Complementarianism - Ep. 134

SHOW NOTES:

What is complementarianism? Where did it begin? What are the practical effects of its teachings on real life couples and Christian communities? And how do we, as Christian couples and communities, do the most good and the least harm when it comes to how and what we teach? Tune in and stay tuned to engage in this conversation.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to the Brave Marriage Podcast, a podcast for couples and communities who want to grow as individuals, do marriage with intention, and live mutually empowered, purposeful lives. If you’re just joining us, I’m Kensi, an LMFT who’s passionate about helping couples discover mutuality in Christian marriage, that we might grow healthier individually and together—not only as couples, but as the body of Christ.

In Season 2, our theme is marriage, mutuality, and gender roles, and over the next two episodes, we are talking about complementarianism and egalitarianism.  

If you’re unfamiliar with these two terms, these are two distinct approaches to the way Christians have come to define their positions, theologically, on the relationship between males and females, in the 20th century, as it relates to equality, authority, leadership, and roles in marriage and ministry. Why I’m wanting to define these two positions at this point is because they carry very different implications for what actually gets played out between husbands and wives in marriage, and for what actually takes place between men and women in the church.

In the summer of 2018, right as I launched this podcast, I was still on social media at the time, and taking questions to address on the podcast. And immediately, from the beginning of Brave Marriage, I had someone ask, complementarianism or egalitarianism—which is better? 

Now at the time, I thought I had a firm grasp on both, yet not a strong position on either. On complementarianism, having read books from that perspective since high school and having studied at the Focus Leadership Institute at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs and reading Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which was the text first written to specifically define the complementarian position. And then, I attended a megachurch and two denominational churches that supported a complementarian view, without explicitly using that term. And when you live somewhere, where complementarianism is baked into the culture and traditional gender roles are widely accepted, you don’t really see it as an issue to take up, because you don’t see it from any other perspective at all—at least from any other perspective that you deem worth considering (I didn’t at the time). 

…Which is funny because I grew up in a church that would say it holds egalitarian doctrine, in that it supports women in ministry, and I ended up at a Wesleyan university and seminary for my education. But like the complementarian churches I attended, the church I grew up in and the egalitarian ones I’ve attended since didn’t explicitly use that term to describe their position either. So on the surface, it seemed like, either way is good, whatever couples prefer, I’m Switzerland on the question. My only desire is to share with couples the idea of mutuality in marriage and mutual flourishing, this idea that men and women are created equal and designed as marriage partners to reflect the image of God, and the relationship between Christ and His bride by way of intimacy and mutual love, respect, submission, and empowerment between spouses. 

But what began to dawn on me was that what we talk about here on the Brave Marriage Podcast is new to so many couples. Some couples, and solid couples from solid families started sharing with me that no one ever painted a picture for them in the church of mutual flourishing in marriage, or of making room for each other in marriage and ministry. And it had begun to free both of them. 

So clearly, the complementarian/egalitarian question is one that I have developed a lot of passion around the longer I’ve been doing this. And here’s what I want to say first: I believe that at the end of the day, Christ’s grace prevails and His transforming love for us is stronger than our limited understanding, and while I believe that the Holy Spirit can do whatever He wants, in whoever He wants, and turn marriages around and use couples—complementarians and egalitarians alike—for His glory. Having said that, I also think it’s appropriate to ask those in the Church—as a Christian and as a marriage counselor—to take a look at what we’re actually saying, what we’re actually teaching, and how that’s actually affecting couples in our congregations and in our communities. I think it certainly could do us good to take a look at both positions to see how we, the body of Christ, can do the most good and the least harm, to couples and families in our congregations, in our communities, in our care. 

So as I talk about complementarianism today, I ask for your understanding. For your openness to hear its history, to try and understand what’s going on behind the scenes, which I’ll do my best to explain given my study, and to have compassion for the people of God as we take a look together. And I wouldn’t be asking us to really take a look at these positions and challenges ourselves on them unless I thought that together, we could bring our intelligence to this as couples, our advocacy to our own relationships and for those we do life with, and our hearts to know God more fully and the depths of love and freedom and flourishing He has for us. 

Okay, starting with complementarianism:

Complementarianism is the belief that men and women are created equal in spiritual worth and dignity, but different in spiritual role and function. In the home, men are to lead and women are to help. In the church, men are to lead from the pulpit and both men and women are to be inspired by their leadership to fulfill their complementary ministries—typically men as pastors, elders, and unrestricted teachers, and women serving in every other function in the church. And men, but the first three offices mentioned are typically reserved for men based on Paul’s teachings to certain churches in the New Testament. But for the purpose of this podcast, which pertains to marriage, we’ll limit our conversation to the role of husbands and wives. 

In a complementarian family, there’s a belief in the general premise of male headship and female submission. As Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood states: “Biblical headship for the husband is the divine calling to take primary responsibility for Christlike servant leadership, protection and provision in the home. Biblical submission for the wife is the divine calling to honor and affirm her husband’s leadership and help carry it through according to her gifts” (p. 63). Complementarians also have varying views on the degree to which women should submit to all men or just their husbands and pastors, but officially, the position is: “Ephesians 5:22, Titus 2:5 and 1 Peter 3:1, 5 exhort wives to be subject to ‘your own’ husbands. This term ‘your own’ shows that the relationship of leadership and submission between a woman and her husband should be different from the relationship of leadership and submission that she may have with men in general” (p. 52). 

Complementarianism is the majority view in evangelical Christianity today because of its emphasis on harmony displayed through complementary roles, as outlined by Paul in Ephesians 5:22-33. It’s taught in many churches to help couples understand their male and female roles, purpose, and the meaning of Christian marriage, to illustrate the mysterious relationship between Christ and His bride, the Church. 

Now here’s the thing…I think if we were to start there and end there, or work our way toward the centrality of Christ and his character as evidenced in the Gospels, I think most of us would agree that the relationship between men and women in marriage and ministry would be a beautiful thing to behold! I mean, consider how Jesus related to both men and women in the Gospels and in the beginning of Acts, both who represent the bride and body of Christ! Consider the types of people he engaged with, listened to, healed, criticized, challenged, and called to serve and follow Him. (And by the way, Paul does exactly that if you read his letters to the churches in their entirety. He always starts with the centrality and preeminence of Christ in the Church and in our lives as the basis for our Christian living, including our marriage relationships.)

But that’s not where the Complementarian camp focused in the beginning—the beginning being the 1980s. In fact, in their first official position paper, what’s known as the Danvers Statement, not once is Jesus or any of the four Gospels cited in the biblical references given to support the position. Instead, Complementarianism began with lots of inherent contradictions, pointing to what’s biblical in some ways, but exposing their cultural biases in others. Understandably, much of this plays out in my office. And we’ll spend the next bit of the episode taking a look at some of those mixed messages and trying to understand all the different competing components. 

You might be surprised to learn that the term complementarian was created in 1988, just 33 years ago. It was a term invented to draw attention to the male and female complementary embedded in the position, and away from the hierarchy and patriarchy built into the perspective. That’s not how the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood would say it, but in my research, it seems that because of the Women’s Movement, the term “Christian patriarchy” had a bit of a PR problem, and a small group of evangelicals were looking to nail down a thesis of human sexuality—specifically, of biblical manhood and masculinity and biblical womanhood and femininity. Thus, the term complementarian was chosen to emphasize the harmony between men and women in marriage and ministry, when played out through male-female complementary in their respective roles as head and helper. 

Now I want you to put yourself in their shoes for a second…

We’ve already talked a little about the Feminist Movement, the Sexual Revolution, Civil Rights and Women’s Rights in previous episodes. Well, this was the rising tide that Wayne Grudem, John Piper, and others were seeking to address in their formation of a formal position on biblical sexuality. And to some degree, I can understand and empathize with that desire. I grew up in a small church in the ‘90s with many older couples who were parenting children in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and I remember one specific couple’s disdain for sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, and anything remotely feminist. Because having had children negatively impacted by some of those things at the time, they railed against them, believing that women should be protected from the world, finding their place in the home and in the pews, and that men should step up, finding their place in servant leadership at home and at work. 

But what society was offering and modeling at the time wasn’t all bad, right? We can’t throw the baby out with the bath water. The Women’s Rights movement offered an articulation of what many women were already experiencing, and this gave Christian women a chance to envision themselves as living into all they were made to be, not just into who they were always told to be. So as you can imagine, many in conservative Christian circles were feeling anxious, concerned, fearful, even potentially displaced, should they fail to take back the Christian culture wars for God. To use some of the language from the handbook on complementarianism, this group was truly worried about “secular feminism infecting the church” and Christians being swayed to believe things they deemed antithetical to Scripture. 

And given the past few years for us, I think we can all appreciate the uncertainty, the unknown as to what the future will look like or what changing tides will bring. So I want us to have compassion for where they were at the time, so close to culture change, and yet so far away from being able to observe the effects of what they proposed at the time as a better future for Christian marriages and families. 

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? That any of us can be genuinely worried and concerned about something, desiring to make change for the better. And at the very same time, we can have blind spots that lead us to engage in efforts that are well-intentioned, but turn out to be more harmful than helpful. It seems to me that rather than giving an honest evaluation or even a 30,000 foot-view to the good brought about by women gaining equal rights, this original group in the ‘80s was unable to hold their faith and culture in tension, which led to doubling-down on their rather homogenous perspective, without really listening to the other side with an open mind and heart. And so, in an effort to define the correct Christian position, this group of 25 evangelicals wrote what’s known as the Danvers Statement. From there, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood began distributing the publication, and what I’ve heard referred to as “The Blue Bible” was written in 1991, entitled: Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism. 

So in 1988, it was decided that the term complementarian would be used to describe their position. 

Now, this might be getting into the weeds a bit, but I’m including it because I think it’s worth taking a look at the official Complementarian position to understand the differences between what views are held on paper versus what gets played out in practice when couples, churches, and communities firmly hold this view. 

Starting with Danvers Statement, written in December of 1987, it included 2 sections: its Rationale for existence and Biblical Affirmations outlining what Complementarians believe. 

The rationale section starts: “We have been moved in our purpose by the following contemporary developments which we observe with deep concern…” and then it lists 10 points outlining their concerns. In summary: the confusion in our culture regarding the differences between masculinity and femininity; the subsequent unraveling of marriages; the ambivalence of women toward motherhood, homemaking, and women’s ministries; the increase of pornography and the distortion of human sexuality; an increase in physical and emotional abuse in the family; the promotion of Egalitarianism, leading to distortions in the harmony between husbands as loving and humble leaders, and wives as intelligent yet willing followers; an increase of women in church leadership; and finally, the threat to Biblical authority, as they saw it, by egalitarian theologians and scholars who were working on more accurate translations of the Greek and Hebrew into English, and who were seeking to understand the Bible as it was written and intended, interpreting each book not with a fundamental Western lens, but with a contextual middle Eastern lens. 

Okay, so this describes the concerns they were having in the late ‘80s, which we’ve talked about already, and there are a few earlier points of rationale upon which egalitarian Christians would also affirm as problematic, but of course, since the latter half of their concern was solely around egalitarian Christians, they would obviously differ on those points.  

In the affirmation section, we’ll have to break this down a little bit more, but it begins “Based on our understanding of Biblical teachings, we affirm the following…” There are 10 bullet points, but I’ve lumped some together for the sake of time.

(A) That man and woman are created in God’s image, equal yet distinctly different in the created order, per their God-ordained masculine and feminine roles. And here are those roles according to Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood:

“At the heart of mature masculinity is a sense of benevolent responsibility to lead, provide for and protect women in ways appropriate to a man’s differing relationships” (p. 41). 

“At the heart of mature femininity is a freeing disposition to affirm, receive and nurture strength and leadership from worthy men in ways appropriate to a woman’s differing relationships” (p. 41).

“A man, just by virtue of his manhood, is called to lead for God. A woman, just by virtue of her womanhood, is called to help for God” (Ch. 3, p. ).

(B) That the Old and New Testaments affirm God-ordained male headship in the home and in the church—so they see male headship as biblical prescriptive, whereas egalitarians would see male headship as purely descriptive.

(C) That Adam’s headship over Eve was inherent in creation, not a consequence of sin or the Fall. Rather, it was the Fall that led to both passivity and abuse of power in men; and it was the Fall that led women to both servility (which is excessive pleasing of men and others) and usurping male authority. 

This point is really important. Everything that complementarians believe flow out of their presupposition that male headship is built into the created order—that it’s reflected in the Trinity with the subordination of the Son to the Father; that when Paul says “the husband is the head of the wife,” that he means the husband is to lead, protect, and provide for his wife”; and that when God delivers the curse to the man, woman, and serpent, that God is saying, “Eve, you will desire to ruin, destroy, and usurp your husband’s authority, but in my good and gracious plan for you, Eve, Adam will rule over you.”

I remember being taught this at Focus on the Family in my Gender Identity and Leadership Class, where we read Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and in 21 years of being a Christian, I had never heard this particular exegesis of God’s curse to Eve, that her heart would be evil toward her husband, but that because of Christ’s redemption, she would be able to be free from that posture, and that Adam would rule over her with love. That was also a time when the English Standard Version read, “…and your desire shall be for your husband…” in Genesis 3:16, instead of “and your desire shall be contrary to your husband” as it was permanently changed to in 2016–a decision which was later reversed after the outrage of scholars. Anyway

(D) That no earthly submission should follow human authority into sin—a point upon which Complementarians and egalitarians would both agree.

(E) That Christ came to reverse the curse of gender-role confusion, and confusion around the created order; that because of our redemption in Christ, husbands should aim to forsake harsh or selfish leadership, while wives should aim to forsake resistance to their husband’s authority. In Christ, husbands should grow in love and care for their wives, while wives should grow in willing, joyful submission.

Now this point comes directly from Ephesians 5 where Paul puts a twist on the ancient household codes. But whereas egalitarians tend to start with Ephesians 5:21, with the call to the church to mutually submit to one another in love, Complementarians tend to start with Ephesians 5:22, with the call for wives to submit to their husbands. What I also found interesting is the additional omission of any reference to the Gospels or to the teachings of Jesus.  

(F) That women or men who feel called to lead or pastor should never use their “heartfelt sense of call to ministry” as reason to go against Paul’s prescription for godly men to lead, except in places outside the reach of indigenous evangelism, as outlined further in point #9. In other words, in places where missionaries have not yet gone and established a Christian presence, the Danvers Statement allows that “no man or woman who feels a passion from God to make His grace known in word and deed need ever live without a fulfilling ministry for the glory of God and the good of this fallen world.” In other words, if a people group is unreached, one’s sex doesn’t matter in the delivery of the Gospel, because the Gospel matters too much to limit the sharing of it, on the basis of sex. However, in establishing Christianity as a religious presence in that unreached people group, male and female missionaries are expected to teach Complementarianism, organizing families and church communities accordingly.

By now, I hope you can more clearly see some of Complementarianism’s internal contradictions.

Now, I want you to hear me on this, because even though I’ve shifted the neutrality of my position, I really do want to be fair to the Complementarian position in their commitment to Scripture, as they understand it. They read it plainly and in the tradition of Christian fundamentalism and with commentary or statements like these from scholars they trust. Nevermind the fact that the Danvers Statement doesn’t include one single reference to Jesus’ teachings or the Gospels, for a lot of people, especially in my context of small town Christian America, Complementarianism makes sense. Gender roles and gender bias often already exist and are un-examined. There’s nothing really new there except for those who are genuinely committed to Christ, to turn from their selfish ways and love each other like Jesus. And for a lot of Complementarians, I believe their desire to know Truth and to live by it is genuine and pure.

Here’s the problem. 

In John 8:31-32, Jesus said to the Jews: “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the Truth and the truth will set you free.” 

That’s not the problem; this is: I don’t see a lot of freedom coming from Complementarian teaching or practice. I say it like that because many people who call themselves Complementarians aren’t—but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Let me start with complementarian teaching: In my opinion, Complementarianism has led to more confusion than clarity for couples. Because first of all, both complementarians and egalitarians affirm the complementarity between men and women, as two distinct genders uniquely, yet together, reflecting the image of God, which you can read about in the link in the full transcript to an article by Scot McKnight. But second of all, in my opinion, Complementarianism, as defined in 1988, has intentionally or unintentionally created a bait-and-switch, whereby what is offered on the attractive surface isn’t all that couples are getting when they buy into the product. In other words, the advertising of the product turns out to be very different from what couples expect and what they receive when they unbox the whole package. 

Here are some examples of the confusing messages, mincing of words, and contradictions built into Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. 

“If one word must be used to describe our position, we prefer the term complementarian, since it suggests both equality and beneficial differences between men and women. We are uncomfortable with the term “traditionalist” because it implies an unwillingness to let Scripture challenge traditional patterns of behavior, and we certainly reject the term “hierarchicalist” because it overemphasizes structured authority while giving no suggestion of equality or the beauty of mutual interdependence” (p. 15).

In other words, the term Complementarian was chosen because it’s more comfortable and palatable. And at the time, it seemed, they hoped to be open to letting Scripture challenge tradition. They also preferred Complementarian to hierarchicalist, even though that name was thrown into the mix as an option, because they genuinely wanted to emphasize equality and the beauty of mutual interdependence, while minimizing the structured authority still built in.

“While I am not keen on hierarchy and patriarchy as terms describing the man-woman relationship in Scripture, Genesis 2:18–23 . . . and Ephesians 5:21–33 . . . continue to convince me that the man-woman relationship is intrinsically nonreversible. By this I mean that, other things being equal, a situation in which a female boss has a male secretary, or a marriage in which the woman (as we say) wears the trousers, will put more strain on the humanity of both parties than if it were the other way around. This is part of the reality of the creation, a given fact that nothing will change” (p. 54).

In other words, while the writer doesn’t like thinking of his position in terms of hierarchy or patriarchy, he cannot say, in good conscience, that they are not a part of his position. Based on his reading of Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5, paired with his fear of Matriarchy perhaps, or role reversal, he concludes that patriarchy is a fact of creation. That men and women are equal…except on the basis of personhood, sex, and authority. 

Can you see why this would cause someone to have to do a bit of mental gymnastics? And there are 690 pages of this book, taking time to exegete every related passage and answering every possible question that might come up about Complementarianism. And part of me respects this endeavor. I remember reading the book in college and thinking, “My goodness, I’m so glad these guys took the time to form a position for me and to reason with all of these extraneous questions because this seems so complicated and complex!” Now, my Christian upbringing contributed to this thought, too, because prior to my reading, I was also taught to be humble, lowly, to not think too much of myself, which in some ways was constructive to character building, and in other ways, misguided, in that the way I was taught this led me to distrust my own intelligence. And so, I trusted theirs. I took them at their word and considered all the things they were saying as just part of playing my role in the kingdom of God. 

This is why Complementarianism is confusing to so many people and why, unless you’ve grown up in it, or are immersed in it, it can be a little bit crazy-making. 

Case in point: By 2012, Mary Kassian wrote an article entitled, “Complementarianism for Dummies” to try and clarify the position. A founder of the movement, she wrote:

“I was at the meeting, 25 years ago, where the word “complementarianism” was chosen. So I think I have a good grasp on the word’s definition.” 

The graphics on that post read: 1. It’s about complimenting, not complimenting. 2. It’s not about perpetuating a 1950s stereotype—that’s called traditionalism. 3. It’s not about one sex being more privileged than the other—that’s called hierarchicalism. 4. It’s not about guys having the right to rule over and oppress—that’s called patriarchalism. 5. It’s about male and female reflecting complementary truths about Jesus. Kassian concludes her article: “We don’t get to dictate what manhood and womanhood are all about. Our Creator does.” 

Okay, but again, given the text we’ve previously covered, just because the term Complementarianism was the one chosen to represent the group’s predominant value doesn’t mean they’re not present in the position itself. 

Remember, patriarchy has played out predominantly in culture since the beginning of civilization, as has the practice of men as heads of households. The inferiority of the female sex has been an idea forwarded by men throughout history. Take St. Augustine, for example, who wrote in the 4th century: “It is the natural order among people that women serve their husbands…because the justice of this lies in the lesser serves the greater…. This is the natural justice that the weaker brain serves the stronger.” Take John Calvin, for example, who wrote in the 16th century: “Let the woman be satisfied with her state of subjection, and not take it amiss that she is made inferior to the more distinguished sex.” In the 18th-19th centuries, the idea of complementarity took root to maintain social stability with the emergence of the love-based marriage. And finally, in the 20th century, this same blend of Scripture and sexism has been promoted through Complementarian teaching. 

“Manhood” and “womanhood” as such are now often seen as irrelevant factors in determining fitness for leadership.“ … When the Bible teaches that men and women fulfill different roles in relation to each other, charging man with a unique leadership role, it bases this differentiation not on temporary cultural norms but on permanent facts of creation” (p. 40).

And the thing is, Complementarian teaching is pervasive. It shows up all over the internet, on social media, without our necessarily knowing it. The Gospel Coalition, GotQuestions.org, Crossway, who publishes the English Standard Version of the Bible, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and in many Christian marriage and parenting books and podcasts. 

But more and more, their own proponents are identifying the presence of hierarchy (J.I. Packer), patriarchy (Russell Moore), paternalism (Hannah Anderson), subordination (Beth Allison Barr), and benevolent sexism as built into the Complementarian position, whose books and articles I’ve linked to in the full transcript on my website. 

And finally, I want to cover complementarianism in practice. Now, as I said before, some couples, by the grace of God, maneuver around this in their marriages. They stick to the Ephesians 5 passage, but base their love and respect for each other on Jesus instead of on hierarchical practice. They intuitively find healthier ways to relate. They leave the misogyny out of their marriages. And so, I’ve known plenty of couples who call themselves Complementarian, who say they hold complementarian beliefs, but in actuality, the way they live is quite egalitarian, thus, they’re happier, more intimate, and freer than those couples who try to apply biblical manhood and womanhood rigidly to their relationships. Why? Because hierarchy and predetermined marriage, gender, and ministry roles set couples up for resentment, distance, isolation, inauthenticity, and power struggle with one another. 

I’ve worked with lots of young couples on both sides of the spectrum of complementarianism and egalitarianism, but in my work with couples middle-aged and older, I’ve predominantly work with couples who’ve practiced complementarianism and its outworkings for 20-30 years who are frustrated, who are seeing: This is not working. This has not worked. We are halfway through a lifetime together and no better at resolving conflict, sharing decisions, figuring out our sex life, figuring out how to be happy together, or knowing what to do with our shame, resentment, guilt, hostility, and lack of emotional intimacy with one another.

Research backs this up, too, in its look at traditional arrangements in a modern world versus an egalitarian approach to marriage. 

In the 1980s, when David Olsen was doing his research that’s now encompassed in the Prepare-Enrich curriculum, he found that couples who perceived their relationship as egalitarian were qualitatively happier: 81% compared to 19% who reported being unhappy in their marriages. Strikingly, when both husband and wife abide by traditional roles, 18% reported being happy, compared to 82% of couples who reported being unhappy. In 2002, Jennifer Finlayson-Fife found that women who didn’t subscribe to traditional gender ideologies, or who said they did but actually didn’t in the way they organized their relationships—who were actually more egalitarian in practice—were healthier and freer in their sexual agency than those who practiced traditional gender roles. And in 2006, Heather Helms did a study that concluded that spouses who follow stereotyped gender roles tend to have marriages that are reportedly less satisfying and happy than couples with more egalitarian roles. 

Now, here’s what I’ve seen in my practice and why I’m so passionate about this topic and why I want to educate couples on what’s healthy and leads to wholeness. 

1. It seems like gender roles are being emphasized over Jesus. And the prescriptions feel unfair, based on their strengths and personalities; unbalanced, based on their workloads between work and home; and un-Christlike, in that one or both partners is more concerned with trying to play a certain part than with loving their partner and trying to connect on an intimate level, rather than a role-based one. 

2. Christian men are experiencing suffocating amounts of pressure, not only in their expectations for themselves, but in the shame they feel when they can’t or don’t measure up to one of these complementarian standards. A husband loses a job, another struggles with mental illness, another doesn’t know what to do with the fact that his wife makes more than him, another is overworked and burnt out, but doesn’t have any sort of frame in which to put those things. Instead, he says to himself because of what he’s been taught, “I should be better than this. I’m ashamed and embarrassed. I’m weak. I’m not holding up my side as a man. I need to man up.” All of which make the pressure worse, not better, by the way. Oh, and sometimes, not always, the wife is laying that message on him, too, because guess what? They’re buying into what they’ve heard at church or through unhealthy Christian teaching. Men, in this framing are taught that they’re weak and unworthy, when really, they’re just human. As James would say, “brothers and sisters, this ought not to be.” There ought to be kindness and grace and support built into our teachings so that when life inevitably happens and roles inevitably shift, men’s self-esteem and self-respect don’t plummet, leaving him to be able to do less of that which he desires to do for his wife and his family. 

3. Christian women are experiencing loads of guilt and resentment as they blame their partners for not living up to the unrealistic expectations placed on Christian men in complementarianism, and then the guilt comes for disrespecting their husbands and getting angry with them for reasons perpetuated by complementarian views themselves! Do you see how this could be a crazy-making cycle for wives? Because not only does she cycle through thoughts of, “He makes me so angry, but I just need to love and respect him better,” she herself has no sense of inner stability or strength. Why? Because she’s been taught that her stability and strength lies in her husband. That if she exhibits strength, she’s doing it wrong. So instead, she needs to manipulate herself, oh, and her partner to get him to become who she wants him to be, which is, who she’s been told he’s supposed to be in the Complementarian view. But she’s a human, too! So of course, she has agency and personhood—those are God’s gifts to her, just like her husband! But either she won’t recognize her agency in the marriage, winding up in a really underdeveloped state for an adult woman, or she’ll subconsciously use her agency in unhealthy ways to try and fit herself or her husband into a mold that likely doesn’t fit, or is just plain unhealthy. So here, we need teaching, Church, that encourages Christian women, wives, and mothers—all people, really, to grow up into Christ, who is the head, not to be stunted in their growth by leaning too heavily on their husbands, who were not made to be their lords. 

Okay, I’m cutting myself off. We will have to stop here. But we’ve covered a lot, so feel free to connect and let me know your questions, considerations, all those types of things. And especially if you’re in church leadership, I would be more than happy to have a conversation about how to more effectively help the couples you serve. That we both serve in complementary ways. I’m not on social media, but you can find my website in the show notes and my email and contact form from there. Alright? Thanks for being here. Thanks for your engagement this season. I’m Kensi Duszynski. Podcast editing is by Evan Duszynski. Music is by John Tibbs. Have a great couple of weeks and I’ll talk to you again soon. 

For Better or Worse: Christian Teachings on Marriage

SHOW NOTES:

What have some of the most popular authors and speakers on Christian marriage had to say over the past 5 decades? We’ll talk what’s good, what’s bad, and what we’ve believed to be true—before questioning our assumptions about what we’ve been taught God wants for our marriage relationships.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to the Brave Marriage Podcast, a podcast for couples who want to grow as individuals, do marriage with intention, and live mutually empowered, purposeful lives. I hope wherever you are, that you’re doing well, and enjoying this series on marriage, mutuality, and gender roles. And thank you to those of you who’ve recently left ratings of the podcast, I really appreciate it. 

On today’s episode, we’re picking up where my conversation with Steve and Twyla left off. They had talked about having few resources available to them in the ‘70s as they got married, and I’d like to share a little bit of my story and context as well because what I plan to do today is talk about Christian resources, and especially Christian books on marriage, to help us think wisely about what we’re inputting and how we’re internalizing what it means to be married and to do marriage well as Christ-followers.

So I started reading Christian relationship books in the early 2000s, and back then, the only way to access those resources was through my local Christian bookstore. I lived in a small town and our church had a library, but it wasn’t regularly updated, and I wasn’t sure if my local public library would have the resources I was looking for, so what I had to choose from was whatever my local bookstore sold as Christian. So I picked up a few Christian books on male-female relationships in high school, one by Joshua Harris, one by John Eldredge, and one by Emerson Eggerichs. I read their books, and apart from seeing what was modeled for me at church and at home, I really didn’t have any explicit teaching on marriage, so I thought what I was reading was gold! You know, I started dating early, I was interested in counseling, and so I wanted to know the right way, as a young Christian girl, to go about dating and I hoped, one day, marriage. 

What I did then was I assimilated this information on marriage and male-female relating into my pre-existing schema, into my Christian worldview. I didn’t question what these books were saying; I trusted what these books were saying because I grew up in a small town and apart from youth group and theological conversations with my mom and grandmother, I didn’t know any better. I assumed that if someone was published, then they must be credible and trustworthy, and that what they’re saying in their books must be true. What’s more is that I could see myself in the godly woman role these men were describing. So I never doubted or had any qualms about what I was reading; I just wanted to do what was best and honoring to God! 

So I lived by these teachings, I internalized these messages, not even realizing they ran counter to my church doctrine! Because these authors seemed so sure of themselves, and I thought that by following them, I would not only be pleasing God but also my future husband. That’s just a little part of my story, I’m sure I’ll share more in bits and pieces in the future, but it wasn’t until grad school, until seminary, that my professor of Couples Counseling, Toddy Holeman, had us read Jack and Judith Balswick’s, A Model for Marriage: Covenant, Grace, Empowerment, and Intimacy that I realized: 1) the model for marriage I was reading in grad school resonated with me so much more than anything I’d read before—it felt more true to God’s nature, it felt more intuitive 2) perhaps this Christian teaching on marriage is qualitatively and fundamentally more Christ-like than any of the rules or roles that I was taught through other books, were Christian. 

If you’ve been listening for a long time, you’ll recognize the Balswicks’ names, as I mentioned them and their work on differentiated unity all the way back in episode #004, I believe. For the longest time, I hoped that teaching marriage differently—by teaching healthy relationship dynamics that align with Scripture as a Christian and as a licensed professional—would be sufficient to give listeners a better foundation for their marriages. But the longer I’ve been in the field and immersed in the world of marriage education in the church, the more earnest and eager I’ve become about shedding light on things that need to be exposed, in order that we might live healthier, lighter, freer, fuller, and more loving lives in Christ, within our homes, and within the Christian communities.  

So here’s my plan for this episode. I want to walk you through a few books that I was able to get my hands on in paperback form that I’ve read or others have read over the past five decades in the church. Taking one example from each decade, we’ll talk about what’s good, what’s bad, and after taking a look at each one, I’ll draw out a few themes that I want us to think about as we continue our conversation on marriage, mutuality, and gender roles in upcoming episodes. 

Starting in 1975 with psychologist James Dobson’s “What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women.” Most of the book talks about low self-esteem, depression, fatigue, loneliness, isolation, and financial, sexual, menstrual, and parenting problems, as wives and mothers experience them—from the perspective of Dr. Dobson. What’s good about this book is that I think Dobson is genuinely trying to help husbands at this time better understand their wives. He’s addressing the most common complaints he hears in his office or on his broadcast, and attempts to give men advice on how to love their wives better and remedy problems at home. 

What’s bad is that he tells men in chapter 5 that as husband, he is her sole reflector of self-esteem due to her being isolated at home; thus, he needs to take his job as head of the household seriously to save his wife from mental illness and to fulfill her emotional needs. He also encourages husbands to understand that wives need romance and emotional connection in the same way that husbands, as it was thought at that time, need their biologically-driven sexual appetites fulfilled—sooner rather than later. So I wonder, what parts of this teaching have you heard in the church and believed to be true? What of this do you not believe is true, but are still influenced by nonetheless in the way you relate in marriage or in what’s taught to you in your circles? 

It’s important to remember that Dobson’s teachings are coming out of a time where teachings on marriage were already “bad for women,” (as Steve Lee stated on episode 132), so rather than placing all the blame and responsibility for the husband’s attitude at home on the wife, Dobson seems to be trying to help wives by getting their husbands to take on some responsibility as well. As he wrote in his book, Straight Talk to Men and Their Wives in 1980: “For the man who appreciates the willingness of his wife to stand against the tide of public opinion—staying at home in her empty neighborhood in the exclusive company of jelly-faced toddlers and strong-willed adolescents—it is about time you gave her some help.” So he’s seeing the plight of wives in his work, those who’ve chosen to stay home, going against the cultural tide of change, who are sacrificing their own personhood and self-esteem, as evidenced by their mental health issues, for the sake of the family. But his solution is to try to get men to take better care of their wives. Believing that husbands are biblically called to be the head of the household, he encourages husbands to steward their household rule with benevolence, and loving leadership, rather than ruling their households with cruelty and abuse on the one hand, or passivity and disengagement on the other. 

So I can see where people thought at the time that this advice was helpful, healthy, and loving. Wives at this time probably appreciated Dobson’s advice, encouraging their husbands to do something different in order to relieve their pressure and depression at home. But time, distance, and research in social science shows us the deficiencies in this line of reasoning: 

1) Biological, psychological, and environmental factors all play into mental illness, so in the first line of chapter 2, to state that depression and apathy are merely a fact of life for women that needs to be dealt with and normalized in marriage is not only based on availability bias, but proven to be untrue. Furthermore, if a person’s depression is linked to environmental factors, the solution is not to prescribe more of the same that’s not working (in this case, hulling up in the house, relying on one’s partner to take care of them) but to help a client change environmental factors with the differentiated support of a spouse. 

2) To suggest that a husband is solely responsible for his wife’s sense of self-worth and self-esteem is an immense amount of pressure to place on a husband. If in the ‘50s, the advice of the day was for a woman to play a certain part so prop up her husband’s ego and to make sure he was happy at home, and if that contributed in part to a housewife’s mental health during those decades, then it’s illogical to reverse those roles, changing the advice in Christian spaces to get a husband to play a certain part to ensure his wife’s happiness. All we’re doing there is creating a system of relating in which both husbands and wives feel unhappy to some degree, overly responsible for their partners, and codependent on each other to now meet expectations that have been created through teachings such as this, that neither partner was ever meant to fulfill! 

I was just having a conversation yesterday with a former professor of mine and now colleague and she was saying how worried she is about the low self-esteem she sees among women and the purposelessness and lack of direction she sees among men; I can’t help but think that as a church, we’ve done this to ourselves! The loudest evangelical Christian teachings since the development of the love-based marriage have not led to our mutual flourishing, but instead, for many couples who buy into these teachings, to mutual discouragement with themselves, and their subsequent blame, shame, guilt, lack of freedom, lack of love, and misgivings with each other. (Somebody research that please.) 

3) While Dobson tries to convey the importance of emotional intimacy in marriage for women, in doing so, he diminishes the importance of emotional intimacy in marriage for men—when we know through attachment research that both men and women require a secure emotional attachment to relate in healthy ways with one another. Furthermore, on page 64, he says that men need respect for self-esteem purposes, while women need love for self-worth purposes. Again, both are true, but so is the other side of the coin, that men need love for self-worth purposes, and women need respect for self-esteem purposes. Sixteen years later, we’ll see this treatment of men and women needing love and respect differently in the handbook of complementarianism (which we’ll talk about next episode). And thirteen years after that, we’ll see a Christian psychologist and pastor write a NYT best-seller based on this treatment of a divergence of love and respect based on gender, encouraging couples to heal their marriages based on giving a woman the love she most desires and giving a man the respect he desperately needs. And what’s so wild to me is that when Dobson writes about love and respect, he acknowledges that he’s writing in gender stereotypes and overgeneralizations, and yet, the conventional wisdom for relating in conversative Christian circles holds these virtues as diametrically opposed—even though Paul’s instructions to couples in Ephesus were an outpouring of his instructions for those in the church to mutually submit to one another; not rigid rules for relating between men and women. 

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Next, we’ll look at the book, For Women Only, a book of essays by different authors, written in 1988. What’s good about it is, there are many essays written by many different people with different perspectives. For example, there’s an essay by Mary Lou Lacy encouraging women to grow up into spiritual maturity in Christ, seeking Him first daily, above all else, above husband, about children, above all, until women grow up into the fullness of Him, who is the Head, Christ, and learn to love God and others as Christ has called them to. 

However, there’s also an essay by televangelist Robert Schuller called What Does a Man Really Want in a Wife? Five things, he says: 1) a confidante, 2) a companion, 3) a creative climate-controller, and by that he means, his very own source of positivity and possibility-thinking at home—for “No man” he writes on page 116, “will ever leave, or stop loving, a positive-thinking wife who feeds his enthusiasm and self-confidence.” 4) for her to be his conscience, and 5) wait for it—that she be his “consecrated concubine.” He supports his desire for a consecrated concubine to fulfill his biological needs by saying, “we must never forget that God is responsible for this thing called sex” and “many counselors agree that sex is a primary cause of problems in marriage.” 

Now, this is where we see the breakdown between the knowledge of a mental health practitioner, and a Christian person or pastor with a platform disseminating pop psychology and using the Bible to back it up. At least in Dobson’s work, he understands that sexual problems more often expose relational problems in a marriage, rather than causing them, as Schuller misinterprets. But the difference is, Dobson is a parachurch professional, whereas Schuller is a televised pastor to whom evangelicals looked for spiritual guidance and spiritual wisdom on how to relate in marriage. On top of that, there’s a world of difference in what these teachings lead to. When a Christian psychologist understands sexual problems as exposing underlying relational ones, they’re at least a step closer to helping a couple get to the root of their issues. But if Christians are taught by pastors to believe that there’s a causal effect between a lack of sex and relational issues, then what happens in practice is that wives feel pressure to provide sex and husbands feel anxious about not getting it. So they end up doing this dance of pressuring, avoiding, and trying to create desire out of thin air, to solve their relational woes. But what they don’t see is that it’s the teaching itself, rather than the insufficiency of the wife or the enduring need of the husband, that’s perpetuating the problem rather than solving it. Sex and couples therapists will tell you that that type of pressure and perceived insufficiency leads to more problems, relationally, sexually, and psychologically, not less. But it’s hard to know that or to be convinced of that, when Christian leaders and shepherds use God to command their points, which prove unhelpful and harmful when applied to the Christian marriage. 

But again, I want you to ask yourself: Is this something you’ve heard in the church, or been taught in some way, or believed?

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Okay, now we’re getting into the ‘90s and what I want to point out is that by this time, research in the field of marriage and family therapy had advanced like never before. Both John Gottman and Sue Johnson had done years of research specifically on couples in marriage and intimate relationships. But when Dobson started writing his books to couples in the ‘70s, the study of marriage relationships was still in its infancy; the pioneers of my field were actually Dobson’s contemporaries because remember, the love-based marriage was extremely new in history, and how to do it well was still unknown. Dobson was a child psychologist who worked with Paul Popenoe, the father of marriage counseling, but Popenoe was a former eugenicist who wrote popular marriage advice—the same advice that Steve Lee said on last episode, was bad for women in the ‘40s-50s. So throughout the 20th century, we have the emergence of the field and study of intimacy in love-based marriage relationships, which paralleled teachings on marriage in the church, some of which was based on Scripture, but some of which was based on pop psychology and pseudoscience before there was actually empirically-validated scientific studies and evidence-based models for working effectively with couples. I just want you to keep that in mind. 

So in 1996, Gary Smalley wrote a book for Christian couples called Making Love Last Forever. What’s good about his book is a lot, compared to what I’ve shared thus far, and that’s because he combines Scripture and evidence-based principles found in marriage and family therapy. In part I, Smalley gives instructions on how to fall in love with life, the idea being taking personal responsibility before trying to make change in your relationship. And in part II, Smalley gives instructions for how to stay in love with your spouse, getting at the fact that love is a personal choice and decision. Both of these overarching principles are good. 

What’s bad though, is the perpetuation of gender-based stereotypes which don’t fit all couples. For example, in Ch. 11, entitled “How to Bring Out the Best in Your Maddening Mate,” he highlights how men love to share facts, while women love to share feelings. On p. 192, he says, “there’s one particular thing we men wish we could control about our wives—sex whenever we want it! But as we’ll see in chapter 14, that’s not how good sex works.” So I’ll give him credit for saying that’s not how good sex works. But I get so frustrated with the perpetuation of stereotypes, because in my practice, thanks to Olsen’s premarital research in the ‘80s, I have premarital reports that directly express the opposite—both in regard to sexual desire and the communication of fact versus feeling. So when couples are taught that these traits are gender-normative, how are they supposed to feel about themselves when they’re wired differently than what these books they’re reading are purporting? I hear these questions time and again from husbands and wives in my own practice who feel, in some way, deficient because their personality or desires don’t line up not only with what our society calls masculine or feminine, but what the church and Christian authors like this, have set out as normative and typical! 

Smalley makes a few points about gender differences that I would call conditioning, such as men tend to be independent, while women tend to be interdependent, and men tend to compete and be controlling, while women tend to cooperate and be agreeable. Twenty years earlier, Dobson observed that women could also be competitive with one another, and in 1991, the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was sure to point out that it’s women who tend to be controlling of men and therefore, need to heed the advice of remaining agreeable and cooperative. 

So how, as the church, are we to make sense of gender differences when all of these authors are saying different things about men and women in their books, based on what they’re seeing in their own work with couples? Well, there are a few things that are important to remember: 

1) Men and women are biologically different in some ways, yes, but they are also culturally conditioned to behave differently over time. The traits that are labelled masculine or feminine in a given time and place don’t stay the same over time; rather, they change and reflect their culture.

2) Men and women are no more prone, disposition-wise, to certain personality traits than the opposite gender. Men and women can both exhibit independence, competitiveness, cooperation, a desire to control, or a desire to be agreeable. Again, I have many research-based premarital reports which say that each of these traits can and do exist in both genders. So what service are we doing to couples when we speak in broad strokes without looking at each individual person and relationship?

3) We are all prone to cognitive biases and attribution errors. The problem is, when we aren’t aware of our bias or blind spots, we teach solutions to problems as we see them—not as they actually are. In the case of these authors, they see the issues as gender-based rather than culturally-based, and so they apply a medical model to treating couples, linear logic that might alleviate symptoms in the short term, but do nothing to actually help couples long-term, especially when systemic issues are at play. What’s worse, is that they call this truth God’s truth, and at that point, couples not only have relational injuries to address, but emotional and psychological injuries as a result of Scriptural misuse.
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Let’s take a look at another example of this, moving into the 21st century: Emerson Eggerichs’ best-selling Christian book, Love and Respect, written in 2004. Starting with what’s good about the book, Eggerichs does use the family systems principle of feedback loops in his book. And I think this book had such huge success because for the first time in Christian literature, a psychologically trained Christian minister is saying, hey, these issues you’re facing are cyclical—and he names this dynamic “the crazy cycle.” 

What’s bad about this book is that it virtually names every couple’s dynamic as the same in conflict, while research shows that couples tend to have 1 of 3 different dynamics in conflict. But according to Eggerichs, when couples get into conflict, the problem is that conflict makes most men feel disrespected, while women tend to feel unloved. In contrast, eight years earlier, Gary Smalley quoted Deborah Tannen in his chapter on what drives one’s mate mad, quote: “Many women could learn from men to accept some conflict and difference without seeing it as a threat to intimacy; and any men could learn from women to accept interdependence without seeing it as a threat to their freedom.” 

So, who’s more right? Smalley, in his suggestion that men can better tolerate conflict than women, but that men don’t like feeling like their freedom is threatened? Or Eggerichs’, when he suggests that what men fear most is disrespect, and conflict makes most men feel disrespected? Well, I would say that no human likes feeling disrespected or like their freedom is threatened. So to me, their differing emphases seem more like matters of personal experience than matters of universal truth. For example, Eggerichs’ confesses his own intolerance of being disrespected when on p. 68, he writes, “There are many wives who tell me, ‘Respect and love are the same thing.’ I respond, ‘No, they aren’t, and you know they aren’t.’” “The bottom line is that husbands and wives have needs that are truly equal. She needs unconditional love, and he needs unconditional respect.” 

So from there, the author spends the book outlining his solution, what he’s named “the energizing cycle,” assuring readers that the cycle will be broken if wives and husbands could just learn to spell love and respect, respectively. To spell love to women, Eggerichs tells men that a wife wants her husband to be close, open, understanding, peacemaking, loyal, and in agreement with Dobson, to provide her with self-esteem. On the other hand, he tells women that a husband wants his wife to appreciate his conquest, hierarchy, authority, insight, sex drive, and desire for friendship. On page 252, he uses a case study of a woman who calls her mom to tell her they won’t make it to visit her parents that day because her husband is upset. The mother asks why and the daughter responds, “I suppose because we have not been sexually intimate for seven days.” Eggerichs goes on to say that the mom “let her daughter have it,” replying, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Why would you deprive him of something that takes such a short amount of time and makes him soooooo happy?” 

Again I ask, have you believed this to be true. This shame-based motivation for marital change is a common pattern I’ve seen in Christian teachings on marriage throughout the past few decades. Certainly not all books lead with shame, but it occurs to me that some of the best-selling Christian marriage books do. I’d love to know what’s going on there, that we’d prefer to have shots fired at us, borrowing a phrase from Dobson, than to have someone teach on love in marriage in a way that leads to life and grace and the truth spoken in love.

The last book in my literature review through the past five decades is, A Model for Marriage by Jack and Judith Balswick. The premise of their book is that by looking at the way the Trinity relates, we can take a few different principles and apply them universally to our relationships in a way that will lead all couples, through all times, in all places, toward life, love, and health relationally, and those are the principles of covenant love, grace-filled love, mutual empowerment and servanthood, and the intimacy of knowing and being known. 

In Romans 1:16-25, Paul talks about the power of Gospel and how as humans, we are without excuse when we exchange truth for lies and choose to worship created things rather than the Creator because he says, “for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.” And I tend to think that when human-made principles are applied universally, the fruit of such teachings are exposed, as I believe we’re seeing more clearly today in the evangelical church. But when the power of the Gospel is taught correctly, it brings life and health in its transformation of individuals and couples, not death and dysfunction. So I think we have to look at what we’ve been taught, for better or worse, about Christian marriage, and evaluate it accordingly. Does a teaching lead couples closer to Christ and toward freedom and intimacy with each other, or does a teaching lead couples away from Christ or from true intimacy with each other?

To contrast the Balswicks’ teaching on sexuality with the previous books we’ve looked at, they make no mention of gender differences except to say that it's in our being created male and female that we move toward knowing and being known through emotional and sexual intimacy, and that by communing together in sexual union, we reflect the full image of God. On p. 165, they affirm that the erotic expression between the lovers in Song of Solomon goes beyond sexual desire to a longing for the lover, him or herself, making sex a person-centered experience rather than a husband-centered experience that wives are shamed to participate in. Imagine how much difference teachings like these could make if they were the ones primarily taught to couples in the church! 

My main hope for this episode is that you feel caught up to speed on where we are today in the church as it relates to teachings on marriage. This series so far has been in no way exhaustive and there’s so much more I could share, but I think this will give you a good foundation for thinking about what you’ve been taught and why, and how these messages have impacted couples in the church. The most interesting thing to me the more I’ve learned and studied this topic is being able to see how conventional wisdom morphs and changes over time, but how influenced we still are by many of these messages, not really realizing or understanding where they come from. 

Stay tuned for the next two episodes where we’ll dive into Egalitarianism and Complementarianism, to find out what those mean and why it matters to your marriage. Thank you so much for listening to the Brave Marriage Podcast. I’m your host, Kensi Duszynski. Podcast editing is by Evan Duszynski. Music is by John Tibbs. Have a great week and I’ll talk to you again soon. 

How the 1950s Defined Marriage as We Know It - Ep. 130

SHOW NOTES:

We’re starting this conversation with a little understanding of history, how the 1950s defined marriage and split-sphere gender roles as we know them today.

Together, we’ll consider this question: If Paul tells us in Romans 12:2 not to conform to the patterns of this world, then why does so much of what we’re taught today in the church reflect the culture of marriage in 1950s America rather than mirroring Christ?

Join Kensi Duszynski this fall as she facilitates a conversation around marital health, relational dynamics, and the proper place of gender roles in Christian marriage.

Conversations will take place biweekly.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to the Brave Marriage Podcast, a podcast for couples who want to grow as individuals, do marriage with intention, and live mutually empowered, purposeful lives. I’m Kensi Duszynski, a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified professional coach. And you are listening to episode 1 of season 2, where ready or not, like I said in the trailer, we will be diving into a conversation every other week around marriage, mutuality, and gender roles. 

I know we have some new folks listening, so just to give you a little bit of background on who it is you’re listening to, I am someone who grew up in the church in a small town in Kentucky. I felt called to ministry as a teenager, was commissioned in that calling by my church body, and have spent my vocational life pretty much ever since in marriage ministry, if you will, which for me, has taken the shape of becoming a licensed practitioner and working with married couples in the Bible Belt. I studied at Focus on the Family’s Leadership Institute in college, where I learned about what has come to be known as biblical manhood and womanhood, I graduated from Asbury University, where we talked a lot about the integration of psychology and theology, I attended Asbury Theological Seminary where I learned evidence-based practices of couples therapy, and then I worked toward my license as a MFT for four years after grad school. And I’m getting to the age now where I can look back on my reading and study of marriage over the past 15 years or so and compare it to what I’ve seen in my work with couples over the past 8 years or so, and see what is actually helpful and actually true when it comes to helping couples and what’s not. So season 2 is really a passion project for me to synthesize all these ideas, and I appreciate you coming along for the ride! 

As I’ve been thinking about where to start this series, I knew I couldn’t start with what’s good, what’s bad, and here’s why as a therapist, because I know, as someone who’s grown up in the Christian community, how deeply we hold some of our ideas about marriage and what it means to be a good husband or wife. I also know, having grown up in a rural area, that some can feel mistrusting of psychology and therapy and don’t even know how to conceptualize mental and emotional health as something as important as physical health. I know that when it comes to relationships, those of us who’ve grown up in conservative families and churches trust what we’ve been taught about marriage and gender roles there, even if we’ve also been influenced by the media and culture around us. 

So instead, I decided to start this conversation about marriage, mutuality, and gender roles with a little understanding of history. Because when we’re inside of a certain context, like right now, as we’re living through history, it can be hard to step outside of it, to take a look at it, to examine it, and to evaluate it based on its strengths and weaknesses. But personally, when I began to understand marriage in the context of history, that’s the place where I was finally able to assimilate all these ideas and come to my understanding of what I’ve seen in the church, versus what I’ve seen in marriage therapy literature, versus what I’ve seen in my office. 

So here’s what we’re gonna do: In order to examine marriage as we understand it today, we’re gonna start by taking a look at marriage in a decade before most of you listening were born: the 1950s. The first time I ever thought about marriage throughout history was in 2010 at the Focus Leadership Institute, where I had my first marriage and family studies course. Our professors, as kind of a warm up exercise, had written each decade from the 20th century on a piece of poster board, and spaced them out around the perimeter of the room. And they instructed us to go and stand in front of the decade in which we thought we’d most want to live, if we could—to choose the decade that we thought had the best that marriage and family life had to offer. 

Okay, so there were 44 of us, and as 20-somethings who grew up in the ‘90s, most people ended up in front of the 1970s posters or later. I, on the other hand, had grown up watching reruns of I Love Lucy, Happy Days, and the movie remake of Leave It to Beaver, so I stood in front of the 1950s poster, along with one other classmate who chose that decade because she liked the idea of wearing pearls and poodle skirts, that was her reasoning. But when asked why I chose that decade, I said something about how it seemed like the 1950s held all these moral values that growing up in the church, I’d learned were a part of Christian living. And so, from what I’d seen on TV, it seemed like the 1950s were a pretty ideal place for Christian families to live.

…And that’s when I got my first education on just how little I understood about the history of Christian marriage in America. 

So I would like to do a little exercise with you. I’d like you to use your imagination to travel back in time with me to the mid-1950s. Eisenhower is President of the United States, and we’re about 20 years removed from the end of the Great Depression, and about 10 years post-World War II. Compare that with the distance we are today from 9/11 and the recession of 2008. So understandably, between Truman and Eisenhower’s presidencies, lots of effort has gone into re-stabilizing society and the economy upon the return of millions of WWII veterans. This effort is seen in government programs like the GI Bill, which provided unemployment aid, education, and mortgage assistance to millions of American veterans. It’s seen in strengthening the image of America as a strong, militarized nation, armed with a capitalist economy and Christian family values. And it’s seen in the emergence of the ideal American family: the white, middle-class nuclear family with a breadwinning husband who works outside the home, and a stay-at-home wife, who works within the home to keep her family strong. 

Can you bring to mind the image of Rosie the Riveter? Well, if she was the model picture of a woman in the 1940s, a woman who stepped up and served and worked to aid in the war effort on behalf of her country, then upon WWII veterans’ return, Rosie the Riveter was replaced with the image of June Cleaver as the ideal 1950s woman. 

So imagine you’re a married person doing life in this 1950s world. Some societal and economic stabilization has been achieved, and if you’re white and above the poverty line, you’re enjoying the benefits of this in a disproportionate scale to your black neighbors. I say this to indicate here that many black Americans weren’t granted equal access to things like VA mortgage loans or suburban housing due to some legalese in the GI Bill that placed federal benefits in the hands of the state, many of whom were still operating under Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the south. 

But on the whole, the economy is flourishing such that compared to what’s been called “the prosperous twenties,” the middle class in America has nearly doubled, as has your discretionary income. In the mid-1950s, this means wealth building, again, especially if you’re white and benefiting from government programs, and extra money for things like houses with separate bedrooms for everyone, a second car, a new TV, and modern kitchen appliances.

So you’ve just endured a few decades there of recession, of war, and of hardship. And in a matter of ten years after the war, you find yourself the recipient of a quaint little home in the new suburbs, with a church of your denomination not too far away. You can now rest easy in the assurance that you live in a safe, Christian nation, which you’re reminded of every time you say the Pledge of Allegiance, which now, includes the phrase “one nation under God,” or every time you spend your new discretionary income because of the recent addition of “In God We Trust” that’s been added to all US currency. I mean, compared to what you’ve known, this is ideal, this is the good life. This is the epitome of the American dream. 

And as a middle-class couple living in the 1950s, you find yourself enamored with a couple of things: First of all, new and improved home technologies that you can now afford, like the washing machine, an electric dryer, a refrigerator/freezer combo, the vacuum cleaner, all things that promise to make your home life more convenient. K, this is like the Alexa or the Roomba of the 1950s. And on the topic of home life, the second thing you find yourself all consumed by is how to construct this nuclear family ideal that you’re seeing everywhere in mass media and pop culture. From TV shows and magazine ads, to family experts and marriage advice columns, it seems like all efforts are being aimed at solidifying and reinforcing rigid male-female gender roles. 

From Hoover vacuums, you see ads that read, “She’ll be happier with a Hoover.” From a refrigerator company, you see a blindfolded mom holding the hand of a child while her husband presents her new fridge. The copy reads, “The surprise of her life…and the best!” From Edward Podolsky’s book, Sex Today in Wedded Life, you read, “Be a good listener, let your husband tell you all his troubles and yours will seem trivial in comparison. Don't bother him with petty troubles and complaints when he comes home from work. Let him relax before dinner. Discuss family problems after the inner man has been satisfied. Remember your most important job is to build up and maintain his ego; morale is a woman's business." 

From his advice column, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” in the Ladies Home Journal, Paul Popenoe maintained that a husband’s job was to work outside the home and provide for his family, while a woman’s job was to keep her husband happy, faithful, and successful at work. A man’s behavior was thought not to reflect his character, but to offer a window inside his home as to what type of woman he was married to, and what type of home environment was contributing to his behavior and success at work. 

And a question I have is, why? Why were so many in the 1950s invested in creating and maintaining split-sphered gender roles? 

Well, from a socio-ecological perspective, if you’re trying to restabilize a society that’s been marked for decades by men leaving the workforce and going to war, and women entering the workforce with higher paying wages than they’ve known before, and then suddenly, both men and women are trying to find their place again in the midst of a culture that looks quite different from the world before they left, then the way to give men and women a sense of purpose and patriotism after World War II is to promote these split-sphere gender roles as a way to continue to serve your country, especially during the Cold War, is by keeping the family strong. For men, the hope was re-entry into the workplace and back into their seat of influence, as before. For women, the hope was that the preoccupation with, and distraction of domesticity, would soften the blow of what they were losing by focusing on all they stood to gain: namely, a happy home, a happy husband, and the social rewards of playing by the rules and conforming to cultural marital scripts. 

Back to the 21st century and messages we’ve received in the church: What messages like this linger? Does this advice seem absurd to you? Or does it seem in line with what you’ve been taught or internalized somewhere along the way? 

Now, I want you to time travel back with me all the way to the early church in the 1st century, about twenty years after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. Imagine the legacy left by Jesus in the Greco-Roman world. Imagine trying to understand how to live according to the legacy of a man, who was God, who literally died for your eternal salvation but before that, challenged culture and the status quo by bringing life and health and wholeness and dignity to men, women, rich, poor, Jews, Gentiles, and the most marginalized in society. Imagine His influence as you consider this line which Paul writes to the Christians in Rome in Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” The New Living Translation translates it this way: “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.” 

So my last question for you is, if we’re not to conform to the patterns of this world or copy its behavior, then why does so much of what we’re taught today in the church reflect the culture of 1950s America rather than mirroring Christ? 

If you have thoughts, questions you’d like to eventually have answered on the podcast, or monologues you need to get off your chest, know that I can relate and I would love to hear from you. You’re welcome to email your innermost thoughts to kensi@bravemarriage.com. I’d really like to engage with you and hear where you are and what you’re taking from this season along the way. 

That’s it for today on the Brave Marriage Podcast. I’m your host, Kensi Duszynski. Podcast editing is by Evan Duszynski. Thank you so much for listening and for your interest in learning. If you’ve enjoyed this episode and are excited for this series, please share it with someone else you think might be interested. I’ll be back in 2 weeks to pick up where we left off and I look forward to sharing with you again soon.  

RESOURCES:

Marriage, A History, Stephanie Coontz

Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Welcome Back to Season 2 on Marriage, Mutuality, and Gender Roles

EPISODE SHOW NOTES:

BMP is back for a second season! Join Kensi Duszynski this fall as she facilitates a conversation around marital health, relational dynamics, and the proper place of gender roles in Christian marriage. Conversations will take place biweekly.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to the Brave Marriage Podcast! A podcast for couples who want to grow as individuals, do marriage with intention, and live mutually empowered, purposeful lives! It has been a while, I know, and I can’t believe how quickly this year has gone by. 

If you’re listening to this, you’re probably already subscribed to the podcast so you most likely already know that I took some time off this year. But just in case you’re new here, here’s kind of the deal: At the beginning of the year, I decided to take a semester off of the podcast in order to teach a counseling class at the college level. And this felt like a really great opportunity, like a growing experience for me, but one I knew I would need to devote time and attention to, seeing as how I’d never taught a day in my life before that! I don’t love public speaking. I’ve pushed myself to do it over the years, because I know it’s important to my calling, but I’ve certainly never lectured or taught for hours on end before that, so I just knew something had to give in order for me to engage that new role well. 

But here’s kind of what’s transpired since. And I want you to know that I’ve really been trying to wrestle down this first episode back. I apologize for the lengthy explanation, as I’m sure some of you would prefer that I just get back to the content, which I totally understand. But after trying to figure out how to jump right in and pick up where we left off, the fact of the matter is, I can’t—and I need to explain why. 

So during class last semester, we were able to have some really engaging discussions around how counseling helps us become healthier as humans and as Christians, and how we integrate those two things, because all of us, no matter how long we’ve known the Lord, still grew up in families, churches, and communities that shaped us for better or worse. You know, they shaped our personalities, the ways we learned to interact with the world, they shaped the skills we have or don’t have to cope and to engage in healthy relationships. 

And of course, in my line of work, I’ve thought about these things for years, having processed my own family background, church background, and context in which I grew up. But what was so fascinating for me to see through teaching was my students on the very front end of this processing. Still discovering who they are, in light of who they want to be, and wrestling through questions around faith and counseling and psychology and theology and their future roles as Christian counselors. 

And it just so happened that as we were talking about all these things, a few professors got together during that same semester to host a series on purity culture. So I facilitated a short discussion with my students in a conversation around this topic, thinking surely, with them being ten years younger than me, that they’d grown up with healthier views than my generation did on sexuality, purity, and gender roles in marriage. But you guys, I was shocked at some of the messaging they’d grown up with, just some really unhealthy views, although maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised, given the conversations my husband, Evan, has had in working with college students.

And so, as you all already know, I am deeply passionate about helping others learn how to do marriage relationships well. And what I’m seeing—both in the culture at large and in the classroom (you know it’s like, once you see it, you can’t look away)— is this subtly, yet deeply distorted way of looking at Christian marriage and of talking about marriage and sex in the church. In a way that doesn’t lead to life and freedom and valuing each other as we should, but instead leads to dysfunction and bondage and diminishing each other. And that’s not who we are as Christians, that’s not who we were created to be in the imago Dei, that’s not what the family of God is supposed to be, and yet, the way we continue to talk about marriage, unthinkingly, just repeating what we’ve heard before, it’s actually continuing the perpetuation of these relational ideals that are not good for everyone across the board. And end up landing twenty-something year olds in my classroom and couples of all ages in my counseling practice having to work through damage done to their relationships and to their psyches sometimes by the church when the church should be the place where we find the most healing and health and help for our relationships. 

So clearly, all of this has led me to the inability to podcast about anything other than this topic for a while, this topic of healthy marital dynamics and our callings and roles as Christian couples. Until I’ve said all I’ve needed to say on it, until you’ve said all you need to think and say on it, and until the conversation around marriage and gender roles in the church looks more hopeful and creative than it does rigid and oppressive. 

A few things have led me to this place: The first is, living on a Christian college campus for the past 4 years. We’ve seen what’s become healthier when it comes to living and relating in Christian community, but we’ve also seen some of the same old, unhealthy teachings from decades past just continue to live in the zeitgeist of the Christian community, and not only that, but we’ve also seen some really unhealthy things strengthen in the Church that are anything but Christlike. So there’s that, and then there’s this: I’ve really felt led over the past couple of years to speak more courageously to some of these topics, but to this point, have failed to do so. I’ve resisted and avoided, quite honestly, talking about these things publicly. I made excuses, all wrapped up in fear because who wants to give a minority voice to the majority Christian culture, right? Certainly, not me. Certainly not me. 

But then after my class, after these conversations (and a slew of others over the past few years), I just knew I couldn’t not address the roles of men and women in marriage anymore, and how our understanding as Christians of these topics affects our marriages, because it affects our mental and emotional health, and therefore, our relational health! 

When I first started the podcast, one of the very first questions I received was, “Which is a better model for Christian marriage: complementarianism or egalitarianism?” 

And if you’ve engaged with that question at all, you know it’s not a small question to answer. 

But at the time, applying my counselor brain to this podcast: I knew I hadn’t yet built a relationship with you guys to be so bold as to initiate that conversation—that’s not really my style of relating. The other part is, beyond my own personal experience with both positions, I hadn’t given that question three years of deep thought, as I have at this point in my professional journey. When I started the podcast, I knew I wanted to be practically helpful to you all, offering short teachings and action steps that would make an immediate difference in marriages for the better. 

And I think, at least, to some degree, this podcast has accomplished that, as you guys have told me or left ratings and reviews saying, “I’ve never heard some of these things before, I’ve never heard marriage or sex talked about in such a positive light in the Christian community.” Not that it’s not out there—there are so many people doing really good work right now around these topics in the church. People I actually hope to talk to in the future on this podcast, so prayers that I’d be able to make some of those connections. But the thing is, the thing I can’t skirt around any longer is that, to those of you for whom this podcast feels different than what you’ve been taught elsewhere, that’s because it is! This isn’t what so many of us are taught! And I think it’s time that I make this teaching even more explicit for you. I want to give you understanding and language that you haven’t had before to engage these conversations in your own home, in your church, and in your community, if you find relational dynamics and gender roles in marriage relevant to your own life, to what you’re passing on to the couples you mentor and to your kids. 

So, a few months later, here we are with the Brave Marriage Podcast shifting direction a bit. Unlike Season 1 I’ll call it, where there was a quick teaching, an action step, followed by a prayer for your marriage, Season 2, if you will, will be more educational, historical, and hopefully, conversational. I would love to hear stories from you and further understand your experience. I would love to talk to other experts specifically around these topics. And I would love for the upcoming episodes to serve as conversation starters in your own home and Christian communities. 

There’s been a lot of talk in the public square about how everybody is deconstructing everything, and how millennials and younger are losing their faith and what does this mean for the future of the church, and more immediate than that, for our kids? 

But listen, what I’m wondering is, is if we can move beyond that fear stuff? Or perhaps more accurately, as my friend reminded me of yesterday, can we add goodness to the conversation despite our fear? And I’m talking to myself here, too, maybe even more than I’m talking to you right now. I am just tired of adults in the room and the loudest adults in the room peddling fear instead of Hope, because we have a hope, y’all! His name is Jesus! And He has not given us a spirit of fear, other people have, but He hasn’t! He’s given us a spirit of power, and of love, and of self-discipline! 2 Timothy 1:7 And personally speaking, I’m tired of being the adult in the room who’s not peddling fear, but equally as bad, is too afraid to speak up. 

So here we are, diving into marriage and gender roles and healthy relational dynamics because I believe that after all the pruning—after all the deconstruction of so many things that we’ve missed the mark on as a church, myself included—that there is fruit to be found. There is love and a Savior who says in John 10:10, “It’s the thief who comes to do nothing else but to kill and steal and destroy, but I have come that you may have life, and an abundant one at that.” 

So I hope you’ll join me on this journey. On this second season of the Brave Marriage Podcast, if you will, where we’ll dive into marriage dynamics from a biblical perspective, a psychological perspective, and a relational systems perspective to see if we can’t create something better as Christian couples, to see if we can’t engage in relationships that emanate life and hope and healing in a hurting and broken world. 

If you’re looking forward to this series, please leave a rating and review if you’re able on Apple Podcasts. And if not, no worries, I completely understand, and I will see the rest of you back here soon.