The strangest thing about watching Netflix’s Death of a Pastor’s Wife is how familiar it all feels.
Our family has been attending an Anglican Church since COVID ended. We haven’t been in a typical evangelical church for over 7 years. We left because of trauma and grief about how the church has ignored the injustice of the way women have been treated.
Yet I felt, watching the documentary, that Hollywood had learned the secret language that evangelicals share. They had uncovered what makes us feel safe, and what makes us stay, even in churches that are toxic under the surface.
It’s the fact that in a church of just a few hundred, there will be enough musical talent that you will feel like you’re at this amazing concert.
It’s little children running around after the service and crawling on the stage and playing with the drums.
It’s the row of ladies lining up beside the serving tables and the coffee urns to receive their thanks for volunteering at the ladies’ tea.
It’s that you can call your pastor when there’s a medical emergency, and someone will come.
It’s feeling like you are truly, honestly, worshiping Jesus together with the people who matter most to you.
It’s all the things that make you feel like a family.
And I still mourn and grieve so many of these elements.
Yet I can never go back, and the Netflix documentary Death of a Pastor’s Wife shows why.
I renewed my Netflix subscriptionjust to watch Death of a Pastor’s Wife. So many people were tagging me in posts about it and sending me questions about it, I thought I had better watch, even though I’m not on the Netflix part of my yearly roster right now (I subscribe to streaming services one at a time, watch everything I want, and then move on to the next one so I’m not paying for everything all at once. Right now is Apple TV, not Netflix!)
I’d like to share a few thoughts I’ve had
I shared this first on Substack last Friday, but I want it here for posterity too!
I remember when Mica Miller died two years ago. I watched the clips of JP Miller’s sermons, talking about how women owe their husbands sex, with horror. I read about how he deliberately leaked her nude photos online, and about how she had posted videos about the abuse she was suffering from. I read about how he groomed her since she was thirteen years old.
None of that was a surprise. But what emotionally hits is two things I want to talk about: (1) the dangerous intersection of Every Man’s Battle theology, and (2) the evangelical reliance on charisma.
Every Man’s Battle redefined battling with lust as being of good character
Every Man’s Battle hit Christian bookstores in 2000, and sold like wildfire. The book turned into a franchise that has sold more than 4,000,000 copies. It was based on one simple premise: all men struggle with lust, and they do so because that is the way God made them.
And the solution that is offered to lust? Men “bounce their eyes” from women (which is still objectifying, because whether you’re lusting after her or deliberately refusing to look at her, you’re still seeing her as a collection of body parts rather than a person), or you treat your wife like a “merciful vial of methadone” (their words) and transfer all your sexual energy to her, going to her for “10 bowls of sexual gratification a week.” (they never define what a bowl of sexual gratification is. Perhaps we should be grateful.)
Every Man’s Battle was written by Fred Stoeker and Steve Arterburn, two men who have absolutely no credentials to be writing about sexual struggles or getting over such struggles. They are not counselors or psychologists. They are not social scientists. And they have ZERO citations in their book.
Their only qualifications are simple: They are both self-proclaimed former sex addicts.
That’s it.
And the evangelical church allowed them to speak for “all men.”
I have written at length on the problems with Every Man’s Battle, and its offshot Every Young Man’s Battle (which is infinitely worse, and left me in tears). It features prominently in our book The Great Sex Rescue. You can download a one-page info sheet on the problems with it here.
But what this book did was it turned men talking about their struggles with lust into something that we should applaud, not judge.
It turned using your wife as methadone for your lusts as something moral, a sign of good character, rather than a sign that you hadn’t discipled your sexuality and that you were not renewed, and showed no fruits of the Spirit.
It turned your wife into a sin management tool, and if she refused to be used as a masturbatory aid to slake his lusts, she was the one sinning against God.
The expectation that a man could see a woman as a whole person and respect her as such was simply erased from popular consciousness. Any man who said he could do this was lying, as Mark Driscoll recently said in a reel. Growing in self-control so that you saw women as sisters in Christ was suspect; getting up in the pulpit and announcing you lusted after everything that moved and had a hard time when 12-year-olds wore tight sweaters became a sign that you were in touch with the Holy Spirit.
Enter JP Miller
Mica Miller’s husband JP was a charismatic, attractive pastor that, from Mica’s accounts, degraded her sexually, pressuring her to take testosterone to keep up with his sex drive; giving homeless people money to use his wife sexually while he watched; demanding she have sex with him four or five times a day, and refusing to let her sleep if she didn’t.
The congregation didn’t know this part of their life.
What they did know was that JP Miller “had an affair” (it was actually clergy sexual abuse) with Mica while he was still married to his first wife. They knew there was a 15-year age gap, and that Mica was barely in her 20s, and that the Pastor had been close to her since her early teens.
They knew he then married Mica.
And they knew that his favourite thing to preach about was how wives had to satisfy their husband’s sexual urges.
The creepiest part of the documentary is listening to this man’s disgusting sermons, and watching the backs of the heads of the congregation members just sitting there as he misquotes 1 Corinthians 7. Repeatedy he claims that 1 Corinthians 7:3 says “do not refuse your spouse”, even though it does not. It says “do not deprive,” and those are not the same thing.
In his sermons, he completely eliminates the idea of consent in marriage, giving the most blatant examples of what we have deemed the “obligation sex message” that I have ever heard. When we measured this obligation sex message in our survey of 20,000 women for The Great Sex Rescue, we found this to be one of the most destructive messages. It lowered women’s libidos, orgasm rates, and marital satisfaction, but most importantly it’s one of the big contributors to the fact that evangelical women suffer sexual pain disorders at twice the rate of the general population.
What was so sad was hearing Mica’s friends who were interviewed in the documentary speaking as if what JP taught was biblical, he just took it too far. They didn’t even realize, even now after all that has happened, that JP was not teaching what was biblical at all. They still think he was actually right about the Bible, just wrong about how he treated Mica. They don’t see how the one leads to the other.
How did JP manage to hoodwink so many?
One of the saddest parts of the first two episodes is when JP announces that his wife has left him and is undergoing a psychotic episode, but that he wouldn’t allow this to derail what Jesus is doing in the church—and the church gives him a standing ovation.
That church was filled with people who knew Mica. She had been front and centre leading worship for years. She had been active in women’s ministry; she had welcomed newcomers and taken time to get to know them; she had invested in people’s lives in a way that JP never did. But when he announces that she has left him, instead of questioning why, they all applaud him. Hundreds of people stood up to give this degraded, disgusting abuser a standing ovation.
How did this happen? I think it is something inherent in evangelical churches that I’m not sure can be fixed. I think it’s one of the reasons that liturgical churches are growing because they are not as prone to this. But it comes down to this:
Evangelicalism rewards charisma over character
The story of JP Miller’s church is one of rewarding those with charisma and talent over those with maturity and character.
JP played piano incredibly well, and he announces at a young age that he wants to preach. And so the church lets him, and he becomes their pastor at a very young age. But there is no consideration whether he actually has the character for this. There is only the fact that he can mesmerize a crowd.
Even Mica, as lovely and in love with Jesus as she is, should never have been given the roles she had at the tender age of 16. Sure she could sing, but why is she actually leading the praise team? Why is she not being mentored, discipled, cared for, rather than thrust into the position as if she is a mature believer?
Why did the church stay with JP after he admitted to the “affair” (clergy sex abuse) with Mica when he was still married to his first wife?
Because charisma was more important than character, and Every Man’s Battle had turned public confessions of battles with lust into a sign of good character.
Why did the church stay with JP after Mica left him?
Because charisma was more important than character.
Evangelical churches tend to revolve around a pastor. When you can find a charismatic, relatively young, good looking pastor, it can make it seem like your church is “hip.” Like it’s somewhere that everybody should want to be. And so the church starts to grow.
But character is missing. And I don’t know how we can bring back character when the church service itself so relies on charisma to keep people coming through the door.
I think it’s why we need a return to liturgy, more of a focus on Scripture, and less on a sermon.
Cultural evangelicalism has eroded character.
And it’s done it at the expense of women.
Every man’s battle swayed an entire generation to think that when a man complains that he’s finding a 14-year-old’s sweater distracting during a service, that man is being righteous, rather than that man is showing serious predatory vibes and we need to keep him away from children.
Every man’s battle taught us that the way men defeat lust is that women do their part, and if a man falls, it’s because a woman, somewhere, messed up. Either a woman dressed too immodestly, or a wife didn’t give enough oral sex (Remember Mark Driscoll telling women they should get on their knees and repent of not giving oral sex?)
Every man’s battle taught us that we as women can’t expect to be treated with respect, because God wired men to visually lust after women.
Every man’s battle taught us that while women love God, women should never expect to be safe in church. And we need to just realize that God wired men to be unsafe.
And then, when predators like Miller start giving all the signs that they are dangerous, we don’t pick up on them, because they’ve all been so normalized.
We’ve forgotten what true character is.
And so we don’t even notice abuse and sexual degradation when it’s right under our noses.
I pray that one day Mica Miller gets justice, and I hope this documentary is the beginning of that. Everyone should watch it just to see how these ideas from Every Man’s Battle have become so pervasive in the church that they don’t even set off red flags anymore.
But I also know that until we confront the lies beneath the every man’s battle idea, we will continue to disciple a new generation into sexual harm, where consent in marriage is eroded, dehumanizing and degrading your wife is normalized, and no woman is truly safe.
Have you watched the documentary yet? What were your takeaways? I’ve been amazed at how surprised the outside world is, when it’s all just so normal to me!
It is really disturbing uow even with books like Outgrow Porn and Surfing for God and Desire and Boundaries for the Soul that the Every Man’s Battle book are still the default.
I think it’s a combination of relying on charisma, and an unwillingness to “rock the boat” unless it is unavoidable. My evangelical church had a lot of underhandedness toward a new children’s director we got, that to my knowledge the pastor never confronted. To be fair, the children’s director has issues herself that I’m not sure if anyone has talked to her about. Plus, our church library had to be moved to a smaller room, forcing us to get rid of books. Sunday school classes shifted locations and the only equally sized room belonged to an elderly class with only 3 people. No one wanted to deal with suggesting the small class move, even if the smaller room was on the same floor and equivalent to their current room other than smaller. I’ve never understood it. I know you will always have some friction whenever you put enough people together in one place. But it’s like things get avoided or ignored until they can’t be anymore.