They don’t teach you this in Sunday School!

Sheila Wray Gregoire is know for her popular blog, To Love, Honor, and Vacuum where she writes about marriage and sex. In this book she teamed up with her daughter Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky for expertise in psychology and statistics. The book shares the results of “The Bare Marriage Project,” a survey project involving 20,738 participants.

Here’s the punchline: not only has popular Christian marriage literature given bad advice, that advice does real damage to women and the sex lives of Christians. Some of the worst offenders include Leman’s Sheet Music, the LaHaye’s Act of Marriage, Arterburn and Stocker’s Every Man’s Battle, and Eggerichs’ Love and Respect. These books teach (to put it bluntly) that it’s the wife’s job to keep the husband away from porn by satisfying him regularly. While I can’t believe I just typed that sentence, it’s even more shocking to see what passes for marriage material in the evangelical world!

The Great Sex Rescue is a necessary corrective to the damaging nonsense that’s promoted by evangelical authors. That said, the book is incomplete. I would love to see a companion book that surveys men to see (empirically) how their understanding of sex and marriage impact their relationships. The male perspective in Gregoire’s book is only represented in two ways: harmful evangelical marriage literature, and the assurance based on the authors’ marriages that not all men are like that! Fair enough—perhaps a sequel is in order.

If you’ve read any of the popular marriage books listed above, you really should order this book right away. If you haven’t imbibed the standard evangelical fare, The Great Sex Rescue will likely shock you. In that case, Kristen Kobe Du Mez’ Jesus and John Wayne would be a good companion volume to help you understand just how it is evangelicals wound up in this mess!

Gregoire, Sheila Wray, et al. The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended. Baker Books, 2021.