Evangelical Marriage Advice Failed Us

Note: This article contains references to sexual trauma.

IT WASN'T SHEILA Wray Gregoire’s initial plan to make a career of writing about the intimate lives of evangelicals. But when she began her “mom blog,” To Love, Honor, and Vacuum, in 2008, she found her readers responded most when she wrote about sex.

Four years later, Gregoire wrote The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex and quickly found herself as a keynote speaker at conferences and churches throughout the United States and her home country, Canada. Recently, with her daughter Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach and statistician Joanna Sawatsky, she wrote The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended to free women from toxic messages about sex and marriage often promoted in the church.

Gregoire told Sojourners she initially wasn’t aware of how pervasive these toxic teachings were. But after hearing from women that Love and Respect, a marriage advice book by popular Christian speaker Emerson Eggerichs (which boasts more than 2 million copies in sales), had been harmful, she read it for herself. She was horrified to find that the entire chapter on sex was addressed solely to women, instructing them to care for their husbands’ sexual needs. “Until then, we were working with blinders on as we created helpful resources to improve people’s marriages and sex lives,” Gregoire wrote in The Great Sex Rescue. “Once we read it, we realized that we needed to do far more.”

Sex as control

AS A CHRISTIAN couples therapist, I’ve been following Gregoire’s work and the backlash she has faced from some conservative evangelical men. Gregoire believes the teachings on women’s sexual obligations are due in part to who writes the books on sex and marriage popular in white evangelical churches: namely men, such as Eggerichs and Gary Thomas, author of Sacred Marriage. Other commonly read books are co-authored by couples, such as The Meaning of Marriage by Tim and Kathy Keller and The Act of Marriage by Tim and Beverly LaHaye.

As Lindenbach told Sojourners, “When you look at the best-selling books, when you look at who is running the organizations like Focus [on the Family] and Christianity Today, when you look at the people who are the most influential voices in evangelical Christianity, they are [mainly] men.” This influences how the church thinks about sex, she explains. “Most of the time, even the women who have influential voices are speaking on behalf of men.”

In writing The Great Sex Rescue, Gregoire, Lindenbach, and Sawatsky analyzed the popular marriage and sex books commonly read by evangelicals. They began with the top 10 Christian marriage books on Amazon, excluding those that did not significantly discuss sex. They also included other influential Christian books about sex, such as Every Man’s Battle by Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, and added a top-selling secular book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John M. Gottman and Nan Silver, for comparison.

While not all the books they reviewed were problematic, several contained harmful messages, such as viewing sex as a physical need only men have, rather than a mutual experience of intimacy, or blaming women for their husbands’ pornography use or affairs. Gregoire, Lindenbach, and Sawatsky also found exhortations that wives should maintain their appearance or weight as it was when they got married, arguing that failing to do so would be sinful. Many taught that women were prohibited from saying no to sex unless it was for a time of prayer and fasting approved by the husband. Of all the Christian books studied, none mentioned consent.

Gregoire and her co-authors believe that church teachings on gender roles in marriage have significantly shaped these books. In Lindenbach’s summary, the church’s message to men has been: “God made you to have sex. Your woman owes you sex. And your job is to be the leader, her boss, her king, and the priest of your family.”

In response to the broader society’s moves to deemphasize rigid gender stereotypes, roles, and identities, conservative churches and organizations have fought back by insisting on “traditional” gender roles and differences. Unfortunately, this gender-role framework has fostered transactional—and even coercive—relationships, rather than connection based on mutuality. When relational needs are categorized by gender, such as “women need to talk, men need sex” (a paraphrase of a common teaching in evangelical circles), it fosters emotional distance rather than couples learning to communicate, care for, and connect with one another.

Baring it all

SEEKING A MORE balanced perspective on heterosexual marriage in the church, Gregoire, Lindenbach, and Sawatsky launched a survey initiative in 2019 they called “The Bare Marriage Project,” aiming for 10,000 responses. In the end, over 22,000 women responded, more than 75 percent of whom identified as evangelical or had at some point in their life.

“Women were just so happy to finally be able to speak about this,” Lindenbach told Sojourners. “We were willing to listen. And I think that’s why we had such an amazing turnout.”

To ensure they weren’t just pulling from the readership of Gregoire’s book and website, they recruited through multiple avenues. More than half of the respondents came through these other sources.

The survey asked about adherence to beliefs such as “The only biblical reason for divorce is an affair,” and “a wife is obligated to give her husband sex when he wants it.” They found that these beliefs and others corresponded with both lower satisfaction in marriage and lower satisfaction with sex life.

Sixteen percent of respondents reported feeling used after sex. Grappling with that number, I pictured the church sanctuaries I’ve sat in, now knowing that more than one in 10 women in those pews likely often or always feel exploited by sex. Gregoire found that the reasons for what she terms “obligation sex” range from feeling guilty for saying no, to being treated badly for saying no, to feeling responsible for ensuring their husband doesn’t look at pornography or have an affair if they say no. In The Great Sex Rescue, the authors reference a spousal contract called the “Sexual Refusal Commitment” that was presented at a major Christian conference in 2000. The document states: “I no longer have authority over my own body, but my spouse does,” with a reference to 1 Corinthians 7:4. Sawatsky told Sojourners in response: “We are left with the horrifying conclusion that abusive husbands seem to be bringing their wives Christian resources that tell women that if they won’t have sex, they are in sin. ... Abusive men are using our evangelical resources as weapons.”

The God who sees

GREGOIRE REFERENCES THE story of Hagar, a woman who did not have the ability to consent to sex and who is abused further after she gives birth to Ishmael. God meets Hagar in the desert, and Hagar—a woman who has been sexually assaulted—is the first person to name God. She calls God “the God who sees me” (Genesis 16:13).

Christian marriage and sex books do not often discuss rape, but The Great Sex Rescue tackles it head-on. “Nothing could have prepared us for how many horrific stories of marital rape we heard,” Gregoire wrote. “When Christian resources fail to discuss marital rape appropriately, it leaves women without the words to describe what is happening to them.”

Gregoire and her co-authors analyzed what happens when couples are taught that women don’t have sexual needs or that “to set up a marriage with two equals at the head is to set it up for failure”—a direct quote from Eggerichs’ Love and Respect. They talk about what happens when church leaders don’t teach couples about sexual consent in marriage and found that if women feel they can’t say no to sex, it reduces both sexual satisfaction and marital happiness.

Lindenbach said many women wrote to say they have wonderful, responsive husbands, but mentioned things such as “just reading through [the chapter on coercion] made me cry because I realized that even with my marriage, I felt like I couldn’t say no, though I’ve never felt like I needed to.”

Two years before publishing The Great Sex Rescue, Gregoire wrote a short blog series about Eggerichs’ Love and Respect after reading it for herself. She received hundreds of comments from women telling stories of how the book was used to enable abuse in their marriages. She, Lindenbach, and Sawatsky created a report summarizing the comments they received and sent it to Focus on the Family, which published and promoted Love and Respect. Focus on the Family and its founder, Dr. James Dobson, have been considered authorities on marriage, raising kids, family life, and more for the evangelical church. The organization hosts a regular program featuring Christian advice on family life.

“I’ve been featured on the Focus on the Family broadcast three times,” Gregoire wrote in The Great Sex Rescue, “I honestly thought they would listen.” Instead, they released a statement characterizing Gregoire’s critiques as a “concerted campaign against the book” and asserted “that Love and Respect has a biblically sound, empowering message for husbands and wives.” Gregoire also received criticism from Mark Gungor, producer of the Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage curriculum used in churches throughout the nation and customized for use in the U.S. military. Gungor called Gregoire “the patron saint of sexually unfulfilled women.” She wrote in response in her Twitter bio, “I take it as a compliment!”

Robbed of good sex

ERIN GENTRY GREW up in a nondenominational church and has been married for more than a decade to her husband, whom she met at a Christian private school. She said she’s “felt robbed of truly good sex,” attributing this largely to teachings on “gender roles, the pressure on women to be the gatekeepers of purity premarriage and endlessly available sex receptacles after the wedding,” and “from being told—maybe not in so many words—‘if your husband looks at porn, it’s your fault.’”

Reflecting on what she’s learned from Gregoire’s writing, she recognizes that what she was taught about sex growing up in the church has kept her from “feeling free and safe to express and explore sexuality within a marriage relationship.” She said Gregoire has been instrumental in helping her untangle the “complicated and often damaging messaging from so-called Christian marriage resources.”

Amy Knöttner, who grew up in a fundamentalist Christian community, said that Gregoire’s work has been “reprogramming [her] entire understanding of male-female relationships.” She deftly identifies the draw to these rigid approaches to relationships: “There’s some safety in feeling like I know what my job is—how to protect my marriage, how to protect my husband from the ‘darkness of the world.’” The rules she was taught promised a level of security she found comforting—even if they didn’t deliver. To this day, it’s still tempting to believe that she alone is responsible for her husband’s purity. “But if that’s not true,” she says with a tone of hope, “then we have a lot more life, and love, and liberty than I thought possible.”

Gregoire, Lindenbach, and Sawatsky want to conduct research to better serve people in the church, and they’ve already submitted their survey results to a database for use in peer-reviewed research. As a couples therapist, I appreciate their concern for getting the right data because it’s easy for therapists or pastors to have inflated assumptions about the effectiveness of our counsel. It’s crucial to find out what’s really working and what’s not. They also will continue to rely on the peer-reviewed research of others. “If you look at the best-selling books on marriage,” remarks Lindenbach, “of the 13 evangelical books that we looked at, there were only 11 peer-reviewed citations. Not per book—11 across the board.”

Just as Gregoire invites other Christian writers to reconsider their approaches to sex, she’s modeling it herself as she continues to gather data. She published The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex in 2012 but is currently rewriting it, informed by her new research. “This is not just revised,” she says. “Let’s torch the old one, because my ways of thinking about this have totally changed.”

The new version will be available in March 2022 alongside The Good Guy’s Guide to Great Sex—a new book for men, also informed by survey data. Ultimately, Gregoire hopes that writing about sex and relationships will lead to intimacy, mutuality, equality, and emotional health for couples and get churches talking about consent and abuse in marriage.

Gregoire dedicated The Great Sex Rescue to “Aunt Matilda,” a woman briefly mentioned in a vignette in the LaHayes’ The Act of Marriage, published nearly half a century ago. In their book, the LaHayes recount the story of a woman who tells a young bride to expect marriage to be a continual experience of “legalized rape.” The LaHayes criticize Matilda for telling the young bride that sex is unenjoyable and frame Matilda’s husband and rapist as “embarrassed,” “clumsy,” and, worst of all, “equally unhappy.” Rather than naming the sexual assault for what it is, the LaHayes blame Aunt Matilda for talking about it. The story of Aunt Matilda stuck with Gregoire as a prime example of how the church has responded to women’s abuse in marriage. Gregoire’s dedication reads: “To The Act of Marriage’s Aunt Matilda, and all the women like her. We see you. We hear you. And we are so, so sorry.”