As we close out the month of October, I want to close Spooky Month out with what evangelical leaders are saying about the end of an evangelical marriage. For many years, both evangelicals’ troubled marriages and their divorce rates have been the subjects of observation from onlookers. For years now, Read more…
Once again, a complementarian pastor has revealed why so many evangelical men like their sexism-for-Jesus relationship rules. And once again, evangelical women struggle to reconcile that truth with the indoctrination they’ve absorbed. (The 80s songs are linked throughout the post because before I gained the vocabulary to describe my unhappy Read more…
You’d think someone might have told the guy much earlier that his ideas perpetuated some really sickening and toxic dynamics between spouses. But nobody did. Really, nobody could have.
Today, let me show you how good advice goes bad in the cargo cult of evangelical marriage counseling.
Last week, we touched on the anger of white evangelical men. There sure does seem to be a lot of anger there, and it’s only getting worse as white evangelicals’ cultural dominance dissipates. Their leaders’ conventional wisdom for dealing with anger is worse than useless, however. It’s not just because there’s no god in the middle of things making prayers work and whatnot. Rather, it’s because their vaguely-worded, folksy processes can’t actually help with anything real that’s gone seriously wrong. And today, I’ll show you this inadequate tool that white evangelical men have to help with their vast anger.
Years ago, I started a long blog series called The Unequally Yoked Club. It aimed to help Christian couples deal with a spouse’s deconversion at a time when the available advice sucked beyond all logical measure. Today, we’ll see that Christians’ marriage advice to the unequally-yoked has gotten worse in recent years.
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.
Author Gary Smalley coaches complementarian men in repairing their failing marriages. And as we all know, the first step in fixing a problem is identifying it. Right? So today, come watch my husband, Mr. Captain Cassidy, take a quiz to find out how much trouble our marriage is in. Who knows? Maybe we really need Gary Smalley’s help!
Lately, we’ve been discussing the terrible Christian marriage-advice book If Only He Knew. Written by Gary Smalley, the book seeks to walk men through repairs to their failing marriages. But his fans only want advice that will allow them to keep the ideology destroying their relationships. They especially protect one central idea, the pillar of complementarianism: women as less-than-human. Indeed, complementarianism only works if women aren’t really people. Here’s why.