When women are vulnerable, abuse can flourish And it's a problem that so much advice to evangelical women today is aimed at making women extremely vulnerable--sexually, financially, relationally. Today we're going to look at how much women are asked to do risky things...
The Emowered Wife is really, really bad. Like horrifically bad. It basically tells women to self-erase and self-censor in order to make husbands have as smooth a ride as possible so that there's no reason for them to feel triggered, so that they'll be nice to you. And...
One of the things we're passionate about on this blog is making sure the advice that is given about marriage and sex in the evangelical world is healthy. Over the last few years, our team has surveyed over 40,000 people, measuring how certain teachings common in the...
Let's look at how specific discipleship materials actually enable marital rape. But first, a bit of background. Last week on my Substack I re-ran a post I wrote a few years ago on this blog about the two kinds of marital rape (here's the Substack post and the original...
How do you actually measure the "good fruit" of marriage teaching? Over the last little while, we've been criticized for saying that it's good fruit if marriages are happy, while ignoring the more important things like whether people are obeying Christ. That's...
Complementarianism is threatened when women see there are alternatives. I've got some quick new findings for you today, and then some birthday reflections I had yesterday (took the day off to celebrate my 56th birthday, mostly by building new garden beds, which was...
A funny thing happened last week for Mother’s Day. The Gospel Coalition, a rather mainstream evangelical organization founded by the late Tim Keller and having entirely male leadership, published a Facebook post. And what was their message for Mother’s Day? Was it...
Recovery from obligation sex begins with understanding autonomy and consent. It begins with understanding it was never God's will for one person to use someone else's body for their own pleasure/emotional coping mechanism, without consideration of what this was doing...
Yesterday I had a message from a woman being summoned in to defend herself to a toxic elders' board. She had been going to a very hierarchical, controlling church and had realized it wasn't healthy and had decided to take her family and go elsewhere. The elders' board...
Another Duggar son has been charged with sexually abusing a child. This time it’s Joseph Duggar, the seventh born and third son. (I wrote this piece before news broke that his wife Kendra has also been charged with 4 counts of false imprisonment, among other things....
With thanks to Zondervan and the book To Heal or Harm for sponsoring this post.My husband Keith is in the middle of a 4-part series about why complementarianism has such bad outcomes. He started last week looking at the analogy that complementarians often use when...
Thank you to Zondervan and the book To Heal or Harm for sponsoring this post Often when we point out advice is harmful people respond with "but it's not meant for abusive marriages!" The implication is that those who are abused should realize that this book or video...
How did we get to the point where Scripture is so easily weaponized? Thank you to Zondervan for sponsoring this post. I mean, I suppose it always has been. That's one of the things Jesus railed against the religious leaders for, and that the prophets railed against...
How did people fall for Love & Respect? Emerson Eggerichs' 2004 best-selling marriage book is honestly one of the worst books I've ever read. It's badly researched. It messed up stats. It states bizarre opinions as if they are common sense. It gets the Bible...
It's impossible for Emerson Eggerichs' ideas in Love & Respect to work in practice. Because what he tells men to do and what he tells women to do are completely and utterly mutually exclusive. So something will have to give. And in Eggerichs' world, that's always...