I’ve got two case studies of wholly unqualified people giving advice for you today!

I’d like to tell you 2 different stories about 2 different influencer duos, 2 decades apart, and then show you how these stories relate to the harm being done in evangelical circles with regards to marriage and sex advice.

Whoa. That was a mouthful. Ready? Let’s jump in!

A few weeks ago several different followers sent me the same Instagram reel to critique.

It was of quite popular Instagram account by Terry and Katie McCabe, and in it, Katie was arguing that women don’t need to feel connected to have sex.

There’s lots wrong with that advice, so I decided to do a few stitches of it, which you can see here and here.

This couple has several different accounts across multiple platforms, with over 1,000,000 followers. And I wanted to see—what exactly are they trying to build with all of their marriage reels? Are they selling courses?

So I took a look at their bio—and saw something very concerning.

They said they were “Gottman Certified Marriage Coaches.”

Now, for those who don’t know, The Gottman Institute is the world’s premier research institute on marriage. It’s a big deal. And I thought to myself— there is just no way that the Gottmans certify marriage coaches. So I decided to look on Gottman’s website, and I was correct: They do offer certification, but:

• Only to licensed therapists
• with postgraduate degrees
• who have completed 3 levels of their training
• and who have worked with a personal supervisor and submitted videos and much more

It’s is a very rigorous process. While they do offer training courses, some of which give you a “certificate of completion”, you are simply not allowed to say that you are certified if you are not, indeed, certified.

So I contacted the Gottman institute, sent them a screenshot of this account, and asked if the couple were certified. Within 15 minutes I had a response, and here’s one of the emails in that email chain:

We are now left with two possibilities:

1. This couple is deliberately lying
2. They don’t realize that they aren’t certified, because they don’t understand what being certified entails

Both options are abhorrent. Even if they’re not deliberately deceptive, the fact that they are totally ignorant of how qualifications work means that they should not, in any stretch of the imagination, be counseling (or “coaching”) anyone.

Yet they have built a huge platform, and sell courses and coaching to people, with virtually no training.

Here’s what concerns me about their approach:

1. Couples counseling is contraindicated when abuse is present; and
2. Most abused women don’t realize they’re being abused before they start counseling

Many people seeking marriage help, then, are in abusive dynamics, and it’s vitally important that a counselor be able to spot this so that they can stop counseling a couple if needed and work instead with an individual to create a safety plan.

This is something you need training for, and this couple doesn’t have that training. Without training, you can do a lot of damage.

This is why counseling is at least a two-year graduate degree program, with supervision required afterwards.

I don’t offer counseling—because I’m not qualified.

I want to be clear about something: counseling one-on-one is a unique skillset that involves specialized training. I do not have that training, and though I’m asked on a daily basis to counsel (or coach) couples, I always say no. I am qualified to write books, to synthesize research studies, conduct our own research studies, submit those studies to peer review, and look at trends. Yet understanding the science of relationships and trends does not translate into properly being able to diagnose and help an individual couple. You need schooling for that—real schooling and real qualifications.

Yet today so many “coaches” are charging for services they simply aren’t qualified to give. While some coaches are certified in things and help with very specific areas of marriage, this couple appears to have very little training or qualifications at all.

Yet social media platforms are filled with savvy influencers who are wholly unqualified to give advice, who are creating courses and offering coaching.

It’s scary out there, and we need to be more discerning.

But there’s another side to it, and this is where our second story comes in:

Evangelicalism’s best-selling marriage and sex books were also written by wholly unqualified people.

Back in 2000 an evangelical phenomenon hit the bookshelves: Every Man’s Battle, telling the story of men’s perpetual battle with lust and how to defeat it.

The book opens with an anecdote of one of the two authors getting into a car accident because he’s staring at a female jogger, whom he describes as a “banquet of glistening flesh.”

The authors go on to claim that men lust naturally, “simply by being male.” They claim in another book in the series that “men just don’t naturally have that Christian view of sex.” They describe a 15-year-old girl seducing an adult male youth volunteer, who is now petrified because he may actually go to jail for statutory rape. No concern is shown for the girl whom he sexually abused; instead he is painted as the victim of his own “lust”, and her sexual maturity.

And the solution to the lust problem? Men should transfer their sexual energy solely onto their wife, who can become “like a merciful vial of methadone.” Instead of lusting after all women, he gets to lust after just one, going to her for “up to 10 bowls of sexual gratification a week.” And then, when it comes to other women, men should “bounce their eyes” away. On their website, they call female joggers and female co-workers “enemies.” They warn men that if they walk into an office, they should immediately bounce their eyes to a wall, because offices have receptionists who tend to be female and who bend over a lot.

So you either lust, or you ignore all women around you.

But Jesus never refused to look at women. Jesus chose to truly look at women.

This book is an abomination, and you can download our one-page with all the problems with it here.

But what’s most interesting about it, and why I bring it up, is that the two authors, Steve Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, had absolutely no credentials for writing this book other than the fact that they were self-proclaimed “former” sex addicts (and given the way they speak of women in the book, it does not seem like they have left objectification and dehumanization behind.) They have absolutely no citations to any scientific studies in their book either.

And no one batted an eye.

Evangelicalism has a problem with de-valuing qualifications.

As I’ve said before, to give advice in this area, we need two things:

• People who have relevant educational qualifications (social work, psychology, sociology, epidemiology, medicine, counseling) AND/OR

• People who write and give advice based on up-to-date peer reviewed research

Yet when we look at the marriage and sex books that have shaped evangelicalism since the 1980s, we’ll see that very, very few of them pass this simple test.

Even those with qualifications are problematic:

Relevant peer reviewed citations are conspicuously absent from virtually all of these books.

Yet on the secular side?

Secular marriage and sex best-sellers are overwhelmingly written by highly qualified people; evangelical best-sellers are overwhelmingly written by wholly unqualified people.

Then today’s unqualified influencers parrot back what they learned from unqualified authors.

And all of the same messages get recycled again, but this time by people who are selling courses and coaching, and even marriage intensives and retreats, that can do even more harm. And then pastors like Josh Howerton or Josh McPherson or Mark Driscoll get in on it too!

What harmful messages are being shared?

We’ve identified several very harmful messages in our surveys of over 40,000 people, and we talk about their implications in our books The Great Sex Rescue, She Deserves Better, and The Marriage You Want. Most evangelical authors I’ve listed here teach almost all of these:

What happens when these things are taught? Here’s what we found:

When unqualified people teach without using peer reviewed resources, the advice harms people.

And today’s evangelical couples are paying the price.

It all started because our best-sellers were written with no regard to what research actually says, and with no knowledge of psychology or counseling.

And now these same messages are being spread like wildfire by unqualified social media influencers who want to become “marriage coaches” or sell courses.

It’s time to start expecting actual qualifications and the use of peer reviewed research.

This won’t stop until we all stop buying books written by people with no relevant qualifications in the field.

It won’t stop until we start muting and blocking social media accounts that are grifting people.

It won’t stop until we, as a church, say that it isn’t okay to give advice on something as important as marriage or sex when you quite frankly don’t know what you’re talking about.

And we deserve better.