Evangelical marriage teachers are changing the meaning of “good fruit” when it comes to marriage teaching—largely because of us.
We’ve successfully shown through our studies of about 40,000 people that many evangelical teachings on marriage and sex bear bad fruit, often making marriages worse, while teaching about partnership and mutuality and equality bears very good fruit.
Many who believe in male hierarchy haven’t liked that.
We talked about this in detail on last week’s podcast on measuring fruit, and there were some great comments here on the blog about that! Today I want to run the post I ran on Substack that Joanna wrote, and then end with one of the comments that was left on the blog last week by Kristy.
Juli Slattery, on a podcast four years ago, described good fruit like this:
As modern Christians, we want the fruit of a good marriage. We want our husband’s love as well. We want him to help with the kids we want. We want to be good wives that encourage him. That’s fruit. The root is what is God doing in my heart? And do I really trust that God is good?
So four years ago, good fruit was a good marriage with a husband who loves us and helps with the kids, while we encourage him.
Recently, she described it differently, saying this:
I’ve heard the verse over and over again. Used. You got to look at the fruit of the tree. And if a teaching doesn’t bear good fruit, if it makes some people miserable, it’s a bad teaching. But when we actually look at when that passage is used, it’s actually saying, look at the teacher of the fruit of a teacher’s life.
Do they have the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control? Yeah. So I think, you know, part of this is like you’re saying, the discernment of what is the spirit behind the critique. And is it ultimately defining flourishing? Is reconciliation with God or something else?
Now she’s saying all Jesus meant was look at the teacher’s life. But good people can give awfully bad advice. That is, quite frankly, ridiculous, and an attempt to get out of the box they’ve got themselves in, where it’s obvious that the advice that prioritizes men over women doesn’t end up bearing good fruit.
Watch last week’s Bare Marriage podcast to see these clips, and more:
Basically the argument comes down to this: they’re arguing that we only measured happiness in marriage, while we should have measured spirituality and obedience.
But here’s the problem for them: Our surveys didn’t really ask people “do you feel happy in your marriage?” We actually used scales of relationship health that asked questions that allowed us to measure things like:
- Is your marriage joyful?
- Does your spouse have patience?
- Do they exercise self-control?
- Are they faithful?
- Are they good?
- Are they gentle?
We pretty much measured the fruits of the Spirit in marriage!
And we found that the fruits of the Spirit are more present in marriages based on partnership and mutuality rather than on those based on hierarchy.
To better explain all of this, I’m going to ask Joanna Sawatsky, our statistician for all of our studies, and co-author of The Great Sex Rescue and She Deserves Better, to respond.
She’s also the author of our peer reviewed studies based on our datasets, and our research coordinator.
Here’s Joanna!
One of my hottest takes is that I think that we need more statistics in our theology.
And I think Jesus would agree with me.
After all, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said,
16 By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.
This concept – that we can identify the goodness of a teaching by its outcomes – is central to what we do at Bare Marriage. So much so that our non-profit initiative with the Bosko Foundation is called… Good Fruit Faith (btw you can support our research, translation, and other work that doesn’t directly bring in revenue by donating here, where Americans can receive a tax receipt).
Recently, an author/podcaster/apologist decided to critique our work by claiming that we were measuring fruit incorrectly. So today you get me, resident stick-in-the-mud and dedicated fruit-evaluator.
Here are some common problems that happen when we get critiqued for our “check the fruit” argument:
1. People conflate the fruit with the tree
The fruit in our lives is the outcome of our choices and behaviors. Let me give an example. I am a person who loves going to the mountains and hiking with my kids. The fact that I take the kids to the mountains is not fruit – it is the tree. To put things in statistical terms, it is the independent variable. The fruit is the dependent variable, the thing(s) that change because I take my kids to the mountains.
What things does taking kids to the mountains change? It makes my kids feel competent, it gives us family togetherness, it creates shared memories, it connects us to the natural world, and so on. Those are the dependent variables.
What many of our critics do is say something like:
We believe X is right. People who read our books also come away believing X is right, so our books bear good fruit. People who read other books start not believing X, so the other books bear bad fruit.
But this is measuring the tree by the tree. You cannot judge the fruit of a belief in X by measuring whether people keep believing X or not. You have to judge whether a belief in X leads to other things that we want—or things that we don’t want.
In our case, we have a variety of dependent variables we have utilized to measure the things that we want to see. They include:
- Marital satisfaction
- Relationship Flourishing
- Marital Trust
- Healthy Conflict Resolution
- Self-Esteem
- Being safe in a church community from sexual harassment or exposure to clergy misconduct
- The absence of sexual pain (caveat here: I don’t mean to imply that women are to blame for their pain, only that is an unwanted and sad outcome that, while multicausal and complex, is often linked to religious teachings about sex)
- Having high sexual satisfaction
- Not being abused in one’s marriage
- Not being overwhelmed by lust
Depending on the research question, a dependent variable might also be frequency of church attendance or time spent in prayer, especially given other research on the benefits of religiosity for overall well-being.
However, and I do think this is important, measuring church attendance without other measures that evaluate the fruit of the spirit or the abundant life in Christ can accidentally end up simply measuring the tree. That is, the fruit should be apparent in the life of the person following Jesus. In fact, the verse following Jesus’ admonition to examine the fruit regards the import of following the will of God, not simply declaring the Christ is Lord.
To use a theological term coined by Matthew Bates, our salvation is by allegiance to Christ. And that allegiance is shown by being “little Christs”—aka being the hands and feet of Jesus in the world and developing the fruits of the spirit. It is easy to be a butt in a chair at the Sunday morning service and become a whitewashed tomb, instead of a flourishing member of the body of Christ, continuing his work in the world.
Alongside these dependent variables, we have considered a variety of independent variables, largely relating to how the church has discussed issues of biblical manhood and womanhood, lust, sexuality, and marriage. Those variables are the tree.
2. People seek to downplay the impact of the outcome variables we chose
One of the measures we used in our survey for She Deserves Better is the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. And so we have been criticized for “only measuring happiness.”
First, a point of order. Happiness is different than self-esteem.
Second point of order. We measured plenty of other outcome variables (see list above.)
But finally, I’d like to take some umbrage with the idea that we shouldn’t measure happiness because that isn’t a valid outcome for the Christian.
Seriously?
The God-Man himself did his first miracle at a wedding so that people could celebrate together and so that the hosts wouldn’t lose face.
But beyond the wedding at Cana, among the fruit of the spirit is… JOY!
And I’m sorry, but every sermon I’ve ever heard about how joy is an acircumstantial sense of well-being is… just describing a form of happiness and good cheer. The Bible says that “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” and that “God loves a cheerful giver.” SO even if we HAD simply measured global happiness (which we didn’t), I can make a solid scriptural case for why that’s completely fine.
But finally, what we DID measure was self-esteem. And I can totally put that into a Jesus-y register by saying that we “evaluated whether women were secure in the knowledge that they are daughters of the King of Kings and have the high and holy calling of being image bearers and Christ’s representatives on earth.”
3. Theological Language and Taking the Lord’s Name in Vain
One of my broader concerns is that, if we believe that Jesus is Lord, then we believe that there is power in his name and teachings. To claim that authority by applying it to what we are doing, then, ought to be done with circumspection (aka fear and trembling).
I am concerned that folks will use Jesus-y language in an attempt to discredit us, hiding behind Bible verses and making us out to be heretical or enemies of the church.
You’ll notice here that I have used a lot of scriptural allusions and language. That is because while the Bible is a challenging, difficult, and strange book, it is also a book which I find utterly fascinating. I remain completely taken by the teachings of Christ, even after everything. There are Old Testament stories which are some of my greatest tools in understanding my own biography! That is, I believe in the power and import of the scriptures in our lives as believers and the potential of the teachings of Jesus to create a world where things are “on earth as it is in heaven.” Furthermore, I think that the vocabulary of the scriptures is simply beautiful and it connects us to a tradition that goes back thousands of years. However, when I am writing to a scientific audience, I use a different voice and register, which does not include appeals to scriptural authority or Biblical references. I like to think of Paul’s line about being “all things to all people.”
But there is another side to the use of Biblical language – we can use the power of the scripture and the fact that people do, understandably and legitimately, want to follow the teachings of Christ to hoodwink them by baptizing bad behavior with spiritual sounding language. People say “abundant life” and mean “participating in deliverance ministries countering demons” or they say “love so and so” and then the action is to… not offer that same person hospitality. Words have meanings and obfuscating them by using scriptural language to literally sanctify behavior that is harmful, such as when Emerson Eggerichs edited scripture to make his point seem more scriptural in Love and Respect, is abhorrent.
When Jesus was confronted by the Syrophoenician woman, he didn’t hem and haw and go on about how he was God in the flesh and therefore her argument was invalid. Instead, he altered his behavior because she made a good argument. That’s the kind of fruit I hope to display in my life as a person writing about the work and teachings of Christ and how the impact our lives today. As James said, “not many of you should presume to be teachers, because you know that you who teach will be judged more strictly.” That is to say, “your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus” aka I am not hoping for anything more than Christ himself did.
Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life
If Jesus lived today, I don’t think that he would be a statistics professor. But I also don’t think he would not be a statistics professor. In fact, I think he’d be pretty into using mixed methods research to dig into difficult topics. Why do I think that?
On earth, Jesus was all about exposing the lies that underpin our actions and attitudes. That’s why he talked about specks and logs.
- Jesus was all about ensuring that his followers showed integrity, measuring themselves against the same standard they measured others, which is why he talked about not judging lest you also be judged with the same standards.
- Jesus was all about exposing that *actual* state of affairs, which is why he talked about casting pearls before pigs.
- Jesus was all about leaning on the everlasting arms while also being “shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves.”
Jesus was AND IS the Truth.
Statistics are a way for us to get at truth, to measure things accurately. You can’t know if you’re a wise man who built his house on the rock or a foolish man who built his house on the sand unless you can identify what is a rock and what is the sand.
Right now I’m mucking around with some very fun statistics, beyond my usual bread and butter of regressions. (Say a prayer for my computer’s RAM. She is sad that I keep asking her to calculate class means in my latent class analysis.)
And the reason that I care so much about this is that if we want to see truth, we should use all of the means at our disposal and seek to find truth. Statistics and rigorous scientific methods are good gifts that we can use to do that.
Following Jesus means pursuing truth, because Jesus is the truth.
Now that can be scary, because if I actually follow the truth wherever it leads, I might end up somewhere uncomfortable. I might have to deal with the underlying realities of the world (environmental degradation, the use of sweatshop labor to make clothing, etc.) One of the great tools of the modern world in creating suffering is simply hiding it so that we don’t see the brutality. Statistics allow us to tell the truth, as best as we can and with limitations that we state (again, we come back to integrity) and to reveal what is. Now, that is scary, because there can be surprises and things we did not expect.
But if we’re pursuing Christ we are pursuing truth and if we are pursuing truth we are pursuing Christ. And so we do not need to be frightened.
Overall, I just want Christianity to live up to its marketing material.
I want the church to embrace the ACTUAL abundant life in Christ. I want our lives to be characterized by relationships in which we can trust each other, where we “spur one another on towards love and good deeds.” And we measure that using fruit, largely including evidence of the fruit of the spirit in the lives of those who claim Christ.
I just don’t see what is so controversial about that.
In the sermon on the Mount as recounted in Luke, Jesus says
“No one lights a lamp and hides it in a clay jar or puts it under a bed. Instead, they put it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light. For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Therefore consider carefully how you listen.”
May we all consider carefully how we listen.
Last Thursday, after the podcast, there was an extended discussion in the comments section about whether or not the “fruit” that Jesus referred to could be referring to the fruit of the teacher’s life. I think amazing arguments were made on both sides, and I agree that it is likely both.
But I’m still inclined to think that the fruit that matters most is outcome, because of the story of the rest of Scripture and the emphasis on protecting the vulnerable. I’d also agree that even if you measure by the teacher’s character, these teachers would fail, as we’ll talk about in tomorrow’s podcast looking at whether there has been any accountability for teaching wrong things.
I want to highlight one comment by Kristy, but many were amazing and I encourage you to read the discussion.
Matthew 7:15 warns that these false teachers will come to us “in sheep’s clothing.” In other words, they will appear to be “good Christians” (sheep). Jesus is warning us that we won’t be able to tell whether they are good teachers or false teachers by looking at THEM.
Besides, how long does it take for the truth about the teacher’s personal lives to come out? Often, many years, Sometimes never. And in the meantime, people trust them because they appear to be “sheep.” So Jesus is warning us not to look at the teacher, but at the outcome of his or her teachings. Since many false teachers will come to us in sheep’s clothing, we absolutely need a way to identify them other than by looking at those teachers themselves and their very well-disguised outward appearances.
We need to separate the teacher from the teachings. Every one of us sins, and the presence of sin in a teacher’s life does not necessarily mean that his or her teachings were false (as you seem to be pointing out about Philip Yancey); nor does the relative absence of sin mean that a teacher’s teachings are true (as is the case with so many Evangelical authors). Even sincere and godly Christians can sometimes be mistaken. So how would it help if we could somehow discern a teacher’s character accurately? The teacher is not the teaching. Focusing on the character of the teacher is of little help in discerning whether or not to trust his or her teachings. And it is the teaching that actually impacts us, not the teacher. Let’s be careful not to fall into the trap of venerating celebrity preachers and teachers, something Evangelicals are particularly prone to do. We tend to think, “Oh, this person is a good Christian, and therefore whatever he or she says must be true.” This is dangerous. And this is the reason Jesus warns us not to look at the teacher (the tree, the seeming “sheep”) but at his/her teachings and their outcomes (the fruit).
Even the apostle Peter, surely a true “sheep” and a godly man, had at least one wrong teaching, and when he began discriminating against gentile Christians, Paul took him to task and set him straight. Again, we need to look at the teachings, not the teacher. Both Peter and Paul had good characters. But even the best of us get it wrong sometimes, so testing the teacher (even if such a thing were possible when only God knows our inmost hearts) is useless in determining whether or not to accept what he or she teaches. And what are we to do then when two (or more) sincere, godly Christians teach opposing things (as Sheila and her team are teaching different things from so many Evangelical authors)? We are in another Peter/Paul scenario. Are we truly supposed to pit the teachers against one another to try to determine who has the better character and then believe that person? How preposterous, and how ugly! We are supposed to recognize that it is not about the teacher. Jesus wants us to test the teachings.
Think about what “the fruit of the Spirit” means. It does not mean that the Holy Spirit produces love, joy, peace, etc. within himself. He produces them within us.The way, then, to discern whether or not the Spirit is producing fruit is NOT by looking at what he himself is like, but by looking at what he is supposed to be producing in us, in our lives. And so it is with teachings. We do not judge their truthfulness by the teacher, but by the results of the teaching in our lives.
That is what fruit means. When Jesus asks, “Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?” (Matthew 7:16), he is talking about fruit as something that affects other people. It is not the teacher (the thornbush and the thistle) who picks and eats the good or bad fruit that he himself has produced. It is other people. It is us. His fruit goes out into the world, and we pick it. Whether or not it is good fruit or bad can be seen by whether it makes other people healthy or poisons them. Testing the fruit means looking at its effects on us, its outcomes, just as testing for the fruit of the Spirit means looking for its effects in our lives. We need a way to tell whether or not teachings are of God, and the way to test them is not to test the teacher and his or her character, but, as Jesus says, to test the fruits of those teachings, their outcomes.
Let’s keep the discussion going! Do you think people are judging the tree by the tree? Do you think they’re ignoring that happiness in marriage actually flows from God-honouring actions and attitudes? Let’s talk!
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