The Games We Play

We return now to Gary Smalley’s terrible Christian marriage-advice book If Only He Knew. This time, we examine advice that appears in every single such book: that to maintain a happy, harmonious marriage, spouses should prioritize their god over their partners. This book continues that tradition. But is this advice really useful? And how can Christians actually put it into practice? Today, we ask questions about one of the mainstays of Christian marriage advice.

While reading this awful book, I quickly realized that Gary Smalley wasn’t suggesting his readers make any big changes in their behavior or attitudes. Rather, he only wanted to show them some techniques to ease the worst of their marital crises. But those efforts are doomed to fail. Today, I’ll show you why his suggestions represent the weakest of all weak sauce.

Though he kept these facts on the down-low, Gary Smalley himself was a big-name complementarian and evangelical Christian. Because he wrote from that perspective, his tribe didn’t even care that he lacked any qualifications for counseling married couples. Today, I’ll show you why that perspective matters more than qualifications to Gary Smalley’s target audience–and why that audience would turn to poor-quality advice like his for help.