Episode 316: What Still Surprised Us Making the Love & Respect Docuseries

Rebecca, Joanna, and I are pulling back the curtain on what went into making the Love & Respect docuseries — including the things that didn't make the final cut.

From the bizarre Nazi torture illustration Emerson used to keep women in bad marriages, to the genuinely heartbreaking story of a little boy watching his father abuse his mother, this episode gets raw and honest about why we've been fighting this battle for seven years. We also share the stunning survey results from a church in Florida that show exactly what happens when love-and-respect-style teaching takes root in a community. And we end with a word of real hope: healthy churches exist, better books are being written, and the tide is turning.

THANKS TO OUR SPONSOR:

To Heal or Harm: Scripture's Use as Poison or Medicine for Abuse Survivors by Dr. Steven Tracy. How to refute it when Bible verses are weaponized! https://amzn.to/4rSYkZu

TO SUPPORT US: 

• Join our Patreon for as little as $5 a month to support our work
• And check out our Merch, or any of our courses!
• Give to the Good Fruit Faith Initiative of the Bosko Foundation
• Join our email list!

LINKS MENTIONED: 

• Watch the Love & Respect Docuseries! Episode 1, Episode 2, and Episode 3
• Our Love & Respect hub (links to all Love & Respect articles 7 resources at bottom)
• The Substack from the Florida woman
• Subscribe to Good Fruit Faith on YouTube

Transcript

Sheila
Welcome to the BareMarriage podcast. I'm Sheila Wray Gregoire from BareMarriage.com, where we like to talk about healthy evidence based biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage. And this is an important podcast because we have just finished our Love and Respect docu series. For the last two weeks, we have been running episode one and episode two of our three part docu series
For episode three, you're going to have to watch it on the Good Fruit Faith channel, and we have that link in the podcast notes. It is live now.

Rebecca
Yes, we have a new YouTube channel called Good Fruit Faith and a new podcast channel. And Joanna and I are going to be doing more of these deep dives going forward. And those channels are going to be where they are. Obviously, we'll share it to our social media here on Bare Marriage, but make sure that you're subscribed so that you see it as soon as it goes oup.

Sheila
Yes, because we want to prime people for that. So I am joined today by the people who are really behind that docu series. So Joanna Sawatsky, who spent the last I don't know how long..year?

Joanna
Yeah.
  
Sheila
Maribel Morgan and watching the conference DVDs and doing.
  
Joanna
Just marinating in it. I was just I was just soaking in the Love and Respect juice.

Sheila
Right? I guess listening to everything and then your dreams.
  
Joanna
And then Rebecca took my many trees, the many, many trees that I could see. And she was like, oh, look, it is in fact a forest.  

Sheila
And of course, and then my daughter Rebecca Lindenbach is here as well, who was the host of the Love and Respect docu series. So we filmed it with Joanna sitting in a corner in the same room, often telling her what to say.
  
Rebecca
Yes, if you're watching the video series, you have to picture Joanna kind of huddled in the closet you were sitting in the closet.
  
Joanna
You have this desk in the closet. In fairness, I guess not. So you're on.
  
Rebecca
The floor for a lot of it, though.
  
Joanna
It's true, I was, yes.
  
Rebecca
But yeah, I have a picture like Joanna on a on a chair on the floor in the closet. I'm like, you can't say that. That's not quite right. Or actually, do you want to use this this quote over here. And it was so good. It was so much more helpful to do it together than if I had had to do it by myself.
  
Joanna
Oh, I would also like to shout out my husband who made that possible. And your husband, Rebecca. They both, did amazing jobs as dads. Josiah had sick kids and horrible sciatica, so he was like, not moving from the couch the whole time. I felt so bad. But we made it work.  Luckily the kiddos were also sick enough so he didn't have to walk them to school because guess what
He couldn't walk so it was they had a tie to this. There's some lore behind this YouTube series.

Sheila
Yes.
And we and we want to say thank you to the people who made it possible for us to do that. So those of you who donated through the Good Fruit Faith initiative of the Bosco Foundation and donations through there are tax deductible within the United States. We're still working out of the countries. It's just hard. So really sorry about that.
And also to our Patreon supporters. So if you're in another country and you want to support us and you can't get the tax receipt anyway, our Patreon a great way to do that because you can join our Facebook group, give on a monthly basis.
  
Rebecca
And that if you join the Patreon now, Joanna and I are about to flood it with a bunch of bonus content from this Love and Respect docu series. So anyone who joins, we are now splitting our Patreon a little bit, so that the actual stuff on the app is going to be about our Good Fruit Faith stuff and our book club that Joanna hosts.
And then everything on our Facebook group that's exclusive for Patreon is going to be really focused on Bare Marriage. Yeah. So you're going to have kind of double the amount of stuff. Yeah. At this point, if you join now. Yes. Including some, Joanna has been compiling lists of clips that we didn't, but in the, in the series for me to live react to and stuff like that.

Sheila
So, so for those you I know there's people listening to this podcast who haven't seen the docu series, so let's just take a back. Let's back up for a minute and tell our story about Love and Respect. The big picture story about how we got started doing this and why we decided to do the docu series. So who wants to start?
Should I start? Because I guess I was the one who read it. Okay, people are nodding. All right, so it was a it was January of  2019 and I was getting cold and windy. It was a cold and windy.

Joanna
I was playing in the basement with my toddler and my bunny rabbit, who we didn't yet realize my toddler was allergic to.
  
Sheila
I yes you were. I remember this and I had a headache and I was on Twitter, as it was called then, and people were having this debate about whether women needed love or respect. And a lot of women, they were referring to the book Love and Respect by Emerson Eggerichs, and many women were saying that it was totally off base because they needed respect more.
And I thought to myself, yeah, so do I. I mean, I think respect is super important. And then I realized I have that book upstairs, but I've never read it because I had been speaking at a bunch of marriage conferences, and they had given us this huge box of evangelical marriage books, and I hadn't read them because I had this real fear of plagiarizing.
So I had been writing in the evangelical sphere. I had bestselling books in the evangelical sphere, but I hadn't read a lot of other ones. And so I thought, this is an amazing way to procrastinate. So I went and got it, and I turned to the sex chapter, and that's when I started FaceTiming Joanna. I don't know why didn't I FaceTime you?
I FaceTime Joanna more than you. Yeah, that first day you must have been, I don't know.

Rebecca
I'm not the favorite, clearly, that's.
 
Sheila
And then I started getting you into it, too. And and then, we were trying to figure out what to do, and so I wrote a post, for Monday. And, up until then, I hadn't really called out books by name.
  
Rebecca
Nope.
  
Sheila
I had I had written a post two years earlier on, ten reasons Why You Can Respect Your Husband Too much, because I knew that the concept was out there, and it wasn't the best concept, but I hadn't I hadn't read the book, and I wasn't referring specifically to the book in that post. So I wrote, like, this 3 or 400 word manifesto on how badly this book treated sex, and I didn't know if I should read it or not.
And I walked into church that Sunday and the pastor was preaching, on a story in Second Chronicles. I think it's chapter , but I might be wrong. Where the Israelites are surrounded by two different nations and they don't know what to do. And so they're praying. And it was Sunday and I walked into this church saying, God, I don't know what to do tomorrow.
Like, I don't know if I should run this piece tomorrow or not. I don't know what to do. Like just help me find peace about it. And the pastor read the story and two times it says, Tomorrow I'll go down and fight for the battle is not yours but mine. And it says that twice tomorrow go down and fight.
  
Sheila
And I'm like, okay, so we ran the post, it blew up on the blog.

Rebecca
And we've been fighting for seven years and.
 
Sheila
 And then and then, we were so flooded with stories of people who said this book made my marriage worse. And Joanna took all those comments. And what did you do, Joanna?
  
Joanna
Well, I was mad enough to do qualitative research. And also my toddler had a fever, so she was pretty chill.
I was like,  think everybody just needs to remember that our work is so marinated in motherhood. It's really quite funny. But yes. So I decided that I was going to take all the stories and do a thematic analysis of those stories. And so we put that on the blog. You wrote the piece for Monday, and then we had a follow up pieces that ended up getting written throughout the week.
And then I think on the Thursday or Friday you ran the stories that we had gotten thus far. And it was just so powerful to read the actual fruit of these teachings. And that was the first time, I think, that for me, the depth of pain and the desire to be heard that was sort of coming out from a generation of evangelical women was really that I first realized that this was that there was something that there was this untapped heart cry, and then we could help.
  
Sheila– AD
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Joanna
And so we did the first thematic analysis, and then after that week, we decided to go to Focus on the Family because on the side of Love and Respect, it says, oh, Focus on the Family book. And so I wrote up a report for Focus saying, hey, guys, like, this is weird. You must not know about this.
Obviously, if you did, you could care, because of course you would care because, you know, yeah, there are problems with Focus as an org, but like, surely they care about women being abused.
  
Rebecca
And let the record show let the record show that even back then, seven years ago, I was like, there's no there's no chance in hell that they are going to care.
  
Sheila
And I was, I was medium, I was like, well, I really think Jim Dale is going to email me back. Like, even if they don't care, he's going to email me back because I had a relationship with him. And they never did. And so that May I was doing dishes and I was FaceTiming Joanna again. Sorry, I don't know where you were.
  
Rebecca
I should be honest. At this point. I was probably nauseous and puking cause I was pregnant with Alex.

Sheila
Yes, yes. And Joanna and Joanna said, you know what I should do? I should go get my PhD so that we could do a study on how this book has affected people and his teachings have affected people. And I said, I don't think you do a PhD. I think we can get a publisher to pay for it. And within 24  hours we had, we had, an offer for the Great Sex Rescue. And so and the rest is kind of history.

Joanna
Yeah.
  
Sheila
So since then we have created a downloadable one, sheets on Love and Respect. We have done deep dives into, how he gaslights emotional abuse victims in sermon series. We have, Joanna did a huge look at how he misrepresents scripture and some of that you will have seen in episode two.
  
Rebecca
But I can't emphasize enough how many times of misused scripture. He just did, didn’t even make the video.
  
Sheila 
Yeah. So we had we have longer posts on that. And all of that. If you, if you go to the post on bear marriage, where the podcast post for this, this episode, you will see all of the links to all of our Love and Respect stuff. So I will put the link to that in the podcast notes, because there's so much stuff we've done since then, and this was kind of like our saying, okay, we've done all these one offs.
Now let's put it all together in one place in a new form that people might listen to,
  
Rebecca
Yeah. Our goal for this year, we've talked about like a big thing we want to focus on is how do we reach people who haven't heard of us yet, or maybe who aren't in the internet spaces that people usually find us in? Because I feel like we've done a really good job, frankly, finding the people who are like, experiencing hurt from the church and who know that there's a problem, I'm not entirely sure that we're reaching the people who are still in it.
In the same way. And that's who I want to reach. I want to reach people who are still in it. And I think that people can understand why I'm very prevention focused. Yes. As a person, I like to get ahead of problems.
 
Sheila 
Well, and Joanne is an epidemiologist, public health. So that is like prevention. 
  
Rebecca
So Joanna, so Joanna and I are really, focused on with these video deep dives. We're trying to do it in a way where the YouTube algorithm would pick it up and give it to people who otherwise might not have heard of us. And good news, it worked.
  
Sheila
Yeah.
  
Rebecca
The, this the app we've been studying the analytics on our YouTube studio thing, which, by the way, is very fun. I know at some point it's going to give me existential dread and anxiety and a sense of horror, because it does for everyone who does YouTube. But right now I'm having fun with it. But you can see how after about 72 hours on the platform, our deep dive started getting sent into people's, up next into their recommended watches, on to their home page.
Even if they aren't subscribed or aren't, viewers of either of our channels, we started getting almost half of the people who are clicking on our video, from what I can tell, didn't know who we were.

Sheila
Yeah. So they weren't coming from where I shared on Facebook exactly. I said it on the blog.
 
Rebecca
Or from, from being a subscriber of ours or something. So that was really amazing to see because that was really what we wanted. I was, I just wanted to know, can we reach out and start to get people who otherwise might not have heard of this? And can we maybe inoculate a bunch of people against this?
  
Sheila
And, and, you know, one thing, that one complaint that we got, was you guys, you're being too funny. You're taking this. You're being too snarky, or you're not taking this seriously enough. Pastors aren't gonna listen to you. It's like, 

Rebecca 
I don't care. 

Sheila
We weren't trying to reach pastors. I mean, we lost pastors. If you are a pastor and you watch the docu series, thank you.
  
Rebecca
And I also know we have a lot of pastors in our patron who were like, this was hilarious.
  
Sheila
And they're like, yes, but I want people to understand, if you were to a 20 something evangelical right now, you are being put down that tradlife algorithm everywhere you go. And even if it's not like total tradlife content, like you need to leave the workforce and raise six kids and chickens like some of it is still this super, super, toxic mess of
  
Rebecca
Yeah, just patriarchy.
And another thing too, is like, one of the things that we're trying to do is we are an evidence based group. Quite frankly, I want to do the things that will actually get eyeballs on this. And, you know, it gets eyeballs as if it's really entertaining. Yes. And so if you're someone who's like, I really would have loved to watch a Ted talk, instead, I go watch a Ted talk.
Have a great time. But we know from, just what works, is it's this needs to be something that is not simply making people angry, but it's also making them think. Making them, laugh, making them feel. Oh, I actually I am able to critically think about this. I am able to follow this logic and see why this doesn't make sense, because then they're going to be able to apply that logic to other things.
And so everything that we did was for a reason not to be glib. And you'll notice in video three, when we start talking about some really intense stuff that's more personal, you'll notice a lot of the, the, the funny movie clips and all that stuff, they go away because it wouldn't have been appropriate. Yeah. But I just wanted to say that we're just so thrilled that our research project, our experiment, it worked and it just worked. For anyone who’s watched the video.
  
Speaker 
The video, and I just want to say the Brooklyn Nine and the Brooklyn NineNine “self-burn” thing. 

Rebecca 
Yeah. And those are rare. 

Sheila
That was my idea.

Rebecca
Yes that was
  
Joanna
Yeah. I also want to say that if you are interested in Ted talks and more serious takes, we actually have those too. Obviously there's the podcast that you've done a lot about Love and Respect for years, but also our work is now being published in peer review. So if you would like to go read our stuff, we now have we have a paper out at Sociology oF Religion that we've had out.
We have another one that was accepted at the Journal of Sexual Medicine. So we do it all like we are your one stop, stop.
  
Sheila
Yes, yes, 

Rebecca
Yes exactly.

Sheila
so let's just answer this question okay. Why did we take on Love and Respect. And part of it is because it's our origin story right. Like everyone has an origin story. I mean, love and respect completely changed the direction of what we were doing before we looked at origin story like, I Love and Respect.
Joanna was busy with SEO for me, for my old version of the blog. Yeah, I think we were doing totally different things. 
  
Rebecca
But a big point is that love and respect is, first of all, it's the bestselling, explicitly evangelical marriage book. Yes, fall like, of course, the Five Love Languages sells better, but it's also has a massive, popular popularity in the secular world as well. That's not the case for Love and Respect. So it doesn't seem fair to compare the two.
Love and Respect  is the bestselling explicitly Christian. Yeah.

Sheila
And I will say, you know, Power Pray life sold more copies. But it's not like a marriage book.
  
Rebecca
So this is like other book that says this is what marriage is exactly. And it is the best I, study.
But also it has the easiest hook. Yeah. Like, I think that's the big one is like, okay, we're going to like Sacred Marriage. We'll say, like it says the same thing that every single other evangelical marriage book does. And same with like Tim Keller's book and same with like all these other books. Like they just all kind of say the same thing.
Love and Respect actually does say something that is that is like self-contained in a way that the others don't. But additionally, it's just the most egregious one.

Sheila
But it also went beyond the book. Yeah. And that's what and we we, are you I, I helped you with this one. Made a compilation of the Love and Respect people talking about love and respect from all different places. And why don't we just play that right now to show you how it went beyond the book.

Miscellaneous Evangelical Content 
Love and Respect
Love and Respect
Your wife needs love, your man needs respect.
The respect of a wife for her husband.
The Bible tells husbands to love their wives, but it tells wives to respect their husbands.
You will not, under any circumstance, have a happy, healthy marriage unless your husband feels respected,
Just as much as women need love. Your husband needs respect.
Wives respecting and following the leadership of their husbands.
Your husband craves respect.
Love and Respect,

Sheila
So you will have recognized that from episodes one and episode two. 
Did you put in episode three?
  
Rebecca
No I didn't, I did a new compilation for episode three.
  
Sheila
That's right. Yes. Yeah. But that's the thing. Even if you didn't read the book Love and Respect, if you if you're in the evangelical church, you've heard it, you've probably heard it because it's everywhere, right? Like it's not just in the book. This is just what is taught as canon. Like, I don't know how to explain it, but this is just taught as a truth universally acknowledged, right?
  
Rebecca
Yeah. But listen. Okay, we are going to assume that everyone listening to us has watched the series. If you have not watched the series, well, you're officially in the minority of, you know, people who are cool. So go watch the series. Let's do some peer pressure there. No, but seriously, it is really fun. It took us literally, like so much work and, I pulled so many 12 hour editing days over the last two weeks trying to get this done.
I even caught like, a stress cold in the middle of it and had to like, sleep for three days because it was so much work. But go watch the series, go watch it. But I want to just talk about a couple of things that didn't make the cut. 

Sheila
Yes

Rebecca
The things that you wouldn't know from listening to those three videos, the stuff that as you're watching it, you might have questions about and we want to answer them.
Okay. So first of all, I want to ask Joanna first because she was our big research. Actually, no, I'm gonna ask you first because you weren't behind the scenes of this. What was your biggest surprise? Sheila, Mom? Yeah, you you.
  
Sheila
This might sound obscure, but I didn't realize how much he misused the research on the shoulder to shoulder stuff. I had known most of the other stuff, like all the critiques we had of his marriage teaching, but I had never actually looked up the study that he quoted about how men need shoulder to shoulder time.
And when you read that and put it on the screen and how it had nothing to do with his conclusions, I'm like, I don't understand how a man, like this man has a Ph.D.. Okay, I don't have a PhD. I have two master's degrees.
 
Rebecca
I just have my undergrad with honors.
  
Sheila
I know what it is to have to look and have multiple peer reviewed studies for every paper that you write, and to have to comb through peer reviewed studies like, did he not have to do that in his university degree?  

Joanna
He did. He went to the University of Michigan, which is a very good school. I'm an Ohio State grad, and I will happily cop to the fact Michigan is a very good 
  
Sheila
I know that a lot of pastors go in like later in life. As he.
  
Joanna
Was younger, he was like in his early s. No, he was like he was young, but he wasn't like, yeah, with him, he was 

Rebecca 
No like normal aged, like a PhD
  
Sheila 
I thought he went in later.
  
Rebecca
Well, he might have, but it's like a lot of people do, though. A lot of people work for five years and they go and get their PhD he was within the normative range. No, there is no explanation. You are right.
  
Sheila
Because I just don't even get that.
  
Joanna
I have a theory here because, I've thinking about how they did the study. They genuinely could not have done worse in question design had they tried. If you've watched the video, you've seen Connor's hot take about the wizard at the Basement Dweller, and
  
Sheila
You're talking about not the study that I was talking about Shaunti Feldhahm’s study.
  
Joanna
No, no the Shaunti Feldhahm study. We felt instead of that Emerson Eggerichs quotes, very, frequently in Love and Respect. If he couldn't have done a worse job in citing research, he couldn't get a worse job in question design in all of this if they had tried. And so what I have come to believe, because I actually do believe that Emerson Eggerichs was well trained.
I do believe that Shaunti Feldhahn is well trained. I do, I went to the University of Saskatchewan for my MPH, which is not an amazing school. Like it's good, it's a solid good state school, but it's not like Harvard, or Yale. But I.

Sheila
I'll put a caveat in there for Shaunti. Let's come back to Shaunti in a minute. But you keep going when you say.

Joanna
But essentially they do actually have the chops and the training from the academy to know what they're doing. And they actively did not do that thing such that a person who is trained should have been able to look at their work and say, yes, major problems. Giant red flags going off everywhere. What happened? Well, I think that they self-sabotaged.
I suspect that this was likely subconscious, but if you know the conclusion that you would really like to draw and you are going to look for any evidence that you can find to bolster your conclusion, because your ego, your, your psychology cannot handle the, conclusion being different than what you've already decided. It must be for you to be safe and okay.
You will do whatever you have to. And in this case, yeah, we write a really bad double barreled question. We cite studies in ways that don't make any sense. We make it so that 85% of men stonewall, as opposed to 85% of stone. Waller's our men, we say studies about boys being explicitly told to talk about something deep and then doing that even though they're 15 year old jerks.
Because they actually can because men can have deep conversations. We make that about how you have to watch your husband paint a wall for three hours.

*laughter*
  
Sheila
Yeah, I
I do want to say I am not, I believe that Emerson Eggerichs was trained in recognizing and how to analyze a peer reviewed study and try to draw the conclusion from it.
I am not certain Shaunti was. And I'll tell you why. I did both a master's in sociology and a master's in public admin. And I think Shaunti has, like, a master's in some sort of a business course. And the difference.
  
Rebecca
And  economics.
  
Sheila
The difference in, my master's in sociology and my master's in public admin in terms of how you handle peer reviewed research, is night and day like sociology. It was constant. Look at studies and analyzing studies and analyzing data and figuring out whether this is good or not. The public admin very, very little of that. And then you have this one stats course that wasn't
And she said that herself in her first book, that she took a stats course and didn't understand it and really struggled with it well.
Don't think she was trained in social science.

Rebecca0
At all. Well, here's the here's the thing. Economics is technically under social sciences. Yeah, but and so no no no no. But what I'm I'm getting there. Don't worry. I'm getting there. No, I think what's happened is we've taken a technicality and we've run with the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. She says that she is Harvard trained social scientist, when from all we can tell, she did not actually go to Harvard, but to an adjunct school related to Harvard.
And then she studied economics, not social sciences, as we, the general public, would know. And then she becomes a psychology researcher, which means she's not actually doing what she was trained to do. And she was not trained by the school that she's claiming she went to. She did go to a Harvard related school, but it is objectively misleading to say I am a Harvard trained researcher
When you did not go to Harvard University and.

Sheila
And You were not trained.
  
Rebecca
And you were not trained in that.
  
Joanna
And for. And finally, when you ignore the advice of the people who you hired to be your consultants, to help you do that research, which is what we would actually expect someone to do if they were behaving in an ethical manner.

Rebecca
Yeah, exactly. And so I think this is what's happened. Exactly like Joanna is saying is they're so focused on and we talk about this in video two. In the antiintellectualism segment, you're so focused on the conclusion that the methods be damned. Yeah, right. Like the end justifies the means. As long as we prove that men need respect and women need love, who fricking cares if we actually proved it or not?
And that is really dangerous if we get into that habit because then we, we don't actually know what truth is.
  
Sheila
Okay. So that's what surprised me was how badly they handled that study. What surprised you Becca?
  
Rebecca
No I'm gonna go last okay. What surprised Joanna?
  
Joanna
Okay, so I had been given the Love and Respect conference DVDs when we got married in  as a wedding gift, and I don't know how these conference DVDs made, I can understand. Once I started working with you, Sheila, and we were doing the books. Like, I totally understand why they made the move to Iqaluit and why they made the move back completely.
Makes sense. But how did they go from Saskatoon to Belleville? I don't know why. Do not ditch them. Yeah, why did I.  
Never watch them? But I kept them for some reason. I think it was guilt. Like I felt like I really should and I felt bad that I hadn't, but I also knew that if I did watch them, that it was likely to make me incandescent, angry. And I didn't want to be incandescent angry. And so it was just sort of a lot.
And so I had these conference DVDs kicking around, and we were going to do this video series. And so of course, the time came to dust them off and put it in the DVD and, wow. There was a lot of surprising stuff in those conference DVDs. The first one is actually, first of all, Emerson Eggerichs.
Really, especially then. So this is the 2007 , I think is when they put this out, really meandering style, but very charismatic. Incred, incredible charisma, genuinely, uses the whole stage, has skits, characters, does voices, has clearly practiced some impressions, some of which he should not have practiced. But he did practice. And it's very clear that he has put in the work.
 But his skill as genuinely an entertainer, versus when Sarah goes up on stage, she is an excellent speaker. 
She is up there. She stands at the podium, she presents the talk that she's clearly memorized and done. Much easier to pin her down. Pinning Emerson down. Very difficult. He's all over the map. But man, the the way that he performed the conference was really surprising to me.
 The other thing that surprised me was in fact the, the, the, theme of making fun of or doing improvizations of people with, mental illness, mental, or intellectual disability, or conditions such as cerebral palsy, which happened repeatedly in the conference series.
  
Rebecca
Yeah, it was really uncomfy. We didn't really put those in.
  
Sheila
Yeah. We, I know you guys were debating it for a while because there were so many of them, and you.
  
Joanna 
It just didnt’t fit and he did, 

Rebecca
No, it was real uncomfy

Joanna
But like he did genuinely stop after the kind of aughts. Yeah, it's not in the later ones, which is good.

Sheila
So there's two different conference series and you may have. Right. Like there's the early one and then the later one.
  
Joanna
Yes. Yeah. And then we actually had the third video. You found a sermon he did in 2018  that we had never found. Sheila. Do you found it like last week. And then we were.
Like, oh goodness.
This fits perfectly. So there's a bunch of stuff from more recent eras in there too.

Sheila
Yeah. Yeah. Do you know I saw him, do an interview with Moira Brown on  Huntley Street many years ago called The Wounded Healer. And I remember some of the things he said and that and I really wanted to include that interview and it's just not online anymore. So I couldn't find it. But I was looking for while I was looking for it again, that's when I found that sermon series.
  
Rebecca
So yeah. Okay. Well, I think what surprised me the most and this is this is genuinely what Joanna and I've talked about a lot, is what surprised me the most is how sad I feel for Eggerichs, because I think for seven years this has been like, I'll be really honest, like Eggerichs has been the villain in a lot of people's story.
Like I'll be very for real. Like he has been a pillar of patriarchy in the church. He has done more to damage the witness of Christ than most people. In the evangelical church, he has single handedly will not single handedly if you watch video two, he was, in essence, an industry plant. But he has been the face of this teaching that has eroded so much of the positive momentum that the church had for so long.
And then you watch him talk about his childhood and you watch him talk about that, that that line that I used a couple times in video three, how does how does a mommy and daddy do life together? And you watch him puzzling through the awful things that were in his home while he firmly says, my father was not an ill willed man and my father, he wasn't a bad guy.
He was. He was just insecure and well, it's so good that my mom never talked bad with my dad and I was so awful as a child. I was I was so rage filled. But my mom was wonderful. She never saw herself as a victim. My mom was so wonderful. And, you know, my dad came to the Lord and and you just see it and it just breaks my heart like I was going through this stuff and, like, crying, like.
And I don't think that I expected that, like, I already I did feel bad for the guy. Like the way you feel bad for, for for for a guy. But you see it this kind of like like I'm be honest. I'm sorry. I'm just be honest. See it as their villain origin story. Yeah. And I don't see it as a villain origin story in the same way.
It really is. Just, you see that three year old little boy watching his dad maybe killing his mom, and you see that 11  year old, his face of the fact that this scary, abusive man who is tormented his childhood is also cheating on his mom. And you see that boy who's desperate enough to pull a knife and just be like, maybe if this man just dies, my life will be finally better.
And then he gets sent away from his mother, who he's been trying to protect. And now his mother's alone with this man while he's off in military school. And then he comes home and everything's okay? And his dad isn't violent anymore, but his mom, his mom also stopped speaking up. And that is just a mind bending, horrifying thing to go through.
And I think that is what shocked me the most, is that I feel so much sympathy for Emerson Eggerichs, so much more than I was expecting. And I'm glad that I do. But it really also solidifies that the empathetic thing to do for this man is to stop letting him continue his own trauma in other people. Is to stop letting him continue this cycle because he doesn't want to.
It feels very much like, you know, when you have a kid who's just too overstimulated and freaking out and they can't hear reason, and you just kind of have to grab them and just hug them until they calm down and they get that shudder when they're finally like, oh, like I'm safe. And I just feel like the church needs to do that to a Eggerichs
We need to take away the book, take away the microphone, and the church just needs to hug Emerson Eggerichs, his personal group until he feels safe. But we need to still make him stop hurting other people. And I think that's what surprised me the most, was just how much his story impacted me emotionally. And I think that that's a good thing, and I hope that I was able to like, portray that as well about how, yeah, we can't ignore that this man literally destroyed thousands of families, and he doomed thousands of women to horrific abuse. 
And some stories that we've heard are truly horrifying stories. And it's not a case that people miss reading Love and Respect. It's a case of people applying Love and Respect appropriately. Which makes sense. It is an entire marriage theory that is based on an abusive parent who never actually repented.
And so, like, it makes sense that it would be an abusers playbook because it's describing an abusers playbook. But I think that that like, I hope that we can understand the balance between just because Emerson’s story is really sad doesn't mean that we ignore the harm he did, but it also doesn't mean that we ignore the harm that was done to him.
And we can see both.

Sheila
Yeah, I think something else that that I hadn't realized until I watched the clip. So you guys put together, I had just never really seen Sarah before. I had seen pictures, but I hadn't heard her. And I was just really sad for her too, because every story that and I know that we were choosing clips,

Rebecca
No, every story from Sarah was sad.
  
Sheila
Yeah. It just she sounds like she just is really sad. Like she's trying to convince herself that she's in a good marriage with someone who loves her. But there's no evidence of that.
  
Joanna
No, I mean, again, her husband says that he doesn't know what a woman is aroused. Like, that's just like she's not. Her sex desire for sex is clearly dead. She has been berated for wanting basic things like putting candy wrappers in the garbage can, for not putting wet towels on the bed like basic, basic stuff. And she's been berated for it.
She's been told that her husband didn't miss her. She told us she's disrespectful for informing her husband that he forgot her birthday, when that clearly mattered to her. Like it's just her life is really sad.
  
Sheila
I know, and she they've been married for, I don't know, 50 over  years or something, like it's a long time and I just over the last few years as I've looked, yeah. More of these authors and you realize how sad their wives are and how sad their marriages are, like so many of them, if you actually listen to what they're saying about their own marriages, these people who are writing marriage books, it's like, wow, your wife sounds really sad.
And so and so much of the advice is her trying to convince herself she's okay. 
And what we now know, like, especially the marriage advice from women, that originates from women is, so many of them are writing to convince themselves that things are okay, and it makes sense of the confusion that they're feeling. Like I when I started blogging in 2008, and I was in that mommy blogging sphere, I would estimate that over 50% of the people that I was in this group with are currently divorced because of abuse or infidelity.
  
Rebecca
Yeah.
  
Sheila
And that's a much higher rate than the.
  
Rebecca
General public.
  
Sheila
The general population in churches, because women who are abused, but who are also good communicators are often really drawn to making sense of this. But and so that's when women do it. But then I've also been on the marriage conference circuit, and so many women are pulled into this because their husbands speak and their husbands write marriage books.
And so if you're going to do a marriage conference, you really want the women to speak to. And so the wives get pulled into this.
  
Rebecca
And way to go, you and dad breaking those gender norms.
  
Sheila
Yeah. For me, I dragged Keith into this
  
Rebecca
Although, Dad was already a theater kid when he was younger.

Sheila
He was. We met in a drama group. Yes, I like, I, I don't know, I just, I, I have seen the, the marriage conference circuit is a strange place because it's very rare that you get two individuals who are equally gifted and equally passionate about this, married to each other. You know, you don't usually marry someone who's also a really good speaker. And so usually one of the spouses is pulled into this against their will.
And it's just awkward. And it's also one of the reasons why I hate when pastors make their wives do Instagram lives with them and stuff, because I just think that's not appropriate.
  
Rebecca
So I want to know if the wife is getting paid by the church.
  
Sheila
Yes, yes. So anyway, I just I just felt really sad for Sarah because she seemed really sad, like, and maybe that's just her personality.

Rebecca
And we don't use that many clips from Sarah. We, we talked about using more me and Joanna. But, my, our thing was the one thing we kept to talking about is, listen, she's married to a man who believes a woman is not allowed to say no, who believes that obedience is God's, desire for women to their husbands.
And so, like, can we even hold, like, do we even know that Sarah believes what she's saying on stage? Because could Emerson just have said, you have to do this? Like, we don't know if Sarah’s a willing participant or if she was coerced into being on stage. So we wanted to use as few clips from Sarah as we could.
  
Joanna
Yeah, actually, we actually have evidence that she was coerced on stage because he talks in his book about how he had to convince her to do this because she didn't want to.
  
Sheila
Yeah, exactly. No, but I think that that's that's just the issue. So we just tried to use as few clips from Sarah as we could because of that. Because we were like, I mean, she's a grown woman. She also could have made different decisions. There's nothing actually holding her back from saying no and not doing it. Yeah.
But at the same time, it's just it's just it's just complicated. Right? The stuff is complicated.
  
Joanna
And also we have, I mean, the, the document with clips to pull from the conferences is incredibly long. There are so many clips that we could use. There are so many, like just the nonsensical stuff. There's a lot of use of, understandably, given Emerson went to military school, a lot of use of military imagery. There's weird stuff about diet books, like there's so much lore that it it just if you did ten deep dives, you could be like, all right, we're going to tackle the diet book today.

Sheila
Okay.
There's one though that that didn't make it in that we were talking about that was just so like, whoa. And that's the Nazi torture thing. Oh yeah. Can you tell me who wants to tell me about that?

Rebecca
Oh yeah!
  
Joanna
Rebecca should do that.
  
Rebecca
Okay, I'm going to tell you about this one. Okay. So literally it was down to like the ninth hour. Do we let this, do we keep this in the video or not? And it's just I could it, just didn't work. And so I took it out. But there's this bizarre instance where Emerson is talking to the people, listening and, you know, he's talking to the women, okay? Like just based on the context. And he's saying, you know, like, can you give your kids the gift of a stable home? And then he says, there was this Frenchman back in the time of World War II who he was a Nazi. He was a spy. And he got captured by this guy who was called The Torturer.
  
Joanna
So he was a French Resistance fighter who. Thank you. Sorry.
  
Rebecca
Thank you. Joanna. So this is between us. She fact checks me. She. Who's a French Resistance fighter who was captured by the Nazis. And he was brought into this room. And this guy who was named the torturer came in and he said, do you know who I am? And the French resister says, yes, you're the torturer. And he's like, well, aren't you afraid of me?
And he says, you can kill me. You can torture me, but you can't make me hate you. And he says, the peace of Christ came over this resistance fighter, and he was able to say, you cannot make me hate you even if you take my life. And Emerson is using this right after he's told women who are in really difficult marriages that the best thing they can do for their kids is make sure that their kids don't end up in a divorced home.
And it's like, so the message is, he can kill you, he can torture you, but your responsibility is to still like him and to not hate him. And it was just the most blatant manipulation. It's like literally. So you're saying that.
He also says you can't just say that your your spouse as Hitler's distant like second cousin. And he's also saying even if a Nazi torturer were in the room, the priest of Jesus should make you be able to say, I don't hate you. Like it was so bizarre and so out over his skis like it was so not an appropriate metaphor.
  
Joanna
Yeah, I think that what's so bringing it back to what we were talking about earlier. Like how did we react to sending the thing to Focus on the Family. My take was different I think, from either of yours, because I believe very strongly at that time that if I did my work perfectly, that people would listen, but I just wasn't doing perfect enough.
And that's why, and, and I knew that when I did that report that that was up to par, I knew that that was my best work. I knew I could do no better. I knew that it was convincing and then that people could read it. 

Sheila
And people can read it, by the way, it's still online. There's links to it.

Joanna
Yes. But I knew what I sent it off that it was good, and they didn't listen. And that actually was really shattering for my worldview because suddenly there was evidence that I could do a really good job and people wouldn't listen. And what's so interesting about Emerson Eggerichs and how he talks to women and how he talks to his own mom.
Right? The answer isn't you need to get safe. He does say that occasionally, but mostly his message to women is you need to be perfect-er. Or have you considered being more perfect? Are you? Maybe your tone was slightly off. Maybe you didn't have the peace of Christ overwhelm you. Why didn't that happen? This happened to this French guy, right?
Why weren't you just being more perfect? If you had been perfect and daddy wouldn't have done that to mummy, right? You wouldn't have brought it on yourself. And it's such an it's a really sad. Again, the psychology of this is just awful. I remember when we found the air hose thing and realized that he is talking about women cutting off the air supplies of men and the psychological reversal that that is, given from the.

Sheila
From the fact that.
  
Joanna
His dad to trying to strangle his mom or did strangle her and did not kill her, it's terrifying. And the fact that he talks about how he didn't talk about that event until after his father's death, and I don't think that he's put together like. What's so sad about Emerson as well is that it seems to me that there is a significant cry for help from his wounded inner child, like he wouldn't share.
Oh yes, on the stage, if he didn't want somebody desperately in his core to again grab him and hug him and say, actually, he's all okay. Like nobody is doing that. And the sad thing is that he actually is. There's a lot of cries for help in the way that he speaks. And again, like, I just don't know how that didn’t happened.
Previously. Like James Dobson actually did have a side like he was a PhD in psychology. Like he he did. Actually, Dobson did actually know better like he was trained at UCLA again. Like he had good training.

Rebecca
I feel like when you look at Eggerich’s  story and the way he talks about it, it sounds to me and I know we've talked about this Joanna. We talked about this mom it sounds to me like it's a, it's a little boy who sees this abusive father and is terrified of the fact that he, he sees himself more in his dad than he does in his mom.
And, you know, we see this a lot with kids who have, like, you know, behavioral problems. A lot of what they're trying to do is they're trying to get you to prove to them that they're not that right? And it just feels like no one ever had boundaries with Eggerichs. It feels like no one ever had boundaries with him.
And so no one ever proved to him, you aren't actually your dad. And so we had to keep on telling him that my dad can't be that bad, because I can't be that monster. But what if someone had just said, no, your dad wasn't allowed to do that. You're not allowed to do that. Get over yourself. You don't.
You are not owed anyone's deference or obedience or respect. You need to be okay with yourself, regardless of what other people are or not. And no, I'm not holding your hand. And you, this 40 year old man, are mad that I'm told you forgot my birthday. Like, what if that had just happened to Eggerichs? What if he had just had boundaries?
But he didn't. Instead, he kept on getting placated by everyone around him. And then he goes to these big conferences. Everyone tells him how amazing he is, and they put him on a stage. Instead of just saying, hey, some of the stuff you're saying raises some red flags, and I just feel like this is a story of a boy who's just trying to get someone to tell him, actually, you're not your dad, and everyone just keeps on patting him on the back and says, yeah, your dad must have been not that bad of a guy.
And it's just perpetuating it. It's awful.
But yeah.

Sheila
Okay. One thing, I just, I just want to say yes. Another thing that surprised me, and this is from episode one, that compilation you did about what is an evil willed man?
Was wild.
  
Rebecca 
Yeah.
  
Sheila
I had never seen it all together like that. Like, and and just understanding that in Emerson, his worldview, it's basically impossible for a man to be considered evil willed. Yeah. So when he says that this book is only meant for good willed men, that means this book is meant for every man. 
  
Rebecca
It's meant for men who strangle their wives up against the refrigerator door.
  
Joanna
Yeah, well, their three year old is in the room.
  
Sheila
Yeah, yeah. And and, like. And that's, that's what really gets me is the, the the, the criticism we often get when we call it love and respect is. But this book isn't meant for those in abusive marriages. He clearly says it's only meant for good willed men. And it's like, okay. But as you will see from episode one, if you haven't watched it yet, he make, that the the criteria for which Emerson agrees will grant that a man is evil willed is impossible to meet.
You have to have  2-3 witnesses. It can't just be a snapshot of what he does every now and then. It has to be constant. So he has to be constantly strangling you, not just once.
  
Rebecca 
Yeah,
That sounds ridiculous, but that is that is the logical conclusion of what he's teaching.
  
Sheila
Yeah. Like, it's it's crazy. It's craziness. And I it was interesting, you know, when we wrote to Focus on the Family originally, they didn't respond, but they were responding to other of our others, of our readers 

Rebecca
Who were donors

Sheila
And they were saying and they were saying, well, this book isn't meant for abusive marriages. Right?

Rebecca But then some people were saying to other donors, oh, no, this is a good, healthy, a book for all marriages.
  
Sheila
And there will. And then when Jim Daly did write me back, he said, we recommend this book for all marriages. So like and again, I've published those emails on the website too. If you want to go down the rabbit trail. But in in his very book, he says that it is meant for all, like whether you're straying, whether you're drinking so whether you're an alcoholic, you're drinking, you strangled your wife. Rage is bad for you. Yeah. Raised that rage that can't be controlled. Like withering rage like. Yeah. And so it's just it's just such a harmful book. And, and and we pray that not just that this book will fade away into obscurity. And please, if you own the book, do not donate it, okay? Rip the cover off and recycle it. Make cool blackout poetry.
  
Rebecca
Or you can buy our for research purpose only stickers. And you can keep it on your bookshelf in case you ever have to show someone. No, this book really is wildly bad, but we have these stickers that we make, which you wrap around and you put on the spine so that people, know that you don't recommend the book again.

Joanna
So again, the lore for these is that we needed something for our kids.

Sheila
Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, but I also I also I don't just want the book to go into obscurity. I want the thesis to get into obscurity because. And that was one of the fun things for me. In our research for the Marriage You Want. And I insisted that Joanna do this, and Joanna was all on board, like, let's let's test the thesis.
And again, we found that it's women who desire respect more than men. And when you go into marriage believing that men need respect and women need love, your marriage ends up worse off. And please hear me on that, because this is so important. Becca was talking about this in episode three. But like when people read Love and Respect, their marriage ends, ends up worse off than if they hadn't have read it. If they internalize that concept.

Rebecca
Yup. And that's, I would say, not the greatest endorsement for a book. Yeah, yeah. Don't want that slapped on the cover. Yeah. This book statistically significantly likely to make your marriage worse.
Love and Respect.
For people whose.
Marriages could get a lot worse.
  
Sheila
But again, when we say, if you go into marriage believing that, we're not saying if you go into marriage after reading the book, we're saying if you go into marriage believing the thesis of the book. Yeah. So even if you haven't read the book, but your pastor is preaching this Love and Respect thing, you're still going to be worse off.
So pastors need to stop saying this.
  
Rebecca
Yeah, absolutely. And we need to stop putting up with this crap when it is obviously so toxic.
  
Sheila
Yeah.
  
Rebecca
Yeah. And I'm hoping that things are changing. I mean, I do feel like we can talk about a little bit about what's happening in, like, the publishing world these days and how things are different from back then.
  
Sheila
Yeah, because I have seen some really hopeful things. First of all, I know a lot of the editors in a lot of these. Here's what happens in Christian publishing, okay? It's very hard for for companies to make a profit. Like it's just you never know which book is going to take off. It's very expensive to publish books and ship books and all of these things.
And so their margins are pretty small and most publishers make their money not from the books they're publishing this year, but from their back, what's called their backlist. So let's say that you're a publisher and you publish 20 or 30 books a year. One of those books is probably going to do really well, and that one book is going to keep your company afloat for this year.
And next year and hopefully and hopefully contribute to your profits in the future. 
And so what's happened in evangelicalism is that all of these marriage books that were written 20-25  years ago, they're totally toxic, are the things that are keeping these publishers afloat right now while they are trying to put out the healthier stuff. So I know a lot of the acquisitions editors, like the editors that choose which books are going to publish this year, they don't like a lot of this old stuff.
You know, like, I've talked to a lot of them. I'm friends of like, they don't they don't agree with a lot of these books. Even the books of their own company has published. But it's these books that are, that are keeping their company afloat. And so they're just in this really difficult position where you can't get rid of the book because it's what's keeping you afloat, but you really want to change the conversation.
And there are some publishers that are just really choosing to come out with very healthy books. Like, I think it's so funny when people say, oh, you hate all books. Have you looked at how many authors we have on the BareMarriage podcast? There are so many amazing books being written To Heal or Harm that we were just talking about, that I talked about earlier who's sponsoring this podcast? Like great book on how to look at scripture and show how it's been weaponized against to be as victims.
  
Rebecca
Yeah. And that one's really one that's accessible for people who are still really in the conservative space.
Yes. It's it's a very conservative book, but it's written in a way that hopefully people who are in the conservative space can start to realize how these how these scriptures have been weaponized.
  
Sheila
That's exactly what we need. You know, like Baker's putting out some of the good books IVP is putting out. InterVarsity press is putting out some really good books. And there's, you know, I have been put out to healer. I'm like, there's there's lots of of publishers that are putting out good things now. And so I'm just hoping that some of those things take off.
But I think what happens is people get used to the books. They've always like a pastor, God given Love and Respect in 2004.. And so that's just the marriage. But they recommend for forevermore. And I just want to say to people, please, before you decide to study another book for your women's Bible study, or before you buy a book for a gift for a new couple, or before you look at a parenting book, can you choose one that's been written in the last five years?Because then that doesn't mean that every book of the last five years is good. No no no no no no no no no. But there are some really good ones being written in the last five years. And I think if and often we just tend to gravitate to the books that we read 10,15, 20,  years ago, and we don't realize there's actually better stuff now.
  
Rebecca
Because if we stop buying those books, then those publishers will be able to phase them out. Yeah, and that's the thing. If we start making another book that's healthier, the new one, that is the profitable foundation for the company, then these other books can start getting..
  
Sheila
Speaking of that I had the funniest thing in my email yesterday where, I get a notification whenever anyone downloads our free book study. We have free book status for She Deserves Better and we have free video book studies for, the Great Sex Rescue. And I got I got all of these notifications all of a sudden that like 20 different women with, downloaded the Great Sex Rescue studies
So.

Rebecca
Oh that’s so nice

Sheila
Yeah. So it's like, I know that people are taking it.
  
Rebecca
Yeah, they're doing our book study. That's good.

Sheila
Yeah. And in our patient group, there's a couple that decided to lead The Marriage You want study? Because we have we have a video series that goes along with that too. And they have so many people, they no longer have chairs. Or have you seen those?

Rebecca
Yeah. It's actually now I'm remembering that. 

Sheila
Yeah. You know, and so I think there really is a hunger for healthy stuff out there.
So yeah let's move to that.
  
Joanna
Yeah, yeah. And we also wanted to take a quick minute in this podcast to shout out our Patreon, as we were just discussing the Facebook group. It's a super fun place. We hang out there. There's lots of comments and posts every day. It's really a good time. But then also, we decided or I decided while sitting at, swim practice, and watching my kiddo attempt to do her, front crawl, or freestyle
She likes to remind me. No, no, no, mommy, it's not the front crawl. It's the freestyle. Okay, but as I was doing that, I thought, you know what? I'm forever reading books, and it's time to talk books with the patrons on a more frequent basis. So I've actually been putting out weekly episodes of a book club podcast.
So we started with Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, which is a wonderful Christmas book. We then decided to go really hard in January, and we did The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which was a six podcast series, and it's a  500 page Victorian doorstoper, but it's a great book about abuse dynamics in marriage, and Anne Bronte nails it.
In the 1840s. And then this month we're covering George Orwell's Animal Farm, which is, eerily similar to evangelical marriage. And we've talked about that in a lot of our peer reviewed paper. And so it was time to actually go back to the source. So, those podcast episodes are coming out, frequently for patrons every week.
And so if you would like to join us, as we're talking through literature and learning how to think critically, learning how to recognize these dynamics, also, again, recognizing that this people have been noticing these things forever, and it feels sometimes like only now that we've only discovered a few standard makes in the last five, ten years. It's like, no, actually it we've been seeing it forever.
There have been people who have had eyes to see for hundreds of years. And actually, for me, it's been so comforting because I feel like I'm a part of the great cloud of witnesses, that there are people out there. I'm not alone. I often feel like, we've got the patrons. We've got, you know, I have. You had Rebecca, I have there are people around me.
But it does feel lonely at times, especially when we look back at church history and we see all of the horrible things. But recognizing that there were, Anne Bronte a deeply pious love to the Lord, very, led by her faith, she wrote this incredible book about abuse, dynamics in the s. And so talking through those stories and really, again, marinating in those stories as opposed to marinating in love and respect, somebody needed an intervention.
Okay. So that's why we have the.

Sheila
Yeah. And I think I think you bring up a really important point, too, when I think of what my goal is or what we're trying to do, I think when we started this, I was really naive and I thought, oh, I just want the book taken out of print and I want no one to ever read it again
And I want him to be, like.

Rebecca
Forced into retirement. 

Sheila
Yeah. But when you look at what Jesus said, what he was constantly saying, like, you think about the parable of the wheat and the tares, right? Like that. They're going to grow together and you can't actually, you know, rip up the weeds, because in doing so, you're going to rip up the wheat. And so you just have to wait for the harvest and then they're going to be separated.
And he has so many he, he says that in so many different ways. Right? Like how the kingdom of God, is like a tree that grows and the birds of the air are in its branches, and often the birds of the air are a negative thing in a lot of his parables. So it's like the tree is going to be there, but there's still going to be the negative stuff, like you're never going to totally get rid of the negative stuff.
That's not the point. The point is to stay faithful anyway and to realize that, you know, we can be salt and light even if there is negative stuff. And you think about how much of Jesus's teaching about the future was that there's going to be a lot of false prophets. People are going to be led astray. Like, I don't think success is having a perfect church because we're never going to have a perfect church.
But I think success is that more and more people see who Jesus really is. And I hope that that's what we're doing. And it may not be everybody. It may not even be the majority. It might just be like a small remnant. But isn't that small remnant so much of what Scripture talks about, you know, and and so.
Yeah. So I'm, I'm just thinking, I'm thinking more on an individual level now and, and I think that's effective. Like, that doesn't mean that I'm not trying for big things. It's just I think we need to judge our success differently, because it's quite clear in Scripture that you never really do defeat evil on this side of it.
  
Joanna
And that a lot of the times, again, evil is, yeah, causing a ton of harm. But it's also we're really scared, little boy. And that challenge and balance is just so hard.

Sheila
Yeah. Okay. So, can I just switch gears completely, or did you do something else to say? Okay, so I, I didn't know where to put this, but I got a really interesting email from a woman coming out of a church in Florida, and I'm not going to name the church. I'll link to her Substack article in the podcast notes so you can look at it, but she was just telling me how it's a really fundamentalist church, and she was talking to a lot of the women in the church and so many people shared stories of being abused there as teenagers or experiencing harassment or, being in really destructive marriages and how the church leadership really hurt them. And she decided that they needed to do something about it. And I love people like this who are like, no, we're not going to strand for this. We're going to do something about it. And I and so she wrote it, she, they did a survey of the people in her church of the women in her church.
And I'll share some of those findings with you in a minute. And then she published all of this on her Substack. She gave her report to the church, and the church has done nothing. She had 11 victim impact statements in this, in this thing. There was some criminal activity that happened, but it's beyond the statute of limitations. And the church is is not addressing it at all. And everything's, you know, things are falling apart and it's difficult. But I just thought, yeah, these women got together and they did something. And so I just want to read her words of some of some of what she wrote in this:

“In situations where there are credible allegations of sexual misconduct, sexual abuse or systemic failure, particularly involving elders or church leadership, a different biblical and ethical standard applies.
One that calls for public accountability and the protection of the vulnerable. So we speak now to you, the church. This is not gossip. This is not slander. It is a testimony. It is a warning. It is a call for transparency. It is a call to protect those who remain inside the church and the school. For years, women and former members have quietly carried stories of harm, spiritual abuse cloaked in doctrine, manipulation, masked as counseling, sexual misconduct, excused, ignored or covered up by those in power.
These stories are not isolated. They point us to a pattern and patterns demand examination.”

And I want to read to some of the findings of her survey. Okay. She says this:

“Every single one of the  women who responded to the young woman survey said that they were told that it was their responsibility to prevent men from lusting a burden of purity placed solely on young girls without accountability on the part of the boys.
Two thirds said they were actively discouraged by church leadership from pursuing higher education. More than three quarters reported feeling inferior to men because they had been taught that it was their biblical role. Over one third reported feeling that they received romantic or sexual attention from an adult man at the church when they were minors. In the same survey, nearly 30% of respondents reported they were manipulated or coerced into sexual behavior by an adult male church member or youth leader when they were minors.
Among mature women surveyed 96.4% said they were told mental health struggles were a sign of weak faith or even sin. Well over three quarters, 81.5%, reported feeling that their professional opinions were dismissed by men in the church because of their gender, in much the same way that youth girls felt responsible for the sexual purity of men around them.
75% of mature women answered that they were advised to be sexually available to their husbands in order to keep them faithful, and 84.6% said they were made to feel inferior to or submissive toward men in the church who were not even their husbands.”

And she goes on from there. But I just want to say, way to go. Like, you know, like these women got together and they wanted to do something about it.
 And the fact that that many women in the church were so hurt in that church and the men don't care. You know, and shake the dust off your feet.

Rebecca
Yeah. I think that just because I know that we have a lot of people who listen, who are who are in spaces like this and don't realize they are, we always want to say very clearly, if you are in a space that is encouraging people to not go to secular universities, you are in a dangerous church. Yeah, like flat out I don't that is actually a very easy line in the sand. If you are in a church that is saying that it's, it's not safe to go to a non-Christian institution or is actively telling you not to get educated, but instead just get married and have babies. You are not in a normal church and you might say, yeah, but all the churches are like this. No they're not. You are in the minority of churches. You're even in the minority of conservative evangelical churches in North America. Like you are actually in an extreme church. And so if you're someone who's listening and you're like, yeah, but like my church just has all the kids go to Bible college, I want to hold your hand as I'm saying this, you are in a bad church.
And I have no qualms saying that because sometimes people just need to have it said clearly and plainly to them. As often we say things like, you know, that we it's important to value research and education. So I say, yeah, but my church values Christian research and Christian education, that's also a red flag. There should not be asterisks on truth and on education and all of this stuff. And so if you are in a space that is demonizing anything that is not Christian as inherently dangerous, like going to a state school, going to a just regular university instead of one that is explicitly teaching from a Christian perspective. I would, I would immediately start to make plans to find a different home church.
  
Sheila
Here's here's the other thing I wanted to bring up with this. And because I've had a pet theory and I know this, this one survey doesn't prove my pet theory, but but it gives it gives a little credence to it, which is that when you look at our frequency stats of, how many people were abused in church as minors, how many men, how many married men watch porn?
Let's take the porn one. Right. We found 49.7% or something of married men have some sort of a relationship with porn right now, whether it's daily or or intermittent binges, and most are intermittent and rare. Not daily. But I don't think it's 49.7% in every church. I think in some churches it's 80%, and in some churches it's 20%.
You know, like I think I think that there are pockets where the culture encourages this behavior. And I think there are pockets where the culture is so respectful of women and, you know, so open and encourages therapy and stuff that it's actually quite rare.

Rebecca
You also have to realize that churches are self-selected groups.

Sheila
Yes.
  
Rebecca
And so we're more likely to have birds of a feather flocking together. So if you are a church where there are teenage boys and grown men who are predators, you're going to get more predators, because guys who are not predators are going to say, I don't want to go there. Those guys are gross, and they're not going to want to go, whereas guys who are predators are going to feel like, oh, well, now I don't feel so alone.
And so what you have to realize is that when there's one person who feels comfortable and is a problem, you should assume that there are many more that are just like them. If someone's just a problem, but they are acknowledged as a problem and the church is dealing with it, that's different. But when this is part of the church culture, but you're like, yeah, but no one actually feels like that. That's not true. These are self-selected places.
  
Sheila
Well, and it's not just whether a predator it's it's also okay when you're a church that teaches that girls have to cover up so they're not stumbling blocks, then predators know, oh, if I abuse someone, they're going to feel guilty themselves. They're not going to blame me. They're going to put the blame on themselves. So it's the teaching in the church, right?
And her stats are much higher than our frequency stats from She Deserves Better. Right. Because like when I looked at our frequency stats for how many women, how many girls were were abused and harassed in church as minors, I was horrified. It was like 20% right, but they've got it at like 35 or 40 
And so and and that's what I mean, right. In some churches it's going to be a lot higher and some chips are going to be lower. So if you're in a church where it's high, please, please, please. No, that's not it. Jesus. That's just that's just that church is not not part of the kingdom.
Not really.

Rebecca
And also, I'm going to be really blunt and honest and kind of mean by continuing to go to that church, you are now responsible for its continuing of that culture. Like flat out, if you're in a church that is normalizing a culture where we are blaming young girls for their rape, and you're still giving money and you're still going to that church, you are lending credence to that church, and you are increasing its ability to reach new victims.
  
Sheila
Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, I did want to say way to go to these women who are standing up. Exact. This isn't okay. Yeah, it's not okay. And we're going to do something about it.
  
Rebecca
And I hope they all leave.
  
Sheila
Yeah.
  
Rebecca
Yeah, yeah, burn it down. 

Sheila
Burn it down. Because there are healthy places. And that's what I want it. That's what I want. The takeaway to be is if you are in a place that teaches Love and Respect, please know there are churches that don't. Okay, if you were in a church that is going to blame you if you are sexually assaulted a teenager, please know that there are churches that don't, and we need to start distinguishing between the healthy and the unhealthy.
Because when we started this work, evangelical teaching was just all evangelical teaching. And that's what I used to think. They they love Jesus, I love Jesus. We're all saying the same thing. No we're not. We're saying very different things. And so please find the churches that are healthy. They are there. They may not be a denomination you're used to.
It might mean stepping outside your comfort zone, but, you know, there are so many good churches out there and we need to support those, especially because a lot of them are small. They don't have the budget for fog machines and for bands every Sunday morning. But they're good and they're, they're following after Jesus and they're trying to feed the poor in their communities and reach out and help their neighbors.
And that's what we need to be a part of.

Rebecca
So, I'm curious for those who are listening, I want if you're on the blog or on YouTube and listening to this, I want you to leave a comment and just tell me what you found the most shocking or interesting or thought provoking from the Love and Respect. Series.
Yeah, because I was a lot of work and we would like to hear what you like to do. 

Sheila
Rebecca is so tired

Rebecca
I am exhausted. And so we really want to hear what you liked about it. We want to hear, if there are any other areas of evangelical culture that you would love to see, either a one or multipart video deep dive into from me and Joanna.
We'd love to hear your ideas. And by the way, if you want your ideas to have a little bit more weight, you better join our Patreon. Because we're going to have our patrons help us, with some of these, kind of topics in the future. And if you're a patron listening, that might make you pretty excited.
And so just wait for the next couple months. There will be some announcements coming.   

Sheila
Yep. Awesome. So thank you for joining us. Thank you to our sponsor to heal or harm from Zondervan driven, wonderful book. Put the link in the podcast notes. And thank you for watching our docu series. If you haven't already, go do it. You don't want to be a dork like see it? It's amazing. It'll make you laugh. It'll make you cry.

Rebecca
I didn't want to say dork anymore. 

Sheila
I don't know, I do. We're trying to reach the younger audience. So? So.
Thanks, everybody. I'll see you next week.

Rebecca
Bye.