Complementarianism is threatened when women see there are alternatives.

I’ve got some quick new findings for you today, and then some birthday reflections I had yesterday (took the day off to celebrate my 56th birthday, mostly by building new garden beds, which was super fun!).

One of the things we’ve measured in our surveys is the idea of headship–that the husband is head of the wife, and that this means that he is in authority in some way. Unsurprisingly, women who act out male headship (ie: where he makes unilateral decisions vs collaborative decisionmaking) have lower marital satisfaction than those who don’t act it out, and the best marriages are those who never believed it and don’t act it out (what we’ve been saying all along!).

But here’s what’s interesting: if women act out male headship while believing in it, the negative impact is still there, but it’s significantly reduced. Acting out headship is associated with lower marital satisfaction, but believing that it is your lot in life mitigates these effects.

Again, the best case scenario is to never believe it and not to act it out. But if you’re going to act it out, if you believe that this is God’s will for you, that dampens the negative effects. 

What this means is that complementarianism is significantly threatened when women see that there are alternatives. And you know what?

Increasingly women are seeing the alternatives to complementarianism.

First, we see them in the real world. All of us can see relationships today where husbands are equal partners. Even if we spend time only with people who believe like us and act like us, or go to a church where everyone thinks this way, we still live in a bigger world. We have doctors appointments and we see the dad taking his kids to their medical appointment–and rocking it! We go out to restaurants and see couples with an easy back-and-forth camaraderie where she can speak up and state her opinion. We can see that a different world is possible because people around us demonstrate it everyday, and that makes staying in our boxes far less psychologically tenable.

As more and more women see that something better is possible, the chance that they will willingly stay small decreases. And that means that denominations and churches will have to step up the rhetoric to keep women small.

But women are also hearing that complementarianism is not the only way to see the Scriptures, and that when you look at the original Greek, the total story of Scripture, and the practice of Jesus, Paul, and the early apostles, egalitarianism is much more supported. And if women start seeing that there is a better way, they are far less likely to willingly submit to an inferior position. 

They are seeing that complementarianism is being taken far too far, even by relatively mainstream evangelicals. We have Nancy Pearcey declaring on Alex Clark’s podcast that women’s suffrage was a net negative. We have whole denominations refusing to address sexual abuse crises, but instead saying that making sure women aren’t called pastors or do the work of a pastor is a main priority (Al Mohler has even recently said that women shouldn’t be on church podcasts).

Things are getting more extreme, which makes many women question complementarianism even more.

Why is complementarianism becoming more extreme?

When systems are threatened, they double down. And that’s what we’re seeing. Complementarianism is a system that allows men to be in hierarchy over women, and as Skye Jethani argued in a recent Holy Post podcast, the biggest benefit of this is mediocre men. Men get to be in charge without earning it, and they get to have power over women, which is really intoxicating. There’s nowhere else in society where you can discriminate against women blatantly and still be called a good guy. In church, you can. 

But all of this could easily be lost if women stop going along with it. 

And women tend to stop when they see that there is an alternative. 

That’s why what we do here at Bare Marriage is so threatening.

The backwards way people critique Bare Marriage

In the last few days a podcast has dropped critiquing us and calling us unbiblical and warning against us. Many people have sent it to me, and our Patreon group has thoroughly analyzed it (I love that!). We’re not going to do a reply because it’s laughable, and they don’t even offer valid critiques. They didn’t even quote anything I directly said until after the 50 minute mark! It was all just innuendo.

But what I found fascinating for our discussion today was that the main argument they used was that “she isn’t complementarian and so you can’t listen to her because she isn’t biblical.” In other words, they did everything backwards. 

They didn’t look at the evidence. They didn’t look at the arguments. They had a pre-determined end point, and that became the way they measured whether something was good or not.

That’s not how you do research, science, or even critique. You can’t say, “because she disagrees with my interpretation, you shouldn’t listen to her” and think that that’s a valid critique! (and yes, the podcast said other equally ridiculous things, but I found this so interesting).

When people critique us, or other people pushing back against complementarianism like Beth Allison Barr or Kristin Du Mez, they tend to start with “well, you know she’s not one of us anymore.” They don’t address the arguments, they just say, “they can’t be right because we know we’re right, and they disagree.”

That’s not what Jesus said to do.

Jesus, in Matthew 7, talks about how important it is to judge fruit. In context, He’s speaking about how to figure out what interpretation, what teaching, is correct. And His answer was to look at the fruit, because a bad tree can’t bear good fruit, and a good tree can’t bear bad fruit. So look at the fruit!

What’s interesting is that so many complementarians think they’re doing this, but they define bad fruit as “stopping believing what we believe.” So they say that we’re bearing bad fruit because we’re leading people to believe differently than they do. But that’s ignoring the whole point of what Jesus is saying! He’s telling us to judge between two viewpoints by looking at the fruit. You can’t then say that believing in one of the viewpoints is evidence of the fruit, because that would be circular logic. 

Why do they do this, though? Because their belief system is threatened because more and more women are seeing that they don’t have to be in subjugation, and that God wants them to live a full life. And once that’s out of the box, it’s really hard to put it back in.

And they don’t have real arguments to put it back in, because the evidence isn’t there. (We broke down the arguments that complementarianism leads to better marriages and sex lives here critiquing Josh Howerton’s claims and here critiquing Nancy Pearcey’s arguments). 

Complementarianism only endures if you convince women there’s no real alternative.

That’s why they can’t debate egalitarianism on the merits–because to do so acknowledges that egalitarianism is a valid viewpoint based in Scriptural arguments and data. Instead, they have to shut it down, because they can’t let women realize that theirs is not the only way of seeing the Bible.

Because once women see that–they realize they don’t have to live with injustice, and in fact God wants more for them. 

And they want more for themselves too, including thriving marriages and sex lives! And you can’t have those without real intimacy, and you can’t have real intimacy when one person’s opinion automatically carries more weight in the marriage than the other’s.

I was thinking about all of this on my birthday yesterday.

(And that’s why I didn’t write this post on Monday like I usually do–I was letting myself take my birthday off!).

I had a strange realization this birthday, which is that I see the world fundamentally differently than I did for most of my life–and let me explain, because I’m going to loop it back around. I shared this on Facebook yesterday, and I want to elaborate a little more.

I have said before that I always thought the church would have made more progress on embracing the full humanity of women by now. Even after we wrote The Great Sex Rescue, I thought people would engage us on its merits, rather than just dismissing it because we didn’t think like they do. I thought better of people, I guess. I wasn’t anticipating the huge backlash we’d have against women that we have seen in the last few  years, both in the church and outside. I wasn’t expecting that things would be getting harder. 

This applies not just to the church, but to the wider world. For many older Gen X, like me, we grew up with lots of instability in the 70s and 80s, but there was a sense that things would get better. We saw the Soviet Union fall in the 90s. We felt like freedom was on the march. 9/11 was a huge, pivotal moment, but even then, I had this sense that the people at the top were at least trying to protect us (one can debate how well they did that in hindsight).

Our generation had relatively good wages. We were able to buy houses. Things looked like they would continue getting better.

That’s not where we are anymore.

It feels like the world is heading in a direction that NOBODY wants except the ultra-rich, but governments seem unwilling to do anything about it–or are actively hastening the demise.

I realize now how sheltered I was in so many of my other decades. I think about people growing up in countries where they could never trust their governments to do right by their citizens, or where governments were actively discriminating or hurting them. That really was the norm for most of human history, and it still is the norm in many parts of the world.

And so I worry, perhaps for the first time, that the world that I am leaving for my grandkids won’t be as good as the one I grew up in.

We thought that the trajectory was going in one direction–towards equality and justice and human flourishing. But what we’ve seen is that, when systems are threatened, they double down and become more extreme. We’re seeing it in the church, and we’re seeing it in society.

The fact that they are threatened, though, shows that there is an opening.

In all of this chaos and pushback, God speaks to us. So much of the themes of what I’m saying are the themes of Scripture. And what does Jesus call us to? To love our neighbour. To build community. To think not only of ourselves but of others. That’s the way that we combat so much of what is happening now. We get back to community. The church needs to function as what it was supposed to be–as the hands and feet of Jesus, as the shelter in the storm, as a safe refuge for people.

I want to be the safe refuge. I want to be part of a community that is trying to build something that matters in a world that is getting off track. We can’t do anything about the billionaires, or about the data centers (though protest if you can), or about AI taking everyone’s jobs.

The early church couldn’t do anything about the Romans.

But we can love each other. We can call the church to more. We can leave spaces that are ignoring the harm that is being done, or that are actively covering for those in power, and we can create spaces that are safe.

We can imagine a different future for our kids and grandkids where there is justice and love, even if it’s only in safe pockets. So let’s create those pockets. Let’s create those churches. Let’s be the light. I don’t know what that will look like, but I will spend the rest of my working life exposing where the church has bought into darkness, and calling us to something better.

And I’m so grateful to all of you who are here with me, doing this work with me! Let’s keep pressing ahead, no matter what happens around us, and no matter what threatened complementarians say. 

Because once women see that there’s a different way, a glorious way where they can experience true intimacy and acceptance, you can’t put us back in that box.