Will we ever hear an apology from Dannah Gresh and others?
We’re wrapping up our 3-episode arc on the Bare Marriage podcast this week, looking at how purity culture authors (and others!) are trying to rewrite history to make it seem as if they didn’t say the harmful things they did, and what it would look like for them to have accountability.
Today we look at what Dannah Gresh considers an apology, and how it doesn’t hold water to what she should be doing.
Honestly, I think they won’t listen until their platforms disappear. So we have to make sure that churches and organizations know that we won’t support them if they platform people who did harm and won’t apologize. We have to call the church to more. Too many have been hurt, and healing needs to come–and that can only come when there’s a full accounting of what went wrong.
Also–you will LOVE what Dannah Gresh said about me in the new version of And the Bride Wore White! Listen in–I won’t spoil it!
Or, as always, you can watch on YouTube:
Timeline of the Podcast
00:00:00 Intro: What Does it Look Like to Make Amends?
00:03:41 Carl Lentz: Profiting Off Infidelity & Narrative Defense Mechanisms
00:06:10 Navigating Different Levels of Culpability & Who Actually Needs to Apologize
00:14:44 The Binary Evangelical Mindset: How Salvation Fear Blocks Accountability
00:19:14 Dannah Gresh’s Sofa Anecdote: Crisis Management vs Repentance & Change
00:30:02 Inside a Private Call: Misapplication Defenses & Refusal to Acknowledge Harmful Teachings
00:34:17 Modest is Hottest: When the Message Itself is Traumatic & Problem-Inducing
00:45:19 Sheila’s Hot Takes on the Revised Version of And the Bride Wore White
00:47:12 The Erasure of Consent in Evangelical Self-Help Literature
00:54:08 Dannah’s Reasons for the Rewrite
01:01:03 Weaponizing Footnotes: Debating “The Greatest Critics” Label
01:07:34 What Does it Look Like to Make Amends? Listeners Chime in on True Repentance
01:10:49 Conclusion: Actual Change or a PR Stunt? The Positive Impact of Accountability
Key Talking Points
True repentance requires more than private conversations.
There is a difference between listening to individuals and publicly correcting harmful teaching. When leaders of large religious movements offer personal phone calls to individuals expressing hurt, it often functions more as crisis management than genuine repentance. While personal conversations can be meaningful, when misinformation has reached hundreds of thousands of people, public correction is necessary so the same harm is not repeated.
Binary Salvation Mindsets Block Accountability
Within certain evangelical frameworks, faith is treated as a strict binary—you either believe the exact right things and go to heaven, or you are wrong and face damnation. This subconscious fear makes it incredibly difficult for leaders to admit their past teachings were wrong, as doing so feels like jeopardizing their salvation or admitting they led souls astray.
The “Misapplication” Defense Shift
A common defense among authors of purity culture is claiming that the harm occurred because individuals “misapplied” the rules or lacked the right environment. However, when rules are marketed globally as universal keys to spiritual success, leaders must take responsibility if those very principles inherently foster trauma and fear in a large percentage of followers. This is especially true when literature is written explicitly for vulnerable children and adolescents as a universal prescription for spiritual and sexual integrity. Asserting that text failure is exclusively a reader problem ignores the systemic vulnerabilities baked directly into the material. Leaders must take ownership of the collective fallout.
Culpability Changes with the Internet Age
While leaders from the 1990’s could previously claim they were unaware of the negative impacts of their teachings due to isolated communication channels, our modern internet culture leaves no room for that excuse. With direct access to feedback in comment sections and social platforms, continuing to promote harmful content becomes a willful choice rather than an ignorant mistake.
Modesty Culture is Intrinsically Traumatic
Pushback against purity and modesty movements is frequently dismissed by leaders as an emotional overreaction from previously traumatized individuals. Data and peer-reviewed research suggest otherwise: the modesty frameworks themselves actively cause trauma, distort body image, and statistically increase a person’s vulnerability to abusive dynamics.
Shifting Focus from Internal Misery to Action Steps
Evangelical culture frequently substitutes feeling debased, humiliated, or sad for true action-oriented repentance. True amends do not require a leader to sit in perpetual guilt, but rather demand clear, public recantations of harmful theological points so that future generations are protected from the same mistakes. Don’t just apologize and wallow in guilt – make a real change for the better!
PR Image Management vs. Relational Repentance
True systemic repentance within large-scale ministries requires a transparent step back from the microphone rather than continuous rebranding efforts. When a ministry changes a book’s text under cultural pressure but leaves matching submission quizzes, toxic blog entries, and original digital platforms fully operational online, it reads more as crisis management designed to preserve a publishing platform rather than making lasting structural amends.
Things Mentioned in the Podcast
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LINKS MENTIONED:
- Bare Marriage Episode 290 on Authoritarianism
- The free book The Authoritarians (Includes the quizzes you can take to see where you score!)
- Bare Marriage Facebook Page
- She Deserves Better
- The Whole Story resource for parents
What has your takeaway from these three podcasts been? Why do you think they won’t apologize? What did you think of what Gresh said about me? Let’s talk in the comments!
Transcript
Coming soon!
How can they apologize when They Can Do No Wrong?
There will never be an apology with them. They can’t admit that they were wrong—ever. If they admit they were wrong in one thing/area, that might mean they could be wrong in another thing/area and they can’t have that. (Slippery slope—just not in the way they always preached to us. )
They are protecting their brand. Too much money is at risk if they apologize.
I really appreciate the sentiment that a genuine apology doesn’t benefit the person apologizing. It clarified some things for me about a past experience where a pastor unnecessarily lost his temper with my husband, came back and offered what we thought was a sincere apology, then used it as a sermon illustration the very next Sunday to paint himself as the humble hero without being specific in what exactly he’d said that was so out-of-line. It left a bad taste in my mouth, I think exactly for this reason, that he was using it to his advantage.
Wow, that’s definitely icky. Even if he meant what he said in the moment, the fact that he used it for his own purposes later shows the hollowness behind the sentiment. When this kind of behavior is scaled up in the form of massive social media followings and book deals, it’s even more glaringly self-serving.
I’ve listened to the whole series, and one of the oddest things is Dana Gresh’s desire to make a phone call to people who have a problem with her — and what? Apparently try to smooth it over?
And then it finally dawned on me why she might do that. Is it a Matthew 18 thing for her?
She’s been called out for her damaging messages, and she feels that she must meet with individuals privately. But Matthew 18 does not apply to people who have giant platforms and are giving bad advice. That’s for one-on-one sins. People preaching the wrong message need to be de-platformed until they publicly confess in detail, identify the inaccuracies in their teaching, and start teaching the health thing. Yet that’s not what’s happening here.
Excellent point, Gretchen.
Private meetings don’t always work as demonstrated by the letter that was shared during the podcast. The apologies, if they happen, are usually lame or not at all. In many instances, so much damage has occurred because of the teaching, the apology seems too little too late.
Rebecca, I loved your rat poison illustration. It is very true in relationship to bad teachings.
Besides, private apologies won’t change the book or sermon or video material. The book has been printed and distributed. People have bought it or downloaded it or borrowed it from the library. The videos have been posted on YouTube. The sermons or seminars have been held, and people have listened to them.
No matter how heartfelt or sincere the apology may be, it won’t change the fact that the material is out there and has got a life of its own. Words have got wings, so to speak.
Conservative evangelical culture puts a ton of focus on personal sins while ignoring systemic and institutional harm and oppression. It’s the same attitude that leads them to feel good about charitable giving while supporting policies that make charity necessary. The powers that be want us focused on the small things so we are constantly putting out the fires that they’re starting.
The problem isn’t just that a house is burning. The problem is that the house was made to be flammable, the resources to put out the fire are inadequate and inequitably distributed, and that wealthy people whose houses will never be at risk are both making it so that more fires start and profiting off of the damage control.
Forgive me if I took the allegory too far. I am just so frustrated by this stuff.
Navel-gazing Sin-Sniffing, just like all those Massachusetts Puritan Journals.
With Jesus demoted to only a Postmortem Fire Escape.
(Unless you count Revenge Jesus the Punisher from Left Behind et al…)
I like that extension of the allegory, actually! I think it fits.
Absolutely! I think it’s a way for her to practice self-flaggelation and be seen as making amends without having to actually do anything.
It may not be the dynamic at play here but I have a female associate pastor who has a knack for discoursing with individuals whom she has hurt and, in her ” listening,” she turns the tables; it all becomes about explaining why the *other person* is at fault and *she* is actually the injured party.
I don’t necessarily believe she has ill intent, but these tactics may have been a learned behavior. It is a behavior she needs to unlearn.
Perhaps Ms. Gresh has learned to turn the tables on the victim based on those whom she looked up to (possibly men in the church?)
I’m a bit surprised by the way you guys downplayed the influence of social media personalities. After all, they are called influencers for a reason.
I definitely understand and agree that there’s a difference between profitable institutions lending credence to a message and someone posting content on the internet. But nowadays that has a wider reach and stronger influence among young people than media conglomerates, mega church speaking tours, or publishing companies. Each individual content creator might not have the same power as say Focus on the Family, but as a social media movement carrying the torch of such institutional harm, they still do a ton of damage. And many of them don’t even care if they help or hurt people. They’re just trying to make money off of engagement.
Of course there needs to be an emphasis on personal responsibility to practice media literacy and critical thinking skills, but we are experiencing a very concerning epidemic regarding those very things. It’s not as simple as saying people should just scroll away. Yes, people *should* know better, but many just don’t. And acting as though that’s a personal failure instead of a systemic issue that is going to take a lot of work to remedy is not super helpful.
All that aside, however, I did really enjoy the bulk of this episode and am always grateful for the work you all do.
Yeah, we really truly struggle with this. We don’t want to be bullies online to people who are just parroting what they are taught. I think Savannah Stone is an interesting case; I wasn’t originally going to touch her, but now that she’s speaking for TPUSA, I think it’s different.
One of “the greatest critics of the churches teaching on sex”! Wow! I didn’t know that Dannah Gresh’s teaching about sex were directly taken from the Bible or the historical church.
I have never read Dannah Gresh and I’m not sure what her credentials are, but I get a little tired of people who are not biblical scholars or theologians claiming that their ignorant commentary on the Bible is sound biblical teaching. Don’t get me wrong, biblical scholars and theologians can get it wrong too sometimes and I also get tired of their lack of humility as they claim that their own reading of the Bible is correct and those who disagree are wrong, but at least to some degree they understand how to read and study the Bible and they have made it their lives work to do so. I get so aggravated by the ignorant pride of people who just assume that God and the church (not their church, but THE CHURCH) are on their side without really studying Bible or church history to verify such.