Sheila: Welcome to the Bare Marriage Podcast.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from tolovehonorandvacuum.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.  And I am joined today by Rebecca Lindenbach, my daughter.

Rebecca: Hello.  

Sheila: And we will not be at tolovehonorandvacuum.com, hopefully, too much longer.  

Rebecca: Oh gosh.  Hopefully.  Hopefully.    

Sheila: We can’t give you an exact date because every time we think we’re almost done we find something else big.  But we are in the process of moving over to baremarriage.com.  We are only taking the posts from 2018 and forward because I don’t agree with 2016 Sheila all the time.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  Well, and it’s just easier just to start over than to go through every single one of the 2,700 blog posts that are on the site right now.  

Sheila: Yes.  Yes.  And I’m reposting some of my favorites too to make sure they come.  So that will be soon.  We hope.  So that’s one major announcement.  The second one is if you have been listening to the last two weeks you will know we are in the middle of a really good series called Women Heroes of the Faith That You Need to Know About.  Women that history has forgotten.  And so two weeks ago we talked about Josephine Butler because I read just a life-changing biography on her and so inspirational.  So please go listen to that podcast.  Last week we did Katharine Bushnell.  I interviewed Kristen Du Mez about her biography of Katharine Bushnell.  And yeah.  There’s just a lot of people that have done amazing things for God in history that we may not know about.

Rebecca: And they don’t get the air time because they aren’t usually in positions of power.  

Sheila: That’s right.  And also because a lot of these women were fighting—  

Rebecca: Were fighting the status quo.  They’re fighting the guys in power.  So, of course, they’re not going to want to be remembered.

Sheila: Yes.  So go check them out.  Today we want to do something a little bit different.  We want to tell you some stories of modern day women from around the world.  And we don’t have biographies for you to read, so these won’t be quite as long.  But just really inspirational stories that we would encourage you to check out.  And I want to start with Theresa Kachindamoto. And apologies to everyone in Malawi if I am saying that wrong.  But Theresa Kachindamoto is just an amazing story.  She was born the youngest of 12 kids.  So we all know if you’re the youngest of 12 kids, you’re not that important.  Kind of like the David and Goliath story.  Remember that?  Bring out your all your sons, Samuel says.  And he’s like, “Well, these are all my sons.”  

Rebecca: There’s one more.  Oh, it’s just David. 

Sheila: Yeah.  So youngest of 12.  She came from a family that was from the elite, tended to be the rulers in their tribe.  But she was the youngest, and she worked as a secretary for 20 years.  But she had the kind of personality that everybody just knows you.

Rebecca: Yeah.  You’re just a very typical baby of the family.  Yeah. 

Sheila: And so in the early 2000s, she was actually elected as chief of her tribe of 900,000 people.  So they have democratically elected chiefs.  It’s not hereditary or anything, but it is from her tribe.  And then I think there is like 500 tribal heads or tribal leaders under her.  And so she gets to be chief.  And she looks around, and she sees there is all these 12, 13, 14-year-old girls who have 2 kids.  And she’s like, “Oh, no.  This is not happening on my watch.”  And she goes on this huge crusade to end and annul child marriages.  And child marriages are against in the law in Malawi, but the law wasn’t being enforced.  And so she said to her chiefs, “Either you enforce the law in your areas, or you are fired.”  And she ended up firing a bunch of people.  And then when they did annul the child marriages, she let them back in.  So that’s great.  But she’s established these parent councils.  They do door-to-door campaigns where they knock on people’s doors, and they talk about the importance of girls getting educated and how when girls stay in school the family benefits and everybody benefits.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Because the problem is, of course, a lot of these communities, the reason that you don’t send your daughter to school is because you’re relying on dowry as part of your income, right?  Like you need to, in essence, sell your daughters to feed your family.    

Sheila: Right.    

Rebecca: And so showing them if you educate your daughters, if you give them a chance to build a life for themselves, the whole family will benefit.  It’s not just a one-time dowry payout, right?  Because remember?  A lot of people are quite desperate.  It’s not always an issue of being cruel as much as an issue of desperation.

Sheila: Right.  And in Malawi at the time, you had a 50/50 chance of being married before 18.  And girls, who become mothers before 18, they—they were having a 20 to 30% maternal mortality rate.

Rebecca: Yeah.  It’s horrific.

Sheila: Malawi is, I think, the sixth poorest country in the world.  So health care is really bad, so there’s all kinds of issues here.  And she has annulled, I think, over 2,000 child marriages now.  

Rebecca: Something amazing like that.

Sheila: Yeah.  And it’s not just girls that she’s trying to rescue.  She’s trying to rescue boys from child marriages too and just get everybody back in school, and nobody become a parent until you’re an adult yourself.  And she’s just doing such an incredible job in raising awareness of this.  And you think about a woman doing that as chief in what’s normally a patriarchal society, and she’s someone who was just using the power that she has to really make changes that are going to affect generations to come.  So I love that.  I love that.  And now you have a story.  

Rebecca: I do.  I want to talk to people about Dora.  The woman that I follow on TikTok.  She is in, I believe, Zambia.  And Dora Nyambe.  And she actually is doing something slightly different than Theresa because she doesn’t actually have power.      

Sheila: Right.    

Rebecca: She’s just a woman.  She’s a 20—I think she’s in her late 20s now.  She’s about my age.  She said at the beginning of 2020 she had already adopted 5 children.  So she had 5 children of her own already.  And actually, I’m just going to read out what she posted.  So she moved to the remote village of Mapapa in 2020.  She had already adopted her then 5 children by that point.  But then she started a free school for the kids of the village that provides food, education, health care, love, and a safe house for abused children.  They have since then begun building a hospital for the village, and she has added to her personal family by adopting 7 more children herself as well as fostering 150 children at the school.  And, as she says—“And yes.  I’m not yet married.”  Okay.  I love this woman.  She’s amazing.  So what she does is she actually posts everything that she is doing on TikTok so people can see what it is like to do a grassroots, on-the-ground operation where you are helping save children—save girls from child marriages.  She goes to court to get these marriages annulled as well.  She helps sue rapists of these children.  She’s doing all of this on her own and with the help of other women in the community.  And in essence, they’re doing this amazing thing all just because she’s a woman who saw people in need, and she said, “Well, I’m just going to do something about it.” And she’s done other TikToks where she talks about how she always wanted a family.  And people keep asking her, “When are you going to get married?”  And she’s like, “I have kids.”  

Sheila: Yeah.  I think you said she adopted—when she was 21, she adopted—

Rebecca: She adopted a 14 year old, and she kept on doing all these things like, “I’m 21 with a 14 year old.  Ask me how,” and stuff like that.  Yeah.  And she just has fun with it where she’s like, “Yeah.  You know?  You just help the people in front of you.”  And that’s what Dora does.  And so I—if you’re looking for someone to support or ways to actually make a real difference in people’s lives and to support people who are on the ground in their own communities doing it just check out Dora on TikTok.  We’ll put her link in the podcast description notes because I love her.  And the coolest thing is as you give money, I know last year they had a big fundraising initiative for the school supplies for the year.  And then she got to actually show them unboxing all the school supplies.  So you get to actually see it happening as it’s unfolding in real time.  It’s amazing.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  So that’s so cool.  And, again, here’s a woman who she didn’t have much, but she used what she had.  And it seems to me that both Theresa Kachindamoto and Dora are really living out the parable of the talents.

Rebecca: Oh, 1,000%.  

Sheila: Because Theresa was given 10 let’s say, right?

Rebecca: She just made 100.  

Sheila: And she’s made 100.  And Dora might only have been given like 5 or 2 or whatever, and she’s multiplied that hugely because not all of us have the same circumstances.  But you do what you can with what you have.

Rebecca: And it’s astounding what this woman has done.  It is astounding.  She went from just adopting one child because she saw a child in need and wanted to save her from a child marriage to now fostering over 150 kids. 

Sheila: Yeah.  It is incredible.  When you step out and you just do the little things that God has put right in front of you, “Hey, this is something you can do,” then it’s like God increases the things that you are able to do.  And I just—I love that so much.  So we will put the link to the story of Theresa Kachindamoto.  It’s just a wonderful story to talk about as a family—what she is doing and the reality of child marriage around the world and how we need to fight this.  We’re celebrating in Malawi outlawing marriage below the age of 18 and a lot of African and Asian countries have made child marriage illegal because of the problem of it.  What people may not know is that child marriage is actually legal in Canada and in—how many states in the United States?

Rebecca: 44 out of 50.

Sheila: 44 states.  In Canada, it is illegal to take your child abroad to get married if they’re 16 or younger or to marry them, but you can get married at 17.  In some states, I think you can even get married as young as 12 with parental permission.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  It’s horrific.  Yeah.  In Canada nationwide, there is, in essence, no way to legally marry a child, who is under 16 years old in Canada, but many states it’s terrifyingly young how as long as the parents or guardians sign off.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Mm-hmm.  So that’s just something that we should keep in mind and talk to your elected representatives about.   

Rebecca: Yes.

Sheila: Okay.  The big picture we’re trying to say is hey, when God puts something in front of you where you can really make a difference, let’s make a difference.  And we have a cool story to share with you about how two young women are making a difference.  Mailli and Abbi are two young filmmakers, who heard about The Great Sex Rescue, read The Great Sex Rescue, got really excited about it, but also were very horrified at the things that were being taught in other marriage books and the things that they had been taught as teenagers growing up.  And so they created a short film called All the Books.  And we’re going to put a link to that in the podcast notes even go watch it now.  Hit pause on this.  Go watch it now because we’re going to bring Mailli and Abbi on to talk about their film.  I am thrilled to bring to the Bare Marriage podcast two young women, who have done an amazing service for the Christian community.  I have Abbi Fisher and Mailli Brown with me.  Hi, ladies.

Abbi and Mailli: Hi.

Sheila: Now I need to tell the story of what you guys did.  Or maybe you should tell the story.  I’ll just say.  So Abbi, you are an English major right now at Grove City College, right?  And Mailli, you’re trying to figure out if you want to work in film or not.

Mailli: Yeah.

Sheila: But you’re both early 20s.  

Abbi: We’re not in our 20s yet.

Mailli: I just turned 19.  

Abbi: I’m about to turn 20.

Sheila: Okay.  So you’re really young.  You jumped into the fight with me.  So yay.  I’m so glad that there are young women jumping into this fight.  So tell us about the All the Books short film.

Mailli: It’s a short film.  It’s about 6 minutes long, and it follows a young woman who’s engaged and she’s very excited.  And she’s a Christian, so she goes to buy a Christian marriage book.  And it kind of follows her as this book kind of challenges her faith and—yeah.  Changes her perception of her relationship and herself.

Sheila: Yeah.  It’s got a real emotional punch.  I’m watching it.  And she gets—she’s so excited to get married and about her relationship.  And then she gets this book out.  You made up the book.  

Mailli: Yeah.

Abbi: Mm-hmm.

Sheila: So you created the cover and everything?

Mailli: Yeah.  We used Canva, so it was all free.  But we got together in Abbi’s room a Sunday afternoon reading through chapters of different books.  And the whole back cover is a composite of the Amazon synopsis of five different books.  So everything in it is paraphrased from a real best selling Christian marriage book.

Abbi: Yeah.  And we just sat up there, and we’re trying to not be horrified.  Really proud of what we’re writing but also like this is the worst.

Mailli: It felt so uncomfortable.

Abbi: This is terrible.

Sheila: I think the first heading that stood out to me when you opened this fake book that you wrote was, “A need you don’t have,” or something, which is a direct quote from Emerson Eggerichs, right?    

Abbi: Yeah.

Mailli: Yep.  Because I’ve listened to a lot of the stuff that you said about Love and Respect, and then I’ve read parts of it too.  Weirdly enough, it was for school.  We were practicing respect, so it was like, “Here is someone I disagree with.  Let’s see if I can respect him as a human being.”  So I got to read a lot more of Love and Respect.  I’m like, “Hey, look.  I know this stuff.  We can put it in our little fake book here.”  

Sheila: That must have been fun.  I remember last year my daughter, Katie, and I—we created all these fake romance novels.  She did a photo shoot.  It was really quite fun and writing the back covers was the best part.  But tell us what the back cover of your book said?

Abbi: Oh my goodness.  Oh—

Mailli: The book we didn’t bring with us because she got from—just came back from camp.

Abbi: I’m in the middle of a week of summer camp, so I left my campers for a couple hours.  Well, we have some amazing reviews from Emmett Egbert and Sharon Farnes.  

Mailli: Definitely fake names for sure.

Abbi: Yeah.  I know at least we have the phrase, “smoking hot wife,” in there.  

Mailli: I’m trying to see if we have a photo of it or not.

Sheila: And I remember in the internal part of your book I’m sure I saw something from Every Man’s Battle there too about—yeah.

Abbi: Oh yeah.

Mailli: Yep.

Sheila: So you’re critiquing it.  So she reads this book.  This is where the emotional part comes in because she gets really crestfallen.  And then her finance comes, and he’s all excited to see her.  And he doesn’t know anything is wrong, and now she just doesn’t trust him anymore.

Abbi: Mm-hmm.

Mailli: Mm-hmm.

Sheila: And just feels really awkward with him.  And that’s what so many women go through.  

Abbi: Mm-hmm.

Sheila: So what got you into this?  You guys are 19.  What made you realize how toxic this stuff was?  

Abbi: Oh, how toxic it was.  Well, so it was this weird thing of—maybe last year or the year beforehand, I suddenly realized that a church that we were at, at the same time—it was where we met.  We were there about 10 years ago.  My family was there for 4 years after that.  I kind of had the sudden realization of like oh, I have all these things that happened to me at this church and, specifically, with some of the young male members of the church.  It’s like oh that was super toxic.  That was super sexist.  That was bullying.  And just I became aware of it and then really shortly after that I had read some of your articles through Pinterest.  And I told my mom, “Mom, I found this really, really cool website called To Love, Honor, and Vacuum.”  And she goes, “Abbi, I’ve been telling you to read Sheila Gregoire for years now.  She has a book coming out soon.”  So then I read The Great Sex Rescue very shortly after it was published and was like, “Oh, there’s a name for this kind of stuff.  There’s a name for these kinds of attitudes.”

Mailli: And then I was at camp a year ago.  And I don’t know.  I don’t remember why, but you sent me the modesty episode, which you just reran.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.

Mailli: About the modesty message.  So I had a free morning, and she sent that to me.  And I was like, “Wait.  This is our camp’s dress code.”

Abbi: Well, I sent it to you because that camp is run by the church that we were both at when we met.  

Mailli: Yeah.

Abbi: It’s not still run, but it used to be run by that church.

Mailli: Yeah.  So then I started getting into that.  And we talked about it.  And we’d been doing film making projects together for years and years.  And so last Christmas, I was—I wanted to get The Great Sex Rescue from a local bookstore, if I could.  So I went to the Christian bookstore, and it wasn’t there.  But I thought, “I’ll just read through the marriage section and see if there is anything there.”  So I picked up His Needs, Her Needs because I didn’t recognize the—I didn’t recognize the cover.  And I read the whole first chapter, and, at the end, I was like—my hands were shaking.  I just felt really gross because it’s about—yeah.  Yeah.  It just didn’t feel like a marriage book at all.  They don’t mention Jesus.  It was like you can’t really control.  So that’s a lot of this book is you have to keep him from having an affair was a lot of that message.  So then I came home.  I walked home, and then I texted Abbi.  And I was like, “This was so weird.”  And then I opened Google Docs, and I wrote the entire script in half an hour.  It hasn’t changed since.

Sheila: Oh, that’s amazing.  

Abbi: Yeah.  Just one draft.

Sheila: So what have people’s responses been?  It’s been out for, I think, about a month.  At the point where this podcast goes live, it will have been out for about a month.  So what have people been saying?  

Mailli: So the first bit of reviews that we got from the—

Abbi: Our feedback.

Mailli: The feedback form were really interesting because we had—basically, I would say 3 groups of people.  There was a group of people that was like, “Anyhow, I’ve been sobbing for the past 10 minutes.  I can’t stop shaking because this is exactly what my experience was in the church and part of the reason I left.”  

Abbi: That was a lot of women our age.  Our friends who we sent it to.  That was a lot of that.  Or 10 years old who are maybe divorced because they finally got out of an abusive marriage because of all of these books.

Mailli: And then there was the people who—they hadn’t really interacted with this kind of stuff.  And some of them were like, “Well, this—it was really good.”  And other people were like, “Oh my gosh.  I can’t believe that there are people saying these things.  I’ve had no awareness that there were these messages out there.  And I’m horrified.”  And that was funny.

Abbi: That was really nice to—a lot of our young male friends that we sent it to.

Sheila: Oh good. 

Abbi: That was really comforting to—

Mailli: They were so happy with the film.  And they were like, “I’ve never heard this stuff before.  It’s horrible.”

Abbi: And they were outraged at the messages.  We know their moms.  And we’re like, “Okay.  That makes sense.  Their moms are very good.”

Mailli: And then we had the condescending like some students.

Sheila: Yes.  That’s okay.

Mailli: Those are our three types of responses.

Sheila: I just want to say too about the guys.  I think this is really true.  Most men do not want women getting these messages.  These are not the messages that guys want women to hear at all.  And it isn’t just hurting women.  It’s hurting men too.  So but a lot of guys because they don’t read the books and they’re not aimed at the guys they don’t always get the messages.  So they don’t know what we’re hearing.  So it’s great that some guys have watched it and understand more.

Mailli: It’s been really fun making it because, like Abbi said, a couple months ago she said, “I think our parents are more excited about this than we are.”  My dad was the most excited.  And yeah.  Yeah.  He loves your podcast just so much.  Yeah.  It’s been really fun to see our parents learning more about these things and then looking back and talking with their friends, who have teenage daughters and teenage sons.

Abbi: But since releasing it, we haven’t had any negative responses whatsoever.  Have we?

Mailli: No.  I think it’s still been in communities of people who—it’s mainly been mainly women who’ve been through, who’ve seen it.  

Abbi: Yeah.  Yeah.  And that was kind of our goal because I realized I—neither of us ever had these things directly, directly told to us growing up.  But it was very—it was implied.  And we saw it.

Mailli: Or it was in the churches that we were part of.  But it wasn’t in our families, so I know I’ve had—and I still have—tons of friends and people who completely believe these messages and are saturated in it.  And they will sometimes indirectly say or behave in manners like stemming from these beliefs which is weird to watch.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So should we have faith in the younger generation?  I’ve always said that it’s your generation that’s going to change things.  And I love the fact that you’re proving me right.  But do you think in your group at Grove City College or in the people that you know—do you think there’s an openness to challenge what’s been taught?

Mailli: Well, I only talk to 3 people at school.  So I’ve had some girls from school who are absolutely loved it and were super excited with what I was doing.  But I’ve definitely had a lot of interactions with people there who they’re really willing to discuss ideas.  And even if they don’t directly agree with something, they’re going to sit.  And they’re going to listen to you and really think about stuff.  And you’ve had some good experiences at school with people who believe this stuff.

Abbi: I think what’s been—yeah.  The majority of interactions I’ve had with people who believe it it’s—were definitely willing to talk about this.  And I don’t actually—it’s like they’ve grown up in it.  But they haven’t really thought about it.  So it seems like people are more open, but the deepest conversations I’ve had with people who have actually left Christianity because of all of these things and have a lot of hurt from it.  And so that’s been really encouraging with this process to have those people say, “I’m outside of this now, but it’s neat to see that you can critique it from the inside because I haven’t seen that yet.”  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.

Abbi: So I feel like that’s what I really want to keep doing is showing that you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bath water, and you can stay—you can keep Jesus and get rid of all of the—all the bad stuff.

Mailli: The nastiness.

Abbi: Yeah.  Yeah.

Sheila: Amen.  And I want people to understand that.  Is that the people who have been so hurt and who are leaving the church they’re watching us.  They’re watching, and they’re so—they just want someone to say this was wrong.  What was done to them was wrong.  And I think you guys did such a good job of doing that.  Again, I’m going to put the link to their video.  Please go watch it.  It’s 6 minutes long.  It is worth your time.  So check out the podcast notes for that link.  Watch the video.  Share it on Facebook.  Share it on Instagram.  Share it everywhere.  And follow them on Instagram and let’s get the word out because here is two young people doing amazing work.  It’s so creative, and I’m excited to see what you’re doing to do next.  So do you have any plans for the next thing you’re going to critique?

Mailli: Well, we have ideas.  

Abbi: Yeah.  We have lots of ideas.  Nothing solid.

Mailli: We need to take a break from something heavy to do some funky space Western or something.  Vikings.

Abbi: Vikings or something.  Who knows?

Mailli: Before we do—the next one that—the one that I really wanted to do is one about—more directly about purity culture.

Abbi: More about modesty and girls.

Mailli: And specifically at camps.

Sheila: Oh yes.  

Mailli: I’ve got to do that.  You’ve dealt with it a lot more than I have.    

Abbi: It’s fun being at the camp I’m at now because it’s slowly changing.  And it’s fun to be part of the changing conversations and talking with the campers about it.  But it’s also uncomfortable.

Sheila: Our new book.  Yeah.  Our new book—our mother daughter book—She Deserves Better—it’s going to be out in April.  We have stats of what the modesty message does to people.  

Mailli: Yes.

Sheila: So if you want to get an early look at those stats, I can give those to you, and you can put them in your video.  

Abbi: Oh my goodness.  Oh my goodness.

Sheila: Just let me know.

Abbi: We’re so excited.

Sheila: And then we would love to see your video on that.  So thank you so much for joining us.  Again, why don’t you tell people really quick where they can find you on Instagram?  

Mailli: We have an Instagram page for the short film.  It’s called @allthebooksfilm.  And then I’m—

Sheila: @allthebooksfilm?  

Mailli: Yes.  Yes.

Abbi: And then you have the main film account.

Mailli: I have all my film making projects, which is @maillibrown.

Sheila: Okay.  So I will put the link in the podcast’s notes, @allthebooksfilm and @maillibrown.  And that is awesome.  Well, thank you, ladies.  It’s been great talking to you.

Abbi: Thank you so much.

Mailli: Thank you.

Sheila: Isn’t that amazing?

Rebecca: They’re fantastic.  

Sheila: And I honestly didn’t know when I began the interview that they were as young as they are.  So imagine what these two are going to do in their lives.  I love—I absolutely love seeing—I want to say kids.  And I know I shouldn’t say kids.  They are young women.  I’m getting old.  But seriously, it makes my heart so happy to see people in their late teens, early 20s, doing such incredible things.

Rebecca: Well, it’s prevention work.  The thing is it’s prevention work.  If you can get in it while it’s young—while people are young, it’s prevention.  And an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right?

Sheila: Yes.  So if you want something to motivate your own teenagers, your own young adults in your life, show them that movie and say, “Hey, this is what some really motivated 19-year-old young women did.”  And so let’s see how else we can change the conversation.  All right, Becca.  Something else happened on social media last week.

Rebecca: Yes.

Sheila: We changed what we were going to talk about for this podcast.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  I did.  I don’t even remember what we were supposed to talk about because the minute this dropped we were like, “This is what the podcast is on, right?” 

Sheila: Yes.  There was an article in Psychology Today that came out.  And it went quite bit on social media because the top of the article had the key takeaways.  If you’re watching on YouTube, Katie will put that graphic on there.  But I want to read you how this article was introduced.  It is called The Rise of Lonely, Single Men, and there were key points.  You want to read them?

Rebecca: Sure.  The key points are these.  “Dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise.  Men represent approximately 62% of dating app losers lowering their chance for matches.  And men need to address skills deficits to meet healthier relationship expectations.”  

Sheila: Yes.  And those are the key takeaways.  What I really appreciated about this article is that he linked the studies that he was basing his findings on, and the studies were actually quite good ones.  One is a peer reviewed study about how loneliness is increasing among single men quite a bit in the last few years.  Another one was from the Pew Research Project where they looked at census data.  So this was only census data for the last 30 years, and they just analyzed the numbers.  So it wasn’t any interpretation of the—it wasn’t anything.  It was just pure census data, and they were—and what they were finding is that there are now more unmarried men than unmarried women in the age cohort of 25 to 54.  Or I’m sorry.  Not unmarried.  Unpartnered.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Unpartnered.  

Sheila: Unpartnered.  I need to make that very clear.  They were combining married and cohabiting.  Yeah.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  And usually, it’s been the other way around, hasn’t it?

Sheila: Yeah.  So this was a flip.  This was actually quite the flip, and it’s the first time it’s flipped.  So if people are saying, “Well, how could there be more,” basically, younger women might be partnered.  So women might be partnering faster so that on the lower end of the age spectrum of 25 to 54 more women are partnered than men.  But also on the older spectrum where you might get people who have been divorced or widowed or whatever women are more—women might be more likely to be partnered because they’re partnered with older people.  So you get this—yeah.  This thing where at both ends you might have more women who are partnered than men.

Rebecca: The other thing, of course, is that as relationships—that what they’re saying here is relationship standards are going up.  And this is why people are not going for people who are emotionally immature anymore which, statistically speaking, tends to be men.  Women are just dating other women more often.

Sheila: Yes.  There are more same sex relationships now as well.  So, again, this is going to affect how many women are partnered.  And the other issue that they also said is that when you look at people who are not partnered women are far more likely to live with children.  And so women are less likely to be lonely because they’re more likely to have people with them than men.  So really interesting.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  And, obviously, we know single motherhood is incredibly lonely.  

Sheila: Yes.  Yes.  Not trying to diminish that.

Rebecca: Just saying we’re talking about when we look at these studies that are looking at different markers of loneliness single women are more likely to have family community ties even if they are relatively draining ones— 

Sheila: Yes.  Yes.  Yes.

Rebecca: – than single men, who are truly, not just lonely, but alone.  

Sheila: Yes.  Yeah.  Exactly.  And that there was another study they linked to about how 62—how men are more likely to be on dating apps than women.  I was looking at other studies, and I did find—that one I find a little bit more ambiguous because it really seems like it depends which app you’re talking about.

Rebecca: Which makes total sense, right?

Sheila: Yeah.  If you’re talking about Ashley Madison where—  

Rebecca: It’s like 98% are men.

Sheila: I think it was like three-quarters.  Where you go to have an affair.  Or even Tinder is primarily men.  The hook up apps are primarily men.  But things like eHarmony are slightly more female I believe.  Christian Mingle slightly more female.  Not a lot.  We’re talking about a 52 to 47 or something.

Rebecca: I do wonder though, too, because the things about the Christian dating sites too I do wonder when we know that there are so many more religious women than there are men.  The fact that it’s not that huge of a difference actually might mean that it is more skewed in turn of men being on the sites, right?

Sheila: Yes.  That is true too.   

Rebecca: If the church is in general 60/40 and the sites are only 47/53, that actually is a pretty big difference.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So anyway so that one I wasn’t quite as sure about that study when I looked at it because I could see other ones.  But two very good studies.  And so the guy is taking this data, and he’s saying, “What can we—what conclusions can we draw from this?”  And one of the interesting things about the rise of unpartnered men, in particular, is that it does look like unpartnered men do worse on a number of things than unpartnered women do.  So they were looking at educational attainment, health outcomes, whether you’re living with your parents, and your finances and income.  And the group that has lost since the last census—the most on income—is single men.  The group that has gained the most in all those other things is partnered women.  So partnered women are doing really well.  Partnered men are doing really well.  And unpartnered women are actually doing—

Rebecca: Doing pretty okay.  They’re doing pretty well.

Sheila: Yeah.  Men are far more likely to live with their parents.  They’re far less likely to be independent if they are unpartnered than women.  So we have this group.  And what he’s also talking about in this and this is more anecdotal than he was talking about in this article.  But we have also seen peer reviewed studies on this is that women tend to be more emotionally mature and emotionally intelligent.  That is not biological.    

Rebecca: No.  It’s not.  And so the Lord decreed that the women would have the emotions and the man would have the sex as which is often said in our Christian marriage books.  No.  This is not biological at all.  This is a result of socialization, right?  And so there are certain biological things that make it more likely that we’ll be socialized certain ways such as, for example, if women don’t have social support systems in a land—in a community where it’s really dangerous and you have babies you might die.  And so women may have been more likely to create strong emotional attachments whereas men might be more focused on sports and athleticism because for each of us based on our risks that we’re likely to meet on a day-to-day level when you’re at a more primitive society that makes it less likely you’ll die.  It’s not because biologically speaking women are emotional and men can’t be emotionally healthy.

Sheila: Not at all.  Not at all.  And just to point out, in the Bible, Jesus shows a whole range of emotions.  Whole range of emotions are attributed to God.  Emotions are good.  

Rebecca: Yep.  David and Jonathan were super close.

Sheila: Yeah.  We had a whole series on emotional health.  I will put a link to that in the podcast notes to this.  So emotions are good.  So what women are really looking for in the dating pool is men who can invest in a relationship, who—where women don’t have to carry the relationship, with men who are emotionally healthy, and also men who just know how to clean a toilet. 

Rebecca: Yeah.  Well, there was that one study that we’ve talked about, I believe, on the podcast before that has found that in marriages men tend to always do better, married versus unmarried, right?  But women only do better in good marriages.  And if they’re in bad marriages, they actually do way worse.  And not abusive.  But just bad marriages.  Like even in a not great marriage, men are still more likely to have higher salaries.  They do better at work.  They have better health long term.  

Sheila: Less mental health.

Rebecca: Less mental health problems.  That kind of thing.  Whereas women in good marriages do great and in okay and bad marriages, just kind of either stagnate or do worse.  And so we have this situation now where women are just deciding I’m doing okay on my own.  I’m not marrying a man who is not—going to make my life worse so that I can prop him up while I just suffocate.

Sheila: Yes.  Yeah.  They’re saying, “Look, if I’m going to get married, you need to bring something to the table.”

Rebecca:   Exactly.  

Sheila: I want to get married because it will enhance my life.  And part of the problem, of course, is that this hasn’t always been the case.  Like now that women can financially look after themselves, now that women have support networks so they don’t necessarily need a guy to have their own emotional community support, whatever, they’re like, “I’m only going to get married if there is really a reason for it.”  And studies have also shown that when you marry women do more housework and men do less.

Rebecca: Yep.  And that’s not fair.  That should make no sense.  It should be that both of you do less.  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Yeah.  Because where you both had to do everything on your own when you’re married, now you should only have to do half as much.  

Rebecca:   Exactly.

Sheila: Well, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Sheila: So yeah.  So women are just being able finally to be selective and to say, “Hold on a second.  I would rather stay single than be with someone who drags me down.”  And we were talking about this in social media.  And overwhelmingly, that’s what women were saying.  

Rebecca: Okay.  So while we’re talking about emotional health and how men tend to not have the same kind of lessons taught to them in their earlier formative years as girls do when it comes to emotional wellbeing and relationship and all that kind of stuff, let’s talk about The Whole Story.  

Sheila: Okay. 

Rebecca: So my sister and I—when we went through puberty, we found that things were not as clear as they could have been.

Sheila: No.  I did not do a perfect job.  And so a couple years ago, they were complaining and laughing at me about this.  And I said, “Well, fine.  Do it better.”

Rebecca: Yeah.  Exactly.  So we actually create a course.  We did one course for girls, me and Katie.  And then Sheldon Neil as well as both of our husbands—me and Katie, our husbands—did the boys version.  And the boys version, in particular, actually has a whole unit on, in essence, spiritual development and character growth because, quite frankly, boys go through a lot less during puberty than girls do.  But on top of that, we knew that this is particularly an area especially in the Christian church we really need to work on with boys.  And so we thought that was a great idea.  But if you’re looking for an easy way to start these conversations in a way that’s not just fear based, it’s not purity culture.  It’s just the information your kid needs to know.  It’s very matter of fact, but also we do the hard parts for you.  We’re the ones who actually explain how does sex work.  What is intercourse, right?  What is an erection?  

Sheila: What’s a tampon?  

Rebecca: What is a tampon?  How do you use a tampon, right?  We do all that stuff for you.  And then we offer you discussion guides and question prompts so that you can continue the conversation and keep it going for years to come.  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  So we will put a link to The Whole Story course.  It’s available in two different ages for younger kids, 10-12, and then older kids, 12-14, after that too.

Rebecca: Yep.  And you can get bundles as well if you’ve got kids of both genders and all different ages, whatever it is.  Just go check it out, and I’m sure you’ll find something for you.  Something that I also want to say with this is the idea that women are saying, “I’m not going to marry someone who is going to bring me down.”  A lot of people that I’ve seen online as people are talking about it is always saying, “Oh, well, they’re just being mean to these men.  And it’s not these men’s fault that they haven’t put in—they don’t know—have these skills.  And you’re going to have all these lonely men and all these women saying, ‘I’m so much better than them.’”  But I do want to say these are all learnable things.  There is no reason—people can say all they want.  “Oh, but your mom should have taught you this.  Or your dad should have taught you this.”  YouTube exists.  You can simply follow housekeeping channels on YouTube.  If your apartment looks like a very typical bachelor pad and is super destroyed all the time, because that is one of the big reasons why women are like I’m not marrying someone to be his maid, right?  If you don’t know how to keep a house and how to meal plan and how to cook healthy and how to get a budget going, I don’t know what to tell you, bud.  YouTube exists.  Google exists.  If you can memorize 800 football players’ numbers and stats, you can figure out the way to clean a bathroom.

Sheila: Yeah.  When I got married, I had no idea how to cook.  I really didn’t.  And so you know what I did?  I bought a couple of cookbooks, and I just—I followed—this is before the Internet, okay?  A long time ago.  But I just followed them step by step, and I actually learned how to be a pretty good cook.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Exactly.  

Sheila: I didn’t have anyone teaching me.  I just got a cookbook.  

Rebecca: Yep.  It’s not that hard.  This is what I hope that the next generation of men and the current generation of men, who are currently single, and like, “Why am I single,” can kind of think about.  Is like what are the skills that the girls around you—the women around you have had to learn simply because they’re women and people don’t allow them to not learn these things without a lot of stigma.  Because that’s the thing.  The bachelor pad aesthetic is not for girls.  It’s for men, right?  If you’re a single women whose apartment is super, super messy, you’re looked at like you’re a total slob.  A man, it’s like, “Ahh, your single days,” right?  So what are the things that I have not had to learn that the women around me, my peers, the people who I want to marry someday have had to learn?  And how can I learn those things, right?  Do you have close relationships?  Are you able to take criticism?  Are you showing personal growth?

Sheila: Yeah.  Because it’s not just housework.  It’s also this emotional—it’s also this emotional health.  

Rebecca: Yeah.  Emotional health.  And it all ties together, right?  Do you have—and be very honest with yourself.  Do you have a lot of entitlement? Because currently, women are not putting up with that anymore because they don’t need—and this is going to sound harsh.  But they don’t need you.  They don’t need you.  

Sheila: And there are a lot of guys who—and it’s not fair.  It’s not fair that so many men were raised without any help in identifying and talking about their emotions.  It’s why so few men have deep friendships whereas most women do have deep friendships with other women.  It isn’t fair.  But the problem is it isn’t a woman’s job to fix that in you.

Rebecca: Or to allow you to go on without learning those things because that’s really what they’re saying.  They’re saying, “Well, you should marry us anyway and feel bad for us.”  It’s like I shouldn’t have to fix this.  It’s like no.  No.  You can but you have to do the work.  And they’re going to be a lot of people who are single and they shouldn’t be.  And that’s just the unfortunate reality.

Sheila: Yeah.  I think we can—all of us can think of people who were like, “Why were they not married?  They’re an awesome catch.”  

Rebecca: Yeah.  Goodness sakes.  And sometimes it’s just luck of the draw.  But I know that my goal when I was dating because—and I’m not talking to singles because I got married at 20.  I’m just talking about the evidence.  But my philosophy was very much like, “I don’t know if I’m going to find someone.  I don’t know if it’s going to work or not.”  And so I was just like, “Well, I just don’t want to have any what ifs,” right?  And so I went to like literally everything.  I went on tons of dates even with people I was like, “This is not going to work.”  And we tried everything, and I did end up finding Connor very quickly.  But don’t let the what if be that you didn’t just become a better person.  Like don’t let the what if be that you didn’t learn how to take criticism, or you weren’t able to be a safe person to confide in.  Or you weren’t able to be a good partner.  Let’s not let that be the what if.  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  And that goes for both men and women.  

Rebecca:   Yes.  Totally.  But statistically speaking, it’s just as more likely to be men.  That’s my big thing is these are things you can learn.  And these are things that there are women out there.  Women are not saying yes.  I love being single.  I’d rather not be married.  That’s not what they’re saying.  They would rather be in a good marriage relationship.  And then they’d be single, and then they’d be in a bad marriage relationship.  That’s all we’re saying.  So if you can do the work, if you can put yourself out there having been honest with yourself, maybe go to therapy.  If you’ve had a hard time keeping relationships or you’ve been choosing bad partners or you don’t have a lot of close friendships, just go to therapy even if you don’t have mental health problems.  Just be like I don’t know why people don’t seem to stick around me.  And just talk it out and get the skills that you need because this is something that can be learned.  And if you do learn it, there are people out there who are looking for a partner, but they’re not going to settle.  So don’t make them.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  Women are increasingly less likely to settle.  And I want to another dimension to this conversation too which is that this is even more so in the church.  

Rebecca: Yes.

Sheila: Last week was just an interesting week on social media.  And if you do not follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, please do because I love the fact that you listen to this podcast, but the community is a lot bigger than this.  And often the funniest stuff happens on social media.  And I seem to be a different person on each social media platform.  On Twitter, I’m just like burn it all down.  

Rebecca: Burn it all down.  I don’t care.

Sheila: And on Facebook, I tend to be a little bit more measured.  And then on Instagram, I’m like very pithy, and I have all my famous fixed it for yous.  But there were several interesting conversations that happened on Facebook last week.  And I was sharing a graphic where a man had been talking about how it’s a husband’s job to get his wife ready for Jesus by lovingly correcting her.  And I was fixing it so that it was proper because husbands are not our Saviors and Jesus already saved women.

Rebecca: Mm-hmm.  It is by grace you’ve been saved through faith except if you’re women and then it’s by your husband’s loving correction.  Yes.  That’s not how the verse goes, guys.  

Sheila: Yes.  Yeah.  Just not how the verse goes.  But a lot of men who are never on my social media ever were jumping in and calling me a heretic and all the bad stuff that often happens.

Rebecca: The very typical.

Sheila: And this is really common in Christian circles is whenever there’s a conversation about how there shouldn’t be male entitlement towards sex or where women are—

Rebecca:   Standing up for themselves.  

Sheila: Or are in the image of God just as much as men are.  Or where women should be treated as equals.  Men come out—certain men come out and really, really yell.  And women just aren’t taking it.  And that’s what’s interesting in the comments is that article that I shared about getting your wife ready for Jesus—I also shared that four years ago.  And while most people agreed with me, there was much more of a debate.  Today there is not the debate.  Women are just like now—the culture has changed.

Rebecca: Yeah.  And some of that is that the people who disagreed with us have left our page.  There’s also a lot of people who I remember from four years who have totally changed their mind.

Sheila: Yeah.  Because we even changed our mind on some things.    

Rebecca: Yeah.  Exactly.

Sheila: But the culture is changing.  

Rebecca: It is.

Sheila: And women are less likely to put up with this.

Rebecca: If the only thing that, as a Christian husband, you have to offer a potential wife is control over her, she’s not going to want what you’re offering because she doesn’t need it.  These days.  What do you bring to the table if you are like these men in these Christian marriage books?  Men, who like Emerson Eggerichs says, they need conquest and hierarchy and insight.  And incite doesn’t actually mean insight.  It means I need you to think that I’m smart even when I’m not, right?

Sheila: Yeah.  It means   that you need to forget everything you think, and you need to go ahead with my—my way goes.  My insight is the one that we listen to.

Rebecca: Yeah.  Exactly.  Yeah.  What really is disgusting when you read it because it really feels like they want some sycophant to just pant and drool over their wise words, and that’s entirely my opinion of Love and Respect.  But it’s disgusting.  But yeah.  Authority, insight, relationship.

Sheila: Yeah.  Conquest.  Hierarchy.  Authority.  

Rebecca: I love how I know how to spell the chairs.  And I automatically skip over authority because I find it so abhorrent to have the idea of wanting authority over your spouse.  It’s just so disgusting to me.  It’s like subconsciously I can’t remember that one.

Sheila: And all of this has to be unconditional remember?  Yeah.

Rebecca: Yes.  Unconditional.  But this is the kind of person who Eggerichs describes as what they need.  The kind of man who needs that much power and control over a woman is incredibly emotionally stunted.  Like incredibly emotionally stunted.  Like to the point where it’s like how can you even have a relationship with that kind of person.  But when you look at the relationships that are described in these books, it’s not a relationship.  It’s not what these women want.  This is the kind of relationship that makes her life worse, not better.  

Sheila: And that’s why, I think, so many women are saying, “I am not dating a Christian.”  We had so many women on our page saying, “Look.  I have dated evangelical men, and I will never do it again.”  A lot of women said, “I married an evangelical man.  He was entitled and abusive.  I divorced him, and I now married a lapsed Catholic.  And he treats me so well.”  Or, “I married someone that’s not a Christian.”  I hear that all the time, and it breaks my heart.  What does that say about our evangelical culture?    

Rebecca: Well, I mean even myself, I always said that Connor becoming a Christian when he was 19 years old was actually not a negative for me.  That was something where I knew I was much more likely to connect with someone from that background than from someone from a traditional conservative Christian background.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Who had grown up feeling—

Rebecca: Because I knew that I could make sure that I was with someone who honestly saw women as equals.  And that was the number one priority for me. 

Sheila: There was one comment on our Facebook page about this, and she said, “I was dating a guy who told me that if we married I was allowed to keep my car.  I still have my car.  I don’t know where he is anymore.”  

Rebecca: Exactly.  I love that comment.  I love that comment.  But this is the problem in these religious circles is the entire focus of marriage is so about male control and male headship that you have to wonder why are they so focused on this.  And let’s talk about the Halo study.  It’s so interesting.  

Sheila: Okay.  Okay.  Peer reviewed study.  We are using this a lot in our book She Deserves Better for mothers of teen girls which is coming out in April, so you still have to wait.  I’m sorry.  It’s all written, but it just takes awhile to get these things out there.  But we looked at this study that was done in Halo 3 players.  Okay?  And they were looking at female-voiced players, and they were seeing their interactions with the male players.  And what they found was that if you had a really, really skilled female-voiced player, the skilled male voice—male players treated her fine.  But the unskilled male players were so abusive and insulting and tried to take her down.

Rebecca:   Yeah.  Like sexual harassment, absolute insults, crass language, horrific.  And they did not treat the skilled male players this way.  In fact, the title of the news article for—by which we found the actual, original study is just hilarious.  I love how they titled it.  They titled it, “Video game study finds that losers are more likely to harass women.”    

Sheila: Yes.  Yes.  And here is the conclusion that has taken from the peer reviewed study.  “Low status males that have the most to lose due to a hierarchical reconfiguration are responding to the threat female competitors pose.  High status males with the least to fear were more positive.”

Rebecca:   Yeah.  And this makes sense.  It’s like say you think there is only room for 10 people to play.  And right now there are 10 men who want to play.  And it’s a boy’s club.  And then women say, “I want to play too.”  Now it goes to 20.  But if you were in the top 10 when it was only boys and now you’re going to be in number 18 if the girls play, it’s not—the problem you see is not your own lack of skill.  It’s that the girls came in, and that is entitlement.  That is male entitlement.  And that’s what we’re seeing here.  And I think that’s what we’re seeing in the church too.

Sheila: Yeah.  And so when the conversation changes and we’re starting to say women are equal to men.  God loves women.  God wants us to follow Jesus together and to have us both follow Jesus.  Listen to the Holy Spirit rather than tell a woman that she has to listen to her husband that that is the way she listens to God.  Telling a woman that, “No.  Together we’re supposed to listen for the Holy Spirit’s voice together.”  That becomes a threat—  

Rebecca: When you don’t have anything to offer.

Sheila: When you have nothing to offer and when your whole identity was formed in having someone under you and having a woman under you.

Rebecca: And not having to earn your place.  This is the problem is men don’t have to earn their place in marriage, in Christian circles.  They just simply are given a role where they have absolute power and authority, and they’ve never had to earn it.  They can be horrible people, and you’re still supposed to obey them as a woman.  And since women are not taking this anymore, I want to make prediction.  

Sheila: Okay.

Rebecca: So we’re already seeing this happen, but I think it’s going to happen even more is that the people in very conservative Christian spaces that are highly gendered focused especially when it comes to marriage are going to find that women who are exposed to the outside world don’t want what they’re offering anymore.  And so they’re going to have to breed up their own women in essence.  And how they’re going to do that, Christian schools, Christian college.  Keep them in the bubble.  Keep them in the bubble.  Convince them that everyone else is a tool of Satan.  They’re going to become more and more cloistered, and it’s going to become even more cult like because that’s the only way you can actually get women to marry unimpressive men.  But there’s no way to raise impressive men if you raise them with entitlement which is what their theology is.  So that’s my prediction. I think that in the next little bit I think that, as a whole, we’re actually going to see the influence of this kind of thinking die down.  Because why would a woman put themselves through a marriage like that?  Why would they put their children through having a father like that if they know they don’t have to?

Sheila: Right.

Rebecca: Unless they don’t know they don’t have to.  

Sheila: And so we’re going to see this increasing polarization.  There was a really interesting article, The Six Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism, talking about this.  We won’t get into it.  I’d love to talk about the article.

Rebecca: I’ve talked about it a lot of times in the unfiltered podcast, so all of our patrons will know what we’re talking about.  

Sheila: So here’s a plug to join our Patreon.  You can support us for as little as $5 a month, $8 a month.  You get unfiltered podcasts.  You get access to an amazing Facebook group, and it helps—it really helped us fund the writing of She Deserves Better.

Rebecca: Honestly, we thought the Patreon was going to fund totally different things this last year.  And then we are supposed to write this small, cutesy devotional for moms with daughters.  We’re like, “What if we try a second Great Sex Rescue?”

Sheila: Yeah.  What if we just go all out? 

Rebecca: What if we just put the same amount of work in as we did the first time?

Sheila: And by the way, let’s do it while you are Joanna are having another baby.  

Rebecca: Yes.  It was a lot, guys.  And the Patreon is really—it made it possible.  

Sheila: Yeah.  So we’re so grateful to them.  We’ve got some really fun ideas of other things we want to fund, so we’ll be telling you about those in a few weeks, but you can see the Patreon.  And our unfiltered podcasts are there including the ones where we talked about The Six Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism where things are going to get more polarized because yes.  People are no longer going to put up with toxic things.  And so I think it’s a good thing.  I think it’s a good thing that women are no longer settling.

Rebecca: I think so too.  And I think that the more that these more abusive communities have to dig in to the harmful parts of their theology because it’s in such stark contrast to the regular public I think it’s going to be easier to see them for who they are. 

Sheila: Yeah.  But let me end on, again, a good note because we know that there are a lot of single people listening to this podcast who desperately do want to get married, and we’re not the best people to talk about this honestly because we all got married so young.  And so I feel like I might have all of this advice, but it’s almost—

Rebecca: It’s insulting when people who got married before they were legally able to drink in the States gives singleness advice. 

Sheila: Yeah.  It really is.  And so I am sorry about that.  And I do really want to see people who want to get married get married.  But I want even more is just for people to be able to have meaningful relationships and be emotionally healthy wherever they are.  And we know there’s a lot of people who are married who are not emotionally healthy.  And so let’s get us all having meaningful relationships.  And in terms of getting married, the best piece of advice—I will just give you this.  It’s not for me.  It’s from Andy Stanley’s book, The New Rules of Love, Sex, and Dating.  I read it back in 2016, and it really stuck with me.  There’s this one phrase he says over and over and over again.  It’s his catchphrase from the book.  “Be the kind of person the kind of person you’re looking for is looking for.” 

Rebecca: Yeah.  No.  Andy Stanley.  That was just such a good quote from him.

Sheila: Yeah.  So be the kind of person the kind of person you’re looking for is looking for.  So do what you can.  Get emotionally healthy.  Get your finances in order.  Learn how to do housework.  And then you know what?  Even if you have to wait longer than you would like to get married or even if you don’t get married, you’re still in a really good place.  

Rebecca: Yep.  And that’s coming from, we’re talking about from the evidence based.  Just want to make that clear here.  We’re not talking as like married people, “You should be happy being single.”  I’m saying evidence based, research speaking this is why women are doing better when they’re single is because they’re more emotionally healthy.  

Sheila: So anyway, thank you for joining us for that discussion.  And we will put links.  I know we’ve talked about a lot of stuff.  We’ll put links to the article and all the research that went on for the article to my emotional maturity series.  Please look at that, The Six Ways that Evangelicalism is Fracturing.  And, of course, to Theresa Kachindamoto and Dora.

Rebecca: Dora Nyambe.

Sheila: And Dora Nyambe.  And All the Books video.  I want to say too—just one thing about the All the Books video as we are wrapping up.  I just want to do a plug for next week’s podcast.

Rebecca: Oh yes.  

Sheila: Next week’s is going to be an important one because we’re asking the question where are the authors now.  It’s been over a year.  It’s been a year and a half since The Great Sex Rescue was out.  So what’s happened?  What have the authors said that we were critiquing?  What have they done?  And where are they now?  And we’re going to be answering that question.  And so join us, it’s going to be great.  

Rebecca: Yes.

Sheila: A little sobering.

Rebecca: There is some tea that will be spilled.  I’m going to be honest.

Sheila: Yeah.  Little bit sobering, but I think you’ll understand a lot more where we’re coming from too.  So I’m looking forward to seeing you next week at the Bare Marriage podcast, hopefully soon at baremarriage.com.  

Rebecca: Lord, please.  Connor and I have been working on this for so long.  But hopefully soon.

Sheila: Yes.  And remember, subscribe to this podcast.  Tell other people about it and rate it five stars.  It helps us so much.  Okay.  Bye-bye.  

Sheila: Welcome to another addition of The Bare Marriage podcast.  I’m Sheila Wray Gregoire from tolovehonorandvacuum.com where we like to talk about healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice for your marriage and your sex life.  And I hope you are prepared for a jam-packed podcast today.  We are in the middle of our heroes of the faith series where we are looking at women that history has largely forgotten.  Last week on our first episode of our new season for Bare Marriage we were looking at Josephine Butler, and this week, Kristen Du Mez from Jesus and John Wayne, is going to join us to talk about Katharine Bushnell, a woman that she wrote a book about even before she wrote Jesus and John Wayne.  Then after that, we have another interview with a woman with some unique understanding in 1 Corinthians 11 and what man is head of the wife means.  So stay tuned for that.  But before we get there, a few announcements.  We are soon going to be leaving tolovehonorandvacuum.com and going over to baremarriage.com.  That’s going to be happening, hopefully, in the next week or two so keep your eye out for that.  Also just a reminder, it always helps us when you subscribe to this podcast and when you rate it five star it helps other people find it.  So please do that.  And without further ado now, here is Kristen.

I am thrilled to welcome back to the Bare Marriage podcast Kristen Kobes Du Mez.  Hello, Kristen.

Kristen: Hey, Sheila.  Thanks for having me back.  

Sheila: And Kristen is the author of Jesus and John Wayne, which is awesome, but that’s not what we’re talking about today.  

Kristen: No.  No it’s not.    

Sheila: So this is the summer of women’s biographies, and the book that you wrote before Jesus and John Wayne was a biography of Katharine Bushnell which was called—what—I—you know what?  This is terrible.  I don’t even know what the biography is called.  Rediscovering God’s Word to Women?  No.

Kristen: No.  It is A New Gospel for Women.  I have it right here.

Sheila: A New Gospel for Women.

Kristen: Yes.

Sheila: Yes.  Yes.  And I’ve read it.  I love it.  Sorry.  I forgot the title.  When you’re reading stuff on Kindle, you don’t see the cover of it all the time.  

Kristen: Yes.  I totally get that.  And I went back and forth on this title.

Sheila: So say it again.

Kristen: So I have to think about it.  What did we finally end up with for the title of that book?  Yes.  

Sheila: Yes.  So say it again.  And I will put it in the podcast notes.

Kristen: A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism.

Sheila: Awesome.  And I love Katharine Bushnell.  I love Josephine Butler more.  I have to admit it.  I think it’s the Canadian in me where I had relatives who were fighting alongside Josephine Butler.  And so—

Kristen: She is remarkable.  Right?  Her story is so amazing.  

Sheila: It is.  And I loved how they intersected.  So Josephine Butler was older than Katharine Bushnell, so she—they were compatriots.  But she was going before Katharine Bushnell was, and she died sort of at the height of Katharine Bushnell’s career, so to speak.  So they knew each other, and she was definitely a mentor to Bushnell which I think is amazing.    

Kristen: Yes.  

Sheila: But let’s paint the picture.  So Josephine Butler is over there in England, and Katharine Bushnell is in the U.S.  And she did three big things.  Tell me if I get this right.  So she started off as a missionary doctor.

Kristen: Mm-hmm.

Sheila: And then she started campaigning about purity in the sense of holding men to the same standard that we hold women.  

Kristen: Yes.

Sheila: And then it became Bible translation.  

Kristen: Yes.  Yep.  All of those things.    

Sheila: Awesome.  So let’s go back to the beginning.  She did so many cool things, and we’re talking about starting in the 1870s.  So this is—I think her first medical missionary journey was 1879 or something.    

Kristen: Yeah.  So she was just one of these do gooder Protestant women.  Methodists seem to produce a large number of these, in particular.  As a young woman, she went to college, which was not all together unusual.  But she was a bit precocious.  And her family had moved to Evanston, Illinois, which was kind of the center for this kind progressive Methodist women’s culture, and she met Frances Willard there who would later go on to found the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.  So she was really embraced by the women of this community and had a way to kind of hold together her faith and her sense of life’s calling.  And it was actually the women in her town who convinced her to go to—after—actually, after she decided to study medicine to become a missionary.  And she ended up going to China for a couple of years, had a harrowing experience there but kind of faithful missionary work.  And that’s what introduced her first to the subjectivity of biblical translation when she saw missionaries—right?  Missionaries who cared deeply about the Word of God because they were bringing it to all the nations who were playing fast and loose with biblical translation in order to quote unquote not offend the sensitivities—or sensibilities of heathen people.  And so they would translate passage more patriarchal then the original words, right?  

Sheila: And she noticed that first—I think it was—what was it?  Philippians 4 when it was talking about Euodia and Syntyche.

Kristen: Syntyche.  Right.  I’m not a biblical scholar, so I will probably butcher some of the pronunciations here.  But yes.  That they had changed two women in the story into men.  And that, to her, was just shocking because she took the Word of God so seriously.  Every word of Scripture was God breathed and inerrant.  And how dare you?  Right?  And then all of a sudden she thought, “Now, wait a minute.  If missionaries could do this, what have our biblical translators throughout history done with the text?”

Sheila: Right.

Kristen: And so she just—that was in the back of her mind, right?  

Sheila: Yeah.  That’s where it all got started.  It’s going to come back (cross talk).

Kristen: Exactly.  Yeah.  Then she went back to the States, ended up getting involved with Frances Willard.  

Sheila: Hold on a sex.  I just want people to understand this a little bit more for context.  So we’re talking about 1879.  She goes to China until 1882.  And she was only 24 years old.

Kristen: Yes.  Very young.  Right out of med school.

Sheila: She’s already been working as a physician in a hospital for awhile because she was really young when she went to college and everything.  And she goes across the world.  This is a time when there are no planes.  We’re talking about getting in a boat, and there’s not a lot of western people in China.

Kristen: Yes.

Sheila: And she goes by herself as a single woman to join a mission there.  That’s incredible.

Kristen: Yes.  Yes.  And she always ends up having close companions so other women missionaries, other single women at that time.  So I think it was Ella Gilchrist that she ended up becoming close to, and then Ella ended up passing away because it was—the diseases were rampant.  And the health of the missionaries was very poor.  And yes.  But then she came back to the States.  And then she became involved in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.  But her cause wasn’t just—or even primarily—alcohol, right?  Which was their primary cause.

Sheila: And let’s just give people—because now when we hear temperance that has a really negative connotation because we know prohibition didn’t work. 

Kristen: So prudish, right?

Sheila: Right.  But at the time, the reason it was such a big deal is because in among the lower classes especially so many men were drinking away their paychecks, and there was no money to feed the kids.  

Kristen: Right. 

Sheila: And this was what my great-great-grandmother was so involved in.  She had ten kids, and she was married to a drunk.  And so she was a very, very smart woman, and she became really involved in this in London.  And it was a big thing too because—so really it was a matter of survival for a lot of these women.

Kristen: It was survival, and it ended up being one of the most essential tools for protecting women and for women’s rights because so many of these men would drink away their paychecks, come home drunk from the saloons, abuse their wives and children, and then go off and do it again the next day.

Sheila: Right.

Kristen: And in a patriarchal culture where divorce was very difficult achieve and if you did get a divorce, your husband retained custody of the kids.  So that was not an option for the vast majority of women.  You are trapped.  And so the temperance was a way to say, “Here’s how we can make lives better for women by restraining alcohol consumption of men.”  

Sheila: Right.  So it was really like a modern anti abuse movement.    

Kristen: It was anti abuse.  It was essentially the mainstream women’s rights’ movement to a significant degree in the late nineteenth century.  And so she fit right in.  A lot of Christian women were totally in on that cause. 

Sheila: Yes.  But for her, it wasn’t mostly about the alcohol.  It was the other side of it which is she got really involved basically like Josephine Butler in the sex trafficking side of it.  

Kristen: Yes.  So she ended up settling in Denver and started as a medical doctor and volunteering with the WCTU.  But very quickly she was draw into this kind of new branch, but she helped them to create as a department which was that of social purity within the WCTU.  Now that’s a kind of euphemism for sexual purity.  So this was Victorian era.  

Sheila: Right.

Kristen: Most people weren’t talking a lot about sex.  Bushnell was the exception.  But she said—and she convinced a lot of Christian women, “Hey, we have to talk about sex because we have to talk about abuse,” right?  

Sheila: Right.

Kristen: And so she started working with prostitutes in Denver.  Denver was a pretty rough and tumble place in the 1880s still.  And so she was working with prostitutes to help restore them and to protect, give them legal protections, and so on and quote unquote redemption, right?  Which in that day, people saw her as—most people saw prostitutes as fallen women.  Just give up.  They’re beyond redemption, and they can be used and abused.  And so she started working with them and realized very quickly on this was a much broader problem, and that the root of the problem was the sexual double standard.  The idea that men could be men.  Boys will be boys, and you can’t really hold them to high standard of morality.  But women have to be unsullied, perfectly pure.  And any woman who is not, even though through a fault of her or no fault of her own—didn’t matter—beyond redemptions.  She said, “This is not Christian, and this is not biblical.”  And so she took on that entire ideology.  First WCTU.  She does this mass investigation of the brothels in Michigan and Wisconsin lumber camps.  But that’s just the background—this investigation—to really focus in on the theology.  That it is respectable Christian men and women who are perpetrating these abuses and offending them, and that turns her to the theology. 

Sheila: Yeah.  I have a quote that you wrote about this.  She says, “Appalled to find so many upstanding citizens coming to the defense of local brothels, Bushnell was particularly distressed to find that some virtuous—God forbid the misnomer—women considered the degradation of young girls necessary for the protection of their own virtue having embraced the belief that such girls provided an outlet for men’s natural iniquity.”  

Kristen: Yes.  Exactly.  I mean it’s horrifying to read that, and she was horrified because, like many Protestant women, she had been raised in this purity and morality and had believed that and had believed that this was for all Christians, not just for women.  And she also believed that there was redemption, and that was the heart of Christianity.  And what she realized, shockingly, is that she was in the minority on that.  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.

Kristen: So that was all before she came into touch with Josephine Butler, but it was after Butler saw what she had done in the United States that Butler said, “Why don’t you come over here?  And we need to meet.”  Excuse me.  And then Butler asked her and her friend, Elizabeth Andrew, to lead this similar kind of investigation into the brothels in Colonial India that was sponsored by the British.

Sheila: Which the British military was setting up.  Actually setting up.  Not just using.  But actually setting up.  Mm-hmm.

Kristen: Horrible stories.  And so she does that investigation, gets international attention.  And here the situation is even more starkly set up for her which is here you have white, Christian, respectable men, right?  The British empire, civilization.  And, again, western Christianity—that’s who these guys are abusing women.  In this case, heathen women, right?  Non white women.  But they were supposed to be the civilized Christians bringing this civilization and Christianity around the globe.  They were not.  They were abusing women in horrific ways.  And that’s—that just present so starkly to Bushnell.  This situation.  And that is when she ultimately—actually it was a later visit back to Colonial India where she read about this brutal rape of a Burmese woman at the hands of several men from the British military.  And that’s when she opened the Scriptures of her and said, “This crime is the fruit of the theology,” and she had to face the fact that these were not men who were doing this despite their religious faith.  These were men who were acting with such cruelty towards women because of their Christian faith.

Sheila: Yeah.  Which is just horrifying.  When you look at how she describes the way that people justified the brothels and the sex trafficking, I don’t see how that sounds any different from Every Man’s Battle today.  I feel like we’re still fighting the same thing to a large extent.  

Kristen: It was quite something reading Bushnell.  First the history that I uncovered and her work against abuse to call christens to account for the sexual double standard.  This was over 100 years ago that she started this work, and it just feels so very present in terms of purity culture.  We have the sexual double standard very much alive and well.  But what we don’t have today, which we did have in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, is a whole bunch of Christian women, evangelical women, out on the front lines saying, “Enough of this,” right?  And calling men to account.  You have some of that going on, but you don’t have this mass movement anymore.  What a sense of loss.  As a historian, it’s often tempting to think that things are getting better through history, right?  We’re becoming more enlightened.  And when you look at stories like this, when you look at women’s history often, you think, “Ugh, this is not a story of unrelenting progress.”  In some ways, it’s one step forward and two steps back.

Sheila: Right.  So Bushnell got quite famous in writing several reports about India and then coming home and writing several about the U.S.  She was very famous, but she was also very stressed, losing some ground.  And at that point, Josephine Butler invites her instead, “How about if you start—change track?  Change tactics and just talk about the Bible.”    

Kristen: Yes.

Sheila: And that’s what she did.  So she moves to England.  And she becomes a blogger in a sense.

Kristen: That’s a great, great example or great illustration.  Yes.  She starts a correspondence course.  So these mimeographed papers that she is reading the Scriptures.  And I never mentioned that.  Before she began her study of medicine as a college student, she had studied the classics.  So she knew Greek.  She taught herself Hebrew.  And she refused to believe that the distortions of the Scriptures that she was reading about women’s subjugation to men and this patriarchal authority and the sexual double standard that they were really contained with the Christian Scriptures.  And instead she started to think about, what about those translations?  What about the men who had translated the Scriptures for centuries now?  And so she went back to the Hebrew and the Greek text, and she started a pattern of mistranslations and misinterpretations.  And so she started this correspondence course.  She was visiting British libraries.  I mean her papers now are held—you can see these correspondence courses that draft after draft after draft—just piles of them—in the British library.  

Sheila: Oh, that’s so cool.  I want to own—that’s awesome.

Kristen: There’s so many.  There are so many.  And you can read the drafts.  What I wrote about in A New Gospel for Women is just the tip of the iceberg.  Somebody really needs to write a comprehensive history of just that book, God’s Word to Women, which is how she eventually published those lessons because there is a whole book just describing the process and the changes and the edits that she made.  And then women, a small group of women, would pay her, right?  So it’s kind of like Substack. 

Sheila: Yeah.  Like Patreon, Substack.  Yes.  Yes.  

Kristen: For these lessons that would circulate.  And so the final product was a book, God’s Word to Women, that contains just all kinds of mind blowing retranslations, reinterpretations of the Christian Scriptures, passages that refer to women, to sex, to gender from Genesis through Revelation.  And honestly, when I was first reading this book, I thought, “This cannot be real.  What do I even do with this?  And why have I never heard of this before?”  Because it is really revolutionary.  But she did this all as a conservative Christian.  By conservative, I mean theologically, right?  She identified as a fundamentalist against modernist.  She took every word of the Scriptures seriously as God’s Word, which was why she was so angry when she saw men mistranslating and misinterpreting those Scriptures. 

Sheila: And I want to read another quote that I picked out from your book because I think this is really key.  You said, “What is perhaps most remarkable about God’s Word to women is that Bushnell pressed to revolutionary claims while upholding the authoritative truth of the Scriptures.  She considered every word of the biblical text inspired, infallible, and inviolable.  However, she rejected modern translations as patriarchal corruptions of the true Word of God and turned instead to Hebrew and Greek texts as the basis of her theological revisions.”  So this is not a theological liberal.

Kristen: No.  Not at all.

Sheila: This is not a woman who says we need to throw out Scripture and just have new interpretations.  This is a woman who remained very true to the original language and intent.

Kristen: Absolutely.  So much so that—because she was dependent, right?  Writing as essentially kind of a blogger.  As a woman, she was not given a respected position in a prominent seminary.  She wasn’t a pastor of a church.  She was just a woman, a reformer, who was doing this on her own really.  And so she didn’t get a publisher.  She self published this book.  It wasn’t reviewed in a whole lot of places, but I did track down several reviews.  And what was really surprising to me was just to see how positive those reviews were from conservative Protestant pastors.  

Sheila: Yep.  One was from Moody, I think.  

Kristen: One was from Moody.  And it was, “You know what?  Essentially it’s like we don’t agree with every interpretation that she makes, but we have to say it’s—they’re at least as good as the standard ones and definitely take a look at this.”  And they gave her work the stamp of approval because they saw that she took every word of the Scriptures seriously.  And in this fundamentalist, modernist battle over the, “How do we read the Scriptures,” she was so firmly on their side, and they knew it.

Sheila: Right.  Which is a very interesting thing.  Okay.  So I want to look at two—in your book, Kristen, you go through 1 Corinthians 14, which is the first thing that she tackled.  1 Corinthians 11, Ephesians 5, et cetera, et cetera.  I just want to take two quick snapshots that are—that people can easily understand.  Okay.  The first is deacon.  Our listeners may not know this, but the Greek word diakonos is translated differently when it refers to a man or it refers to a woman.  So you said this, “In a similar vein, Bushnell pointed to the Greek word diakonos, which was translated as minister or deacon in each instance where it referred to an office held by a man in the church but was rendered servant in the single instance where it referred to a woman.”  Romans 16:1.  That’s Phoebe.  “Despite the fact that it was distinctly stated that this is her rank in the church, an ecclesiastical order.”

Kristen: Yeah.  And Bushnell has no time for that, right?  She is like, “Enough of these different weights and measures.  Or enough of this.  What we want is God’s Word.  Unadulterated.  And we want it equally applied, translated.  We want the same words applied the same ways.”  And what she early on discovered is in so many different words in the Old Testament and in the New, a different set of translations or possible translations if that word was describing a man or if it was describing a woman. 

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  Okay.  Now, I don’t know how—here’s another example.  I don’t know how to say this word.  I read it all the time.  This is the problem with living online when you always read and you never hear anyone say it.  It’s like, “I don’t actually know how to say this.”  So is chayil?  

Kristen: Chayil.  So I asked my brother-in-law, who is a Hebrew scholar, and he’s—so I’m probably still getting it wrong.  But chayil or C H A Y I L.

Sheila: Right.   And the problem is when it’s a man of chayil it is a man of valor.  

Kristen: Valor.  Strength.  Yes.

Sheila: Right.  But when it’s a woman of chayil, it is a woman of virtue.

Kristen: Virtue.

Sheila: But it’s the exact same word.

Kristen: It is.  It is the same word.

Sheila: So men get to be valorous and strong and brave, and women get to be virtuous.  

Kristen: Exactly.  And she has just—I can’t remember how many.  She counts them up.  All of the times that the word is used to describe a man it’s strong, army, strength.  All these things.  And then women it is virtue.

Sheila: So here are examples.  Boaz in the Ruth and Boaz story was a man of valor.  And yet, Ruth was also a woman of valor, but that’s a woman of virtue.

Kristen: A woman of virtue. 

Sheila: Even though same word.  Proverbs 31.  

Kristen: Proverbs 31.  Yeah.

Sheila: The famous one.  Woman of virtue, who can find?  Right.  Even though, chayil.  Yeah.  We see this throughout that when it’s a man it’s valor.  It’s strength.  When it’s a woman, it’s virtue.

Kristen: And her dissection of Proverbs 31 is just brilliant because she lists all the attributes of the woman of chayil in Proverbs 31.  What is it?  She’s industrious.  She’s up early in the morning.  She sells things.  She cares for her household.  I think she dyes cloth.  I can’t remember.  There’s this massive list in Proverbs 31, but there’s actually no mention of her particular relationship with her husband or her sexual fidelity in this long list.  And yet, they render her a woman of virtue.  That’s how they reduce all of that.  And now she says, “Okay.  Great.  We can look at the root of the Latin word virtue.  And we can get vir, and that’s (inaudible).  And so there’s a link there between virtue and valor or this kind of masculine strength.  But,” she says, “we all know that in the 19th century,”—where she’s writing—late 20th century—“and up to today virtue means something very specific.”  It means—it’s generally reduced to sexual morality and generally applied to women.

Sheila: Yes.  

Kristen: And that’s how these translators were using it when they were differentiating how we talk about women and then how we talk about men.  So we need men to be strong and valorous, and we need women to be virtuous.  

Sheila: Right.  Even though, again, in the original language, Scripture did not differentiate that.  That is something which is done by translators.  

Kristen: And she had a (inaudible) 24:28.  Remember?  She worked with all these abused women and prostitutes and former prostitutes.  And she said, “Okay.  You want women to be virtuous.  How about you teach them to be strong first,” because she saw so many cases where they were abused, where they did not have the power to extricate themselves from these abusive situations.  She’s like, “You want virtue?  Teach women to be strong because that’s what the Bible says.”

Sheila: Let me read another quote that you had.  “So the more she searched the Scriptures the more she came to believe that the abusive of women she had observed in her travels was, in fact, closely linked to the most sacred institution, Christian marriage.  Men could not make women obedient slaves within the marriage relationship,” she surmised, “without coming to see all women in that light.”

Kristen: Exactly.

Sheila: And so she had to tackle this.  And then one more thing, “She defended her use of the term abuse insisting that subordination was abuse.  Men would feel abused if enslaved to a fellow man,” she argued, “and the same was true of women.”  

Kristen: She does not mince words.  When I read that, I just thought, “What do I do with this?”  And she also—really the heart—she does a lot of very careful textual analysis, right?  Throughout the Scriptures.  Very careful work.  But at the heart of her critique is her understanding of who Jesus Christ is.   And her understanding of Christ, biblical understanding of Christ, is the incarnate, right?  Word of God, who divests Himself of power and gives his life for the redemption and restoration of all things.  So she says, “Okay, men.  Why on earth would you be claiming power over women when the very model of Christ is divesting of power?  Claiming power and usurping power is not the way of Christ.”  She goes back to Genesis.  That’s the way of the devil, right?  That’s the way of sin.  And so the patriarchy is a disobedient response.  And women who align themselves with patriarchy are aligning themselves with sin.  And so for her to live according to Christ and according to God’s plan and in the redemption of Christ is to live as liberated women, who can obey their God and not submit and subordinate themselves to men.

Sheila: Yeah.  And, again, this is a woman who was writing over a hundred years ago.  Well, a lot of the stuff she was writing about a hundred ago, but she started even more than a hundred years ago.

Kristen: Exactly.  Exactly.

Sheila: What struck me too, in reading your work of her, is just how alone she felt especially at the end of her life once she got into the Bible translation.  When she was doing all of the sex trafficking stuff, she had this network of women around her and different political things happened within that movement.  And she lost supporters and felt herself very alone.  Let me ask you something.  Do you feel like that?  Because you’re kind of at the forefront of a lot of things, do you feel like we’re more alone?  Or do you feel like we’re a network?

Kristen: No.  We’re not alone.  Nothing like Bushnell was.  First, you’re right.  In the 1870s, 1880s, she was not alone.  She was so supported, financially supported and emotionally supported, spiritually supported by tens of thousands of women through this network of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.  So she was very well supported.  And you could see the amazing work that she did because of that support system.  For a variety of reasons, right?  Josephine Butler passes away.  Frances Willard passes away.  You have broader changes in terms of American Christianity, this growing split between fundamentalists and modernists.  You have changes in the women’s movement that make it more difficult for some of this Victorian Christian women to fit in with the mainstream women’s movement.  All of that is going on.  And so she ends up being isolated, and you can see how that affects, not just her personally, but also her platform, right?  She doesn’t have the same power to disperse her ideas.  And I wonder sometimes.  If she had been able to write God’s Word to Women, her women, 30 years earlier when she was at her prime and when she was well networked, I think it would have had a dramatic impact.  Instead by the time she finally was able to cobble together this book, didn’t have a publisher, didn’t have an editor, didn’t have a distribution system, a few people found it.  And it changed their lives.  And you can kind of trace how it was passed along through American Christianity down through the 20th century.  And it was powerful, but its influence was very limited.  I don’t think we are in the same boat at all.  Like I said on Twitter the other day, “Man, if Kate Bushnell had had Twitter, she,”—first of all, she was very sarcastic, and she was very blunt.  She would have been amazing, and she was meticulous.  But just the reach, right?  And that’s what we have.  We can come from nowhere, like I did.  I spent years in the archives doing this research, publish with an academic press—several hundred people read it, and that’s great.  But now we have blogs.  And we have Twitter and Facebook, and we have podcasts.  And so we can take this information and tell these women’s stories and share what is actually generations of Christian women doing amazing, remarkable, and liberating work.  And that work can find its audiences.  And it’s really fun to be able to do that for Bushnell especially because she had been almost entirely abandoned and forgotten by the time she died in her early nineties.    

Sheila: Mm-hmm.

Kristen: And now to think that her work could be resurrected.  And on the one hand, it’s very tragic that it still is very timely and it speaks to where we are.  On the other hand, there’s something redemptive about  being able to bring her voice into this moment.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  I want to bring up this one quote.  This was early in the book as you’re setting up the book sort of reflecting on her whole life.  You said, “Time and again women have wrestled with the Christian Scriptures and have penned intriguing and insightful commentaries only to have their work quickly forgotten leaving each generation to begin the task anew.”  And I know it feels—all the arguments about what 1 Corinthians 14 really meant or what 1 Timothy 2 really—she already dealt with all that.  

Kristen: She did.

Sheila: Over a hundred years ago.  And we’re still talking about.  But hopefully, now, if more people read about Kate Bushnell, we won’t have to do this from scratch anymore.  Now there are so many people saying it.  We do have Twitter.  We do have numbers again, and, hopefully, we won’t have to keep reinventing the wheel this time.

Kristen: Hopefully.  And one thing I noticed too early on when I started talking about her work, a lot of conservatives, conservative men in particular, have kind of written off all of Christian feminism as that’s something recent, and it’s secular and kind of 1970s women’s libbers.  And they’ve got all of their arguments down pat.  And so to bring in somebody like Bushnell, no.  No.  No.  She was way before women’s libbers, right?  She’s working in the late 19th century.  Oh, also she identified as a fundamentalist.  So now you got to listen to her.  You can’t just write her off and then maybe that will open you up to some of the more recent work as well.  But she’s a lot harder to dismiss for people who already have all their arguments lined up for why they’re not going to listen to women’s biblical interpretation.

Sheila: All right.  Well I am so glad you could join.  Tell us about your other book.  

Kristen: I’m absolutely pleased.  Any time I get the chance to share Bushnell’s work, so thank you for having me.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Thank you, Kristen.  And I hope you have a wonderful summer and get a chance to read too.

Kristen: Thank you so much.

Sheila: So grateful to Kristen for making time for us out of her busy schedule.  And now just as Katharine Bushnell learned so much more and had so much more understanding of the New Testament when she started the Greek and looking at the context, I want to turn to another woman, who has recently written an amazingly easy to understand conversational book about how we can look at some of these difficult passages.  So here is Julie.  Well, I am so please to bring on our podcast today, Julie Coleman.  Hi, Julie.  

Julie: Hi.

Sheila: You are the author of this new book, On Purpose: Understanding God’s Freedom for Women Through Scripture.  I love it.  I have read it.  I even endorsed it.  So thank you for writing it.

Julie: Thank you for endorsing it.

Sheila: Yeah.  And I think what I like about it, it’s an accessible book, okay?  So those of you who are watching on YouTube, you can see.  It’s a good length, but it’s not super, super dense.  And what you do is you go through each—well, you interweave it with your own stories, which I love.  Let’s make this stuff personal.  But you also go through each of the passages that are often talked about when we refer to a woman’s role in Scripture.  And you break it down in Greek and the historical context and all these different things that should come into play with our interpretation.  So you deal with each individual passage because I get asked so much about, “Well, what about Ephesians 5?  And what about Genesis 3?  And what about 1 Timothy 2?  And what about 1 Peter 3?”  And it’s like they’re all there.  So I do want to get to a specific passage.  But before we do that, how did you get started on this journey yourself?

Julie: Well, I was raised in a very conservative denomination where women wore head coverings and kept their mouths shut.  And so I thought that was the right way to do things.  I mean it was in the Bible.  And I always did that, but it was hard because, unfortunately, God gave me a whole lot of leadership ability.  And I always felt like I was hitting my head on the glass ceiling inadvertently.  I mean I wasn’t trying to do anything.  I just found myself always trespassing against that boundary line.  But like I say, they had a verse for everything.  So I was in because I wanted to do what God’s Word said.  But over the years, one was marrying my husband, who was not—he was in our denomination but was not a fan of those interpretations of those passages.  And little by little, in studying myself, I just started coming around to the conclusion that I don’t think that means what they think it means.  And so when I started seeing women, men too, who were leaving the church because of the treatment that they were getting because of gender things, doctrine, and I started seeing people actually walk away from God because they understood Him to be this tyrant that only had picked one sex out to be the beloved, the chosen ones, and the rest of the—the females were to be second class citizens.  And especially in light of the fact that our society has moved on from that kind of thinking, it gets harder and harder for people to accept that the Bible teaches that which, by the way, it doesn’t.  

Sheila: Yes.

Julie: Which is why I wrote the book because I thought, “You know what?  If people are leaving the church, people are leaving God, over misunderstood teaching, then if I could just get the truth out there, look at these passages.”  I’m a seminary grad.  I know how to do that.  “Look at these passages and say what is it really saying.”  And so I started the journey.  But I was scared to do it because I hate controversy.  I want everyone to like me.  It was just too controversial, and I knew I’d get a lot of nasty feedback because I’ve seen others.  And so I was afraid.  And I’d write it, and I’d put it down.  And I’d write again and put it down.  And then finally, the Lord just really impressed on me it’s time through a series of events and people that I talked to.  And I also, in that time period, listened to a lady named Mimi Haddad, who is the president for Evan—wait a minute.  I’ve got the wrong acronym.  Christians for Biblical Equality.  Wonderful woman and loves the Word of God.  But she has love in her heart.  And so as she talked, she said, “You know, whatever we do in order to help people understand, we have to do it in love.”  And that was the missing ingredient for me because I was more about anger from what I had been taught.  And I thought, “You know what?  Everyone is just trying to do what the Bible says.”  Christians want to do that.  But the problem is how we interpret what the Bible says, and that’s the human component that can go wrong.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yes.  Because you can be seriously convicted of something, but, at the same time, be seriously wrong.

Julie:   Absolutely.  

Sheila: And well meaning.

Julie: Yes.  Absolutely.

Sheila: Yeah.  Yeah.  So I want to focus—there’s so much good stuff in here.  There really is.  And when I was 16 years old, I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this on the podcast before.  I think I did.  I think I shared it a couple years ago on the podcast.  But when I was 16 years old, I was really struggling with the role of women in the church because I loved Jesus.  Absolutely loved him, wanted to serve, wanted to be a missionary.  I wanted the whole bit.  But I could not reconcile the fact that He would give me certain gifts and then tell me I couldn’t use them.

Julie:   Right.

Sheila: And that was really problematic for me that God would say that He preferred someone over me simply because someone else was a guy.  For no other reason.  Something so arbitrary.  And I didn’t know how to reconcile those things.  I didn’t know how can I keep being a Christian and how can I follow a God that wouldn’t love me as much just because I’m a girl.  And I talked to my pastor, didn’t have anything to say to me.  But then my aunt gave me some great books, and those set me on a journey where I really did find freedom, which is exactly what your book is for.  And so this is for a new generation.  And, again, I just love how biblical it all is.  And the chapters really are not overly long, but they get to the heart of everything, of all of the different passages that are so problematic.  So before I hit record, I said to you Julie.  I said, “You know what I would love to do?  Is just focus on one passage.”  And I told you which one, and your reaction was, “Oh, that’s the long one.”  But this is the one I get asked about so much.  So I’m going to put you on the spot, and I thought we could do 1 Corinthians 11.

Julie: Yes.

Sheila: So why don’t you set the stage and tell us what the controversy is about 1 Corinthians 11?

Julie: Okay.  So much controversy.  I had a schedule that I had to keep to in order to make the book deadline.  Three weeks per chapter is what I gave myself.  It was intense.  But as I wrote, I kept to that, and I knew that I would have time at the end to do this and that before I sent in the manuscript.  But anyway, I got to 1 Corinthians 11, which I know very well.  I was raised with that passage.

Sheila: Yeah.  The head coverings.

Julie: Yeah.  Exactly.  Exactly.  And so I screamed to a halt, and I just couldn’t understand what Paul was doing.  And I wrestled with it, and I prayed over it.  And I talked to my husband and other people that knew their stuff.  And I just couldn’t get—I just couldn’t do it.  And so finally, the breakthrough came when I was listening to Ron Pierce, who is a professor at Biola and Talbot Seminary.  And he does a class online and YouTube that is free on gender.  On gender.  He’s a super great teacher.  So anyway, so I went and looked at what he had to say about 1 Corinthians.  And he gave me the thing that just blew it open for me.  And so I even wrote him a thank you letter.  I was so thankful.  He didn’t know me or anything.  But I just wanted him to know how much it meant to me because what I wanted was a big picture of view before we zeroed in and started getting lost in the trees.  And so my problem was this.  Paul makes these statements, and he says these three things and then finally the middle thing about the head coverings.  And then he says three more statements, which actually are opposite or contradictory to the three statements he made earlier.

Sheila: Mm-hmm.

Julie: I didn’t understand why he would compete with himself.  What was he doing there?  And it took awhile to figure out that this was something that’s—and this might be a little bit too detailed.  But it’s a chiastic structure used very frequently in the New Testament and in the Old Testament.  Paul used it quite a bit.  And it’s a way of setting up an argument.

Sheila: Yes.  And I just want to put in.  When we had Bruce Fleming on last year, he was talking about the chaiastic structure too that’s also in Ephesians 5.  So yes.  Very much—yeah.  Very common device that Paul uses, and it was very common in Greek literature.  

Julie: Very.  Very.  Now we don’t spot it right away because we’re—that’s not our thing.  But definitely back in ancient Greek times, it was certainly a thing.  So anyway, so I started looking at the statements in terms of a chiasm.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And what’s a chiasm?

Julie: So the letter chi is an X.  And so what you see in this X is it kind of goes in and then comes back out again on the half of the X.  And that’s what a chaiastic structure is.  I wish I had a PowerPoint slide I could show you better, and I didn’t think I was going to need that.  So sorry about that.  But anyway, I’ll try to do it orally here and see what happens.  Okay.  So the first statement he makes—and it’s—and I’m going to call that Statement A, right?  And that’s the one that’s furthest over, and it says, “Now I praise you because you hold firmly to traditions just as I have handed them down to you.  But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman.  And God is the head of Christ.”  That’s Statement A.  Then he goes to Statement B, “Every man who has something on his head while praying or prophesying disgraces his head, but every woman who has her head uncovered while praying or prophesying disgraces her head.”  Now Statement C, “Man is the image and glory of God, but the woman is the glory of man.  For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man.”  Okay.  And then finally, here’s the center.  So it’s gone—let me see if I do this backwards.  A, B, C.  So they’re kind of lined up this way.  Okay.  And then Statement D is the center, which is the main point of the argument.  And it is, “Therefore, the woman should have a symbol of authority on her head because of the angels.”

Sheila: Okay.

Julie: Okay.  Then he says this, “However, in the Lord,”—and he makes a C statement that contradicts the C statement above.  So I’ll call that C Prime.  Okay?  And so in the statement above—or statement below matching C it says, “Neither is woman independent of man, nor man independent of women.  All things come from God.”  Now in Statement C above was woman came from man.  

Sheila: Right.

Julie: And he contradicts that now.  See how it’s contradicting?  That’s what was driving me crazy.  Then he says for B, which matching the B above—B Prime—“Judge for yourselves.  Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered?  Does even nature itself not teach you that if a man has long hair it will dishonor him?  But if a woman has long hair, it’s a glory to her.  For her hair is given to her as a covering.”  So now he’s contradicting what he said about head coverings up above.

Sheila: So that’s B Prime contradicting the head covering.

Julie: Right.  B Plain.  

Sheila: Yep.  Okay.

Julie: And then finally, A Prime says, “We have no such practice nor have the churches of God.”  So you’ve got this—and before he was saying about traditions with Letter A over there.  So these statements match up as they go along, but they’re contradictory.  He answers the B Prime—or A Prime, C Prime—all are contradicting the statements he had A, B, and C.

Sheila: Right.

Julie: Well, that was driving me crazy.  And the thing is that one statement at the beginning that he makes about—and this is the one that I’m sure everybody asks you about on your podcast.  “Christ is the head of every man, and the man is a head of a woman.  And God is the head of Christ.”

Sheila: Mm-hmm.

Julie:   So I can get Christ is the head of every man.  I can get Christ—or that a man is a head of woman.  Sure.  That can happen.  But then it says, “And God is the head of Christ.”  So, okay.  Wait.  Christ is God.  And so that’s where I was stumbling.  I was just like, “How can this be?”  As a matter of fact, some of the people who are on the other side of this women’s issue they believe that—a doctrine, a teaching—called the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father.  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.

Julie: And they believe that, “Oh, yes.  Christ is equal to God, but He is subordinate to God.”  That’s not equal.  That’s subordinate.

Sheila: No.  And that’s actually a heresy.  That’s specifically against—the Council of Nicaea figured that out in the 300s that that’s not kosher.  That’s not good.  We ain’t doing that.  

Julie: And yet, we’re bringing it back because—

Sheila: We’re bringing it back.  Yeah.

Julie: Well, because it backs up a position on women, see?  

Sheila: Right.  Mm-hmm.

Julie: And so I started looking and thinking, “What is that?  Why did Paul say that?”  So the word that Paul uses for head is actually kephalé.  And kephalé—there’s two words that are translated head in the New Testament.  Greek words.  One is kephalé.  And the other is arke.  And arke is absolute authority.  You had to obey no matter what.

Sheila: Head of the army.  Head of the army.  Head of a corporation.

Julie:   Yes.  Generals.  Yeah.  So that’s arke.  But he doesn’t use that word.  He uses kephalé, which means—can mean leadership, of course.  But it’s a different kind of leadership.  It’s going in by example.  It’s leading in that way, putting themselves out front to be, at most risk, that kind of an idea.  Or it can mean source.  Comes from.  And, of course, God sent the Son, so that could mean that there.  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.

Julie: So anyway—but then I started looking at this thing, and I thought—I went all the way back to chapter 7 in 1 Corinthians.  And in chapter 7, Paul starts answering questions that they had written to him in a previous letter.  

Sheila: Right.  

Julie: Okay.  We don’t have that letter.  But he’s answering the questions because of that.  And so the first thing he says, “Now concerning the things you wrote,” and he starts in chapter 7 and starts answering their questions.

Sheila: And this is something that we talked about on a previous podcast specifically about 1 Corinthians 7 where one of the issues that was going on in Corinth was celibacy.

Julie: Yes.

Sheila: And so a lot of what—we use the 1 Corinthians 7 verses to say that you’re not allowed to say no to sex.  And you need to have frequent sex, but Paul wasn’t arguing that.  Paul was arguing against the idea of marital celibacy not saying you get sex whenever you want.  So we have actually talked about this on a previous podcast too that a lot of 1 Corinthians was actually Paul answering their questions.  It wasn’t trying to make these big doctrinal statements.

Julie: Right.  And he goes on and talks about eating food that had been sacrificed to idols.  He talks about how they met together.  So there’s all these different things that were—he was discussing from their questions.  Well, now we get to this chapter 11, and he says—and he starts it off again.  “Now I praise you because,” and he starts this thing.  What if he’s stating their statements they sent to him, their understanding of things?  And then they got to that conclusion about women wearing head coverings.  And then Paul says, “Okay.  I understood you said that.  But, however, in the Lord,” and he starts making those three contradictory statements.  And so I really believe that’s what was going on there.  The problem is in Greek there’s no punctuation.  So there’s no quotation marks.  I mean if he had been writing in the 20th century we would have had nice quotes around that.  And we would have known he was quoting, and there’s no way to do that.  But I feel like we can assume that since they’re contradicting—the one set is contracting the other.  That he wouldn’t—why would he do that?  It would just add confusion.  But he was clarifying where they stood and then talked about however in the Lord this is how it should be.

Sheila: Yeah.  And that’s actually really important because this idea—a lot of people make a big deal about how man is the image of God, but woman is the image of man.    

Julie: Yes.

Sheila: And so we were made to reflect men.  We were made to support men.  And on our own, we’re not important.  And Nancy Leigh DeMoss, I think, has written a lot about that.  There’s a lot of Christian writers, female Christian writers, who have really pushed this idea that women are the image of men, not the image of God.  That men were made more in the image of God than we are, and that’s simply not biblical.  

Julie: Not if you look at Genesis because in Genesis 1 it says that they were equally made in the image of God.  “Male and female he created them,” but in His image.  And then He turns around and He says to them, “You are to have dominion over the earth and over the animals and that kind of thing.”  But he’s talking to both of them.  So there was no distinction between man and woman when it came to God and how He viewed them.

Sheila: Right.  And I think that’s so important for us to see because there’s been a lot of hurt caused, I think.  And you experienced this too, right?  Growing up.  You just want to love God.  You just want to serve God.  And yet, at every turn, you’re told that, “Well, you can’t do that because you’re a woman.  Or He didn’t make you to do that.”  And that can be very hurtful.  And then if you try to express that you’re hurt, people say, “Well, you just don’t believe the Bible.”  It’s like yeah.

Julie: Yeah.  It’s a matter of verses that have been taken out of context and plucked out and then grouped together to form a doctrine.  But the problem is is that nobody is looking at the context of each of the verses that they’ve just plucked.  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.  

Julie: And so when you look at the context of what’s going on in the chapter, what’s going on in the book, and in the whole New Testament, whatever—if we’re not looking at the context, then we’re going to miss the purpose it has.  We used to say in seminary, “I love it when the Bible backs me up.”  That’s not how you approach Scripture.  You’re supposed to do what the Bible says, not the Bible says what you say.

Sheila: Exactly.  Exactly.

Julie: And we knew we were joking.  Honest.  In seminary.  But just that idea of you can’t approach Scripture with a preconceived idea and then expect to find something new because all the time in your heard you’re going, “I know this.  I know this.  I know this.”  And so you’re not open to the Holy Spirit leading in any other direction or helping you to understand because you’re already sitting on something that you already firmly believe.  So I really feel like what we need to do is, as believers that have the Holy Spirit in them who is ready to guide and teach, that we study those passages for ourselves because maybe what we were taught was incorrect because what we were taught were interpretations which is exactly what my book is.  It’s interpretations.  The Bible is the Word of God, and it’s absolutely accurate.  But interpretation is human, so it’s not. 

Sheila: Right.

Julie: And so we have to be really careful about that.  So yeah.  

Sheila: Yeah.  And one more thing about how so many of these pastors have been used to hold women down.  And yet, often, the interpretations that we give these passages contradict even each other.  And you can see that in 1 Corinthians 11 and 1 Corinthians 14 is that in 1 Corinthians 11 the whole point is women praying and prophesying in public at a church service.  That is what is being discussed is whether they do it with a head covering or without.  In this conversation, Paul brings up, as you’re saying, that Christ is the head of man, and man is the head of—he brings—Paul brings all of this up, but it’s in the context of trying to figure out if women are supposed to wear head coverings when they pray and prophesy in public.  But then three chapters later, you look at 1 Corinthians 14 where it says women must stay silent in church.  And Beth Allison Barr actually has an interpretation of that passage where she makes a similar thing where he’s actually quoting what is commonly said.  That that’s not his belief either, but he’s quoting what is commonly believed in the culture.  And then he’s dismantling it.  And so once again, we—you can’t both believe that women are supposed to be silent in church and also believe that women can pray and prophesy in church.  

Julie:   That’s a passage—that verse that you’re talking about is super—context is important because Paul starts this argument where people are—the problem with the Corinthian church was they were in the Corinthian society.  And the Corinthian society was all about getting honor and prestige.  So there were people in the church who were trying to do that, and they were stepping over the backs of each other trying to make it to the top.  And you see it entirely through the entire book.  He starts with what preachers each person follows, and they were all following somebody that they thought would give them the most prestige.  

Sheila: Right.

Julie:   And he goes on to all these other things.  Well, he gets to this, to the gifts, and one of the ways that they were mistreating each other was that they were valuing some gifts above others.  And one of the gifts that they all thought was the most spiritual and the most commendable was speaking in tongues.  And I think that probably came from their background where speaking in tongues was part of a thing in some of the pagan religions that would be—that were—given the same kind of value.  They’re really spiritual if they speak in tongues.  Closer to the gods.  So anyway, but for whatever reason, they were saying it.  And then he said there’s another problem.  This is all about their meeting.  Another problem was that there were prophets, a lot of prophets or many anyway, and they were wanting to talk about what God had impressed on their heart.  But once a prophet got the mic—I know there weren’t any mics back then.  (cross talk) and he would start talking he wouldn’t stop.  He would just keep going and going, and he would just hog it.  And there were other people waiting to give their prophecy, but he wanted to be the most important.

Sheila: Right.  

Julie: And then finally, the third thing he addresses is women asking questions out loud within the meeting.  But every single one of those three groups, the tongue speakers, the prophets, and women that he’s addressing, he uses the word silent.  Sigao.   

Sheila: Right.

Julie: So he’s not just telling women to be silent.  And he’s talking about men in the same ways.  There were men and women speaking in tongues.  I’m sure there were men and women that were prophets.  And so they needed to be silent.  Why?  Because they were hogging the stage, and they weren’t allowing people to use their gifts to build up the body.  And that’s what the gifts are all about.  They’re not for us.  They’re not to make us feel good about ourselves.  They’re to build up others.  And so the tongue speakers were building up themselves by making a big deal of speaking in tongues in front of everybody, and they didn’t even worry about interpretation or anything.  They just wanted to show they could do it.  And then you go the prophets, who were wanting to be the most important prophet.  And so, again, they were trying to build up themselves as the most important and not worrying about building up the church.  

Sheila: Mm-hmm.

Julie: And the women, who had not been used to sitting through a kind of a meeting like the men had been, they were asking questions.  But there was a whole thing in Greek culture at that time.  It was like an unspoken rule that when somebody was lecturing if you had an intelligent question that showed you knew what you were talking about you could ask it in the middle of a lecture.  But if you didn’t know what you were doing and you’re just enjoying the sound of your own voice and you were actually disrupting the meeting instead of clarifying things, and so, therefore, you were expected to stay silent until you knew what you were talking about.

Sheila: Right.

Julie: And I think that was what was going on.  The women were loving the freedom that Christ has given them, and they were yelling out questions or making comments or whatever.  And they didn’t know what they were talking about.  

Sheila: Yeah.  Because until this point, women wouldn’t have been educated at all.  This was the cool thing was in Christianity suddenly women can be a part of it.  Even in Greek culture, women weren’t educated.  So it wasn’t just in Judaism, and these aren’t Jewish converts.  These are Greek converts.  And so for the first time, women are actually included.  And so this is—and so it’s like how do we get women and men to learn together when this has never been done before?  And so this is a huge deal.  Yeah.

Julie: I’ll tell you as somebody who has a gift of teaching I would have been first up there making comments and disrupting everything.  So I can sympathize with those poor girls.

Sheila: Yes.  Yes.  Exactly.

Julie: But Paul’s whole point was, “Look.  Every gift is important.”  He says that in chapter 12.  “You’re all members of the same body.  There’s one head.  That’s Christ.  Everybody else, you’re on equal ground.” Everybody has been given a gift, and the gift is the Holy Spirit’s choice.  Not ours.  And He decides who gets what, and then we are to use that gift not to make ourselves look good but to build up the body of Christ.  And when that’s happening, it’s a healthy, healthy church.

Sheila: Yep.  Amen. 

Julie: And so Paul could see, it wasn’t healthy.  So that’s where that verse came from, but it’s pretty much the same instructions that he gave to the other two groups, if you look.  If you do a word search on that silent, you’ll see it.  So again, another verse taken out of context.  And what I’ve seen happen is people take 1 Timothy 2, “I suffer not a woman to teach,” and then group it with, “Women should be silent in the church.”  And together that makes a foolproof doctrine that women should not be vocal at all.

Sheila: Yep.  Yeah.  And, again, let’s remember the bigger context of what you just said about how the Holy Spirit gives gifts, and it’s to build up the body.  And this is what Paul was talking about is how we, the whole body, could be built up.  And that includes women.  And so I love this book.  Again, the book is On Purpose: Understanding God’s Freedom for Women Through Scripture by Julie Zine Coleman.  I will put a link to that in the podcast notes that go along with this.  Julie, any last words on what you want people to take away from your book?

Julie: Take another look.  Take another look at the passages.  Put aside what you’ve always believed or have been taught and take another look.  And look at the context.  Look at the things that you would do to be able to get a good interpretation.  On my website, juliezinecoleman.com, I have all kinds of study tips on taking a passage apart and really looking at each component.  And I’ve got some free—I call them cheat sheets, but it’s different things you can do to open a passage up for yourself.  And just pray.  Pray over those passages.  Ask the Holy Spirit for help because it really matters.  We’re talking about not just half the church.  We are talking about the whole church because if we are limiting women unnecessarily we will be endeavoring to walk on one leg in the church instead of the two we were given.  And I think that, if we want to see health and we want to see growth and we want to see God really on the move, we need to incorporate all members in being able to perform their gifts as they were designed to do.  

Sheila: Amen.  Thank you.  Well, that’s great.  So glad to have you one, and thank you for writing this book.  I think it’s going to help a lot of people.

Julie: Well, thanks for helping me be on the show.  I’m very excited about that.

Sheila: So appreciated Julie and Kristen making time this week.  It can be really hard when you are in a church and you start to wonder does God really care about women.  And what I just want all of you to know is that He does.  And if you are in a church where you’re feeling like He doesn’t, please read some of these amazing biographies of women like Josephine Butler or Katharine Bushnell or read a book like On Purpose and get a glimpse of what God really thinks and how maybe, just maybe, we’ve misunderstood Jesus’s heart.  And if we can get back to Jesus’s heart, the church is going to be a lot healthier because Jesus cares about us.  And if you’re feeling like He doesn’t, something is wrong.  And lean into that.  Ask the questions.  He’s big enough to handle them, and I believe He will point you to some amazing resources, even like the ones we’ve mentioned this week, that can put you on the right track.  So thank you for joining us.  Tune in next week for some more women that history forgot in our great series of women heroes of the faith.  Bye-bye.