Have you ever felt uncomfortable with the treatment of women in the Old Testament? I was recently sent a note from a woman that said this:I've been really seriously struggling as I've been leaving the evangelical church recently and what has spurred a lot of this on...
We have a crisis of abuse in the evangelical church. It's hard to get exact numbers on it, but it seems as if marital abuse is just as high in evangelical circles as it is in the general population--BUT (and this is an important BUT) evangelical women take longer to...
Evangelicals have a horrible history of blaming rape victims. We saw it during purity culture where losing your virginity--whether consensually or non-consensually--was lumped into the same category as being "impure." We saw it in Eric and Leslie Ludy's book When God...
Mainline Christians are salt of the earth people. Ever noticed that? They often fill all the volunteer slots at soup kitchens. They do the Christmas and Thanksgiving community giving programs. They volunteer with recent immigrants and refugees. It's often the more...
Today I'm going to intoduce you to Dawn, The Minimal Mom! And there's a story behind it. Dawn has a huge platform where she's shared info, tips, and inspiration for becoming more minimal and oganized to be able to enjoy life more. But along the way she got divorced,...
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...
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....
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...
Jeffrey Epstein apparently found James Dobson useful. TW: I will be talking in generic terms about sexual abuse in this article, and mentioning Jeffrey Epstein. And I will be including several snippets from evangelicals that sexualize little girls. Over the weekend,...
Thank you to Zondervan and the book For the Love of Women for sponsoring this post God isn’t glorified when women stay in marriages where they’re abused Too many women have sat across from church leaders, bruised and broken, only to be told they must "bear their...