Sheila: Is there a crisis in the evangelical church where women are refusing to get married?  That’s what we’re going to talk about today.  It’s a fun one.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from baremarriage.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your marriage and your sex life.  And I am joined today by my daughter, Rebecca Lindenbach.

Rebecca: Hello.  Hello.

Sheila: And you’re going to have thoughts about this one.

Rebecca: I do.  

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s going to be fun.  Before we get to it, a special thank you to our sponsor for this podcast, Brazos Press, and the book Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, which is just so good.  Beth Allison Barr’s latest book.  Showing us how the whole idea that women shouldn’t be in ministry is not something which is based on the plain reading of Scripture.  It is not something which is just the way we have always done it.  It is, instead, a modern invention, which keeps coming up with new reasons to keep women out that haven’t been around forever.  And so it’s a super important book because it tells us that if we did this, if we chose to leave women out, then we can choose to let women back in again.  And we can choose to have a church that actually functions as the total body of Christ and that is effective in meeting the needs of the world and in meeting the needs of the people in its pews and in reflecting Christ.  So yeah.  So it is a great book.  And I’ve written a number of articles about it recently.  I’ll put a link to those in the podcast notes too, but please pick it up.  So important.  And also a special thank you to our patrons, who support us for as little as $5 a month and give us an amazing space online in our Facebook patron group where we can just talk and relax.  And it was actually in our patron group, I think, that somebody messaged me and let me know about this Al Mohler Briefing that we are going to be talking about today.  Now this is a heavy subject for a lot of people because there is a lot of people who desperately want to get married and who aren’t married.  And you know what?  That has happened throughout history.  Not everybody gets married. And some people are single for their life, and it’s not by choice.  And they’re really sad about it.  And that’s always happened.  Okay?  And sometimes you can be a really great person, who brings a lot to the table, and you just never met anybody.  And if you’re that person, who is—especially if you’re a guy given what we’re going to be talking about today—if you’re really putting your all into making yourself super marriageable, making yourself the best person you can be, and nobody seems to be interested, that’s hard, and we’re not talking about you today.

Rebecca: Well, that’s the thing.  This is a numbers game.  And at some point, it’s like things (inaudible) more or less likely.  It’s not 100%.  I’m sorry there’s not an easier answer for it.  But I think anyone who tries to give you an easier answer is lying.  So it’s okay to acknowledge that sometimes life isn’t pretty and neat and doesn’t come wrapped up in a little bow and it’s not fair.  And so we just do want to acknowledge that this is not a one plus one equals two situation.  It can be really complicated.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And so we’re going to be talking some big trends as to why women don’t necessarily want to get married in the same way anymore and why women may not find a lot of men attractive.  But this doesn’t mean—this doesn’t necessarily apply to you individually.  We’re talking about the trends.  So with that disclaimer, let’s jump in.  So Rebecca, here’s what happened.  Okay.  So Al Mohler, for those who don’t know, is the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, so the SBC—their largest flagship seminary.  He has been president for a long time.  He was very influential in the Southern Baptist Convention.  I think he’s run for president before.  And he does these podcast episodes, I think, several times a week where he talks about something that is going The Briefing from March 27th.  Okay?  And it is based on an article from The Wall Street Journal called American Women are Giving Up On Marriage.  Yeah.  And he just wants to spend this entire briefing talking about the fact that women no longer want to get married especially women in the church.  All right?  And he calls this a crisis.  He calls it a 5-alarm fire several times.  He says it’s like hitting the panic button.  This is seismic.  This is an emergency.  This is really, really, really bad that women don’t want to get married.  Okay?  All right.  So what we’re going to do is we’re going to walk through the article.  I have a number of clips that I want to play.  You haven’t read it, and you haven’t listened to it.

Rebecca: Nope.

Sheila: So you’re hearing this for the first time too.    

Rebecca: Absolutely.  That to be completely fair, I have not read this.  I do, however, know who Al Mohler is, and I’m pretty sure that I know exactly where this is going.  These guys are nothing if not predictable.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Okay.  So what he does, first of all, in The Briefing is he just summarizing the problem.  Okay?  He’s summarizing the problem that this article is bringing up, and I want—I’ll let everybody listen to his summary of the issue.

Al Mohler: Just to do the math again, 51.4% is more than half.  This is a 5-alarm fire.  This is a huge thing.  And frankly, this headline doesn’t come out of the blue.  Many of us watching these things have understood that marriage has been in decline across the American population for a matter of decades now.  The age of first marriage has been extended further and further out into the future.  We’re now looking somewhere at about 30 for both men and women.  It had been at about age 20—ust closer to 20, if you go back, say, a half century.  So you can say, “Well, what difference does it make if someone gets married closer to 30 than to 20?”  Well, it makes a lot of difference over the marriage cycle.  It makes a lot of difference in terms, for instance, of having children.  How many children you will have, what the expectation is, what’s the model of marriage.  It turns out that that has a lot to do with it.

Sheila: Okay.  So he’s saying, “Look.  We’re going through this huge demographic change where people aren’t getting married as young anymore.  And they’re not even necessarily getting married anymore.”  But did you hear what he said at the very end?

Rebecca: Yeah.  I love that.  It was like the very model of marriage might change if the women have a job.  Let’s be clear.  That’s what he’s saying, right?  It’s better to get people married off when they’re 19, 20, 21, and this is someone who got married at 20.  It’s better to get them married off young before they are established so that they can just start getting pregnant and have tons of kids.  

Sheila: Right.  And he does—even before this, he talks about how this gets to the very heart of creation order.  We’re going to get back to that argument in a minute too, so this is all about creation order, how it’s very important that women get married young so that they’re—    

Rebecca: They have multiple, multiple babies.

Sheila: I think so that—and he hasn’t—he doesn’t say this explicitly.  But so that we have creation order where the man is in hierarchy over a woman and women are less likely to want that.

Rebecca: Well, absolutely.  I mean it makes logical sense that if you’re 27, 28, 29 and you’ve been working for 6, 7, 8 years in the word force with a degree, why on earth would you want someone else to make the decisions for you versus if you get married straight out of high school at 18 to a 25-year-old youth pastor, who you’ve been dating for 4 years, right?

Sheila: Exactly.

Rebecca: Oh, we all know younger people are easier to manipulate.

Sheila: And as Beth Allison Barr talks about in Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminaries, they had courses for pastors’ wives that included things like how to pack your husband’s suitcase.     

Rebecca: Okay.  That’s horrifying.  Anyways, yeah.    

Sheila: Yes.  Okay.  All right.  So he sort of summarized the problem.  Now he’s going to summarize the article from Rachel Wolfe.  All right?

Al Mohler: what’s the model of marriage?  It turns that that has a lot to do with it.  Now Rachel Wolfe in covering this story goes on to tell us that it’s not clear that a lot of the women who aren’t married don’t want to be married, but it is increasingly clear that they don’t think they’re going to get married.  Many of them are basically moving into some kind of permanent singleness as a lifestyle.  They’re making economic decisions about, say, buying real estate, buying homes, looking at making their own plans for travel and life and everything else.  They are planning not to be wives, not to be married, to be outside of marriage as an institution.  Furthermore, this article tells us that among many younger women in the United States the unmarried women at least think themselves happier than the married women.  Now I’m not saying they are happier.  I’m not saying that the married women say they’re less happy than the unmarried women.  I’m saying it’s interesting that these unmarried women, at least an increasing percentage of them, say that they think married women are not so happy.  And that tells us something about the transformation of social expectation, personal expectation.

Sheila: Okay.  Now what I find really funny about this is that at the very end it’s like he’s almost getting it.  He’s almost there, but he won’t let himself go there.  He says increasingly these unmarried women they think that married women aren’t very happy.  How could this possibly be?  

Rebecca: Isn’t this so ridiculous? 

Sheila: I was talking about this on social media.  And I had several posts that went viral, and I had hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of comments.  We’re going to read some of them throughout this podcast.  If I don’t get to your comment, I loved them all.  I read them all.  I appreciate them all.  There were just some that illustrated different aspects super well that I want to highlight.  So one woman wrote, “As the mother of a young woman and as someone who has been married nearly 25 years, I can say with 100% accuracy that these young women don’t hate men.  They’d really like to meet a good man and have a relationship.  But they’re not willing to do what we did.  They’re not willing to tie themselves to men who they’ll later discover don’t even like them or be married single mothers.  They’re not willing to bring home half the bacon and always be the one cooking it. Young men need to grow up and level up.”

Rebecca: Having to bring home half the bacon and being the only one cooking it is really good.  Exactly.

Sheila: But he doesn’t say that.  But this is it.  He is saying that the problem is that these young women think they’re happier not married and how awful is this.  But he’s not even—

Rebecca: Well, okay.  These guys all really love economics and everything, right?  The basics.  One of the basic principles of economics is people do not make decisions that don’t help them.  Right?  The rational buyer.  We all understand now the actual—it’s a myth.  People are not fully rational.  But we do make decisions based on evidence that it will help or hurt us.  The evidence may be faulty, but it’s for a reason.  So it’s not like these women are just like willy nilly like—oh no, they’re being totally thoughtless.  No.  There’s a reason why they’re buying houses and not just renting until they find someone to settle down because they’re like, “Well, I’ve got to start my life.”  

Sheila: Right.  Exactly.  There’s something really funny coming up too.  I won’t play a clip of this.  Just a few minutes after this, he says, “But even though these women are giving up on marriage, they’re not necessarily writing off being mothers.”  So a lot of women, they’re not getting married, but they’re assuming they’re going to foster through the foster care system or—  

Rebecca: Or they’re going to have a kid.

Sheila: Or have a kid somehow.  But they’re just assuming that marriage probably isn’t in the cards, which means that these women would prefer to be single mothers than actually marry.  What does that say about what women are thinking would happen if they got married?  

Rebecca: Well, and I think that’s the thing is it’s not that they’d actually prefer to be single mothers.  It’s that they don’t believe that the option of having a good relationship with a man, who is an equal partner, is possible.  So out of all the potential options available to me, I think the most likely realistic one is that I will have a child.  And I’ll have a wonderful family with just me and my kid or my kids.  And I’ll just be a single mom because at least I know then I’ll have a family.  And they don’t think that it’s realistic that they could find a man, who not only could have kids but actually raise them and actually make her life easier.  Yeah.

Sheila: Al Mohler doesn’t get into all this stuff.

Rebecca: No.  Of course not.

Sheila: He doesn’t get into that part.  He just gets into, “Look at these women, who think that they’re better off not married.  How can that possibly be?  Look at these women who actually think they’re going to be mothers without getting married.  Oh my goodness.  This is a 5-alarm fire.”  Okay.  Let’s listen to the next quote.

Al Mohler: As Rachel Wolfe writes, ‘American women have never been this resigned to staying single.  They are responding to major demographic shifts, including huge and growing gender gaps in economic and educational attainment, political affiliation and beliefs about what a family should look like.’  Now that’s a very powerful paragraph. I think it’s true, but I think we need to dissect it just a bit.

Sheila: Yeah.  So he’s acknowledging that we have all these major demographic shifts, that women are getting educated and men aren’t, and he goes on—in his dissection of it, he goes on to share a lot of the stats about how women are going to university and men aren’t, about women’s incomes levels starting to come up to what men’s were, and, in many cases, they’re outpacing men in certain fields.  And more single women now own homes than single men.  So single women are getting their act together, and they’re getting themselves on good financial footing.  And single men just aren’t.

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  Yep.  And, again, like with everything, statistics are not a monolith, right?  So we’re not—for anyone who starts to get really offended because you know a single woman who does not have her life together, remember, statistics are not a monolith.  You’ve got to use your brain.  You’ve got to use a little bit of media literacy here.  Sorry.  

Sheila: So yeah.  Again, just like we always say—yeah.  This is cases of overlapping bell curves we talk about a lot.  Just because single women own homes more than single men that does not mean that all single women own homes and all single men don’t.  There are some single men who own homes, and some single women who do not.

Rebecca: And I will say again if you got offended immediately this is a media literacy issue.    

Sheila: Yes.  Okay.  Then he goes on about how society is becoming completely recalibrated because women are entering the work force.  And that this is really driving this idea that women don’t want to get married because look at all these women in the work force thinking they’re going to find their identity in working instead.  Okay?  And I love this comment that a woman left which shows a lot more insight than Al Mohler does at this point.  She says, “I think a good man can bring amazing things to the table.  But most have had it too easy for too long in terms of women needing them and, therefore, have to put up with varying degrees of selfish entitled prideful behaviors.  So here we are.  They cannot just be needed any longer.  They must be wanted.  And that takes a lot of change and effort on their part, and most are not up to the challenge.”

Rebecca: I think that is (cross talk).

Sheila: I would disagree with most.  I don’t think it’s most aren’t up to the challenge.  

Rebecca: I actually think that most are up to the challenge.  I think it’s just an issue of willingness rather than capacity.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  But I also—when we’re saying that there is a crisis in women not getting married, we’re not saying that—most women still do get married.

Rebecca: Most women get married.  Yeah.     

Sheila: And yes.  So we’re not trying to say that no men are up to the challenge.  It’s just that there is a growing gap in the younger generations where the women have it together and the men don’t seem to in the same way.  And then he goes on about how women just don’t want to link themselves to lower status men.  And so as women get all this education, they’re far less likely to want to get married.  And so this is a problem the church is going to have to deal with is that when women en masse get educated they’re far less willing to marry.  And so what does that mean for us as a church?

Rebecca: Well, and what I find so funny is this idea of not wanting to be quote unquote linked to a lower status male.  Right?  Is I don’t see that actually as a real issue because how many of these quote unquote lower status males will be like, “Well, honey, you make 3 times the amount of money than I do, so why don’t I just be the househusband?  Why don’t I do all the meal prep and I make sure that we’re eating the right number of micronutrients in every meal?  And I’ll down the FlyLady cleaning app, and I’ll take care of all the housework.  And I’ll drive the kids to ballet and soccer, and then you can be the breadwinner.  And I’ll be your wife frankly,” as traditionally it’s been.  “I’ll be the househusband.”  How many of those men are doing that?  

Sheila: I know some in my family.  We have some in our family who have done that.

Rebecca: Well, that’s the thing.  We have some in our family. 

Sheila: Some of my husband’s colleagues have done that.  Yeah.

Rebecca: That’s exactly it.  And you know what?  Those men are married.  

Sheila: And they’re happy.

Rebecca: Well, an my thing is—but I also know of people in my own life to—people who I know in my general large social group where she makes a lot more than him, but he still has this idea that he has to be the patriarch of the home.  And it’s like those are the guys that women don’t want to be paired with in terms of quote unquote what Al Mohler—what I do not believe—but what Al Mohler calls lower value males, right?  Or maybe the study calls.  I don’t know if he took that from that the study or not, to be fair.  But I don’t believe in someone having a job that pays less means that they’re lower value.  I don’t believe that.  Lower effort does actually, I think, mean that.  If you just never tried and never worked on yourself, I do think that you have lesser value—less to offer as a partner than someone who is trying to work on themselves for a long time.  That’s just what I mean.  But in terms of like you make $30,000 a year, she makes $120,000 a year.  You’re not a lower value partner.  What do you bring to the table, right?  It might be like I just don’t like the grind life.  I just want to bake cupcakes with my kids.  Great.  You get to be a stay-at-home dad then, but I’m not seeing guys line up to scrub toilets and go—and do a laundry routine.  That’s the issue here.  It’s like if you are not the one who is putting in the effort to get educated, to work hard, to go up the corporate ladder, whatever it is that you’re doing, then you have to be the one who tackles the home front then.  I just don’t understand why this isn’t being talked about as much.  Because the families I know where they’re doing that, they’re doing great.  And it’s like—no one is like, “Oh no.  She’s the one who works, and he stays home with the kids.”  They’re like, “Oh my gosh.  That’s so cute.”  Awesome.  The only thing that sucks about it is that it’s harder to make friends as a stay-at-home dad because so few men do it.  And women are really skeevy about just inviting a dad over for their kids to have play dates which—yeah.  Makes sense.  Valid.  No one actually has a problem with that.  So it’s just this idea that—it’s the men who think that even though they don’t have the education and they don’t have the jobs and they don’t have the paycheck and they don’t have the benefits they still should be seen as the one who is providing for the family.  That’s the problem.

Sheila: And that’s what—I think we talked about that in last week’s podcast where Matt Walsh was saying, “But you need to remember the extreme pressure that men have to provide.”  And it’s like but you don’t need to have that pressure.

Rebecca: What pressure?

Sheila: Together you’re going to figure out how to provide monetarily for your family, and together you’re going to figure out how to provide the housework and the childcare for your family.  And you can work that out however it works best.  But when there’s this assumption that he shouldn’t have to get educated, he shouldn’t have to get a good job but he should still have this wife who does everything for him, yeah.  Women are going to want to not marry as much.  And we also have to talk about the problem that comes—okay.  So he’s head of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, right?  You  know who doesn’t make very much money?  

Rebecca: People who go to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  Flat out.  Going to theological seminaries, it’s very hard to get a very well paying job.  

Sheila: Right.  And so these—if you’re in this culture where it’s assumed that you’re going to have a stay-at-home wife who is going to look after you and you’re going to provide and all you have is a theology education, you’re really not able to get a lot of good jobs.  You might be able to land a job in a big church, and you might get a good salary.  Most pastors do not have great salaries.  And so most pastors are going to need their wife to work a second job as well.  And so if you can’t—so if you’re not willing to also help with the house and do all of these other things, then why should she want to sign up for that?  That’s not something that’s really attractive when she’s been working at getting her qualifications to work as a nurse where she’s making great money from the start.  I don’t know what they make in the U.S.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  They make really good money in Canada for a four-year degree.

Sheila: And we’re recruiting.  In Canada, we are recruiting for nurses.

Rebecca: We are recruiting.  Exactly.    

Sheila: So if you want to leave the U.S. and come up to Canada, you can do that.  But yeah.  You get all of these women who are going for these—going to be an accountant, going to be a nurse, getting qualified to be a teacher—these jobs that can pay fairly well.   

Rebecca: In Canada, again.  I know this is different in the U.S. versus Canada.

Sheila: Yeah.  In Canada, teachers make a fair amount of—they do better.

Rebecca: They do.  They do.  Yeah.  In the U.S., they don’t.  But in Canada, they do.  Yeah.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  So yeah.  So problem.  Let’s get another quote here.  Another clip.  

Rebecca: Awesome.

Sheila: All right.  Here he goes.

Al Mohler: The article goes on to say, “Stories of women complaining about the lack of quality men have long infused pop culture from Pride and Prejudice to Taylor Swift’s works.  Yet women throughout history rarely questioned whether finding and securing a romantic partner should be a primary goal of adulthood.”  The next sentence, “That seems to be changing.”

Sheila: And then he goes on to say that this means we need to hit the panic button.  So this is a reason for panic.  That the idea that women’s primary goal should be securing a romantic partner—that that’s a primary goal of adulthood is changing.

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  And why is it changing?  Because women have rights now.  That’s the thing.  It’s changing because women have options.  We’ve talked about it a lot.  But for people who haven’t listened to the podcast for very long, that Halo study that we talk about all the time.  There was a study they did where they had people playing Halo, an online—doing it.

Sheila: Video game.  Multi player video game.

Rebecca: Multi player, online Halo.  And they had people with female voices playing.

Sheila: Yeah.  Female avatars, female voices.

Rebecca: Female avatars, female voices.  So clearly a female player, and they wanted to see how the male players reacted.  The male players, who were in the top percentage of best players—the ones who are playing really, really well, no problem with the female players.  The ones who are middling to low players—oh, they hated the female players.  They didn’t like anyone encroaching on their turf.  Oh, there’s a good female player.  Oh, I’m going to say all sorts of sexist crap to her.  And it’s because—having to actually do well is only threatening to men who are not doing well.  The men who are like, “Yeah.  No.  I’m good at this game.  You can absolutely join me at the top,” they’re fine.  It’s the ones who like, “Oh no.  If there’s more people, now I’m getting pushed farther and farther down the league because I’m not actually that good at this,” right?  There’s this insecurity there.  And I think we’re seeing that with this too, right?  Oh no, the women can choose not to marry us now.  That’s the worst thing ever.  Why do you want to be married to someone, who if they would choose otherwise, would choose to not be married to you?  The rest of the world, the rest of the guys out there who had wives who chose them happily, are like, “Dude, that’s weird.”  

Sheila: And, again, we’re not saying that the middling to lower is everyone who is going to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary necessarily or to Bible college in general.  It’s just that it is—to be frank, it is more likely to happen because what often occurs in evangelical churches is you get these boys growing up.  They love Jesus, but they don’t have a clue what to do with their lives.  And they’re pushed towards Bible college because they get to seem like they’re mature and Christian.  And everyone pats them on the back and says, “Isn’t this great?  They’re going into ministry,” when they haven’t actually figured out what—

Rebecca: They want to do.

Sheila: And so they keep their life and their world very, very small. 

Rebecca: And they end up with a degree that’s completely useless outside of ministry, and ministry does not pay very well.  

Sheila: And people burn out in huge numbers.    

Rebecca: And people burn out in huge numbers.  And it’s one of those things.  We need pastors.  Absolutely.

Sheila: Yeah.  So if you feel super called to be a pastor and you’re gifted at that, by all means go to seminary.  But don’t do it by default because you need to figure out your life.    

Rebecca: Our default should be things like getting your electrician’s or plumber’s licenses.  That should be your I don’t know what to do with my life.  Electrician is a good job.  I’ll become that.  The things where it’s like then if you don’t know what to do with your life do something where it’s a skill you can learn.  And now you’re certified, and you can actually support yourself and a family, right?  Versus becoming a music pastor that you can never get more than part time work, right?  This is just the issue.  It’s like you can’t expect someone to—who has spent all this time, statistically speaking, thinking through their education, planning out their life goals, saving up their money, organizing their life so they can have the most success to then just kind of submit to the quote unquote authority of someone who didn’t actually plan out what their degree could even be used for.  That’s the issue here.  That’s what we’re looking at because Al Mohler is not wanting people to get into egalitarian marriages.  He is the president of the Southern freaking Baptist Theological Seminary.  

Sheila: And this whole thing is talking about creation order, which we’re going to get to in a minute.

Rebecca: This man gets hives when a woman has an opinion.  Okay?  This is the level—Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is so complementarian, it’s not even funny.

Sheila: Al Mohler was the one who made sure that any—that the women were fired who were teaching.

Rebecca: Yes.  No.  I’m sorry.  And they can say, “No.  We respect women.”  No.  You don’t.  Show me literally any evidence of your respect for women.  I don’t have any time for this anymore.

Sheila: So then he goes on.  And this is kind of interesting.  And, again, he’s just saying, “Look at these women who don’t want to get married.”  He’s never asking why they don’t want to get married other than demographics.  “Look.  They have too much education.”  Okay?  So then he says, “And now you know what happening is we’re in this situation where now young men are attending church in greater numbers than younger women—than young women.  And isn’t this awful?  And now a greater proportion of young men are saying they want to get married than young women.”  And he’s using this to say what is wrong with the young women because—mm-hmm.

Rebecca: Can I just say?  We just cannot win.  Because when I was growing up, it was all about how we need to get more men to church.  So it’s not okay if it’s more women.  And it’s definitely not okay if it’s more men.  What’s okay then?  Because you’re not going to have exactly even.  You have to just kind of, at some point, be okay with something.  You’re complaining no matter what.  It’s like oh no.  Too many women are at church.  Oh no.  Too many men are at church.  Ahhh.  Maybe it’s because you made—you footballified services.  Anyway.

Sheila: Yeah.  Okay.  So he’s staying on this topic of how women are just getting super picky.  They’re even thinking that marriage may not be for me.  They’re not making it a necessary part of their adulthood, and he’s saying, “And then when they do date, they treat it like a job interview.  They want to make sure that all—they have a checklist.”     

Rebecca: Yeah.  It’s called not wasting 4 years of your life or accidentally being with someone who doesn’t believe you should have rights.  

Sheila: Right.  He says like throughout history the norm has been arranged marriages.  But now people get to choose.  And when people get to choose, women seem to think it’s okay not to get married.

Rebecca: By golly, it all started when we let them into the universe.  We let them into the universe they start to think they could think.  And when they started to think, they think they could have a brain for themselves.  And what are we supposed to do with a woman with a brain with her soul?  We don’t know.  We gave them lobotomies in the 60s.  What do we do now?  By golly gee.  Someone alert the policemen. 

Sheila: Yeah.  So anyway, so that is his synopsis of why this is happening.  And that is basically all he says is that women aren’t doing this.  They’re picky.  And marriage rates are plummeting.  Then we get into part two.  Okay?  So this is a part—this is a three-part briefing. And part two is—he calls it this, “The growing political divide between young men and women.  Women are growing more liberal than young men, and it’s having massive effects on marriage rates and more.”

Rebecca: Yeah.  That makes sense.    

Sheila: Okay?  And we will let him explain what he means.

Rebecca: Awesome.

Al Mohler: And a lot of young women are saying, “You know, I want to marry someone as liberal as I am.  If I’m going to get married, it’s not going to be to some kind of conservative,” but an increased percentage of young men are conservative.  And the more they think about it, the more conservative they become.  By the way, it is not coincidental that the more liberal women become the more self-consciously conservative young men become.  And it is because the liberalization of young women and the changes in the demography, they alert a lot of young men to the fact that something basic has changed.

Sheila: Did you notice the dig at liberalism there?

Rebecca: Yeah.  I loved that.

Sheila: The more that boys think about it the more conservative they become.  

Rebecca: Insinuating that people who are liberal are liberal because they haven’t thought about it which is very telling of your bias.

Sheila: You know what this reminds me of?  Yes.  And you actually told me this.

Rebecca: I did tell you this because I know what you’re talking about.  I know what you’re going to bring up.

Sheila: The current season of Love is Blind.

Rebecca: Yes.  I did bring it up to you.  You did not—yes.  My mother is much more sophisticated than I am in that I am a psychology graduate.  And anyone who knows anyone who has taken psychology knows that it’s very popular.  Reality television, very popular amongst psych grads because we are nosey.  And people are observational studies to be watched and learned from.  But yes.  No.  The latest season of Love is Blind went super big because there were multiple women who got engaged in the pods.  For anyone who doesn’t know what Love is Blind is, good for you.  I’m not going to ruin your brain by telling you.

Sheila: It’s really dumb.

Rebecca: It’s so dumb.

Sheila: It’s awful.

Rebecca: No.  Here’s the thing.  I saw a tweet, which was perfect.  It was like, “Live is Blind proved in the first season that, no, it’s not blind.”  And then they just do it again anyway.  Anyway, no.  But they all—they get engaged.  They are all like, “We’re going to get married.”  It’s been 4 weeks.  This is the love of my life.  I see no problems with this arrangement.  And then at the altar, many of these women said no to their, again, absolute infant of a fiancé relationship because they weren’t on the same page politically.  And what that mean for a lot of these women was that they were really passionate about social justice issues that these men didn’t care about.  They just hadn’t even thought about it, or they were saying they hadn’t thought about it because they wanted to cover up for the fact that they actually didn’t care about these issues because it’s better to say, “Well, I’m just uneducated,” versus, “No.  I’m educated, and I just don’t care.”  And so this has been a big thing people are talking about because these women weren’t saying, “It’s specifically because you are conservative.  It’s because you’re not caring about this stuff.  My friends aren’t going to be emotionally safe around you.”  There’s that kind of stuff.  And that’s something that conservatives have to grapple with, first of all.  I will say this is not a political statement in the same way.  But it’s like you have to grapple with if there is whole swaths of people who are like, “Well, then I’m not welcome around you,” that’s something to be considerate of.  And there is a question.  We know that throughout socialization women tend to have more diverse social groups, and they tend to be friends with people who are different than them.  And there is a question of is it that women are more liberal because they have more people in their lives who are affected by these issues, right?  There is also that kind of question.  Is this an issue of socialization as well where it’s like if we just had more diverse friend groups maybe this would actually not be as much of an issue. 

Sheila: Well, and it’s also just simply an issue—like the stuff we talk about on this podcast.  We think of conservative and liberal as being political things or political parties, but sometimes it’s just your outlook on life which is basically does justice matter or does power matter.  And maybe that’s not a fair way to describe it.  That’s how I kind of see it.  But when you’re looking at the SBC, for instance, right?  Women fought so hard for years to get them to take the abuse thing seriously, and now it’s just gone.  They’ve give given—the SBC is just never going to make it right. 

Rebecca: No.  They just don’t care.  

Sheila: They just don’t care even after all the reports and everything.  And you know what?  I don’t want to get too political here because there’s no point, and I’m so glad that there are people from the political spectrum who listen.  But we do need to understand that when so many women have been victims of abuse, when—that means that they are going to be more open to the fact that, hey, there’s a lot of people who start off life with a bad deck.  We don’t treat people equally because women know that because women haven’t been treated equally.  And so they’re like, “Yeah.  We do need to treat people better.”

Rebecca: Well, and also there is this habit amongst very conservative churches that just focuses so much on male power.  

Sheila: And so yeah.  And so yeah.  Women are going to be less conservative because being conservative is associated—and we know it is—with keeping men in power and with not taking women’s issues seriously.

Rebecca: Yep.  Absolutely.

Sheila: And it’s getting more so.  I don’t think it was politically 20 and 30 years ago actually, but it is getting more so that way.  And so yeah.  You’re seeing more and more women get liberal, and you’re seeing more and more men get conservative.  The way Al Mohler is framing that is look at these women who are becoming liberal.  Isn’t that awful?

Rebecca: Yes.  The men are so thoughtful, and that’s why they’re becoming conservative.  And the women are being very silly that they think that they can think.

Sheila: Yes.  Okay.  So now we move to part 3.  Okay.  So he explained the problem, how the problem is.  Look at these women who don’t want to get married.  How awful is that?  Look at these women who are liberal.  How awful is that?  And now we get into the creation order.  Okay?  And I will let him explain.

Al Mohler: – truth, Christian reasoning.  As I said in the beginning, the closer you get to creation order, a crisis in creation order, the closer you get to a 5-alarm fire.  And in this case you’re talking about the very heart of creation order.  

Sheila: So this is a crisis, Becca.  This is a crisis in the creation order.  And he goes on to explain how God made man not to be alone, and He made women.  And this is the whole point is that man and woman are supposed to be together.  And I agree.  We’re a pro marriage blog.  For pity’s sake, everything that we do is about how to make marriage better.

Rebecca: Well, and also people want to get married on average.  The majority of people want to get married.  They want a happily ever after.  All those women on Love is Blind they freaking put themselves out there to try to find their perfect person who they marry in 6 weeks.  Again, it’s a terrible premise for a show.  But they wanted to get married, but they still said no, right?  This is not people being like, “Yay.  I would literally rather be miserable and single than happy and married.”  No.  It’s that they don’t think that happy and married is an option or it’s a very likely one.

Sheila: Yeah.  Okay.  So he goes on to explain more about the creation order.  Here we go.  

Al Mohler: “It was not good,” it was declared—God declared, “For man to be alone, nor for woman.”  And in looking at this, you recognize this is not a small change.  This is not just a major statistical change.  This is a subversion of creation order, and this will lead to human tragedy.  I read this article and I’m just heartbroken.  I’m heartbroken for the young women in this article who seem to have abandoned marriage on their horizon.  And we’re not talking about a number of people to whom a gift of celibacy has been given, in the distribution, a gift to a church for service for the gospel.  No, we’re talking about a sociological reality, a demographic reality of increasing numbers of young women just deciding across the society that marriage is not for them, deciding they’re going to go through life without a husband.  An increased number of young men don’t want that.  They want a wife.  They want marriage.  They want a wife and marriage and children, but some of the women in this article say that’s not the picture they want.  They don’t want, as one woman said here, the husband and the wife and the kids with a white picket fence.  They want something else.  So here you have the therapeutic age.  You have the self-assertion age.  You have the personal autonomy age.  It all comes together, and of course, with the mismatch in educational and economic attainment, and a situation in which many women have just decided they’re not all that interested in marriage.

Sheila: So here Al is, and he is summing up all of the problems at this very end of this article.  Here is his description of what the problem is and what—how would you describe the problem, Becca, as Al is saying it?

Rebecca: I mean the problem—and the funny thing is he says it.  The problem is that women have put in the work to become more mature in all these areas.  And they just don’t see the point.  

Sheila: Well, no.  He’s not even saying that.  He’s not really saying that.  I mean he kind of acknowledges it.  But as he is summarizing the problem, the problem is these women don’t want to get married, but men do.

Rebecca: Of course, men want to get married.  Women want a wife too.  

Sheila: And so here you have this therapeutic age and the age of autonomy and look at all these women that are going towards autonomy instead of realizing they’re supposed to get married.  And so the problem is women.  Becca, look at the women your age.  They are the problem.  

Rebecca: Exactly.  

Sheila: They are the problem according to Al Mohler because they are not going along with the creation order.  

Rebecca: Well, and this is the thing is I’m looking at this.  And I’m like, “Okay.  So what you—you are literally saying out loud all these women are too successful and have too many houses and too many jobs and too many educational achievements.  And they won’t marry men who have don’t those things.  And isn’t that so horrible.”  And I’m like, “If the men did those things, don’t you think they’d get married?”

Sheila: Well, here.  He does say that in a second.  Okay.  So let’s play the next clip.  Okay.

Al Mohler:   And so a part of the responsibility of Christian parents, even a responsibility of the Christian church and a responsibility of Christian leaders is to help more young men be ready for marriage, be ready to be husbands, be ready to be fathers unapologetically, to be able to grow up on time, and put away the video games, and put away the toys, and put away the laziness, and get busy and show up as a young man some young woman is going to want to marry, and some young man who is going to be able to fulfill the responsibilities of being a husband.

Rebecca: Okay.  We see something that Al Mohler and I agree on.  Because here’s the thing, I grew up in the generation that he’s talking about now.  And the difference between what girls were expected to do and what boys were expected to do was astronomical.  I went to multiple youth groups, multiple youth groups, because I had problems with all of them, right?  I fought with the leadership in all of them.  So I went to multiple youth groups, right?  No one is shocked by this.  But the average achievement of the girls versus the average achievement of the boys was just—it was the same in every youth group.  The girls were more impressive than the boys in every single youth group that I went to.  And that was a cultural thing that happened.  You can see it.  It’s talked about in education research about how boys stopped being as good at things when girls got good at them.  And this is a thing that happened, and boys got sucked in by video games a lot more than girls did.  That genuinely is a problem.  And the parents did not do a good job at making sure that boys are not spending time on time wasters.  That is genuinely a parenting flaw that your generation, quite frankly, did quite poorly.  And I’m sorry that that’s harsh, but it is true.  I saw it happening over and over again.

Sheila: No.  It absolutely is.  But do you notice what he doesn’t say?  And this is what I find so interesting is he is framing the problem as these boys aren’t ready to be husbands by which he means they aren’t ready to make a lot of money.  And they are lazy.  Okay?  And so we need to raise them to be not lazy and to have jobs.  Do you know what—and not watch video games.  He doesn’t mention two big, huge, huge, huge things.  The first one is he never says anything about porn.  He never says, “Guys need to stop using porn.”  About 83% of men, who go to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, will be watching porn, right?  According to our stats in our survey.  When you look at the age group of that late teen—

Rebecca: That late teen, early 20s, is—it’s a lot of them.  Yeah.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And he doesn’t say anything about the fact that girls do not want to marry men who have had a pornified style of relating and pornified approach to sex.  This is not to say that if a boy has watched porn he is not an eligible husband.  

Rebecca: This is not the new purity culture, guys.

Sheila: No.  Because you know what?  You can stop watching porn.  And it doesn’t need to affect your sexuality.  And we found that men, who stopped watching porn before they got married, they’re chance of having a good sex life was basically the same as if they hadn’t ever watched it.

Rebecca: Yeah.  And you can always just stop.  You genuinely can.  Again, I want to say that again.  This is not the new purity culture no matter how much people are trying to make it that.  Okay?  Porn does not irrevocably ruin you just like how having sex and not being a virgin doesn’t irrevocably ruin you.

Sheila: But if you adopt the mindset of pornography and if you think things like choking is normal and you’re entitled to use a woman’s body and you don’t nee dot worry about whether or not she’s feeling pleasure and all of that, then—and if you’re using porn as your coping mechanism, then yeah.  You’re a problem.  And you need to deal with it.  And there are a lot of men in that group. 

Rebecca: Yeah.  And so acknowledge it.  Get a therapist.  And work through it.  

Sheila: But he doesn’t say anything about that.  But the other thing  he doesn’t say is something which the article talks about a lot.  And this is what I find the most interesting is he spent half an hour dissecting this article.  His conclusion is look at these women who because of the age of autonomy don’t want to get married even though all these poor men do.  And this is so terrible.  We need to do something about it.    

Rebecca: So we need to make sure the men are employable.  Yeah.

Sheila: But he never mentions what the article actually talks about. 

Rebecca: Okay.  What’s the article talk about?

Sheila: Okay.  So I want to read a couple of quotes from the actual article that he has been going on about.  This is what he left out.  She writes, “Jones, who identifies as politically moderate, thinks couples with kids should split household and child care responsibilities equally.  She was surprised by just how few of the men she has encountered in D.C. share this view.  Rachael Gosetti, a 33-year-old real-estate agent in Savannah, Georgia, said she broke up with her boyfriend, with whom she shares a 5-year-old son, over a year ago because she was tired of doing most of the child care, cooking and scheduling while also earning almost double her boyfriend’s salary.”  Okay.  So women want an engaged partner.  They don’t just want someone to make the money.  They want to someone who is going to be a genuine partner.  Another thing, “But men seem more satisfied with their options than women.  A 2023 AEI survey,”—American Enterprise Institute.  Is a conservative think tank.  Okay?  So this is conservative think tank.

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  So this is not some liberal bias.

Sheila: Right.  “Survey of college-educated women found that half blamed their singlehood largely on an inability to find someone who meets their expectations.  Less than a quarter of single men said the same.  ‘To the extent that some women are staying single because this is what they want, that’s great,’ said Kearney. ‘But we have to take seriously the likelihood that many are doing it as a Plan B because they’re not finding what they’re looking for, and that should make us concerned.’”

Rebecca: Yeah.  Absolutely.  

Sheila: And that is not what Al Mohler really talks about.  Yes.  He talks about how men—

Rebecca: Need to be able to make money.  But he insinuates.  It’s like, “Men, it’s shameful that you are letting women be the bread maker—breadwinner.”  Not bread maker.  Sorry.  He thinks they should be the bread makers.  He’s saying it insinuating that the man should be making more money than the woman versus understanding that like no.  This is an issue of—quite frankly, if you’re in a relationship, you want to be with someone who is your equal.  That does not mean equal salary power.  That does not mean equal type of job.  That means you’re equal in terms of your character, in terms of your morals, your values, the things that drive you forward in your life.  You want to be on the same path.  And if you’re someone who has worked very hard to achieve their goals but who also watches cleaning videos and organizational videos on YouTube and spends your free time trying to figure out how to make your apartment feel nice, you want to be with someone who also does that stuff because you’re working the same 40 hours a week if not more.  And then you have some guy, who doesn’t care if the dishes stay in the sink for 5 days.  That is just not—

Sheila: And the whole point is women have choices now.  That is what education and jobs gave women is choices.  And when women have choices, they are going to say, “Hey, I want a partner.”  And if Al Mohler is so worried that women aren’t wanting to get married, maybe he should realize that the form of marriage that he is teaching where men are in authority over women and where things are very gendered as Beth Allison Barr shows really well about the SBC and the whole biblical womanhood movement—that is going to make women not want to get married because it’s not—how—it’s just not fair.  It is not fair.

Rebecca: I also think it’s very funny that Al Mohler really likes to hide behind the issue of, oh, they’re just becoming too liberal.  And men are just staying conservative because, again, they’re the thinkers.  But even in this article, it’s the politically moderates too.  It’s not this issue of left versus right.  It’s this issue of competent versus have not put the work in.  And that’s the issue here.  And I think that there’s a lot of these very convenient things for these men to hide behind.  It’s like oh no.  You can just blame them because they are the other, right?  Stop blaming them because they’re the other.  They’re not.  They just worked hard.  And they’re not willing to put all of that time and energy into something that’s going to then get the—and then let life get sucked out of them by a marriage that’s unequal.

Sheila: Yeah.  I know.  And, again, if he wants women to want to get married, then he should be teaching men from The Marriage You Want.  He should be teaching—this is our new book, The Marriage You Want.  And we show how, hey, you know what really makes people happy, you know what really increases marital satisfaction is when you function as teammates.  If you function with hierarchy, the marriage is not very satisfying.  And yet, what Al Mohler is teaching is hierarchy, and now he’s saying, “But women don’t want it.”  And now he’s saying, “Why aren’t women getting married,” and it’s like because what you’re offering is not attractive.  I think what has happened in a lot of evangelical churches is that men have gotten to skate by really easily.  Because these evangelical churches have said, “Hey, guys, you get to be in control.  You get to be in power.  You get to be elders.  You get to be in power in your marriage.  Even if you have done nothing to earn it, your wife needs to give you unconditional respect.  You get to,”—the worst thing is to be on the nominated committee at church for elders.  I’ve been on nominated committee at church for elders when—in a complementarian church because you have to come up with lists of men, who can serve as elders.

Rebecca: And all their wives are amazing.    

Sheila: And all their wives are amazing.  And there are often so few men who could serve.  And this is a problem is that in a mini culture, in a mini society where men get rewards without having to actually work, you often get—and this is a big generalization.  I’m not saying everyone is like this.  But when you’re in a society where you are rewarded for doing very little, you often get unimpressive people.  But when you’re held down, then you often get quite impressive people because they have to work really, really, really hard to even get noticed.

Rebecca: Yeah.  I think that what’s happened is because of this dynamic it’s also become a very self-selected group.  You have this—you now have this denomination that, in general, is going to have the Christians, who are less—I mean who have not worked hard to do things.  They have done—they have skated by.  They have done—they have made decisions that have led them to be, quite frankly, less impressive.  And, again, this is generalities.  I am begging you to use some media literacy here.  Okay?  Generalities.  This is not everyone.  These are trends that are well established.  You are more likely to go to a highly conservative church if you are uneducated.  That is highly—that is just highly established.  Your mom worked really hard to grow you a brain for 9 months.  I am begging you to use it.  Okay?  If you’re getting super offended and it doesn’t apply to you, it doesn’t apply to you.  Okay?  And if you’re super offended because it does apply to you, then improve yourself.  That’s fine.  You have that option.  The Internet exists.  No.  But this is the thing is we have this group that is self selected.  And so then why on earth would the people who are interested in actually having iron sharpening iron types of faith where they are being challenged, where they are able to learn from a diverse group of voices and perspectives?  Why on earth would they stay in a place that rewards mediocrity and punishes impressive people simply based on sex?

Sheila: Well, yeah.  Think about the podcast from last week.  We shared that clip of Josh Howerton, who is a Southern Baptist megachurch pastor saying that men get to lead their wives emotions.  So when the wife is upset about something in their marriage, he can just come alongside her and say, “Hey, you’re not being rational.”

Rebecca: Women love that, by the way.

Sheila: If anybody thinks that’s good marriage advice—and then the leader of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary wonders why women don’t want to get married.  It’s like hmm.

Rebecca: It’s like yeah.  That’s great advice.  

Sheila: Maybe that’s the reason.  Okay.  You want to turn some more peer reviewed studies on this?     

Rebecca: Sure.

Sheila: Okay.  Because I have a couple of studies to share.  Okay.  First, I have a—this is a conference paper that came out of Europe in 2023.  I’ll put a link to it in the podcast notes.

Rebecca: 2023.  Very recent.  Very shiny.  New.

Sheila: Yes.  And it is talking about how fertility rates are highly correlated with men’s attitudes towards household labor.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Makes sense.

Sheila: So I just want to read the abstract.  All right?  This is what they said.  “We propose that men’s resistance to increase their contribution to home production is an important factor holding back fertility as well as female employment in developed countries.  We document a new stylized fact: a gender divergence in attitudes towards household chores over time.  While women give more and more importance to the sharing of childcare and housework, men’s views remain unchanged over time, leading to a growing gap in attitudes.  This gap is in contrast with views regarding women’s participation in the labor market, which have evolved in parallel for men and women over time.  We then show that this divergence in attitudes is strongly correlated with fertility rates and with female labor participation rates, in cross-country and cross-cohort regressions.  Fertility declines and low female employment are more pronounced in countries and cohorts where men report a stronger reluctance to share childcare and housework.  Our results suggest that men’s attitudes towards home production may be an important driver of both low fertility rates and persistent child penalties in labor market outcomes for women.”   

Rebecca: In other words, hey, dudes, women did the work and got jobs and got educated and did all of the work you were doing, and dudes have not lifted a finger to do the work that women are doing.      

Sheila: Yeah.  And so what happens?  Women are having fewer babies.  And in those situations, they’re often working less because they just can’t count on the men.    

Rebecca: In the situations where they do have babies, they are working less.

Sheila: Yes.  They are working less.  And so when people are like, “What’s wrong with women?  They don’t want to have babies,” it’s like, “Well, here’s what happened.”  

Rebecca: So and what this also shows is if you are then in a situation where the men are like, “No, yeah.  I’m a dad.  And this is my house too.  I should take care of it,” they have babies.        

Sheila: Yeah.  Their fertility rates go up.  In countries where the men have—share those attitudes towards childcare and housework, the fertility rates increase.  So it’s like attitudes have shifted where women want partnership, and men don’t.  And so where men are unwilling to be partners, you’re going to have fewer children and you’re probably going to have fewer marriages too.

Rebecca: It’s been so funny though because for generations there’s been this whole thing about how—it’s these very heavily conservative Baptists who have all the kids.  And I do wonder how much that’s going to change because I think the people who remain in that space will continue to have a lot of kids.  But I do think there’s going to—my prediction is that there is going to be a massive dip in fertility rates over the next couple years.  But in a decade, in a generation, I do wonder how much it will flip where people who are more egalitarian have more kids again.  And people who—and there will just be fewer people who believe in male hierarchy because it’s just been proven to be so bad for everyone.  I don’t know.  We’ll see.  We’ll see if I’m right.  Now you have to listen to the Bare Marriage podcast for 10 years to see if I’m right.

Sheila: Okay.  Here’s another quote from the same study.  “We show that, as female labor force participation increased over time, women’s work became more socially acceptable among both men and women.  Women also became more and more favorable to men and women sharing childcare and housework more equitably.  However, we show that men’s attitudes towards sharing of home production did not change in parallel. And we thus propose that men’s stagnant attitudes regarding the sharing of house work and childcare are holding back women’s labor market outcomes, as well as fertility.”

Rebecca: So in other words, it actually is men’s fault.  This is actually not women’s fault.  Women are fine with having the men be the one who is the stay-at-home dad, if he just doesn’t have the same earning power as she does.  Women are fine with splitting the jobs.  Women are fine with being partners.  Women are fine with marrying someone and having them be the stay-at-home dad, househusband, right?  That’s fine.  It’s men who are getting in their own way.  It’s like, “My dude, my absolute brother in Christ, my bro, okay?  If you want to get married, you need to start watching Clutterbug on YouTube.  That’s the answer.  You need to start watching Mom cleaning channels.  And you need to start meal prepping.  And no.  Do not meal prep just ground beef and brown rice.  Your wife is not a bodybuilder.  She gets to have flavor.”  You learn how to do these things.    

Sheila: But you also need to start reading books like Adam Young’s Making Sense of Your Story and doing some work on yourself too.  You need to do the whole thing.

Rebecca: Yeah.  But I think—but if you are the kind of person who wants to get married, don’t gripe about the person you want to marry.  You have to be attractive.  And it’s not that hard to be an attractive partner.  You just have to be someone who is actively going to make their life better.  And I’m so sorry, but it is not actually true that just you are what’s going to make their life better because we do not live forever in the first 18 months of infatuation in a relationship.  Life gets real very quickly.  And relationships require more than just that initial attraction and spark.  They require this foundation that it can then build on so that the love and the joy—it continues because, quite frankly, marriage is both romantic and practical.  And I think that men have thought a lot about the romantic side and not a lot about the practical side, which I know is the opposite of the gender swap.  What they often say is that women are so romantic and men aren’t.  That’s not actually true.

Sheila: Well, because what women have done is they have watched what happened to their mothers.  They’ve watched what happened to their aunts.  They’ve watched what happened to their older sisters and their friends.  And they’re like, “I don’t want that.  I want to marry.  Sure.  I want to marry, but I am not willing to get married where I know that I’m going to end up doing most of the work.”  And that’s valid.  Okay.  I have another study I want to share.  Okay?  This is a time study.  And it looked at the time that women spent on various activities based on their marital status.  Okay?  And here is the money sentence.  “The bivariate results show that married mothers spent the most time in housework and childcare and the least amount of time in leisure and sleep, compared with all other mothers.”  So when they compared married mothers to never married mothers and divorced mothers, the married mothers spent the least amount of time in leisure and sleep.  Here’s another little bit where they’re expanding.  “Never-married and divorced mothers spent about a half hour less per day than married mothers doing housework, whereas cohabiting and married mothers reported about the same amount of housework time.”  So women who are married to men or living with men spend more time on housework than moms where there isn’t a man in the house.  And so men are causing more work for women.

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  And, again, like I said, please use your brain.  This is an average.  Say it with me.  This is an average.

Sheila: Yeah.  This isn’t true for every—my husband does not cause me work.  My husband saves me work.  But that’s why we have a good marriage is because we’re partners.  And this is what we’re trying to say.  And you know who I’m going to let say it?  Is some of our commenters.  I want to read some of the comments that came in.

Rebecca: Awesome.

Sheila: Because we had so many people comment on social media about this topic, this went quite big.  And these are in no particular order.  “When I was dating 20 years ago, the dating pool among Christian boys was abysmal.  The standard was literally just that they had to be a Christian and go to church regularly.  The boys around me/in youth group didn’t have their licenses, no jobs, couldn’t fry an egg, had little personal hygiene, were largely unemployable outside of youth pastor roles.  And then there I was, planning to go to graduate school, independent with multiple jobs to pay for education as I went, was told I was intimidating.”

Rebecca: Yeah.  Yeah.  And I do want to say I know this is hard to hear from the men who were raised without the skills to be competent adults.  That is not your fault.  I will say that.  Again, there is a generation of parents that failed their boys because they watched them sit on the couch for 8 hours a day, and they watched them not get jobs.  They watched them not push themselves at school.  They watched them be like, “Well, at least I passed.”  And they didn’t clock that as a red flag.  There is a whole generation—and that is something that was honestly robbed from you because that’s a lot easier to learn at 14 than to learn for the first time at 34.  Okay?  Let’s be very, very clear.  I don’t want this to be a thing where it’s like this isn’t—this is why it’s so hard to talk about these issues.

Sheila: Well, yeah.  Because we’re not actually trying to beat up on individual men here.  What I’m trying to do is say that Al Mohler is so problematic—he’s declaring there’s a problem when he’s the one who created it.  

Rebecca: He’s literally written the book on this.  

Sheila: He is the one who has been saying, “Men are supposed to be over women.  Men are supposed to be in hierarchy over women.  There are supposed to be gender roles.”  He runs a seminary that had classes on how women could pack their husbands suitcases.  

Rebecca: But at the same time, one of the people who was super fear mongering about better education and about going to university.  The whole Southern Baptist was so anti education.

Sheila: And so then you end up in this situation where the whole marriage milieu that he has created doesn’t work for women.  It doesn’t work for men either.

Rebecca: No.  It doesn’t.  

Sheila: But it really doesn’t work for women.  And so more and more young women are like, “Look.  I would love to get married.  I would love to have a husband.  I would love to have kids.  But I am not willing to do it if I’m going to be miserable.”  And we just need to grapple with that.  If young women are saying, “Hey, I would rather be single than married,” that is not an indictment on those young women.  That is telling us something.  And I agree with Al Mohler that it is a 5-alarm fire.  It is a crisis.  It is seismic.  But the crisis is not that women don’t want to get married.  The crisis as this article actually says—which Al Mohler never does admit to is that these women, who want to get married are finding that there aren’t men that they can marry.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  There aren’t marriable men in large enough numbers.  

Sheila: There are not marriageable men.  Okay.  Let me read a couple more comments.

Rebecca: Okay.  Sorry.  Let’s read some more comments.

Sheila: All right.  Another woman writes, “I will add the disclaimer that I am no man hater.  Good men are a blessing to our communities, our families, and our lives.  But many men have gotten by with the bare minimum for too long, and that’s not working anymore.  They have to up skill, not just professionally, but emotionally and spiritually.  I think they’ll get there because they’ll have to, but I think there are a lot of women in my generation who will give up having a partner if it means showing future generations that they deserve better.”

Rebecca: Yep.  Absolutely.  I agree.  I think they’ll get there too.  There’s no reason that they can’t.

Sheila: Yeah.  But I think they will only get there when there is a crisis.  And thankfully, there’s a crisis.  Okay.  I want to give some—I just want to give these women a bit of a platform because we get to be lectured by Al Mohler, and women’s voices aren’t usually heard.  So I just want to read some more of these comments.  Another woman said, “My daughters do not want to get married.  They’ve watched the women of my generation suffer under the hands of men that just refuse to step up.  They do their 8 hours at work and then nothing else while women do everything.  They aren’t interested in relationships and would rather adopt children to raise as single parents than deal with a man making their life harder.  My boys are focusing on themselves and their own ambitions as well.   While one of my sons would like to have a family, it isn’t his primary focus right now.  I taught all my kids how to be decent humans.  There are no gendered skills dishes, laundry, housework, childcare, yard work, earning an income.  Those are all something every adult should be doing.  Relationships should be bringing something positive to each other and not the unbalanced hellscape that most of us have lived through.”  And I want to agree that she has lived through a hellscape and that many people have.  But if you are in a community where you could say this about every woman in your life, you’re in the wrong community.

Rebecca: Absolutely.  This is not normal in most communities.     

Sheila: Yeah.  My family is not like this.  The men in my family are not like this.  The men in my church are not like this.  And so if you are in a community where you could have said this about all of the men and, therefore, you’re like, “Yeah.  My daughters probably shouldn’t get married,” you need to get your kids in a different community.

Rebecca: Absolutely.

Sheila: You need to get—join a different denomination where women are actually—where women matter, where women’s voices matter.  Find different friends.  If your families are all totally sexist, then hang out with different people.  Because it’s sad, if people want to get married, they should be able to get married.  It shouldn’t be this hard.  “I only want someone who has put the same work into themselves and their life as I have.  I don’t ask for anything that I haven’t already asked of myself.  And until someone comes along that fits that criteria, I will find contentment in the life God has given me to live.  I won’t waste it waiting for a person to complete me when God has already has that job.  And I won’t settle for less than an extension of the true love that I have experienced with God.”

Rebecca: Yeah.  I think that point of I’m not asking them to do anything I have not already done myself is very important.

Sheila: Yeah.  Okay.  Another woman said, “Look, Al, I tried.  I did all the things.  I followed God’s call while keeping an eye out for who was running the race beside me.  The problem is there were 3 times as many women as men.  There just aren’t that many men who love Jesus that much.  And it shows.  And since everyone said it was better to be alone than unequally yoked, here I am.”

Rebecca: Yep.  That’s also a good point.  It’s like right now there might be more men than women in many conservative spaces—in churches.  

Sheila: But that doesn’t mean there’s more women than men—or there’s more men than women loving Jesus.  

Rebecca: And that’s exactly what I was going to say.  And it also doesn’t mean that it was the case awhile ago too.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Okay.  So here’s one from a woman who is on staff at a megachurch.  And this isn’t—it’s not like a liberal megachurch.  But it’s certainly not a conservative.  It’s more like middle of the road.  And most people would even see it as on the healthier side but still very complementarian.  Okay?  And these are her observations as to why women aren’t getting married because she’s seeing this in her church.  And she works with young people in the church.  And yes.  She’s saying yes.  The women aren’t getting married.  And she says, “Why?  1. The men are overtly patriarchal and frame male headship as God’s design.  The degree of sexism in evangelical spaces is becoming truly toxic.  2. The men are becoming increasingly politically conservative while the women are becoming more progressive.  3. The women are highly educated and often work as bankers, lawyers, and medical professionals.  To insecure men, their professional achievements make them intimidatingly undateable.  4. Male pornography use is rampant and rightly unacceptable to women.  5. Christian men suffer in comparison to non-Christian men, who are often more respectful, more empathetic, less misogynist, less fragile, and less Christian nationalist.  6. Many of the men have underdeveloped social and emotional skills.  They’re awkward, passive, silent, low-key creepy.  To use Gen Zed lingo: they do not pass the vibe check.”

Rebecca: Yeah.  Absolutely.  I think this is what’s just so hard, right?  I think this is where I get sad because it’s one thing to talk about the 30-year-old man, who is given all the opportunity and then just didn’t do any work in his 20s and became very selfish.  It’s another thing to talk about the 18 year old, who from age 10 had been groomed to be passive and lazy because he was never expected and never parented to do anymore.  And I will say.  As someone who is a mother, that’s what I feel very sad about because we talk about, “Well, 18 is a grownup.”  Yeah.  But they were also a 17, a 16, a 15, 14—they were also a child.  They have been a grownup for mere months.  The rest of their existence has been not their responsibility in the same way, and I think that’s where I get sad where it’s like you have parents who are raising girls to do these things.  And they are not raising their boys to do it.  It’s a thing that genuinely—it comes out as frustration with me.  But I find it so sad, and I find it so heartbreaking because people have been so socialized in specifically these circles to be not critical of men.  And as a result, they’ve been hyper critical of their daughters and so push their daughters toward success.  And they’ve been completely just—they just love their little baby boys.  And, oh, he’s just my special boy.  And, oh, you’re a mama’s boy and all this stuff.  And it’s like you have done your son a disservice.  You have set your son up for failure because you were not willing to see them in the same light you saw your daughter.  It just makes me sad.  And it’s something I just saw so often that genuinely—it—I hope that some of the men who are listening who would classify in that example of who aren’t able to bring things to the table because they don’t know how to function as grownups because they—while their sisters were being taught how to meal plan and cook and go and find a job, they were allowed to play video games.  And their mom, “Well, I guess I’ll write your resume for you and get you a job at McDonald’s,” versus the daughters were out there doing it, going door to door asking people if they needed babysitting, right?  That was not okay that that happened to a generation of men.  But it is because of theology of men like Al Mohler, who taught us that men are to be celebrated and coddled and women are to be critiqued and judged and they need to prove themselves even more because they have to earn their spot at the table that men simply get by default. 

Sheila: Yeah.  And that’s the problem.  And I find it interesting too that she said that it’s non Christian men, who are more respectful, less misogynist, more empathetic.  I hear this from so many people all the time that they’ve had to date outside the church.

Rebecca: Can I say a massive statistical asterisk for this though?  

Sheila: Yeah.  Mm-hmm.

Rebecca: If you’re saying all the men at my high power job are respectful and wonderful and lovely and all the men at my church aren’t, my question is—you’re in a self-selected group in your high powered job.  We are not—the reality is the average Christian actually has better—it is better on many things to be religious than to be not because there is a whole slew of men, who are not religious you ain’t going anywhere near.  You are not touching.  You are not going anywhere close.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Well, here I have some stats on this one.  So there is a study from the Institute of Family Studies that they put out what they called the world map.  I think the most recent one that I have is 2019.  It was based on a study of 16,000 people from around the world, and they divided everybody into 6 groups.  Okay?  Whether they were patriarchal or egalitarian, okay?  Whether they attended church all the time or they were mixed attendance where they went sometimes or maybe one went and the other didn’t or when they didn’t attend church.  Okay?  And the worst was the non religious patriarchal.  They were the worst.

Rebecca: Yeah.  That’s what I was going to say.  Yes.      

Sheila: But the second worst of those six groups—   

Rebecca: Is the religious patriarchal.

Sheila: – is the religious patriarchal.  Yeah.  

Rebecca: Absolutely.  Yeah.  And that’s the point.  I think that when you’re in circles you tend to see your circles as the entire Venn diagram whereas really you’re in a very small sliver of it.  If you’re a banker or accountant and you’re like, “Well, all the men who are also accountants are all really respectful,” yeah.  Those are the kinds of men, who worked really hard to get where they are and have a lot of oomph.  Yes.  You’re comparing a subgroup to a larger group.  If you were to work in an area where you just have a randomly selected group of men, you’d find problems with them as well.  So this is not actually a true observation.  This is a thing where it’s like we’re in a self-selected group here.  Your peers that you are around who are non Christian—the church is the only placed that you’re forced to hang out with people you wouldn’t otherwise hang out with.

Sheila: Right.  And that is a problem.  But here is the caveat to that.  Of those 6 groups, the best group is the religious but egalitarian.

Rebecca: That’s exactly it.

Sheila: And so if you’re not in an egalitarian religious space, it is unlikely you are going to meet those kinds of men.

Rebecca: Absolutely.  

Sheila: And so if you’re sitting in a SBC church and you’re like, “I guess I’m never going to get married, and I’m going to go adopt out of the foster care system,” I mean please adopt out of the foster care system.  That’s wonderful.  But you might also consider getting into a different church.

Rebecca: Well, exactly.  It’s like don’t go on what your observations are alone because none of us have the full picture.  Look at the actual data.  

Sheila: And to get back to where we opened this podcast, like Beth Allison Barr says in Becoming the Pastor’s Wife, it didn’t need to be this way.  And we are the ones who are propping up the system.  And so we need to decide if we’re going to keep propping up the system where people like Al Mohler can look at a crisis where women don’t have anyone to marry and blame the women for being too picky or whether we’re going to be honest and say, “Hey, we have been teaching about this wrong.  We have been holding women back.  We have been making women’s voices a problem instead of celebrating women’s voices.  And we have been teaching a form of marriage and a form of church that doesn’t work, that hurts women, and ends up hurting men as well.  It’s just that men get to keep the power.”  And we can do it differently.  And so if you want woman to get married, then get men to read The Marriage You Want and teach your boys how to cook.  Teach your boys—expect your boys to be getting part time jobs.  Teach your boys how to clean.  Teach your boys to be responsible.  

Rebecca: Watch for passivity.  Watch for unhealthy screen time relationships.  Watch for just the loss of that spark.

Sheila: But also expect that marriage will be a partnership.  Teach both your boys and your girls to expect that, and it’s more likely that they will find others who think the same way.  And so, Al, it’s interesting what you think is a 5-alarm fire.  And maybe one day you’ll realize what the real 5-alarm fire, and you’ll repent.  And that would be really nice.  So you can pick up The Marriage You Want.  The link is in the podcast notes.  The link to Becoming the Pastor’s Wife is also there.  And the link to the article, to Al Mohler’s briefing, and to the other peer reviewed studies that we mentioned are also there.  So thank you.  And we will see you again next on the Bare Marriage podcast.  Bye-bye.