Episode 332: When Purity Culture Supporters Try to Rewrite History (Dannah Gresh Case Study)

And….we’re BACK with a fresh new season of the Bare Marriage podcast! We’re kicking things off with a lively deep dive into the debate over purity culture, asking what happens when influential Christian voices revise their past teachings, redefine the terms, and rewrite the history of what they once taught. We unpack the difference between biblical chastity and shame-based purity culture, take on straw man arguments and shifting definitions, and explore how messages about sex, marriage, authority, and obligation can shape the church in ways we may not always recognize. Real change requires more than just saying something was harmful - it requires honesty, accountability, and a willingness to pursue better fruit. This is Part 1 of a 3-part series, so let’s get to it and be sure to tune in next week!

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LINKS MENTIONED: 

• Friday Round-Up link on Alisa Childers
• Our statement on Shaunti Feldhahn (with links to her statement)
• Roys Report article on Sheila calling out Focus on the Family
• The Whole Story Course
• Our book, “She Deserves Better”
• Dannah’s interview with Juli Slattery
• Dannah’s interview with Focus on the Family
• Zachary Wagner’s book, “Men of Virtue”

Transcript

Sheila
There are an awful lot of evangelical authors and organizations trying to rewrite history to make themselves look not quite so bad. And we are back in another season of Bare Marriage, where we're going to talk about it. 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 we are joined today after our break by my daughter, Rebecca Lindenbach. We didn't actually have a break though, because it seems like we took a break. We took like six weeks break from the podcast, and then we immediately started recording new podcasts because we were hoping to get ahead so that we wouldn't be in crisis mode when you're actually watching and listening to this.
 
We'll let you in on how that's going later on. But, you know, one of the things that we've been so dedicated to doing at Bare Marriage is saying, hey, if the church's teaching harmful stuff, let's just stop. Yeah. How about doing that? How about not doing harm? And how about, like, doing what's healthy instead? And that shouldn't be controversial.
 
And I think we're making a difference, because there's been a bunch of stuff happening in the last few months where people have literally been rewriting history and say they never said what we claimed that they said. And no, what they said was actually helpful.
 
Rebecca
And many times, almost quoting She Deserves Better, saying what they used to teach when I'm like, well, that's what we taught. Yep. In that book we mentioned what you taught, and it was not that.
 
Sheila
It was not that. So, to let you all in. So those of you who are new, I believe this is season 12. I don't even know how we number our seasons, but we are back and we have done the biggest research projects into evangelicalism and marital and sexual satisfaction. We've completed four surveys, now studying approximately 40,000 people. We've got three peer reviewed articles published. More to come. And writing another book. We've got a lot going on, and we are determined to change the conversation. Thank you to everyone who participates and helps us in that. Big shout out to our Patreons who help keep us going and give us the funding to keep our research going and also provide our safe space on Facebook.
 
You can join that. Joanna is going to do some really exciting things this fall. She's teaching a course at King's College, which we're also going to offer to our Patreon group on, of.
 
Rebecca
A certain tier. We have to figure out which one. We haven’t decided yet.
 
Sheila
Yes. So, we're going to be offering that really fun. And lots of things going on. Special thank you to our donors too. And if you have any extra money at the end of the month, we would love to be considered for your monthly donors, because people who give even $10 a month, you can get a tax receipt within the United States.
 
It just gives us guaranteed funding, so we don't have to keep asking for funding. And then we can hire people full time. So, thank you to those people. And now, without further ado, I want to jump in. So, we have a three-part conversation coming because this is a big thing we're going to try to do. We're going to try to talk about it first of all, how people are rewriting history today, how they're redefining what good fruit is.
 
And then in our third episode, what it actually looks like to make amends and what we should be asking people to do because, yeah, when harm is done, then we should be making up for it, and we should be walking on healthy pathways. And that's what we're seeing right now. So, let's talk specifically. And today we're going to look at the purity culture issue. But we're going to bring it in some other stories as well. So, it's not just purity culture, but there's been an uptick in the question of whether peer to culture was actually helpful or harmful. And for context, Dannah Gresh has just released a new version of her book, And the Bride Wore White, and she's been going on lots and lots of podcasts talking about this, which is why this conversation is going on right now.
 
But it didn't start with Dannah, and it didn't start in 2026. I think the reevaluation of purity culture was sort of this grumbling that was happening all over social media for a decade or two. And then it erupted when Josh Harris, who was one of the main architects of Purity Culture, wrote the book I kissed Dating Goodbye and some subsequent books to basically say I was wrong.
 
Rebecca
Oh, he just did say I was wrong. Yeah, like he flat out said, yeah, I was wrong. He pulled all of this from print. He did a giant apology tour. He pretty much tried to make it clear that, no, you weren't wrong or broken. If this didn't work for you, like, yeah, he was all honest and his teachings promoted fundamentalist thinking.
 
And that was not enjoyed by many people in that world.
 
Sheila
It wasn't. It wasn't. And so, we want to show you some of the different reactions to that. First, we have Eric and Leslie Luddy, who wrote the book, When God Writes Your Love Story. We talked about this in our book. She Deserves Better. They were the ones who talked about a couple in a Christian college who had consensual sex. And then afterwards, I think her name was Kathy. Had lost her most precious treasure, but he hadn't.
 
Rebecca
Yeah, they just didn't even mention that he had lost his purity. No. It was one of the most blatant examples of how purity culture was not even, for boys and girls.
 
Sheila
Yeah. And then they had a chapter on, like, how you need to get over the shame of losing your purity. And they equated a girl being raped at 11 with this college aged couple having consensual sex, as if those are the same thing, which is like so heavily problematic. So, do they apologize? Let's see. Let's see.
 
 
Eric Luddy
It'd be fascinating, Les. You want to comment on the fact, like, do we? We wrote a lot on this. We spoke a lot about this. Do we have something to apologize for in what we shared?
 
Leslie Luddy
No, I don't think either one of us regret anything we ever said or stood for in this area. And that's saying a lot. After 30 years and however many books, now, I do think we could say it better now. We have had so much more life experience than what we stood for were just simply biblical principles. And you can't apologize for biblical truth. I mean, purity, the word purity may fall off the popularity rating in the church, but it was God's idea.
 
Rebecca
Well, at least they were unequivocal at least.
 
Sheila
Yep. At least, at least we know where they stand. Then this is a clip that we played.
 
Rebecca
And to be clear, the Luddy’s were talking about this back when Harris came out.
 
Sheila
Yes.
 
Rebecca
Their response was not what we were talking about. That was about when people were calling for them to do the same thing that Josh had done. Yeah, but now the next clip we're talking about is because of the stuff that we were talking about.
 
Sheila
Yeah. So, this is two years ago, at Cedarville University, which is a very conservative Christian university. And Bob and Dannah Gresh were speaking now for context. Dannah Gresh, wrote the book, And the Bride Wore White, which again, we talked about a lot in, She Deserves Better. She also has True Girl events across North America. She wrote Secret Keeper Girls. She was the one who told eight-year-old girls that your bellies are intoxicating and so you can’t be showing your belly. And she defined intoxicating to girls as making men out of control. So, she told eight-year-old girls that the sight of their belly could make adult men out of control.
 
And we had a problem with that. And this was how. And that was blowing up in social media right around the time that Bob and Dannah Gresh said this.
 
Bob Gresh
Now I want to say something else. Dannah led purity culture. She wrote about purity culture. And I'm sort of sick and tired of hearing everybody beat up purity culture as the most traumatic thing they've ever gone through. And I'm also sick and tired. I'm sick and tired of that woke message. And I'm also sick and tired of Christian leaders and institutions and people that won't wake up to some of those messages and know that the good days weren't always so good.
There were mistakes. There were things that hurt people.
 
Don't let your life be wrecked by a book. It's a book. Don't spend your life criticizing, becoming cynical. Don't just ingest every day from your phone. negative critical spirit from people who half the time don't know what they're talking about. And they have no solutions, they don’t deal in solutions and answers, they deal in criticism, it never gets to the exact point.  So I want to say that there are things that have been changed.  And I am going to ask Dannah about that today, But for those of you who throw out purity, sexuality and modesty, because you don’t like purity culture, you need to start to grow up and realize that life is very complicated and you get older and wiser. And that click bait is easy, when you just say nasty things.
 
Rebecca
So, here's the thing. It's clear the authors have now known they can't ignore the fact that they've known for years that this is a problem. Right? Right. And even in many of these books, they include stories from people who said, hey, this is not healthy. And then they just kind of laugh those people off in their own books so they can't ignore it anymore because they've made it clear that they do know people who have been hurt.
 
And so now they're trying to figure out, okay, how do we manage the publicity issue that this is. Yeah. And in Dannah's case she's just literally trying to rewrite it. She's writing it. She's revamping her old book. But the question is whether she is doing it in a way that is actually healthy.
 
Sheila
And is she actually dealing effectively and intellectually, honestly with the critiques. And that's, that's.
 
Rebecca
You know what. Is she going to say, actually no, that purity culture harmed you, you weren't the problem. Is she going to disavow what they said?
 
Sheila
Yeah. And as we're and we probably should have done this earlier. But let's just define what we mean by purity culture here. Because when we talk about purity culture like I grew up in the 80s or I was a teenager in the 80s and in our youth group, we definitely talked about saving sex for marriage. That was the expectation. I think that's pretty much always been the expectation.
 
Rebecca
Chastity has been one of the most consistent Christian principles throughout all history.
 
Sheila
Yes, absolutely. The difference was in the 80s, that was not the only thing we talked about. We had a huge emphasis in our youth group on missions, on prayer, on evangelism to our neighbors. We were really, really big. And the books that we were reading were like Rebecca Manly Pepper. It's, Out of The Salt Shaker and Into the World, like it was all about evangelism and all about prayer.
 
And then the 90s came along and purity culture entered into it. And by the early 2000, the youth group wasn't just about saving sex for marriage. It was about understanding that your worth and the sign that you are a Christian is that you are a virgin and.
 
Rebecca
And not only that, but it was also this whole culture that was hyper focused on sexuality. Yeah. Even if all they ever talked about was saving sex for marriage. You know that was the thing they talked about. Yeah. It's this hypersexual religious experience that was purity culture. Yeah. And everything was framed within gender and sexual terms. Yes. So, your clothing was based on lust not based on pride or your evangelism. We all were told, yeah, like wear your purity ring because then people will ask you about it and you can share about God.
 
Sheila
Yeah. So, sharing about God was equated with sharing about it. Yeah.
 
Rebecca
That was a big thing that we heard all the time. But it's that, that's just, that's really different. So, when you think of purity culture, I want you to think, okay, wait, are we talking about just basic chastity, specifically purity culture. Yeah. Because we're going to get into wonky definitions in just a minute. Yeah, and show how that actually matters.
 
Sheila
Yeah. Okay. So here is Dannah Gresh on Focus on the Family, explaining why she rewrote, And The Bride Wore White and she's told this same story. I've heard it in several different interviews. So, this is a foundational story for her.
 
Focus –
John
Some of that downside with that kind of legalism, if I could call it that.
 
Dannah
Well, yeah, here's what's hard. The purity conversation right now isn't doing what you just did, which is acknowledging there's good and there's bad, and we've got to be very careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And I feel like we have to understand why that's important. So let me tell you about a letter I got.
 
Two years ago, 2024, early spring I got a letter in a silver envelope. I call it the silver letter because this was just a trajectory shifting moment for me. Inside was a letter from a mom whose daughter had just become a teenager, and she had some questions for me about how to talk to her daughter about sex.
 
And the reason she had those questions is because this mom had grown up kind of at the apex of the purity movement. And the letter included photocopies of a newspaper article because on her wedding day, two different media sources came out to report on this couple waiting until they were married. I mean, you gotta think like, can you think of a world in which this would happen today?
 
John
It isn’t newsy.
 
Dannah
No. And I mean, this was when Miley Cyrus had a purity ring on her finger. You know, this and half of the other Disney characters are Disney, Disney celebrities. And so, she was a part of what was celebrated about that movement. Fast forward now, her daughter is a teenager. She goes to the youth pastor and says, my husband and I would like to come tell our story of waiting until we were married.
 
And she went on in this letter to say, we have enjoyed a beautiful marriage, we've enjoyed a beautiful sex life. We've had a really healthy impact in our community, in our culture. And so, I just thought this youth pastor was going to be like, yes, I would love for you to share that. Instead, he informed me that teaching that period of time in the church was very toxic.
 
And she said, I was dumbfounded. I was confused because good things came out of it in my life. And I'm just writing to you to say, am I going to mess my daughter up if I teach her what I learned during that time period? And do you still believe what you taught then? And I'm telling you, that will stop you in your tracks to do some research.
 
So, for about two years now, I've been looking at the good and the bad because there's some of each. I think I'm a part of the good fruit of the purity movement. Even though I was discontent with it. You know, I looked like I was a youth leader at the time, and I looked around and I was like, I love that the church is talking about sex. That's probably the best thing that happened, right? The church is finally talking about sex.
 
Rebecca
Can I just say. If Cindy and Mark, a couple from a church, wanted to speak to my 14-year-old about how awesome their sex life is, I would also be like, please don't do that Cindy and Mark. Please don't talk to my kids about how you didn't have sex. And it was so hard and so tempting, and then you did. And oh my gosh, don't do that please. Like, I know that sounds silly, but that is the message that I got. Like, I remember, yeah, the twenty-three-year-olds at the big event going up there Oh gosh. And being practically having in essence tantric sex on the stage talking about getting so aroused by how great their sex life is and please wait like this be I'm going to be very honest.
 
Sheila
You know.
 
Rebecca
It is weird how much sexual content children are exposed to in churches. And I'm glad of this youth pastor standing up and putting a stop to it.
 
Sheila
Yeah, I remember I was in. I don't remember why we were there, but there was a youth event. And dad and I were both there for something. One of the youth leaders shared with the group that when he was a teenager, this was a guy who was newly married. Okay, when he was a teenager, he was really tempted by one of the girls around him. He would just picture her taking a dump. And that has never left me. And I looked at each other across the room. We were like, did we intervene? Like. And he acted it out. He said, like you, do you remember this?
 
Rebecca
No, I think, I just blocked that from my brain. No but here’s the thing.  This is what I find so frustrating about this conversation about purity culture is that Dannah is talking about how sad it is this woman.  And she's using nice flowery language. But when it gets to the brass tacks of what she is saying, she is grieving that a woman is not allowed to share about her and her husband's sex life with minors. Yeah, that is not necessary. That is purity culture, not chastity. You can teach chastity without having a hypersexual faith. Yeah, I am not hyper sexualizing children in order to maintain their virginity.
 
Sheila
But okay. But here's, here's the first step in the rewriting of history because what she is essentially saying is yes. And this is the first step in rewriting it, is that now people can't talk about how wonderful it is to wait. And now people can't talk about how waiting is a good thing. Yeah, that has never been the critique, really. I mean, yes. Okay. You know what? It probably is the critique from people who have who.
 
Rebecca
Many people, who have a different perspective, think that it's unhealthy to wait. Sure, there's going to be people like that. People who are speaking to an evangelical audience.
 
Sheila
That's not that's not the critique from within evangelicalism. It just isn't. And to say that that's the critique is to rewrite history.
 
Rebecca
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, it's very clear that Dannah has read She Deserves Better or heard of it. We have all sections in there about how we found in our statistics that, you know, you can talk about chastity, but purity culture was bad.
 
Sheila
Yeah.
 
Rebecca
Like this is what we mean about they're redefining things and they're reframing and they're acting like those are the same things when all the rest of us who are actually critiquing purity culture are understanding that they are separate entities. Yeah.
 
Sheila
Because like what we found in our survey of 7000 women for our book, She Deserves Better. Oh, which is right here. For those of you who are watching on YouTube. Here you go. It's nice and pink. You can't miss it. Do aspirational messages do not do harm? So, when you say things like, you know, God designed marriage, or God designed sex to be sacred in marriage or, you know, God created marriage, or God created sex to be a highly intimate thing.
 
Those are not negative messages. But when you say if you have sex with someone before, you're married, you will lose a piece of yourself. That's a threatening message that harms people, even if they don't have sex before they're married. And these are the kinds of messages that we've been critiquing for years now. And other people have been critiquing, and they're just glossing all of this.
 
So Dannah is telling a story, in this as to why she rewrote this book, which was her bestselling book. Okay. And she's had so much flack for it, she felt she needed to rewrite it and so two years ago, around the time that they were at Cedarville University giving that, stop saying a book harmed you, she got this letter and decided to rewrite it. So that's the history of this.
 
Rebecca
Which instils so much confidence in this rewrite.
 
Sheila
And here's how she announced the rewrite on Facebook. I'm not going to read the whole thing. But she said this:
The purity movement wasn't all bad. And I think it's important we say that out loud. But here's where we got it wrong. The word purity became synonymous with virginity. And that simply is not biblical.
 
Rebecca
Good, I'm glad that she acknowledged that she got it wrong. Isn't that what she's about to do? Is acknowledging she made purity synonymous with virginity because she was, in fact, one of the foremost people who did that?
 
Sheila
Well, that's a good question, Becca. Let's read on.
 
Sheila
She says, I have been standing on this soapbox since the year 2000, trying to help teen girls avoid the pitfalls of shame that come from this terrible conflation.
 
Rebecca
Oh my gosh, no, she hasn’t. She built the soapbox that caused the girls to cause shame. Like, this is what's so frustrating because it's like she read She Deserves Better. She got the right language. Then she just assumed that she was on the right side because she thinks she's a good person. You can be a good person and still be wrong and hurt people by accident.
 
Sheila
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So, that's where she's coming from. She's saying that the big thing they got wrong was that people conflated purity with virginity.
 
Rebecca
But she didn't get it wrong. That has always been her message.
 
Sheila
But she didn't get that wrong. Yes. But in her book, she's now going to change that in the rewrite. But she didn't originally get it wrong.
 
Rebecca
So, she didn’t get it wrong, but purity culture got it wrong. And she was one of the mothers of purity culture. But she has been saying the good of purity culture since 2000. So yes, rewrite her book to make sure she took out the purity culture stuff that she never said.
 
Sheila
Yes. Got it. Yes. Very good. Okay, here's another clip where she is talking about how people are afraid to talk about purity culture. Now. Okay. Ready?
 
Dannah
Sound an alarm. I want to begin our hour together with the question. Why are so many parents suddenly quiet when the conversation matters most? And I think there are many reasons, but one of the reasons is because we've been told again and again, over and over. That if we speak clearly about God's design for our bodies, for sexuality, and for truth, we might cause shame.
 
We've been told things like talking to our children about sexual boundaries produces sexual repression when they're married. We've been told to talk to our daughters about how they dress and teach them to dress with dignity. Body shames them. We've been told that talking to our sons about the porn you find on their computer. Well, talking about that might produce shame.
 
Sheila
Okay. So, she's saying that this is what we've been taught is all these things that we want to tell our kids about. Well, that could cause shame and how awful this is. And no, parents need to know they can, they can do these things with their kids.
 
Rebecca
The good news is that if you do not talk about those things, your kids in a healthy way, we have literal handouts on how to do that in She Deserves Better.
 
Sheila
Yeah, and we have a course on it: The Whole Story.
 
Rebecca
This is such a non serious fear mongering response to the critiques. Yeah. The critiques have not made it all about us. But we are the primary person who Dannah has received flak from. Now that would be considered like more of an influencer or in this we are one of them. There's a lot of them who are also our buddies. Yeah. We're all saying the same kinds of things like we're all in the same boat here.
Our book literally has a whole section on mother daughter activities on figuring out how to figure out what to wear. Yeah. How do you talk about sexual boundaries and what you want for your daughter? How do you talk about these things? In a healthy way? In the whole story, we talk about porn, we talk about sex, we talk about dressing, we talk about makeup. We talk about friendship. We talk about everything. You're just not allowed to tell eight-year-olds that their bellies are intoxicating to grown men Dannah.
 
Rebecca
No, I'm going to get up on my soapbox, I will. Okay? Right now, I do not think 13-year-olds should be having sex. You know what Dannah? I agree children should not do adult activities. Whoa. Yeah okay. Can we agree that we're going to stop doing these bad faith straw men arguments? It's like yeah, I don't think that I'm going to be dressing my kid in a little, you know pretty woman dress up thing for Halloween. Like. No, that's ridiculous. She's going to be a fairy princess. Yes, a kid like obviously this is so silly and it's not serious.
 
And the problem is that she's ignoring the real complaint. She's making this big laughable thing like, oh, we're saying we can't tell our kids what they can wear, or we might body shame them. I'm like, no, you can talk to your kids about it. Just don't body shame them.
 
Sheila
Yeah, you can talk to your kids about it. Just don't equate it with causing a man to get out of control.
 
Rebecca
Especially when, like there are people out there who are predators. And you, Dannah, are directly responsible for grooming young girls and teenagers for those predators with the way that you wrote this book. You didn't mean to, but you did it. And it wasn't just people saying, oh, I feel body shamed. It also is more than that. And you're ignoring it even though it's clear how it happened. Yep. So anyway.
 
Sheila
And this is what they're doing is their, their, their characterizing the critiques in a way that they haven't actually been critiqued like that, that that wasn't a fair characterization. But she's saying, you know, she's doing this characterization so that she can seem like a good person and notice how she doesn't actually point to any of the critiques.
 
She doesn't read any of them out. She doesn't quote any of them. She doesn't read any of the specific things that she has said and then said, and then people critiqued me for this. She just generalizes it in a fearmongering way to get people to sympathize with her.
 
Rebecca
It's the nebulous secular other. Yeah, big bad scaries who are coming for your kids.
 
Sheila
Whereas within the church, and there's been an awful lot of critiques of purity culture within the church, people have not critiqued the idea of the sacredness of sex, really. No, that has not been the critique we have. We have not been saying, hey, it's great for teenage boys to watch porn.
 
Rebecca
No, nope
 
Sheila
We haven't, but we have been saying, hey, the way that you talk about it can do harm because you know what, it can. And the way you talk about how girls dress can do harm because you know what it can. And we measure that. And to not even to not even treat that fairly is really wild. She goes on in several of the interviews to explain her own testimony, which is actually quite moving and, and, you know, she actually seems like she seems like a lovely person who's just confused. I mean, I don't even know. Maybe that's not fair.
 
Rebecca
The problem is when you have that many people saying, hey, I was raped and you hurt me. And she's like, yeah, it's your fault. Yeah. This is what's so hard. So, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I know that people who dislike us will laugh at that, but it's true. But then at some point, you can only get so many messages from child sex abuse survivors and tell them, well, maybe you shouldn't have been abused as a child and you could have made different choices because that's what she says to people. She says, well, then you should have read it better. Like, but yet she was eleven when she wrote it, read it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like or well then you, you also made decisions or like these are the, these are the callbacks really. Oh, I'm so sorry that I hurt you. But it wasn't because of me. Even though this is an abuse, I was saying no, it was you.
 
 
Because when I was trying to figure out what God felt, what happened to me, I read your book in the church library, and it told me that if I wore a short, short skirt that, yeah, a boy would become intoxicated. And so, what happened to me was your book, told me it was my fault and that it was your words that told her that.
 
And so, you can only have so many survivors of child sexual abuse tell you her and brush them off so many times before. I just have a hard time believing you are a nice person. Yeah, I just, I don't know, like, I want to be able to believe that they're good people, but it's getting harder. And that is what is hard.
 
Sheila
Yeah, it's. And that's what's difficult is that there have been so many thoughtful critiques, so many peer reviewed articles written about the harm done by purity culture. So many books. We're going to have Camden Morgante next week to talk about, to talk about this a bit. So many different things are written and they just are, they're refusing to deal with it because they don't want to. And at some point, if you refuse to deal with it, then there's a problem. And so, I want to talk about the idea of a straw man argument okay. Okay.
 
So, Strawman fallacy is and I'll read you the official definition. It occurs when someone misrepresents or exaggerates another person's argument. And then attacks that distorted version instead of addressing the original argument.
 
And that's what we see over and over again in the evangelical church when legitimate critiques have been made, they distort the argument. And you'll notice that, again, they don't, they don't actually quote, they don't play a recording they don't like. They don't show you what was said and then engage with it. They just simply mischaracterize it. And often they won't even say who the person is that made it.
 
Rebecca
Like, oh, Sheila Gregoire, says that you can't talk to your kids about sex without shaming them or causing them to get repressed. They can't say that clearly. Check out what Sheila Gregoire says and resources for talking to kids about sex from a biblical perspective or whatever. Like, yeah, they can't.
 
Sheila
So, we want to give you a couple of other examples of strawman arguments or when people distort the argument that were made and say, I never said that. That's not what we say, okay. And they change the definition. One of them is from Alyssa Childers, who and there was a big dustup like, gosh, I don't know, two months ago now, where she.
 
Rebecca
How many weeks ago at this point? She tried to take on our book, and it didn’t work because her followers were all helped by our book.
 
Sheila
Yeah, we did, we did a Friday roundup about it. I'll put a link to the Friday roundup in, in the podcast notes, she keeps doing more podcasts on me. I think because her followers get good engagement and her followers are calling her out because she wasn't, she wasn't characterizing our arguments fairly. So, her latest one was asking whether our data is correct on whether complementarian marriages do worse than egalitarian marriages.
 
Rebecca
Which, I will say, is a very fun thing to try to talk about when you don't understand the data.
 
Sheila
Yeah. Like at one point they said they said that we had a journal, an article in the Sociology of Religion journal, and then they said they have no, but they have no way of knowing that it's peer reviewed. It's like, honey, if It's in the journal, it's peer reviewed anyway. It's just there, it's a lot. Yes, it's fine, it doesn't matter. But this one I want to play this one particular clip. Okay.
 
When she's talking about our argument and to give her credit, she is actually at least quoting our name and our argument, which is something that Dannah didn't do.
 
She was talking about the argument that I have made in social media, which was that the only thing that you could actually differentiate clearly between complementarian marriages and egalitarian marriages. This is that complementarianism believes in authority that a man is an authority over a wife, because everything else that her husband should love the wife as Christ loved the church. Egalitarian. Egalitarians believe that too, like everything else egalitarian, believe.
 
Rebecca
That men and women may have different roles in the marriage based on their giftings. That yeah, is also egalitarian.
 
Sheila
Or now. Now, she did use a bit of a straw man earlier in the same podcast because she said that egalitarians believe the sexes are the same when, no, we don't. And I've actually talked about
 
Rebecca
I did not get angry at Connor for being unable to breastfeed.
 
Sheila
No. And we and I like I've talk about the fact that women are inherently more physically vulnerable. I think that that does have implications for how masculinity and femininity is, is active anyway. So, like it's just not something that we believe, which is crazy. But I want to listen to this one clip. Okay. So here we go. Let's play it.
 
Sheila
So, complementarianism is basically the belief that men are in authority over women.
 
Alyssa Childers
Okay. I just have to pause here and really disagree with that definition of complementarianism. I think that's a very uncharitable definition. A very simplistic one and actually not correct. So, what complementarianism teaches is that male and female, men and women are both made in the image and likeness of God and because of that, have equal dignity and value and worth before God, but because of the differences between them, they have different roles to play, particularly in the home and in the church.
 
And complementarianism does not teach that all men are in authority over all women. The Bible never says that all women have to submit to all men. It's wives, submit to your husbands. There is a hierarchy of authority biblically that you cannot escape, and we're going to get into more of that in a moment. But I don't agree with that definition at all.
 
Rebecca
So first of all, you'll notice the argument she says that we are making that complementarianism believes that all men are in authority over all women. Now ironically, I actually think we can argue that, but we are not arguing that.
 
Sheila
But John MacArthur did say that.
 
Rebecca
MacArthur did say that.
 
Okay, But that's not actually the argument that we were talking about in the place that she's critiquing. We were talking about marriage. Yes. And so, then she says. Complementarianism does believe that wives submit to your husbands, there's a hierarchy of authority biblically you cannot escape. But she says that we don't teach that. We just teach that.
 
Like this is in essence what happens.  She says, no, no, no, we're more reasonable than the fake argument that she didn't make. Yeah. And so therefore I'm just stating what she says that we said. And now it sounds reasonable because I put it against something that sounds more silly to her followers. Right. That is not good argumentation, I think.
 
Sheila
I think that's the Motte and Bailey fallacy that she was doing there. But for those of you who are like Bare Marriage podcast fans.
 
Rebecca
Do a poll in the Patreon group. Yeah. Tell me what fallacies do you think it clarifies?
 
Sheila
Yes. Keith loves delineating which fallacies are which. But you know, again, it's simply rewriting history. Okay. Because we never claimed that.
 
Rebecca
We didn’t claim that complementarian marriage advice says that all women are in authority over all men. I do think the thing is, I believe that the natural, logical conclusion of complementarian theology is that, in essence, men are always in authority over women. But then she also says this. She also does say that complementarianism does believe that men and women have different roles to play in the church. What she doesn't say is those roles are authority based. Yeah. So actually, by her own definition, men aren’t like only men are able to have authority over women. Women are not able to have authority over men in the church. Yeah. Because she does believe that there are authority roles in the church that you cannot escape from biblically, even though there are lots of explanations.
 
Sheila
All right.
 
Rebecca
So even in her fallacious argument, that puts up a strawman. But she even proves that she actually does believe what the ridiculous version of the argument is.
 
Sheila
Yes.
 
Rebecca
It's ridiculous guys. Yeah. To actually think about what people are telling you, think about what they actually mean. About whether or not they are using the same definitions as the person they are critiquing. And if they are not, look into why. Because sometimes the person you are critiquing is using fluffy definitions. And so, they, you have to read it, redefine it.
 
All that different stuff. So, she's not doing that here. What she's doing is she's saying I don't believe that. I just believe it. Yeah. Like it makes others. It makes me angry.
 
Sheila
Yes.
 
Rebecca
As someone who is again, very, very focused on literacy and actually engaging with materials, it makes my brain hurt.
 
Sheila
Yeah, yeah. Let's just do some critical thinking people. Critical thinking. Okay. Here's another example of someone changing definitions and rewriting history. So, when The Great Sex Rescue came out, actually, I believe it was like the day it came out. Shanti Feldhahn, who wrote for Women Only and, who was one of the authors that we critiqued in The Great Sex Rescue, specifically for some of the things that she said, around lust and other things like that.
 
She wrote a large, public statement, a long public statement, and we wrote one in response. I will link to it in the podcast notes that you can read. But one of the things that she critiqued us for was that she claimed that she didn't teach that men, that all men, that all men struggle with lust. Okay, so she says that we mischaracterized her work because she never claims all men struggle with lust but claims instead that most men struggle with visual stimulation and temptation in this sexualized culture, but they work to fight it.
 
Rebecca
Which is a very fancy way of saying they struggle with lust. Yes, and adding more words that mean the same thing doesn’t change the definition.
 
Also, I love what she says most here. Yeah, I didn't say all, I said most. Yeah, but you also said in your book to not ask your husband if this applies to him because he'll lie to you.
 
Sheila
Yes.
 
Rebecca
So, like even if you say most, you just got rid of the safety net for those little, tiny minority of women who you think are married to men who don't struggle with lust by telling them you can't talk to your husband? Well, because you said that he doesn't struggle with it. He's lying. Yeah.
 
Sheila
Like, yeah, I know, it's crazy. This is part of our response. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I just want to read this by saying that men are struggling. She is implying that they must be struggling not to do something which is bad. If they are struggling against temptation, then they are struggling not to be tempted to do something that is bad.
 
The common, normal, regular, everyday word that would be used in this case is lust. In our discussions with women, overwhelmingly, when asked where they heard the teachings that all men struggle with lust as every man’s battle, they cited For Women Only as one of their sources. So, whether one calls this a struggle with lust or a struggle with visual stimulation and temptation in the sexualized culture which is fought against, the result for women is the same.
 
Rebecca
Exactly. Adding again, adding more words. That means the same thing works a lot if you're trying to hit a word count in a high school essay. Yeah, it doesn't work. If you're trying to cover your butt and deny what you clearly taught to thousands, hundreds.
 
Sheila
Well, millions, 2 million women, right? bought For Women Only.
 
Rebecca
Hopefully, they didn't all read it.
 
Sheila
Yeah, but then you think of libraries and church libraries would get passed around, so, I'm sure. Yeah. Anyway, okay, here's another example. And this one blew up on the Royce report. Julie Royce wrote an article about this. I think it was from 2022.
 
Rebecca
It was right after the Great Sex Rescue came out.
 
Sheila
And Juli Slattery was on a Focus on the Family program, and they published this clip from her show and, and I and it's a little bit longer. I just want you all to hear it. Okay.
 
Juli Slattery
For some reason, we feel like once we get married, we shouldn't ever have to use self-denial or self-control related to our sexuality. And I think the teaching traditionally has been to men. Once you get married, you should get all of your needs met sexually in marriage. And now your wife is obligated to do that. And that has hurt so many marriages, hurt so many women.
 
And for women that have had sexual trauma, they can feel retraumatized. They can feel like they're just objects to their husband. They're not being loved and nurtured. And so, I think that this sort of simplistic approach to sex and marriage is something we need to take another look at, to really even look at a passage in first Corinthians seven, which is often used to give that kind of teaching and to say, actually, what Paul is saying is that the sexual relationship is a call for both the husband and wife to minister to one another.
 
And men need to be encouraged. If your wife has pain during sex, if she has trauma in her past, if she's not enjoying it. The burden in some ways is also on you to say, how do I minister to my wife emotionally and physically? How do I understand the complexity of how she's created sexually? How do I go on the healing journey with her and not just say no I get my needs met regardless?
 
Sheila
So, I actually agree with her. I agree with pretty much all of this. And so did the commenters and in the commenters over and over again what people were saying was, you know, yes, Juli, obligation sex is bad. Sheila Gregoire just published a study on this and Focus on the Family, deleted all those comments and it got really crazy. So crazy that yeah, the Royce report actually wrote a story on it. So, we'll, we'll, we'll put a link to that in the notes. But what I found so interesting is the way that Juli Slattery was characterized. And I want to be careful here, because I actually think of all of the people in sort of the married sex influencer writer, speaker space. Juli has come the furthest.
 
Rebecca
Yeah. She's the one who seems to be the most willing to change her mind and address things.
 
Sheila
And address real problems. And I think, like reading between the lines, I think it's because she's actually lived a lot of the stuff too, like from some of the things she's written, like she's experienced vaginismus. I believe I could be wrong on that, but I'm pretty sure that from some of the things she's written, like, like she, she lived through the consequences of a lot of this bad stuff. And, and so she really has redone her the way that she teaches. The problem is that she hasn't admitted that in the past, she taught the same stuff.  So she’s like I mean the Church, they taught obligation sex.
 
Rebecca
People used to teach obligation sex as like, your people, sweetheart.
 
Sheila
And she's sitting there and Jim Daley's nodding along and I'm watching this and going, yeah.
 
But you guys did it. And I did too. Okay. In 2004, I wrote a book called Honey, I Don't Have a Headache Tonight, which I since took out of print, and I don't really talk about it. I don't think any of you have ever heard me talk about it, because I really think that it preached the obligation text message to, you know, and I didn't really like it after a while.
 
And. Yeah, in 2009, Juli Slattery wrote a book called No More Headaches. Very similar titles, with a very similar message. And again, it was mostly obligation sex. And she had articles up on Focus on the Family, where from back there and back then where she said things like, you know, one of the biggest differences between you and your husband is the fact that he experienced sex as a legitimate physical need.
 
His body tells him he needs sexual release. His desire is impacted by what's around him, but it's determined by biological factors. And then she goes on to talk about how, the best way for a woman to, to build her marriage is to understand what this desire means to him and what this need means to him. Like she's teaching the obligation sex message. And so, when she says, people used to teach this, I just wish she had said, I used to teach this.
 
Yeah, because I did. Hello? Hi. I'm the problem. It's me. You know, it's not. And it's not hard to say. Wow. I was really wrong about that. And that's when we wrote The Great Sex Rescue. That's something that I said, like, I think three different times in the Great Sex Rescue. I said that this is something that I massively changed my mind on when I looked at the data. And good for Juli for, for, for changing the way she talks about this.
 
Rebecca
But she still also has a very complementarian male headship focused view. In her more recent books, we do know that. Yes. But I do agree she really changed her mind the most.
 
Sheila
Yeah. But the fact that she and Jim Daly can sit there nodding about how I mean, can you believe that that's how the people used to teach this stuff is like? Yeah, but it was you.
 
Rebecca
You're people.
 
Sheila
Yeah.
 
Rebecca
You were kind of like the poster boy for its Jim. Yeah. Your whole organization looks like when you look up obligation sex, like Focus on the Family.
 
Sheila
And this is what we mean by rewriting history, it's like yeah, but that was you like it's like it's like, the story, the Old Testament story of Nathan and David. Right. Where Or the VeggieTales story. Some of you may know it better. Yeah.
 
Rebecca
Where Paw Grape talks to Larry the Cucumber in the ground.
 
Sheila
It's like, you know, you are that man. Yeah, like where Nathan says to David, you are that man. It's like it was you, though. It was. It was you. And it wasn't only you, but you were part of it.
 
Rebecca
And this is a very, but this is very common is this idea that we can acknowledge something is bad, but we can't take ownership of how we've done it.
 
A lot of times, what people do if they want to address them, they know is harmful without having to take accountability or responsibility, is they will say the stuff they need to say to cover their backs, but they won't actually stop teaching the stuff that's also bad. So, they'll say things like, well, let's just do the Married Sex example.
 
Sheila
Okay? Sure.
 
Rebecca
Here's another Married Sex came out right afterwards Great Sex Rescue
 
Sheila
Yeah. October 2021, written by Gary Thomas and Deborah Filletta.
Rebecca
And they clearly read Great Sex Rescue, we know they had read the Great Sex Rescue
 
Sheila
Well because they had. Oh yeah, they had it. Yeah. Long story
 
Rebecca
But they say in the book they talk a lot about obligation sex about how it's bad, it's bad.
 
Sheila
Yeah.
 
Rebecca
You shouldn't feel obligated in the same book.
 
Sheila
In the same paragraph.
 
Rebecca
Paragraph. Thank you. They also say that if you don't feel like you're sacrificing yourself sometimes sexually, then you're probably not dying to yourself. You're not being a good spouse, and the obligation is bad. But you should be obligated sometimes.
 
Sheila
But sometimes. But if it doesn't feel like a sacrifice, at least sometimes it's wrong and then they get the example that Gary gives is that sex should feel like it feels like when you have to get up in the middle of the night to feed a baby.
 
Rebecca
Yeah. It's like you understand that the baby has needs and you don't begrudge any of his needs. You just do it because you have to. Your husband has needs.
 
Sheila
But now he can say he didn't teach obligation sex because he said in the book obligation sex was bad and this is, this is what we mean by like one of the ways you rewrite history is you change definitions and, and you say things like, well, obviously obligation sex is bad, but we should all feel self-sacrificing and, and have sex the way that you would feed a baby in the middle of the night.
 
Rebecca
But this is what happens? Because we've created a hypersexual faith. We take the verses like carry your cross and yeah, like carry their own burden, all these things, and we apply it to the bedroom when and that. And because we're applying it to the bedroom. So, I'm going to do one of my theological grades. Now I just have to because we apply these verses to the bedroom.
 
It then excuses us from applying them elsewhere because we're dying to self in the bedroom. We don't have to die to self with our money. We don't have to die to self with the way that we treat our neighbor. We don't have to die in our self in the hard way because I'm making myself do it this way.
 
And I'm sorry. I know this sounds harsh, but this is what I see over and over again. Evangelicalism has fundamentally narrowed its view of what it means to follow Christ. That is all things. What I do with my body. And yes, you're hurting yourself. It's bad for you, women. You have been hurting yourself and harming yourself. Absolutely. But often we will take the thing that hurts but is familiar and use that as a soothing way to tell ourselves I am a good Christian.
 
I am a good person. I don't have to do these hard things that I'm getting called to do, because I'm already doing a hard thing that God didn't call me to do. Yeah, and that makes me angry because of the amount of wasted potential and the amount of wasted suffering and wasted emotional turmoil that women in the church have gone through.
 
And what would we have been able to do in the last 30 years if instead of us all dying to self in the bedroom, we actually told women, hey, demand more and then be able to do more?
 
Like maybe if you're not always feeling like you want to die because everything is so just exhausting and overwhelming and you have no support and you don't have a real partner and you're carrying your own load and your husband. If we just had stopped having such a hypersexualized faith and stopped making faith entirely about the marriage relationship in the marriage bed, then maybe women as a whole generation would have risen up and said, like, this is ridiculous.
 
I want to be focused on outreach. I want to make sure I have space and time, that I can have friends who don't see the world the same way as me, and I can be a light in my community, and I can figure out where there are people who need and where I can meet that need. You can't do that in survival mode, and this kind of teaching about sex keeps the church in a perpetual survival mode, so that we're not able to actually be a light. We are a light under a basket, and the basket is terrible sex.
 
Speaker 1
Yeah, well. We've buried our talents. We've buried our talents. Yeah, yeah. Because we've said the master is harsh. Like we believe the master is harsh. We believe the master wants us to live in a miserable marriage where we're having obligation sex, and that pleases God. And because of that, we have no energy to actually do the work.
 
Rebecca
But you know how weird that's to read the Bible. And honestly, God is most concerned about whether or not you are having enough sex in your marriage.
 
Sheila
I know.
 
Rebecca
This is when you realize how weird it is you can never go back. Yeah, that's I think why Dannah and everyone are freaking out so much because we've all realized how weird it is, how sex focuses our religious lives.
 
Sheila
Well and I was actually going to get to this in a minute, but the.
 
Rebecca
This is coming from Sex and the Christian. Yeah, this is what we do. I mean, I'm saying that.
 
Sheila
I want to get to this point. I'm going to get to it. So, we'll do it. It will do things in a slightly different order because I think it's a really important thing, but okay. Marshall McLuhan, Canadian sociologist in the 1960s. Okay. And he had this great phrase, which was the medium is the message. Yes. And he came out with that specifically to talk about TV and how TV news was going to change, because with newspapers, with news stories, the average number of words that people read in a news story was so much greater than the average TV segment about the news.
 
And so, news was being dumbed down and, and so the simply the medium of watching it on TV instead of reading the news was actually changing what news was presented. And, and the message we were given. Okay. I and what you're really arguing is that the medium here is the message in the sense, in the sense that since all we talk about is sex, even if the message that we're giving is that sex doesn't define your life.
 
The fact that sex is all we talk about means that sex defines your life.
 
Rebecca
And we mean like in the world, like the Christian world at large.
 
Sheila
And this is the thing that Dannah Gresh said, okay. And I want to get back to something that she wrote. She said that the reason that she rewrote and The Bride Wore white, okay, was that there was way too much conversation about how virginity was the whole thing, and she wanted to talk about holiness rather than virginity.
 
So, she wanted a book which told girls, know what you do, like, like whether you've had sex or not. That doesn't define your relationship with Christ, okay? You can still be holy. We need to pursue holiness all right. But when we looked at all of the books for teenage girls and evangelicalism.
 
Rebecca
They're all about sex. And you know what else is about sex, Dannah’s book is all about sex.
 
Sheila
Yeah, it's all about sex.
 
Rebecca
And even if it was about holiness. Dannah did not write a book about, like, the holy Christian teen girl. She wrote a book called And the Bride Wore White. Yeah. Like, that's all.
 
Sheila
And Secret Keeper Girl or now True Girl. The way that that's defined about how you dress with dignity is so that people don't notice your body parts. It's still everything is about sex. And we did this really cool, word chart, a word cloud. And She Deserves Better because we ran the word, the common words used in the purity culture bestsellers and the Bible.
 
And it's just so the New Testament and it's just so clear what the differences are. If you're watching on YouTube, we'll put those word clouds on the screen. But it's like, even if Dannah is saying, look, I'm writing a book to tell girls that sex doesn't have to define them, but the book itself is all about sex.
 
It's expressing that our holiness is expressed in what we decide to do about sex. And that in itself gives a message. And we are not saying that your sex life doesn't matter. It's just and I believe the Pope said this recently, like kudos to the Pope where he said that Christianity has spent way too much time talking about sexuality and not enough time talking about feeding the poor. And you know, you know, or, yeah, feeding the poor and all of the other things that Jesus talks about in Luke four about what the gospel means. And, and we've really, we've really missed the boat on that. Yeah.
 
Rebecca
And I think that that's just so hard though. When your entire religion is based around sex, you can think that you're not talking about sex, but you're still talking about sex.
 
Sheila
Yeah. Okay, I want to play another clip by Dannah. Okay. So, she's again trying to say that, yes, we acknowledge that purity culture got some things wrong. She's trying to say, see? See how big I'm being like? I'm acknowledging that the things were wrong, you know? But we have to acknowledge what's right, too. And so, let's just listen in on what she's saying here.
 
Dannah
Three great things about the purity movement. One, the church was finally talking about sex. That was good news. Two in alignment with the abstinence movement happening at the same time. We could tell teen pregnancy there's statistical evidence of that. Three we brought awareness to sexually transmitted diseases, and we got people to be more responsible. One of the problems of purity culture is that we pigeonholed the word purity to equal virginity. And that is not true. It's not biblical, and it's something that we really need to work to correct, to heal the hearts of women who went through it, and also to disciple the next generation.
 
Sheila
So, the three things that they got right is the church is talking about sex more and teen pregnancy rates are down, and STD rates are down. Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about each of those in turn. First of all, the church is talking about sex more, as we just said. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
 
Rebecca
I’m not sure that is a positive.
 
Sheila
Yeah, like the church's attitude, the youth group attitude towards sex when I was in high school was way better than it was when you were in high school.
 
Rebecca
Like, there are so many books from the 60s and 70s, 80s that talk about sexuality as well, like people writing books on this before purity culture.
 
Sheila
Yes. And when we did, in, in our survey. So what?
 
Rebecca
Sorry, Like, yeah, maybe our pastors weren't hanging out in a bed provocatively for 24 hours.
 
Sheila
Yeah. On the top of the roof of their church. Who did that? Ed Young. Yeah. Ed Young and his wife
 
Rebecca
This life, it's like it's just so bizarre. Yeah, we're doing that kind of thing. But I'm like, you know, maybe those were the good old days. No.
 
Sheila
No, Like, trust me, we talked about sex of the 80s, like But, like, like we also talked about other things. And when we did our research for, She Deserves Better, we asked women if they could identify ten different words at the time that they graduated high school.
 
That all had to do with sex. And my generation did better than your generation. So, the idea that people now know more about sex because of the purity culture is actually not true. People know less about sex because of purity culture. At least less actual education.
 
Rebecca
More sexual shame. And they yeah, sexual guilt. And they, and they were hypersexualized while under educated. Yes. And that's the difference. Right. So again, at least at the beginning chastity versus purity culture. Discussions of chastity have always been around. Yeah. That has always been a thing. The church was always willing to say don't fornicate.
 
Sheila
Yeah.
 
Rebecca
Yeah. The Church has never had a problem saying don’t fornicate. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But we actually found that people who went to church in purity culture times were less educated on sex than people beforehand. So yeah, they may have heard sex talked about more, but that means that they were more sexually exposed with less education. Anyone who has done any sort of training with your kids, with online internet safety protocols, you know that high exposure, low education is the number one thing that actually, predisposes someone to be, groomed for abuse.
 
Yeah. And that is what the church did. Hyper exposure to adult sexual topics like Cindy and Mark wanting to share about their banging sex life to children. Yeah, right. With less education, it's parents. So, so sure. You know what purity culture did that. Yes. Okay. Good job Dannah, you did that.
 
Sheila
Let's look at the next two. So teen pregnancy rates and STD rates have gone down. She's right about that. They have gone down. Yes. Just because things happen at the same time does not mean that they are that one is responsible for the other. And let's. And there have actually been peer reviewed articles that have been published like multiple over the decades that have shown that actually the type of education given, during purity culture is highly correlated with higher teen pregnancy rates.
 
Rebecca
Okay. Yeah. The data shows clearly that abstinence only education as a state policy is ineffective in preventing teen pregnancy and may actually be contributing to high teenage pregnancy rates in the U.S.
 
Sheila
Yeah, yeah. And then they go on to talk about why we need better STD education too.
 
Rebecca
So, so the reason, the reason that these things seem to have gone together, is that purity culture came often as a shock response to comprehensive sex education being in schools. So, people, mostly evangelical Christians, were shocked that their children were being taught about things like STDs and sexual health in school. And their response was they should only be taught not to have sex because it felt like you were giving kids permission to have sex.
 
And in many places, this was done clumsily. This was done in a way that was not respectful. Yeah. Various faith traditions including Islam and like there absolutely were growing pains right. Not arguing that it was always done. Well. No. But the fact of the matter is purity culture happened at the same time as comprehensive sex education.
 
Comprehensive sex education was found to reduce teen pregnancy and STD rates, abstinence only education was found to increase them.
 
Sheila
Yeah. Like one of the things that we were well, I was I think I was more blown away. But you were not, you were not surprised at all. But I think I had bought a lot of the sex education lines from evangelicalism that, you know, teaching kids from a young age what a condom is, is only going to encourage them to use it, etc.
 
I think I had bought some of that in the back of my mind, even though I try to deconstruct a lot of it. But when we look at our data and we really drill down on this hard for our survey, for She Deserves Better, there was no downside to more information, like the more information girls had and the younger they had it.
 
Even things like what age were you when you knew that the female orgasm existed that was highly protective against marrying an abuser? It meant that she had higher self-esteem. Like long term, understanding your period in a healthy, comprehensive way, like, not just this is a blessing and now you're a woman, but, like, understanding, you know, ovulate, like what all of this was and why, like, that was highly correlated with not being abused when you were a teenager like it's so wild how protective all of this stuff is.
 
Rebecca
And meanwhile, Dannah Gresh in her books was talking about how we shouldn't be so comfortable talking about our periods with boys because it can make us feel sexually intimate.
 
Sheila
Yes. Yeah. That was an actual quote. Yeah.
 
Rebecca
Things that she said. And so, yeah, you can say this because a purity culture is like, no, you were actively fighting against these things actually. Yeah, these two things that you're claiming were purity cultures that you say are good things. Yeah. You were actively standing in the way of two of these. Yeah, yeah. We'll give you one. Not sure that one was a win though.
 
Sheila
Yeah.
 
Rebecca
And I would like to hear about fewer pastor sex lives. Yeah.
 
Sheila
Oh, gosh. Okay. True story. So, we're going to an Anglican church now. And my pastor is really involved in the community. He's just really great. He does these ride alongs with police officers. He's really involved with the homeless shelter. He's just involved in all kinds of different things around the community,
 
And one of the more evangelical pastors, in our town, asked him to do something with him. I think it was for some sports team to be a chaplain for one of the sports teams. Okay. And he wanted to take the boys through this devotional, and he wanted to take them through Every Young Man's Battle. And so, my priest came to me and he said, I didn't know what to say because I was really ignorant. But do you know what every young man's battle is?
 
Rebecca
Oh my God.
 
Sheila
Like, is it pride? Is it Selfish? You know. This is every young man's battle.
 
Rebecca
Like, yeah, yeah.
 
Sheila
And I told him what the book was about and he was just appalled. He was like, why are they going to spend like, why are they doing that? Why don't you just teach people to respect women and have some self-control, then get on with what a virtuous life looks like. You know, which, by the way.
 
Rebecca
Why don't we?
 
Sheila
And by the way, if you want to do that, Zachary Wagner's book Men of Virtue, we had Zach on for one of the last podcasts last season. Really great book. If you want to take young men through like what it actually does mean to be a man of virtue and to look like Christ. Okay. So really rewriting a lot of history here and then, I want to play this one last clip from Dannah about what she sees is happening now and why it's so important to rewrite this book.
 
Dannah Gresh
I think a lot of people are deconstructing their faith as they consider the teachings of purity and the church, because they're taking their questions to TikTok, where they're met with deconstruction theology, instead of taking their questions to the Word of God and testing what they've heard. If they do that, they're going to find healing instead of more wounds to deal with.
 
Sheila
Okay. So why do people feel like they have to go to TikTok instead of the Bible? Or Focus on the family?
 
Rebecca
Once again, we're giving a false dichotomy. Yes, on TikTok you are not going to the Bible. Yeah, it's because the place is like Focus on the Family are not allowing these voices to speak there. Yeah. It's like, yeah, okay. The big guys who are making all the money from purity culture aren't exactly letting people who have problems with purity culture speak there, but they, in essence, have a monopoly on the evangelical media. So, yeah, obviously we're going to go to social media.
 
Sheila
Yeah. Because you aren't, you aren't being serious about addressing the critics. And so, if you won't fairly address the critics and if you're going to mischaracterize all the arguments and if you're going to try to rewrite history, then yes, people are going to go to social media.
 
Rebecca
I mean, like the Catholic Church could have said. I mean, it's so sad that we're having people read these articles and little letters by one guy instead of going back to the word of the Lord and the Bible. And the church, like, yeah, it was Martin Luther.
 
Sheila
Yeah.
 
Rebecca
Like this I think whenever, whenever there is a new media form that people can engage in, the church has a reformation because all of a sudden, the people who had power and control no longer have control, because people can reach out to each other. Social media is the current one. Before it was the printing press.
 
Sheila
Yeah. And social media. We're losing a lot of that because of algorithms and tech billionaires. But it's still. Yeah, it.
 
Rebecca
Was. Yeah. And this is the.
 
Sheila
Things and that is why plug here. It is really, really important that people follow me on more than two channels. Because we never know when an algorithm is going to wipe us out. And so, if you're following me on Facebook, please also follow me on Instagram. Follow me on YouTube. We're really going to try to build our YouTube this season,
 
Rebecca
And make sure you are on our newsletter list.
 
Sheila
Yeah. And the best way, the most important way is to make sure we won't. We won't spam you; Becca sends out one.
 
Rebecca
Email a week.
 
Sheila
Yeah. And then sometimes you'll hear about extra things throughout the week. Or if I'm ever speaking in your area. We are doing a simulcast in October. October 2nd and third. If your church wants to get in on that, we're doing a sex talk on the Friday night for women and a marriage conference on the Saturday.
 
And you can if you can't, if it doesn't work for your church on the second and third, you can do it anytime in October. But if you want to do it, live with us. It's October 2nd and third. There's information on the website. I will put a link to that in the podcast notes, but that's the kind of thing you'll never miss if you're on our email list. So please join that and we'll put a link to that too.
 
So, but this is the problem when they are mischaracterizing history, when they are trying to rewrite history, people are going to say that that's not that's not okay. Because I was harmed. And you're telling me that I wasn't, or that my harm didn't matter, or that the only reason I'm harmed is because I didn't really understand what you were saying.
 
Rebecca
Which, by the way, is one thing when you're writing to adults. But all of these people were writing to children.
 
Sheila
They were writing to kids.
 
Rebecca
If you're writing to children, it actually is on you to write a book that is in fact understandable to children. And also, if a huge swath of your readers are all reading it the exact same way, even the ones who said they were helped by it was a bit of a survivorship bias situation, right? Relationship. And to marry a good man. They happen to not have an abusive parent. They happened to not be sexually harassed like all these different things. Then maybe you actually did write it the way that everyone says that you did.
 
Sheila
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So next week, we're going to come back and we're going to look at good and bad fruit and how they are trying to redefine those things to make themselves look better, restore their reputation that they feel like they've lost. Okay. But we really wanted to show you today how there is a pattern.
 
It's not just Dannah Gresh. We're using her as an example, but there's a pattern throughout evangelicalism of people mischaracterizing their critiques, they’re their critics, so that they can still maintain their reputation, and not dealing honestly with the things that people have said. And I want to point out one of the ways that you can tell that someone is mischaracterizing their critics is that they will not actually quote their critic or cite their critic or when they do quote them, they're still just mischaracterizing their arguments, which is what Alyssa Childers was doing with us.
 
Rebecca
And then you can check, you can look.
 
Sheila
Yeah, but I mean, at least at least she did mention my name so people could check it out. And that's why she got so much flack. Was because people were saying, that's not what Sheila said. And, that her study was actually really good.
 
Rebecca
And that is why these people don't typically drop our names.
 
Sheila
Because it didn't work.
 
Rebecca
Well, whoever dropped our name has gotten so lambasted. Because people are like that. No, they helped me to have an orgasm. Like I am going to be honest like that, It's silly but it's true. Yeah. When it works it works. Yeah.
 
Sheila
Yeah.
 
Rebecca
Yeah, I think what makes me sad about this whole thing and it's just it once again highlights like critical thinking really is just lost in evangelicalism in particular. You know and that's not me saying that because I disagree with them. They can't say that's not what I mean. There are people that I disagree with who are engaging, critical thinkers.
 
There are people for. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who are very strong critical thinkers who seriously disagree with us because we are not, you know, going to endorse polyamorous relationships and stuff. Like that. Yeah.
 
Something that I actually do hold to a Christian chastity ethic. I do. Yeah, that's fine. We can disagree. Like things you are allowed to do. Sure. They have great arguments. And that's it. I used to get in arguments all the time with my professors about monogamy versus non-monogamy stuff at university. And you can, you can have disagreements and both be critically thinking.
 
That's not what's happening here though.
 
Sheila
Yeah.
 
Rebecca
Because in order to critically think you have to be willing to ask what if I'm wrong. Yeah. And you have to actually be willing to face new data and actually address it head on and not just ignore it. And it's just hard because a lot of the arguments in more deconstruction spaces from like bigger leaders and stuff do tend to be relatively critical.
 
They sound like they tend to be more sound. Whereas in Evangelical spaces. It's hard to even find the argument because they do the kind of thing that Shaunti did. It was like, I never said that all men struggle with lust. I say that blah, blah, blah say like just a word salad that means nothing. And then and then you get you parce out like oh the same thing.
 
Sheila
Yeah.
 
Rebecca
For you, you, you get what Allysa Childers or says was like, well, I didn't say that men have authority over women. I just said that men have authority over women.
 
All of these arguments don't make sense, and you realize there is just no logic here. Because if you were to start engaging with logic, the whole house of cards falls apart. And that's what happens to so many people. They question one thing and evangelicalism and then everything falls apart over the next few years because you realize none of it was based on logic and God's not afraid of logic. He's just not God makes sense. Yeah. He's the author of the universe.
 
You're allowed to have a faith that makes sense. Yeah. That's you. And if you've never seen the Wesleyan Quadrilateral and you're still really in evangelical spaces, look up the Wesleyan Quadrilateral faith. It'll make you feel a lot better. You are allowed to have a faith that actually doesn't make you have to turn your brain off. Our brains are gifts from God, and they can help us find God as well as make sure that we're not doing silly things like hurting people, even if they tell us that they've been hurt.
 
Sheila
Yeah, and that's really what Romans one is about, how like, you know, the very nature shows us who God is, right? Like, we can use our brains and see what God is. That doesn't mean that we're going to understand everything about God very much. You know, his ways are not our ways. He is God. We are not like there's obviously that right.
 
But yeah, you're allowed to ask questions. Yes, things should be logical. Yes, words mean something, okay? Words mean something and authority means something. And sexual consent means something and modesty means something. And you can't claim that. I never taught something when you did.
 
Rebecca
My question is, how many evangelicals, how many people, even the people in the pews who have been systematically turning their brains off because it's just too hard to face the truth? That's the question that kept me up when I was in my deconstruction phase: if I met God today, is he going to look at me and be like, you had the answer in front of you, and you just weren't willing to take it?
 
That was the question that kept me up was, I have to face God, and God has truth. So, if I'm hiding from the truth, that means I've been hiding from him my whole life. And that was one of the things that really was like, I'm done. I have to rethink, I have to, I have to figure out a foundation of my faith that is solely Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
 
And that was my big deconstruction moment, realizing I have to face God. And if I'm running away from evidence and from truth and from things I don't want to deal with, I know they are right. That means that I am running away from an aspect of God. And that's why I want to leave you with Dannah.

I want to leave that with all these people who are getting a bit of it, but they're running away from something. No, it's true, because it's just too hard to deal with. We are not called to live easy lives as Christians; we are called to carry our crosses. We are called to seek out righteousness. We are called to seek out truth.
 
And that might mean dying to self. There are verses about what we're supposed to do that ego death should not be a scary thing to the Christian, and it definitely should not be something so terrifying psychologically to us. So, we are unable to rationally, rigorously, honestly look at data. It definitely should not be something that pushes us towards buzzwords, dog whistles and word salad to cover up our past mistakes.
 
We should be able to face the truth, approach the throne of grace with confidence, because we know that we are not hiding from what is right, because Jesus is the way. He is the truth. He is a life. It's time that we stop running away from one of those.
 
Sheila
Amen. I wish we could end on that, but I want to end on a word salad.
 
Rebecca
Okay, okay.
 
Sheila
Can we tease next week's episode? Yes. And show what it means to run away from the way, truth and life. I just want to play this clip, from Dannah’s interview with Juli Slattery. This is actually Juli Slattery speaking on what good fruit means.
 
Juli
I've heard the verse over and over again. Used. You got to look at the fruit of the tree. And if a teaching doesn't bear good fruit, if it makes some people miserable, it's a bad teaching. But when we actually look at when that passage is used, it's actually saying, look at the teacher of the fruit of a teacher's life. Do they have the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, self-control? Yeah. So, I think, you know, part of this is like you're saying, the discernment of what is the spirit behind the critique. And is it ultimately defining flourishing? Is reconciliation with God or something else?
 
Rebecca
And we are going to get into that next week.
 
Sheila
See you then. All the links to everything we talked about today are in the podcast notes. Check them out. Check out our Whole Story puberty course that parents can share with their kids to teach about sex and puberty in a healthy, non scary way. We have a younger version, for 10 to 12-year-olds, an older one for 13 to 15-year-olds.
 
The link is in the podcast notes. Check out our book. She Deserves Better if you need to re parent yourself. If you live through purity culture and you read and the bride wore White or all of these other books that scarred you for life, check those out and let's go on this journey together. Let's not rewrite history. Let's just be honest about it.
 
We don't have to run away from the truth because Jesus is the truth. See you later. Bye bye.