We had four lawsuit threats the week that The Great Sex Rescue was published.

Authors were upset that we had quoted their works and showed them in a bad light. Our publisher pretty quickly talked them down (after all, you can’t sue someone for quoting your exact words), but it was still a harrowing time.

And it reminded us that, even if we bring the receipts based on a HUGE study (20,000 women in that case) to show meticulously how certain ideas contained in their books did real, measurable harm—their first instinct will be to lash out, not to apologize.

Shaunti Feldhahn even said that we weren’t doing things in a “kingdom way.” Apparently trying to warn people against false teachings that can hurt them long-term is going against Jesus.

Yes, those lawsuit threats were a little scary.

But more importantly, those threats did a real number on my faith.

For the next few years, when picking up the Bible I could only read the gospels. Everything else in Scripture was too triggering. I had to just look at Jesus, and Jesus alone, to comfort myself in what God was actually like. To see how God actually does care for people.

It was excrutiating realizing that these people that I had looked up to, whom I had thought knew Jesus and cared for people, were only interested in their own bottom line.

It didn’t matter that evangelical women were suffering from sexual pain disorders at twice the rate of the general population. It didn’t matter that their teachings were stealing women’s sexuality from them, making it harder to get aroused or reach orgasm, or artificially lowering their libido. It didn’t matter that their teachings were making it harder for women to identify when they had been date raped, or even raped in marriage. It didn’t matter that their teachings were causing divorce rates to increase.

They simply didn’t care.

And those statistics represented thousands of individual women. Extrapolated from our data, it’s millions. Millions of women who try so hard to get in the mood but just can’t. Millions of women who feel used. Millions of women who are seeking medical help and trying desperately to find a solution to the pain they’re having.

And they didn’t care.

Usually in these articles I try to teach something, or show one of our findings, but today I just want to get a little raw and explain why this matters so much to me.

We’re doing a three-episode arc on the Bare Marriage podcast right now looking at how purity culture authors are rewriting history.

Dannah Gresh, the “mother” of purity culture who wrote the curriculum that told girls as young as 8 that their “bellies are intoxicating”, which she defined as having the power to make adult men out of control, has just rewritten her bestselling book And the Bride Wore White. And she’s doing a publicity tour where she talks about why she rewrote it and what she corrected.

The problem?

She doesn’t mention any of our actual critiques. Instead, she uses strawman arguments to make it sound like we were critiquing her for something totally different.

She’s rewriting something without apologizing for what she wrote before, or telling people what she got wrong.

She’s rewriting the book while keeping the same messages on her website (and even in her publicity interviews for it; she talked about modesty at length in the Focus on the Family interview).

What should it look like if an author wants to apologize?

The best biblical model we have for this is Zacchaeus. He’s a tax collector who has been cheating people for years, and when he encounters Jesus, he doesn’t just change and say he’s sorry. He makes restitution, paying back anyone he cheated four times. That’s what change looks like. It’s not just saying “I’m sorry.” It’s recognizing that there was actual and measurable harm done that requires amends.

I asked on social media what it would look for an author to truly make amends, and I got some great answers! Liz Daye said:

Here’s another answer:

I like the emphasis there on listening to the experts!

Yet what have Dannah and Bob Gresh done?

Bob had a tantrum at Cedarville University where he said:

You can watch it in our podcast last week, starting at around 7:15:

Bob is sick and tired, y’all. He’s sick and tired of everybody complaining about purity culture and complaining about Dannah’s books.

That doesn’t sound like people who want to make amends. That sounds like people who want to keep profiting off of their messages.

Here’s what I don’t understand:

It isn’t hard to say “I was wrong.”

I’ve said it so many times. I’ve taken books out of print. I’ve taken down podcasts. I’ve erased about 1000 blog posts. I talked in The Great Sex Rescue about how seeing the data showed me I was wrong in some of my teaching, and I vowed to do better.

You know what didn’t happen? No one got angry at me. They just thanked me.

When we make things right, people feel healed. Validated.

They don’t tend to get that angry, because we all know that we can get things wrong. We know that we need to grow. And so when people do grow, people are often relieved and feel seen!

This week Kristin Du Mez made a factual error in an article she wrote. It wasn’t an error that would cause anyone decades of harm. It was simply a factual error in an argument she made.

You know what Kristin did? She wrote an entire other article telling people, “hey, I got this wrong.” She published in full the message she received detailing the error. She apologized and did a full mea culpa. She wrote that second article because, as she says, when you merely correct the first, most who saw the error will never see the correction. So she went all in.

She showed integrity. She showed that saying, “hey, I’m sorry” isn’t that difficult. It’s what you do when you got things wrong!

Do these authors not care that so many people would feel tremendous healing if they just said “I’m sorry”?

Kristin’s error didn’t harm people, but their messages did. Decades of marital turmoil. Decades of stolen sexuality or pain. Decades of heartache that could have been avoided if they hadn’t internalized toxic messages.

Bob may be “sick and tired” of us pointing this out, but the rest of us are here trying to figure out why these people don’t care. Why they’re happy to make millions off of toxic messages, but they aren’t willing to care for the souls they hurt in their wake.

And they’re doing it in the name of Jesus.

Having those lawsuit threats broke something in me. Not because I was scared of the lawsuits, but because I realized how morally bankrupt so much of evangelical publishing was. How could the vehicle that was supposed to teach us about God look so little like God?

That’s why we want the apologies! We want our pain validated. And we want to know that we weren’t just a means of people making money. We want to know that we actually mattered. We want to know that having faith in Jesus actually does change you and make you care for people.

When they don’t apologize, it is a cancer on the church.

And that cancer continues to grow with each tantrum, each strawman argument, each rewriting of history to make themselves seem like the victims.

I’m still holding out hope that at least one of these big name authors will say “mea culpa”.

I just want someone to say, “it mattered that so many people were hurt, and I’m so, so sorry I contributed to that in very real and specific ways.”

I know, of course, that it may never happen. But I so desperately wish that those authors would understand that I’m not quoting them or showing where they went wrong to get famous myself, or to make money myself, or any of the other things they accuse me of.

I’m doing it in the desperate hope that (1) people who have been hurt will realize that this wasn’t of God, and it wasn’t Jesus who was telling you these awful things; and that (2) I’ll be shown that belief in Jesus does make you want to help people.

I so want to believe that those who teach the Bible actually care about people. I so want to believe that people I used to think of as colleagues, and even prayed with, were serious about Jesus. I so want to believe it wasn’t a farce to make money.

I so want to have my faith restored.

And while I’m still waiting for that, I hope I can help others restore their faith.

Because none of this nonsense was ever of Jesus.