the Sterling Marmara area in eastern Ontario because that’s what all the farmers did because it was horrible farm land.  They had to rip out those stones.  And I feel like we’ve been dealing with some really terrible farmland in evangelicalism.  

Sheila: Yes.  This is the worst farmland in our area of Ontario.  We were the worst—we were the last to be settled because there were so many rocks.  And so if you drive around our town, there’s all these beautiful rock fences.

Rebecca: And they’re really old.  They’re super old rock fences that were put in by the original farmers and everything who moved in.  But I just feel like we’ve been doing a similar thing with evangelicalism where, quite frankly, we’ve made some pretty nasty farm soil.  And we’ve been just ripping out those rocks.

Sheila: Right.  Exactly.  And we’re going to keep—it’s not that we’re going to stop doing that.  We’re not going to stop taking on toxic teachings.  We’re not going to stop my fixed it for yous on Instagram.

Rebecca: Gosh, no.

Sheila: But The Marriage You Want, our book that’s coming out in March that I coauthored with my husband Keith, that Joanna did the stats for again, that is really focused on, hey, if we just want to build a healthy marriage, how do we do it from the ground up?  So we’re not tearing anything down.  We’re showing, hey, there’s a healthy alternative.  You don’t need all this toxic stuff.  We can build a healthy alternative.  And today what I want to talk about is as we’re building that healthy alternative, how do you not get sucked in to the toxic stuff again?  How do you not—or maybe you’ve rejected some toxic stuff.  But it’s super easy to get sucked in to other toxic stuff if you don’t deal with the root of why we all got sucked in to the toxic stuff in the first place.  

Rebecca: Exactly.  Yeah.  We hear from a lot of people who they—it takes them years to leave an abusive church.  And they realize they just want somewhere to be a rest for them, and then they go to what feels good because it feels kind of familiar.  And the same thing happens again.  And it’s just so painful, right?  But also, as we are figuring out how we got to this place where—we hear from people all the time.  When they start to deconstruct, they’re just like, “How did I buy it?  How on earth did I believe that my husband couldn’t handle me saying, ‘Maybe don’t give the kid, who is allergic to peanuts, peanuts’?  How on earth did we get to a point where we couldn’t just talk to each other like human beings?”  So we wanted to do a little bit of a postmortem on why we believe crap teachings. 

Sheila: Yeah.  How did we get to the point where we all believe the crap teachings?  And my husband always says that whenever there’s a case that goes bad in the hospital, they have these big case meetings where they bring all the doctors, the head nurses, everyone who worked on the case in to say, “Okay.  What happened?  And how can we prevent that from happening again?”  And so that’s what we want to do in this podcast?  How did these books that we’ve been critiquing for years—how did they sell 30 to 40 million copies?  Do you know how much money 30 to 40 million copies of books are?

Rebecca: Do you know how many people Canada has?  

Sheila: I know.  That’s our entire population.

Rebecca: That’s our whole country.

Sheila: How did that many people get sucked into these books?  And, of course, it’s not just these books.  It’s also the mega church pastors, who have been preaching the same thing.  It’s today’s pastors, who learned from these books and are now spouting it all themselves.  How did we get to the point where there was no discernment or so little discernment that we could be taken in by these toxic teachings about love and respect, about things like women aren’t allowed to say no sex, about the fact that all men struggle with lust.  It’s every man’s battle. And so women, you need to cover up.  And if he lusts after a 12 year old, it’s probably because of what she’s wearing.  And eight-year-old bellies are intoxicating.  

Rebecca: It just goes on and on and on.

Sheila: It just goes on and on.  

Rebecca: We could literally write a book on it.

Sheila: Oh, I think we did.

Rebecca: I think we wrote two actually.

Sheila: Oh, speaking of which, I checked today.  We’re recording this last Sunday.  So four days ago.  And I didn’t know this, but Great Sex Rescue on Kindle is on for $3.99.

Rebecca: Oh gosh.  Okay.

Sheila: I don’t know why.  It might not be on for $3.99 anymore.  But if you are listening to this podcast, go and check on Amazon because, hey, it’s on sale.

Rebecca: It might be super cheap right now.  Yeah.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Now is a great time to get it.  So we did write those—we did write some amazing books on that.  They always say you need to understand history, so you don’t repeat it.  And they don’t mean you need to understand all of the facts so that the exact same thing doesn’t happen.  We don’t need to know that Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, and that’s—

Rebecca: Versus, oh, I thought it was 1938.  You’re going to repeat history because you didn’t know it was 1939.  It’s like no.  Know the general—the story.  But the big thing is understanding the why.  What led up to it?  What kinds of things were happening socially, politically, religiously, economically?  What kinds of things led to this so that we can start seeing the red flags three steps sooner and, theoretically, stop it?  Right?  That’s what they mean.  And so we wanted to look at what are the things that—not just what are the toxic teachings because that’s the end result.  But what are the things that got us to believe things that when you look at them head on are ridiculous.  That you need to be conditioned into believing.  So what was that conditioning?  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  And we have five things that we’re going to talk about on this podcast, so I’m going to give you a quick—I’m going to give you a quick synopsis first.  Okay?  First of all, us versus them thinking and how the nature of the modern church really, really feeds into that.  Second is the idea of secularism versus Christianity.  

Rebecca: And how this is a false dichotomy.

Sheila: Yes.  It is.  And third is patriarchy and male authority and how the church wanted to continue that.  Four is gimmicks and quick fixes.  The church just likes gimmicks.  We like them way too much.  And finally, change is painful.  And when you put all those five things together, that’s how we got here.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  So we’re going to look at each of these, so that you don’t get the wool pulled over your eyes again. 

Sheila: Right.  You don’t need to be someone who believed that—yeah.  Women’s main concern postpartum is that they keep their husband sexually satisfied.  Yes.  No.  No.  No.  No.  We don’t need to do that anymore.  Okay.  So number one is us versus them.

Rebecca: Yes.  Now we are wired as a species to crave acceptance but also to crave group safety.  And that means we are also wired to expel the unsafe from within us.  That is something that we, as humans, evolved to do.

Sheila: And God created us that way because our main focus is survival.

Rebecca: Every pack animal does this.  The people who are harming the pack are left, and the people who help the pack are brought together.  Now one of the things of being a Christian is that we are called to elevate past our base lizard brain, right?  What the Bible calls the flesh, right?  The flesh versus the Spirit.  The flesh might say, “I just want to have the prettiest in group possible,” whereas the Spirit says, “Invite the beggars to your banquet,” right?  So that being said, we are not endorsing the idea of us versus them, but this is just a realistic look at how our psychology operates.  The problem is us versus them is really, really easy to weaponize because our brains already have highways developed for it.  

Sheila: Right.  Right.  And so we’re trained to see other people as the enemy and our group as, oh, they’re part of me.  And so I don’t question that.  And so we’re trained to see are you with me or are you against me.  And be suspicious of people that are against us.

Rebecca: Absolutely.  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca: The thing too about being part of a group is there are so many benefits to being in a group, right?  If you’re in a big church, you have meal trains.  If you are sick, you have childcare often.  You have people to give you hand me downs.  You have people to throw you baby showers.  You have community.

Sheila: Well, one thing I remember when you were really little and we were in a church, which we later left because it was toxic—but one of the things I loved when you were—when you guys were five and three or seven and five is when we walked into that church on a Sunday morning there were so many older people, who loved you and knew you by name and were really good to you.  And yeah.  We had to leave the church because it was toxic.  But at the same time, it is really nice being in a place where people of all generations care for your kids and take an interest in them.

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  And the thing is—

Sheila: In a non-creepy way. 

Rebecca: Yes.  Exactly.  No.  In a healthy, beneficial way.  But the thing is the way that many churches operate is it’s with this idea of purity and sanctification but not the good kind.  It’s purity of, in essence, making sure that there’s no one who is unclean around us, right?  And unclean doesn’t necessarily mean the things that we automatically think of.  We don’t think necessarily of someone who doesn’t have enough money, right?  Or something like that.  What it often is is ideology, or it’s different belief systems.

Sheila: Yeah.  Different political beliefs.  Yeah.

Rebecca: Exactly.  And so what often happens is we are trained very early on in these communities to stop thinking when we have—in essence what are called dog whistles.  But that are red flags that someone is not part of our community.  Okay?  So we are trained to have thought-stopping triggers.  And I’m going to say some now that are both on the conservative and the progressive Christian side that are thought-stopping triggers for people.  So things like social justice, prolife, feminist, family values.  If someone is talking about those kinds of things, that’s often a thought-stopping behavior.  We stop looking at their argument, and we start protecting ourselves from that person because they are of the outside.  They are not with me.  They are against me when they could just be using a different word to describe the same thing that you are, right?  You never actually know until you’ve actually heard the argument.  

Sheila: Right.  A lot of pastors are doing that with Bare Marriage right now is they’re telling people, “Oh, don’t listen to them.  They’re feminist.”

Rebecca: Oh, that’s a big one.

Sheila: Right?  They’re feminist.  And then people stop thinking, and they’re like, “Oh, well, they must be the enemy then,” as opposed to listening to what are they actually saying.  Because when most people listen to what we’re saying, they’re like, “Yeah.  I totally agree with that.  Yeah.  We should want intimacy.  Eight-year-old girls are not intoxicating to adult men.”

Rebecca: Well, and the reason that is a thought-stopping behavior is that it allows us to look for signals instead of substance.  We get trained to look for signals instead of substance.  So there’s a lot of people, who on our surveys—the majority of people who came from very, very conservative churches said they were fine with women being preachers and did not really have any issues with women in leadership positions. 

Sheila: Yeah.  We were actually really surprised by that.  But multiple studies have found that.  Lifeway has also found that.  I know a bunch of Barna surveys have found that.  Even a majority of people in Southern Baptist pews believe that women can be pastors.

Rebecca: Yeah.  And we have met with so many people, who—feminist is that thought-stopping word for them, who are also very happy with women being in positions of power.  And no.  Of course, a woman shouldn’t have to obey her husband.  It’s like, “Sweet pea, I hate to break it to you.  I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you—those are feminist ideologies,” right?  So there’s this idea where we are not actually thinking through what we believe because we’re all focused on signaling which group we are a part of.  So if you have a word that makes your—the hairs on the back of your neck stick up and make you think, “Oh, no.  I don’t know if I can trust this person,” just because of a phrase or something like that, I want you to actually think about—wait a second.  Why am I thinking this?  Is this because this person is actively actually trying to hurt me?  Or because they just happened to use a phrase that is often associated with people I disagree with?  Because those are two different things, right?  For examples, if you’re talking to someone who has covered up child sexual abuse and they start talking a lot about reconciliation, that’s a valid thing to say, “Oh, no.  You’re not a safe person,” because the context is there’s actually some harm being done.  Versus if someone in the general congregation of a church is talking about the concept of reconciliation and that’s a buzz word for you because of your history with families covering up child sex abuse, that is a thought-stopping situation because you need to look at the substance of what’s being said.  Are they talking about just not allowing bitterness to creep into our lives over unnecessary drama, which does happen?  Right?  There’s a difference there.  So I want us to think about those thought-stopping phrases.  And we’re going to give you an example of one right now which is often used in churches and is truly a problem.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Okay.  So you all know that we’ve talked a lot about Josh Howerton on this podcast.  He’s a megachurch pastor in Texas.  He did that famous wedding night joke, so to speak.  It wasn’t a joke.  It was whatever.  Stand where he tells you to stand.  Do what he wants you to do on the wedding night.  

Rebecca: On his wedding night.  Yeah.

Sheila: On his wedding night.  And plagiarizes a ton.  We’ve called him out for plagiarizing.  So here he is in a sermon from—I believe this was April of 2022.  Someone sent me this clip.  And I’ll just let you listen.  

Rebecca: First of all, though, my mom screen recorded it and didn’t realize that it wasn’t being recorded from the internal microphone.  So you can hear her coughing for the first half.  So enjoy Mom coughing.

Sheila: Yes.  Sorry about that.  I was sick.  I was sick.

Josh Howerton: And listen.  I’m going to break these things down.  Listen to me.  Biblically.  I’m going to break them down biblically because I want you to understand that what I’m saying is coming from God’s Word.  Listen.  Here’s why.  So that you cannot argue with me.  Listen.  Every time I make a point, I want you to see that comes from God’s Word.  So you might not like it.  And you might not want to receive it.  But if you resist it, you’re not resisting a pastor.  You’re resisting God.  And so I’m just going to be very—

Sheila: Yeah.  So if you resist Josh Howerton, you’re resisting God.

Rebecca: This is such a standard thought-stopping behavior that is used in churches.  I’m just telling you God’s Word.  This is from the Lord.  How on earth are you supposed to challenge that then?  That reeks of—if you challenge that, now you’re a prideful person, who thinks they know better than God.  That’s so inappropriate.

Sheila: And what people forget is that we have 2,000 years of Christian history behind us.  And people have felt differently about all kinds of different issues in the past looking at the same Bible verses.  When you preach from the Bible, we need to understand that your preaching is not equivalent to the Bible itself or to God itself.  Your preaching is merely your interpretation of the Bible.  And so that’s why it is incumbent on everybody, every Christian, to act as a Berean as Paul talks about in Acts who listens to what he’s saying but then who goes and examines the Scripture for themselves, who prays, who thinks about it, and who makes their own decision.  If any pastor ever tells you, “You’re not allowed to question this,” that is such a huge red flag.  And it isn’t biblical.  

Rebecca: But this is how we—this is the first step though to starting to believe those toxic messages is we are trained to stop thinking through a variety of small ways.  Some of which are more obvious than others.  This one I think is quite obvious.  But it also is in those in group, out group signals.  And so watch for all of it.  And don’t let yourself stop thinking.  Don’t let yourself immediately become aggressive and angry at someone because they just use the wrong phrase.  Actually look at the substance of what we are saying so that you actually can be informed about what you are believing and informed about who you are talking to.

Sheila: Yeah.  And what also happens too is people deconstruct from toxic Christianity like the stuff that has men in power over women and women have to obey and—et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  And then they flip, and they go majorly to the progressive side.  

Rebecca: But we keep the fundamentalism.

Sheila: But they keep the fundamentalism.  And they still react in the thought-stopping ways.  

Rebecca: And then what ends up happening is—it’s just this is the problem is we have to deconstruct the fundamentalisms as well.  You have to deconstruct the legalism and the fundamentalism, not just the teaching.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  Yeah.  So the issue really is how do we inform our own beliefs.  How do we figure out what we believe?  Yes.  What we believe is important.  But unless you figure out how we form those beliefs, we’re going to get into trouble again.

Rebecca: You don’t want to just ping pong from one bad belief system to another.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Exactly.  The problem is that the whole nature of the way that we do church in North America is set up for these thought-stopping—because think about—

Rebecca: Can I give you an example of the extreme to the other side?

Sheila: Sure. 

Rebecca: Okay.  So there’s a very common trend among people who deconstruct extreme purity culture, right?  To immediately say that everything is okay then.  Right?  And I’ve seen a lot of people online talking about how—do we really need to be worried about 12 year olds watching pornography because isn’t that not sex positive?  Right?  And it’s like okay.  See?  What we’ve done here is we came from one system where we have a standard answer for everything which is don’t have sex.  And we don’t that didn’t work, so I’m going to take everything I learned about having a standard answer for everything.  And I’m going to apply it to the opposite.  Sex is always good.  And it’s like, well, we know that’s not true.  We know there are studies that show that, actually, sexual chastity is incredibly good for you.  We know that there are studies that show that having multiple sexual partners is not healthy for you long term.  It’s not actually—the world is better if people are more sexually chaste and are more focused on making sure that we are being, in essence—I know it’s a bad buzzword—but holy in how we do sex.  Again, one of those buzzwords.  That’s one of those thought-stopping words.  It’s going to make a lot of deconstructioners really mad, right?  The idea of being holy.  There’s a lot of evidence that it’s really good for you.  And so this idea that, okay.  Well, now I guess it must be okay to have orgies of seven people because having sex with only one person my whole life didn’t work for me.  That is taking the same all or nothing thinking and the same way of thinking and applying it to something else.  And if you say anything like, “Well, no.  We should be sexually chaste,” that’s a thought-stopping belief now.  No.  We can’t engage in that.  You’re saying you agree with purity culture.  No.  That’s just a phrase that happens to be used with purity culture.  So yeah.  That’s an example of how you can actually flip really easily to an extreme in the other position that’s also not healthy because we don’t deconstruct why we believed the negative teaching in the first place.

Sheila: Right.  And again, I want to say this.  I think the nature of the church is set up for this because you think about what happens.  So believers get together.  Maybe a house church forms.  Eventually, you get to enough people that you buy a building.  Maybe you have a hundred people coming to the church.  You have someone on staff.  Well, now you have a budget.  And you have to make that budget, or else your church is going to be in trouble.  And so the church—we think that the church in North America—that the purpose of the church in North America is to convert North America—

Rebecca: No.  It’s not.

Sheila: – and to do missions and reach all the unreached.  But if you look at what the church in North America is actually preoccupied with, it’s keeping the people in the pews happy.  And it’s making sure they keep coming back.  And that is just the nature—and I’m not—

Rebecca: That’s not a bad thing.

Sheila: I don’t even mean this as a critique.  I mean I think it is a problem.  And I don’t know how else to do it.

Rebecca: But it’s a problem the same way that a lot of other realities are a problem, but that’s just how it works.  The reality is we age.  And so no.  We can’t spend 24 hours a day doing ministry to the poor because we need 10 hours to sleep and rest.  We need to be able to eat nutritious food, and that takes time to do.  And so yeah.  In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to sleep.  We wouldn’t have to do all these things.  We could just help people all the time.  Burn out exists.  Depression exists.  Food needs exist.  Sleep needs exist.  It’s in that category where it’s like I don’t really know how you fix that because that’s how the church functions.

Sheila: Right.  So this isn’t meant to be a critique of the church.  But the church has to make that budget, and so they have to make sure they don’t T people off.  And they have to make sure that people think, “Oh, if I go out of this church, I’m going to lose my access to truth.  I’m going to lose my access to God.”

Rebecca: That we will absolutely criticize.        

Sheila: That we will criticize.  But the reason behind it, I understand.  And so it’s an amazing tool that churches have to tell people the only way you’re really going to hear from God is if you stay here.  And look what God is doing.  Oh my goodness.  God is blessing us so much.  We are growing so much.  That’s evidence that God wants you to stay here because that’s evidence that the word of God is here.  And so that creates this us versus them because the church has a vested interest in making you not trust anything outside of the church.

Rebecca: And that’s why it’s so difficult because a lot of the healthy churches are the ones who haven’t been railing on the us versus them.  And unfortunately, they’ve lost a lot of members because of that.  And they’ve had to—they’ve sacrificed a lot by just doing what is healthy and what is Christ like because a lot of these—

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s very hard to get to be a big megachurch if you’re healthy because you’re trying not to give in to these dynamics.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Exactly.  Because all these megachurches come into towns and they siphon off people who are, quite frankly—I’ll be honest here.  A little bit more gullible maybe or a little bit more susceptible to cult like dynamics for a variety of reasons.  And they were going to these smaller healthy churches, but it just doesn’t have the pizzaz they want.  And then these big churches come in and say, “Yeah.  Well, your small church doesn’t have the pizzaz because they don’t really know God.”

Sheila: Yeah.  Look at the evidence of God because we have fog machines.  Yeah.  

Rebecca: Exactly.  Right?  And it does happen.  And people might laugh at that like, “Oh, that’s so silly.”  No.  But it happens.  There’s a lot of faithful congregations that are losing a lot of members because they won’t say, “I am the harbinger of truth.”  And so as you’re deconstructing, if you are in a church that claimed to be the harbinger of truth, maybe look at the smaller dying churches in your area because there’s a good chance that they were dying because your giant, harbinger of truth church came and sucked all the oxygen with its cult like tactics.  And I know that’s harsh to say.  But it’s true.  And maybe if we could just do a mass exodus back into these small churches, it might be easier to kind of deconstruct a lot of these negative thinking styles that weren’t there in the other churches.

Sheila: Okay.  We have a great example too of us versus them thinking from Focus on the Family.  Yes.  So they posted these in November.

Rebecca: Oh, these are so cringe, guys.

Sheila: And a ton of people posted them in our patron group because people were like, “Oh my goodness.  What is going on?”  

Rebecca: They were these weird things.  

Sheila: I don’t even know how to describe it.

Rebecca: So they put out these Facebook graphics that are, in essence, talking about the need for a new sexual revolution.  Okay.  

Sheila: Okay.  I’ll read it because it’s in front of me.  So it was a series of graphics that they put up, and they started with Jill and Jane.  So they said, “Meet Jane and Jill.”  And there’s just a picture of two stick figures.  Two stick figure women.

Rebecca: Like the women washroom sign women.

Sheila: Right.  One from 1964 and one from 2024.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  So 1964 is on the left, 2024 is on the right.  Just for anyone who isn’t watching on YouTube.

Sheila: And it says, “Jane has only had one sexual partner, her husband, who she moved in with after her wedding ceremony.”  This is from 1964.  “But Jill, from 2024, has had 11 sexual partners and is currently cohabitating with her current boyfriend.”  And it says at the bottom, “The average number of sexual partners in 2024 is 11.”  

Rebecca: Now I don’t find the citation for that I will say.  I’d be curious to see the citation.

Sheila: Yeah.  I have seen much lower numbers.

Rebecca: I have seen much higher and much lower based on which population you’re looking at.    

Sheila: Yeah.  Okay.  Next one, “Jane is currently works part time as an accountant.”  That’s what they put.  So yes.  Let’s just say it the way it’s supposed to be.  “Jane currently works part time as an accountant while her children are at school.  Jill is an OnlyFans creator and makes over $10,000 a month.”

Rebecca: And the funniest thing is—I don’t know if it will still be there.  They’ll remove the comment.  But I have to say.  In the comments on Focus on the Family, there was someone who commented, “Focus, I love you guys.  But you’ve got to know in this economy, advertising you can make $10,000 a month on OnlyFans is not the way you want to go.” 

Sheila: Okay.  And then they have at the bottom, “As of November 30, 2023, there are 4 million creators on OnlyFans.” All right.  I want to talk about this slide for a minute.  

Rebecca: Yes.  This is a doozy of a slide.

Sheila: Because it’s trying to set up this dichotomy between how wonderful things were in 1964—and whenever people say how wonderful they were in 1964, let’s remember that civil rights—the civil rights movement was heating up.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  In its infancy.

Sheila: In its infancy.  And so a great percentage of the American population did not have full rights.  

Rebecca: I mean Ruby Bridges.

Sheila: Ruby Bridges was 1960—right around then too.  

Rebecca: It was around then.  

Sheila: Three, I think?

Rebecca: Yeah.  I think something like that.  But Ruby Bridges was being that brave, little, six-year-old girl at this age.

Sheila: Right.  So whenever you’re saying, “Let’s go back to 1964,” you’re also saying, “Let’s go back before no-fault divorce.”  So if women wanted to leave an abusive husband, it was extremely difficult.  Women could not get credit cards in their own names or loans in their own names.  And when no fault divorce came in in the 1970s, women’s suicide rates went down and so did men’s rates of dying by accidents.  There’s a lot of men who fell down wells.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  There are.

Sheila: When women didn’t have a choice of how to get out of these destructive marriages.  To try to set up wasn’t 1964 so wonderful is just—

Rebecca: But also here’s the thing too.  They are comparing the most chaste from 1964 with the most—

Sheila: This is not typical.

Rebecca: This is not your typical—I don’t—none of my friends are waving around their OnlyFans money at me.  Right? They’re taking the most chaste with the least chaste of today’s society.  If you just compared it in 1964, Wanda went to a Woodstock orgy and took a bunch of LSD and doesn’t know how many people she slept with.  That’s the equivalent.

Sheila: Yeah.  That was the 1960s too.  Free love.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  Exactly.  In 1964, Sherry and Michael have an open relationship because it’s all the craze these days.  They each have a lover on the side.  The average person is not an OnlyFans model making $10,000 a month.  

Sheila: No.  No.  And so I don’t know what point they’re trying to make here.  

Rebecca: I mean I think they’re trying to keep alive this dream of the good old days when men could smack a woman’s butt, and no one could call HR about it.  I think that’s what they’re trying to hearken back to.  

Sheila: Okay.  So next slide.  “Jane has a strong sense of fulfillment from her faith, her job, her husband, and her children.  Jill, in 2024, is suffering from depression and anxiety and is struggling to find fulfillment in her life.”

Rebecca: We do know that mental health had been an issue in the 60s and 50s and 40s and everything before then too, right?

Sheila: There’s a reason the feminist movement really got going in the 60s because of how unfulfilled women were.  

Rebecca: Exactly.

Sheila: When they could only perform one role and they were really taken for granted.

Rebecca: Have you read any books from the 50s and 60s and 70s?  They’re not exactly like, “I love being a housewife.  This is the best.”  No.  They’re like deep, cutting commentary on what is the role of a woman.    

Sheila: And this doesn’t—we’re not speaking against stay-at-home motherhood here.

Rebecca: No.  I’m a stay-at-home mom and working full time pretty much.

Sheila: I was a stay-at-home mom, but it’s a choice.  And that’s what our surveys found is that when it is a genuine choice and when it’s best for the couple that’s great.  But when you do it because you feel like you have to because it’s a gender role, it tends not to work out well.

Rebecca: Well, and also a lot of people are stay-at-home moms and are not particularly fulfilled because they’re—it’s hard.  That’s the thing.  It’s also okay if you’re struggling with it.  That’s the big thing.  It’s this idea where it’s, in essence, the lobotomy wife is what Focus on the Family wants here.  

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s just ridiculous.  But can you see the us versus them?  It’s look at how great everything was in the 1960s, and now look at how terrible the outside world is because they’re all OnlyFans people that have slept with 11 guys.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Oh my gosh.

Sheila: And besides that I really have an issue coming down on OnlyFans creators when they wouldn’t be creating if there wasn’t a market for it.  And also there’s been so, so many studies that have shown that a lot of the creators are coerced.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Well, I mean how—I still think there’s a good argument that it’s actually not able to not be coercive because if you wouldn’t be doing it unless there is money involved that is, therefore, offering an incentive to perform a sexual act, which in any other context is called coercion.  

Sheila: Right.  Okay.  Here is what they wrote a couple days later about John.

Rebecca: After getting lambasted.

Sheila: Yes.  Because why are you blaming—yeah.  

Rebecca: So I want to make it clear.  They did not release these at the same time.  They got lambasted by people being like, “Why are you focusing on women when it’s men who are the ones who are fueling the sex trafficking industry?”

Sheila: Yes.  So here is John and Jack.  Okay?  From 1964 and 2024.  “John has only had one sexual partner, his wife.  Jack is addicted to Internet porn and pays for three OnlyFans subscriptions.”

Rebecca: Yeah.  And then it says OnlyFans had about 1 billion monthly visits in January 2024. 

Sheila: I’m not quite sure why they want to advertise OnlyFans but whatever.  Okay.  Okay.  “Marriage is far from easy, but John is proud of relationship.”

Rebecca: The grammar on these is just embarrassing, guys.

Sheila: “Proud of the relationship.”  That’s my—I’m correcting them.  “He’s been able to forge with his wife.”  And then it says, “Jack has no desire to seek out real relationships and has recently invested in an AI girlfriend.” 

Rebecca: Okay.  I know that AI girlfriends are getting more common.  But, friends, it is not the average experience to invest in an AI girlfriend.

Sheila: What are they thinking?

Rebecca: Again, it’s not like there weren’t weird loners, who were obsessed with pornography in the 60s too or whatever.

Sheila: And then it says, “Google Trends data shows that 24”—

Rebecca: But they know strip clubs existed in the 60s, right?    

Sheila: I know.  I know.  “Google Trends data shows a 2,400% increase in interest for AI girlfriends.”

Rebecca: Which is like yeah.  That’s a problem.  Also AI girlfriends were just discovered.  They were just invented.    

Sheila: Yeah.  If something goes from 2 to 4,800 out of a population of 300 million—

Rebecca: That’s a huge impact.  No.  I do believe it’s getting more and more common, which is horrifying.  But also this is still a fringe thing.  It’s still an embarrassing thing. 

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  And then, of course, the end.  “While it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, John has a strong sense of fulfillment from providing for his family.”  And then Jack, on the other hand, “has an overwhelming feeling of isolation and lonliness.”  That should be loneliness.  It says lonliness. Yes.

Rebecca: What I love here is you could so easily rephrase this to while it’s not all sunshine and rainbows John is able to escape to work for 80 hours a week, so he never has to actually spend any time with his screaming children.  And he finds great fulfillment in his secretary because that was also the 60s.  Oh my gosh.

Sheila: The whole point of this post from Focus on the Family is to make people think in terms of us versus them.

Rebecca: And what it does is it gives you the opportunity to pat yourself on the back because, gosh, I’m so much better than all these other people.  And that is also a way to get you to stop thinking because our brains like the dopamine hit of feeling like I’m a good person.  And so if you can just denigrate other people, it actually is quite rewarding in your own dopaminergic little system.  

Sheila: Here’s the issue.  As they have divided the world into us versus them and said, “We have the great truths.  The outside world doesn’t, so you can never listen to anything from the outside world,” and they define themselves by being different from the world—okay?  We need to do differently because we are Christian.  What happens when the world gets healthy?

Rebecca: Well, because here’s what I think a lot of these churches aren’t considering is a lot of the huge social justice movements that have happened throughout history have been done primarily from churches.  It’s been Christians organizing themselves and standing up for the downtrodden.  So a lot of these huge quote unquote social justice movements that conservative churches, in particular—and we’re talking about conservative churches because that’s where these teachings typically come from about women’s rights being lesser than men or just nonexistent.  A lot of them—they’re railing against Christian principles that were Christian movements by Christian organizations.  They’re actually going against their own Christian history.

Sheila: And the reason they’re doing that is because as Christians got successful, as they won those fights, as they won the fight against slavery, as they won the fight for feminism largely—because it was Christians who got women the right to vote.  Not entirely, of course.  But Christians, largely, fought for it especially in the UK and Canada.    

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  And there’s all these pictures of churches with bake sales and stuff to help support.

Sheila: Right.  And so as these things become accepted in the wider society, well now suddenly these things are the society’s values, not the church’s values.  And so we have to differentiate ourselves from them.  And so as society get healthier because it is becoming more and more Christian in some ways.  Not in all.  I’m not trying to say that society is healthy in all.  But when it comes to things like mental health, when it comes to things like how we handle child abuse, when it comes to things like women’s roles, when it comes to racism, when it comes to all those things, often the world is getting it more right than today’s churches.

Rebecca: Well, because for generations and generations, it was Christians who were trailblazing in those areas.  It is Christians who set up the first orphanages for children being left to die in the elements because they were disabled.  That was a Christian heritage, right?  And it was Christian—there’s Christian values behind making sure that the children didn’t have to go into mines.  A lot of these things when—but now it’s churches who aren’t turning the pedophiles.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Just think about this for a minute.  Think about how many times in the parables when Jesus was talking about what the kingdom of God was like, and He said—He talked about it being yeast that works through the whole batch of bread eventually.  He called Christians the salt and light of the world.  He talked about how the way that the world has changed is because Christians are in the world, and then they infect the world kind of.  They affect the world.  They change the world.  Because of Christians’ presence and because of our values and because of what we do, we end up changing the world.  And it’s taken 2,000 years on many of these things, and we’re still not there yet on many things especially on wealth.  It’s taken a lot—but you can see how over history things have gotten better and better and better on many areas, not in all—we’re not saying in all.  But on many areas and that’s because Christians were the yeast.  We were the salt.  We were the light.  But as the world starts adopting many of these things that are basically Christian, it’s like the church has now turned against it.

Rebecca: Well, and as a result, there are lots of things where if the world is doing things that they only believe are good because of, in essence, the Christian values that built the foundation for that but now the church is, as a reaction, are saying, “Well, I don’t want anything to do with that.”  And so there’s no way for the church to have any real influence over these things anymore.  So for example, take feminism, right?  The number of people who are now saying, “Well, maybe women shouldn’t have the right to vote, and maybe it wasn’t that bad pre suffrage,” because they don’t like how the world is handling everything when it comes to women’s rights.  Right?  Which is ridiculous.  If you genuinely are going to be that reactive and that all or nothing, you’re going to lose your saltiness, right?  Our pastor literally talked about this today.  You’re going to lose your saltiness and be good for nothing but the garbage heap.  Don’t just be reactive.  That’s a juvenile response to someone’s argument is to say, “Well, if you’re going to say that, then I just don’t think women should vote at all.”  But this is getting more common.  I mean Nancy Pearcey in this big book that she wrote talked about—

Sheila: Toxic War on Masculinity.  Yeah.

Rebecca: Talked about in positive terms about pre suffrage days, about how, “Well, women’s suffrage was, on the whole, positive, but there are some major drawbacks.”

Sheila: But then on another podcast, she said that it was a net negative.  

Rebecca: She said it was a net negative.  Yeah.  She really hedges her bets on that one.  But that’s the thing.  Why on earth are we hedging our bets on women’s right to vote?  Because we are not thinking.  We’re being reactionary, and we’re trying to signal who is in our in group and who is in our out group instead of actually doing the hard work of using our brains.

Sheila: Yeah.  And so then what happened was that the church started—instead of trying to preach Jesus, they started preaching culture wars.  They started preaching us versus them.  And it wasn’t about being the hands and feet of Jesus anymore.  And then when you look at dollars, at donation dollars that go to Christian organizations, so many of them go to organizations that are trying to change the culture like Focus on the Family instead of organizations that actually are the hands and feet of Jesus.  And this really impacted how Christians functioned in the 80s, 90s, 2000s.  If you were going to listen to Christian—if you were going to listen to music, you had to listen to Christian music, right?  We became a parallel culture.  So if you were going to watch TV or movies, you had to listen to—watch Christian ones even if they weren’t as good.  And they definitely weren’t.  But because Focus on the Family was so huge, publishers couldn’t publish books that Focus on the Family wouldn’t like if they wanted those books to sell.  And then Lifeway, which was an arm of the Southern Baptist church, had this whole network of Christian bookstores.  They don’t anymore.  But for years, they were so influential.  And publishers were afraid to publish books that Lifeway wouldn’t stock because then they wouldn’t make a profit on them.  And so it was a very narrow set of books that got published, and that became, hey, this is the evangelical way of looking at marriage.

Rebecca: And we got there because we had trained people to react and not to think. Yeah.

Sheila: Right.  Right.  So those are the first two things.  The us versus them.  And then forgetting that secularism isn’t always bad.  We need to look at what is healthy and what most looks like Jesus, not just what is against what the world does.  Because if the world is healthy and you said, “I don’t want to be like the world,” then what you’re saying is, “I would rather be unhealthy”.

Rebecca: If the world thinks that you should have an HR system so that if women are sexually harassed in the work place they have someone to talk to and the Christian church would be like, “You can’t even work with women anymore because it’s all MeToo this and that,” it’s like—because I hear that from Christians because they think it’s some huge thing to be against the culture of the time.  It’s like, guys, stop it.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And that’s why so many women would rather work in secular workspaces than Christian ones because they’ve been so burned in Christian ones.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Because they’re experiencing more Christian values in the secular world than in the church.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Because in the church world, one of the major values still is male authority.    

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  And we talk about this one a lot.  We’ll give you our point quickly on the patriarchy, male authority.  

Sheila: Yeah.  But it isn’t in secular marriage books.  It just isn’t.  Secular marriage books are focused on what is healthy, and that’s what The Marriage You Want that’s coming out in March does too.  But Christian marriage books have largely looked at how can we do marriage in a way that upholds male authority.  And, hey, guess what?  That doesn’t lead to health.

Rebecca: No.  Who would have thunck it?  Enabling someone—in essence, permissive parenting your husband leads to be outcomes.  Well, permissive parenting anyone leads to bad outcomes.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Okay.  So now let’s change tactics a little bit here.  So we’ve looked at the ways that we have held up what is basically unhealthy thought by not challenging thoughts.  But then there’s another aspect of Christianity which often leads to believing unhealthy stuff, and it’s this desire for gimmicks and quick fixes.  And this is so big in the church.

Rebecca: It’s big everywhere, right?  I mean you see it all over TikTok with all this manifestation stuff and all these crystals and everything, right?  Where people want something simple like if I just hold jade then some energies will align or whatever, right?  They want something simple where there’s an answer that’s easy.  And if I just do the right things, then good things will happen to me.

Sheila: Yeah.  Easy things too.  If I just do the right, easy things because there has to be some easy thing that I’m missing out on that if I can just do everything will work.

Rebecca: If I just eat the right foods or don’t eat the wrong foods or if I watch the right type of podcast so that I’m inspired to start the 5:00 a.m. morning routine, yeah.

Sheila: Right.  Yeah.  And here’s the issue.  Okay?  We know what it takes to get healthy.  What it takes to get healthy emotionally, mentally, relationally, spiritually, physically.  It takes work.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  It does. 

Sheila: It’s not easy.  We all know what you need to do.  You need to care for your body.  You need to care for your soul.  You need to care for those around you.  To get healed from trauma takes work.  Please see a licensed informed—please see a trauma informed, licensed therapist.  But these things are not quick fixes.  And so people want something that’s faster.  They don’t want to do all the work.  

Rebecca: You just need to forgive and let go.  Just forgive.  Just forgive.

Sheila: And so we get these gimmicks instead.  So, hey, your marriage isn’t working.  Try the five love languages.  It’s super easy.  And think about how many of our books—our marriage books are based on gimmicks, right?  Love and Respect.

Rebecca: It’s a gimmick.

Sheila: It’s a gimmick.  5 Love Languages.  It’s a gimmick.  And that doesn’t mean that nobody can be helped by The 5 Love Languages.  I don’t think that the application of 5 Love Languages is as toxic as Love and Respect although the book itself is highly problematic.  And we’ll talk about that maybe in a couple of months.  I don’t know.  But the simple fact is that when it comes to marriage advice in the church we gravitate to gimmicks because, as Christians, that’s often the way we see faith, right?  So we think that because God can do a miracle I shouldn’t have to do a lot of work.  As soon as I become a Christian, I shouldn’t be addicted to porn anymore.  I shouldn’t be addicted to alcohol anymore.  I should be totally healed.  And other people see it in the same way, and so then if you’re not healed, well, you just haven’t believed enough.  So you just need to pray more.

Rebecca: Because it’s too psychologically difficult to believe actually maybe we will just keep suffering in this life even if we know Christ.  That’s too psychologically painful for people to really believe a lot of times.  And so you have to believe that they just don’t have good enough faith.  They just didn’t try hard enough.  They just didn’t respect their husband enough.  They just didn’t submit enough.  They should have just done more, and then it would have worked because there’s a formula.  And the formula works, and I can trust the formula.  

Sheila: Yes.  As Christians, we gravitate to formulas.  We do because we think, “Well, God should be doing this work for me.  And so if I can just find that right formula, everything will be fine.”  But that’s not the way Jesus works.

Rebecca: It’s like we think that God is some trickster fae from Celtic lore where if you just say the right thing and get Him trapped in a lie He’ll have to serve you forever.  It does feel kind of like those pagan roots kind of crept in a little bit somewhere in there because it’s very interesting how many similarities I see quite often.

Sheila: Yeah.  It is.  And so we need to get away from this idea that there is a quick fix to anything because there isn’t.  If you want your marriage to be healthy, it means you got to do some work.  And sometimes that work isn’t—is really hard initially, but it gets easier later.  But you do have to do work. 

Rebecca: And also it means that life isn’t fair because I was raised with you guys as my parents.  I went to university.  I had great grades because, frankly, I am naturally intelligent, right?  I married a man, who is also very intelligent.  Comes from a fantastic family.  We have had an incredibly easy marriage because we both went into marriage with all the tools that we needed.  And there are other people who have different family backgrounds, and it’s just going to be harder for them.  And that’s not fair.  And we don’t like to say that as a culture.  We don’t like to say it as a church.  We don’t like it when people say, “Oh no.  I had it easier, and you’re going to have it harder.  And that’s not fair, and I’m very sorry.”  What we like to hear is, “No.  No.  No.  It’s easy for everyone because I don’t like the idea that I got handed something.”  Right?  Or “I don’t like the idea that I might have to work harder,” right?  It’s not fair.  And how can we as Christians learn to sit in the unfairness and not artificially inflate what we did to get here but also not artificially deflate what it will take to get to where we want to go?

Sheila: Yeah.  And so when you’re getting out of these toxic teachings, make sure you don’t just fall for gimmicks on the other side because maybe you realize that the gimmicks that you’ve looked at in the past haven’t worked and so you’re trying to find the other gimmick.  Essential oils.  Whatever it might be, right?  And there isn’t a gimmick.  There’s a person named Jesus, who wants to live with you and transform you from the inside out and work with you.  But it means every day submitting yourself to God and doing the work.  And it isn’t easy.  But just don’t get caught up by gimmicks on the other side.  Okay.  And all this leads to the last point, which is why do we get sucked in to toxic teachings.  Because people don’t like hard work.  We just don’t like hard work.  

Rebecca: And that’s not meant to be shameful.  That’s not us saying, “Oh, you just didn’t work hard enough.”  No.  This is, once again, one of those psychological just principles of how people are.  If there is a flat road or a road with a hill, 99% of people are taking the flat road, right?  If there are stairs versus an escalator, most people will take the escalator unless they’re in a hurry, right?  There are all these different things where very small things we’re going to choose the easy one, right?  That’s why it’s so hard to not just get fast food instead of cooking from scratch, if you’re used to doing that, right?  Because you don’t want to have to start expending extra energy, right?  It’s perfectly natural to want to take the easier road.  That’s how we are wired.  So what all these books did was it said, “I have a formula where all you have to do is suppress stuff.  And that’s what you’re doing already.  You just need to keep doing what you’re doing, but you’re going to wrap it up in Christianese.  And it’s going to get you everything you ever could have possibly wanted.”  Because here is what happened in a lot of marriages, okay?  Say the husband and the wife are living.  And the wife is living at a daily difficulty level of six.  It’s over her threshold of three is what we can manage as people.  She’s at a six.  But she has the capacity to deal with a six.  It’s right at her capacity, but it’s not over yet.  Okay?  And so she knows that confronting her husband, actually changing how their marriage happens, having those hard conversations is going to be like a 13 for a short period of time.  But that’s still seven points of energy that she needs to find somewhere.  That’s going to put her in a deficit.  Right now she’s hovering at zero.  She’s at net zero.  Okay?  It costs six.  She’s got six.  It’s sucky at a six.  But the thing is then this book comes along and says, “Maybe God designed that six.”  And now she has an extra point of energy because she can feel proud of herself and holy and like there is this vindication that’s coming that she knows that when she dies God is going to look at her and say, “Well done, you good and faithful servant.  You put up with that horrible man.” 

Sheila: And Love and Respect says this.  It’s like there are literally billions of angels.  And he says billions.  Of angels in the sky rejoicing whenever you showed respect to that harsh man, who had withering rage against you.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  Yeah.  This is the way that it said is it takes that thing that is currently kind of livable and says, “No.  No.  No.  You don’t need to expend any more energy.  Yes.  This sucks.  But you’re doing the right thing.  You’re going to get rewarded.”  And it makes that six livable in a way that doing the work to get to a better spot feels totally untenable.  Because why on earth would I invest more energy into something that might not even work when this might make this survivable?  Right?  We don’t want to do work even if we’re currently dying.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And I get emails all the time from women, who are like, “I’ve never had an orgasm.  I’ve told my husband I want to work on my pleasure, but he says that I should—I’m just not sexual.”  And seriously, I get these all the time.  And she’s like, “I’ve tried to talk to him, but he just won’t do anything.  And so I guess sex is just going to be awful, and this is what I have to put up with,” because to do the work of saying, “I am no longer willing to be treated like an object and I am no longer willing to have intercourse with you if you’re not caring about me,” there’s risk there.  

Rebecca: There’s risk there. 

Sheila: It’s scary.

Rebecca: What if it ruins your whole marriage?  What about the people who are married to someone who can’t be trusted to be alone with the kids because of severe negligence and they’ve had CPS called on them but they were cleared and it’s okay and it’s just because he let the kids be outside after 2:00 a.m. and the five year old was on the road, but he didn’t do that again.  These kind of things where you have to at some point realize reality, but these books get in the way of our ability to approach reality with open eyes because they give us this glamorized, beautified version of what life could be.  And it spiritualizes unnecessary suffering in a way that disincentivizes change because it adds even more price on something that was already quite costly.    

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  And life is just work.  If you want growth, growth is work.  I’m reminded of the story in John 3 when Nicodemus comes to see Jesus.  And Nicodemus—I think he gets a bit of a bad rap in Scripture because he was honestly searching.  I think he really, truly knew that Jesus had something that he didn’t, and he wanted to figure it out.  And then Jesus explained to him what it meant to be born again, and Nicodemus was like that’s too much.  

Rebecca: He was greatly troubled.  Yeah.

Sheila: And he just walked away.  And how many of us are like I know that’s true—I know what you’re saying is true.  I know that it’s going to require a huge change to actually grow.  But it’s too much.  And then they’re walking away and trying to find a gimmick instead.   

Rebecca: Yeah.  And it’s the poison we know, right?  That’s really what this comes down to is it’s easier to keep eating the poison we know than to try something new that might destroy everything or might lead us to somewhere really, really great.  Even if we know that no matter what we’re going to be a healthier person on the other side of it, it’s just easier to keep eating the poison we know.  So don’t let yourself get blinded by the poison you know.  Okay?  An example that I think of and, obviously, I’m going to be the one to think of this because I have a five and a three year old.  But I see a lot of really toxic stuff on the online parenting community that has completely warped ideas of what it means to actually gentle parent.  For example, there’s all these gimmicks online about how to get your kids to do X, Y, or Zed.  And if it’s anything other than this is going to take months of repetition and consistency and firm boundaries, it’s a gimmick.  You’re not going to buy another toy and have it suddenly work.  You’re not going to suddenly find some phrase from some gentle parenting Instagram account that’s not licensed and is just a mom who happened to have a really easy kid who now thinks she’s a parenting expert, right?  It’s not the way—it’s not your tone of voice.  It’s not whether or not you did a singsong voice.  It’s none of that.  That’s all gimmicks.  It just is.

Sheila: It’s your relationship, your connection, your boundaries, and your consistency.

Rebecca: Yeah.  If you have been doing the same kind of parenting for three years and your kids are getting worse or not changing, you are eating the poison you know.  You need to do something different.  Okay?   And that has been a very freeing thing for me as a parent to realize is, oh, I’m allowed to change how I do this if I’m not getting the results that I—that we need for my children to be functioning members of society, right?  So that’s a big one too where it’s like if you think if I just buy this one type of set up for my child I will finally be able to have five minutes without them screaming, no, you won’t.  That’s a gimmick. Okay?    

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  It totally is, and that’s what we’ve done in so many areas of our lives.  We’ve gravitated to gimmicks.  We’ve avoided hard work.  We’ve been caught up in us versus them because it makes us feel important and belonging as opposed to actually doing the hard work of thinking things through.  And so our challenge for you as we move into a healthy 2025 is to make sure that as you escape the toxicity of some of the teachings in the evangelical church around marriage you don’t gravitate to toxicity in another way.  And that as you start reforming your beliefs you practice those muscles of realizing I need to think through what people are actually saying.  I need to truly examine arguments.  I need to be prepared to do some hard work.  Life is not always easy.  And just because I find the perfect church or the perfect group or the perfect whatever doesn’t mean everything is going to be perfect now.  It still is always going to be work.  But that work can become easier and lighter as we work those muscles.  That’s what Jesus does for us.

Rebecca: Well, and it’s also just we know that that’s how it works, right?  It’s really, really hard to get in the habit until you’re in that habit.  And then it’s hard not to do the thing.  I can’t go to bed without brushing my teeth now because I’ve been doing that my entire life, right?  That’s the thing.  You work the muscles.  They get stronger.  The other thing too is I know with that example of just the threshold just being too high remember that often once you get past that threshold it gets easier, right?  So if you’re sitting at a six, right?  Say with the parenting thing, right?  You’re sitting at a six all the time, and you’re just always in fight or flight.  You’re always frazzled. And you’re kind of using those Instagram, “You got this, mamas,” to get through without changing anything that we’re actually doing, right?  If you actually do—if you have a week where you can expend the energy and just change how you’re doing stuff, you’ll notice that your day to day is no longer a six.  Your day to day is a lot lower.  

Sheila: Right.  But it took some time at the 13, 14, 15 to then get to the 3.  

Rebecca: It takes a big investment.  Yeah.  Exactly.  And I just want to encourage you that there’s a lot of people who are in that 13, 14 right now.  And that’s why they’re on this podcast because they’ve started deconstructing.  They’ve started having those hard conversations with their spouse.  They’ve started talking to the leadership of their church, and they’re feeling spiritually homeless.  They’re feeling at a loss.  They’re starting 2025, and they’re not nearly as optimistic as we are because they’re where we were in 2022, 2021.  And they’re feeling like, oh my gosh, my entire world is coming crumbling down.  I don’t think I can even bear this.  Keep going.  It gets easier.  If you’re in that situation, I want you—you don’t even have to listen to the whole thing.  I want you to just go to any random point in our last podcast from 2021, 2022 and then this year in 2024.

Sheila: Yeah.  Just keep looking at the last one in December of every year and see how—

Rebecca: I think I cried for 80% of those two, and we were just super happy in this one.  It gets better, guys.  Because the more that you work out how to be healthy and you give yourself permission to really think through what you believe and believe what you believe, not just latch on to another charismatic leader or another group you want to belong to and just echo whatever they say but actually have beliefs yourself, it’s so freeing because people aren’t scary anymore.  You can talk to people you disagree with, and it doesn’t have to freak you out, right?  You can realize that your life actually has hope to get better because you’ve proven it to yourself because you’ve done the work.  And, hey.  Now I’m healthier in this area, and these things are more tenable as a result, right?  And I just want to encourage you that if you’re in that phase where you’re putting in the work and it’s at 13, 14, 15 difficulty keep going because you are going to get to a point where you’re going to see the pay offs.  And you’re going to be proud of yourself for having done it.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  And so as we move into 2025, I want this to be the year that we get healthy in all kinds of different ways.  But let’s get healthy.  Let’s throw out the toxic stuff and let’s not get taken in by more toxic stuff just in another area.  But instead, let’s practice those muscles because that’s how we grow, and life is so much better on the other side, people.  It really is.  It’s so much better on the other side.  So stay tuned.  Next week is a super fun one.  We have been waiting literally five years to do this podcast that we are doing next week because we are sharing our data on what we found when we actually examined the whole thesis behind Love and Respect.  That men want respect and women want love.  And it is fire.  It is fun.  It is everything I ever dreamed of.  And so that’s fun because we finally have the data to share with you.  And then we’ll be moving into a lot of info about our new book, The Marriage You Want.  We are starting a launch team.  There will be more on that next week.  But you can preorder the book and the study guide right now.  And the link for that is in the podcast notes.  And so if you want to get healthy in your marriage, that’s going to be a great way to do it this year.  Another thing that’s happening and—before we go, we want to share with you some different things that we’re going to be doing in Bare Marriage in 2025.  Because a lot of stuff happened on social media in 2024, our Facebook page got hacked which caused us so much consternation.  

Rebecca: I still have flashbacks and full body shakes whenever I get emails I don’t recognize.  

Sheila: Yes.  And Meta is not admitting this, but they did not get in through my profile.  They got in through a business profile through a security glitch.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  They never had your password ever.

Sheila: They never had my password or anything.  They got in through a security glitch, which was why so many people are losing their pages right now.

Rebecca: And this is happening to a lot of really big pages.    

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  I had to factor authentication everything.  But Meta is not admitting this, but they have a major security vulnerability, I think.

Rebecca: Yeah.  We will sign for the class action lawsuit whenever that happens.

Sheila: Yes.  Please.  But we have a great Facebook page going now.  We had to get off Twitter, X for a whole variety of reasons.  It was getting really toxic.  But Threads is going great.  But what we really learned is all of the social media platforms are inherently vulnerable.  We can’t rely on any of them.  And so we’re trying to really diversify.  So we’re going to be in a whole lot of different places.  But one thing that we really do want to do is concentrate more on video this year.  So on Fridays, Rebecca and I are going to do a quick video synopsis of the week.  What’s happened, what we’ve posted, interesting comments we’ve had, thoughts we’ve had behind the scenes.

Rebecca: Absolutely.      

Sheila: And we’re only going to be posting three times a week on the blog, but we’re also going to be starting a Substack.  And the link to that is also in the podcast notes where the one in depth post of the week will be cross posted on the Substack, on the blog.  Since so many of you, I know, consume long form material on Substack now, so we’re going to get in there.  And all kinds of other things are coming.  Hopefully, a TikTok channel, but we’ll see.

Rebecca: We’ll see.  We’ll see.  Yes.

Sheila: We’ll see.  But the best way to keep track of everything is to join our email list because every Friday we have an email that goes out with all the best things that happened across all the different platforms.  Rebecca, you write an awesome piece that has incredible—my open rate doubled when you started writing our Friday emails.  

Rebecca: Thank you.  Thank you.  It did. Yep.  Any time that I’m—I can always just pull that one out any time I need to.    

Sheila: Yes.  And it’s just—yeah.  Exclusive content there.  And then you’ll never miss anything.  So, you’ll also get invites to the launch team if you’re on the email list, so you’ll be able to get that directly.  So please join that.  And yeah.  Thank you for being here in 2024, and we are excited at what’s going to happen in 2025.  So, bye-bye, everyone.    

Rebecca: We’ll see you later.