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.
Over the next week, I’ll show you just why Christian marriage advice is so pathetically awful. Today, we kick off the slumber party with a look at the author of If Only He Knew, and get an overview of what this book offers.
If you celebrate it or like it, then may it be a fun one for you and filled with all the things you like best. If you don’t, then may it pass tolerably so that Half Price Chocolate Day can arrive all the sooner. Either way, come hunker down with this SUPER SPECIAL full of love-themed posts from this blog’s past.
Conservative Christian leaders have sold their female followers a bill of goods about marriage. Today, I’ll show you what that bill of goods contains, and how it’s hurt the women who believe it. It’s a horror story that beats werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and goblins–because it’s real, and it’s happening right now to millions of women.
Last time we met up, we talked about why Christians have such a bizarrely-regressive view of marriage. In essence, rigidly codified relationships help keep their authoritarian vision alive. Today, let’s dive into the rules that get that rigid view ensconced in people’s everyday realities.
Christian leaders push hard to get their flocks to adopt rigid, unworkable rules about marriage. There’s a reason for it, of course.
Some years ago, I ran a series called the Unequally Yoked Club (UYC). It was one of my most popular series–and also one of my longest-running! It was about how Christian couples navigate when one partner deconverts from the religion. Today, let’s return to that topic. Together, we’ll see what’s changed Read more
I’ve been wanting to return to the UYC lately, since I’ve seen new developments on that front in recent months. So today, I want to show you what happened after I deconverted from Christianity, and the ups and downs of how I handled sharing the news of that deconversion with my then-husband Biff. I didn’t do everything perfectly, but then, I reckon almost nobody ever does.
Mark Driscoll’s blog has been a treasure trove lately, as he struggles to resolve one of his religion’s greatest failings: its defective and faulty teachings about marriage. One can see why half his his blog appears to be composed of advice regarding marriage–Christians labor under a divorce rate that screams out the truth about their religion’s poor teachings, and the further right into the religion one progresses the worse marriages get and the more acrimonious and frequent the divorces seem to be. Mark Driscoll happens to stand way to the right in his religion, so one can easily excuse him for being thus concerned. Today Lord Snow Presides…. over Mark Driscoll’s terrible not-good ineffective guaranteed-to-fail marriage advice.