He’s one of many, many thousands of men and women in his end of Christianity desperately seeking spouses these days. And his reaction to frustration is, sadly, all too common for authoritarian male Christians.
Hi and welcome back! I know nobody’s surprised when we talk about evangelical hypocrisy. They’re soaking in it! However, today’s story might represent one of the more egregious recent examples of that trope. Jen Hatmaker, a popular Christian speaker/author, recently announced her impending divorce. As expected, most people responded with compassion. But Read more
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.
Hi! Lately, we’ve been talking about a terrible Christian marriage-advice book, If Only He Knew. In it, author Gary Smalley promises his readers surefire techniques they can use to save their ailing marriages. Last time, I offhandedly mentioned my surprise at seeing Gary Smalley described as kindhearted. This dude’s anything but! Today, let Read more
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.
As you’ll be overjoyed to learn, this Christian has totally figured out how people can tell if their significant other is good for the long haul. It’s not the advice itself that’s so cringe-inducing (though it very much is). It’s the attitude that went into the advice. Today, let me show you how one Christian refuses to allow reality anywhere near her best ideas.