We have a plague in the evangelical church of unqualified people giving dangerous advice.
In our original study for The Great Sex Rescue (we’ve since conducted three more!), we identified four main teachings that do great harm–teachings which are not biblical, but are often spread in the evangelical church nevertheless. We also created a 12-point rubric of healthy sexuality to apply to our resources to see if they are helpful or harmful. Of the 13 bestselling sex and marriage books we looked at:
- 4 were helpful
- 2 were neutral
- 7 were harmful
Why is it acceptable that best-selling evangelical marriage books cause harm?
Now, it’s normal that there will be disagreements about biblical interpretation.
What I am talking about today is not merely disagreement, but rather messages that we know cause measurable harm. When we follow God’s design for relationships, emotional health should follow–not emotional and relational harm. If following a piece of advice brings harm rather than health, that should be a sign that what is being taught is not of Jesus.
In fact, Jesus Himself said this:
Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.
Jesus is telling us that outcome matters.
Right now, in the evangelical world, we do not even consider outcome when it comes to teaching. Instead, the criteria we use for judging whether or not to recommend a book, or whether or not to invite a speaker to a conference, tends to revolve around these three things:
- Do I agree with the person’s theology?
- Are they friends with the right people and featured on the right media?
- Are they famous/have they written best-sellers?
None of these things relates to whether or not their advice actually works. But marriage, sex, mental health, parenting–these are not just doctrinal issues; they are relationships, and they are complicated. We need to handle with care.
We are facing a crisis of harmful teaching in the evangelical church.
Because we have relied on connections rather than asking people to prove that their advice works, we have elevated people and teachings that should never have been elevated.
Emerson Eggerichs, for instance, was a good friend of James Dobson’s, and Focus on the Family published and promoted his book Love & Respect. But as we’ve talked about before, when we put that book through our rubric it scored 0/48 (while The Gift of Sex by the Penners scored 47/48).
It could not have scored worse. (And if you’re interested in seeing why it scored so poorly, see this post.) Yet, Love & Respect remains the most widely-used marriage book study in North American churches today.
Every year, when I look at the line-up of keynote speakers at the American Association of Christian Counselors, I’m amazed that authors that we found to be the most harmful often present (even though they are not trained in counseling). We have to ask: by what criteria were they considered to be the best choices for speaking from the stage? (And please note: this is not about me wanting to be there instead. I couldn’t have traveled from Canada due to COVID restrictions anyway!).
Right now, the evangelical world is doing real harm to real couples, and especially to real women. This must stop. But it won’t stop until we adopt higher standards for our resources, and start enforcing them.
We would like to suggest a simple 2-pronged approach to evaluating relationship teaching.
We believe that we could avoid much of that harm by expecting authors, speakers, and teachers to pass two tests:
- Evidence-based advice
- Accountability for their teaching
Our call
- Before a church or conference invites a speaker
- before a small group leader suggests a book to study
- before a publication features an author or speaker–
they be vetted using these two criteria.
We don’t expect everyone to vet everyone; but before someone gives an author a platform, they have a responsibility to vet that author and his/her work first.
Let’s look at these two criteria in turn:
A. Is the book “Evidence-Based”?
Instead of asking what is this person saying, we tend to focus on who is saying it.
But please remember that a seminary degree does not confer relevant experience or knowledge about abuse dynamics, human sexuality, mental health, or anything of the sort. In fact, one of the most horrifying things we have seen as we have researched evangelical marriage and sex teaching is how many seminaries use the harmful books that we identified in The Great Sex Rescue as their actual textbooks. Seminary teaches people to be a pastor; it does not qualify someone to teach the intricacies of marriage or sex.
And sometimes people don’t know what they don’t know.
A great example is Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage. In that book, he included an anecdote where he talked about sex early in their marriage, relating:
Kathy, in those remarks, said that if she didn’t experience an orgasm during lovemaking, we both felt like failures. If I asked her, “How was that?” and she said, “It just hurt,” I felt devastated, and she did, too.
They go on to talk about how they decided to stop making sex a pass/fail thing, and just keep having sex without aiming for orgasm to take away the stress. Now, this seems like a rather innocent anecdote (although rather bad advice considering our 47 point orgasm gap!). But here’s where ignorance can be dangerous: 23% of evangelical women experience sexual pain disorders, a rate approximately twice that of the general population. This anecdote, and what surrounds it, makes it sound normal to have intercourse when it hurts, and not speak up. It doesn’t say, “hey, sex shouldn’t hurt, and if it does, please see a doctor or pelvic floor physiotherapist.” No, it said keep having sex but don’t aim for orgasm.
A few years ago, many women spoke out on social media, saying how they didn’t get help for vaginismus for a decade because of this anecdote. Tragically, instead of apologizing, Tim and Kathy Keller just doubled down and blamed their readers for misunderstanding what they had said.
But that’s the problem with writing only from your experience, and not knowing about that 23% of evangelical women: you can do great harm.
(We go on to relate this episode, and read some of the social media posts, in this podcast).
The advice being given simply must be evidence-based, or we can do harm. It must be shown to bear good fruit. Let’s look at what that entails:
1. All claims must be backed by peer-reviewed research
When an author makes a claim, the author should be citing his or her sources.
We can’t just say things like:
- as we all know, the divorce rate is increasing
- since people stopped spanking, disobedience and rebellion has increased
- the root of depression is a spiritual failing
- the reason people divorce is that men aren’t acting as head
- teenage pregnancy is increasing because of awful sex ed in schools
and many more, without citing our sources.
If an author makes a claim like this without citing data, that is a sign that the book is based on ideology rather than evidence.
Not only should books use peer-reviewed journal articles, though; they should use the most up-to-date research. Many of our books are relying on research that has been disproven, or are still spouting things that we know are not true.
(A great example is how Shaunti Feldhahn and Gary Thomas insist on sharing a neuroscience study from 2004 claiming there are gender differences in how our brains are wired for sex, instead of the 2019 and 2021 meta-analyses, which include the 2004 study, and definitively show this isn’t true.)
Other times the book may have used up-to-date knowledge at the time it was written, but these claims are now wrong. The book The Act of Marriage, for instance, first published in the 1970s, says vaginismus does not exist (even though Christian women suffer from it at twice the rate of the general population). If a book has passed its “best before” date, it is best to let it die.
TIP: Check the back of the book for footnotes. A safe book will quote at least a handful of peer-reviewed journal articles to back up their claims. Make sure those articles are within the last 10 years.
The book Every Man’s Battle, for instance, focused on an area which has been widely studied in academic literature: sex addictions, pornography addictions, and lust. And yet there is not a single footnote in that book.
Here’s our one-sheet summary of the problems with Every Man’s Battle
2. Does the author understand data and statistics?
To be qualified to write on relationships, a person must show that they can understand how research works and what to do with data.
Emerson Eggerichs has a Ph.D., yet he misquotes The Gottman Institute’s statistics all the time. The Gottman Institute claims:
-
85% of people who stonewall are men
Yet what does Emerson Eggerichs say in Love & Respect?
-
85% of men are stonewallers
Can you see how those are not the same thing? The fact that he would make such a mistake shows he is unqualified to talk about these things.
In a (now deleted) article by Gary Thomas about how a wife can’t cure her husband from porn, but he can help her, he shared that Christina, the wife, wasn’t having sex very frequently, even though she was orgasming. Thomas asserted:
“This blows apart the myth that sexual infrequency is always caused by a husband’s selfishness or lack of hygiene.”
He does not cite where this myth is from. Also, by using the word “always” in his sentence, he appears to be setting up a straw man so that he can knock it down. However, there is indeed a wide body of evidence that shows that women who don’t orgasm frequently do indeed want sex less–although that same evidence also shows that relationship quality, porn use, and sexual dysfunction contribute to frequency as well.
But most importantly, one anecdote does not blow apart data.
In fact, multiple anecdotes do not blow apart data either! Think about it like this: we know that lung cancer is largely caused by smoking. If you meet someone who has smoked two packs a day for fifty years and they don’t have lung cancer, that does not mean that the research into smoking causing lung cancer is disproved. It just means that you met an outlier.
When we were looking at our survey results, I was very surprised when Joanna, our wonderful stats person, told me that 48% of women orgasm always or almost always during a sexual encounter. I assumed it would be way lower–because I work in this field, and the people who write in to me or comment on the blog tend to be people who are having more problems than others. And so I had a distorted view of what was actually happening–even though I know a lot about sex in Christian marriages.
Just because someone counsels hundreds of couples a year does not mean that they know more than a research study. Your own experience does not trump data. Experience is important, and anecdotes and case studies are wonderful and make books richer, but they cannot stand alone, nor can they disprove what academic literature says.
TIP: If the author/speaker makes a claim that says that current research consensus is wrong, be suspicious. The only valid way to claim “the research is wrong” is to show either how the research was done incorrectly or to conduct your own study and publish it in peer reviewed journals. And one has to be qualified in the field to properly critique other people’s research.
3. Does the author’s anecdotes line up with their teaching?
Often authors will know what they “have” to say to avoid criticism, but in their anecdotes they’ll give the opposite advice. So, for instance, the author may teach that women aren’t responsible for men’s porn use, and that women are never to blame, but the anecdotes they use may all be about how having sex with her husband helped him not watch porn.
The classic one is the standard abuse caveat. Authors will say that “this advice doesn’t apply if you’re in an abusive situation; and abuse is wrong, and you should call the police,” but then they give anecdotes of situations which are obviously abusive where the wife is told to submit more or consider what she can do differently to not provoke him.
Here’s how I explained this problem previously:
From Is It Okay if Christian Books Are Just a Little Bit Harmful?
Here’s an analogy: Think about how drug companies handle warnings
Drug companies are required to warn you: “This drug is not meant for people with these conditions.”
What would we think, though, if a drug company said, “This drug is not meant for people with asthma”, but then went on to tell a story about a woman who was having real shortness of breath, and who felt her chest tightening, and who often had trouble catching her breath when it was cold or after exercising, but she used the drug and it was amazing!
Well, you might assume that if you have shortness of breath, and if you have chest tightening, and if you cough a lot after exercise or when it’s cold, then you must not have asthma. You must have something else. And maybe this drug would work!
That’s what going on with too many Christian marriage books.
They’re saying they’re not meant to be used in abusive situations, but then they’re describing abusive situations without naming them as such.
TIP: Leaf through the book and find 5 times when the author uses names–that’s usually an example. Read the story and see if it lines up with the caveats or advice that the author explicitly gives in the book, or if the anecdotes tell a different story.
4. Use a standardized method to judge the outcome of marriage and sex teachings: Does the advice work?
In the academic world, researchers are expected to have their work peer-reviewed in journals. That means that they have to first pass an ethics review (if the research uses people), and then several peers (academics in the same field) will evaluate that research, look for holes in the arguments, see if it passes current standards, see if the research was done well, and see if the conclusions are correct. Only then is it published (that’s how we get the term “peer review”).
In the Christian world we don’t do any of this—and that’s why we at Bare Marriage are so proud that are work has, indeed, been peer reviewed!
We would like to suggest that evaluating outcomes is the most crucial component of accepting any marriage or sex teacher.
Currently, there is a huge body of knowledge in the academic literature of what beliefs and practices lead to:
- lower marital satisfaction
- higher rates of abuse
- higher rates of porn use (or difficulty quitting porn use)
- lower orgasm rates
- lower libido
- higher rates of male sexual dysfunction
- higher rates of sexual pain disorders in women
Our own research identified beliefs that directly lead to lower marital satisfaction, lower orgasm rates, and higher rates of sexual pain. We should be able to screen people’s teachings to see if they match up to best practices.
My co-authors and I have created a rubric for healthy sexuality teaching that we encourage others to use to judge materials before they host a marriage conference or a book study.
A book or resource should be required to achieve a “green”, or “healthy” rating, in order to be used.
If others would like to develop their own rubrics about healthy marriage, parenting, or mental health teaching, we welcome that and would welcome a robust discussion on what such rubrics should include.
We are endeavouring to have our sex rubric in peer review publication, and we encourage others to do the same thing. It should be normalized that we go to peer review with our research.
B. Asking for Accountability: Have they proven themselves trustworthy?
1. Have they corrected their own work?
No one can be perfect all of the time. In academia, the aim is to disprove the current theories and move research forward. That should be the norm in the evangelical world, too. Or, to put it more simply, in the words of Maya Angelou:
When you know better, do better.
It must become the norm that people can admit that they didn’t have the full picture, and then correct course.
When people have been shown to do harm, they should be expected to issue revisions to their books, or at least state on their websites and explain what teaching they no longer agree with.
2. Are they platforming people who have done harm and will not course correct?
Here’s where the rubber hits the road: the only way to eradicate harmful teaching from evangelicalism is if there is a price to pay for promoting harmful teaching. That means that when someone is known to have spread demonstrably harmful teachings, we must no longer platform them or endorse them.
And, if someone continues to platform a harmful teacher, without any kind of disclaimer or announcement, that is a sign that they are not safe, either.
We should not use people’s books, invite people to speak at our conferences, or recommend people who:
- Have not corrected previous books that contain messages we know cause measurable harm
- Work with and frequently speak with those who have covered up abuse or caused measurable harm (for example, those who work with Mark Driscoll in marriage ministry)
- Have endorsed highly problematic books or people in the past, and have not rescinded those endorsements, though they’ve been asked to (for instance, those who endorsed Mark Driscoll’s book Real Marriage; endorsed James MacDonald; endorsed Every Man’s Battle; endorsed Ravi Zacharias, etc.)
Measurable harm will keep being spread until we all say, “enough is enough,” and expect more from our teachers.
It is not unreasonable to ask teachers to correct their teaching when they learn more, or to withdraw endorsements when appropriate.
Look, I’ve endorsed stuff in the past that I regret, too! As I’ve said repeatedly, I held up copies of Love & Respect at marriage conferences and told people it was a great book. When I realized it wasn’t, I apologized and have been very vocal about how I was wrong.
I asked Zondervan, one of my publishers, if I could rewrite The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex for its 10th anniversary, and I completely gutted the book and pretty much started over, even though I wasn’t paid for doing so. It was my best-selling book, and people have loved it. But after surveying 20,000 women, and listening to all of your stories, I felt it needed a different emphasis. It’s not that I thought the original was harmful; it’s just that it wasn’t done to my current standards.
Growth is allowed, and should be encouraged. That means that we don’t ostracize those who apologize and retract; we embrace them. There should be benefits to admitting you were wrong. We must become a Christian community that rewards people for growing, but that also stops platforming those who refuse to acknowledge harm and change course.
It’s not about cancelling people–it’s simply holding people accountable.
It must become the norm that we hold teachers to a higher standard, as the New Testament does.
Let’s remember that the sheep’s welfare always matters more than the shepherds’ reputations.
Please, church, let’s get away from celebrity culture and start asking for more.
Jesus does not want people hurt.
What the church is doing right now by allowing those with no or few credentials to speak; by not judging outcomes; and by not holding people to account is hurting the sheep.
When we don’t care for the sheep, but instead worry about protecting the platforms of those in power, we show we’re not following Jesus.
As the wider church, let’s repent of the harm we have done. Let’s figure out a new way, together, to raise the bar on what we expect of teachers in the marriage, sex, and even parenting realm.
Will you join me in praying for these changes, and then will you start demanding that your counselor, your pastor, your denomination starts vetting people and books, too? Thank you.
"A groundbreaking look into what true, sacred biblical sexuality is intended to be. A must-read." - Rachael Denhollander
What if you're NOT the problem with your sex life?
What if the messages that you've been taught have messed things up--and what if there's a way to escape these toxic teachings?
It's time for a Great Sex Rescue.
What do you think about my criteria? Is there anything you would add? How can we make this easier/more practical? Let me know in the comments!
And please pass this post around to pastors and small group leaders that you know!
>> 4 were helpful
>> 2 were neutral
>> 7 were harmful
A bit off-topic, but so much for the claims that you hate EVERYTHING that isn’t from you
YEP!
By the way, what does it mean exactly when a book is neutral? I believe you, but I have hard time imagining how such a book look like. Something that is not good nor bad. Perhaps a book that is very boring? Or something that deals only with neutral topics like the right way to fold up the laundry? Or something where the useful things and the harmful things outweight each other? Perhaps it is a book that’s completely a waste of time…but would wasting your time not be harmful as well?
The more I try to wrap my brain around it, the more I’m inclined to think that if a book or teaching is not at least somewhat helpful, it is useless, which is already harmful.
Totally agree that people invited by many Christian organisations/churches etc, and given a platform, seem to have strange reasons for being chosen to speak. In my experience I feel that often I am listening to people who have had one ‘famous’ Christian moment, rather than the quieter and perhaps seemingly more mundane lives of those who have faithfully followed Jesus for decades and lifetimes. Churches seem to elect for the sensational, perhaps with an eye to bringing people in. But if you are bringing people in, don’t you want to give them meat, rather than something often jazzy but superficial? It has often bothered me.
I agree that we need to listen to people who are well trained in certain fields, as a priority. I don’t think pastors should never share personally about marriage, even sex, because I think as long as it is presented as personal experience, and not applying prescriptively for everybody, it can be ok (as long as not cringe). But I agree that we need to have clear, current advice from experts trained in the fields of marriage and sex alongside the pastoral take on it all.
I was less sure about the anecdote from the Kellers. Maybe I haven’t read enough of the actual chapter in context. But from what was put here, I think it is a stretch for someone to blame them for not seeking help for vaginismus. You are saying ‘This anecdote, and what surrounds it, makes it sound normal to have intercourse when it hurts, and not speak up.’
But in the anecdote itself Tim professes to be devastated that it hurts Kathy, that reaction doesn’t sound like he is normalising it at all.
And she clearly does speak up, and feels free to speak up, as they are discussing it together.
I think also to me the passage seems to suggest they are taking the aim off orgasming for both of them, so not suggesting sex should be the man orgasming and that it doesn’t matter to the woman.
Actually the anecdote from them seems to suggest to me that they both know that women can and should be orgasming often in sex, hence why they feel failures. So I feel their decision for neither of them to be pursuing orgasm, but to be pursuing sex itself, presumably purely for intimacy and getting to know each other better, is actually quite a good one. I feel like that environment would be one I would relax in. So I don’t feel I can knock it.
I understand you are saying many women blame them, but I think the Kellers’ anecdote would just re-affirm that sex can hurt at the beginning for the woman, (which is very normal, and especially for women who have never used tampons etc), that it can take a little time for sex not to hurt, at the very beginning, and going slow and taking pressure off is a great idea, and that its good to talk about it.
I understand you are saying when they were challenged later they didn’t respond the way people wanted, but just based on this particular excerpt, I just personally don’t think it is very problematic.
I agree that all claims must be backed by peer-reviewed research, but the Kellers weren’t making any claim, they were just sharing a personal anecdote, presumably to show that how women feel during sex is important , and that the male desire to orgasm is not all-important, and can be set aside. For its time, that wasn’t bad at all.
I also think even qualified people can sometimes give dangerous advice. So the need to find qualified teachers won’t mean we never hear dangerous advice. We all need to constantly be thinking critically about what we hear, whether it is from someone qualified in the field or not. Qualified people can obviously have personal vendettas, biased points-of-view, or theological agendas instilled from birth that feel too hard to shift. Someone can know all the science and then choose to completely ignore it. So while it helps greatly to have experts, it doesn’t mean that we are ultimately in completely safe hands.
“I think the Kellers’ anecdote would just re-affirm that sex can hurt at the beginning for the woman, (which is very normal, and especially for women who have never used tampons etc), that it can take a little time for sex not to hurt, at the very beginning, and going slow and taking pressure off is a great idea, and that its good to talk about it.”
But that’s the whole problem. Because it is NOT normal for sex to be painful, even at the start, for women. Do you know why it so often IS painful? Because our society has normalised taking first-time sex at the man’s preferred speed, rather than the woman’s. I even came across a ‘Christian’ marriage guidance website that advised that when the bride started to feel some discomfort, the groom should ‘thrust’ as quickly as possible to ‘minimise’ her pain. No suggestion whatsoever that he should slow down and wait until it didn’t hurt.
I’m sure the Kellers thought they were being helpful by telling couples to take the pressure off if the woman started to experience ‘normal’ pain during sex – but that’s the whole point – they didn’t realise that the pain WASN’T normal.
Yes, exactly. Sex shouldn’t hurt! And they normalized both sex hurting AND her enduring the pain without saying anything during it.
I’ve never heard anyone suggest that first-time sex should be at a man’s preferred speed. I’m from the UK though, so I’ve fortunately been spared the rather odd patriarchal culture that Sheila et al have introduced me to in the US.
I’m not talking about sex being sore after the first couple of times, I’m literally just saying, for nearly all women I have met, that the first time you put anything in there, either a tampon, or a penis, it does tend to hurt. It wasn’t the case for me, but I suspect that’s because I did high level gymnastics for years, and everything got stretched out. I will admit though prior to marriage I still never liked at all that feeling of a tampon going in, and so I refused to use them.
But any female friends I know, and that’s majority non-Christian, and minority Christian, experienced a little bit of pain the first couple of times they had sex. It just took the area a little while to get used to something being in there when nothing really had before. There was for almost everyone, little bit of blood. And we all know that usually when people bleed, there is a bit of accompanying pain.
These girls were not being pressured into anything, not having to do anything, not facing a different speed of sex than they wanted. Most were having sex before marriage, but some of the Christians were having it after marriage, but across the board, the first few times there was a little pain. They were enjoying themselves, they were a lot of them initiating, not having ‘sex’ done to them, they were pretty liberated girls for the whole. But they did experience a little blood and a little pain. Nothing to be worried about. I think if people were to say ‘oh gosh that’s vaginisimus because it hurt a little first time anything went in there, and because there was blood, that would be really unhelpful. It would be making people worry about something they don’t need to worry about. The flap of skin that is there before you have sex the first time, simply doesn’t just magically disappear for most people. Even myself, with all my gymnastics background, my hymen was still there, and breaking it through it did actually cause me one solitary moment of pain, even though I was most definitely the one initiating and leading in the sex at that moment.
I don’t think the hymen breaking with a little bit of pain, and a little bit of blood, is unusual or vaginisimus. I have had one friend with vaginisimus, and her pain lasted over 6 months, so it was clearly not just getting used to sex the first few times.
I just think we need to be careful here not to over worry a ton of women who did experience pain the first time, and also not to minimise the pain of vaginisimus to something as minor as one or two sexual experiences.
“… sex can hurt at the beginning for the woman, (which is very normal, …)”
That must have been a common folk belief back in the 1930s thru 1960s, because I remember my father (depression kid/WW2 vet) mentioning it once.
” I even came across a ‘Christian’ marriage guidance website that advised that when the bride started to feel some discomfort, the groom should ‘thrust’ as quickly as possible to ‘minimise’ her pain.”
i.e “Get It Over With Quick” with overtones of both “Lie back and think of England” AND C.J. “Chhuckles” Mahaney’s sermon anecdote of how he forced himself on his pregnant wife while she was puking from morning sickness (and humbly chuckled about it in the sermon).
Speaking of “chuckles”, I think one of the podcasts here mentioned a medieval monk whose advice was for the husband to go slow until the wife was ready and “chuckling”(properly/fully aroused).
Hi JSG! The claim that it meant that women thought vaginismus was normal was not even initially mine; it was from a bunch of women who came forward on social media.
In the anecdote, you don’t read that he stopped orgasming. Just that they stopped worrying whether she did, essentially.
And the point was that she didn’t say it hurt until AFTER they had had intercourse. That’s what people were commenting on on social media. The expectation was that sometimes sex hurts, and that’s not a reason to stop (because they didn’t stop having sex; they only stopped aiming for orgasm).
The quote in the post ends before the rest of the anecdote that says that he didn’t stop orgasming; Just that they stopped worrying whether she did, essentially?
Is there a link to a longer quote?
The quote in the post ends before the rest of the anecdote that says that he didn’t stop orgasming; Just that they stopped worrying whether she did, essentially?
Is there a link to a longer quote?
I do get the point, that Kathy didn’t say it hurt until after they’d had intercourse.
But I don’t get why you attacked Kathy so hard on social media and here?
There’s no compassion for her or their younger selves – who described it as devastating.
There’s no recognition that he did care enough to ask, which is already alot more than many men do.
There’s no empathy for her pain and their shared pain they felt at the time when they didn’t know better. Or that way back then they didn’t know about vaginismus or pelvic floor physiotherapy.
It became an attack on Kathy and the Facebook group and Twitter comments descended into attacks on her too.
She responded and asked you to stop and that you were taking away her agency. You doubled down then and again here years later.
This post says about Jesus cares about the fruit. Jesus didn’t teach by attacking or shaming or encouraging an angry mob of his supporters. Jesus showed compassion and kindness towards those who were hurting. He gently corrected people. He lovingly helped people see a different way.
This is what I wish I would have read on your page about Tim and Kathy’s anecdote.
“This is a heartbreaking experience and it’s brave of Tim and Kathy to share it publicly.
I too experienced sexual pain early in my marriage. (I wrote about it here…)
It was devastating for me.
Like Tim, Keith was devastated for me too. It wasn’t easy to talk about with each other. But we did have courage to talk about how to get through it together as a couple.
Thankfully nowadays we know a lot more about sexual pain. Our research showed….
Hey, sex shouldn’t hurt, and if it does, please see a doctor or pelvic floor physiotherapist…”
(I’m not a good writer but hopefully you get the idea.)
The point is their book is still being published, in its current form. They have not changed it even though they have been told by people it hurt them.
I’m curious why your concern is so much for them, and not for the people who are being hurt by the book, whom they are dismissing? Even though more are likely being hurt now?
Seriously, I received so many letters about that anecdote, and then all of this popped up on social media where I had nothing to do with it until I was tagged. Why aren’t you concerned about this women who were actually hurt?
It was the other women who brought up their stories on social media, and they were talking about enduring painful sex for over a decade–many women telling their stories. And Kathy just dismissed it all, essentially blaming them. That’s when I chimed in and said it’s not hard to just say we were careless and didn’t know and we’re sorry. But they refused to do that.
When people are speaking up and saying, “your book hurt me,” THEY are the ones who need to be the priority; not the people who have made a bunch of money off the book. And the fact that she and Tim knew all of this and still refused to change it, even after hearing from so many women? That’s simply not okay.
I’m not JD, but I’d just say, it’s possible to be both concerned for women who have been hurt in sex and experienced vaginismus, and been given bad sexual advice by the church (that will be a lot of women), and also to be concerned for Kathy and Tim.
It’s not an either or situation. We can be concerned for both of them, and show concern for both. I’d imagine the poster probably does feel concern for women who experienced vaginisimus. But their point was, why was so little concern shown for Kathy?
It just sometimes feels like things escalate quickly and get aggressive, when Idon’t know that I think that is helpful. I get that there is a lot of hurt people on your threads Sheila, and you have been helping them for years, and hearing all their pain. But that doesn’t mean we have the right to turn round and ambush others either. And sometimes on the threads etc it just hasn’t been a great experience for me.
It almost feels like if you dare to put an alternative view on one of your articles, that you get devoured. not thankfully not in every case, and what I’ve experienced of you has been kind and gentle. But do you know what I mean? Sometimes it’s like there is so much energy in one direction, people forget that they themselves might not have the whole, complete truth or the whole way of viewing everything. or they forget that other people acted sometimes out of good intentions but without a full picture themselves. For me, I just feel scared sometimes trying to be myself and put soemthing out there when something doesn’t seem right, or doesn’t seem honest or has missed out on something in my view.
First an apology: Kathy didn’t write you’re taking away her agency. She wrote you attributed her quote to Tim and robbed her of her voice.
https://christiannewsnow.com/one-reader-says-tim-kellers-marriage-book-referring-sex-caused-her-damage-kathy-responds/
Your Aug 20, 2022 blog post demanded they “simply remove this problematic bit” from the book. That’d erase her experience and silence her.
Second, this exchange was mentioned in Friday Roundup! Curiously your retelling was off – I never wrote you were “mean”; I asked why Kathy and Tim were not shown compassion, as Jesus did to all who were hurting.
And you answered! Tim and Kathy were, and now Kathy alone is, undeserving of any compassion because Tim sold too many books! And made too much money!
Again I wonder, what would Jesus do? Are there any clues to Jesus responding to wealth? Possibly in Mark 10: 17-31?
Tim was relatively young when he died, and was definitely young on his honeymoon and early marriage.
You say he’s rich.
He was powerful in evangelical circles. He followed the Commandments in verse 19.
So what does Jesus do?
“(21) And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him,….”
Jesus. Loved. Him.
(Jesus tells him to give away his possessions – something Tim was doing by March 2021 when facing death from pancreatic cancer, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/tim-keller-growing-my-faith-face-death/618219/
I didn’t say they were undeserving of compassion. I said that our concern should be for people who are still being hurt.
Here’s an analogy that someone left on Facebook which I think speaks well to this:
Hi Sheila, thanks for replying. Look I probably do need to get the book or read their full quote in context, but just so far as what you have put above,
‘They go on to talk about how they decided to stop making sex a pass/fail thing, and just keep having sex without aiming for orgasm to take away the stress’
for example, to me, honestly, that sounds like they decided to keep having sex without aiming for orgasm for either of them. There’s nothing in it to suggest they were only stopping aiming for Kathy’s orgasm. To me, I would 100% read that every time as neither of them was orgasming and they were just relaxing, getting used to having sexual fun together and just for both of them taking orgasm out of the picture for a time. Now obviously if that ended up being permanent, that would be an issue, as both of them would miss out on a lot of joy, but I think for a time, taking away the idea that either of them have to feel that orgasm, is sort of nice advice. And feels fairly equal.
Like if you are sure about this, where in that quote does it say it’s only talking about Kathy’s orgasm? I’m not being mean at all, it’s a genuine question, as I just don’t see it.
But like I said above, I’m not from American or Canadian culture. In UK things do tend to be a lot more equal. So it may be possible there is bias in the above quote that is understood in a very patriarchal culture, but that doesn’t translate over here to a much less patriarchal culture. (We still have masses of problems in that area, but we very much aren’t where AMerica is and where the American church is).
I appreciate your insights, JSG. Today I bought the Kindle version. To say Kathy was misquoted and the whole section is misrepresented is frankly an understatement. Reading the actual text gives a sense of why Kathy might’ve been upset enough to respond in 2021 – not only to her direct quote in the book being attributed to Tim, but to Bryana Joy’s original framing on Twitter before Sheila was tagged in – in a long thread linking porn, pain, and Christian sex. It’s linked in an earlier post though you need to be logged in to Twitter/X to read it.
baremarriage.com/2022/08/podcast-how-have-the-authors-we-critiqued-responded-to-the-great-sex-rescue
This is Kathy’s full quote, with the lead in:
——
We had a great deal of trouble until we started to see something. As Kathy said in her notes:
“We came to realize that orgasm is great, especially climaxing together. But the awe, the wonder, the safety, and the joy of just being one is stirring and stunning even without that. And when we stopped trying to perform and just started trying to simply love one another in sex, things started to move ahead. We stopped worrying about our performance. And we stopped worrying about what we were getting and started to say, “Well, what can we do just to give something to the other?”
——
Its followed by lengthy paragraphs on mismatched libido, giving and getting pleasure, emotional connection, that he learned slowly, and learning to be very patient with each other when it came to sex. It concludes with: “It took years for us to be good at sexually satisfying one another. But the patience paid off.”
And this is honestly terrible advice. As we said in The Great Sex Rescue. Multiple studies shave shown that the best route to female orgasm is when they BOTH concentrate on her pleasure, not when she decides to concentrate on her own, which is what we said.
Also, this whole book is under Tim’s name. She said them, but he published them under his name, and thus it was under his name that this advice was being spread. If I put a quote from Keith in a book that I authored, it would still be me giving that advice.
What I struggle with is presenting the idea that outcomes matter, and that Jesus doesn’t want people to be hurt. Because usually the conservative Christian side of most issues is viewed by the non-religious side as cruel or mean, because it elevates spiritual standards over human happiness, “normal” (according to some, others would say “normal”=sinful) human desires, or relief of human suffering. The issues that come to mind are ones like abortion, homosexual marriage, assisted suicide/euthanasia, transgenderism, premarital sex, and divorce. Even beliefs, like belief in the existence of hell, or the eternal condemnation of those who reject Christianity in favor of another religion (that likely they were born into), is seen as cruel, exclusionary and bad for mental health by those who don’t follow the Christian belief system.
I’m struggling to put this into words, but how can we convince people that Jesus doesn’t want them to be emotionally hurt with regard to marriage and sex, without also opening up a lot of questions about the emotional hurt (or economic, or physical, when it comes to something like abortion) that a lot of Christian teaching produces?
you’re right. It’s absolutely time for Christians to rethink (by rethink I mean throw away) the whole concept of eternal conscious torment. I recommend Dr Eitan Bar’s book on hell. That doctrine coupled with the doctrine of total depravity (that we all deserve hell from the moment we’re conceived) cause untold mental and emotional damage to generations of people, especially young children. ultimately both are excellent tools for manipulating and controlling vast numbers of people. and ultimately, neither lines up with God’s redemptive plan and heart for his creation.
Now add Rapture Ready (any minute now…) to the mix, with lip-smacking obsession about The Antichrist and The Tribulation, and….
50 years after going over the Berlin Wall, and the damage is still there.
Once you are catechized with God as Cosmic Monster, you will never be completely free of it.
Sheila – I have a written scene from a fanfic novel I collaborated on some 10-12 years ago which illustrates “catechized with God as Cosmic Monster” It’s a bit long (3 pages/1400-odd words) so I’m leery of flooding your comment section. (Especially because it’s set in the world of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.) If you want to OK it, contact me by email; you should have my email address from the submit comment form.
P.S. Recently YouTube’s Sacred Algorithm struck again and filled my feed with a couple “TRUE Visions of Hell” testimonies, “My Near Death Experience” sub-type.
* One about encountering Benjamin Franklin in Hell, begging the NDE to tell everyone to Accept Christ as Personal LORD and Savior before It Is Too Late. Gloomy Void archetype of Hell. Did not know that Franklin (an 18th Century British American) was fluent in 21st Century Christianese.
* Another where one of Steven Hawking’s aides or associates had an NDE and saw Hawking in Hell. No further details, as it was probably similar to the above one, just with the names swapped in the AI prompt. You often get a bunch of similar AI-generated stories hitting YouTube en masse.
* A recent one about a German nun about 90 years ago (possibly in a dream) receiving a literal Letter from Hell from a friend who had died in a car wreck a year or two before. No description except that friend like all in Hell were consumed by an obsessive hatred of God. Caused by her falling away from her devotions, prayers, and sacraments (i.e. “going lukewarm” in American Christainese).
* Also one with an obviously clickbait title “Three Things you NEVER say to Christ at the Last Judgment”. Used a trick to scan the thumbnail scenes without running the video. Visuals definitely AI-generated; my guess is the prompt was something like “Jesus Christ on Great White Throne, make Him as terrifying as possible”, over and over again.
That’s so awful!
Yeah, I hope more people start thinking along these lines- looking at common Christian beliefs which are harmful, in all kinds of topics, not just marriage. Changing our beliefs so we don’t believe the harmful stuff any more.
It definitely is a really big change though- I feel like the Christianity I believe in now is so completely different from the Christianity I used to believe in.
I think Jesus wants flourishing for all, and the Christian belief is that the fetus is a person, and so that person is included in the flourishing.
(I also think we’d do so much better trying to change the conditions that lead to abortion, rather than focusing on making abortion illegal, because rates of abortion are far more dependent on financial/relational/mental health issues than they are about the legality of abortion, and if we honestly wanted to save babies, we’d pay attention to what women are going through.)
If flourishing underpinned a “Christian belief”, there’d be nuanced debate on instances where flourishing was impossible – fetal abnormalities incompatible with life, women with life threatening complications, heck even d&cs for diagnosed and progressing miscarriages.
The conservative “Christian” position is more about motivating voters and donations, not about addressing any of the issues.
“and if we honestly wanted to save babies, we’d pay attention to what women are going through.”
It makes sense to intercept the problem earlier in the stream instead of the end stage, but…
But then the Godly wouldn’t have anybody to PUNISH! PUNISH! PUNISH! SMITE! SMITE! SMITE! like God on His Great White Throne.
Look at the CHRISTIAN Red States after the overthrow of Roe v Wade, passing law after law after law — all “PUNISH! PUNISH! PUNISH!”
Especially the CHRISTIAN State of Texas, where bounty-hunting abortionists and their Jezebels for the reward money became a lucrative cottage industry.
Yep! (I seriously do not understand America’s lack of maternity leave. It’s a human rights issue).
These are such important observations, JoB.
Churches may preach a message that Jesus cares, but ignore the Old Testament is full of descriptions of violence, rape, destruction, death. Some explicitly impacting women and children. The sometimes horrific accounts are read aloud and we say “Thanks be to God!” like it’s no big deal.
Your post name here, JoB triggered a recent memory of hearing passages from Job read aloud.
God allowed Job’s wives and their children to be killed. No pause in the text to reflect on the gravity of thst. No mention of how that might’ve physically and emotionally impacted *their* extended families.
No, the text moves quickly on and eventually frames Job as awesome because he didn’t get angry or blame God. As a reward Job gets an entirely new family. We’re told God restores what was lost. Which only holds true if the wives and children were interchangeable and had no unique qualities.
God might love and value marriage as an institution (in all its formats described through the Old Testament), but he sure doesn’t seem to value the emotional health of the individuals within it.
I actually am not that bothered by much of the OT, especially the more I have studied it in context. To me, the biggest obstacle to accepting the idea that “good fruit” must always include human flourishing and never contribute to suffering is the New Testament expectation that Jesus’ followers would give up everything for him, including their lives. One of the first controversies in the early church was how to treat believers who had caved under pressure and denied the faith or made the required show of allegiance to the religious or governmental authorities- were they even Christians? And should they be accepted back into the body? So, it seems like the flourishing of individual believers (and the families they left behind if they were killed) was definitely considered secondary to a greater spiritual mission.
In defense of the book of Job, I have usually heard teachers focus on the very beginning and very end of the book. The 30+ chapters in the middle are quite surprising and touching regarding suffering and the insufficiency of religious explanations. (Also, a side note- Job only had one wife that is mentioned, and she lived. It was all their children who died.). But I guess I do see the appearance of God at the end as contradicting the idea of a warm, gracious, approachable God who wraps his arms around you as you suffer. It reinforces the idea of God as mysterious, powerful and unpredictable, who tells Job he has no clue as to what the Almighty is doing or how the world is run.
I think the issue of human flourishing is that it’s not about circumstances as much as emotional and relational health. What the early church showed us is that you can have emotional and relational health even when you’re being oppressed, or you’re very poor, or you’re being marginalized. It’s not that life is always going to go your way, but that in these difficult times, followers of Jesus will find more peace, better relationships to help them through, and form healthier communities.
And that certainly is what research shows–faith tends to lead to those better relationships and better mental health, and that’s what we’re specifically looking at. It won’t stop your child from having a heart defect, or your mom from getting in a car accident, or your husband from losing his job. But it can make all of these things easier to handle.
Just to clarify, I wasn’t thinking of misfortune or the circumstances of life. If you’ll pardon the Christianese, I mean when you have a choice before you, and the worldly option is the “easy way out” that will relieve your pain, and the godly way is the narrow path that will hurt now but lead to righteousness.
Here are some examples I have seen cited over the years:
you can choose to comply with the authorities and stay alive, or you can refuse to say “Caesar is Lord” or otherwise deny Christ, and be executed or persecuted. Likely your family would be persecuted as well.
You can make an unwanted pregnancy disappear in the early stages and keep pursuing your goals and dreams, or you can carry a child to term and endure the physical, emotional and financial difficulties that brings.
You can abort a child that the doctors tell you will have profound disabilities, or you can commit to being a 24- hour caretaker for your child all your life and trying to arrange protection for him after you’re gone.
You can go forward with IVF with no restrictions and destroy embryos, selecting the “best ones” in order to maximize your success, or you can treat your embryos as human life and limit your number of embryos and thus reduce your chances of success.
These and similar dilemmas are the kind of choices I was thinking of. If you did a psychological study of the mental health outcomes of situations like these, my guess is that the “worldly” option would have better results, as long as people were reassured that they didn’t need to feel guilty about their choice.
I agree that the suffering involved with the “righteous” choice could be alleviated by having a loving, supportive community around you, and especially if you felt the Holy Spirit in your heart comforting you. However, I personally have been searching for this kind of comfort my whole life, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not given very often, and never to some people. So I have a hard time believing that God wants our emotional wellbeing consistently, and am more inclined to think that he cares more about our righteousness than our wellbeing here on earth.
I can certainly see why you’d think that, and I’m so sorry that you’ve never found a supportive community! I think the only thing that I would say is that Jesus is who God is like. I think it’s often easier to say “God cares more about our righteousness than our well-being” than it is to say “Jesus cares more about our righteousness than our well-being.” Because with Jesus we can picture what He actually did. And so many of his miracles were helping people in the here and now, and really had very little to do with their righteousness. In fact, they were spiritually healed through His acceptance of them and Him seeing their physical and emotional pain.
Again, I’m not saying that life will go well for Christians, and sometimes we make hard choices simply because the world is evil and puts us in terrible positions, but when it comes to the here and now, I do think that God wants us to thrive in relationships etc.
Research on faith broadly shows it tends to lead to good outcomes – better mental health, relations, flourishing.
But, if I may, one of the most important contributions of your research is that not all faith beliefs do.
Your research specifically linked certain faith beliefs with terrible outcomes in terms of sexual pain. It links those beliefs to teachings prevalent in evangelical & complementation doctrines.
As I understand your conclusions from the TMYW survey – published in the book and hopefully sometime soon in a peer reviewed journal – certain teachings in evangelical & complementation doctrines aren’t associated with relationship flourishing. You make that point over and over in your blog and podcast – that patriarchal faith beliefs, complementarian faith beliefs lead to bad fruit, not flourishing.
As to the early church, yes we’re told it was flourishing – but we don’t actually know what that meant.
The constructs measured through validated relationship flourishing scales reflect very recent understandings of what it is to “flourish”. Early church “flourishing” might have a completely different definition and theoretical basis.
We can’t go back and measure individual or relationship flourishing using validated scales to make sure we’re measuring the same thing.
“Your research specifically linked certain faith beliefs with terrible outcomes in terms of sexual pain.”
Sounds like “Garbage In, Garbage Out”.
And there’s a lot of Christianese Garbage out there.
Thank you so much for your insightful and honest comments. So many profound thoughts. Much of it resonates with me.
The last reflection – on Job’s God – troubles me a lot. This same God at various times hides His face, ignores cries of anguish, punishes and seeks vengeance…. But then welcomes people back and love bombs them. I often sit in church wondering what someone brand new to Christianity must think when they hear the OT (which is read every week in the Anglican Church)? We’re at a time where at least one woman a week dies at the hands of her current or former partner; there’s widespread community concern and social focus on family violence and coercive control.
A man behaving as God did – exhibiting violent, threatening or other behaviour that coerces or controls a member of the person’s family (the family member), or causes the family member to be fearful – meets the definition of family violence in Australian Family Law. Not sure how to (or if I can) reconcile it.
To your point about martyrdom, I took comfort in trusted scholars telling me that it’s a very specific life calling, and that I’d “know” (spiritually sense?) it if it were my path. That at least helped me to stop dwelling on it as a big spiritual question. Too many others though.
Hi Sheila, just a quick note to say thanks for responding and your thoughtfulness. I know our perception of God has a great deal to do with our individual personalities and formative experiences. I just wanted to communicate that for me personally, the gospels are actually one of the scarier parts of the Bible (the Pauline letters probably more, the OT the least). Jesus seems scary to me, because his expectations are the highest (especially the “dying to self” as a kind of lifelong living martyrdom) and the many warnings he gave about being in unexpected trouble when judgment comes. Also, growing up with the constant drumbeat of a “relationship” with Jesus, and so many people talking about how they experienced love, acceptance, etc, and I could never find that experience no matter what I did (I am middle aged, and I have been in about every Christian setting you can imagine.). So, I may not be in the majority, but I don’t think I’m totally alone in my perception of Jesus, either. I am genuinely glad for you that you do have a relationship with him, and maybe someday I’ll have an experience that will change my mind.
My main point is to just remember when pointing to evidence that xyz practice leads to human flourishing, the same argument can be applied in favor of a number of things that you or other Christians may feel is still wrong, in spite of its measurable benefits (eg, abortion).
I guess I asked this question thinking of multiple articles that I had read following the Dobbs decision. I follow a lot of more liberal media, and there was story after story about the measurable harm done to women and society by restricting abortion. So when Sheila was pointing to demonstrable harm caused by certain teachings, it made me think of how there were certain similarities with the arguments I was seeing in favor of abortion.
I still think that God prioritizes certain laws and values over human happiness and flourishing. For example, with abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, perhaps the argument is that God is the only creator of human life, and we do not have the right to destroy a life He created? Even if it seems more merciful to do so, or would alleviate suffering?
Or, if hell and judgment are real, theoretically, aren’t we doing more harm if we say they are not real and don’t take the danger seriously? Even if doing so has a major negative impact on mental health?
As you can see, I’m mostly arguing with myself. Because I have never personally experienced warmth or love or encouragement from God, I feel hurt by the idea that God wants some people to be happy and flourishing, but has withheld it from me. I feel very nervous about the risks of completely abandoning more conservative orthodoxy; is the only alternative embracing an extremely liberal form of Christianity? Or complete deconversion? I don’t have any problem with egalitarianism in marriage because I see it as biblically supported and consistent with the overall message. But showing that something causes harm or flourishing doesn’t convince me nearly as much.
An observation regarding the Dobbs decision: reporting on consequences of restricting access to abortion was already fairly widespread across the healthcare literature even before the decision. It was and is associated with the substantial rise in Catholic ownership of hospitals and healthcare facilities around the world.
This paper, published in 2008, was one of the earliest I read that captured real world clinical impacts of Catholic doctrine (specifically the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services”) on what they call “beginning of life” care:
Lori R. Freedman, Uta Landy, Jody Steinauer, “When There’s a Heartbeat: Miscarriage Management in Catholic-Owned Hospitals”, American Journal of Public Health 98, no. 10 (October 1, 2008): pp. 1774-1778.
https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2007.126730 PMID: 18703442
The equivalent document in Australia is the “Code of Ethical Standards for Catholic Health and Aged Care Services in Australia”, endorsed by the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Council. The Code, like the US directive, impacts health care across all life stages you mention – beginning of life and end of life care – and so much more.
Obvioulsy Sheila’s focus is on the evangelical not Catholic church, and hasn’t researched (nor sought to research) sex and marriage for Catholics. Some of her teachings don’t align with Catholic doctrine. That in itself adds another aspect to your questions – biblican interpretations on God’s laws or what He wants or values is not consistent across denominations (or even within denominations on some matters).
I mean from the longer quote from ELF, thanks ELF, I would say I don’t have a problem with what Kathy is saying.
It sounds to me that they were concentrating on both people in the marriage getting and enjoying sex – both getting pleasure.
While I can appreciate in a different marriage to Kathy and Tim’s, where the wife’s pleasure in sex was not on the table at all, there might need to be a season when there is an unequal focus, more on her than him, it doesn’t feel like this is the case in Kathy and Tim’s marriage. It sounds like her pleasure had always been important.
And to me, the longer quote would more clearly suggest that they took orgasm off the table for both of them, not for one of them. And that for them, that worked, and led to both of them getting better orgasms and better sex in their marriage.
Do Tim and Kathy have stuff to learn about how to talk about sex, marriage, abuse etc – undoubtedly. Don’t we all! We all need to keep up with the current research and critically sift through it to figure out what is helpful and what may not be helpful even though it is ‘current’.
But I don’t think they deserve pilloried for something that at its heart doesn’t sound awful.
Regarding the metaphor re the oysters. Again for me currently, it sort of fails in the sense that I don’t think Kathy and Tim’s teaching in that chapter was guilty of causing awful illness. To me I still don’t see the quotes as massively problematic, and on their own, I don’t think these quotes could be held to blame for keeping women stuck in a cycle of vaginismus.
I honestly imagine that the ladies who were stuck in that awful situation, and going through so much pain, must have also been influenced by lots of other influences that led them to not know what they were suffering, not seek help, and experience such prolonged frustration and pain. I don’t think anything I have seen yet in that chapter is something that is massively at fault.
“They’re saying they’re not meant to be used in abusive situations, but then they’re describing abusive situations without naming them as such.”
That reminds me of this famous exchange from South Park’s early episode “Sexual Harassment Panda”:
KYLE: But Dad, isn’t that Fascism?
KYLE’S DAD: No it isn’t, son. Because we don’t all it “Fascism”. Do you understand?
KYLE: Do You?
Pretty much!
This is a helpful post for people ready to take action for change. After reading, the thought kept coming to me that this is a natural outcome of the various movements within Christian history that emphasized the ability for anyone to be a paster/preacher if they feel “called,” bonus points for not having a formal or relevant education.
Add that to the, in my opinion unbiblical, teaching that if a person is functioning as a preacher, then they are called by God to do that and we need to accept that whatever they say, at least taken as an aggregate, is inspired by the Holy Spirit. Add that to the doctrine that if you are in a church, then you are exactly where God wants you to be. Then you’ve got a slew of messed up doctrines feeding into each other and creating a culture where anyone can say anything, but if they preface it with some version of “I was called by God,” then we think using our critical thinking skills is equivalent to challenging God. It’s messed up and convoluted with just a sprinkle of truth, which is perfect for keeping people oppressed while telling them that they are liberated.
I completely agree! And then add to that demanding that everyone live in a bubble because the outside world is suspect, and you never have people challenging you.