“Sure it was harmful–but it was still an improvement!”
Or was it?
That’s the pushback that I often get when I critique evangelical sex and marriage books. I’ll show that the book contains harmful teaching, and people will say, “well, yeah, but it’s still better than what came before!”
This week, as I’ve been talking about the intersection between the cultural phenomenon of Every Man’s Battle and normalizing pastors addressing lust from the pulpit, as the documentary Death of The Pastor’s Wife shows, many in the comments section have been saying that–yes, Every Man’s Battle was bad, but for its time, it was better.
I don’t think so at all.
So let’s start with some definitions:
What counts as an improvement in sex and marriage teaching?
I see teaching as existing on a continuum. At one end is true flourishing, true justice and mutuality, and Jesus-like love. At the other end is the cultural condition we’re in now, which is preventing in some way mutual flourishing, and which is promiting things that don’t look like love.
If a book takes us further along that continuum, towards more justice and righteousness (in Hebrew they’re the same word), more flourishing, and more love, then the book is an improvement.
How does Every Man’s Battle do according to this test?
Does Every Man’s Battle pass the test?
More Justice?
Every Man’s Battle made women the sin management tools for men. Men were told that the way they were to defeat lust was to either “bounce their eyes” from women, which effectively dehumanized all women, while transferring their sexual urges onto their wives, treating their wives as “methadone”, and going to them for “10 bowls of sexual gratification a week” (I’m scared to know what that means). Fail.
More Flourishing?
Every Man’s Battle made intimacy virtually impossible. You cannot be intimate with someone who dehumanizes you. Our study found that believing things like “all men struggle with lust; it’s every man’s battle” artificially lowered women’s libidos, making their sex lives WORSE than they would otherwise have been. The belief also made husbands into worse lovers, since when men believed it, they did less foreplay and were less satisfied with their wives in bed. Fail.
More Jesus-like love?
It is not loving to treat your wife like an object to be used to slake your lusts. Fail.
Now, you could argue that it still could have moved us along the continuum if what was already in the culture was also doing these things, but to a lesser degree, but that simply isn’t the case, and the arguments that people were making in favour of Every Man’s Battle prove this.
People say Every Man’s Battle was an improvement because it let men talk about their lust and not feel so ashamed.
People are admitting that before Every Man’s Battle was written, this was largely not a conversation the church was having. So Every Man’s Battle allowed men to feel like they weren’t alone, they weren’t perverts, this is something others also feel. But is that true? As we showed about Every Young Man’s Battle, a big problem with the book is that it makes young men feel that they are indeed perverts, when prior to reading the book they were nothing of the sort.
Every Young Man’s Battle, directed at teen boys, is one of the most heart-breaking books I have ever read, and the harm it did to a generation of young men cannot be overstated.
You can download our summary of problems with Every Man’s Battle here!
Every Man's Battle
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Those making the argument that this book was an improvement are essentially saying, “sure, it dehumanized women, but now men didn’t feel so ashamed!” Is that a valid argument?
As I was discussing this on Facebook yesterday, many people left wonderful comments addressing this.
In the guise of removing shame, it also removed guilt. And guilt, when you’re doing something wrong, is the correct feeling to have. It replaced the shame of “I am the way I am and I am bad” with “I am the way I am and it’s not going to change.” That’s not an upgrade.
Kind of like women performing obligation sex makes marriage better-when you define “better” as the man is more regulated and his childishness and selfishness have an outlet so he treats people better. Just not better for his wife-who is the other half of the whole marriage!
The philosophy behind Every Man’s Struggle is to accept that men must be kept in perpetual adolescence on a Gerbil Wheel of arousal and obligatory ejaculation either by masturbation assisted by Porn or by using an available female as a masturbatory tool. Instead of teaching men to grow and mature and seek intimacy with the women in their lives using non sexual modalities they encourage remaining in this immature state using sexual release to moderate any difficult emotion or challenge. By excusing the use of P*rnography they are actually changing the chemistry of the brain and making it impossible for men to find satisfaction in the women they have vowed to love, honor and cherish. Scripture tells men to honor the wife of their youth but modern evangelical patriarchy excuses perpetual pursuit of youthful partners. Is it any wonder that we are confronted weekly with the arrest of Pastors and Youth Leaders using their positions of trust to abuse their flock? The day of reckoning is coming. Gray divorce is epidemic as women who have been fed a steady diet of submission realize that the obligatory sex they have been subjected to has left them financially and emotionally destitute. I see the rise of Matriarchy where women expose the lies they have lived by and demand justice within the church and without. Men like Joel Webbon will be the first to fall.
One often seen approach to solving the problem of sin is via asceticism. Basically you take something like gluttony, and then try to avoid the sin of gluttony by suppressing the desire to eat at all. This approach inevitably creates a sense of shame around food – even things which are purely natural and innocent. Eventually thing like merely finding the smell of food enjoyable becomes sin adjacent. This leads to all sorts of screwed up views and attitudes about food.
This is the sort of thing that evangelicals very commonly did with sex before EMB. It lead to all sorts of screwed up ideas about sex and sexual desire. For instance, purely natural biological attraction to women became indistinguishable from the sin of objectifying women. So men constantly felt equal shame for both innocent and evil thoughts. This definitely needed to be corrected.
But EMB did *not* correct this. They instead fully accepted this screwed up view of sex and merely *normalized* it. This helped to reduce the sense of shame, but didn’t do a thing to address the very screwed up ideas around sex. Which means that it normalized the evil along with the innocent. Worse, the author of EMB in fact leaned into explicitly normalizing the evil
So no, EMB didn’t improve a darn thing. It merely justified men’s sense of entitlement around sex that had already been festering in evangelicalism.
“Better” that men felt their shame and guilt alleviated… and then instantly were told that their shame and guilt was the fault of their wives, and their wives owed them anything and everything that could alleviate that shame and guilt.
“He doesn’t feel like such a monster, now that he has been given tacit permission to turn his wife into a sex slave instead of learning to deal with his indoctrinated guilt around normal human sexuality and his natural shame at his lack of self-control and hurting his loved ones!”
That actually sounds worse than him feeling shame and guilt. Before, he had very little reason to actually feel guilty or ashamed, and now, he has sexually abused his own wife without guilt OR shame. Healing from thought crimes to commit actual sex crimes is worse on every conceivable level.
So let’s put Every Man’s Battle in its proper context
It was published in 2000, when porn was very much in the public conversation. There had been a Presidential Task Force on porn in the 1980s. Everyone was concerned about porn DVDs being everywhere, and now the internet was ushering in a whole new age (though high speed internet was still a few years off for most people).
It was the first book that went big in evangelicalism that addressed lust and porn.
But just because it was the first does not mean that it advanced the cause. On the contrary, because it was the first, it largely set the stage for how the evangelical church would talk about lust for the next few decades. And it was completely and utterly wrong.
Again, this isn’t surprising, since the two men who wrote it (Steve Arterburn and Fred Stoeker) were completely unqualified. They have no relevant education or experience or qualifications. They used no peer reviewed research (there’s not a single citation in the book). They were simply self-proclaimed former sex addicts (and given the creepy descriptions of women’s bodies they have throughout the book, which are utterly gratuitous, the “former” part has to be suspect).
In the year 2000, the evangelical world was at a crossroads
In the 1970s and 1980s, many marriage and relationship books were becoming much more egalitarian. In the 1980s, the church was much more egalitarian. The church could have gone towards greater love and mutuality at that point, but instead, by the late 1990s, it was largely doubling down on marriage being about power dynamics with the husband in authority over the wife, and teaching about male entitlement.
None of this was automatic. We could have gone a different way. But the church largely chose power.
In 2001, for instance, Men Are Like Waffles, Women Are Like Spaghetti was published. It completely drilled down on gender roles and ignored mental load, but it did not have authority or power dynamics as part of its teaching. Yet by 2004, we saw Love & Respect and For Women Only being published, which made male entitlement the central focus of the teaching.
His Needs Her Needs was still a best-seller. Power of a Praying Wife was selling like hotcakes. And the evangelical church chose its side–male entitlement and boosting men at the expense of women.
So I am a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin‘s writing – – especially the movie The American President which came out in 1995
In the movie, there’s a quote about leadership that has stayed with me for 30 years, voiced by Lewis Rothschild, who was the character played by Michael J. Fox
“People want leadership. And in the absence of genuine leadership, they will listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone.”
I think that very succinctly sums up what happened in the late 80s in early 90s and in Christian publishing, at large. Every time an author “discovers” a message that no one else is specifically talking about and they write a book about it – – everyone assumes that they must be right…. Because they are the only one speaking.
Put a little bit of a reputation and a few letters behind their name, call them pastor or counselor and suddenly they are an expert.
As we have noticed 100 times over, this was a very dangerous thing to do, and people are still paying for it with their heart and their relationships.
I read “Every Man’s Battle” and told my wife it was SO MUCH WORSE than the teaching I had growing up, from Dobson and others. In my view, it cleared the way for more bad teaching and either echoed or helped bring in some of the more extreme views, like saying women will give account to God for the sin that men committed in their minds that they don’t even know about, due to their “immodesty”. It’s insane what’s out there these days, and it was less common teaching in the 70s and 80s.
No, Every Man’s Battle was not an improvement. It was part of the movement in publishing to usher in the conservative resurgence from the SBC in the 1990s, and ensure that women stayed in their place.
And Every Man’s Battle did that by objectifying and dehumanizing women, and teaching men that their battles with lust were something “every man” faced their whole life, so women expecting faithfulness was women expecting too much.
The church chose this.
The church saw a book that was saying something totally new but also totally harmful, and said, “that sounds about right, because that makes us more comfortable in our views of sex and women, while not challenging us to confront our entitlement.”
By choosing it, they set the stage for churches excusing youth pastors who abuse their students; for pastors like JP Miller preaching about sex as he did and treating his wife as he did; for countless men telling their wives that if they don’t give them oral sex postpartum they’ll cheat on them.
It’s time for the evangelical church to choose something different.
If you haven’t already, please read The Great Sex Rescue where we outline this in detail. And stay tuned for my new book Fawn, where we talk about how this dehumanizing and objectifying view of women as sin management tools created a trauma loop for so many evangelical women!
Every Man's Battle
One Sheet
Everything Harmful with Every Man's Battle Summarized on One Sheet!
Enter your email to get the free printout to share with your friends, family, and pastors
What do you think? Did Every Man’s Battle make things worse? Let’s talk in the comments!
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