Sheila Wray Gregoire's Blog, page 9
April 19, 2022
Why Evangelicals Can’t Influence the World about Sex
I’ve been pointing out how we went so very far off track with so much of our messaging in our best-sellers–focusing on men’s satisfaction and ignoring women’s; seeing sex as a female obligation and a male entitlement; prioritizing his needs over hers.
In The Great Sex Rescue, we pointed out that Christians often have just as pornified a view of sex as the world that we criticize: we view women as sex objects; we view men as unable to treat women as anything other than sex objects (Gary Thomas says that God made men to think about sex constantly and to always be ready to seize a sexual opportunity; Every Man’s Battle says that men sin naturally, simply by being male).
Even the “bounce your eyes” solution to lust STILL treats women as sex objects. Either you lust after her, or you ignore her because she’s a threat. In both cases, you see her merely as a collection of body parts (and Every Young Man’s Battle actually talks about women that way–“a pair of boobs walking towards you.”)
I believe the conversation is changing, and for that I am rejoicing greatly.
However, what saddens me is that because evangelicals have gotten sex so wrong, we really have had nothing to say to the world about sex.We are supposed to be salt and light to the world, but we have failed in our task.
In fact, not only have we failed; in many cases the world is far healthier than we are. Our study for The Great Sex Rescue does suggest that non-religious secular women enjoy better sex than evangelical women, with a lower orgasm gap and with higher libidos.
But also the things that we were teaching in The Great Sex Rescue, which were so groundbreaking in evangelicalism, have been largely taught in the secular world for decades. When I was in university we learned about the importance of consent and the problems with the objectification of women. We learned about the problems with only seeing sex from a male perspective. And this was 30 years ago!
We debated how the sexual revolution and the porn culture had merely made it easier to objectify women by putting cultural pressure on women to approach sex the way that many college frat boys did. We debated what sexual liberation really should look like for women; did it mean rampant promiscuity, or did it mean being allowed to figure out what they wanted?
Again, we debated this thirty years ago.
I’ve been reading a book called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
Check it out on Amazon! The central thesis is that evangelicalism became so populist and fundamentalist and “Bible only” that it stopped being able to influence the thinking, the arts, the philosophy of the wider world. It became merely reactionary, and had nothing substantive to say about morality, politics, economics, and even sexuality.
By declaring that the Bible was all that was needed, evangelicalism started looking down on higher learning. And we stopped learning how to engage intellectually with the world. There have been no evangelical Nobel Prize winners; few evangelical Rhodes scholars. Yet this is not true of Catholics or other streams of Protestantism, who have been very active in intellectual life and philosophy.
I’ve been reading a chapter of the book at night, and then during the day working as usual. And so it happened that juxtaposed in my reading was an hour and a half that I took out of my life to listen to one of John D. Street’s graduate level classes on Advanced Biblical Counseling. John Street was one of the ones I fixed in a recent graphic for blaming the rape of a 4-year-old on the fact that the mother hadn’t had enough sex with the stepfather, so he sought “sexual satisfaction” from the young girl instead.
I decided to listen to his series of lectures, and I’m in the middle of his one on sexual deviancy. I was surprised by several things in listening to this lecture:
The level of academic discourse is much lower than I would have expected in a first year university course, let alone a graduate level course.As someone who has lectured in first year university courses, and marked and led tutorials for multiple first and third year courses at a prestigious Canadian university, I will tell you that this lecture was not in the least academic, and did not meet our standards of rigour.
Street portrays almost an idolization of ScriptureHe spends half an hour, for instance, showing how sex was meant to be mutual (at least he said that!) and that it was meant to be in marriage and it was meant for love. All of that could have been said in one sentence, yet he has to prove it with multiple Bible verses, as if one cannot declare “the sky is blue” unless there is a Bible verse for it.
Only if you can proof text it with a Bible verse can something be true. And thus if you cannot proof text it, it must not be true.
This is really the heart of the critique that Mark Noll is making in The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind. It is as if Christians have forgotten that Jesus is the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life. If Jesus is Truth, then study that finds Truth is a worthy pursuit. It points us to learning more of God’s creation.
But if you can only declare something true if you can find a verse that talks about it in the Bible, then you’re very limited in what you can study. And you can’t grow to have a robust intellectual understanding of key things.
Evangelicals display a gnostic strand when we treat the Bible as if it were an esoteric code to be deciphered as a way of obtaining privileged information about the creation of the natural world, the disposition of historical events, or the unfolding of the future. (p. 66)
Proof-texting did not cause great damage so long as the culture as a whole held to general Christian values, but when those general Christian values began to weaken, the weakness in evangelical theologizing–even more, in thinking like a Christian about the world in general–became all too evident. (p. 127)
Mark A. NollThe Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
The only thing that evangelicalism has to offer the world about sex is “don’t do it.”That’s what we’ve been saying for decades–“don’t have sex before marriage.”
But we’ve never really said WHY, because we’ve never answered that question ourselves beyond, “because God said not to.”
We need a Christian view of sexual ethics that goes beyond “don’t do it” and encompasses the sacredness of sex.
The world has been developing its own sexual ethic, and it mostly focuses on the twin goals of personal satisfaction and fulfillment and consent. Both are worthy goals; but alone they fall woefully short of what God made sex to encompass. We need a view of sex that honors the dignity of all persons; that encompasses God’s design for real intimacy, and that understands how that intimacy can be expressed even outside of our sexuality. A view of sex that is rooted in relationship and our personhood.
Catholics have actually been very good at this. I can’t count the number of people who have recommended The Theology of the Body to me, and Christopher West’s work is next for me to read.
But evangelicalism’s anti-science bent and our anti-intellectualism, as well as our conceit (if I may say it so boldly) in thinking that our graduate school courses are at all analagous to the rigour that is found in top-notch secular institutions, is keeping us from being salt and light in this crucial area.
Quite frankly, if the church wants to reach the world, we need to get our act together.Normally when that is said in a sermon the pastor is referring to repentance and becoming holier.
But that’s not what I mean (though those are worthy goals too). We need to start engaging real arguments. We need to get our own view of sex right, and then we need to figure out how to articulate it to ourselves so that we can start influencing the world. Yelling “don’t do it because the Bible says so” doesn’t work, and it’s insulting. Explaining WHY God created sex the way He did is a worthy and important intellectual pursuit.
I hope that evangelicals will start embracing it.
What if you're NOT the problem with your sex life?What if the messages that you've been taught have messed things up--and what if there's a way to escape these toxic teachings?
It's time for a Great Sex Rescue. Buy it on Amazon! Where Else Can I Buy It?
What do you think? Have we lost our influence in the world when it comes to sex? Let’s talk in the comments!
Sheila Wray Gregoire Founder of To Love, Honor and Vacuum
Sheila is determined to help Christians find BIBLICAL, HEALTHY, EVIDENCE-BASED help for their marriage. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8 FacebookTwitter Related Posts Biblical Counseling and Horrid Perspectives on Abuse: How Did Things Go So Wrong?Apr 11, 2022 | 146 Comments
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The post Why Evangelicals Can’t Influence the World about Sex appeared first on To Love, Honor and Vacuum.
April 14, 2022
PODCAST: The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible–and Research! Feat. Mary DeMuth
We’ve got Joanna visiting, so we’ve recorded a whole bunch of segments about how not to misuse research!
Plus today Mary DeMuth joins us to talk about her new book The Most Misunderstood Women in the Bible.
Browse all the Different Podcasts
See the Last “Start Your Engines” (Men’s) Podcast
Or, as always, you can watch on YouTube:
Timeline of the Podcast0:10 You can support us!
5:00 Gender research mistakes
14:00 Did God just make it that way?
21:00 Distinction between averages and specific couples
25:30 A false default
30:00 Mary joins to discuss misunderstood women in the Bible!
32:30 Hagar, Bathsheba, and Phoebe
43:30 On being misunderstood
54:00 Happy Easter!
We started out with some of the issues that evangelicals have with gendered research, such as:
1. Assuming gender differences without asking both gendersA great example of this is Love & Respect which used Shaunti Feldhahn’s badly worded survey question to say that men prefer respect–but then they never asked women. They just assumed women want love.
2. Assuming gender differences mean that God designed it that wayWhen really it could just be culture!
3. Talking as if a gender difference trend means a gender absoluteWe need to remember bell curves! Just because men are taller than women does not mean that an individual man is taller than an individual woman.
4. Taking the male experience as the standard.We’ve talked a lot in The Great Sex Rescue about how often it’s assumed that because sex is easy for guys, they’re more sexual than women. But that’s not the case.
Joanna will be back on some upcoming podcasts as the three of us talk about more misuses of research and misunderstandings of research that we’ve seen in the evangelical world.
What if you're NOT the problem with your sex life?What if the messages that you've been taught have messed things up--and what if there's a way to escape these toxic teachings?
It's time for a Great Sex Rescue. Buy it on Amazon! Where Else Can I Buy It? The Most Misunderstood Women of the BibleMary DeMuth is an author or more than forty books, a podcaster at PRAY EVERY DAY, an artist, and a literary agent with a passion for the Lord.
The most compelling books come out of personal experience, and no one shares her life more openly than Mary. In The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible: What Their Stories Teach Us About Thriving, Mary draws readers in at the very beginning to transparently share her own connection to being misunderstood. Combining her gift for storytelling, and her scholarly skills, she looks at the lives of misunderstood biblical women we may have skipped over—women like Eve, Bathsheba, Tamar, The Proverbs 31 Woman, and Mary of Magdala among others, women, not so different from ourselves.
What if we could step into the lives of these women and learn something from their stories? What if readers began to gather hope and learn a better way to work through being misunderstood. How would that change women’s lives?
I had a chance to ask Mary about some of my favourite women in the Bible, why she thought they were misunderstood, and who else she would have liked to include. This book would make an awesome study for a small group.
See it on Amazon! Support this Podcast with Knix Bras!I love Knix bras. Like seriously love them. They fit amazingly well; they're so comfortable. They look better than my underwire bras, but there is no underwire! I bought three over Christmas and NEVER wear my underwire ones anymore.
I'm an affiliate for Knix, and when you buy their bras or underwear or clothing I get a percentage. I want to make enough to start paying to transcribe this podcast! And I'm only promoting stuff I absolutely love myself.
Check them out in the U.S.! Check them out in Canada! Things Mentioned in This Podcast:Join our Patreon for as little as $5 a month! Get access to an awesome Facebook group, unfiltered podcasts, exclusive merch, and more!Knix Bras: See Knix in the U.S. or Knix in CanadaFind Mary DeMuth at her website or on Twitter, and find The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible!Our podcast on the problems with the original Love & Respect questionThe podcast with the problems with For Young Women Only’s question on 82% of boys going too far, and our post fixing that questionThe Podcast exploring the problems with misusing neuroscience researchThe Great Sex Rescue
Sheila Wray Gregoire Founder of To Love, Honor and Vacuum
Sheila is determined to help Christians find BIBLICAL, HEALTHY, EVIDENCE-BASED help for their marriage. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8 FacebookTwitter Related Posts Out of a Bill Gothard Cult, and Finding Jesus: Podcast with Emily Elizabeth AndersonApr 7, 2022 | 27 Comments
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The post PODCAST: The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible–and Research! Feat. Mary DeMuth appeared first on To Love, Honor and Vacuum.
April 13, 2022
4 Concerns I Have with Biblical Counseling
It eschews psychology and “secular” research, and focuses on using the Bible to counsel people.
Many Christian counselors are not biblical counselors. To become a counselor you can use, in general, four routes:
Four Types of Counseling Christians DoBiblical Counseling: Unlicensed counselors who use the Bible alone. They often focus on advising clients what changes they must make.Pastoral Counseling: General counseling that incorporates many psychology findings, but is limited in scope to allow pastors to do some basic counselingIntegrated Licensed Counseling: Training in integrating your faith and psychology and evidence-based therapies to help people. They do not tell clients what to do but rather give them tools to think through their situation.Licensed Counseling: Training in evidence-based therapies and psychology without a faith component. Again, they do not tell clients what to do.Licensed counselors could include Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists (LMFT); Licensed Clinical Social Workers (LCSW); Licensed Clinical Pyschologists, and other professions that include licensure.
The term “biblical counselors” does not encompass all Christian counselors.
I know that biblical counselors go into counseling because they love Jesus and want to help people.For the vast majority of biblical counselors, the intent is pure and good.
However, that does not mean that the results are necessarily pure and good.
On this blog, I tend to avoid controversial subjects that aren’t directly related to sex or marriage because I’m already controversial enough; I don’t want to turn people away about things that aren’t central to my main subjects.
When it comes to biblical counseling, then, I would prefer not to talk about it. I know that this topic is really hurtful for many biblical counselors. Nevertheless, this does directly relate to how we handle sex and marriage in the church, because in doing our research for our books, we heard so many stories of people who received very well-meaning but ultimately harmful counseling from biblical counselors.
I’m hoping that by raising these issues we can raise awareness of the different types of counseling, and help people “stay in their lane”, so to speak.
With that, I’d like to share my four concerns about biblical counseling.Yesterday on my Facebook post about this so many people shared great points and great stories, and I’ll incorporate these where they fit.
1. Biblical counseling can too often fail to define the problem appropriatelyBiblical counseling tends to see all issues through the lens of “what can this person do differently or think differently to get in line with Christ?” The focus then is on fixing the person who is coming in for counseling.
This is entirely appropriate when the person has guilt from past sin, or when they’re confused about what to do with their life, or when they have general malaise and feel unmotivated in life and they need to work through some things.
In fact, biblical counseling would likely be the BEST course of action when a person needs to be told to repent (something licensed counselors can’t do).
However, I can think of three situations where this isn’t an appropriate approach:
When Biblical Counseling May not Be AppropriateTrauma: When a person has undergone trauma, that “fight, flight, or freeze” response has been triggered and not resolved. This isn’t a sin or faith issue but instead a trauma response issue, and needs proper therapies to help through it. Treating panic attacks or externalizing behaviours or fears that are trauma responses as sin or lack of faith actually exacerbates trauma.Mental Illness: Our brains are organs; they are part of our physical bodies, and they can go wrong. Most biblical counseling programs see spiritual roots to all, or most, mental illnesses.Dysfunctional or Abusive Relationships: Having someone focus on what they should be doing or thinking differently to exhibit the fruits of the Spirit is warranted when they are in fact thinking or acting badly. But in many relationship situations, the fault is not shared Telling a person who is responsible for 10% of the problems that they have to own their stuff and work on themselves rather than identifying a perpetrator and a victim is not a good or safe idea. Sometimes the reason a wife may feel exhausted and depressed is not because she isn’t grateful or submissive, but is instead because she bears all the mental load, her husband ignores her, and she’s forlorn. It’s an entirely appropriate response to the situation.Of course, some biblical counselors would handle all of these situations appropriately!
But the stories that I have heard, and the curriculum that I have seen, tends to raise red flags for me in each of these three categories. I shared a few years ago on the blog about a homework assignment a woman was given when she went to biblical counseling at Harvest Bible Chapel in Chicago for help with her cheating husband. She was told to complete the form 98 Ways I May be Sinning Against My Husband–a checklist I found throughout biblical counseling websites across the United States, which originated from a biblical counseling textbook and is still handed out by a biblical counseling professional development center (while there isn’t an equivalent one for men).
In my post yesterday where I shared commenters’ thoughts about biblical counseling, I shared a comment where one biblical counselor defended her counseling practice, which actually demonstrates the problems I’m talking about. She claimed that they now treat abuse really well. They make sure to get the woman to safety, and then: “we work through any heart issues with her (bitterness, resentment, anxiety, fear, etc).” The problem is that someone escaping abuse is in a trauma recovery situation. She needs trauma therapy. Being told instead that she needs to deal with her bitterness actually exacerbates the trauma.
Let’s hear from some other commenters, most of whom were reacting to #2 and #3 above:Being taught in biblical counselling training from my former church to look at mental health issues through the lens of sin heaped loads guilt on me when I walked through a very dark season several years ago. I now question why some Christian circles find therapy and the like unbiblical when it’s God who gave us that knowledge in the first place. As someone who has been to biblical counseling, with two different counselors, it did so much harm. Grew up in a home and a church that believed much of the way biblical counselors counsel. You need to read the book, “Seeing Depression Through the Eyes of Grace,” by Julie Ganschow. It shows how victims are blamed for being “depressed.” I can’t begin to explain how messed up I am mentally right now. I can’t fully shake what I’ve been taught and told. The struggle is real. Being made to repent for the sin of being repeatedly sexual abused as a child, followed by being sexual assaulted as a young teenager, followed by a couple of rapes as a young woman, has had a detrimental affect and effect on my faith, self-esteem, and mental health, which in turn (funnily enough) has impacted my marriage.
Anytime I have gone for ministry, I have been made to repent repeatedly for sins I didn’t consent to, or commit, but were atrocities committed against me.
And when I am still bound by shame, they blame me for not choosing to “walk in freedom”, failing to see that their insistence on my self-condemnation binds me into toxic shame far more than anything my abusers did to me.
I found it really helpful to go to a LCSW counselor who didn’t have an agenda other than my health, and no emotional involvement other than simple human care. She had professional boundaries and the emotional space to help me process my grief, and all she cared about was my healing.
I didn’t even look for a Biblical counselor but knowing what I know now I’m grateful I didn’t. Honestly any form of spiritual pressure over my depression, anxiety and grief might have sent me into more suicidal ideation.
We also heard from some where the “sin leveling” approach was really harmful–where the approach was assuming that everyone had something to repent of and that reconciliation is always the goal:(TW: description of rape)
“Biblical counseling” advised and encouraged my mother to invite my rapist and his parents into our home for a round table discussion on “why we should keep these two apart going forward so they aren’t tempted to sin again and have sex before marriage”.
At 17yrs old I was forced to sit at a kitchen table with my mother, MY rapist (19), and both his parents for an “open discussion” on what went wrong and how to ensure we didn’t have “unsupervised” contact anymore. The rapist was a school friend of mine that had invited me over to his home to watch a movie while his father was in the other room. After giving me massive amounts of alcohol I blacked out and he proceeded to violently rape me in the bedroom of his parents home and then drove me home and dumped me on my doorstep, drunk. This wasn’t a “sex before marriage” situation. It was rape. Full stop.
There’s not enough money in the world that would ever have me setting foot in another “church” again in my life.
2. Biblical Counselors most likely have little training to adequately know when they are out of their depthEven if biblical counselors are told that they should refer out people with mental illness issues, if they are not trained on the DSM (the manual for identifying mental illnesses and personality disorders and other issues), they often miss these diagnoses.
Anyone who plans to enter into 1-on-1 counseling relationships with congregants is doing them a disservice by not being familiar with actual psychology concepts. This is the core of the problem… pastors with no clinical background are over their heads and don’t know when to tap out… they unintentionally do more harm than good… they recommend things that go directly against researched best practices… you can give help from a secular training background thru a faith based lens, but you cannot give clinical input from a purely faith based background… these are ppl who think depression is a choice and medications are unnecessary and you can pray away your mental health issues… I saw a Christian counselor for several years to deal with depression in my early 20s. A licensed psychologist or social worker would have recognized that I have ADHD. I have every single symptom. It’s obvious. It took a nurse practitioner, who was acting as my PCP, to diagnosis it. I went an extra 6 years without a diagnosis because biblical counselors aren’t trained to recognize the symptoms of neurodiversity.So, there are benefits to both! Licensed counselors are not there to give advice (and certainly can’t do so from a Biblical perspective). But they ARE trained in appropriate treatments and therapeutic interventions for both individual diagnoses and couples counseling.
If an individual or a couple are specifically seeking Biblical guidance, they’re not going to find that from a licensed counselor. They literally cannot find that because it is inappropriate for a licensed counselor to provide biblical guidance.
There is, and should be, room for both. A licensed counselor is going to say “what feels right for you?” And a Biblical counselor is going to ask “what actions will glorify God in your life?”
The problem is when Biblical counselors practice outside of their scope and can’t identify (or don’t care) when there are deeper issues at play that require (or at least would benefit from) therapeutic intervention.
I think both have an important role, and the issue, as I’ve seen it, is that a licensed counselor may encourage a client to seek spiritual support if those systems are important to them, whereas a Biblical counselor doesn’t always recognize the importance of actual therapy and think that “just trust God” is a cure-all for actual issues.
3. Biblical counseling too often ignores evidence-based therapiesAlong with that, biblical counseling doesn’t train people in what we know are evidence-based therapies for some maladies. I don’t believe that we need to flee “secular” research. When studies have been done that shows that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or EMDR helps with different conditions, we don’t need to flee them because they aren’t directly in the Bible (though I would argue that 2 Corinthians 10:5–taking every thought captive to Christ–shows CBT perfectly).
Our medical therapies that we use today aren’t in the Bible either, but we don’t flee from them. Jesus is the Truth; He said that we could judge a tree by its fruit. If something has been shown to bear good fruit, we should rejoice in that and embrace it, because it tells us more about how God made us.
4. There’s no guarantee of confidentiality or accountability with biblical counselingFinally, and perhaps most importantly, unlike licensed counselors who have strict ethical guidelines around how they practice and strict guidelines around confidentiality, biblical counseling has none of that.
Yes, there can be bad licensed counselors as well, but as one commenter said:
While it can come down to individual “practitioners” who do the most direct harm, licensure has accountability for those individuals, whereas “biblical counseling” does not. And so often the latter has abusive power structures in place to keep people from turning to other resources when an “individual” “biblical counselor” fails them.
There is actually no guarantee of confidentiality in most biblical counseling situations.
It’s common practice with biblical counselors to require clients to sign consent forms acknowledging that the counselor can share information with the church leadership when the counselor thinks that’s appropriate. (I have an example of a biblical counseling consent form here).
This has been greatly misused in far too many cases (James MacDonald, now disgraced megachurch pastor, used information gleaned in counseling sessions to have power over their congregants, according to various news reports.)
I’ve seen a few biblical counselors and I would never recommend them again- every single one broke confidentiality when to came to speaking to church leadership. I only see licensed professionals now, some are Christian and some aren’t, but they are much safer than those who aren’t held accountable. My biggest issues with the ACBC/nouthetic that flows from Jay Adams, etc., that has permeated some areas of the church, is the lack of confidentiality, the lack of recognition of mental illness/the need for medications sometimes and labelling medical/psychological issues as sin issues. The weaponization of what is shared in counselling with others in leadership at the church, under the guise of the counselling process is frightening, sometimes ending up as part of a discipline process at church. The proliferation of unqualified persons who receive minimal training (and it being the ACBC) is concerning. Having experienced it personally and for my kids at a church in Ontario, I can speak as someone who has witnessed this. We are in a different place and healing, but the damage is hard. And sharing deeply personal things in counselling with people that you attend church with, potentially socializing with , is problematic. That is why seeing a counsellor who you do not know personally, is an important thing for me. My plea to biblical counselorsKeep doing research outside typical biblical counseling fields. Read books that aren’t from biblical counselors (The Body Keeps the Score, about trauma, is a great place to start. I realize that the author was credibly accused of harrassment himself, but the book is filled with wonderful research).
Read some critiques of biblical counseling. Learn to recognize your own limitations and know what you can do and what you shouldn’t do.
Many biblical counselors have become trauma-informed and are well-versed in many of these issues, and do great counseling. But it takes an openness to explore resources outside of your typical professional development.
And, if you’re willing, taking extra courses so that you can qualify for licensure is a very good idea.
My plea to those who want to go into counselingPlease pursue the licensed route. You can still learn how to integrate your faith with counseling when you take counseling at a Christian university through a track heading towards licensure. But remember that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. When we study his creation–including humanity–and make discoveries, we’re pursuing Jesus because we’re learning about Truth. We don’t have to be scared about learning things from outside the Bible. Psychology can teach us so much, and there are so many evidence-based therapies for depression, trauma, relationships, and more.
I know this is an emotional topic for many. I just ask that biblical counselors listen to some of the comments on yesterday’s Facebook post. If you could only see the emails that I get constantly! As Rachael Denhollander, the abuse advocate who was the first to go public about the Larry Nassar gymnastics abuse scandal said, she has yet to meet any trauma survivor who went to a biblical counselor who didn’t emerge more hurt than before. When we treat trauma like a faith issue, we further traumatize the victim.
I know you mean well and you love Jesus. But as this person said:
Biblical counseling made things worse for me after I sought help after leaving a multi-trauma complex abuse situation. The intent seemed kind but it was so damaging.
I know you don’t want to do damage. Nobody does! And that’s what this blog is about: looking at where harm is being done, even if it’s unintentionally, in the Christian church, and calling us to more.
If you have a heart for Jesus and a love for people, you can be an amazing counselor. Just, please, educate yourself on some of these drawbacks, and make sure that you avoid them.
Thank you.
Help me with this one–how can we handle this better? I know that so many biblical counselors feel attacked right now, but I also feel this is vitally important. How can we advocate for the best care in the Christian church? Let’s talk in the comments!
Sheila Wray Gregoire Founder of To Love, Honor and Vacuum
Sheila is determined to help Christians find BIBLICAL, HEALTHY, EVIDENCE-BASED help for their marriage. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8 FacebookTwitter Related Posts Pastor’s Wives Tell All–And More Podcasts!Apr 6, 2022 | 1 Comment
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The post 4 Concerns I Have with Biblical Counseling appeared first on To Love, Honor and Vacuum.
April 12, 2022
Your Thoughts on Biblical Counseling vs. Licensed Counseling
I want to stress that we don’t need to think of biblical counseling vs. secular counseling, because there’s a really good alternative: integrative counseling, where Christians learn all about psychology and evidence-based therapies for anxiety, depression, and trauma, and receive licensing to practice.
Many, many Christian counselors choose the licensing route, becoming Licensed Cliinical Psychologists, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists, Licensed Social Workers, and more. With licensing comes ethical guidelines, including about confidentiality, that one must follow or risk losing one’s license.
Some Christians choose to go the biblical counseling route, which is founded on a belief that the Bible is all one needs to counsel, and is sufficient for handling issues that require counseling.
I understand there are some WONDERFUL biblical counselors, and I know many (Kyle Howard who was on the podcast recently is one). I know others in my personal life. And there is definitely a role for pastoral care and spiritual direction. I don’t want to discourage anyone. It’s just that because being evidence-based and grounded in research is such a strong value of me and my team, i do think that there are some issues with a counseling method which eschews modern psychological research and methods.
I’d like to think about this overnight and then write more about what I think tomorrow, but today I wanted to share some of the comments that came in yesterday across different social media platforms (and there were hundreds!). Some were very interesting, and we all had a great discussion.
First, though, I want to point you to Julie Roys’ most recent podcast about Master’s Seminary.In her podcast, she played clips from John Street, the head of the Biblical Counseling program at Master’s Seminary (run by John MacArthur). Those clips included what we were talking about yesterday, where he said that a stepfather raped his four-year-old stepdaughter because the mother didn’t give him sexual fulfillment. It also includes clips saying that women should endure abuse unless she is about to be killed, because otherwise we’d be hypocritical about missionaries.
It’s an important one, and worth listening to (with major trigger warnings).
Listen to Julie's Podcast here From a Biblical Counselor: It’s not like that anymoreNope, this [about enduring abuse and blaming women for men’s abuse] is not still being taught. I’m currently studying to become a biblical counselor. It is stressed over and over again that every church needs to be prepared with multiple “safe house” families that can take in an abused woman and her children on the spur of the moment if necessary. It is stressed that abuse is against the law in America, so we are obligated to report it to the authorities instead of trying to handle it “in house.” It is stressed that a no-tolerance stance on abuse would be a huge deterrent if more churches would actually start to practice it.
We are taught that women can still grow and become more like Christ in the midst of abusive situations (as in the story of Joseph, what people intend for evil, God uses for good). So after everyone is safe, we work through any heart issues with her (bitterness, resentment, anxiety, fear, etc).
Jay Adams is considered “old school” and outdated by many in the current generation of teachers/counseling fellows. None of his books were on my required reading list for that reason.
My biblical counseling training lectures were actually the first place that I heard teaching from the church that sex is to be pleasurable for BOTH men and women, and that my husband’s one job in sex is to bring me pleasure. It was the first place I heard the “do not deprive” verse talked about for both men and women equally. And this was before your book was even released.
EN Well, I’ve taken many classes for biblical counseling and talked many times about topics like these. Every class where it has come up includes first, protecting the victim, calling the authorities, continued care and protection of the victim and their family…. Those who teach to keep it “in house” or practice that are straight up wrong. JGThat’s wonderful to hear that it’s getting better in many places.
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How Licensed Counseling Differs from Biblical Counseling
I’m a Licensed Professional Counselor, and I earned my Master’s degree at a secular state university. But I offer Christian Counseling, so after graduation I felt I needed more training in what it means to be a *Christian* Counselor. I read books on Biblical Counseling and a version of Biblical Counseling called Theophostic Counseling. As I read about it, I didn’t see how it would help my clients. But at first, I was intimidated by this and wondered if the problem was that I was such a bad Christian Counselor that I didn’t know how to use Biblical Counseling to help my clients. I think for many counselors or potential counselors, like myself, there’s trust that the “experts” teaching this stuff must know what they’re talking about, so if it doesn’t make sense to me or if I disagree, then the problem must be with me.
I never used Biblical counseling and I stuck to the Cognitive-Behavioral and Solution-Focused methods that I had learned in my secular university. It seemed to me that CBT and SFBT worked equally well with Christians and non-Christians, and Christians would naturally bring up faith while using these methods. So that’s what became “Christian Counseling” for me. And after being successful with these methods and growing more confident as I gained experience, I was able to see Biblical Counseling for harmful, unvalidated, snake oil.
JBI am not a therapist but went to an undergrad program for Christian counseling. Toward the end of my years there, they switched to the “biblical counseling” model and it was a drastic change to what I had been taught the first many years. In the beginning we were taught by professors who believed psychology and found a way to integrate that with Christian beliefs. They were all actual licensed therapists. When it switched to biblical counseling none of the professors were licensed or had really any credentials and the one class I had under the new program was a drastic and horrific change. I remember feeling sick during that class as the professor would blame everything on personal sin, even going as far as to say someone with schizophrenia just has unrepentant sin they need to repent of to be healed. I remember thinking this can’t be for real. I suffered through that class to get my degree and was glad to be done. I trashed that book as soon as I was done.
All that to say, I think it is important to understand there are two very different veins of Christian counseling. The very core and training of them are different, they are different methods and not at all the same. I saw first hand the drastic difference. One of my favorite professors who had been there for a decade was ousted for being too “liberal” and he was an amazing, humble man who was very intelligent and he wouldn’t fall in line with the changes to the program. This was 15 years ago and it grieves me that “biblical counseling” has such a hold and following and I know it must be hard to differentiate yourself when all Christian counselors get lumped in with them.
Amy Hilliard I also received so many heartbreaking stories from people yesterday who were seriously hurt by biblical counseling.It was actually quite a hard day. I normally get a lot of difficult DMs in a day, but yesterday there was a flood of them, with heartbreaking stories of being told that they had to forgive their cheating husband, put a line in the sand, and decide never to speak or think of it again or else they were in sin. Stories of being told they had to reconcile with their rapist. And more.
I am not saying that problems do not happen with licensed counselors, but when someone has a license, that means there is also a board where you can report them for malpractice, and they can potentially lose their license. There is no route like this for biblical counselors.
It’s just been a really heavy day processing so much trauma that so many people have been through. I need a day to figure out what I really want to say. I know that people go into counseling because they truly want to help, and like I said–I know some amazing biblical counselors.
But I also have to be evidence based, since that’s what my team and I are about. So I’ll be back tomorrow with more, but in the meantime, please listen to Julie Roys’ podcast to get an idea of the problems I’m talking about.
And now I’ll wrap it up with this about how we got into this mess with abuse.I want to give commenter Sarah O the last word, because I thought this was so insightful, in answer to my question yesterday about how we got here where we blame victims for their own abuse.
I’m going to try and put this gently and also to start off by saying that I have been guilty of this in examples unrelated to this post.
The problem is cowardice.
For abuse to occur, there must be at least two people: a victim and a perpetrator.
And honestly, both Christian and secular resources put 100% of their focus on the victim, because of cowardice.
The victim is far more likely to want help. The victim is far more likely to thank you for your involvement. The victim is far less dangerous to the interloper. You will probably get “cookies” from the victim if you offer compassion and care.
But more than this, abuse completely undermines our deep desire and need to feel that the world is inevitably just, that people are basically good and trying their best – things we HAVE to believe in order to navigate life.
You can almost see a grief process in the terrible abuse responses. “That can’t have happened, such a great person, such a great witness, mustn’t be, or at least can’t be THAT bad.” (denial) “Why are you trying to RUIN this person? Why are you tearing your house down with your own hands? Why won’t you take our advice and shut up?” (anger) “Have you tried not provoking? Not wearing that? Not going there? Giving more? Surely there’s something you can do apart from accountability to resolve this?” (bargaining) “I just don’t know what to do with this. I don’t even think anyone can do anything. I don’t want to hear any more about it.” (depression)
The reality is, if a wolf attacks a sheep, the ONLY thing you can do for the sheep is to fight the wolf. You can’t educate the sheep out of the attack. You can’t comfort the sheep while it’s under attack. You certainly can’t heal the wounds while the wolf is actively biting and clawing. But in fighting back, you aren’t guaranteed costless victory, or victory at all. Sometimes, both you and the sheep get killed. You might lose your job, or your church, or your friends, or your family. And the wolf runs loose anyway.
So that’s what we’re trying to avoid doing so desperately. We do “enough” on abuse so we can say “well, I didn’t do NOTHING”…but we never actually fight the wolf. Because wolves hunt in packs. Wolves are dangerous. And we are hired hands who don’t love the sheep and don’t see them as our own. We love our own selves and our comfortable lives and our secure (but inaccurate) world view far more.
This avoidance comes in a variety of flavors that are the result of other beliefs (Calvinism, misogyny, power-worship, celebrity culture, etc.), but at the end of the day, here’s the test: “what does your organization/program/church do to abusers?”
Most will pivot immediately to the victims and “investigative process” and never actually answer the question (these are looking for cookies, not justice). Others will recommend counsel, support and care (these are protecting their worldview, holding onto faith that the abuser is basically a good, reasonable person and no one would choose to harm someone else because they like to). The upper crust will actually offer real safety and support to the victims.
And a bare, bare few shining examples will recommend transparency and accountability for an abuser. “We report them to the police” “We excommunicate them” “We publicly censure them” All of which, weirdly, churches have absolutely done to victims with no fear of the dreaded law suits. Just not abusers.
Solving for cowardice is hard, but simple. We have to love someone else more than we love ourselves, and to do that we have to be lavishly loved by God. I am not where I used to be, but not where I wish I was on this virtue. For those who are vocationally in the path of victims, let us all pray for them to have great love and great courage.
Sarah OWhat do you think? Let’s talk in the comments!
Sheila Wray Gregoire Founder of To Love, Honor and Vacuum
Sheila is determined to help Christians find BIBLICAL, HEALTHY, EVIDENCE-BASED help for their marriage. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8 FacebookTwitter Related Posts The Math of Love and RespectApr 5, 2022 | 50 Comments
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The post Your Thoughts on Biblical Counseling vs. Licensed Counseling appeared first on To Love, Honor and Vacuum.
April 11, 2022
Biblical Counseling and Horrid Perspectives on Abuse: How Did Things Go So Wrong?
Julie Roys has been doing an expose of how John MacArthur handled counseling Eileen Gray, whose husband was physically and emotionally abusing her children (and later found to be also sexually abusing them). When she went to the church for help because of her husband’s abuse, they told her to reconcile. When she refused and got a restraining order, they put her under church discipline, announced in church services to 8000 people that she was in sin, and excommunicated her.
Her husband later was sentenced to several decades in prison. The church is still supporting the husband over the wife.
Part of the issue in the counseling of Eileen Gray was the nature of the biblical counseling she received.Biblical counseling is NOT the same as going to a Christian counselor. Biblical counseling is a specific field and method of counseling that rejects secular research and psychology and focuses only on the Bible. Emotional problems and relational problems are viewed through the lens of sin or lack of faith. Depression is seen as a lack of faith, rather than potentially a biological condition.
Biblical counselors are not licensed with the state (unlike licensed marriage and family therapists; licensed social workers; or licensed clinical psychologists). They don’t have ethical guidelines they must follow to retain their license. There is no guarantee of confidentiality, and in fact, when seeing a biblical counselor, most churches will require you to sign a consent form to say that the counselor can share your story with pastors or elders if they deem it important to. (This is what happened at James MacDonald’s Harvest Bible Chapel, for instance).
Master’s Seminary and most Southern Baptist Seminaries are now exclusively biblical counseling; Liberty University offers both a licensed track and a biblical counseling track. Other smaller universities also offer biblical counseling training, while many other schools focus on licensed training.
So when I say “biblical counseling”, I’m not saying counseling by a Christian. I’m saying a particular method of counseling that isn’t trauma informed, doesn’t use evidence based therapies, and often focues on gender roles and marriage permanence rather than proper approaches to abuse that keep the victim safe.
I know that there are good biblical counselors who are abuse informed.I have spoken to many and they are wonderful. The problem is that the method of counseling as a whole is very problematic and, as Rachael Denhollander has said, often does more harm than good, especially when abuse is involved. I hope that good biblical counselors will speak up and start demanding that seminaries change how they teach about these issues, and start asking for licensing requirements.
In the process of her investigative report of this incident, Julie started looking into the biblical counseling that is offered at MacArthur’s Master’s Seminary.She focused on John Street, the head of Master’s Seminary biblical counseling program, and published a long article looking at how Street believes women should endure abuse in their marriage for Jesus.
Because of that, Twitter erupted again with the problems of biblical counseling and abuse. I saw some things that really disturbed me, and I made some Fixed It For Yous about them. We’ll start with one where John Street blames a man’s sexual abuse of his 4-year-old stepdaughter on the fact that his wife wasn’t sexually satisfying him:
While this may seem horrid, this is actually in line with what Jay Adams, the founder of biblical counseling, taught about abuse.
One cannot understate the importance of Jay Adams on the biblical counseling (once called nouthetic counseling) movement. He was the one who taught the church that using secular practices in counseling was wrong, and the Bible was all we need. His book “Competent to Counsel”, a defence of biblical counseling, is still a big textbook in many institutions. Over his career, he wrote over 100 books, mostly about the movement.
The next two Fixed It For Yous are from his Casebook on how to handle the case “My Husband Molested Our Daughter”:
Most horrid of all, he says that the counselor must entertain this question:
The universal reaction when I have posted these Fixed It For Yous (the middle one is going up tonight!) has been horror and outrage and a lot more profanity than is usual in my social media channels! People are absolutely outraged and gobsmacked and sickened.
So here’s what I want to ask today: If a normal person is absolutely sickened by this, how did biblical counseling become so big in Christian circles?I’m honestly wondering and trying to figure it out. I have three-point theory I’d like to share with you, and I’m hoping that we can start a conversation in the comments to try to figure out the attraction of this.
For context, take a look at this video where the quote from John Street in the first Fixed It For You is taken from. Start at around the 6 minute mark. What amazes me is not just the horrid words he is saying, but the fact that all those men in the classroom are just dutifully taking notes as if this is normal. They don’t seem phased by the horrid things Street is saying at all.
How did we get to the point where Christians–where biblical counseling–failed to see the abuse victim as the victim?How did we get to the point where Christians failed to see the abuser as the problem?
How did we get to the point where we thought it was appropriate to treat abuse by trying to figure out the part everyone had played–as if everyone was guilty?
That’s what I’m trying to figure out, and here’s what I’ve come up with:
1. A devotion to hyper-Calvinism sees humanity as inherently disgusting and evil.Calvinism tends to see humans as “totally depraved”, unable to do anything good outside of God.
Take this to the extreme, and anything that humans would naturally think is good must therefore be evil; or anything that humans think is evil must therefore be good. God’s ways aren’t understandable because we’re so depraved, and so the more confusing and awful it sounds, the more this may actually be proof that it is right. It’s like an upside down world.
Most biblical counseling programs are done in seminaries that are heavily Calvinist, or at least have those influences, and so I’m wondering if this has been taken to an extreme?
2. A devotion to patriarchy seeks to keep men in authority and power, and marriage permanentMuch of biblical counseling is also focused on making sure that women stay in their place. See, for instance, my article on a biblical counseling program at Harvest Bible Chapel that asked a woman whose husband was cheating on her to fill out this form on 98 ways she could be sinning against her husband. The focus seems to be on making sure that women submit to husbands, and that the bad things that men do are not taken as reasons to end the marriage (because we all sin, after all).
Biblical counseling also tends to have a permanence view of marriage, where even abuse is not grounds for divorce. (Again, not all biblical counselors believe this, but it’s far more common among biblical counseling programs than among licensed counselors).
3. A yearning for “secret sauce” makes being counter-cultural a virtueFeeling like you have access to truth that no one else does is intoxicating. It’s really cool to feel like “I’m in the secret club that gets it.”
When I think about my younger years as a Christian, I remember feeling that the more extreme someone was, the more devoted to God they must be. So those who wanted to give up their lives for mission work were the most Christian. Those who chose to save their kiss for the wedding were more devoted than those who kissed earlier. Those who wouldn’t watch certain movies were more devoted than those who did.
We often see the extremes as meaning that people are more sold out for Jesus. The more counter-cultural you are, the more you’re in the will of God.
When we take these three things together, we have a recipe for dangerous counseling.If normal, everyday people are absolutely disgusted by this approach to handling abuse, how did they manage to create a whole counseling movement that does this sort of thing?
I think it’s teaching people that the Bible is all they need, and that God thinks in a different way than us. It’s focusing on roles and men in power rather than emotional health. And it’s feeling as if the more counter-cultural we are, the holier we are.
In this school of thought, God becomes almost unknowable, because what He asks of us is so counter to what we would normally think is healthy. And yet instead of that being a warning sign that we’re going off the rails, it somehow becomes proof that we’re on the right track.
What if you're NOT the problem with your sex life?What if the messages that you've been taught have messed things up--and what if there's a way to escape these toxic teachings?
It's time for a Great Sex Rescue. Buy it on Amazon! Where Else Can I Buy It? I don’t know if that makes a lot of sense, but that’s what I’m thinking about biblical counseling.Other than that, I’m at a complete loss as to how this became mainstream in evangelicalism and is even growing, with Souther Baptist seminaries eschewing their previous counseling programs that led to licensed counselors in favour of biblical counseling. How did that happen? Why? I’d love to chat about it and try to figure it out.
And again–if you’re a healthy biblical counselor, I would ask you to change things from the inside. Please speak loudly about the harm that Jay Adams did (and I haven’t really touched on how he handled mental illness and depression/anxiety). Please speak loudly against how abuse has been handled. Please speak loudly against the Master’s Seminary counseling program. Please fight for licensure and ethical guidelines and privacy. It’s not enough to say “not all biblical counselors believe that” when this has been the foundation of the movement, and when the head of one of the largest seminaries is still teaching this.
We need change. So what should we do? I honestly want to know!
What do you think? How do we make change? Let’s talk in the comments!
Sheila Wray Gregoire Founder of To Love, Honor and Vacuum
Sheila is determined to help Christians find BIBLICAL, HEALTHY, EVIDENCE-BASED help for their marriage. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8 FacebookTwitter Related Posts If Your Church Makes You Feel Guilty and Miserable…LeaveApr 4, 2022 | 63 Comments
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The post Biblical Counseling and Horrid Perspectives on Abuse: How Did Things Go So Wrong? appeared first on To Love, Honor and Vacuum.
April 7, 2022
Out of a Bill Gothard Cult, and Finding Jesus: Podcast with Emily Elizabeth Anderson
One of the things I enjoy most about working online is meeting really cool people.
And one of those cool people is Emily Elizabeth Anderson from Thriving Forward.We met on Facebook, and it took me a while to connect the dots to realize that I had already heard of her. I enjoyed what she wrote about finding Jesus after growing up fundamentalist, but then one day I made the connection that she was one of the girls that Bill Gothard, from the Advanced Training Institute, had sexually harrassed and groomed.
Bill Gothard ran a hyper conservative homeschooling program and conference circuit where the focus was on being under the right “umbrella of protection.” You may have seen the Gothard Umbrellas before:
According to Gothard, your main role was to live under the right authority. (Of course, these diagrams make no sense because if God has the bigger umbrella, why is there a need for any other umbrella?)
Anyway, ATI largely fell apart when a number of women came forward to say that he had sexually groomed and harrassed them as teenagers (and some much worse allegations). Emily was one of those.
Today she joins us to tell her story, and to tell what she’s passionate about now. And especially how she found the actual Jesus after she left what she now sees as a cult.
Browse all the Different Podcasts
See the Last “Start Your Engines” (Men’s) Podcast
Or, as always, you can watch it on YouTube!
Timeline of the Podcast:0:10 Intro
2:50 Emily joins the podcast!
4:30 Emily’s childhood in Fundementalism/ATI
9:45 Not ALL homeschooling is the same
11:20 The early grooming process
16:00 When Emily finally went to headquarters
21:15 The aftermath of coming forward/the lawsuit
27:00 Specifics about the organization… or cult?
39:15 Not giving up on God
45:25 Emily’s take on the state of things now
51:00 Thriving Forward
56:15 Closing encouragement
And even though this is a podcast about the problem in fundamentalist homeschooling circles, we’re not anti-homeschooling! I homeschooled my girls all the way through, and my kids are planning on homeschooling as well (as is Joanna). But we have to be aware that there are a lot of pockets of homeschooling that are not safe.
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Check them out in the U.S.! Check them out in Canada! Things Mentioned in This Podcast:Our Patreon! Support us for as little as $5 a month! Get access to unfiltered podcasts, merch, and more!The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex and The Good Girl’s Guide to Great SexEmily Elizabeth Anderson: On Facebook and on her blog Thriving ForwardStories about the lawsuit against Bill Gothard: Washington Post (paywall) and Medium.comKnix amazing bras: I love the Seamless Moves one! Knix in Canada and Knix in the U.S. 
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Sheila Wray Gregoire Founder of To Love, Honor and Vacuum
Sheila is determined to help Christians find BIBLICAL, HEALTHY, EVIDENCE-BASED help for their marriage. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8 FacebookTwitter Related Posts Remembering that God Loves Women, TooApr 1, 2022 | 47 Comments
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April 6, 2022
Pastor’s Wives Tell All–And More Podcasts!
After getting our manuscript for our mothers of daughters book in last Friday, I’m taking a little bit of down week, getting some things done I’ve been putting off (I got my hair done!; I’ve had some medical check-ups; etc.)
And one of the things I’ve had fun doing is listening to some of the podcasts that have recently been released that I recorded with others. And I thought you may be interested, too!
Pastors’ Wives Tell AllKeith and I joined these three women to talk about The Great Sex Rescue and our new books, The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex and The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex. They’ve been following me for a while and absolutely loved The Great Sex Rescue, and we had such a good talk. And Keith got to drop some real truth bombs, too!
If I’m ever in Georgia, I’m taking these gals out for coffee.
Listen in! And they’ve been sharing a bunch of clips on their Instagram, too!
What if you're NOT the problem with your sex life?What if the messages that you've been taught have messed things up--and what if there's a way to escape these toxic teachings?
It's time for a Great Sex Rescue. Buy it on Amazon! Where Else Can I Buy It? Enneagram and MarriageAnother fun podcast all about different Enneagrams types and how that affects marriage. We didn’t talk about the Enneagram in our interview, but mostly just focused on our views of sex and how to create a healthy sex life in your marriage.
Listen in! Evolved MarriageKeith and I joined Chris from Evolved Marriage to talk about The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex. More of a counseling podcast, and not from a faith perspective, it was great to share in the secular world and widen our audience!
Listen in! Hope you enjoy catching up with me and listening in to some of these! I’ll try to share more soon. I record so many extra podcasts with other people over the course of a week, and I often forget to share them all with you.
But I find on other people’s podcasts I often tell the stories of our books better than I do on my own.I mean, I talk to you guys every week, so I’m usually just focusing on a small part of something. But on other people’s podcasts I’m summing up the whole thing, so you can often get more of a bird’s eye view of the books from what I say to other people.
Hope you find these helpful! And Keith is starting to enjoy giving interviews a little bit more. He found it rather stressful at the beginning, but he’s finding his stride now, too.
Sheila Wray Gregoire Founder of To Love, Honor and Vacuum
Sheila is determined to help Christians find BIBLICAL, HEALTHY, EVIDENCE-BASED help for their marriage. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8 FacebookTwitter Related Posts PODCAST: How Many Christian Men Are Safe? Plus What Masculinity Is!Mar 31, 2022 | 25 Comments
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April 5, 2022
The Math of Love and Respect
Joanna and her family are on their way down from the Arctic today to stay at my house for a week. They’re moving to Edmonton (it’s funny to think of Edmonton as SOUTH for them, but there you go), and they’re stopping by for a few days. We’re hoping to take the kids to the zoo and to some great hikes, because her kids have been cooped up for the Arctic winter.
While she’s here, I’m going to record some podcasts talking about the way that research is commonly handled in many books. I’ve been collecting lots of examples, and one of the basic ones I’d like to use is Eggerichs’ claims in Love & Respect about who the book applies to.
Emerson Eggerichs’ claim in Love & Respect is that men primarily need respect while women primarily need love. I’ve written at length about the problems with Love & Respect and why Love & Respect scored 0/48 on our rubric of healthy sexuality teaching, but today I just want to look at his claims at face value.
He bases his thesis for Love & Respect on two things:
A single Bible verse telling wives to respect their husbands and husbands to love their wivesA survey Shaunti Feldhahn did of just 400 men asking them if they would rather be “alone and unloved” or “inadequate and disrespected”There is much to say about the problems with Shaunti Feldhahn’s survey question and methods, but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt for a minute and assume she’s right that if a man says he prefers to be alone and unloved that this means he wants respect over love.
How many men chose this?
%
Okay, so already we don’t have 100% of men. But now, how many women say that they prefer love–like how many women say they would prefer to feel “inadequate and disrespected”?
Well, we don’t actually know because Shaunti Feldhahn never asked women. The whole “scientific” basis for his claim is an inadequate and confusing survey question given to just 400 men, and then assuming there’s a gender difference without checking.
You can’t just ask men and assume that women would answer in the opposite way, but that’s what they did.
Again, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt.
Let’s assume that the same number of women want love as men want respect.Do you remember back in grade school when you have to find the chance of something happening? You multiply the chance of one thing happening by the chance of another thing happening.
Until we figure out the chance of ONE PARTICULAR HUSBAND wanting respect being married to ONE PARTICULAR WIFE that wants love, 74% sounds pretty high. But let’s do the math and see what happens:
74% x 74% = 54.76%
So in our very best case scenario, this book only applies to 55% of couples.
But what if we ask women the same question that Shaunti Feldhahn asked men?Even though Shaunti didn’t ask women, other researchers have (even acknowledging it’s a badly phrased question; they just wanted to see if there’s a gender difference). A Psychology Today article reports on a poll of 1200 women (so three times as many men as Shaunti Feldhahn asked), and in that study, how many women preferred respect?
%
So virtually the same. In fact, when they asked Harvard grads (of which Shaunti is one), 75% of women chose respect (even more than the men).
Okay, so a little bit more math.
If 65% of women want respect, then how many want love? 35%.
So let’s do the math again.
74% x 35% = 25.9%This book only applies to 1/4 of couples, based on the survey question that Eggerichs used to support his thesis.
Even in the very, very best case scenario (which does not exist in reality), it only applies to just over half.
And Eggerichs should have been able to do the math to see that it only applied to just over half, even using the assumptions that he was using.
The math for Love & Respect doesn’t add up.There are so many other things wrong with the book, and I’ve detailed them at length elsewhere. But I want to encourage us to get used to dissecting the underlying assumptions in the books that we read, rather than taking them at face value.
Emerson Eggerichs and Shaunti Feldhahn:Based a whole theology of marriage on something that only applied to 1/2 of couples AT BESTDid so using a bad survey question while only asking 400 menAssumed a gender difference without ever asking women And somehow this passed muster and the book became the #1 used marriage study in North American churches.And no one pointed out–your basic assumptions are really faulty.
We have to stop letting things like this slide. They’ve done too much damage. And can we please, please learn some math?
What if you're NOT the problem with your sex life?What if the messages that you've been taught have messed things up--and what if there's a way to escape these toxic teachings?
It's time for a Great Sex Rescue. Buy it on Amazon! Where Else Can I Buy It?
What do you think? Why did his math go unchallenged for so long? Let’s talk in the comments!
Sheila Wray Gregoire Founder of To Love, Honor and Vacuum
Sheila is determined to help Christians find BIBLICAL, HEALTHY, EVIDENCE-BASED help for their marriage. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8 FacebookTwitter Related Posts Real Men are not Bullies: Let’s Talk about the Church’s View of MasculinityMar 30, 2022 | 69 Comments
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April 4, 2022
If Your Church Makes You Feel Guilty and Miserable…Leave
Not always. Not even usually! Study after study has found that religiosity actually helps people, and people who go to church tend to have better mental health, better relationships, and better lives overall.
HOWEVER–and that’s a big however–not all churches are equal. And when church goes wrong, it can go wrong BIG TIME.
That’s the theme of our book for moms of daughters, She Deserves Better.We’ve been writing it for quite a few months now, and we finished it up and sent it into Baker Books on Friday! Based on our survey of 7500 women about their experiences as teens, we identified key beliefs that are common in youth group and Christian settings that lead to far worse outcomes for women later.
But again–not everybody was taught this stuff. Not all churches are like this.
That’s why it’s so important to have discernment about what church to go to!
And one big thing we found is that if a church makes you feel less-than, makes you feel shame, then that’s a red flag that it’s not a safe place.I’m taking a bit of a quieter week this week to get over our huge deadline, but I want to share with you a story that a woman sent into the blog that explains what such a church experience may look like.
She writes:
I remember the moment vividly. I was sitting in a little church classroom for an evening of Pioneer Club or Word of Life, I can’t remember which. My daughters’ father (he divorced me years ago) worked nights, so I took them with me as I was also a volunteer. My youngest was under 2, and the oldest was 3.
The program was for preschool and up. The little one was crying, didn’t want to sit like a little robot in a chair, and was generally disruptive. After several minutes of removing her from the room to have a “chat”, I finally took her to the bathroom for a solid spank, at the encouragement of our Pastor and his wife. After all, I would be disobeying God if I didn’t promptly spank her for her “disobedience”.
I whacked her little bottom, told her she had to sit and be quiet, and she cried. All I remember is that sweet, crumpled little face, and those giant tears.
I remember the pain and crushing agony of going against all my maternal instincts by spanking her.
She wasn’t even 2 and was in a class for older children, for pity’s sake! Of course she didn’t want to sit still. She wanted to play!
I had formerly majored in Children’s Ministry before switching majors, so I knew enough about Early Childhood Development to know this class was not age appropriate for her, and expectations were unrealistic. So, I held her, hugged her close to me, apologized repeatedly and comforted her. I cried as well. I walked out of the bathroom and into the little kitchen where a couple older ladies were preparing snacks for the other children. They saw our tears, I told them what was going on, and they offered to let my sweet girl hang out with them. I felt a rush of relief, and my little one loved them, so it was a win.
Later that night after I got home and my girls tucked into bed, I received an email from the Pastor. He saw my little one and I emerge from the bathroom. I was rebuked because I disobeyed God.
You see, if I had properly obeyed, my little one would STILL be beside herself and crying, and had I spanked her properly, would have heard it outside the bathroom door. I “rewarded” her by giving into her and allowing her to sit with the snack ladies. I disobeyed God because I didn’t properly “apply” the rod.
I was furious.
A file was made regarding my disobedience and insubordination, and that file would continue to grow. I sit here now, many years later, and that evening still brings me to tears and makes my heart ache. There were so many things expected of me from that one particular church, and I did what I was told (until I didn’t) because I only desired to obey God. In fact, I went against everything I truly believed and ignored the prompting of the Holy Spirit that would have stayed my hand.
I have made many apologies to my children over the years because, you see, I do not, nor have I ever, believed in spanking. I think it is an affront to Jesus, the Gentle Shepherd.
To spank or not to spank isn’t the subject here, however.
The subject is that an opinion of man, and an interpretation by a man, was to take precedence over the Holy Spirit’s nudging in my own spirit in order for me to be viewed as a “godly” woman in this particular church.
I am not sure I have ever forgiven that Pastor, his wife, or myself for listening to them rather than God. I can’t think of that denomination without great anger as those teachings are still perpetuated to this day.
I share all this to say, we must be trained to listen to the Holy Spirit ABOVE all else – even the man in the Pulpit. We must know God’s Word, examine it closely, and be willing to stand firm regardless of the conflict. I’ve had many discussions with my children about why I believe spanking is wrong. We have also had many discussions about Jesus, his Church, Scripture, and the Holy Spirit. Follow Jesus. Follow him alone. He will never lead you to harm.
Note some of the red flags here:
There was no understanding of child developmentThe pastor felt he had a right to tell her how to parentThe pastor “disciplined” her and called her at home to rebuke herThere was a file opened on herYou can likely spot others!
You may also enjoy:What does the research say about spanking?10 signs you’re in a legalistic churchThis woman wrote back to me with more of her story:
Thinking back, these are all of the things I got in trouble for at that church:1. Asking too many questions during the creation/evolution study
2. Getting a tubal after my last child (I have many). They removed me from my volunteer positions and put an abusive parent in those positions instead because I was disqualified since I had a tubal ligation.
3. Not obeying my husband (Jesus thankfully freed me from that abusive marriage)
4. Not “applying the rod” properly with my children
5. Getting an education because I wanted to be able to support my children
6. Using the NIV when I taught Sunday School
7. Not wanting to homeschool after my husband left for a time and I had to work to support my children.
8. Not being willing to share with our ladies’ Bible study group what time I scheduled sex with my husband.
Between this church, that leadership and many years in a spiritually/emotionally/verbally abusive marriage, it’s a miracle I still cling to Jesus and found a church I love.
My current church isn’t perfect, but it’s a beautiful community that majors in the majors and minors in the minors. My children and I will probably always need to be in therapy, but I’m living out the dreams God has planted within me without that fear any longer.
I know this all looks terrible, and you may think, “how could she have put up with that?” But the thing is that when you’re in the middle of that, the church uses abusive tactics to make you feel like you are the problem.
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“Love AND Respect” Accent Coffee Mug, 11oz $12.00 “Be A Biblical Woman” Canvas Tote Bag $16.00 – $20.00 This church was trying to control her. It looks nothing like Jesus.Let’s be honest: what it looks like is a cult. When someone else is trying to micromanage your life, keep a strict hierarchy, and has a hyper-focus on sex and heavy discipline, that’s a huge red flag for cult-like behaviour.
I’ve gone to churches that aren’t quite this bad, but they do have many similarities. What kept me there at the time was the thought, “well, I don’t agree with everything, but at least they put the gospel front and centre.”
But just because a church tells you to read your Bible and preaches that you need to believe in Jesus to be saved does not mean that the church knows Jesus at all.
Jesus said that we will know His followers by their love (John 13:35) and by their fruit (Matthew 7:20).
If you are in a church like this, please know that you are not alone. So many are just like you. But so many have also gotten out! You can get out without having to give up on Jesus. You can actually FIND Jesus in a healthy church.
I wanted to share this woman’s story today because there are others like her who read this blog.
Please know: it’s okay to walk out and never look back.
I hear stories like hers everyday in emails. There are so many like this woman out there. Were you ever in a church like this? Did you get out? Share your story to help others!
Sheila Wray Gregoire Founder of To Love, Honor and Vacuum
Sheila is determined to help Christians find BIBLICAL, HEALTHY, EVIDENCE-BASED help for their marriage. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8 FacebookTwitter Related Posts The Great Sex Rescue got in Mainstream American Christian Media!Mar 29, 2022 | 9 Comments
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April 1, 2022
Remembering that God Loves Women, Too
Jesus is not more relatable to men than to women, and men are not more in the image of God than women.
And yet this week there were all too many examples that tried to make Christianity into a religion that is primarily for men, where women are appendages.
That makes me angry. It reminds me of the real reason that Jesus threw out the moneylenders. They were operating in the temple courts, which is where women and the Gentiles were allowed to congregate to be near God. And by using the temple courts, the money lenders were preventing them from seeking God or coming near God.
Jesus gets angry when we prevent people from coming near Him.
Today’s a special day for me personally.
Rebecca and I have been working all week finishing up our manuscript for our mother-daughter book (tentatively titled She Deserves Better), and by mid-afternoon today I will be DONE.I will not have something else I need to do because I’m under deadline. I will not have another big project in the pipeline.
For the first time in 2 1/2 years, I will honestly be done. You have no idea how excited I am!
Connor just about has our new website ready to go, and we’ll be doing a migration in a month or so (that’s been a huge project too), and I have a lot of cleaning up on the back end of my blog and my email list (have you joined my email list, by the way?) and I’m so looking forward to that!
I feel so relieved.
But at the same time, it’s been a weird week, and I didn’t realize how weird until I started to look at my social media and see how it intersected with Keith’s post this week on how Christian masculinity isn’t about being a bully, and the podcast that went with it.
On Fridays I like to share what’s been happening on social media, because a lot of the engagement in this community happens not on the blog, but elsewhere.
First, the two fixed it for yous!
And my caption that went with it:
Our survey of 20,000 women found that when husbands make the final decision in the marriage, even if they consult with their wives first, the chance of divorce increases 7.4 times.
And when women feel as if their opinions don’t count, orgasm rates plummet and marital satisfaction plummets.
The idea that marriage is supposed to be a hierarchy is just simply poison. It has terribly bad fruit.
Marriage and sex should be a deep “knowing” of each other, a deep intimacy. You cannot have intimacy with another person if one person matters more than the other. If one matters more, then the other person’s needs and wants are erased. It’s no longer a knowing.
When we see doctrine like this, we need to reject it. And we need to start questioning those who quote people like Doug Wilson, despite his toxic views on women. If he thinks this about marriage, what else is he terribly wrong about? (Perhaps slavery, because Wilson thinks that wasn’t that bad).
We can do better, church.
Sheila Wray Gregoire See it on Instagram See it on Facebook Then Owen Strachan joined the party and tweeted out something so ridiculous Twitter erupted.I actually had another Fixed it For You planned for this one, but so many already did their own versions of what I had planned! So I went another route instead.
Keith’s response when he saw Owen’s original tweet was to think:
When in human history did God stake everything on one individual?And the most obvious answer was with Esther. The king was planning a genocide of the Jewish people, and God put Esther in a place “for such a time as this” to intervene.
Then let’s not forget that when Jesus rose, He appeared to Mary in the garden, and told HER to go tell the disciples. So the first witness of the resurrection was a woman, and He sent the woman to tell the men and set the wheels in motion. Sure sounds like God uses women, too!
But the big thing is that JESUS is our foundation, not men. What Strachan and Wilson seem to be preaching (and Partridge and Morse from Ketih’s article) has little resemblance to Christianity, and seems instead to be an ideology that justifies male supremacy. It’s anti-Christ.
See it on Instagram See it on Facebook Turning to something different, a number of podcasts that I’ve been on dropped this week!I’ll mention just one–Bodies Behind the Bus. It’s a podcast telling stories of people hurt by Acts 29 churches, specifically due to spiritual abuse or the covering up of sexual abuse.
The hosts had me on even though I don’t specifically talk about the Acts 29 network (which was formed by Mark Driscoll and now headed up by Matt Chandler), but they thought The Great Sex Rescue spoke to some common themes.
(Incidentally, the best incident that most encapsulates the abuse in these churches was when Matt Chandler sent emails to the whole church and publicly disciplined and chided Karen Hinkley, a parishioner, for wanting to annul her marriage to her husband, who was addicted to child sexual abuse materials and had been even before they were married. He hadn’t disclosed this to her, and she felt this made their marriage invalid.
Chandler insisted they do marriage counseling and reconcile.
When the story hit the national news, about how they had been hounding her, even though she had left the church and rescinded her membership (they said she wasn’t allowed to do that since she had signed a membership contract), he finally relented.
On the podcast, we discussed the underlying themes of the way the evangelical church frames sexuality that lead to situations like these:
Listen in Here! What if you're NOT the problem with your sex life?What if the messages that you've been taught have messed things up--and what if there's a way to escape these toxic teachings?
It's time for a Great Sex Rescue. Buy it on Amazon! Where Else Can I Buy It? But in all of that, I’ve also had a really encouraging week.Our book is good. Really good. It won’t be out for a long while yet, but I’m excited! We’re going to change things.
And I’ve heard from so many new pastors this week who liked The Great Sex Rescue! Another woman told me that she got on the library committee of her church so that she could clean out the marriage books and replace the bad ones with good ones.
Another woman told me that reading The Great Sex Rescue saved her marriage, because she went into such a downward spiral after reading Every Man’s Battle last year, thinking that her husband was a monster and was irredeemable, and she had to protect her kids from being raised by a man. Knowing that the authors did NOT speak for every man, and that masturbating in gym parking lots or to sleeping teenage sisters-in-law is NOT normal was a major relief for her, and she feels as if she’s finally, slowly, coming back.
Things are changing. And the response to Owen’s tweet was so overwhelmingly negative that it seems as if people aren’t afraid to call out the bad stuff anymore. This gives me hope. We’re making a difference!
And now I’m going to sign off and go finish the last mother-daughter exercises for She Deserves Better!
Sheila Wray Gregoire Founder of To Love, Honor and Vacuum
Sheila is determined to help Christians find BIBLICAL, HEALTHY, EVIDENCE-BASED help for their marriage. And in doing so, she's turning the evangelical world on its head, challenging many of the toxic teachings, especially in her newest book The Great Sex Rescue. She’s an award-winning author of 8 books and a sought-after speaker. With her humorous, no-nonsense approach, Sheila works with her husband Keith and daughter Rebecca to create podcasts and courses to help couples find true intimacy. Plus she knits. All the time. ENTJ, straight 8 FacebookTwitter Related Posts When Going to Church Leads to Worse Outcomes for Teen GirlsMar 28, 2022 | 41 Comments
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