Hey Anne – I want to lovingly push back on some of the things you’ve mentioned in this blog post. First, looking at the comment from Denny Burk and Sheila Gregoire’s response to it, you state that Sheila misses “one critical phrase – ‘to the exclusion of.’” But that is clearly not what Sheila meant – she states that she is “not sure why [Denny Burk] seems to frame [sex] as an either/or thing,” that either you can focus on procreation or on pleasure. Sheila never argues against sex for procreation. What she does focus on in her book The Great Sex Rescue is that when sex is seen as an obligation for wives only and not their husbands, when Christian men are taught to treat sex as something that is owed to them, and when these beliefs combine to create marriages where there is no mutuality (or, in the words of The Great Sex Rescue, where there is intercourse in which one party (the husband) is physically satisfied while the other party (the wife) is left not only physically unsatisfied but often also emotionally hurt (pp. 12-13)), many, though of course not all, Christian women are stranded in unhealthy marriages where they not only feel unloved, but also can feel attacked by their spouse. Sheila is not “privileging the sexual satisfaction of women over the other purposes of marriage” – she’s saying that the mutuality of sexual satisfaction in Christian marriages has been so lost that some Christian sex teachings are actually harming women. Her goal is not to examine all the purposes of marriage – she is examining the sexual part of marriage, and she has found that there are teachings rampant in the church (and, yes, she uses the term “churches” because these teachings cross denominational divides – see her website baremarriage.com for further information) that produce Christian marriages with wives who are broken and husbands who either don’t understand how to help or don’t care about helping the women they are commanded to love. Sheila never says that other parts of marriage aren’t important – she just argues that privileging one party’s happiness to not only the exclusion but also the damage of the other party is not fulfilling the Biblical imagery of marriage.
Second, you take issue with what you see as Sheila’s “Fruit Picking” and privileging a “numbers game” over using “the measures of the scriptures themselves to judge whether [the fruit] is good or not.” I understand how frustrating this can be – when people throw around the phrase, “well, what fruit is it producing?!” willy-nilly, as if as soon as something is “godly” it immediately starts producing The Shining Golden Apples of Holiness, the phrase loses all meaning, doesn’t it? But that is not what Sheila is trying to do here, and this is why she and her coauthors based their books on statistics (for The Great Sex Rescue, they used a professionally-developed and -studied survey of 20,000 women). They clearly demonstrate not only the relationship, but also the causative effect, between certain unfortunately common church teachings and harm to women in Christian marriages. As Sheila says, “Christians, as a whole, do tend to have better sex and happier marriages than people who are not religious. But . . . just because something is better for the group does not mean you as an individual think it’s anything to write home about” (The Great Sex Rescue, 10). When people like this group of women demonstrate, not anecdotally but statistically, that some common church teachings harm women, I would strongly disagree that this is fruit picking or privileging numbers over scriptures. Rather, it is revealing truth, and all truth is from God. You state that “the point of the Christian life is to be obedient to Jesus.” Jesus says to love one another as he loved us (John 13:34). If that is true, where is the love in creating marriages where women feel used, degraded, and often are in pain? Jesus loves women just as much as he loves men. Therefore, there is no reason I can conceive of that he would promote marriages based on teachings that damage women, and the teachings Sheila examines in The Great Sex Rescue do harm women. That’s a demonstrated fact. And when churches teach false doctrines that harm any part of the population to which they minister, that church is not preaching the Word. So, no, don’t leave a church because you don’t see your particular variety of fruit growing on that bough – but do leave if you see rottenness at the core.
I am really looking forward to reading She Deserves Better – I know I deserved better when I was learning about sex in a “Christian” purity-culture context, and I hope that the damage I sustained will not be transmitted to the next generation.
Hey Anne – I want to lovingly push back on some of the things you’ve mentioned in this blog post. First, looking at the comment from Denny Burk and Sheila Gregoire’s response to it, you state that Sheila misses “one critical phrase – ‘to the exclusion of.’” But that is clearly not what Sheila meant – she states that she is “not sure why [Denny Burk] seems to frame [sex] as an either/or thing,” that either you can focus on procreation or on pleasure. Sheila never argues against sex for procreation. What she does focus on in her book The Great Sex Rescue is that when sex is seen as an obligation for wives only and not their husbands, when Christian men are taught to treat sex as something that is owed to them, and when these beliefs combine to create marriages where there is no mutuality (or, in the words of The Great Sex Rescue, where there is intercourse in which one party (the husband) is physically satisfied while the other party (the wife) is left not only physically unsatisfied but often also emotionally hurt (pp. 12-13)), many, though of course not all, Christian women are stranded in unhealthy marriages where they not only feel unloved, but also can feel attacked by their spouse. Sheila is not “privileging the sexual satisfaction of women over the other purposes of marriage” – she’s saying that the mutuality of sexual satisfaction in Christian marriages has been so lost that some Christian sex teachings are actually harming women. Her goal is not to examine all the purposes of marriage – she is examining the sexual part of marriage, and she has found that there are teachings rampant in the church (and, yes, she uses the term “churches” because these teachings cross denominational divides – see her website baremarriage.com for further information) that produce Christian marriages with wives who are broken and husbands who either don’t understand how to help or don’t care about helping the women they are commanded to love. Sheila never says that other parts of marriage aren’t important – she just argues that privileging one party’s happiness to not only the exclusion but also the damage of the other party is not fulfilling the Biblical imagery of marriage.
Second, you take issue with what you see as Sheila’s “Fruit Picking” and privileging a “numbers game” over using “the measures of the scriptures themselves to judge whether [the fruit] is good or not.” I understand how frustrating this can be – when people throw around the phrase, “well, what fruit is it producing?!” willy-nilly, as if as soon as something is “godly” it immediately starts producing The Shining Golden Apples of Holiness, the phrase loses all meaning, doesn’t it? But that is not what Sheila is trying to do here, and this is why she and her coauthors based their books on statistics (for The Great Sex Rescue, they used a professionally-developed and -studied survey of 20,000 women). They clearly demonstrate not only the relationship, but also the causative effect, between certain unfortunately common church teachings and harm to women in Christian marriages. As Sheila says, “Christians, as a whole, do tend to have better sex and happier marriages than people who are not religious. But . . . just because something is better for the group does not mean you as an individual think it’s anything to write home about” (The Great Sex Rescue, 10). When people like this group of women demonstrate, not anecdotally but statistically, that some common church teachings harm women, I would strongly disagree that this is fruit picking or privileging numbers over scriptures. Rather, it is revealing truth, and all truth is from God. You state that “the point of the Christian life is to be obedient to Jesus.” Jesus says to love one another as he loved us (John 13:34). If that is true, where is the love in creating marriages where women feel used, degraded, and often are in pain? Jesus loves women just as much as he loves men. Therefore, there is no reason I can conceive of that he would promote marriages based on teachings that damage women, and the teachings Sheila examines in The Great Sex Rescue do harm women. That’s a demonstrated fact. And when churches teach false doctrines that harm any part of the population to which they minister, that church is not preaching the Word. So, no, don’t leave a church because you don’t see your particular variety of fruit growing on that bough – but do leave if you see rottenness at the core.
I am really looking forward to reading She Deserves Better – I know I deserved better when I was learning about sex in a “Christian” purity-culture context, and I hope that the damage I sustained will not be transmitted to the next generation.