Sheila 

Welcome to the bare marriage podcast. I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from Bare Marriage where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based advice for your sexlife and your marriage and last week we had a really important podcast–we had the first episode of our Love & Respect docuseries that we’ve been working on behind the scenes-at least Rebecca, Joanna and COnnor have been working on behind the scenes–for months now. And that was awesome! I hope you’ve seen it–we’re just taking a look at one of the most important books in evangelicalism on sex and marriage, looking at how it got started, what it says, the problems with what it says, the things that it based itself on, and why it got so big. 

So it’s a three episode series, episode one was last week and we told you that to listen to episodes 2 and 3 you’d have to subscribe to the Good Fruit channel. However, we had so many people ask us for episode two and show some confusion that we decided to release episode two today as well. So some of you may have already seen it on YouTube, but if you haven’t here it is in all its glory! 

It is meant to be watched on video so if you prefer, there’s lots of fun video elements in it and you’ll probably get more out of it if you do watch it so we‘ll have links in the podcast notes to where you can watch it on YouTube. But if you want to listen while you drive around that’s fine too, so here you go for episode two for our Love & Respect docuseries. 

 

Rebecca: 

It’s the 90s. The Focus on the Family headquarters is all abuzz as a massive CEO event is happening. The ties are thick, heavily patterned with a big half Windsor Knot and some shoulder pads are still holding strong from the remnants of the 80s. And everyone in the room has got the Rachel.

And in walks Emerson Eggrichs, a man with an idea and the beginnings of a ministry.

At this event, he meets a man named Michael Coleman, who happens to be the CEO of the publishing house Integrity Publishing.

Eggerichs pitches him his idea for this new book called Love and Respect. And Michael is excited.

He urges Emerson to join him on Integrity Publishing. And Emerson says, yes.

Integrity publishing works closely with the largest Christian radio broadcasting network in the whole world, which is Focus on the family

And the schmoozing doesn’t stop there.

Already lucky enough to have a book contract with Integrity Publishing, focus on the family, even signs on to put their full publicity backing behind this concept.

James Dobson and Don Hodl agree to sponsor the Love and Respect the Marriage Conference and host Doctor Emerson Eggrichs their radio show, frequently.

They even go so far as to call Love and Respect a Focus on the Family book for years, Love and Respect will be handed out as the present for donors to Fpcus on the Family and promoted as their foremost Christian marriage advice book.

This man hit the Christian publishing jackpot. He had a whole group of very powerful and influential individuals who are dedicated to making his book and him a Christian celebrity.

 

Intro– Mixed clips from Emerson Eggrich and other Evangelical figures

Love and respect.

Love and respect,

Your wife needs love, your man needs respect.

The respect of a wife for her husband.

The Bible tells husbands to love their wives, but it tells wives to respect their husbands.

You will not, under any circumstance, have a happy, healthy marriage unless your husband feels respected,

Just as much as women need love. Your husband needs respect.

Wives respecting and following the leadership of their husbands.

Your husband craves respect.

Love and respect,

 

Rebecca

This is the second video in a three part series on the Love and Respect book, which is the best selling evangelical marriage book out there.

In the first part, we talked about what Love and Respect actually teach us, how it affects people and how the messages often actually go quite wrong.

So if you missed that, make sure that you go and watch that video, because there’s a lot of context there that you are going to need to have for this.

So a quick rundown of what we went over in the last video.

The book Love and Respect, pretty much says that men and women have different needs in relationships. And if you meet your spouse’s needs, they will start to meet your needs. And even if they don’t, well, then God, I guess, will reward you after you’re dead.

I know this sounds glib, but it’s actually a very true telling. That is that is the argument. It’s either they’re going to smarten up in this life, or you’re going to get goodies in heaven.

The problem, though, is that the way that they define the needs that they define are that women need love and men need respect.

But the way that respect is defined for men, it isn’t actually about just treating someone with dignity as a human being.

It’s actually more about embracing yourself and just doing whatever needs to be done to make sure that his affect, his mood, his emotions, his ego remains intact.

We interviewed an expert on narcissism and emotional maturity,

And what he said about this idea of what respect actually requires from women is that it’s actually a form of dissociation.

 

Dr. Chuck DeGroat

And respect means you, wife, woman. You have to shut down your heart. You have to shut down your desires, to be really loved, really seeing your desire for mutuality. I think in some ways, respect is code for dissociation, disconnection, you know, it’s the Stockholm syndrome of, Christian spirituality, Christian marriage, just shut down and obey.

 

Rebecca

And so as a result, what often happens is that these marriages get stuck in a very, very nasty cycle where it perpetuates male entitlement and it trains women to ignore their own intuition, to ignore what they want and what they need in the name of being respectful. If we can all see, it does not take a university degree in psychology to understand how that goes bad and that’s before we even get into all the sex stuff, which is a hot mess. And then of course, the question is if this is so obviously bad and if this is leading to such bad outcomes, why on earth did it become so popular? How have we sold millions of copies of this book?

One of the main answers to that is simply the appeal to authority. This book had the heavy hitters in Christianity behind it. Full tilt. They were pushing this like nothing else. Focus on the Family actually sponsored these conferences.

And I can’t tell you how big Focus on the Family was back then. Remember, people didn’t have the internet. Okay, when you want to get Christian entertainment or Christian media, where did you go? You went to the radio.

Focus on the Family was publishing their own magazines. They are publishing their own books. They had their own stores. They had. It was a really, really big deal.

Focus on the Family is big today, too. It still is. But it’s nothing like how it was when there really wasn’t competition in the same way.

So why is it that James Dobson, Don Hodl and this whole crew just latched on to him and loved him?

A big reason is in the 1980s, there was a massive change and shift in the church as the women’s liberation movement was really, had been going for a while at this point, and more and more church was starting to split over the topic of women in leadership.

More and more women were feeling empowered and like, actually, there’s really, good biblical reasons for why we should not be holding back women from their full ability to serve God and other churches are saying, we are willing to lose people in our churches, and we are willing to split our church over this difference because we do not believe that it is biblical for women to have the ability to speak or preach in a church.

This also obviously turned into a lot of marriage changes. You’re talking about something called egalitarian theology quite a bit more.

With this idea that men are not supposed to lead women, but that the two are supposed to work together to serve God in the best way that they, as a couple can, each using their individual giftings.

And the conservative evangelical church saw a lot of this as a massive threat.

And that is what triggered what we call the conservative resurgence.

This is the same time, a history that we saw purity culture coming in full swing with Josh Harris publishing I Kissed Dating Goodbye.

It’s also when we see Brio magazine really getting quite big in the early in the late 90s, early 2000, which was a magazine to teen girls that talked a lot about making sure you were modest, making sure that you were peer, making sure you didn’t do too much with a boy before you were married.

This is really when all of the stuff that’s currently being talked about in deconstructionist circles really got started, and a lot of it was a backlash to the culture that was more and more lenient towards the restrictions placed on women.

And so here comes in this guy who is a Ph.D., who is also a pastor, who’s an incredible performer, who’s charismatic, who’s good looking, has amazing stage presence and is great on the radio. And he’s preaching that women need to defer and submit to men because this is God’s way of doing things, I mean, you couldn’t have placed a better present in James Dobson’s lap.

 

Emerson Eggrichs– clip

It’s just that simple.

 

Rebecca

And James Dobson and the rest of focus on the family, they did not let this gift go to waste. The first rule of thumb, if you’re trying to do a resurgence of previous generations, toxic theology is you can’t say that this is your grandma’s theology.

You have to say, this is new. It’s shiny. This is modern. And that’s exactly what they did over and over again as they introduced the Love and Respect concept.

Emerson Eggrichs emphasizes that this is a new idea. And this is the spin that it’s taken on the Focus on the Family broadcast that he was on as well.

Now we all know like like we’ve been talking about, we know the conservative resurgence was simply trying to bring back theology that already been around for decades. But what they’re claiming is, that they claim that the specifically new aspect of love and respect is not the idea of female submission, is the idea of the male’s need for respect.

 

Emerson Eggrichs– clip

How do you spell respect to a man? This is the foreign area. This is the uniqueness in some sense of what we’re doing. This is the portion that has been somewhat overlooked.

Doctor Dobson has indicated that he and many others have missed it.

There are two sides to the coin, he said. There are two sides to this equation.

It’s both love and respect. Doctor Dobson has been very supportive. They are sponsoring our conferences and he said he missed it. He said most of us who are experts in the family have missed it.

There are two sides of the coin, love and respect. We basically been dumping on men for the last 40 years.

 

Rebecca

And that’s really how it was marketed, is you’re going to hear books about how to love each other. You’re going to hear books about how to be a good wife. You’re going to hear books about how to be a good has. You’re not going to hear is about how to meet your husband’s need for respect. This is new, we missed it.

Except that Emerson’s whole theory was explained 30 years before in the bestselling book for Christian Wives that has ever existed.

Let’s talk about Marable Morgan.

 

Maribel Morgan was an Ohio gal who moved down to Miami, Florida.

Maribel grew up with a really neglectful and abusive mother who was just, problem. We’re actually gonna do a whole video on Maribel at some point because her story is actually really fascinating.

But years later, she’s now grown up, and she’s this young woman. She’s married to this hotshot tax attorney who’s actually representing players on the Miami Dolphins.

And because of her background, all she wants is to have a stable home for her kids and a happy marriage.

So you had to picture this:

You have Maribel, who is married to a ridiculously wealthy man, in a ridiculously wealthy suburb, with ridiculously wealthy friends, who wants to make her marriage work.

And what does she conclude? She concludes that the issue is respect.

So Maribel comes out in 1971 with the book The Total Woman. And the Total Woman will go on to be one of the best selling Christian wives books that has ever been written. I do believe that it is still the best selling one specifically for Christian Wives.

She’s on the cover of Time magazine, she’s on the Phil Donahue Show like a dozen times. This is a very big deal.

In her section where she talks about what men need, she has what she calls the four A’s,

She said that women have to accept him, admire him, adapt to him and appreciate him.

And let me tell you, if Emerson wants to say that the thing that’s so unique about his book is the concept that men need respect and respect, defined as the woman telling him he’s a wonderful job, praising him all of the time, being positive and not negative, not being critical.

Watching her tone to make sure that she’s not coming off as nagging.

All these types of things Maribel did at first in 1971.

Here’s a couple of examples that are just quick ones.

This is what mayor Bill Morgan said 30 years priorp sychiatrist tell us that a man’s most basic needs outside of warm sexual love are approval and admiration. Women need to be loved. Men need to be admired.

And then Love and Respect says scientific research confirms the centrality of love and respect. The woman absolutely needs love, and the man absolutely needs respect. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.

 

The Office, clip 

Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture.

They have the same picture.

 

Rebecca

Both Maribel and Emerson have something called a respect test.

She says this try this test for a week starting tonight. Determine that you will admire your husband by an act of your will. Determined to fill up his cup, which may be bone dry.

Be positive. Remember that compliments will encourage. Him to talk.

And then she challenges wise when her husbands come home to compliment the various aspects of him that are masculine or compliment his body,

Talk about the things that you appreciate about him. It’s just compliment your husband. That’s really all it is. And then here’s the one from Love and Respect. It’s under the heading How to Use the Respect Test with Your husband. I told the wives to go home, wait until their husbands weren’t busy or distracted and say, I was thinking about you today and several things about you that I respect. And I just want you to know that I respect you.

After saying this, they were told not to wait for any response, just mention something they needed to do and quietly start to leave the room. Then they were to see what would happen. One woman reported back to me that after telling her husband she respected him, she turned to leave, but she never even made it to the door.

He practically screamed, wait! Come back! What things?

And we also have this: Have you ever wondered why your husband doesn’t just melt when you tell him how much you love him, but try saying, I admire you and see what happens.

And then in love and respect we have. Men seldom keep love cards. Their wives send them with all the little hearts and Xs and Os. But I will guarantee you the. He’ll keep a card. You send them that says, I was thinking about you the other day, that you would die for me. That is an overwhelming thought to me. Sign it.

With all my respect, the one who still admires you. Note that the use of the word admires.

Remember. Do not sign it with all my love. He knows you love him. Sign it with all my respect. Your husband will keep that card.

This is pretty clear cut. Telling women that she needs love and he needs respect in 1971. I don’t know how you can possibly say that Love and Respect was new.

And this was not a niche book. It sold 10 million copies. When I say this is the best selling Christian wives book, it is. It’s horrifying, by the way. Don’t. It’s it’s incredibly misogynistic. It is very much from the 1970s.

 

There’s nothing wrong with revisiting old topics. Not at all. That’s just kind of how writing and publishing works. We are supposed to expound upon and expand upon what other people have said before.

But there is something wrong with portraying yourself as God’s mouthpiece of this brand new idea, when this was already such a large concept in the zeitgeist, it just feels like a scam. And do I think this was on purpose? I really don’t. I don’t think it was on purpose. But this was so culturally significant, and it was everywhere that, it’s just frankly embarrassing that he thought that this was his original idea.

 

Arrested Development, clip

I have made a huge mistake.

 

Rebecca

What if I told you that this brand new idea that I was bringing to the masses wasn’t just taken from Maribel Morgan, it was taken from James Dobson himself, who is claiming that Love and Respect was new.

That’s right. In 1974, 30 years before Love and Respect came out, James Dobson said this: men derive self esteem by being respected. Women feel worthy when they are loved. This may be the most important personality distinction between the sexes.

This is in one of Dobson’s books from 1974. This man knew that the idea that wives need to respect their husbands in this way was not unique.

 

Emerson Eggerichs

Doctor Dobson has indicated that he and many others have missed it.

It has been overlooked.

 

Rebecca

He was already saying that it was the key to understanding marital differences 30 years before.

So if this idea of respect and love is already in the cultural zeitgeist, if this was already out there, then what was it that actually got Love and Respect to? To just have it hooking people?

Well, they also claim that what Love and Respect was doing knew was that it had research to back this up.

So let’s talk about the research of Love and Respect.

In the same year that Love and Respect came out, Shaunti Feldhahn published a book called For Women Only.

For Women Only claims to tell the truth about his inner life that he desperately wants you to know. She surveyed 400 men, asking them a series of questions, and from her results, she tells women how God designed their husbands so that they can better understand how to meet his needs, how to be better Christian wives, all that different stuff.

Emerson claims that his assertion that men need respect and women need love is based on research, and the research that he uses is from Shaunti Feldhahn’s book. So let’s read the research from Feldhahn’s book.

Shaunti research asked men this question. Think about what these two negative experiences would be like to feel alone and unloved in the world, or to feel inadequate and disrespected by everyone. If you were forced to choose one, which would you prefer? Would you rather feel alone and unloved or inadequate and disrespected?

74% of men chose that. They would rather feel alone and unloved, and only 26% of men chose inadequate and disrespected. And then here’s what Shante says about this. When I originally tested the survey questions, I was perplexed that many men had a hard time answering the unloved versus disrespected question because they appeared to equate the two. Chuck Cohen, the survey design expert, warned me that might happen.

Why, I wondered, those are two totally different things. Then one of my readers tested my survey questions on ten men who didn’t know me. When I got the surveys back, only one note was attached. A lot of the guys fussed over question three they did not feel that the choices were different. Finally, the light bulb came on. If a man feels disrespected, he is going to feel unloved.

And what that translates to is this if you want to love your man in the way that he needs to be loved, then you need to ensure that he feels you respect. Most of all.

So that is one take that you can have.

When a survey developer tells you that people don’t know how to answer your question.

Unfortunately it is not the direction you’re supposed to take as a researcher.

When you are designing a survey, it is very important that your questions meet something called reliability as well as validity and reliability is in essence how often do you get the same response.

So, for example, if we think about a bull’s eye target, they would always hit the same section of the target. Right?

So if you say that you are five foot four, you should also say that you are taller than five foot three and you are shorter than five foot five. Okay.

Otherwise, it’s just something’s going on. It’s all bizarre. So that’s reliability. Validity is that you actually know that you’re hitting the bull’s eye of the target. You want to hit.

And this is often where tests go awry is actually on validity. It’s much easier to get a higher reliability score than it is to get a high validity score.

There are a couple things to this question. Does that make me question whether or not it’s truly valid?

First of all, this has something called a double barreled response set.

 

Men weren’t actually asked if they would prefer to feel unloved or disrespected. They were asked if they could feel alone and unloved or inadequate and disrespected. How do you know which one they’re responding to? If I gave 100 children two plates in front of them, one of them had carrots and peas, and one of them had chocolate cake with goose poop droppings all over it.

And they all chose the carrots and peas to eat. You can’t then say that children like carrots more than chocolate cake, because they’re reacting to the goose poop.

If you’re doing a pilot test of your study, and your participants tell you there is a question that they simply don’t know how to answer, even if they’re all answering it reliably. You have to fix that question. What she should have done was take it back to the drawing board and try again.

And anyone who’s trained in research knows that what you absolutely can’t do is take a question that you know has been flagged as being potentially invalid, and then build an entire theology of marriage on it.

Here’s the thing that’s even more bizarre. And this is even more basic. Okay.

From this question Shaunti Feldhahn concludes that men need respect and women need love. But she never asked women.

This is a survey only of men. She did not ask women.

 

Clip from Spider Man

Hahahahahahaha. Are you serious?

 

Rebecca

I cannot emphasize this enough. You cannot draw dichotomies conclusions about two different groups. When you only studied one group.

Imagine I found a study that found that 89% of men like to spend time with their children.

I can’t then say that only 11% of women like to spend time with their children, or that then women don’t like to spend time with their children. We can’t assume that the sexes are in opposition. When you didn’t measure one of the sexes.

But nonetheless, this is the research that is held up in love and respect as the foundation for the idea that men need respect and women need love.

Now, funnily enough, this has actually been critiqued for a while. And there is a psychologist who actually was so fed up with this and so offended by this idea

that she actually asked women.

 

So let’s take a minute and talk to Doctor Shauna Springer about what she found.

 

Welcome, Doctor Springer, and thank you so much for talking with us about this topic.

 

Dr. Shauna Springer 

You’re welcome. Hi, Rebecca.

 

Rebecca

Would you mind telling our viewers who you are and, what your background is?

 

Dr. Shauna Springer

Sure. In brief. I’m a licensed psychologist. I do a lot of consultation, training and advising. I have a background of studying close relationships for the first decade of my career. And then after that, I’ve really been focused on trauma and, moral injury and military and first responders as both special interest groups that I really want to support and resource with my more recent writing.

 

Rebecca

We found you because of an article that you wrote back in 2012 where you actually addressed the core claim of Love and Respect.

Do you mind, telling us what it is that you what you set out to do when you heard about that assertion?

 

Dr. Shauna Springer

if we zoom out, it’s an interesting question. What sort of person would ask that question in the first place? 

You know, what sort of person asks other people if you had to choose between   love and respect? Which is more important to you? As someone who has worked with many close relationships and couples in a therapeutic context?

I think it’s pretty clear that the question is artificial. To begin with,

that we need love and respect for a marriage to thrive and, you know, be sustainable today. So you need both. And so it’s in some sense sort of like an odd question. But the question was put out there and a bestselling book and a number of, profitable businesses have been launched on the basis of this premise that there’s this gender based difference in what men need.

And what women need. And, when I read that, it was really irritating because I was on a walk with my husband. We have, a marriage of equals. This is what I think of as the kind of relationship that I wanted that many of my friends wanted.

I was a Harvard undergrad, and had a lot of friends that had wonderful marriages, and they were setting out to have two equals in the same relationship really come together.

And I thought, I don’t think that it would be true that women would prefer love over respect, and men would prefer respect over love, at least not in my circle.

And so I set out. I did a study of over 1200 women, mostly Ivy League graduates, and found that just the opposite was true, that women actually, in that study of well-educated women, preferred respect over love when given that kind of bizarre question.

With the same alignment as what the original, author had suggested men would choose.

 

Rebecca

So I’m curious what your response to be talking about this idea of what? What would you classify as like an unconditional respect that might actually be healthy in a marriage of equals?

 

Dr. Shauna Springer

Well, I got a lot of feedback when the study came back to me.

1200 women really went deep to study. I did had, 200 questions on it, and a lot of it was free form in addition to quantitative. So I got some qualitative research done too.

And they said, there is no love without respect. You cannot have, they couldn’t imagine a relationship where somebody could be loved and not respected.

In the main people called out the question in the first place, why would you split hairs around what love and respect are when there are two parts of the same thing really?

 

Rebecca

That’s right. Men need respect in a way that women don’t understand. Except for when you ask women. They also need respect. And also we know that women need love because of greeting cards.

That’s right. Greeting cards. Don’t believe me?

It’s on page 48 of Love and Respect. See, apparently, since greeting cards, they talk about love. More than they talk about respect and see women buy those cards.

 

The Princess Bride, clip 

Is this a kissing book?

 

Rebecca

So therefore it proves that women need love, not respect. Greeting cards.

That is the astounding new research that this brand new idea, Love and Respect was based on.

 

Schitt’s Creek, clip 

I shall bathe. And if I bang my head and slip beneath the surface, so be it.

 

Rebecca

And then it might not surprise you knowing just how ridiculous the research for the actual premise is that the rest of the book is no better in terms of how it handles scientific scholarship. The number one thing that you’ll notice if you read Love and Respect is that for a book that claims to be research based, there’s something mysteriously lacking citations like any citations, there are so few citations and the citations that he does have, he completely misrepresents. Or they’re wildly out of date, even for 1999 2004, times.

Additionally, we talked a lot in video one about the sexuality chapter. Now we’re gonna talk about R in chairs.

Which is men’s need for relationships in a side by side fashion.

 

Vine, clip

Two bros chilling in the hot tub five feet apart because they’re not gay.

 

Speaker 3

Here’s what Emerson Eggerichs says about research and communication:

Research studies confirm the male preference for shoulder to shoulder communication with little or no talking. In one study, researchers performed a series of tests on males and females from four age groups second graders, sixth graders, 10th graders, and 25 year olds. Instructions for each pair of females in each pair of males were exactly the same. Enter a room, sit down into chairs and talk if you wish. So here we have the first misrepresentation of what actually happened.

They weren’t told that they could talk if they wanted to. They were given explicit instructions to sit down and find something serious to talk about.

But let’s keep going. This is what he says.

As the test proceeded, every pair of females, no matter what their ages, reacted the same way. They turned their chairs toward each other. Or at least they turned toward each other so they could be face to face, lean forward and talk. The males reacted differently. They did not turn toward each other in any way. They sat side by side, shoulder to shoulder, looking straight ahead, except for an occasional glance at each other. 

It is it is important to note the seven year old boys did not, in fact sit nicely shoulder to shoulder. So if you are a parent of a seven year old boy and they do not want to simply sit down in a chair, that neither did the boys in the study.

And then here’s what’s interesting Emerson Eggrichs does say that the study found that the most open and transparent of all the pairs male or female, were the 10th grade boys.

So he says that this study found that sure, men tended to not make eye contact as much when they were told to talk about each other, whereas women tended to.

However, the most intimate conversations happened with the 15 year old boys. And so what’s his conclusion from the study? The conclusion is, bizarrely, that if women want to have close, intimate conversations with their husbands, they need to not talk

And because I know that this is truly it sounds like I’m making it up and being hyperbolic. This is one of the examples he gives:

One wife decided to go deer hunting with her husband, who used the bow and arrow. She helped him set up blind, and they both sat there for hours waiting for a deer to happen by. They saw nothing. They shot at nothing and they said nothing. Finally, they took down the blind and headed back to the car. To this point she had said not one word the entire time.

As they were walking down the trail, her husband turned to her and said, this was awesome.

Another wife, despite her reservations about doing something so kooky, decided to join her husband in his workshop and watch him as he completed one of his projects. She sat down, said nothing, and simply watched. He looked over at her and sort of grinned and she just grinned back.

A few minutes later, he looked at her again and smiled and she smiled back. This went on for some 45 minutes. Finally he said, I don’t know what you’re doing, but keep it up.

And in the conference, to agree to give this example of a woman and, of a wife and husband who are fighting because she wanted to talk and he didn’t know what the conclusion was, she sat there and watched him paint for 45 minutes, saying absolutely nothing. She brought a lounge chair, sat down, lounge chair, no suntan lotion, notebook, and she just laid there and watched him as he was painting. She said it was stunning. She said nothing.

For 45 minutes she sat there.

He is claiming that it is research based to believe that men need you to just sit there and watch them wait for dear, finish a project in the garage or paint a picture saying nothing.

And he used a study about communication where boys had deep, intimate conversations to back this up. So because boys had incredibly deep, intimate conversations and showed excellent communication skills, therefore your husband shouldn’t want to hear you talk.

 

Step Brothers, clip

Shut your mouth.

Lucas.

Shut your mouth, I needed someone.

Shut your mouth! Shut your mouth!

 

Rebecca

It’s a truly, mind bogglingly bad representation of what this study showed. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not logical. It’s not even comparing the same things. This study did not find that men want to not talk.

This study did not find that men shut down. When you say, honey, we need to talk. If anything, these kids are put into incredibly high stress situations. So they weren’t just saying, let’s chat. I want to connect with you. It was talk about something serious. And they did that under pressure while being watched by researchers. This is actually a more stressful situation than the average, 

Hey honey, we haven’t connected in a while. Let’s go for dinner and chat.

And if a 15 year old can do it, I don’t understand why Emerson thought that this was proof that the 30 year old man suddenly forgot how.

 

Perhaps a more egregious misrepresentation of data, though, comes from the work of John Gottman and how it is used in Emerson Eggrichs’ book.

The Gottman Institute really does a lot of the gold standard research in couples and what causes divorce, he has a really cool predictive model for whether or not couples will still be married in a certain number of years,

He does really great stuff. It’s incredibly interesting. Highly recommend John Gottman books.

Emerson Eggrichs claims that, according to John Gottman, 85% of husbands will stonewall during an argument. Stonewalling is an essence. When you just go cold, you aren’t responding anymore. You’re not engaging. You’re just kind of, in essence, you’re moping and pouting and you’re just seething and not not actually working towards a positive communication or working through the argument.

You just shut down. But, here’s the problem. That’s not what John Gottman said.

John Gottman never said that 85% of husbands stonewall their wives. What he found was that 85% of people who stonewall are husbands.

That is a wildly different statistic.

But this is a really big deal. This is the difference between saying all poodles are dogs and all dogs are poodles.

85% of husbands will. Stonewall is far different than saying 85% of stone walls are male. And what it does is it normalizes and rationalizes this activity as something that is inherently male, rather than it being a toxic. What’s one of men’s Four Horsemen of the apocalypse for your marriage? That’s what he calls it. It’s one of those things that makes divorce very, very likely if you engage in it.

And Emerson Eggrichs in his misuse of the statistic, is making it sound like this is a universal male experience.

It is not, this is not normal and this is not healthy.

But additionally, he uses the statistic and he uses John Gottman as an expert in his book, even if he misuses the statistic, obviously.

But he ignores John Gottman conclusions about what makes a healthy marriage.

What he doesn’t mention is that one of the number one predictors that John Gottman found for divorce is when the husband is not willing to share power with his wife, when he’s not willing to be influenced by her, when he’s hoarding power for himself in essence, when a man is following the love and respect mandate.

Not only does he ignore that part of John Gottman findings, he actually explicitly states the opposite, with zero citation. Repeatedly throughout his book.

Emerson says in Love and Respect that the reason that couples are divorcing today is because they are a marriage with two heads.

And again. I cannot emphasize enough. He has read John Gorman’s research. He knows about stonewalling. So either he only read a very small part of the research, or he’s just ignoring the findings that are completely in opposition to what he is saying. Either way, it is bad research, and either way, someone with a PhD does know better. There is not an excuse the same way there would be for someone who did not have this level of education.

But that does bring us to our next common problem with the research behind love and respect. There is none the number of just wild claims he makes. I do not have a single citation is mind boggling.

He repeatedly states that half of marriages are headed for divorce with no citation, even though we have not had a 50% divorce rate in… ever.

He claims that five out of ten marriages today are ending in divorce because love alone is not enough. He claims that five out of ten couples in the church are divorcing. And that’s, by the way, that’s a different statistic than how many people just at large are divorcing.

And he claims that the craziness seems to be getting worse with no citation, even though every single metric has been finding that the divorce rate has actually been falling pretty steadily for over 30 years.

Additionally, he makes some very silly arguments about science that don’t really make sense, aren’t necessary for the book, and are just wrong. That, again, offer no citation.

For example, he says that humans are the only one of God’s creation that make love face to face, that is just objectively not true. There are apes that also have sex in missionary position.

But he’s trying to take some of the sound scientific, and he uses it to try to make a spiritual point, Look, no one’s saying that a pop psychology marriage book needs to be held to the same standards as, like some intense Oxford University Press textbook.

We’re simply asking that. If there are claims that they are cited with reputable journal sources, that you’re not blatantly misrepresenting the journals that you are citing,

And can we just not base our premise on whether or not greeting cards are fluffy?

 

But if it’s not a new idea after all, and if the research really isn’t that groundbreaking or good or really rooted in research at all, then maybe the reason that I got so big is because it’s theologically sound right. You might know where I’m going witht his, but let’s let’s roll it

 

Emerson Eggrichs claims to be a biblical expert. He claims to study the Bible 30 hours a week for the last 20 years.

There are some really basic mistakes that are made about Scripture that are just simply not acceptable for someone who has, who claims to have the level of biblical literacy that he has to make. For example, he just flat out says that Ephesians five is God’s last word on marriage, as if that’s some big thing. Like if it’s the last thing that God’s going to say to his people, what don’t you think that it would matter?

 

Emerson Eggrichs

The greatest treatise New Testament, on marriage is in Ephesians five. Paul wrote this letter to this church at Ephesus. And, and, there’s a section which we’ve now put as chapter five, and it’s dealing with marriage.

And then verse 33 is the summary statement to the greatest treatise in the New Testament, marriage. And here it is. It’s it’s like ABBA Father has spoken his last word to the church on marriage.

The last words a person speaks are the most important words. That’s been consistently the case around the world.

 

Rebecca

But it’s not the last thing that was written on marriage in the Bible.

First Peter was definitely written later. And it also mentions marriage.

He also claims that in Genesis three, Eve was alone when she was deceived by the serpent, which is also just not true,

The Bible explicitly says that you’ve turned to her husband who was with her. Not that. And then Eve went for a merry little stroll and went to fetch her husband, who was four kilometers away.

I know it may sound like a small thing, but when you’re claiming to be a biblical expert and a scholar, it’s important not to make these little mistakes because it shows that you’re being careless about the Scripture that you claim to be an expert in.

But additionally, what’s worse is the mistakes he’s making make his point stronger, which implies to people who are analyzing this that Emerson is not allowing his view to be changed by Scripture, but is actually changing Scripture to match his views.

There’s also a lot of really strange things where we’ve been calling them Spiritual Mad Libs, where he’ll take a portion of a verse and  he’ll use that clause outside of its context to prove his point.

So, for example, when he’s talking about the shoulder to shoulder communication, how men don’t want women to talk, apparently, and just want them to literally watch men paint while they stay silent.

He says, that this shoulder to shoulder communication style will give new meaning to wives “winning him without words,” which is ironically from first Peter that he says apparently didn’t mention marriage.

Of course, though, that section in Peter was not about wives sitting and watching their husbands paint dry.

That section was two women who were in a very complicated cultural moment when they themselves were Christian believers and their husbands were not.

We talked to Dr. Beth Felkner Jones. She is a scholar in gender in the Bible.

And we really wanted to talk to her about the historical context of the New Testament when it comes to women’s role in society, how women were treated, the household codes, those kinds of things.0

So let’s talk to Beth.

 

Dr. Beth Felkner Jones

I often say, if, we Christians understood more about how bad things were for women in the ancient world, we would understand more about how Scripture is pushing back against that badness.

When Paul says submit to one another out of reverence for Christ, right. Wives to your husband’s husband. Love your wives. What we hear what seems weird to us as wives to our husbands.

Oh, that must be. That must be the really big deal of the message. That seems weird to us. But what would seem weird in the ancient world is husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and laid himself down right for her.

And so if that’s the thing Paul’s saying, this needs to be different from the world, right? Husbands, you need to act different. You need to act in a self-sacrificial, godly, Christ like way. Right? We we should suppose that has more to do with the main point of the text than the part that nobody would have blinked at in the ancient world, right?

Wives, submit to your husbands. Nobody blinks. Where you blink is the command for men to be different. The command for men to reject patriarchy, frankly.

For a woman who is in a situation right where she’s expected to, do whatever her husband says, even no matter how awful it is, right? Where she’s understood to be property, in many cases. What a revolutionary word, right? To her husband, to to Christian husbands.

To be something very, very different. Not patriarchs and, despeate tyrants, right? But people who love like Jesus.

 

Rebecca

We also wanted to bring this use of research to tell women to be smaller.

Speaker 2

The teachings about how men need sex on demand, all that chairs concept that we talked about in video one. I wanted to bring that together and ask.

Beth what she thinks that it would do to a woman’s faith to be told that research and Scripture both say that it’s best when you are small and here’s what she had to say.

When it comes to having an embodied faith, what do you think that would do to maybe a woman’s view of God? Yeah.

 

Dr. Beth Felkner Jones

 

Nothing good.

Scripture shows us that God made us who loves us, right? And if you’re being encouraged to think instead, that, you are a problem, a problem that you should make a small and quiet as possible so that it doesn’t get in the way of your band. Then it just directly contradicts God’s love for us.

And suggests to us that perhaps, maybe God doesn’t love us either, right? Maybe God too, wants us to get smaller and quieter. Instead of wanting us to be ourselves.

The set of instructions suggest a terrifically low view of manhood. Right? That a man is so fragile and so in need.

Of what? Worship. Really? Right. Which no human being should receive. That he needs women just to stare at him and let him know with their eyes how how amazing he is. This view of men as, sexually insatiable and having these needs that have to be met, right, would have been just unthinkable to the early church. Probably the strangest thing about early church sexual ethics to contemporary American Christians, is that the early church was always thinking maybe we should have less sex. In order to become more holy. Now, yeah. I don’t think that’s quite right. I think that sex is a good gift from God, and we’re welcome to enjoy it. Right? But this idea that it should be on demand, insatiably like.

The early Church fathers would have recoiled at horror at what they would see as selfishness, lust, completely lack of self-control. There really began self-control, which is maybe more of a Roman virtue than a biblical one, at least in the way it’s being worked out there. But again, they would have found Love and Respect just unthinkable.

 

Rebecca

Another place where we see the spiritual Madlib show up, which is really quite damning, is in how he talks about masculinity. “The male fear of contempt is dramatized in the first chapter of Esther. What was the fear that wives would start to despise their husbands and defy them?

The result? There would be no end to the contempt and anger poured out by wives on their husbands throughout the king’s realm.”

And you know what? He is, right? That is what they were worried about. But they were the bad guys.

Yeah. So that context for that story is that this is when a pagan king asked his wife to strip and dance for him and his drunk buddies. She says no. And so he banishes her so that other women don’t get any funny ideas about saying no to their husbands.

Xerxes the king is not considered a good dude in the book of Esther. Wouldn’t say he’s particularly the protagonist, but seriously, you can go look it up. It’s right there.

And then Eggrichs presents this as though it’s like God’s example of like masculinity for us today.

 

Billy Madison, clip 

At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I assure you, no points. And may God have mercy on your soul.

 

Rebecca

This would be like watching Lord of the Rings and agreeing with Sauromon.

He does this again when he claims that “a husband is geared to hear the command, take courage, be men, and fight”

The issue that was a Philistine war taunt in first Samuel chapter four.

That was not God’s definition of masculinity.

But see that clause outside of its context proves his point. And so he uses it by just inserting it into a sentence to have his point be backed by a Bible verse. Who fricking cares? The Bible verse is actually about!

And listen, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t use scripture in their books.

If you’re speaking to a Christian audience, absolutely. You’re going to use Scripture in your books and you should, because it gives people the chance to check your work and see if you’re actually, you know, representing Scripture well.

And Emerson knows this too. He says the proof texting is bad in his own book. And he says a careful exegesis is important. And then he goes and makes the Philistines out to be God’s desire for masculinity.

But this is what I find so infuriating because of how manipulative it is.

Throughout the book, there are many points when he could have just said something as a claim, but he doesn’t. He has half of the sentences, his words, and then he goes in quotations and he just finishes off from a random clause from a Bible verse doesn’t even necessarily go with it.

Here’s an example of how he uses a verse that means something completely different to further his agenda. He says this despite feminism’s cries, a wife best qualifies as the one who, in quotes, tenderly cares for her own children. First Thessalonians two seven. So what do you think first Thessalonians two seven is about?

Do you think it might be about the role of wife in society? Do you think it might be about how, Christian wives should mother their children? No, actually.

Instead First Thessalonians two verse seven is Paul describing how he cared for the people of the church of Thessalonica.

Here’s what he says. We were not looking for praise from people, not from you or anyone else, even though as apostles of Christ we could have asserted our authority, but instead we were like young children among you. Just as a nursing mother cares for her children, so we cared for you.

So because we loved you so much, we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God, but our lives as well. This verse has nothing to do with women’s role in society. It has nothing to do with whether or not women are nurturing and men aren’t. If anything, this is arguing that men should be more nurturing like mothers.

And yet it’s used to make it sound like this idea that feminism is anti-Christian is from the Bible.

 

Derry Girls, clip 

Well, I think it’s safe to say we all just lost a bit of respect for you there,

 

Rebecca

There are so many more examples of this. We simply do not have time to go through all of them but I’m going to scroll a couple across the screen right now.

It is wild how common this is in the book Love and Respect.

And it’s incredibly concerning because just as we talked about in that first video, it is so easy to weaponize scripture and religion against people, especially people in vulnerable situations.

For example, take this quote from Love and Respect. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. From Colossians 3:13. Surely forgive includes your husband, so why not move first and be the mature one?

Okay. Now let’s take a pause, because I wanted to make sure that I was being fair to Eggrichs here.

Because what if the dude said that men have to forgive their wives the way that God forgive them? In the in the chapter for men to write?

So I decided to search for the word Forgive in all of its permutations in the electronic copy of the book that I have.

And so let’s take a look at these results, shall we?

Overall, the word forgive appears 66 times in its permutations in the book.

One of them is in the table of contents, four of them have nothing to do with marriage. 18 of them are neutral, so it’s either presenting both couples as forgiving each other in an equal way, or it’s just kind of talking about the theology of forgiveness in general. But it’s not in a chapter that’s directed towards either spouse.

Nine of those 66 instances are focused on the husband needing to either take action to forgive or seek forgiveness.

The remaining 34 times are all for the woman.

She is told to forgive. More than three times as often as he is in the same book.

Notably, 12 of those instances of the wives needing to either forgive or ask for forgiveness. Are tied to the concept of sin, salvation or Bible verses.

Only one of the men’s instances, were tied to a Bible verse, and it was not tied to one that was based on salvation. The way that the women’s were. It was tied to the one that says, confess your sins to one another so that you may be healed.

So even the Bible verses that are being used are not equal.

One of them is a threat to women. And one of them is a hey, do this so you can get good things to men.

Threaten, cajole.

However, two of the nine times that men are told to ask for forgiveness, he is told that it’s because it’ll turn your wife on. So yeah. Love and respect. Absolutely weaponizes the idea of forgiveness against women.

 

The Office, clip

I’m saying that. You’re being sexist. 

No, I’m being misogynistic.

 

Rebecca

Another scriptural mistake that he makes is actually one that matters quite a bit. The whole verse that he claims to have staked his entire ministry on, the one that he claims to be an expert in. Does not actually say what he says, but it says.

NWe actually spoke to a biblical scholar about Ephesians 533 and how Emerson has mistranslated this verse. He claims to be an expert in let’s listen to Doctor Cynthia Westfall.

 

Sheila Wray Gregoire

However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself and the wife must respect her husband.

 

Dr. Cynthia Westfall

And that’s not really what it says in the Greek.

What the problem is, is that there’s no must, there’s no command and there’s no imperative that’s given to the wife.

It says actually in order that the wife may or may respect her husband or with the purpose of that or with the result of. And I’m going to just read this really woodenly, it says and each of you, each one each. And so there’s three emphatic different things. It’s very awkward. And we no one ever translates it the way it says in the Greek. It’s kind of like saying, you, you, you you know, very emphatic, must love. And this is an imperative, in his own life as himself, in order that the wife may respect the husband.

And so, I would say that this marks reciprocity in the marital relationship.

Specifically specifically says that the husband re way of behavior, is the basis upon which a wife respects. And so there is not, in this passage, a non reciprocal respect demanded of the wife. It’s the opposite. It’s, it’s actually putting the obligation on the husband to behave in such a way that she does respect him.

 

Rebecca

Again, this is something that the, the layperson reading their Bible. I’m not expecting them to know this. Right. Your average Joe, who’s just doing devotions, but this guy claims to be a biblical scholar and an expert in this particular verse. You’re telling me that this man didn’t find a single one of the many people who have talked about this?

You’re telling me that he wasn’t aware of all of the reams of data that people have been discussing this verse for a long time, but how this is actually a contingent on the man’s love, not on the woman’s respect.

You’re telling me he didn’t know about the cultural context, about how women were property back then?

You’re telling me he wasn’t aware that there were a number of women who were married to men who were not believers, and that the church was attractive to women and slaves and not as attractive to men in power.

You’re telling me he knew none of this, and he still is an expert in this area?

Quite frankly, we just need to expect more from people because this is embarrassing.

It’s embarrassing that our best selling book and evangelicalism doesn’t even understand the very verse that an entire ministry is based on.

It’s embarrassing that we didn’t do even the most smallest amount of research about the cultural context here, and included it in the book. Nope.

Nothing.

 

But talking about embarrassing, there’s another one that’s just the most bizarre amount of spiritual manipulation and misuse of Scripture that I think we’ve seen in the book.

Let’s talk about the billion angels, because what on earth is that? So remember from video one how we talked about we had those three cycles, the crazy cycle, which is that when one person starts acting poorly towards their spouse, the other supposed starts acting poorly, and then they end up in a negative cycle. You have the energizing cycle, which is when the woman kind of just shut up. The man starts to be better. And I’m. I know that sounds harsh, but that honestly is just what it is. Pretty much. And then we have the rewarded cycle, which of course we call the cover your bad cycle because this is the one that Eggrichs chooses to say, well, even if he doesn’t change, even if she doesn’t change, you still have to keep doing the Love and Respect thing because God shall reward. You.

So he’s talking about how to the world. It makes no sense for you to treat your husband well even when he’s being unloving or for you to treat a wife well even when she’s being disrespectful.

I do also want to remind you once again, that the definitions of unloving and the definitions of disrespectful are very, very different. Unloving is defined in this book as straying affairs, being cruel, having fits of rage like these all fall under unloving. The most of the examples of being disrespectful are like asking your husband to not forget your birthday,  accidentally putting pepper on his eggs when you know he doesn’t like it and asking him to put his trash in the garbage can. It is kind of ridiculous.  Or being mad at him for being a workaholic and that kind of stuff. So remember, again, this sounds very balanced. It is not.

But here’s what he says “The seemingly fruitless efforts matter to God because this is the kind of service he rewards. What is wisdom to God is foolishness to the world. See first Corinthians 3:19.

And again, on the spiritual Mad Libs thing. First Corinthians 3:19 is not about putting up with abuse from others. It’s about emboldening people to understand that they are God’s temple and that they actually matter and are holy. It’s an encouraging passage to people to understand that all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos are surface of the world or life or death of the present, of the future.

All of them belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. It’s actually a very uplifting message of hope, not something where it’s like, well, you might think that you deserve not to be abused, but you are foolish. That’s not what it means. Nonetheless, here’s what he says.

 

Emerson Eggrichs

One way I like to picture this is that there is a cha-ching effect in heaven when believers do things that the world might call stupid.

 

Speaker 3

It says, though a billion angels are holding a gigantic handle each time you do something. Loving a respectful towards your spouse, the angels pull down on that handle.

It is as though you have an angel, a lead angel saying to you, May I just try to describe what it might be like? And there’s this huge handle with your name on it, and there are a million angels on that handle with you. And there’s a lead angel, and they’re. All watching you. Look at that.

Look at that. He put on love toward that woman trained in the 70s who did angels ca-ching. He did it again. He loved that disrespectful woman, hit it angels, ca ching Look at that. She put on respect toward that unloving man who has issues from his old man. Hit angels ca-ching, ca-ching, ca-ching.

 

Derry Girls, clip

We won’t forget that performance in a hurry. No matter how hard we try.

 

Rebecca

There are repeated callbacks to the billion angels throughout the book going, Ka ching! There is no biblical example of a billion angels pulling a giant lever so that gold spews out whenever you are nice to someone who’s mistreating you, it’s just simply not there. It is, in essence, he has written fanfiction about the Bible and tried to make it canon.

 

Emerson Eggrichs

Hit it, angels, ca-ching!

 

Rebecca

But spiritual Mad Libs, ignoring the cultural context and just writing weird Bible fanfiction are not the only ways that this book does not live up to being based in Scripture, the way that Emmerson Eggrichs claims. He actually edits scripture to make it prove his point. This is what Emmerson Eggrichs says the Bible teaches unconditional respect.

Quote show proper respect to everyone dot dot dot not only those who are good and considerate dot dot dot but dot dot dot harsh. The ellipses are not in the Bible. He’s quoting first Peter two, verses 17 and 18. And Here’s the actual two verses. Show proper respect to everyone. Love the family of believers. Fear God, honor the Emperor slaves in reverent fear of God. Submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.

This is in a section about how to live a godly life in a pagan society. This is a section about how, hey, you’re stuck, you’re in this place where there is slavery and there’s injustice, and people are not fair, and they’re not in the church. They’re not Christians. We can’t hold them to account.

We don’t have any authority. And so how do you live under profoundly unfair and unjust situations? Well, in essence, you circumvent it by being like, well, I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it out of reference to God.

To take that segment that is supposed to be about living in a culture where you are unable to experience the freedom that God actually wants for you, and that is your birthright to take that quote that is about living in an awful society where people are seen as property,  and to edit it with ellipses, where you’re cutting out whole chunks of context to make it sound like women have to show proper respect to everyone.

Also, it doesn’t say unconditional. It says proper respect. Proper respect to everyone, not only to those who are good and considerate, but harsh 

to take that that is actively rewriting Scripture to make it to be about a different population, a different scenario, and have a different order.

This is not simply an oopsie. He put in those ellipses. He knows that he’s cutting up context. And when I’m reading this, even though it’s it’s terrible, all I can think of is that segment in Mamma mia!

 

Mamma Mia!

Dot, dot, dot!

 

Rebecca

But seriously, a lot is said in those dot dot dots. I don’t , so it’s heavy. Okay. So the idea is we’ll say recycled. The research was shoddy and the skull, the biblical scholarship is so incredibly irresponsible in how it literally edits the Bible to say what it wants it to say, ignoring all cultural context and even the very words in the plain reading of Scripture.

But the big question we’re going to keep coming back to, because this is the one that keeps us up at night, is why did people fall for it? Why didn’t anyone notice?

Part of our research into the series was to ask the big question of how so many 

people miss these red flags. And to do that, obviously, we. wanted to pick the brain of some of our experts.

We talked to Jay Stringer. He’s a licensed therapist, a researcher and author. 

He’s written a lot of great books in the sexual wholeness and healing realm.

Now I’m going to let Jay properly introduce himself.

 

Jay Stringer

My name is Jay Stringer, and I am a psychotherapist and author. And so a lot of my work, I would say, is just trying to help people develop curiosity for the primary problems of their life. A lot of my professional work is inviting people into some of the counterintuitive reasons for why they might be struggling with a particular area

 

Rebecca

In our interview, we were chatting about what true accountability looks like, and he brought up some really great observations that he’s made with his many years working in the porn recovery space as a researcher, author and therapist.

And it makes for a great jumping off point for us to be in, to grapple with this question of how on earth did so much of the church get? The wool just pulled over its eyes?

 

Jay Stringer

You know, I wrote a book titled unwanted, which was looking at sexual brokenness, desire for porn. And so what I would tell you is that, like, there’s there’s a lot of books out there that are essentially saying, like, if I had just love the gospel more than porn, none of this would have been happening.

And it sounds right. Like that sense of like, okay, like if I was really satisfied and who Jesus was, then my heart would not be drawn towards this other stuff. So that’s a true statement. But oftentimes those stories are partial truths, and they take it as full truth. So an example of a partial truth in this world would be like, you have a lust problem.

Well, yes, we probably do have a lust problem, but also the amount of men and women that I work with that also have eroticized rage issues where it’s not so much a matter of lust, but they eroticized their anger about spouse or whatever.

It’s a partial truth that it’s lust. But there are other factors that are involved.

And so what happens a lot with Christian teachings is they get a partial truth, right? Like it’s logical, it makes sense. But the dominance of the left brain is that I have certainty. This is exactly what’s going on. And that’s where I always think about like healthy integration is like thinking about a river, like the Mississippi River, that the Mississippi is so powerful because it’s not just one river. There’s 214 tributaries that flow into that.

So I would say in a similar way, whenever we’re developing a theory of marriage or a theory of sexuality, you have one of 214 tributaries. It’s not the only tributary, but what Christian teaching loves to do is like, act like that main tributary. That’s all that’s playing out.

Truth is always something that’s perspectival like. You can’t arrive to it by just one perspective. And that goes back to that humility and kind of understanding the whole person is we should say, okay, I have this experience, but now let me test that with women’s experience, but not just with women’s experience.

What does the research say?

Why are we afraid of what men might say or what women might say or what the numbers might say? It’s it’s all God’s truth. So that to me is always my primary struggle is like personal experience. And my one story comes over indexed at the cost of every other possible explanation and curiosity.

That’s what the left brain loves to do. And that’s why we’ve love theological words and preaching. And teaching is once we have those words, we feel very confident that we have the truth.

And so that’s what I would say to most evangelical leaders, is you know, we can be so convinced that we are right about a particular issue and what we know from neuroscience and from the Proverbs is that when you think you know something, that’s when you’re on some of the most shaky ground.

 

Rebecca

I love that, and I think we’ve been on shaky ground for quite a while.

But let’s keep going with this question.

How is it that it was this egregious and no one noticed?

And to understand that, we’ve got to start talking about anti-intellectualism.

Evangelicalism has a serious problem with anti-intellectual ism,

And I think this is often talked about in terms of science, but I don’t think it’s talked enough about in terms of religion, because you can be anti-intellectual in how you approach theology as well.

I want to introduce you to the concept of right wing authoritarianism and fundamentalism. Now, most of you probably already know what this is, but studies have found that people who score high on right wing authoritarianism scales also tend to score incredibly high on fundamentalism scales. They travel together. And right wing authoritarians have a lot of really negative outcomes.

They’ve done all sorts of studies with right wing authoritarians. And they actually found that if you do like model, you end up with people who score high in right wing authoritarianism no matter what. It ends with nuclear war.

But at the same time, if you do like these model, you ends with people who only score low on authoritarianism scores.

It actually people tend to live quite in harmony. You tend to, do more trading. There’s more reciprocity and no one resource guards, and there’s not that fear and distrust of the other. That’s really what right wing authoritarianism is all about, is this idea of there is a good group of people, and there are people outside of that group that are scary and threatening to me.

Now, right wing authoritarianism does correlate highly with fundamentalist evangelicalism.

And something that people who are high and right wing authoritarianism tend to struggle with is actually logical syllogisms.

So, for example, if you give a group of people the following syllogism. All fish live in the sea. Sharks live in the sea. Therefore, sharks are fish.

People who score high in right wing authoritarianism are likely to say that the argument is valid, and that they agree with the argument. People who are low and right wing authoritarianism are more likely to correctly assess that this is not a valid argument, and the reason is this people who score high in right wing authoritarianism tend to judge the premises based on the conclusion, rather than judging the premises themselves.

 

So now we actually talked about this on a podcast a while ago, and it confused some people. And so if you’re listening and you’re like, but I don’t see why that’s wrong because sharks are fish, but the issue is, even if the conclusion is true, the sharks are fish, the premises do not support the conclusion. And that is what’s important, because that’s what we need for critical thought.

People who are high in right wing authoritarianism are more likely to judge the argument by the conclusion, not by the veracity of the argument structure. So if they agree with the conclusion, they don’t see why the argument doesn’t work.

And we see this in how Scripture is used in love and respect. It sounds scriptural, it sounds biblical. It sounds like it’s church speak or God talk.

And so what happens people ask, well is that what the Bible says they don’t ask is, is that what the Bible means? We jump straight to the conclusion and we don’t check the sources. We don’t check the premises. We don’t ask if the argument is sound. And this happens and this works. These thought stopping words and phrases, they work because at the core of it, people who are high right wing authoritarianism, people who are high in fundamentalism. And by the way, you can be high on these things and go to a non fundamentalist church.

This is very common. But people who are higher in these scores are very, very afraid of being in the outgroup. These thought stopping words act as signals to show I’m one of the good guys. I’m in the right team. I’m one of us, not one of them.

This is also how the mistrust of science really gets started in these religious communities. We are presented with a false dichotomy of either you believe in science or you believe in Scripture.

In a very weird twist of fate as well. You end up in this situation where people are mistrusting of research, unless it supports their own conclusions that they want to support. So that’s why you see people like Emerson looking at, oh, there’s a stonewalling stat that makes it sound like all men are stonewalls, even though it didn’t really any misrepresented that statistic.

But he likes that conclusion until you include that and you ignore the rest of the study.

It has not always been the case throughout church history that science and religion have been seen at being at odds. In fact, one of the big ones we see recently is this idea of six day creation versus evolution. And the idea is that true believers and good Christians believe that the earth was created in six days. And if you believe in evolution, then you’re not believing the Bible.

However, even Augustine didn’t believe in six day creation. C.S. Lewis did not believe in six day creation. Many of our church fathers would have thought that it’s very, very silly to make six day creation this big salvation issue.

And yet science and religion have been shown to be at odds for so long that we’ve ended up in something that Mark Knoll calls The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind in 1994. So this is ten years before Love and Respect even came out. Mark Knolls wrote the book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, in which he says the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. Which I will say that is a banger of a sentence that is such a statement.

But what he says is that evangelicals, because of their fear of the world, because of this desire, to be separate from the others. Put themselves into this bubble where the work being done is not to the same standards as it is being done in the secular world or even to the same standards as less isolated Christian spaces.

So you end up in this vicious cycle where people judging whether something is up to snuff aren’t actually educated to tell you whether or not it’s up to snuff.

And then they’re educating the next generation who also is even less educated than they are. And it just keeps on getting worse and worse. And worse.

Ironically, the anti-intellectual ism that has robbed evangelicals of a robust understanding of science has also eroded our critical thinking skills when it comes to Scripture itself.

Because anti-intellectual ism isn’t actually about science. It isn’t actually about research. It is about critical thought. If you can’t think in one area, you stop being able to think in others as well.

We also posed this question of why so many people bought into this to Dr. Beth Felkner Jones during our interview with her.

And she had a just fantastic point that has to do with anti-intellectualism.

Regarding evangelicalism as reactionary rather than thoughtful in its engagement with culture.

 

This is this is also what we’re steeped in, in our culture for the most part, especially people who are raised in an evangelical Christian bubble. And it does feel like it’s the devil, you know.

 

Dr. Beth Felkner Jones

And, you know, I think it sounds like a fight against the world, right? My friend and former colleague, Tim Larson, is an evangelical church historian. And he has written a really fun piece where, he unpacks the way that for early evangelicalism, 19th century, working towards gender equality was actually a hallmark of many of those communities.

Right. And that working towards gender equality was seen as an against the world, against patriarchy, right? Against what the world wanted to say about men and women. It was conservative, Bible believing evangelical Christians, right, who were ordaining women in the 19th and early 20th centuries against the world. And then Larson suggests that when the world became more egalitarian, if you want to use that language, it became easy to suggest that it would be the opposite thing Christians should do if we wanted to be against the world, right? And so we lost this evangelical, distinctive, spirit based gender equality. Right? And instead we started saying, let’s not be like those feminists. Let’s not be like those secular folk out there. For Christians, our job is not to be against the world. Full stop. We’re meant to be in the world and not of it. And there are good things in this world, and and we can love those things, and they’re bad things in this world, and we should be against those things.

Our job is biblical discernment, So this idea that there’s a shift, because of of what is seen as the culture. Right. Is really interesting to me.

 

Rebecca

Yeah. It’s a reactionary response rather than one that’s actually based in careful theological study. It seems.

 

Dr. Beth Felkner Jones

And or historical study as well. Yeah.

 

Rebecca

And this explains why no one caught what was happening in Love and Respect, because all the conclusions made sense.

James Dobson, Focus on the Family, all of these conservative resurgence guys, they were so focused on making sure that traditional gender roles stay in place in marriage that was their big conclusion. That’s what they wanted to prove. And so some guy comes along and he uses shoddy research and even worse, biblical scholarship to prove his point.

But nobody notices because they’re so busy looking at the conclusion that they like that they ignore the fact the premises are all garbage.

They ignore the fact that he said the Philistines are the pinnacle of masculinity. Apparently. They ignore the fact that the cultural context makes what he’s saying make no sense. They ignore the fact that he literally dot, dot, dot. It’s scripture to make it say whatever the heck you want it, because the conclusion is all that matters.

Once you have lost the ability to critically reason about your hypotheses, when you’ve lost the ability to actually look at science and research with an open mind and change your point of view and change your conclusions based on the premises that you are given, when you’ve lost that, because you’re so focused on making sure you stay in the right crowd, with the right believes, with the right thought, you end up with a gospel of expediency, not a gospel of integrity.

Which, again, is incredibly ironic considering he was with Integrity Publishing.

And it also explains why we can have it in the same book. 

Emerson Eggrichs, clips

It just works. It just works.

It does work.  It works every time. It works.

This is the the way of God. The Holy Grail of marriage.

 

Rebecca

It’s the thing that will fix your marriage. Also, if it doesn’t, it’s okay because you’re going to get heavenly rewards

 

Emerson Eggrichs, clips

The rewarded cycle explains what to do when a spouse is not responding.

What if I do all of this, but my spouse, for whatever reason, is not going to respond. This kind of thing happens. We are very aware of it.

She’s doing this for the Lord, regardless of her husband. God watches and rewards this woman.

Ca-ching, ca-ching, ca-ching!

 

AnchorMan, clip

60% of the time. It works every time.

 

Rebecca

The arguments don’t actually need to make sense as long as we end up in the right place. And that is horrifying.

And it should be scary to everyone who is in this space. Still.  But not only is it scary on like an existential level, as someone who is very passionate about critical thought and about good scholarship, something else happens when we push forward our own agenda and we don’t actually honestly look at the data.

Sometimes you just say stuff that’s really freaking embarrassing,

 

Back in 2015, Emerson put out a podcast called The Good Woman’s View of Sex.

And, if you remember what we said about the sexuality chapter, yeah. Does not seem that his view has changed much since he wrote the book. It’s all it’s all the same thing.

But my husband actually. Wrote an analysis a few years back about this podcast episode. Where he was proving, in essence, that this podcast enabled marital rape and also presented Emerson in a, I will say, less than flattering light

to the rest of the world. He was on the Bare Marriage podcast to talk about with Sheila and Keith Gregoire.

And so I just here’s a clip.

 

Sheila Wray Gregoire

I am not convinced he knows women can orgasm because remember that he says in Love and Respect.

 

Keith Gregoire

He must know that, like physically

 

Sheila Wray Gregoire

He might think it’s a myth or something, or that, like, it’s only its own.

 

Keith Gregoire

You mean the way he talks about it? Sounds like you must think it’s  a myth because.

 

Sheila Wray Gregoire

In Love and Respect. Why would you deprive him of something which takes so little time and makes him soooo happy?

 

Keith Gregoire

And here’s the deal. If you are a husband who wants to make your wife happy, and you know that there is this thing called orgasm, yeah, you know, and you’re writing books about marriage, why would you spend at least a sentence or two saying, hey, this might be something you might try and give your wife because it’s a good thing.

 

Sheila Wray Gregoire

But he never, ever, he never ever brings it up.

 

Keith Gregoire

Does it? Come up in this podcast at all about female orgasm?  Does that come up?

 

Connor Lindenbach

No, no. You know what he does say though, which I think is another red flag. It says you can’t tell if a woman is turned on.

 

*Sheila proceeds to literally spit her tea out*

 

Keith Gregoire 

Okay, before this. I’ll go to the blooper reel. 

So tell me, Connor, is this an Eggrichs defense? Do you think this was an awkward attempt to talk about the concept of, you know, arousal non concordance 

 

Sheila Wray Gregoire

I don’t think he knows what that is at all.

 

Keith Gregoire

I don’t know, maybe, maybe,  like maybe he’s read about it or heard about it. Like you can’t tell it’s true because like for instance, you get this times people say like a wife says she’s turned on. But maybe the physiology isn’t working. Exactly. And she wants to. And we talk about how that we talk about those kind of things. Right. Is that what he was doing or?

 

Connor Lindenbach

No, this was not a nuanced attempt at a deeper conversation about arousal.

non concordance.

 

Keith Gregoire

I’m sorry. I was trying to give Eggrichs, the benefit of the doubt.

 

Connor Lindenbach

This was leading up to him making a joke about how there’s no subtlety to the male arousal.

 

Keith Gregoire

Oh yeah. Oh, it’s a hard on joke. Okay. Yeah.

 

Connor Lindenbach

Yeah, yeah.

 

Emerson Eggrichs

In fact, we get energized by having sex as an end in itself because of our anatomy and the quick release and just the relaxation that comes her sexuality is much more subtle. You can’t tell if a woman is sexually turned on. It’s very subtle. They’re very subtle signs they’re there, but they’re subtle.

 

Rebecca 

That is right. This man went on a podcast and said you cannot tell when a woman is sexually aroused.

 

Brooklyn 99, clip

Ooh. Self burn. Those are rare.

 

Rebecca

And I am so sorry, but that is just not something that a man would say who has seen a woman sexually aroused.

Like it’s just embarrassing. And this is the problem with anti-intellectual ism. When you’re speaking out of personal experience, out of your own hypotheses that are only based on your own experience, in the experiences of your buddies who are talking to you, you don’t realize and what you’re saying is ridiculously and completely and horrific, embarrassing.

The example that I gave a while ago in a podcast is imagine that you’re with a friend and they’re saying, man, I hate cleaning the bathroom. The worst part about it is scooping all the poop out of the shower. It is awful. I hate scooping poop out of showers. I wish I never had to do it again. And you’re sitting there and you’re like, are you pooping in the shower?

I feel like I was in anguish just told us that he poops the shower.

This is embarrassing. But if instead of his theology and theories on sex being about what he personally thinks women should do based on his experience,

if he had delved into what the science actually says, what sex researchers are finding if you looked at orgasm rates, if you had looked at what the experts are saying goes into healthy sexuality, instead of just looking at what it seems like he wants from his marriage, maybe he wouldn’t have accidentally told us that he doesn’t know how to tell if a woman is aroused.

This man’s degrees in family ecology, and he didn’t realize it. That would be embarrassing. But it is seriously baffling to me how often we see stuff like this happen where people who are not educated in the topic, who have not tried to do actual research on the topic, but are just trying to prove their own conclusion, don’t even realize that they’ve shown the whole world that they’re pooping in their shower.

It’s embarrassing. This is not normal. And if you had done any research into sexuality and female sexuality, you would know that.

What is consistently sobered us as we go deeper and deeper into the love and respect debacle is how many signs there were that should have been a clear neon arrow pointing. Run the other direction. And yet people missed it, he missed it.

This book sold 2 million copies. It sold 2 million copies, all being based on a question that never even asked women. It sold 2 million copies, while just flat out misrepresenting the research that it did even bother to cite, it sold 2 million copies. While it had shoddy biblical scholarship that edits and lies about what Scripture says in order to make sure that women keep obeying their husbands, even if he is being unloving and cruel towards her, so I thought,

And it does all that while saying embarrassing things like sex doesn’t take that long, so just get it over with, ladies. Embarrassing things like, well, women should just watch their husbands literally paint and talk about nothing embarrassing things like women don’t need physical release

And then his podcast go on and say embarrassing things like, well, you can’t really tell if a woman is aroused.

Anyway, this is asinine. How no one realize this is a problem.

This is one of those awful. The Emperor has no clothes situations where you look at in hindsight and it makes total sense and it seems crystal clear, but then you just are stuck with this question of how on earth is so many people fall for it?

And so in the next episode, we’re going to answer that question by diving deep with some people who really, really fell for this hook, line and sinker and see how and why it affected them the way that it did.

 

Clips from interviews for next weeks episode

We had conversations then and my husband was like I want us to be equal. And in my head I’m thinking yeah, but that’s not what the book says.

He wanted me fully participating in the marriage, and I wasn’t because I didn’t think I was supposed to.

It just felt like anything I did was disrespectful.

The word respect and disrespect were weaponized against me.

It’s a mind twisting situation.

I, I would ask Jesus like I followed the rules, like I am doing this the way that I was taught and towards the very end, I was like, it’s I am going to die here.